family is really important in Taiwan

One of the less annoying jobs I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks has been editing stuff for December’s Taipei International Documentary Film Festival, which will show a bunch of movies from all over the world (with a disproportionate number from Israel, for some reason), as well as a good number made in Taiwan. They need everything in Chinese and English, so I’ve been going through their movie blurbs, correcting the English and making sure the English and Chinese descriptions correspond (which means I am sometimes end up correcting their Chinese, which is hubris—even I can tell that my Chinese interpolations are not beautiful, and sometimes verge on the full-on weird in my attempt to get across the English meaning. But I’m sure they will re-edit for me). I got into this through a couple of friends who are helping set the thing up—Alex, mentioned a few posts back, who is working on the organizational side of things, and Tony, who was one of the people deciding which films should be shown (they got over 500 submissions, and Tony ended up watching about a third of them).

Tony’s a filmmaker in his own right. Even though he calls his films “experimental,” I think some of them are actually pretty great—and I’m convinced it’s not just because I think he’s lovely and funny and adorable, and also not just because I was in a very benign altered state when I first saw some of them. During the period that he was locked in his apartment watching movies nonstop for weeks on end, Tony occasionally emerged to rave about some of the black and white stuff coming out of Russia, and complain that if Taiwanese filmmakers are not filming aboriginals, all they can think of is to make movies about their parents. Looking at these blurbs, it turns out he’s right: almost all the Taiwanese entries are about the director’s parents; if not, then they’re about his grandparents; and if not that, then they are about himself, as a child, and his relationship to his parents. In response to my queries about what connects Taiwanese and mainland Chinese culture, people here have often told me that "Chinese people all think that family is really important.” I guess they’re not kidding.

communication issues, part 3 (of 3)

Here’s an example of someone actually trying to collect some information within the department—I am not going to follow the document here, but just look at a person who is herself trying to follow some documents. Aside from the external experts and scholars called upon to comment on every major department initiative, every year the department (like all city government departments) holds a couple of meetings with some outside consultants who comment on the department’s general plans and direction, using specific plans as foci. These are usually organized by individual sections (ke) and divisions (chu—bigger than a section). Recently, the Yankao Hui, the ‘research and testing committee,’ a kind of oversight body for the entire city government, asked that every department compile and submit every set of notes from every one of these meetings since 1998, when Ma Yingjeou took office as mayor.

Nobody has been able to tell me why they want this information. The general sense I’ve been given is that, on the innocent technocratic side, they want to get a sense of the overall attitude of experts and scholars toward the city government’s operations, and also to see what kinds of expert advice tends to get implemented and to what extent. On the realistic side, this is probably another part of the preparation for the 2008 presidential race, in which Ma Yingjeou’s performance as mayor of Taipei will surely play a central role. (The assumption that he will run for president in the next election is so universal that people only refer to it, never stating it outright.)

The person to whom it has fallen to take on this odious task is the former head of my section, a no-nonsense woman who was generally described by the people who worked for her as being fair, competent, and “having shoulders” before she was demoted to her present position as I’m not sure quite what, something like a very senior administrative assistant in the department’s central office. I’m not going to go on a big feminist whine here, but it has come to my notice that her being demoted has left exactly two women in senior positions in the sections of the department actually concerned with urban planning (the head of the administrative/secretarial section and the head of the accounting section are also both women). “To have shoulders” means to protect your subordinates and take responsibility for them: if a person in the lowest, dealing-with-it, position does something they are supposed to do, but which incites somebody’s ire, a boss who has shoulders will stand up for them and maintain the correctness of their actions despite the fact that someone else may disapprove. This is opposed, for instance, to a boss who has a lot of beautiful, inspiring phrases but picks favorites and doesn’t really apply himself to his job or take care of his subordinates. It is also opposed to a boss who is overly fond of zuoren, which can be translated as doing-person, or doing-humanity, which might less weirdly be rendered by the phrase ‘being a good person.’

In common parlance, zuoren is a good thing—in fact it’s kind of the good thing. It means acting correctly toward other people and maintaining your relationships properly, behaving in a way that befits the balance of assistance and obligation in a given situation, giving gratitude where gratitude is due and giving aid where aid is called for. In a bizarre twist of phrase, zuoren seems to be an exclusively negative term when used by my government bureaucrats. A boss who likes to zuoren too much utterly lacks shoulders: he may have initiated some great plan, but when confronted with opposition from other interested parties, he buckles, leaving his subordinates in the lurch. Sometimes zuoren shades into intimations of outright corruption, but it always implies some sort of undue influence—the point is less what kind of influence (higher-ups, elected representatives, private parties) or how it is manifested (threats, money, sentiment), and more that the boss himself is too weak, either in ethics or in character, to withstand it.

I asked the former section head (to whom everyone refers as Family Name Former Section Head—leaving me uncertain how to address her) about the data collection and submission process. In response she held up the case file, which happened to be on her desk, gave a wan smile, and half-rolled her eyes. Actually, after every one of these meetings the department sends a copy of the meeting notes to the Yankao Hui anyway; so presumably they have them somewhere. Why don’t they compile them themselves then? Because it’s just as difficult and time-consuming for them to find the information as for us, and since they are in a higher position than we are, they can just tell us to do it ourselves. In our department, these meetings are organized by particular people in particular sections; the responsibility changes hands from year to year. After receiving the request from the Yankao Hui, Former Section Head turned to the head of each section asking for all their information. So far (two weeks after the request) she has received exactly two meeting summaries for the period covering the last six years. There are at least ten more out there, but where would they be?

The meeting notes are usually the responsibility of whoever organizes the meeting—the chengban ren, dealing-with-it person. What with the recent reorganization of the department (in which Former Section Head was demoted for no reason that anyone has pointed to) and its generally high attrition rate, you now have this situation where a lot of the people who dealt-with-it at the time have left, or been moved, or they have cleared out their desks and thrown things away. She asked people in the various sections, but “nobody’s willing to admit having had anything to do with it, it’s like, ‘it’s too long ago,’ ‘I forgot’ and so on.” What about our archives? All this information is definitely in the archives. The problem is finding it. The consultants’ consultations will not be filed under its own category, they will be listed under the particular projects that these people were called in to comment on. So she'd have to go through the bound books that list the documents in the archives, one by one, and figure out which cases had relevant meeting notes.

Former Section Head could go and look through the bound books herself because she has a high enough position in the department and it would be for a department project. But then to actually access those files, she’d still have to fill out a carbon-copy request form for every individual one and then have it stamped by the section head of each relevant section. So it’s not that it’s technically impossible to find all this information; it’s just that it would take a very, very long time and be a big, big bother. Geez, so how are you going to handle this? Won’t it just eat up all your working hours? “I’ll give them what I can get from the individual sections, and let them deal with it themselves.”

In general the archives tend to appear in conversation as a kind of documentation gulag. “Yes yes, the Department of Social Work did an extensive study on that last year," a high-level official told me when I asked about a particular policy. "I think we still have one lying around, I’d be happy to lend it to you. Unless it’s been put in the archives already. Hmm, let’s see, the people in the community services office might still have one, you should check with them right away. Go right now and ask. Let’s just hope it hasn’t been put in the archives already and we can find a copy to lend you. Otherwise you could go to the Department of Social Work and see if they have one that hasn’t gone to the archives yet.”

What’s weird about all this to me is less the fact of dispersed and uncollatable information—that by itself seems pretty normal. But to have this basically pre-computerized approach coexisting with this incredibly high-tech quality of the rest of life here—and the rest of the city government itself—is causing me a little cognitive dissonance.

I'm about to try to finish the last installment of the communications issue blog and it occurs to me that this thing could use a little, um, color to liven things up a bit. I'm sure I am not the only one who has had enough of flourescent lights for a while. This picture is of a puppet show I happened upon recently in the big square behind the central police station (I was getting my visa extended).The best puppetry I've seen here, or probably in my life, was by a troupe run by a Dutchman named Luo-bin (i.e. Robin). But I was happy to see someone else giving it a shot, if only in the rather contrived setting of an 'Arts Festival.'

a little bit closer

pay no attention to the musicians behind the screen

[natnam] amusing wastes of time

Ever have trouble figuring out which box to put yourself in? Try selectsmart.com for all your self-categorizing needs. It'll even tell you who you support for president.

In other why can't I get myself off the web today and by the way don't I have a grant proposal to edit developments, here's John Kerry's Vietnam testimony (full sentences! lots and lots of them!), and an article as to why he's Not All That (if you're an obsessive ACLU type).

