That’s interesting. Do you live in Taibei? Maybe that has something to do with it. I lived in Taichung. Perhaps the thinking of people down there is more traditional or redneckish on this issue. When I lived there, the majority of my friends were women and most of them payed out big every month. Of course, a couple of them didn’t have to do it at all.
I must also confess that of the people I’ve known well enough to ask about their monthly financial obligations, more of them have been HKers rather than Taiwanese. Drawing only from anecdotal evidence, I would conclude that HK sons and daughters are obligated to give a relatively higher cut of their incomes to their parents than Taiwanese kids are. I think this may have something to do with the migration situation in HK over the past half century. Most of the parents of people my age came to HK with absolutely no job skills. An unskilled worker in Taiwan during that era would still have been able to work a patch of land. Not so in HK. Most of these immigrants came down to HK and worked in the sweat shops with no social security or property to fall back on. Maybe raising children was a bigger drain on them than it was for a Taiwanese parent in that time with a similar level of education.
One big difference that I have noticed between Taiwan and HK is wedding money. In my limited observations of Taiwanese weddings, the parents of the bride are less likely to keep the money (ok, I guess we can call it a dowry) that the man gives to his fiance’s parents. I knew of a few instances where the parents took anywhere from 100 to 300k NT$ from the guy, but when the two got married, the parents gave it back to them invested in a mutual fund or trust or something like that. I’ve never seen that happen in HK. For true HK people (meaning their families have been in HK for a few generations), it would be more likely that the parents wouldn’t ask for anything, but for the majority of the population (who are at best first generation HKers), the bride’s parents will demand and keep a sizeable chunk of cash. Furthermore, some parents will keep a decent chunk of the wedding night hongbao takings; the rational I’ve heard for this is that they need the money to give back at later weddings. None of the few Taiwanese people I’ve asked about that said that Taiwanese parents do such a thing. They were all pretty amazed about it.
Concerning paying parents, has anybody noticed any differences between more developed Taibei and the less developed areas of Taiwan? Or did I just manage to know an unrepresentative group of people in Taichung?