I’m always wondering about the typical Taiwanese home. When I was in Taipei and Takao, I didn’t see much of Taiwanese homes, but those which I saw were extremely small apartments, which had tiles all over the floor, and were usually not cozy.
So I wonder if there are any ordinary, cozy “houses” somewhere in Taiwan? I know that there is no beautiful Taiwanese city, but do all Taiwanese live in such apartments? Are there no suburbs with ordinary gardens and houses? The closest thing to that was this “eat man drink woman” movie, which had a real house in it. But apart from that, none seem to exist.
The villages in the countryside, with about 20 houses or so in it, are also not nice at all. There you can watch the people sitting in their living room right at the entrance, which looks extremily uncomfortable. But in the countryside, land prices shouldn’t be that much of a problem like in Taipei or Takao, right?
So I am explicitly not talking about the large cities, but rather middle sized cities, where they could be some western or Japanese style house appearance.
Most apartments in Taiwan are of the tile floor type with a cramped kitchen, and can look quite stark when unfurnished (and sometimes even when furnished). There are apartments that are far more modern, with floors made of other materials, such as wood, and with spacious kitchens. They tend to be much newer apartments, and more expensive. Also, many people are remodeling their apartments for more comfort, convenience and modernity.
Eat Drink Man Woman was set in what I believe to be an old Japanese house… these are quickly disappearing in Taipei as owners die off and their children sell the crumbling properties to developers for big bucks.
There are a few. I visited a guy who still lived in one of the three-sided houses with a courtyard. They are an excellent design for Taiwan’s climate, and very spacious, so you can put mother-in-law over in the far wing while you and the wife make babies in the other. The sad thing was, he hadn’t bothered to maintain or renovate it; if he had, it would have been stunning. Some of the aboriginal tribes have a similar design, long and low, typically set into a natural recess, and made of stone. They are apparently very good at maintaining an even, comfortable temperature throughout the year.
One day I plan to build my own, so I can live out my retirement hobbling round the yard and berating the younger generation for their many faults.
Unfortunately, as in most third-world countries, people in 1960s/70s Taiwan decided that concrete was “modern” and started making the pisspoor tenement blocks you see all around you today. Even more unfortunately, they never quite caught on that both the material and the ‘international style’ design is utterly unsuitable for the climate and start looking ugly (or more ugly than before) after only 10 years or so.
well, I always compare it with Japan, where you have these shitty postwar buildings (ok, they don’t get that dirty on the outside as in Taiwan due to the climate) as well (on top of that, they put the electricity cables in the open…?), but at least, if you live in the countryside or have a little bit more money, they have real nice houses (apart from that extremely thin walls… where did they copy that shit? USA?).
Also, they would never put tiles on the floor. Tatami is much nicer, but even if they don’t have tatami, they have wooden floors or at least some other “warm” floor. Didn’t Taiwanese homes have Tatami in Japanese time?
But I guess the ugliest thing are really the tiles on the floor. How can you live in such a cold place?
(Ok, admittedly, we have this in Germany as well, in the entrance area and the living room. But at least we put some carpets on it, or have carpet or wooden floors in the bed room). I guess the Japanese have the “best” indoor design, imho. What a shame that it didn’t survive in Taiwan.
[quote]Eat Drink Man Woman was set in what I believe to be an old Japanese house… these are quickly disappearing in Taipei as owners die off and their children sell the crumbling properties to developers for big bucks.
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I wouldn’t say quickly. Luckily as Taiwan modernises, many owners try to preserve their old houses. Also, when houses are inherited, they are often inherited by siblings who can’t agree on what to do with the property, therefore the property remains abandoned - sometimes until they die. I think the rate at which old buildings are disappearing has slowed somewhat, but they are still vanishing more quickly than I would like.
Most apartments are sparsely and cheaply decorated and wouldn’t even qualify as minimalist. The lighting, provided almost entirely by strip lights, gives the ambience of a hospital or a factory, but without the ambience. Bathrooms are tacky and full of heated plastic mirrors that don’t work, contain a four year old bar of dried soap and a blue plastic razor from 1983; and they usually smell of stale piss.
