been in taiwan for about a week now. forgot how oppressive the humidity is, and how good the fruits and vegetables are (amazing how things can taste when you breed fruits for flavor instead of resistance to pesticides/long-ripeness for shipping).
had dinner with a couple blogger/social-software guys from Academica Sinica a couple nights ago. it is wonderful, how nerdiness transcends cultural boundaries– Ilya (???), sitting next to me, out of the blue starts talking about where the different free-wireless-internet coffee shops are, around our area. Something I totally wanted to know, but would never have thought of asking. And I would do the same to someone visiting me in Los Angeles. Talk of wardriving in Taiwan followed.
The best part of the night was that no one, not even once, complemented me on my chinese. The significance of this is that, in a rare moment, those in attendence were relating to me, not as a ‘foreigner’, but as a fellow researcher/nerd/academic. This is a rarer circumstance than the typical American might guess. Taiwan is a very homogenic society, and the status quo assumption here is that anyone european-looking speaks only English (I can talk to waiters or bus drivers all I want in Chinese, and they will STILL always insist on answering back in broken, monosyllabic English. I don’t understand this.). On the rare occasion that I do carry on a conversation in Chinese with a local (aside from my friends from back when I lived here before), things rarely progress beyond the “your Chinese is quite good” stage (though, honestly, this feels is more flattery than actual commentary, as most Taiwanese will say this to a foreigner if he or she can speak even one or two simple words). OK, end-rant. My point is that it was a wonderful evening, that I could carry on a real conversation with locals, the first night that I met some of them, talking about the Taiwanese cell phone industry as it compares to U.S. and Europe, the state of social software (Taiwan has a huge BBS/message-board culture that the U.S. doesn’t have, and it changes the way students there approach the social-software table), the economic development of the country, etc. etc. I think it’s easy, as a white male in America, to forget about what it’s like to be objectified, to be treated as a “white person” instead of as an individual. I wonder how much minorities in the U.S. face objectification. It is easy to feel like every time someone complements me on my Chinese here, they are objectifying me, treating me as “foreigner” instead of “Nick”.
In other news, the Taiwanese TV news media sucks. It’s the same gossip-type stories, repeated 10 times a day. There is no real news here. i am curious how blogging-as-mass-media will affect this country. In Iran, you have blogging-as-media as a valid method for the public getting real information beyond the government-controlled newspapers. There is country-wide firewalling censorship, but from what I hear it’s pretty unsophisticated. In China, the Great Firewall is a bit more sophisticated, plus the government is making everyone register their personal web pages, thereby squelching free speech. need to think more about these different case studies: china, america, taiwan, iran. hmmm…
Anyways, I’m off to a wedding feast in a couple of hours. mmm, my first one.