Not true all the time. I often dressed well in TW, especially when having to do any offical business, and often received poor treatment or was just plain ignored. I guess on occation it may have had to do with my being black or having short hair or not skinny enough. :S.[/quote]
Again, this doesn’t change the original point that the way you dress here is going to have a significant impact on the way people assess you. This does not mean that there are other factors which will contribute to the way you are treated, and nor is it a guarantee that you will be treated well.
I don’t think anyone suggested that dressing well secures anyone guaranteed access to those benefits.
Since the thread is about a post on my blog, in a sense I have a strong position to define what’s going on here. The issue of class does not refer to how nice people are to you on the street. Namahottie is much more correct in her assertions concerning access to social and cultural resources. As I have pointed out in post on the family size of foreigners of various nationalities, English teachers appear to have much less access to the resources that allow normal family life. This is a class issue and has nothing at all to do with where you buy your clothes.
You’re right, but I wanted to emphasize this point. It was raised by a number of readers, and I didn’t mean to reply only to you. I think it worth stating again that while it’s true that appearance has an impact pretty much anywhere in the world, in this case, it is not related to what I was talking about when I began the post about social class.
yeah, but as I was remarking to another f.commer the other day. As a 193cm bloke here I have very limited choices as to what I can wear. Hip hop teen or Golf Dad. Thats it[/quote]
haha Ya I can totally catch your drift here. I had to leave Taiwan when my pants size exceeded 38inches at the waist. As those were the largest I could find !!
I totally agree that Taiwanese judge each other by the way they are dressed and therefore by extension do the same for foreigners. Other factors are mitigating though, like what you look like, are you cute? Etc.
And its also true that dressing well doesnt change the law. What it does do is it helps the people dealing with you to give you the benefit of the doubt where it can make a difference.
For example my “b” ticket to HongKong on Thai did not in fact mean Business class at the check in counter, but meant Budget!! I jokingly tried to check in at the Biz counter with that ticket and got promptly checked in BUT given an Economy class boarding pass and a smile!! I thought it was worth a try anyway, and was good for a laugh at worst. But just before I boarded the plane, when another clerk ran my boarding pass over the computer, he stopped me and issued me a new boarding pass on the spot. And it was for 1A in BIZ CLASS. So perhaps being welll dressed and being a bit funny but polite did the trick after all?
Taiwanese generally are quite aware of their appearance and dress and thats why we have so many well dressed ladies around in the big cities.
Are Canadians more deviant versus the norm ? Or is it that there are more of them here foreignerwise, and therefore naturally there would be more deviants as a whole but not as a ratio?
And if Canadians are more deviant as a ratio, then why is that? Are you saying that the social support infrastructure in Canada is turning out miscreants who would ill fit another culture/situ?
And if they were ill suited to live in another culture / situ. Why are there so many Canadians here? Wouldnt they have high tailed it back to what they know best? The security of the CAnadian infrastructure womb?
I’m an American, not Canadian, but my experience in Taiwan was that, though it was accepted, even expected, for me to wear shorts and t-shirts to class, when I dressed better, people percieved me as a better teacher, and even people on the street treated me better if we had cause to talk. However, this is true just about anywhere, I expect. It’s true in America.
But dressing better didn’t help me get access to credit, longer lasting, deeper friendships, or any aspects of normal family life in Taiwan. Getting married did that. Well, I still couldn’t get credit! But being married into a Taiwanese family is what allowed me to be something less than transient, though this still never solidified entirely. I also did not get access to equal justice or civil rights, even married into a Taiwanese family. I doubt that a non-asian ever trully has equal status in Taiwan.
The point about dress is that there is no tattoo or bar code on people’s foreheads that tell others what class they belong to. People have to make judgments about group membership (class being one major aspect of group membership) based on other things, and dress is a very important element of these judgments, along with language/dialect. You are already “lumped” into one larger group for being non-ethnically-Taiwanese, and then they have to sort us out further (if they feel the need, that is – the Taiwanese psyche may or may not, depending on the individual) using other cues.