My first file! Placed on my desk just like I was a real person! This is the order to edit the English website about which I was whining a few posts back.

the formal document, a gong-wen -- would you translate that as public document? Formal documents of this sort are written in a style so arcane that they have to have special tests on it (a discovery I felt really good about, as you can imagine). The formal document in the file will be preceded by an informal, usually handwritten, note from the dealing-with-it person explaining what the formal document means.

the explanatory note, in this case written in an extraordinarily un-cursive fashion, perhaps because it was going to me.

this note has gone through several layers of approval: here you see three stamps of people at various levels, and up above there is also the department head's distinctive "ok." Different leveled people add on their additional requests, as you see in blue.

the department head's distinctive "ok" (ke, meaning, um, 'ok') and signature, along with a request to 'debug' the program (can you read the characters for that) which clearly not aimed at me.

"okay you guys, look cute!" notice the flourescent lights.

communication issues, part 2

So to get back to things getting me, what gets me is this: here we are sitting in this enormous meeting room, with two technocrats from each city government department expected to start working on this project right away, and one technocrat per department expected to show up at weekly meetings to discuss, present, and compile, from now until there is enough information to make it look like the mayor has actually accomplished something in his time in office, or the explicit beginning of the next presidential campaign, whichever comes first. And the question I have, which is supposedly the question I’ve been here answering all along but which I am actually still puzzled by, is: Why is it necessary? Why are all these people needed to compile lists of policies, policy implementation activities, and information on their results? Why does the city government not have access to its own information? We’ve determined that everything is, in the final steps at least, computerized; and we’ve determined that at least some information is regularly stored in relatively centralized, searchable locations. So you’d think that what would be involved in compiling information on policies, their implementation, and their obvious effects would be something less like having a trained professional city planner go around asking everyone to tell her what they've been up to for the last six years, and more like having some administrative assistants go into the machine and extract the information.

So, what is the information storage system that we’re working with then? Here’s how written history works in the department I’m in, from what I’ve seen. Aside from his computer, every administrator has a small notebook, softcover, bound in brown-paper-bag-like paper, in which he writes the information for each case he handles: the case number, the date it came to him, the title, the basic idea, what he did about it, and who he handed it to when he’d done it. This book stays on his desk, for his reference. So if I need to get at some document that he handled—for instance if I am a person from another department and I never got a copy of the meeting notes for which he was responsible—I can ask him about it.

He can look it up in his little book and tell me that the document was sent to my office last Tuesday and I should look around and see if anyone’s nabbed it; or he can go to his computer and find a piece of information in the document if I am looking for something less formal than the full final stamped and dated version; or he can even, god forbid, write down the case number and date on a piece of carbon paper, stamp it, take it to his section head to stamp again, and then give it to the "dragon lady" (direct citation, in English) who runs the archives on the eighth floor and see if one of her lackeys will find it for him, after which he can copy the relevant parts and return it to the dragon lady within the seven-day deadline. The other people who see the little book are the adminstrator’s immediate superiors, the guzhang, his little-group head (in charge of about 4-10 people), and the kezhang, his section head, for purposes of review: how fast did he handle his cases? How many cases did he handle? And so on. As far as I know the information in this book does not get entered into any kind of centralized or searchable format accessible to others, like a database. I may be wrong on this, and for some bizarre reason I haven't bothered to ask yet (tomorrow, really), but so far evidence points in that direction.

Technically, Taipei has pretty bright sunshine laws that allow even private citizens access to city government documents with a relatively simple process that is standardized across departments. In practice, as a student of a friend of mine determined in an informal but thorough study that was then passed on to me, every department has its own archive with its own rules, and documents are generally quite difficult to locate in the first place (in the sense of being able to tell the local dragon lady what you are looking for) and to get access to in the second (in the sense of getting her to actually hand them to you). The Department of Urban Development archives require the aforementioned carbon paper request form, preferably signed and stamped by the chengban ren, the accept-dealing-with-it person, that is, the (lowest-level) person in charge of the case, and then stamped by his section head. If someone does something crazy like die or change jobs or otherwise absent himself from the role he held when he accepted and dealt with the case in question, someone else in the section in which the case was handled can sign and stamp the carbonated request form, filled out with the number and date of the case, and take it to be stamped by the current head of that section. I’ve been told that, if the original chengban ren is still working in the department but is in another section, the dragon lady archivist insists that the request form bear his stamp, also. In any event, the form must have the number of the case. The number of the case is in the little softbound brown paper notebook belonging to the accept-dealing-with-it person.

Presumably when he dies or changes jobs, the notebook stays behind; so presumably someone somewhere would be capable of tracking down a document from, say, two years ago, by looking through all the pages of all the notebooks of all the people who worked in that section at that time, presuming that the person looking for the document knows the section in which the case was handled and the number or name of the case. Presumably he would also be able to ascertain from the titles of the cases which case was of interest to him even if he did not know the document number. However, I am currently translating the titles of the 100 major cases the department is currently working on into English. Aggravated calls by the coworker who is technically in charge of these translations to people in various sections asking them what the hell they mean by giving a case a name like that and how is Anya supposed to translate it when he can’t figure out what it means either lead me to think that perhaps one wouldn’t, necessarily, know which case one was looking for just from the title, even presuming one could find it on some page of a little notebook.

I thought it seemed a little quiet...

Rain day today, everything's closed for the typhoon, I don't have to show up at the office, and I feel like a kid let out from school. Isn't that ridiculous? I mean, given that technically I never have to show up at the office? Truly, humans are self-restraint-creating animals. (HB, do you remember our first snow day in Maryland? I distinctly remember feeling, "You call this snow?" There was just a dusting, really -- it came right off under the weight of your sled, and you could see the full head of healthy green grass still covering the hill underneath.) But it means I can stay home and watch The Price is Right all day -- by which I mean, sit at my computer and actually plow through some of this ridiculous piled-up work. And maybe finish that "communications" blog I started a while back; I know how uncomfortable you must be, being kept on tenterhooks like this.

office notes

Under the guise of reportage and superficial analysis, I think I've been complaining a lot about the city government lately. But I just want to point out that the people I work with here are, for the most part, just lovely. Everybody's out at meetings today, it's just me and Che in the office, he's teaching me how to blow someone off in Taiwanese (tioh ah tioh ah li kong eh long tioh, “right, right, everything you say is right”) and joking about how all of the copyediting people want me to do has to go through him—so he can collect a little processing fee for each case, just like a real, traditional style bureaucrat. I sit back down to work on the English website and a few minutes later yelp and jump out of my chair: JT, the most childish forty-year-old I know, has snuck up behind me and boo'ed the hell out of me. I go into my exaggerated boxer’s crouch and start punching him on the arm, and we have a little mock fight as Che yells encouragement at me in Taiwanese and George admonishes everyone to stop picking on the poor foreigner. Certainly the most fun office environment I’ve ever worked in (if not the most productive).

Last Saturday a big story broke about someone in the urban survey section of our department who had been accused of a big little bit of corruption. Although it’s not technically up to the urban survey section to determine land prices, he managed to convince a major buyer—the Taiwan Electric Power Company—that a piece of land worth some amount of money was actually worth much more than that. He probably managed to do this by having friends in the accounting office. When Taipower bought the land, it cut a check for the higher amount. The seller received a check for the official, lower value of the land. The guy in our department is accused of getting NT$6,000,000 (about US$176,470) out of the deal; the rest apparently went to his accomplices in Taipower and it’s unclear who else. This excited a discussion about how much was enough to buy the consciences of the people in my section. The generally agreed-upon price was reported to me as 200 million NT dollars, with a rueful comment along the lines of, “So I guess we’ll never even have the chance to be corrupt.” Nothing we do is worth that much money.

communication issues, part 1

On Wednesday afternoon, Ma Yingjieou (KMT), mayor of Taipei, publicly ridiculed the Department of Education, Central Government level (DPP), for their lame English. He produced a document—some sort of contract form used by the DOE for international agreements—with his bold red circles around all of its English mistakes. A copy of the contract form with the red circles was published in the major newspapers on Thursday morning. And on Thursday afternoon, as I wandered in dazed from a four hour interview, my boss announced that we were screwed: someone would surely come checking the Taipei City webpages for their own English mistakes, to rebut and re-attack Mayor Ma. So I finally have something to offer the city government. The only frustrating thing is that I’ve already offered it once: I copy-edited the entire English website when I was here last year. Apparently the ‘case,’ as they say here, or project at that point was to “get the English website copyedited,” rather than to “fix the English website,” so my corrections were never entered onto the page and nobody knows what’s happened to them. So I have to do it all over again.

