Ok, here’s something original…an incident where the foreigners actually WON! This is going to come off as boasting, but oh well, anyway it’s true.
My buddy and I were at TU with a couple of our female coworkers two summers ago. There was a group of 5 local guys dancing near the four of us, and my buddy - who was pretty tanked - bumped into one of them. The guy he bumped started glaring up at my friend (there was about a foot’s difference in height between them, so I guess the old “small man’s” complex was kicking in). My friend looked down at him and asked innocently if something was the matter (in English). The guy started swearing up a storm in Taiwanese, asking my friend what the fuck he was looking at and so forth.
I jumped in with a sense of dread (having heard a number of stories) and asked my incomprehending buddy to stop looking at the guy and turn around. However, the guy, persisted in his tantrum, reaching around me to give my friend a shove, which caused him to turn around again. At that point, the guy grabbed a bottle. Luckily, one of his own friends took it from him and started talking to him. Another of the guys he was with - who from the look of his eyes was probably on something - came up to me and grasped the lapel of my shirt. I told him in Mandarin that my friend was just drunk and didn’t mean any harm. He kind of laughed in a mocking way and let go of me. Then I grabbed my friend and asked him and the girls to move over to the other side of the dance floor to let things cool down.
That was my dumbass mistake - we should’ve just got the hell out of there immediately. Probably a minute after we moved, I glanced over to where the other guys were and saw them kind of huddling together. Suddenly they made a bee-line…not for my big friend but for ME! A couple of them grabbed me, saying something like “C’mon, we’re going outside”, and at that point things got confusing.
I remember that I stepped back in the direction of their pull to keep from being off-balanced and gave one of them a couple of body-blows. He lost his grip, leaving one guy holding onto me. I suppenated (sp?) my arm to loosen his grip and palm-heeled him in the chin. I’ll never forget the stunned expression on his face…it’s the kind of expression I’ve only seen when Asians have lost so much face that their ego sort of goes into temporal stasis. (Sorry for that generalization but most likely no one will deny the mega-importance of face in this culture!)
Back to the play-by-play. The other guy who I’d shaken off before suddenly grabbed me around the neck…he was trying to pull my face down into his knee. Anyway I went down willingly but slapped his knee down hard with my left hand and punched him in the balls with my right. I think I scored a good hit because he let go pretty quickly.
You’re probably think, ‘that’s only two guys - what about the others?’ Good question. Apparently while this was happening to me, my friend, who’s a pretty mean boxer, jumped in to intercede between the other three and myself. I missed seeing him trounce them, except for the last one, who ironically was the little twerp who started the whole thing. My friend gave him a right cross that just about exploded his nose and then hit him with a ‘shovel uppercut’ that literally lifted him into the air.
At that point there was a pause in the action. I looked around but saw none of the guys – though I probably couldn’t have differentiated them from anyone else in there anyway – but then another guy popped up in front of my friend and starts trying to grab his sweater. WHAM! He gets a pop to the face and he’s looking dazed and confused.
Unfortunately, turns out that guy was a TU bouncer…he still works there by the way, though fortunately he doesn’t seem to remember me! Anyway his boss comes down. If you’ve been to TU a few times, I’m sure you know the guy – good-looking, mustache, always there looking cool and hanging with the basketball players. So he tells us we’ve gotta go upstairs. At that point we were both all hyped up on adrenaline and I said something like “How the hell do I know we’re not gonna get the baseball-bat treatment from 20 guys up there?” He responded succinctly: “You hit my man” (though it was my friend who actually hit him) and I said “How were we supposed to know who he was? We had just been gang-attacked!”
Somehow all ended upstairs in front with the boss and some huge sumo-looking guy. I can’t remember the whole conversation but it ended up that he told my buddy if he ever laid a hand on one of his men again he’d be a dead man, and then next thing we know we’re being given cigarettes and having them lit for us! Haha, Taiwan can be a wacky place.
As for whatever happened to the group of guys who attacked us, I have no idea. I assume that when we didn’t immediately fall to the floor and assume the fetal position upon being attacked, they split to find reinforcements. That’s what I assumed anyway and convinced my buddy to get out of there pronto.
I realize we were VERY lucky – obviously the guys who jumped us weren’t very tough or good at that kind of thing; otherwise they’d have got more guys first and ambushed us outside. However, there is one lesson here which I’d like to point out, and that is this: no matter WHAT, never go down to the floor. Run away, pick up a chair, do anything you have to, but definitely don’t go down. If you do that, man you are really screwed. Too many foreigners assume that a helpless target will be shown mercy, but the opposite is true. The more helpless you are, the more brutalized you are going to be. In the worst case I heard, one unlucky guy who chose to lie down ,after being pounded senseless by ten guys with ashtrays, had one of his attackers get down and bite a chunk out of his cheek!