Oh for Sherman’s sake, man, you’re living in Alabama, ain’t they got no lakes down there? You’re telling me that the sorority girls at your local university don’t strip off and lay out on the lawns in teensy-weesny bikinis to get tans, withing full view of slobbering frat boys? Give me a break. Y’all got 9 months of summer down there. Plus the Gulf of Mexico. Don’t give me this “nice Christian peoples” shit. I know the region. It’s the most hypocritical and sex-obsessed region in the U.S. of A. All these half-naked girls running around and you expect boys in half-cut jeans (no shirts, bare-chested) to control themselves?
The Gulf Coast is on the Caribbean, and is much more Caribbean - Latin American - than it is Anglo-Saxon Puritan, as is New England. I am happy about that.
[quote=“Quentin”]Oh for Sherman’s sake, man, you’re living in Alabama, ain’t they got no lakes down there? You’re telling me that the sorority girls at your local university don’t strip off and lay out on the lawns in teensy-weesny bikinis to get tans, withing full view of slobbering frat boys? Give me a break. Y’all got 9 months of summer down there. Plus the Gulf of Mexico. Don’t give me this “nice Christian peoples” shit. I know the region. It’s the most hypocritical and sex-obsessed region in the U.S. of A. All these half-naked girls running around and you expect boys in half-cut jeans (no shirts, bare-chested) to control themselves?
The Gulf Coast is on the Caribbean, and is much more Caribbean - Latin American - than it is Anglo-Saxon Puritan, as is New England. I am happy about that.[/quote]
Dang !! And im living in California, oh why oh why??
[quote=“Quentin”]Oh for Sherman’s sake, man, you’re living in Alabama, ain’t they got no lakes down there? You’re telling me that the sorority girls at your local university don’t strip off and lay out on the lawns in teensy-weesny bikinis to get tans, withing full view of slobbering frat boys? Give me a break. Y’all got 9 months of summer down there. Plus the Gulf of Mexico. Don’t give me this “nice Christian peoples” shit. I know the region. It’s the most hypocritical and sex-obsessed region in the U.S. of A. All these half-naked girls running around and you expect boys in half-cut jeans (no shirts, bare-chested) to control themselves?
The Gulf Coast is on the Caribbean, and is much more Caribbean - Latin American - than it is Anglo-Saxon Puritan, as is New England. I am happy about that.[/quote]
Pardon me sir, but I was referring to repressed Canadians. I said nothing about Americans (in this thread).
But as to the good Christian folk of my locale, of course they’re hypocrites and all the usual human vices thrive among them. My rant in the other thread was about getting interrogated for being atheist. Don’t mistake that to mean that anywhere near even 1% of those people actually practice what they preach. I can’t walk down the street without seeing some pregnant 15 year old smoking a cigarette and toting a six pack.
And I live nowhere near the beach, and while there are two sizable lakes down here, I’ve never seen any scantily clad college girls gracing the shoreline. No doubt things are more Caribbean at the beach towns.
In other words you’re saying you’ve never seen a girl in a bikini.
Uh huh…right…[/quote]
Did I say that? I’ve seen plenty…just not much where I live. But the six months I spent in LA? Summers hanging out at Lake Travis in Austin? Trips to the Texas coast? You betcha.
The whole issue of dress and social class seems a little strange to me. In fact, many people around you do know who you are and what you do. Absolutely all the Taiwanese faculty I work with know who I am and what I do. Is that different from you?
But in fact, guessing about what someone does is not related to the issue of social class, and I tried to point that out when I connected this discussion to my post about families and occupation. Social class is a form of discrimination. But it is not discrimination based on guesses of that social class. Powerful people are not powerful because everyone guesses they are powerful and as such is nice to them. Powerful have power. They can do things that people who don’t have that power can not do. I suppose that dressing well can be construed as a kind of power, but it’s not nearly as useful a form as working for a company that allows you to order employees around.
Perhaps I was not clear enough about this in my post, but one of the main points I was trying to make is that social class - and as such social power - are constructed differently for foreign residents in Taiwan. In Canada, the USA, and those other countries colonized by the Europeans, power is linked to income and education. Here it is not - or at least that’s my argument. Here for foreign residents it is constructed around your access to the resources of the nations from which you came and this is almost always made possible by companies.