Let it just be said that although it is not the most difficult thing in the world to do, copyediting Chinesified bureaucratic English-language garbage-speak is also not fun, and it has its effects—so don’t be surprised if the style of this blog takes a plunge in the coming days (the current style seems to the result of last night’s last glass of whiskey and getting home at two thirty, don’t mind it).[i] Let it also be said that, although real English mistakes sat within Mayor Ma’s red circles, they are nothing compared to some of the incomprehensible weirdness of our English website. It would have been nice, my boss implied with his short sighs and his rolled eyes, if Mayor Ma had checked on the English situation of the City Government itself before lobbing what is most likely an early shot in the presidential race of 2008, in which none of my coworkers seems interested in participating, perhaps because they are already being required to do so.

For instance, I recently tagged along with a coworker to a meeting entitled “Taipei—Healthy City.” What’s it about, I asked her? “Who knows?” she shrugged. What it’s about is collecting information from every bureau in the city government to see how they are implementing the city-wide policy of making Taipei a Healthy City. Every bureau needs to collect statistics on healthy-city indicators. Although the basic guidelines for what constitute relevant indicators are drawn from the lists put out by the UN and other widely-cited sources, every bureau should decide for itself what policies are relevant. Then it should collect information about the policies and their rates of success as measured in indicators that the bureau decides are relevant to measuring success.

Why are we doing this now? Because Mayor Ma has only two years in office left, and he’d like to have a clear image of what our city’s accomplishments have been and how we can improve it further. “Oh,” whispered my coworker as the speaker explained the situation, “so he wants us to act as his presidential campaign operatives.” It does seem a little unappetizing to have technocrats use their time to retrieve and compile data for use in election propaganda—especially, I guess, since I know these people and have seen how the attrition from the bureau even in the time I’ve been here has left ‘case’ folders piling up higher and higher on everyone’s desks as they take on the projects of their departing colleagues.

But this is not what gets me. What gets me is this.

One of Mayor Ma’s big initiatives has been the “e-city” policy, which has put a huge amount of information and resources online, including application forms for various procedures and so on. City propaganda publications boast that the Taipei City Government is one of the most world-wide-webbed governments in the world, and although I’m not about to go figure out the technical veracity of this statement, I can confirm that there is a lot, lot, lot of information available on the web via the Taipei City Government portal. Some of the stuff is useless or indecipherable (they scan in images of signed new laws rather than uploading the text so you can actually make out what it says; and give a detailed breakdown of city ownership areas by the “section/number” system of ownership registration that nobody outside the city government itself seems to know how to use, without providing any explanation of how to use it or any way to find the “section/number” system corresponding to a normal address); and some of it is nonexistent (occasional links that lead nowhere); and the English sucks pretty much all around, of course, despite all the hoopla about being an “international city,” i.e. accessible to Americans (see above—but the English is purely symbolic anyway, obviously). But despite the occasional confusing entry, the site still offers a hell of a lot of information on city government organization, legal process, and the city itself—maybe even too much, as suggested by a coworker who says she gets confused by our own bureau’s website.

Here’s what the CIA World Factbook has to say about communications in Taiwan. A population that was estimated to be 22,749,838 by July 2004 used a total of 25,089,600 mobile phones (in 2003) plus about 13,355,000 land lines (in 2003). In 2003, there were 2,777,085 internet hosts and 8.83 million internet users. I think it’s fair to say, despite my opinions about how romantic relationships here work, that people in Taiwan generally are capable communicators and communicate at rather high volumes (in both sense of the word, actually). Closer to home, I think I can also safely maintain that the relevant Taipei city government employees are, by international standards, incredibly competent at putting stuff up on the web, and that even the web-irrelevant are at ease in a computer-permeated environment even though they still give things to each other in color-coded folders and write their comments on documents by hand rather than doing it all in track changes and emailing it around. Every document that goes around has to be stamped with the name-chop of all the relevant people who are supposed to see it, with date and time of viewing written by hand across the (rectangular, vertically-oriented) stamp. After the document has gone up to as high a level as it is supposed to, it is returned to the lowly administrator who is actually responsible for the project, and he incorporates everyone’s hand-written changes and directives into his computer file. In other words, although the work of passing files around is done largely in physical formats (presumably for reasons of accountability as well as it being the way it’s always been done—once you stamp something you are responsible for having seen, approved, or modified its contents)[ii]—it does all end up in computer files eventually.



[i] Actually the plunge about to be taken is due not only to the English website corrections and the translation of all bureau project titles that I need to do for the city government this week. I also have to summarize a linguistics dissertation for my teacher who is doing her MA; and I need to proofread the statement of purpose and recommendation letter translations (or inventions) for a friend who is applying to graduate schools in the US; and my friends who are working on the Taipei Internation Documentary Film Festival (to be held in mid-December) finally roped me in to proofing their English-language materials. You don’t need this list of Work I Am Doing, I know. It’s just a little disorienting to suddenly be living All English All the Time—and large parts of it being Bad English.
[ii] One of the biggest jokes of the season, which had several coworkers holding on to their stomachs laughing, was when someone discovered that a section head had stamped an incomplete overtime declaration sheet: someone had applied for overtime pay for a meeting held past work hours, but had neglected to write in the time at which the meeting began and ended. The fact that the section head had stamped it anyway proved what everyone knew, which is that this particular section head does not “use his heart,” is not concentrated on his work.

a taiwanese take on the mainland

Shanghai already emerged a long time ago as the site of “it’s very modern, they’re progressing quite quickly” being-impressed-with-China’s-capitalism, but it seems that Beijing is quickly taking the lead as the place to party. Jennifer went for a few days a couple of weeks ago and is still in her self-professed mainland craze; and now this from one of my theater friends (notice the line breaks—all your emails end up looking like poetry):


Dear Anya,

我從北京回來
老天
真是好玩呀
海闊天空
房子大
馬路大
吃飯碗大盤子大
講話聲音大
什麼都大
心情也張得開開心心的
每天玩到半夜才回旅館
要不要我們每個禮拜都出去玩玩!?


I’ve come back from Beijing
my god
what a good time [+emphasis particle]
endlessly vast [classical phrase]
the houses are big
the streets are big
when you eat the bowls are big the plates are big
when you speak the sound is big
everything’s big
and my mood expanded too[i]
every day out until the middle of the night before returning to the hotel
let’s go together every week!


[i] lit heart-state also stretched out to be open open heart heart (where open-heart is a phrase for weightless happiness, and reduplication is emphasis)

know your body inside out

It doesn’t look like they hit very many venues (LA and Taipei only in the current listings), but the Bodyworlds exhibit is pretty amazing. They have exhibition cases with specific organs, and then lots and lots of human bodies. Bodies standing, bodies sitting, bodies catching soccer balls and swinging a lasso, I'm surprised they didn't have one doing downward facing dog. The bodies are cut up in all sorts of different ways to expose various parts and their interactions. Lots of corpses in various modes of undress, from all the way down to the bones to bones and innards only to muscles and nerves that are pulled away from the body parts to give a sense of how they are put together and layered on to one another. Artery structures of this and that (did you know ducks have arteries in their beaks?). And other corpses showing different types of things on the same body: left side musculature, right side bones and innards. Little slices of sinus that look like nothing so much as the animal-face decorations on early Chinese bronzes. A standing figure with cubes of various parts of its body cut out and brought forward so you can see the cross section of, for instance, its thigh. Weekly foetus development in tubes, from week 1 (smaller than a snot) to the beginning of week 8 (sudden growth explosion) to the end of week 8 (discernible fingers). And my favorite, a body cut open and splayed out in all sorts of strange places and twists, the halves of its head half-facing each other so that it is a real, dead human version of a Picasso.

Highly recommended if it comes to your neighborhood.

[natnam] clarification of disgust: reality-based communities

So as you know I have been spending way too much time floating around in the bloggy ether of the left, which is the source of my [natnam] entries. I just wanted to clarify, for no particular reason except that I haven't seen it mentioned in the bloggy etherleft (on which this article is making some serious rounds), that in my opinion the really unstomachable part of that excerpt I posted from Suskind's NY Times piece about the faith-based presidency (the faith referred to being the president's faith in himself, of course) is the fact that anyone, in any situation, having been told by someone, ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you," would actually then go on to give the person their vote.