Kitchens are usually small cupboards with a gas hob, built entirely as an afterthought. Scientists generally agree that a new species of cockroach, the Common Taiwan Kitchen Cockroach, has evolved over the last 4 decades, and feeds purely on the congealed fat and oil which has collected on the kitchen tiles and extractor fans.
Living rooms contain a regulation black sofa, complete with factory wrapping, and most important, a TV, which is probably the most expensive item in the house and also the most used. Hair and dust from the present dwellers and their ancestors can be found under the sofa, although floorspace which is visible is routinely mopped, certifying the house as ‘clean.’
A brown coffee table covered in a clear plastic sheet is used to place food on at dinner time, along with the TV remote control. Newspapers, junk mail and magazines can be found on the shelf under the table and these are used for spitting bones onto.
Most houses have a balcony, but in order to make full use of the flourescent tube lights, and to prevent any natural light entering the apartment, any sunlight which would come into the house is blocked by hanging washing up in front of the windows or by piling up boxes.
A piano is mandatory for face, even if you don’t play.
I do write in jest, and apartments are small - it is difficult to store things in them. But with a little effort they could be more homely. I think Taiwanese people generally don’t treat a house as a home, like we often do in other countries. A difference in thought and culture…
There are several reasons for the lack of nice old villages. Extreme crowdedness is only one of them. A super typhoon in the 1960s destroyed, I have read, up to 80% of traditional houses. This was just at the same time the country was getting wealthy (again) and people turned to concrete as Finely said.
The country was also under martial law and so no civic groups could fight for restoration and preservation. Interesting one of the first groups formed after the liftng of martial law was to protect the old street Dihua Jie. Had taiwan been free we would doubtlessly see much more preserved neighborhoods.
The is one large preserved traditional village in Taiwan down in Tainan. Kinmen Island is the best place for villages and a sweet rural atmosphere. The red brick villages have all been restored and they are now even putting power lines and cables underground.
Shuangxi in Taipei County still has a number of old houses. Luye in Taitung is quite pretty in many ways. Lots of restored houses and new ones tend to be wood or log.
In general though, it’s miserable here. Archaic and byzantine ownership laws have also in the past made it exceptionally difficult to tear down buildings or engage in urban regeneration.
Rural regeneration is all the rage now in government circles. Who knows, it could work. To be honest, if you throw a layer of paint and some cool tiles even those boxy houses can look cool. You see that on Kinmen. Window frames are painted or tiled with bright colors. Doors are nice. Outside is painted with decorative strips.
Actually I thought that the “old” street in Yingge actually looks quite nice… If the other streets were like that, I wouldn’t have anything to groan about.
Some residential streets in Taipei were also a little bit better than the rest (where all the shops are), but even them I wouldn’t count as beautiful.
I really don’t understand why they live in such dirtiness. When I visited a Shanghainese family on the 13th floor of one of their skyscrapers, the ways inside the apartment complex were extremely ugly, but the apartment itself was extremely beautiful (although really small) - floors made of wood, everything clean etc.
Of course lack of space counts as one explanation, but Japan is the same, and they have at least beautiful interieur, and to some degree the outside looks nicer, too.
Does anybody know how it is in Korea?
Wow, I guess if I could style Taiwanese cities, they would become so beautiful: Build streets properly, create these arcades in one style (not that it changes in front of every building), create nicer buildings etc…
Edit: Actually, I found Checheng in Shuili quite nice. I think it was completely destroyed after an Earthquake, so they build it again. Sadly, it looks nice only on the front side where all the tourists come, if you go to the back, it looks ugly again
[quote=“Super Hans”]Most apartments are sparsely and cheaply decorated and wouldn’t even qualify as minimalist. The lighting, provided almost entirely by strip lights, gives the ambience of a hospital or a factory, but without the ambience. Bathrooms are tacky and full of heated plastic mirrors that don’t work, contain a four year old bar of dried soap and a blue plastic razor from 1983; and they usually smell of stale piss.
