[quote=“Ermintrude”][quote=“Markova”]
So it’s ok for him to insult all Taiwanese women?[/quote]
Yes. Looking at the context, he’s a hurt ex, striking out. Taiwanese womanhood will struggle on, despite these cruel barbs. Read the whole message and try to get at the feelings behind it, rather than focussing on the surface. His reason for posting was to express his feelings and problems after the breakdown of a relationship, and perhaps a little bit of culture shock and difficulty in adjusting to life in Taiwa after having lived elsewhere in Asia, not to simply shit on Taiwanese women.
fwiw, I despise the term ‘psycho xiaojie’ in all its patronising, infantilising, misogynistic glory, but as I wrote before, we tend to over-generalise when we are hurt by someone belonging to a group. Hand on your heart, have you never ever said ‘Uggggh, I fcking hate X people!’? Aversions aren’t logical: when we are hurt, we try to protect ourselves.[/quote]
I couldn’t agree with you more. To be honest, there’s a lot of things I like about TW and whilst I’ve decided that, as a result of all of this, I’m not going to live here much longer, it doesn’t mean that I’m insulting all TW women.
In fear of feeding the troll (no offense meant, I respect their point of view but have to completely disagree given that they’ve not read most of my post), I have to say that I’m not insulting all TW women. I’m simply basing my opinion on primary evidence, as in what I’ve seen experienced and felt, as well as from hearing other anecdotes and what other people have written on this thread. As I wrote in my last post, I’d love to be proved wrong and the challenge is out there, but I really feel as if that won’t happen because somewhere, deep in every TW woman I’ve met / been introduced to, there seems to be this psycho crazy thing going on.
I’m not so sure if it’s a cultural thing. I’ve lived in Asia over half my life and cultures over here are well, different, to a lot of cultures back in Europe or North America. The trouble is, a lot of people (you good folks not being included here) don’t even bother trying to understand the culture and get stuck in a limbo, or what I like to call ‘the ex-pat ghetto’. I think a great quick anecdote (and true) on this is from Japan back in 2004 when I was working for a Japanese company and had been over to Germany to meet a client, translate from German to Japanese and discuss some strategy as well as things that needed to be implemented in the production / R&D centre back in Japan. I’d flown back early and gone to my local bar to unwind / chillax after the long flight home over a beer. It’s a mixed crowd bar, half Japanese, half expat and I was there early. There were three guys at the end of the bar (from North America and Europe), me and the bar man. And being bored, I listened into their conversation. One guy was saying ‘I’ve been here in Japan now for 15 years and I can never get my head around the language, I’ll never understand it and I really hate being here!’. The next guy chirped in, ‘Yup, I’ve been here 17 years, it’s hard. I can just about string together a few sentences yet the girlfriend never understands me’ and then finally, the last guy piped up ‘You know what guys, I’ve been here 20. I’ve learnt some words, even tried kanji, but I’ll never get it, never! Japan and Asia are not for foreigners and we’re better sticking together and being in our crowd!’. Just then my phone rang and it was my office up the road in another part of Tokyo. They wanted to know if I’d got back OK and ask a few questions about my meetings in Germany. In the end, I was on the phone for about 45 minutes and of course completely in Japanese. When I’d finished I looked around the bar and the three guys were there looking a bit shocked. One of them called out to me ‘So how long have you been here mate, all your life? That was amazing!’. I kind of smiled wryly and looked at my watch and answered ‘Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been in Japan now for precisely 6 hours!’.
The point of this anecdote is there are a lot of people out there who refuse to learn about a culture and stick their heads in the sand it it shocks me when I see people do this. It also makes it very easy for people to throw up ‘cultural differences’ as a barrier when discussing things, like for example what happened between me and my ex. To be honest, yes, there are cultural differences, but it’s actually down to us as the minority over here to learn about the cultural and fit in as best we can. At least that’s what I try to do, try to understand and did my best at when I was with her, even at the time I was not planning to be in Taiwan long-term. It’s much less of a problem when you speak the language, as I do in Japan, but to be honest, I’ve always been impressed with the percentage of foreigners here in Taiwan that speak Chinese pretty well compared to the percentage of foreigners who speak Japanese in Japan. So I’ve been trying. I’ve never had time (and since last year the funds) to enroll in a Chinese class full time, but I do my best and get people to help out - the people in my local convenience store are super helpful and help me with pronunciation when I get things wrong and I always ask how to say this and that when I’m in there. Small steps go a long way.