I have an exhibition of human body parts to go see right now (honestly!) so I am going to restrain myself from going on a long bout of outrage that I would probably just erase afterwards anyway, but I will let you know if I see someone finally start selling the t-shirts that the bloggy ether of the left has been joking about, the ones with the slogan, "proud member of the reality-based community."

this is really long, part 1: stuck outside of xinzhu with the taipei blues again

The other day we were shuffling home through rush hour traffic, exhausted and a little ancy. Well, they were exhausted and I was a little ancy. They were exhausted because we’d just been to an all-day meeting about cross-regional government cooperation, a project initiated by one of my best friends, who used to work at the city government and then left for a bigger, better job just when this was getting underway, leaving it to a much less enthusiastic, much more easily overwhelmed co-worker to handle the minutiae and our very idealistic-in-principle boss to take the credit and the blame. I was ancy because I was supposed to go out with a friend that night, and I’d just been to an all-day meeting and was badly in need of some beer. The cross-regional cooperation plan has been gradually gathering little puffs of steam, but it’s a touchy topic, for reasons that include state structure and party politics.

There are two major levels of state organization here: the “central,” or national government; and the “local” or, literally, “place,” which means the city and county governments. City governments come in two kinds, though nothing in their name reflects this: some are within the administrative boundaries of a county (such as Yonghe and Zhonghe, which lie just outside of Taipei and are connected to it now by subway, and which we whities sometimes refer to as “suburbs” but which are actually cities in their own right). Others, like Taipei, are independent administrative units. Typically you’ll have an X City government and an X County government, where the County government covers the smaller cities (and villages and so on) surrounding the city. You cannot possibly be interested in this fact. Yet I am telling it to you, because I know it.

One problem with getting any kind of cross-local government cooperation is that lines of control, accountability, and communication seem to be structured as a series of binary relations between each local government and the central level. There are no lines running between local governments (in fact according to my boss the real achievement of this meeting was simply to gather all these representatives from these different local governments in one room -- something he says has never happened before -- and to lianluo ganqing, to build up their affective or sentimental relations). This may be how it is everywhere (I know nothing about government structure anywhere outside of Taipei, of course, making my observations slightly … useless), but in any event it seems like a sensible way to set things up if you are a single-rule, constitution-suspending, Leninisty party like the martial-law era KMT; and actually no less sensible if you are the colonizing empire, like the Japanese from whom the KMT inherited a lot of the country’s administrative structure (how much did they inherit? ask me in about five months).

Another problem with the cooperation plan is that, although most of these governments are currently controlled by the KMT (that is, the mayor or county head is KMT), two of them, including a pretty key one, are DPP. As a representative from one of these reported at the meeting: “We’re happy to be here and we thank you for inviting us. We are interested to see your presentation; however, political concerns make it impossible for us to comment on it now or to give any assurances of our participation. We will convey the contents to our superiors.” My boss, who has a gift for heartfelt spontaneous appeals to the good of the nation which seem to get a pretty positive response from people who don’t work with him closely, sighed. “High-level politicians have given us a rich abundance of political concerns. But if we simple administrators are forced to act on the basis of these political concerns, well, the nation really has no hope.”[i] The guy seemed moved, at least in the sense that after the meeting he spent a long time talking to my boss about the difficulties of cooperating across party lines and his own frustrations with the situation.

One common distinction that city administrators make here is between 人治 renzhi, rule-by-a-person, and 法治 fazhi, rule-by-law. It’s usually used to (at least implicitly) contrast martial law rule (when power was held by individuals who were to varying extents above the laws) and democratized rule (when power is held by individuals who implement the laws, which are above them). Here’s an instance of its use. A famous public university whose leadership is elected by the government proposed a huge construction plan that included moving and building around a Japanese-era building. Just as construction was about to start, one relevant city bureau suddenly rescinded its approval and demanded that the old building not be touched. The university stood to lose a lot of money; and the university head stood to look foolish in the upcoming university head selections. A member of the university team appealed to the head of the opposing bureau to give them some leeway on the grounds that “we are all administrators here, we are all civil servants.”

The bureau head erupted into a diatribe about not knowing what that could possibly mean, implying that the university was inducing him to corruption, and insisting that we are no longer living in the days of rule-by-person but are now in the era of rule-by-law, and the law says that this plan must be rejected. What everyone in the room knew was that the bureau had already done all its normal research on the plan and had approved it without even mentioning the old building when it was contacted by a famous professor with a lot of political connections and, possibly, a dissatisfaction with the current university director. At which point the bureau sprung into action and, without proposing an alternative plan, revoked the approval. When I asked a person familiar with the case (but involved in neither organization) about the bureau head's statement that “this is the law and there’s nothing I can do about,” he snorted: “What the hell does that mean? A bureau head doesn’t have the power to get things done? What the hell does that mean? If he doesn’t have the power, who does?” In other words, my feeling is that rule-by-law is most often invoked by people who need to justify their own clearly rule-by-person conduct. Which is not a surprise.

I bring this up in the context of inter-regional and inter-party cooperation just because, from hearsay and complaint and impression more than actual experience, I have this feeling that Taiwanese politics today is a system of elected rule-by-person. Unlike under martial law, when a set of unelected people determined both the laws and the ways in which they would be above them, now it is the populace at large who elects the people who determine both the laws and the ways in which they will be above them. Which makes me wonder why so many people use free and fair elections, and peaceful handovers of power to opposition parties, as the benchmarks for democracy. Elections are not a problem; what happens in between the elections is the interesting question.

[i] A note on the status of labeling something as “political” or a “political concern,” drawn from a footnote to a paper I wrote last spring: Jeff Martin has pointed out that the long-term equivalence (under martial law) of popular political participation with factional self-interest has contributed to a generally negative evaluation of politics itself. This leads to a rhetorical stance that I always found a little puzzling before Jeff explained this to me, in which things that seem to me to be primarily, inescapably, essential political -- like elections or legislative processes -- are only labeled “political” at the point when someone wants to express exasperation with or mistrust of them. Why the same thing seems to be going on in American politics currently is beyond me.

this is really long, part 2: a little code-switch sunburst

The point of light in this whole grey day of bureaucratic socializing had nothing to do with cross-anything cooperation. It was when our driver broke through his Taiwanese to say one phrase in Mandarin. I’ve been collecting tokens of Mandarin/Taiwanese code-switching, and although this technically didn’t fall within the parameters I’ve set myself (Taipei city bureaucrats), it was, nonetheless, totally awesome. My super-sophisticated notation system for keeping track of code-switching instances is writing down the words in romanized form with square brackets around the Taiwanese part. Then I write down the Mandarin translation for the Taiwanese (because the romanization system for Taiwanese is totally different from and yet overlapping with the Mandarin romanization system, so it’s very likely that I will either write it down wrong or get confused when I look at it again later on).[i]

Here’s the thing. A long time ago I noticed that people, bureaucrats, who were speaking to me or each other in Mandarin, would often switch to Taiwanese when they wanted to express some emotion or reaction in the voice of, for instance, the people in the neighborhood I study, who are pretty much all primarily Taiwanese-speaking. I always thought of this as ethnically specific—my bureaucrats know that my neighborhood residents are Taiwanese speakers and voice them accordingly.

But lately I’ve been trying to actually keep track of when people switch from one to the other in the office, and it turns out that it’s much more general than this: people will consistently switch to Taiwanese to voice the supposed feelings or reactions of, for instance, city councilmembers (who do not predictably prefer to speak either one) and even other bureaucrats. Recently I heard a coworker describe a long, frustrating phone conversation he’d just had. His end of the conversation had been entirely in Mandarin. I have no way of knowing what the person on the other end of the phone was speaking, but given that I’ve never heard this coworker respond in Mandarin when addressed in Taiwanese, I strongly suspect that the person on the other end of the phone was also speaking Mandarin. But when my friend recounted this conversation to another coworker, he expressed his own part in Mandarin, his interlocutor’s in Taiwanese. So I suspect that there is something going on with code-switching that is not about which language was or might be used to express the reported speech.