Kitchens are usually small cupboards with a gas hob, built entirely as an afterthought. Scientists generally agree that a new species of cockroach, the Common Taiwan Kitchen Cockroach, has evolved over the last 4 decades, and feeds purely on the congealed fat and oil which has collected on the kitchen tiles and extractor fans.
Living rooms contain a regulation black sofa, complete with factory wrapping, and most important, a TV, which is probably the most expensive item in the house and also the most used. Hair and dust from the present dwellers and their ancestors can be found under the sofa, although floorspace which is visible is routinely mopped, certifying the house as ‘clean.’
A brown coffee table covered in a clear plastic sheet is used to place food on at dinner time, along with the TV remote control. Newspapers, junk mail and magazines can be found on the shelf under the table and these are used for spitting bones onto.
Most houses have a balcony, but in order to make full use of the fluorescent tube lights, and to prevent any natural light entering the apartment, any sunlight which would come into the house is blocked by hanging washing up in front of the windows or by piling up boxes.
A piano is mandatory for face, even if you don’t play.
I do write in jest, and apartments are small - it is difficult to store things in them. But with a little effort they could be more homely. I think Taiwanese people generally don’t treat a house as a home, like we often do in other countries. A difference in thought and culture…[/quote]
Awesome, you’ve been to my girlfriends house? It’s exactly as described! When I used to live there for a few weeks, I told her, I can’t live here anymore I can’t wake up in the morning cause it’s always dark! I need some sunlight. You wake up at 12 and think its 6 and the room is so dark that you think its a typhoon outside but its actually beautiful sunny
Super Hans: I laughed out loud. You were describing my wife’s parents’ house. The only difference was that instead of the black sofa they have a lounge room setting of incredibly uncomfortable wooden furniture (curved in all the wrong directions and with ridges and grooves in all the wrong places) with an assortment of shitty old cushions that are about half a centimetre thick. My wife thinks I’m anti-social when I am at their house, but it’s just that it would actually be more comfortable to sit on a pile of broken beer bottles in their lounge room. My poor brother-in-law gets relegated to sleeping on one of these wooden torture devices whenever we or my wife’s other married sister stay over. I always feel terrible for him, but he’s fine with it, apparently.
Plus, as you mentioned, family time means sitting in front of the boob tube while all talking over each other and spitting chicken bones or the shells of prawns or various seeds and nuts onto the plastic cover of the coffee table, all while fending off dogs trying to make off with a piece of meat. It’s a madhouse. Let’s also not forget the large stacks of soft drink or other cans on the first landing of the stairs, making it nearly impossible to reach the next floor.
MM: I live in Luye, or Yongan to be more precise. I don’t know that I’d say Luye is “quite pretty in many ways”. There are some nice modern houses in Long Tian, up on the plateau, but Luye proper is a freakin’ eyesore. It’s one of those nowhere places you pass on the train and feel grateful for not living in. Yongan is supposedly one of the top ten rural towns in Taiwan, which is a bit of a worry because it surely wouldn’t rate in the top thousand rural towns in Europe, North America or the Antipodes. There are indeed a handful of quite nice homes (one of my students lives in a really big, very modern house, plus there are also those wooden/log houses you mentioned), but most are pretty awful, and there are quite a few abandoned hovels. The house we live in is actually a tourist attraction because it’s a really old house made from bamboo and manure. I personally think it’s pretty ugly (but the rent is cheap and we have a yard). Others think it’s something special though as my wife regularly has to tell those bicycle tour leaders to take their groups out of our front yard and stop barking on megaphones! Bizarre.
Guy, I mean the whole township, though yes, not the area by the station as that is awful. Of course there are some crappy areas and houses. But overall I think it is a lovely area.
As for Yong’an being a top 10, if Taiwan was Alaska it would make it as well. Quite a lot of similarities you know. Most alaskan towns, and tourist villages are just one street with some old clapboard style houses. No lawns anywhere, and on the back streets you get cabins that are musty and dirty with a front yard filled with truck and snowmobile parts, piles of drum cans, spare parts, farm implements, bags of trash and old tires that will probably be burned in winter when there’s an inversion.
MM: Haha. It’s always a shame when people do that in beautiful landscapes/wildernesses.