So tying this up with what happened with me and the ex, it’s something that I tried to do and did my best to minimize. She spent a long time in the UK so should, by default of speaking English perfectly without an accent, understand where I’m coming from at the same time I did my best to understand where she’s coming from. That’s one of the many reasons I insisted on going out at least once a week to meet people I’d made friends with here, so I could swap tales and stories about life in Taiwan with other foreigners from all over the world, so I might get some insight of where they had made mistakes, so I knew where I shouldn’t make mistakes. It was all part of me trying to adjust to being here, even though I didn’t want to be. I mean, given that I could hardly speak Chinese at the time and even now I’d struggle to even call it intermediate level, it was the only route open to me, other than being a sponge through my one source (her). Even at work, I organized meals out and BBQ parties and more for people who worked for me (temps and everyone), firstly of course to facilitate bonding in the office and secondly to quiz them in a more relaxed environment about Taiwan, Taiwanese people and life in Taiwan. I did my best to minimize the cultural difference, as best I could at the time and guess what guys, even though I’ve decided I’m going to move permanently back to Japan, I’m still trying my best to understand Taiwan and will be coming back here from time to time on vacation and business trips. It honestly think it will help me more to learn to understand more.
But she still did what she did. I still cannot understand for the life of me why someone so sweet and loving would suddenly change. Knowing, I hope (and I know she knows) that I was trying my best to understand her culture and the culture we were living in, even though at the time I was planning, we were planning on moving off to Japan or Singapore or somewhere else as soon as we could.
And to reference your point, yes I was hurt. Yes I am still hurt in many, many ways. Feelings of betrayal and similar sit long inside of me and despite my trying to get rid of them, that’s why I don’t think I’ll ever go with a Taiwanese girl again. And no, before anyone says anything, I’m not saying that all girls are psycho, cold and evil like my ex, I’m just saying that one bad apple upsets the whole cart and I don’t think I want to be potentially put in a position where this could happen again (which seems to happen all too often in Taiwan, based on what I’ve read). I would not say though that I’m striking out. Sure, I have raw feelings in me, but the rational side of me says that these should be gone after 18 months! Like I wrote before, my whole aim of this was to raise awareness and make people very aware that these things can and will happen in Taiwan, perhaps more frequently than they do in other countries. I wrote about what happened to me in detail to lay out the facts and show what these people are capable of.
You know, I really hope there’s a reason for all of this. But like has already been written elsewhere on this thread, it’s probably her being completely irrational about things for whatever irrational reason she had (and probably continues to still have). I’d love her to explain why but, and here’s no surprise, she’s not turned up in some cyber-form and written her ‘facts’ about what happened. Which to be perfectly honest, I’d love to hear. Especially about why I have yet to get my things back.
And finally, about the term ‘psycho xiaojie’, personally I don’t think it’s patronizing or infantilizing in anyway at all. I could just as easily write about any ex that did something wrong (unfortunately none have done anything this cold and heartless so I can’t really but…) and call them a ‘psycho chick’, a ‘mad woman’, ‘crazy b!tch’ or, if I wanted to be similar to psycho xiaojie for all my exes bar one, ‘psycho kanojo’. To be honest, I think it’s a handy phrase that highlights what seems to be a big problem with TW girls and makes it specific to TW (well, it could be specific to China too, I guess, but this is a TW-focused forum). Nothing patronizing or infantile is meant by it, so apologies for any misunderstanding / accidental insulting, it’s not intended.
In the end of the relationship, I had spent sooooo much emotional energy on her that it’s like if I’d got all my emotions sucked up and vanished forever. Sometimes I surprise myself wondering what she would be doing… after 7 fuckin’ years! and then I realize how stupid is to dedicate too much energy to something failed or that is gonig to be a failure.