Our driver that day had been speaking Taiwanese for the entire time that we’d been with him—well over an hour going from Taipei to Xinzhu and, now, on the way back, another twenty minutes or so. So I think we can safely say that this is a man who habitually prefers Taiwanese, even though he is clearly perfectly competent in Mandarin when he needs to be. My boss, sitting up front with him, asked him where he’d gone off to while we were all having lunch. He explained how he'd never been to Xinzhu before, and so he’d gone wandering about to get a look at it. Then he described coming upon the wall of a famous building, a wall that he recognized from some city publicity photo.

People often preface real or hypothetical reported speech or reactions (their own and others’) with an exclamation of eh!, rising in pitch a bit. It’s a bit like the American, “I was like,…” prefacing something that sounds like direct reported speech but is clearly not claiming to be a real quotation. Here’s how the driver described his experience, with the Taiwanese in brackets: “[(So I was) Walking along, walking along, and (I) saw this wall] -- eh! I think I’ve seen this wall before!”

The really cool thing about this, in case you missed it, is that this is a person clearly prefers Taiwanese to Mandarin. His own quotation of himself thinking, expressed in Mandarin, can’t possibly have anything to do with his opinion of himself as a speaker of Mandarin, rather than Taiwanese. And while my bureaucrats usually start out in Mandarin and then switch to Taiwanese to voice internal diaologue or hypothetical reported speech, this guy does the same contrast in the opposite direction. In other words, this switch is not about an ideology of ‘what kind of person speaks what kind of language.’ It’s about information structuring: a way to mark, to highlight, certain kinds of information. And I suspect (but don’t have the materials to show yet) that it may have something to do with highlighting the hypothetical status and the second-hand sources of the information (even if one is citing oneself). But this bit will take a little more thought and more sitting around in the office writing down what people say, so I think I will leave it here for now, assuming you even made it to the end of this post, which is pretty unlikely.


[i] What I mean by different and overlapping is, e.g.: ch in the hanyu pinyin transliteration system that we Americans use is a romanization of the English ch as in chortle (more or less). In the Taiwanese language transliteration system that I use (there are two or three out there, each one associated with a political stance: unification, independence, and something in between. I use the unificationist one, because that’s what I was taught), ch renders the English dz or ds as in mounds. Chh renders the unvoiced version, ts as in its. There is no chortle-type ch sound in Taiwanese. You try keeping it straight while paying attention to what people are actually talking about.

[natnam] article: white house decision-making processes

Not surprising but no less creepy for all that. (Ron Suskind, NY Times, free registration required, cypherpunks doesn't work.) A preview:


---begin clip(one of these days I'll figure out how to fiddle with the margins here)---
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''
---end clip---


On a totally unrelated note, I found I, Claudius to be excellent airplane reading when I last left the country (especially the scene where Caligula discovers his divinity).

trafficking in metaphors

Why are roads and traffic the fat soft fruit hanging off the lower branches of the tree of social metaphor? Recently the Taipei City Government announced a shocking new plan, which was to start enforcing the traffic laws (curses, curses, curses, I do not have the link. But trust me. A reputable newspaper.). Not all at once, they don’t want to make everyone paranoid and cause utter chaos, but in stages, over the course of several months. I think it was two stages, over the course of four or six months. The other day I was idling in the white painted square at the head of the lane that is the place for scooters, waiting at a red light where a smaller street intersects the larger street I was riding on. I was on the far right of a three-lane road (lanes are purely optional, obviously, but you get an idea of the breadth). In back of me was one of those little blue goods-transporting trucks (the surest sign of some deep connection between Taiwan and China, I think, because they have the exact same trucks on the mainland). We’re sitting at the red light and we’re sitting at the red light and there’s nobody coming and there's nobody coming and finally the truck just pulls out and turns left, from the right lane, on a red light. The light turns green and I keep riding along and eventually I need to go into an alley. The alley is one-way the wrong way, but it’ll take forever for me to get where I need to go legally, so I just take it anyway. I always do; everybody always does: everybody seems to have agreed that scooters are actually bicycles (and cars are actually scooters). So I get there fine like I always do and a little while later I pull out onto a large street to go home, and run into another red light.

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere before that I think Kali, the goddess of destruction and creation, would be an appropriate patron for Taipei traffic. It isn’t quite as awesome as Nanjing, where I once saw a car take a left turn into a space in between two oncoming cars, but the general idea as far as I’ve been able to figure it out (and note that I am still alive) is that everyone watches out for what’s going on in front of them and has no obligations in any other direction. In cases of sideways movement and other unclear situations, right of way is determined by precedence, which means that if you can get a wheel in edgewise you have the right of way even if everyone else has to slam on their breaks; no one will for instance honk at you for something like that. Unless you’re a scooter, in which case it’s your problem: scooters, Jennifer says, are like cockroaches. I take a less grody view and hold that we are like ants: at any large intersection after the traffic finally stops for a red light, you’ll notice that the scooters never really stay still. They wind their way up, zigzagging between the cars, nosing along the gutter, sometimes riding up on the sidewalk, to the painted white square at the front of the lane. At really busy intersections it’s a pretty amazing sight: maybe four or five lanes of cars and this endless procession of helmeted heads wiggling, squiggling, sneaking through between other people’s exhaust pipes and rearview mirrors.

So that’s what I’m doing when I pull out onto this large street and hit a red light, I’m wiggling along, watching the ants settle like sand and keeping on the lookout for new spaces as they open up until I finally make it all the way up front to the white square, and then I notice the cop. He’s standing at the intersection waving a girl on a scooter at the very front of the square over to the sidewalk where he is, and then he’s yelling at her. Turns out that she had wiggled and squiggled her way up to the white square but hadn’t stopped soon enough, so that about half of her scooter was over the white line marking its outer edge. The edges of the white square are nowhere near the part of the intersection where cars actually cross; but the point is that she has violated the traffic laws by edging out in front of the white square, and the cop writes her a ticket. So, I guess “meaningless universals that we can catch just by standing there” would be the first implementation phase of the traffic law enforcement plan?

charlotte the harlot

In other news, those of you who are related to me by blood or marriage will be happy to hear that I have finally written a full draft of my grant proposal for the Charlotte Newcombe fellowship (I know there are a lot of people named Charlotte in the world but it always makes me think of small boys throwing rocks and unbearable beauty). This significantly reduces the chances that I will be coming to you asking for money come next October (not you, Il’ush; I’m not stupid). I still have to write up an abstract and fill in the “timeline for dissertation completion” (which will go under the heading, “who you gonna believe, bitch, me or your lyin eyes?”). My chances of getting it are not particularly good; but they are a lot better now than they were two days ago, when all I had was two paragraphs of meandering pretentious crap. Now I have a full six pages of meandering pretentious crap, plus a bibliography. And now it’s time for a little outing to a little place called J’s.

[natnam] more disgust

I'm thinking of maybe naming my firstborn child Seymourhershstein. What do you think? (RealPlayer, check it out esp at 41:45 but try to do it on an empty stomach.)

holy cow

We just had the strongest, longest earthquake I've ever experienced -- I actually ducked under my desk like they taught us to do in my Berkeley elementary school (and grabbed onto my standing lamp so it wouldn't fall over onto my computer). And it seemed to go on forever; in fact it kind of feels like it's still going on. My clothes are no longer swinging on their hangers though, so that is probably just my own shock moving my inner ear or something. I thought it was past earthquake season (summer, usually). Anyway, I'm going out to see if anything's broken.


update: Didn't see any damage, and apparently neither has anyone else, yet. It was around 7 on the Richter scale, biggest since the really terrible one in 1999, epicenter around 66 miles off the northeast shore, according to the latest report from bloomberg . See, it's not like my fieldwork is just movies and bars all the time. There's legitimate dangers involved here! Stop smirking.

[natnam] disgust of the day

Despite the fact that I am in the middle (“middle” is a figure of speech) of a grant proposal that starts out with people all around me very smartly questioning the benefits of democracy (at least in its whatever-that-means incarnation), I seem myself to have an obsession with voting that borders on weird mysticism. I think I can safely say that I am failing the “do you eat what you read” test. What I am reading is turning my stomach, though, from soup to nuts.

not about taiwan, not about me

Since we're all about lightness and brightness here, why don't you check out this wonderful obituary of Derrida, which makes him seem much more sympatisch than anything else I've seen.

wot, fisticuffs?

