(Theory) Why Some Foreigners Never Leave Taiwan...

[asian boy]

Excellent post my friend.

Especially part 2.

[headhonchoII]

Taiwan is probably easier than ever to live in, but it seems to be getting harder to make a crust. That goes for most people in most places these days. The great global leveling is coming into play.

[Omniloquacious]

Excellent post my friend.

Thank you, old chap.

Your appreciation is appreciated.

[almas john]

Omni, My dear fellow, your posts are a tonic, always a pleasure to read for both content and the beauty of the prose, a balm for modern times, your posts – though progressive in sentiment – are written in the lyrical metre of a bygone age. Beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence wash over us, and we are left defenseless.

[wonder]

People look up to him, people want to chat with him, girls want him... because he is now special, has a special skill, and is exotic. (He's also a teacher in a culture where teachers are given great respect.)

I have been teaching here for a number of years and I have never had the feeling of being respected by my students...certainly not by the children. I feel the opposite is true: the students figure it's playtime and screw around the white foreign teacher as much as possible until the TW TA comes around and then they fall silent.

Respect? That's a good one.

[tommy525]

Thats because the TW TA is fully capable of shouting at and hitting the kids and the kids know that. Fear of the stick.

And yes Omni's posts are well thought out and make a lot of sense and of course are well written in proper english. And that being so (the proper english) he is sometimes hard to understand by the younger generation who use different vernacular, sentence construction (where there is any) and verbage.

[TheGingerMan]

I have been teaching here for a number of years and I have never had the feeling of being respected by my students...certainly not by the children. I feel the opposite is true: the students figure it's playtime and screw around the white foreign teacher as much as possible until the TW TA comes around and then they fall silent.

Respect? That's a good one.

Whose fault is that?
Respect is earned, not given.

[jason88888]

Omni,

Thanks for the detailed post. You said you think the sentiment towards foreigners has maybe become less positive than in the past, any idea why? Thanks

[Omniloquacious]

You said you think the sentiment towards foreigners has maybe become less positive than in the past, any idea why? Thanks

There are more of us here, and familiarity breeds contempt. Or at least it tends to knock the stars out of people’s eyes. Also, far more Taiwanese have lived and traveled overseas, have seen plenty of the ugly side of Westerners and their societies, and are much less likely to blindly worship any and every Johnny Foreigner who finds his way to Taiwan.

Then, of course, there’s Apple Daily, TVBS, and their like. They have a big influence in shaping the views and catering to the prejudices of the not-so-well-able-to-think-for-themselves masses, and they do so love digging up the dirt on foreigners in Taiwan. They’ll seize upon and make headlines of any kind of misbehaviour by a foreigner that they can get wind of. No matter how trivial or otherwise the foreigner’s infractions may be, it’s all good fodder for their reporters, editors and producers. They’ll exaggerate and distort in whatever way is necessary to enhance its value to them, and they’ll even make it up from scratch on a slow news day when they need something to catch the attention of their audience.

In this age of the ubiquitous camera and the Internet, where you’re hardly ever out of shooting distance of someone with at least a cellphone camera at the ready, it’s much harder than before for a foreigner to be naughty in public without it being recorded and put on display for all to see. And once the incriminating pictures or video are put up on YouTube or a blog, as they almost always will be, the bigger news organs will soon be able to sniff them out and make of them what they will.

These things add up, and the public’s general impression of the kinds of foreigners coming here is inevitably affected by it.

There are probably other causes too, but these are the ones that immediately spring to mind.