I agree that Luye is a lovely area. Coming down the mountain from Yongan every day, I am still blown away by the stunning scenery. That’s why I’d be very reluctant to move from this area, but it would be nice if some of the locals came up to speed. Actually, there’s something about rural townies (the people who live in the towns) in a lot of places in the world. The people who live a little bit out of the town and have a farm often have a nicer property and aren’t quite the same kinds of dickheads driving around like clowns (so far this year, we’ve had three such ninth grade students, plus another student, involved in scooter accidents not involving other vehicles, and one kid ended up in hospital for a week and now has a droopy eye) and generally misbehaving. Many of my worst behaved, most annoying and most anti-social students are the townies, and were also when I lived in rural Australia. The farm kids aren’t necessarily as smart as the townies sometimes, but they’re just a lot more civilised! At least if you live on a farm in Taiwan you can get outside and do stuff and burn off some energy, but what the hell does a kid living in downtown Luye do in his free time? Watch TV and play computer games, and eat a lot of fried chicken, probably. It’s not like such a kid can go outside and ride his bike or play in the street with Highway 9 running through the town.
[quote]Most apartments are sparsely and cheaply decorated and wouldn’t even qualify as minimalist. The lighting, provided almost entirely by strip lights, gives the ambience of a hospital or a factory, but without the ambience. Bathrooms are tacky and full of heated plastic mirrors that don’t work, contain a four year old bar of dried soap and a blue plastic razor from 1983; and they usually smell of stale piss.
Kitchens are usually small cupboards with a gas hob, built entirely as an afterthought. Scientists generally agree that a new species of cockroach, the Common Taiwan Kitchen Cockroach, has evolved over the last 4 decades, and feeds purely on the congealed fat and oil which has collected on the kitchen tiles and extractor fans.
Living rooms contain a regulation black sofa, complete with factory wrapping, and most important, a TV, which is probably the most expensive item in the house and also the most used. Hair and dust from the present dwellers and their ancestors can be found under the sofa, although floorspace which is visible is routinely mopped, certifying the house as ‘clean.’
A brown coffee table covered in a clear plastic sheet is used to place food on at dinner time, along with the TV remote control. Newspapers, junk mail and magazines can be found on the shelf under the table and these are used for spitting bones onto.
Most houses have a balcony, but in order to make full use of the flourescent tube lights, and to prevent any natural light entering the apartment, any sunlight which would come into the house is blocked by hanging washing up in front of the windows or by piling up boxes.
A piano is mandatory for face, even if you don’t play.
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You’ve never even BEEN to my place! How can you describe it so perfectly? Seriously, though. I have concealed lighting, wood floors throughout, a nice kitchen. AND we recently removed the plastic form the white leather sofa. STYLIN’!
Here’s the view from my balcony. patio view by sandman1, on Flickr
But the locals will never come up to speed. What you need is more civilized urbanites moving to the area. We get that clash on the Gulf Islands off Vancouver. Fortunately the hippies and their descendants have long outnumbered the original troglodyte settlers and the islands are about as nice a place as you could imagine. Beautiful scenery and the occasional civilized pub and restaurant, organic growers, artisan markets, and so on.
I have hopes for Taiwan’s rural areas. But they need another 10-20 years.
Depends what Gulf Islands you are talking about. Some (the private ones) were originally inhabited (if you don’t count First Nations) by minor aristocrats and titans of 19-Century business, not the riff-raff.
Salt Spring is what I think you’re referring to and I’d say there aren’t that many hippies any more. Great artisans, awesome soap and cheese makers, an excellent antique book store, and a large American population. Lot more wealthy Yanks there than hippies these days (I go there about 2 weeks/year). I despise the politics of the place and the champagne socialist pretensions of sheltered suburbanites trying to reinvent themselves by embracing an organic-bohemian-save the world lifestyle that 0.001% of people on this planet can afford, but the Farmers Market there is great as are the organic mushrooms (for cooking) and seafood store. I love sailing through there as well. Great Marina close to the small main drag.