The example that I tried to link to this was that English teachers have fewer children than other kinds of workers from the same country. I documented this in my post based on figures from the MOI. This is not because English teachers make less money than most Taiwanese or even many foreign employees of foreign companies. The difference is that we almost all work for small locally-owned companies. These companies do not have the resources to permit ‘normal’ family life for their teachers. But there are a million other structural barriers to integration into Taiwanese life that other workers do not experience. For example, foreign teachers at national universities have no pension even though their Taiwanese colleagues do, as do most foreign managers at large foreign companies regardless of their salary. I have no one to help me find apartments or settle the problems of my daily life. English teachers are pretty much on their own without any of the legal structures that give Taiwanese control over their lives or the control that large companies give to their foreign managers.
Social class has little to do with how nice the Taiwanese are to you on the street. It’s not related to how quickly you get served in a store or whether the girls at the information counter compliment you on your Mandarin. I hope this has put an end to the discussion of social class and where you buy you clothes.
Well Quentin wants to talk about cute girls in bikinis and I think we should hear him out.
Just kidding. I think the only relevance of clothes is that upper class foreigners almost invariably wear formal clothing, at least on the job. I don’t think many of the government representatives/attorneys/professionals go to work in shorts and flip flops. So wearing formal clothes gives off the impression of belong to that upper class, even if you don’t.
You’ve mentioned several times that lots of ESL teachers in Taiwan make more money than expats sent on packages. That seems a little unbelievable to me. A talented teacher who works hard might make 100,000NT per month, which is like $36,000USD a year. Are the engineers, scientists, attorneys, and business professionals sent by their companies not making more than that? And 100,000NT a month seems to be at the high (but not highest) end. Most teachers make around 60,000NT a month. Less if outside Taipei proper.
The example that I tried to link to this was that English teachers have fewer children than other kinds of workers from the same country. I documented this in my post based on figures from the MOI. This is not because English teachers make less money than most Taiwanese or even many foreign employees of foreign companies. The difference is that we almost all work for small locally-owned companies. These companies do not have the resources to permit ‘normal’ family life for their teachers. But there are a million other structural barriers to integration into Taiwanese life that other workers do not experience. For example, foreign teachers at national universities have no pension even though their Taiwanese colleagues do, as do most foreign managers at large foreign companies regardless of their salary. I have no one to help me find apartments or settle the problems of my daily life. English teachers are pretty much on their own without any of the legal structures that give Taiwanese control over their lives or the control that large companies give to their foreign managers.
Social class has little to do with how nice the Taiwanese are to you on the street. It’s not related to how quickly you get served in a store or whether the girls at the information counter compliment you on your Mandarin. I hope this has put an end to the discussion of social class and where you buy you clothes.[/quote]
Thank you Scott, because that’s exactly what I meant when it came to how well one dressed in relation to TW. :bravo:
gao_bo_han, you have me quoted as saying something like “You’ve mentioned several times that lots of ESL teachers in Taiwan make more money than expats sent on packages.” I don’t think I’ve ever said anything remotely close to that. I’ve talked about “foreign managers at large foreign companies” and other similar occupational groups. Perhaps you could dig up the quotes your refer to. Regardless of your accuracy, let me address the point.
The whole point of my post is that income does not determine social class. The social class structure I suggest places culture workers, including English teachers at the bottom beneath white-collar foreign employees. Sure, elite white collar workers such as the one you talk about make loads of money. But many members of what I term the ‘middle-class’ are not elite workers. Instead, they are journalist for the Taipei Times, technical writers and proofreaders for large companies, or editors at the GIO. They’re not making nearly as much money as the English teachers that Maoman and Mark talk about in this blog post. toshuo.com/2005/hard-core-foreign-run-buxibans/
It is also possible for English teachers to make huge amounts of money by operating their own buxibans.
While I agree there are foreign workers here who make vast amounts of money, but my guess is that’s not nearly as many as most English teachers imagine. While teachers at TAS are rumoured to make huge sums, I know for a fact that teachers at Dominican and Morrison make less than most long-term buxiban teachers. If you have any information on this, it would be great to hear more.
:S.[/quote]