What tips would you like to share with new immigrants to Taiwan? The goal being to ease their transition to living in Taiwan and to perhaps avoid the same road bumps that you did.
For now my compendium of advice for living in Taiwan consists of:
Make sure your health insurance is up to date at pedestrian crossings
The Taiwanese drivers that remain on the roads are among the world’s best (natural selection)
A stinky tofu shop may house dead bodies, and no one will ever know
Get a local to accompany you and help you translate rental contracts
It is possible to do almost everything at 7-11
It is possible to initially get by without speaking/reading Chinese (especially in Taipei) but expect to need to learn the language to become fully independent and more integrated
Visiting TW and living in TW are very different, dont be too enamored with the place, lower your expectations and you lower your disappointment.
TW is more expensive than you think, come prepared with extra money.
Dont expect people to bend the rules for you, more probably they will make special rules just for you.
Make evey effort you can to learn Chinese.
Your chances of integrating fully are very low. If you have a local spouse your chances improve significantly.
Think in advance anout family:Many foreigners I know left when their kids were school age, they didnt want them to have a Taiwanese childhood and go theough the locsl education system and couldnt afford international schools.
You will probably not strike it rich in Taiwan as a salaried employee. Work environment and salaries are better in the west. If you are your own boss you can make good money.
Weather is great for those coming from cold countries, if you cone from a country with a mild climate TW will be brutal.
Here’s a key point: eat well, eat what you want, don’t waste time on stuff you don’t like. Example: I adore tofu but can’t abide the stinky stuff. No problem, you’ll see me enjoying mapo dofu with rice.
Discrimination is rampant but not obvious. A visitor would never realise how deeply rooted discrimination is in Taiwan.
Take a deep breath and be prepared to be told many lies that begin with 外國人沒辦法 (not for foreigners). This is almost never true but the gatekeepers are great at gatekeeping and maintaining discriminatory practices.
Think banking, renting/buying property, phone contracts, insurance/retirement plans, signing up for memberships, hotel bookings refused, being told an ARC is not accepted for xxx (not true), constantly being assumed to be American, no access to senior discounts etc. even larger systemic issues such as south east asians not being entitled to minimum wage. There is absolutely a hierarchy of foreigner according to the Taiwanese.
Even small things; i pay the rent but my landlord refuses to issue a receipt in my name despite me being the one who pays. he will only issue it in my husbands’ because he’s Taiwanese. It sounds small but it becomes exhausting being treated like you’re a lesser human.
Also I find Forumosa to be the best resource for correct, factual information. Both government and private company employees are generally terrible at their jobs (when they see a foreigner). Find the information on Forumosa then find a way to do whatever it is you want without a gatekeeper.
We are all immigrants if we came here from another country. The term expat is just a construct not to put white westerners on the same term as other Asians (with the great exception of JP), Africans or Latin Americans.
If you don’t consider yourself an immigrant while living in another country that is not yours of birth/ancestry, then you are living in your own world, otherwise we would not be managed by the National IMMIGRATION Agency.
Miaoli is not famous across Taiwan for excellence in governance or for its delivery of public service. It is unfortunately more famous nowadays for stuff like this:
An obvious difference is that the Miaoli guys are Han settlers, not Indigenous people.
This kind of terrible situation happens when you never (historically speaking) switch parties, which is Miaoli’s situation up until now. You get the some of the lousiest governance around.
Learn mandarin as soon as possible. Dont push it off or make excuses. life gets exponentially better once a person learns the language and also the culture.
Oh. I had a honeymoon period with my present country I am emigrating from where it could do no wrong. Even spent a lot of effort and money learning the local, esoteric language. After a while the naked discrimination and all the -isms got to me, and I’m ready to look elsewhere.
Are there laws against this sort of discrimination? Or better yet, is equality codified in law?
If either or both, presumably from your anecdotes this is not enforced enough.
Or perhaps with more foreign experts coming into Taiwan, attitudes will change a bit?
Sounds awful!
But how is it that Taiwan was named one of the best places to be an expat? Do its pros more than make up for the cons mentioned?
Unless I just felt the good side of Singapore, I found it to be a country very welcoming to foreigners and expats. I’m trying to extrapolate Taiwan’s development arc to see if it will eventually be like Singapore in terms of treating foreigners equally. Do you think it would eventually match Singapore, and if so how soon? 10 years or 100 years? How deeply rooted are the cultural biases?
Taiwan is not Singapore. Why would it be like that? We’re not a British postcolony, we’re not an entrepot. Singapore, HK, Dubai—all different of course but falling to the category of entrepot.
Taiwan is more similar to South Korea in terms of history (dealing with the Japanese, and then Americans). Unlike SK, though, we’re a multiethnic immigrant society, a settler colony, with all the attendance racisms embedded in such colonies. There does seem to be more room to move around though compared to SK and other East Asian counterparts. Hopefully policy can keep pushing in that direction . . . .
there are laws but they aren’t enforced. And to get them enforced requires fluency in Chinese (a written complaint in traditional Chinese) which the people the law is supposed to protect are unlikely to have
This is a good question. For me it is cost of living, work-life balance, convenience, geographic location (I’m Australian which is geographically isolated), ease of getting a job, there aren’t police on every corner, low income tax rates, online shopping/post in general works well, car ownership is optional rather than a necessity
While I am not a high income earner I don’t have to think too much about where my money goes and will have enough for a comfortable retirement without trying excessively hard or working ridiculous hours which I would likely do in Australia.
Basically when you don’t need to get anything done, life’s a breeze, if you want to get something done - self medicate
Part of the biases against foreigners may be mitigated by mandating English to be taught at schools, and using it as the official language, like in Singapore.
In the process of integrating internationally, Lee Kuan Yew proved that beside developing technology, finding a same voice with the world is essential to any nations. From 1959 when he became Prime Minister, he had chosen English to be Singapore’s first language and continuously pushed the learning of English in his country.
The article itself has a number of grammatical errors
Not only that. Legally speaking he is depriving you of actual proof you are contributing to the household expenses. Hence, in a divorce, husband can claim he paid for everything, look, these are the receipts in his name.
Moreover, if anytime in the future you want to apply for permanent residence, and no, it is not the JFRV, the process would be full of problems due to this lack of documentation.
As a matter of fact, I’d would not apply for APRC in Miaoli at all.
Well there are only 2 people at the immigration office. One b*tch and one man who knows his stuff. Guess who I wait to speak to every time I need to go here.
I reply to my landlord every time with a correction. It’s all in line and the payments come from my bank account
Also we have a lady at the household registration office that knows what she’s doing. Well she doesn’t always know what she’s doing but she’s nice enough and helpful enough that everything gets done. I think relationships are important here.
It just took some time and trial and error to find the right people