I think this issue mainly comes down 1) most people in Taiwan have not experienced that many nicely decorated homes. I’d say it’s not common to visit other family homes unless you are related, so your perspective of what a home can look like gets quite limited. Also, you go with what most people have, and most people don’t bother to make the effort or spend the extra money. They’re happy they have furniture where they can sit comfortably, or in style, with a clear view of Jacky’s TV show. (Style in most cases meaning old Chinese wooden chairs or over-the-top faux Louis XIV). And 2) Money to spend on a relatively luxurious item like home decoration. With astronomic house prices and very slow salary growth, most people are happy to just make their mortgage payment.
I’m pretty sure this issue bugs us foreigners more than the locals. Most of us grew up in homes with more space and more money/effort spent on home decoration. We know it’s not hard to make things look infinitely better, and we earn more than the average local so we could easier do something about it. Get over it. It will take several generations to change people of what is the effort/money that should be spent on home decoration. Every time you see a home, your view of what is normal is affected. Taiwan need more people who practice nice home decoration and openly shares this with others.
Adding to the list of things that bug me in Taiwanese homes:
Pretty much every wall are painted white and have no photos. (They may have a free calendar given by their bank). I think I’ve been to ONE(!) apartment in my 9 years in Taiwan where the walls were painted in a nice selection of matching, warm colors.
When you walk in the apartment door you are instantly in the living room, always leaving the question whether you should pile your shoes outside where it will block the hallway/stairs, or inside with the clean slippers, which then risk getting dirty from your shoes.
Although part of me appreciate the spartan and simplistic interior of Taiwanese homes, what bothers me the most is the cold atmosphere in these homes. Like cheap backpacker hostels, they’re places to eat, sleep, store your stuff, and make the hours pass by watching TV. I’d imagine there would be positive changes to people’s mood and personality if more people were able to live in nicer homes.
That’s not too far away from the mark. Most people posting here are not very wealthy and are therefore looking at places that are generally in their own income brackets. I can’t remember the last time I was at a friend’s house that wasn’t pretty nice. But none of my friends are two-year backpackers on their Asian jaunt. If I was spending a year or two, max, living in a rented rathole, I for sure wouldn’t be spending a lot of time thinking about home decor.
Back home, most people, even the most humble, would try to paint the house at least once a year, keep flowers and paintings, scrub the most humble of dirtfloors to a shine -if that’s possible. True, they are coquettish to a fault but I have yet to see that here, even in wealthy homes. I believed it is that most homes are rental, so people cannot/would not fix them nicely. I have always found houses here so cold -in feeling, not even to get started on the actual physical sensation- because they do not have pictures or whatever on the walls -not including the dearly departed-I mean, there is no personal touch or warmth, and the assorted furniture does not match by any strech of the imagination. I often buy interior decoration magazines and I am appalled that the style in vogue, while similar to the ones back in the West, also lacks that “verticality”. Doing anything to walls seems a faux paux, a no-no. Also, I told you guys of my shock when I saw a home that was actually tastefully decorated, the only one in my building. The professionals do this minimalistic style to a fault, also non matching. Very few come with inspired ideas. I’ve been to places in Xinyi fancy states that give you the heebieheebies and those Louis XVI fakes, shiver, shiver.
Let’s say the color schemes and “matching” ideas may not be the same -as they are with clothes. But the collection of recyclables, the dust magnt old watchamacalits everywhere, the general dissarray, speaks more of people too busy to make a house a home, or it not being a home at all. I remember a wealthy student I had who lived in Tunghua. A student dorm had more personality than her house. But then her kids -barely teenagers -were studying in a US boarding school, her husband was always traveling back and forth from China, and she kept moving over all 3 countries. The house was a place to sleep occassionally, less than a hotel. The family wouldn’t be together in it more than once in a lifetime. What would you expect?
It’s not just homes that suffer from lack of maintenance commercial buildings look fantastic once built but give it 2-3 years the fixtures and fittings are worn and broken, the paint on the walls has lost it’s luster. But they won’t close for a day or so to do these repairs because they’d loose money. The outdoor swimming pool in near Hoshanpi MRT closes from October to April yet the stands have chipped and peeling paint. I realise that that example is government run, but the point still stands. People don’t care.