As if to vindicate my recent mention of legislative violence, there was a little fracas in the government today about the in-power-party’s proposed budget of around $18 billion for American weapons. I haven’t been following this case; the most extensive explanation I’ve heard was from a couple of protesters who were handing out leaflets across the street from my house (okay, I admit there are benefits to living near major landmarks). “Extensive” unfortunately does not mean “coherent”—the people who were talking to me seemed dissatisfied with basically every aspect of the current government, and having started talking about how the ruling party was ripping them off and lying to them on one issue would then immediately think of another issue about which this was also true and start ranting about that. I don’t know if this sounds familiar. I can sympathize with the position—“incoherent” doesn’t necessarily mean “wrong”—but find it difficult to retell. So aside from mentioning that these people were convinced that the unreasonably high price tag was a sign that various middlepeople were taking a scoop for themselves, I will look at one of the leaflets they gave me.

“Taiwan stands on the front line of the Pacific for [the benefit of] America and Japan. We ought to turn to America and ask for protection money…weapons should be offered free of charge. Not to mention that internationally, maintaining the status quo is the dominant trend—does Taiwan just want nuclei (weapons), and not want pants (people’s livelihood)?”

Nuclei and pants are a pun in Taiwanese (I’m not sure what the tones are in Taiwanese but I’m pretty sure both of these are kho-ah; in Mandarin they are hezi and kuzi, and different tones). One of the things that the protesters were upset about was that all this money was going to pay America—for outdated weapons, they claimed—when the cost of education and health care and everything else in Taiwan was rising. “Maintaining the status quo” means that Taiwan shouldn’t make any moves toward formal independence, and buying weapons to protect against an attack from mainland China suggests that someone may be considering giving mainland China a reason to attack. These are all old standards. What I really liked about this flyer was the idea that Taiwan is on the front line for the US and Japan. I have to say I am kicking myself for not asking the guys I was talking to what they thought Taiwan was on the front line of, given that the Cold War ended several years ago and the US hasn’t had any formal adventures in east Asia for quite a while now. Are we still containing Communism?

I think they would have had an interesting response—one of them at some point well into the conversation started yelling at me to go home and tell Americans that we can’t just go blundering all over the world invading people left and right, and that we have to get rid of our current president, and that everyone is starting to hate us and we are generally behaving very badly and it’s going to come back and bite us in the ass. He made me promise to convey this message to the people of the United States, so hear ye hear ye. This was more anti-American sentiment than I have heard in the entire time I’ve been here put together, so I was pretty impressed. It’ll be interesting to see if he is a fluke or a weathervane. This is by far the most pro-American place I’ve ever been to (including America), so it would really say something about America’s standing in the world if we managed to make even the people here start hating us.

at the edge of the protest: the flag with "New Party" superimposed on it (the New Party is the strongest supporter of unification with the mainland, at least in principle, although when confronted on the issue directly tend to say "when the PRC is fully democratic and capitalist" so don't hold your breath).

the first protester to talk to me. the headband says "oppose the military purchase, love Taiwan.' (they gave me a headband, so if you want one let me know).

the one in green is the one who sent the message to the people of the United States

protesters relaxing with flags

a story for reader MMM, in which nobody comes off looking very good

Fascinated by the 70% of Taiwanese women who are interested in foreign men, a gentle reader has asked me to write more stories about the topics he’s interested in. I’m sorry to inform you, gentle reader, that I myself have none of those interesting topics going on; but I will steal a story from someone else to feed the boundless belly of your curiosity. (Although now of course I can’t remember if I’ve already told you this story...)

I’ve got a Nameless American Friend who has lived in Taiwan for an unspecified amount of time. One of the specific things he likes to do here is to go to bars and pick up girls, his success in which endeavor being exactly the sort of thing that the very important architect would put under “70% of Taiwanese women prefer foreign men,” in other words rather startling from at least this, perhaps somewhat innocent, American point of view. One narrative evening he was involved in said activity. The young lady he had been chatting with and up expressed interest in his interest, but first had to make sure that the friend she was there with got home alright; she got my friend’s address and left with the friend in a taxi. A while later she did, as promised, arrive at my friend’s place. The first thing she did was pull out her cell phone to call her friend and tell her that she was fine, was safely at home, and was going to sleep. Turning to my friend, she then explained to him that she was very nervous, had never done this sort of thing before, and was in fact a virgin.

“I was like,” says Nameless, “you just let me pick you up in a bar, tricked your friend into thinking that you were taking her home on your way back to your own home, then got here and called her up with utter nonchalance to lie to her about being at home, and I’m supposed to think you’ve never done this before?” Besides which, he was a little offended by her claim to virginity. “You see, I’d already slept with her once a couple of years earlier under similar circumstances, and I was kind of hurt that she didn’t remember me.”

i just liked this scene (in front of a mountainside temple recently). why are there always dogs sleeping on temple steps? (years of deep meditative practice give me the strength to resist the impulse to say anything more about where or how sleeping dogs lie.)

fantuan 飯團 (rice balls)

Tiffany brought along a Hong Kongese friend yesterday when we went out to the hot springs yesterday, a nice guy who has to repeat every sentence he says at least once for me to get it. (Every once in a while Tiffany also doesn’t understand what he’s saying and yells at him for his non-standard, Cantonese inflected Mandarin, which is gratifying to those of us who assume that we’re idiots who have wasted years of our lives trying to learn a language we’ll never really understand as soon as we don’t understand what somebody is saying.) He had just gotten back from a birthday visit home; when asked what kind of fun he had had over the five days he was back there, he answered: “Eat.”

So forgive me for yet another entry on foodstuffs; just take it as a sign of my ever-progressing assimilation.[1]

After that day this summer[2] when my parents finally got a gander at “oil sticks,” a Chinese not-so-delicacy (would the opposite of delicacy be roughicacy?) that they had been hearing about for almost a decade in my miserable for-humor-value-only translation (it’s sticks cooked in oil, see, not oily sticks—although who can tell the difference), I though maybe I’d try to add some specificity to my discussions of the food here other than talking about how people are always eating, or if they’re not eating then they are talking about eating.[3]

So here without further ado is some strip-tease style documentation of the Japanese style ‘rice balls’ they sell in the convenience stores (hand made Taiwanese style rice balls are about three times as big and often includean oil stick—hi again— in the middle to give it some crisp). This one is a shredded pork rice ball, although the one I usually prefer is a tuna fish salad. And now with only slightly further ado...


[1] Did I ever tell you about going hiking on a Very Serious Hike a couple of years back with a group from my friend’s office? After driving halfway down the length of Taiwan, we stopped in a town famous for its Hakka foods and walked around and ate ourselves silly. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon going very slowly along the windy roads on this very serious mountain, up to the indigenous settlement with its rustic hotel, where we proceeded to have an enormous dinner. The next morning we got up about two hours after the crack of dawn and had an enormous breakfast, after which we started the hike, which was at most two hours in one direction along seriously unsteep paths. When we all met up at the far end, at the top of the trail we were hiking, everyone pulled out of their backpacks the crispy seaweed wrapped crackers and the fish flavored chips, and we had a nice little junk food meal right there before returning to the hotel, where we had an enormous lunch. You get the picture.
[2] We went out to their favorite restaurant with a friend who couldn’t resist introducing me to the owner as Our Friend Also Speaks Chinese. Far from reacting in the way I suspect I would have reacted (“Um, yeah, so do a billion and a half other people”), she chatted with me and then came back a couple of minutes later to offer us some fresh-fried 油條 youtiao, long, thing strips of tasteless fried dough. At some point when I was living on the mainland I wrote home about eating youtiao and sweet soy milk for breakfast, and they somehow made it into family lore as one of the Weird Things of the East.
[3] I first noticed this when watching two people who were meeting for the first time talk for half an hour about the different kinds of sweet-things-topped ices their home regions had produced: very coarsely chopped versus very finely slivered. (It is, however, undebatable that things like mango ice are among the very best things this world has to offer, chopped or slivered.)

fully clothed

tasty and demure. this is how you'd actually eat it, grasping the seaweed wrap

the innards

in profile

patron-client loopholes

I was just talking to someone who moved to the Taipei city government a couple of weeks ago. She moved here because she passed the gaokao, the higher-level national civil service examination, which allows her to take up a full-time, formal position in a government office. Before this, she worked in a couple of other government offices in other counties—what's called jianren, not necessarily part-time in terms of hours, but with no official title and no employment guarantees. (Surely we have a name for this in English?) She told me about how she got her first job, after she finished her MA.

Her professor was about to retire and kept intimating that she should take on the responsibility of organizing all his research files and publications and so on for posterity. But he never straight out told her to do it, so she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing exactly. With graduation coming up, she asked him if he could "introduce her" to some job, that is, use his connections. He just kept joking that she treated him so badly, wasn't organizing his files, and so on. She finally went on the web to look for a job herself, and found that a nearby county government was advertising a job that had to do with her training. She figured the hell with it, and applied.

