I haven’t had much contact with the type of ABCs the OP is railing against. I was never much into “clubbing”, apart from occasional hunting excursions to Buffalo Town and the few other equivalents available back in the 1980s, but it never did much for me, and I gave it up almost completely when I moved out of the city in 1987. I have never been to any of the clubs that he mentions, and have never rubbed shoulders with the group he complains about, so I cannot comment authoritatively on his judgment of them. Yet whatever the faults or otherwise of the people who have earned his antipathy, I do feel that he is wrong to extend his disparagement to ABCs, and even to A-to-ZBCs, en masse.
Yes, I have encountered pairs or groups of young Chinese-looking people who are dressed more like North American college kids than typical locals, who yack loudly in exaggeratedly American-accented English, and who radiate obnoxious rich brattishness. I’ve assumed them to be either ABCs or students at one of the international schools. I believe their type can be found pretty much anywhere in the world, wherever affluent parents feed their kids with lots of dosh and an overweening sense of social superiority. I don’t take them to be representative of all Taiwanese who were raised or have spent many childhood years overseas, though perhaps they are typical of the ones the OP encounters when he goes to his playpens of choice.
However, I must say that I’ve never found any cause for antipathy toward the general body of the wherever-BCs I’ve crossed paths with during 26 years in Taiwan. There was a fair scattering of them in the cram schools where I taught in my early years here, and I recall them as among the nicest of my co-teachers, definitely far from among the nastiest.
More recently, my government work has brought me into contact with quite a few young chaps who grew up in the US, UK, Canada, etc., and are doing alternative military service as translators and interpreters in government offices. They have invariably struck me as being polite, earnest, respectful and of genial disposition. I can’t think of even one who seemed at all unlikable.
I still chuckle merrily at the thought of the alternative service lad who was wheeled out for display to us in a meeting with the Lienchiang county chief at local government headquarters in Matsu last year. I could hardly keep from snorting with laughter when he launched off fluently in as broad a cockney accent as I’ve ever heard beyond Mile End Road. He’d also picked up the best of cockney good humour, and I bet he’d have been able to regale me with a good yarn or few about his life in England if I’d had the chance to chat with him over a pint or a coffee.
If you’re inclined to look for things to like and admire in others, it’s generally not very hard to find them. I guess it’s probably equally easy to find things to dislike or sneer at, but I don’t have much experience of that, and I really would not want to.