She was the eighth of eight applicants interviewed, and the first question the interviewer asked her was: "Who do you know?" Every other applicant had some high-up connection in the government, a city councilmember, a legislator, an important professor, who knows what. So the interviewer was kind of in a fix: no matter whom he hired, he would end up offending the patrons of the other applicants. He had to figure out how to minimize the appearance that he was favoring one patron over another. This girl, bizarrely, knew nobody. She had been too scared to tell her professor that she was applying for the job, so she hadn't even managed to get him to mobilize his government contacts. The interviewer was delighted. If he hired her, he explained, at least nobody could say that he was favoring one patron over another. So she got the job.

think of it as kind of like an alley: part 3 (of 3)

I did not have these statistics handy over lunch that day, but I did in a roundabout way suggest that maybe these days many Taiwanese women are less interested than many Taiwanese men in arrangements that only a couple of decades ago would have been considered quite desirable, like the cook-for-my-mom, have-my-kids, take-my-money one offered by my decent-incomed, decent-looking friend. Maybe what foreign men have to offer is a different style of marriage and dating that is more to the taste of these only recently emerging female types. (I was also recalling a different conversation that might not be totally appropriate for text-body retelling, so I’m putting it in a footnote.)[i]

“No, it’s not like that,” My Current Object responded. Taiwan, he explained, and in fact Chinese society as a whole, has a several hundred year history of 崇洋媚外 chongyang meiwai, cravenly adoring the Western and foreign. The fact that these girls are into foreign guys is just another manifestation of that phenomenon. These girls are not the normal kinds of girls that we know; most girls we know don’t go out to bars by themselves looking for guys, looking for one-night stands. But these girls, instead of going home after work, they get all dressed up and go out looking for men, in bars, alone. These girls are like that.

“Wait a minute," I said, "I thought we were talking about Taiwanese girls who are interested in foreign guys. That doesn’t necessarily mean they go out to bars looking for one-night stands. I know several such couples and I don’t think any of them met that way. And if it’s just a manifestation of craven-adoration-of-the-West, then why is it only girls? Taiwanese men don’t seem particularly interested in foreign women. Are they?” He agreed with that: Taiwanese men are indeed not interested in foreign women. But these girls, you see, it’s an ego boost to them, it’s a way for them to feel like they have some value. They know that the society around them looks down on this behavior, this going out to bars by yourself, this looking for men, this one-night-standishness, this wildness. So they go to these bars where people make them feel wanted, make them feel like it’s okay to be that way. That’s why they do it.

I kind of felt like I was watching a Presidential debate—wait, what was the question again? So I let up and went back to nodding and smiling. I figured anyway that the fact that Taiwanese men are with utter predictability not interested in me was nothing I needed to highlight any further. But it’s not quite true that Taiwanese men are not interested in non-Taiwanese women: “Last year 25 percent of marriages involving a Taiwanese male…were to a foreign woman,” wrote the Asia Times in 2003.[ii] As you can probably guess, these foreign women were for the most part not “foreign” in the sense of “white Euro-American” that I described a couple of days ago. Of the 280,000 non-Taiwanese women married to Taiwanese men and residing in Taiwan in 2003, almost 68% were from mainland China, around 14% were from Vietnam, and over 3% were from Indonesia. “To put that 280,000 into perspective, it is equivalent to the number of foreign workers in Taiwan or, even more significant, the number of non-ethnic Han Aborigines - the ethnic-Malay original inhabitants of the island.” I probably should have asked the architect about this interesting anthropological fact and the reason behind it.

In the absence of his explanation, I will start with the explanation given by that same Asia Times article: “availability and … low expectations.” Taiwan’s population has around a 6% bloat on the male side, so more men will be looking to get married in the first place. But aside from that, since foreign brides, as they are called, are usually more or less explicitly purchased from much poorer countries, they are known to be “loyal, considerate and obedient.” A rather bitter article (in Chinese) quotes one foreign-bebrided man explaining his choice to a journalist who sounds like just the sort of woman he wouldn’t want to marry: “Vietnamese women are hardworking and obedient: when my mother says ‘east,’ my wife doesn't go west. She doesn’t talk back, doesn’t give me any mother-in-law daughter-in-law headaches…Not at all like many a Taiwanese woman: doesn’t want to have kids, complains that you’re not romantic enough and don’t understand her heart, and if you tell her she has to live with your parents after you get married you’ll never hear the end of it.” And if that helps explain why so many Taiwanese men are marrying non-Taiwanese women, I wonder if it might also help explain why some Taiwanese women are interested in dating non-Taiwanese men. Next time I see the architect I’ll ask him what he thinks.



[i] I was walking around with a friend of mine, about the nicest guy I know here, who was telling me about a friend of his who had just gotten married. Before he got married he had this habit of going to prostitutes, mainly in Hong Kong—he’d fly over to Hong Kong just for the weekend and visit a brothel or two. And now that he’s married, it turns out he still does it! My friend was shocked, which I found pretty charming. I said maybe his friend found that it was less stressful that way. He said, “Oh, because they can’t refuse?” I said, well, maybe that, and maybe also that his friend doesn’t feel anything is demanded of him, like making sure the girl has a good time too. “Oh, really!” my friend responded, apparently at a loss. “Oh!”

[ii] There are slightly differing statistics on this floating around and I can’t find on the web any of the government statistics that everyone is always quoting. An alternate phrasing I have seen says that in 2002, foreign brides accounted for 11.63% “of the people who registered their marriages during the year.” I’ve seen 11.6ish cited as the percentage of marriages, as well(though I can’t recall where). But presumably there are two people registering for every one marriage, which would place the percentage of marriages involving foreign brides by this statistic at 23.26%, not quite 25% but close enough, I guess.

intermission 3: double ten

Today is National Day, the foundation holiday of the Republic of China, the sum effect of which on my life currently is that the lady who usually sells me my fried rice is taking the day off. National Day, the tenth day of the tenth (solar) month, is kind of a strange event in a place that a relatively limited number of organizations acknowledge as a nation(-state). It’s hard to say anything definitive about it, aside from the fact it is not a sound aesthetic principle on which to construct buildings. The shape of Taipei City Hall, which looks like it was built in 1973 but was actually built over twenty years later, is based on a reduplication of the character for “ten,” which is an even-legged cross, as you can see in red near the base of this image. Aside from looking incredibly clunky and having, by all accounts, miserable fengshui (it’s surrounded by wide avenues that sweep all the good luck away), it is, as you can imagine, pretty inconvenient to get around in. Talk about putting symbolism first.

I’m about to go immerse myself in hot water (going to a mountain hot springs place with Tiffany and My American Friend), so I’ll leave you for now with the President’s National Day Address, and draw your attention particularly to this nice little paragraph: “The sovereignty of the Republic of China is vested with the 23 million people of Taiwan. The Republic of China is Taiwan, and Taiwan is the Republic of China. This is an indisputable fact,” which may or may not cause a lot of talk tomorrow—either from the people who are disturbed about the shutting-out of the PRC, or from the people who are part of the “rectification of names” movement that would eliminate the name "Republic of China" altogether.

not about taiwan, not about me

I'm living in a place that a few short years ago was famous for fistfights in its legislative assemblies. In fact, as someone recently informed me, legislative assembly fistfights, now seen all over the world, actually originated in Taiwan. (I think he was specifically thinking of that picture that ran in the newspapers last year of a Japanese legislator in a tight skirt climbing onto a table to hit someone -- the headline was something like "Just like us.") Tim Ryan yelling to the House of Representatives isn't quite a fistfight, but it's pretty bracing anyway; and you can probably see things better than you would in a real melee. (I think you need wmp; here are some other options.)

intermission 2: “okay, but will it get me a phd?”

A couple of guys from the Urban Planning Department explained to me the global ethnic hierarchy of construction competence the other day, while we were walking around the ‘urban plan area.’ Germans and Japanese care about both process and product: you have to get the correct result, and you have to get it by taking the correct steps. Americans care about product, but not process: as long as you end up with the results they want, they don’t really care how you got them. Taiwanese care about neither process nor product. “Taiwanese: we’re all chabuduo xiansheng, Mr. Good-Enough. That’s why everything we build is so lame.”

intermission: you can’t moral outrage without breaking eggs

I’m taking the day off from flourescent lights and following people around today to sit squirreled up in my room, supposedly writing a grant application but mostly doing busywork and catching up on some internet reading—various “sputtermatter” websites and the news. Around a few minutes ago, I thought I’d cook myself up a soft-boiled egg as a little snack. The eight-minute soft-boiled egg is in a league of snackdom rivalled only by the deep fried chicken butt on a stick, and is also just about the only place where my famously lacking sense of time manifests itself. But today I ended up sputtering so long that by the time I got back to the kitchen the egg had exploded in the pot. I guess I’ll go out for some chicken butt later; in the meantime I guess I’ll just keep reading and sputtering as I spoon up what’s left of the egg. And the grant application I’m supposed to be writing is about “ethical values,” of which it now seems that I have a few too many. Who would have thunk? By the way if you have always felt that there ought to be a psychotropic cure for political depression, you might want to ask these people if they have any plans to create one.

think of it as kind of like an alley: part 2

Being what a professor once politely phrased as “high affect,” I experience fieldwork largely as an exercise in self-effacement. From the mechanics of interview recording, where I’ve learned that my normal “uh-huh, right, I see” responses and general propensity to interruption obscure the interviewee’s voice in a way that nodding and smiling do not, to the gradual realization that voicing my opinion will only sometimes encourage my interlocutors to produce opinions of their own, the fieldwork process has provided a valuable beginner’s course in shutting up. I have been rewarded in this endeavor by comments to the effect that I “don’t seem like an American,” which, although sometimes explained by euphemistic variations on “short,” is frequently enough described along the lines of polite, not overbearing, Taiwanese-demeanored that I figure I must be learning something. But sometimes when I’m tired, or relaxed, or when I’m tired and relaxed and someone seems to actually be interested in something, the reticence breaks down kind of in the way that, at a more advanced stage of tiredness, my speaking skills break down: my self starts emerging in blurts and starts, chunks of internal structure that crumble and break down at the edges.

So in response to the architect’s question about why 70% percent of Taiwanese women prefer to date foreign men (which statistic should perhaps be added to the recent American likely-voter polls), I proposed the not startlingly original idea that women and men tended to want different things from relationships and marriages. For instance, a male acquaintance of mine who works for an international computer company recently mentioned his two top priorities in finding a wife (which, at around thirty-six, he thinks it’s getting time to do). (1) Since the married couple will live in his family home, his mother has to like her. (2) She has to be young enough to have several children, since as an only son he needs to have a boy to carry on the family name. His own stats are not bad (steady job, good income, decent-looking, nice enough); as a reasonably pleasant and tolerant person with a respectable social position and bank account, he’s in a perfect position to do what a man is supposed to do and yang 養, support or nourish, a wife and family (yang is also used for children, mistresses, pets, and plants).

Unfortunately, at least the women I tend to know are not really looking to be yanged—or at least it’s not the decisive factor. In fact, the one woman my age I know who has been in a clearly yanging relationship was someone with a good income who supported her boyfriend while he got his second degree and then spent a year not finding a job. It’s a scewed sample, of course, since even Gallup would probably not accept “my acquaintances” as a reasonable polling block; but still it should be indicative of something. There are even statistics that suggest what it’s indicative of: although I am having trouble finding anything official or updated on the web, it seems that a bit over ten years ago women made up not-quite half of the Taiwanese workforce[i] and not-quite half of the students at both the university and junior college levels,[ii] although at slightly-over half, their average income in proportion to men’s was still at the level of “suck.”[iii]



[i] 44% of the workforce in 1992 according to some ; 46% in 1988 according to others.

[ii] Around 45% in 1992.

[iii] 66% in 1992.

think of it as kind of like an alley

--this is turning out to be longer than anticipated, so i'm posting in chunks as they emerge--

Yesterday was the first time in forever—maybe in literally forever, now that I think about it—that a non-Taiwanese man has paid attention to me in a Taiwanese bar. It was an overpriced, overdecorated, over sound systemed bar in the part of Taipei that is explicitly modeled on the way they build cities “abroad.” If you can’t figure out which “abroad” they’re talking about, you get a hint from one of the area’s main department stores, New York New York, which has a mid-sized Statue of Liberty at its front door (there are also, of course, Japanese department stores here as well). This place is a special “urban plan area” devised around fifteen years ago to be something else, something other than the rest of Taipei. It does not have the different-sized streets intercut by small alleys with mixed commercial and residential buildings that make up most of the rest of the city. Instead it has large single-use buildings, grouped into single-use areas, sitting on very long blocks bounded by very wide streets bordered by very wide sidewalks.[1]

They couldn’t get rid of alleys completely. A couple of smaller, shamefaced streets cut through even these blocks, but their character has changed. They run the length of nothing—no stores, no residences, at best a parking lot sits by the side—and only serve to connect other, larger streets. While in the rest of the city alleys form a primary site for everyday life, here they merely provide passage from one possibility to another: dead space. If this part of Taipei really did resemble an American city, this is where you’d expect to be mugged. With its tall, smooth, glittering buildings and wide-open spaces, the area alleviates the bunched-together, falling-all-over-each-other, cement-block feel of much of the rest of the city, whose rough and tumble buildings seem to begrudge having to pause for the streets. Urban plan area buildings are set far back from the sidewalks. Overlooking the fact that concrete, rather than grass, covers the spaces between them, Le Corbusier would probably not be too disappointed in the way the district turned out.[2]

In other words, although this area does not remind this American, at least, of any particular place abroad, it does do a pretty good job of utilizing some of the sillier trends in zoning and land use that have been popular in America over the last half century,[3] resulting in a thoroughly urban landscape that is structured a little bit like a suburb. On the one hand there’s a pretty high density of shiny stores spread out over the course of several enormous blocks, which, taken as a whole, feels like the guts of an enormous shopping mall spilled out onto the street. (If you don’t like guts, you can go to Taipei 101, the world’s I think currently tallest building, which sits on the southwest corner of the plan area, and get the full effect of neverending mall, neatly enclosed in glass and steel.) On the other hand, several minutes’ walk away, you have semi-gated highrises for movie stars. The thing that makes this area not suburban, I guess, aside from the fact that it’s in the middle of a city, is the relatively large amount of open space devoted to pedestrains, a.k.a. potential consumers. One such potential-consumer space is the wide walkway between the two identical buildings of the Warner Brothers movie theater complex (Warner Brothers? I know, even I am beginning to think that this does not sound like a reasonable place for ethnography) where I met Alexandra last night to watch 2046, the new Wong Kar Wai movie.[4] Which is how I ended up, after the movie, in the over-everything bar, which is probably the only kind of bar you can run in this over-everything area.

The non-Taiwanese man was an olive head with an American accent who popped into the space between Alex and me as we were putting away our wallets and moving to jump off the bar stools. Representing not only himself but a group of coworkers who were presumably around, he asked me about my origins and told me that there was a bet riding on, I’m not sure, either my answer or my reaction, or whatever it is that people bet on in bars. In my typical not exactly polished way, I gave an embarrassed smile and minimal, but polite, answers, and refrained from mentioning one of the big secrets of success with women in bars, which is never to tell them that people are betting on them. Alex has spent a lot of time in English-speaking countries and speaks English, I am pretty sure, better than anyone else I know here. Beautiful and enchanting and poised and gracious apparently from the womb with no training, she smiled a sweet, welcoming smile and responded in friendly Chinese. It was the politeness that got me, the effortlessness of the withdrawal. We’d been sitting at the bar talking about what you talk about after a Wong Kar Wai movie—love, and memory, and how hot all those Hong Kong movie stars are. Alex is a pretty forceful personality, and between her textured voice with its crafted speech and the laugh that erupts from her and transforms her somewhat severe face, there’s something unusually in-the-flesh about her, even on the phone. In that moment of polite evasion, though, she momentarily paled and flattened herself into a Pretty Chinese Girl, fading away in a way that you’d think would be impossible given her crazy perm and high cheekbones and funky clothes. But what was strange about the situation, really, was that he had started talking to me, rather than her, in the first place.

To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic is the title of an article about a mainland Chinese soap opera whose main character is a Beijinger who goes to New York, where, among other things that I can’t recall just now, he screws foreigners, that is, non-Chinese people (who are “foreigners” even in their own country).[5] In one scene, he hires a prostitute and throws American money at or on her (while she is or is not doing something, I don’t remember). The article is worth a look if you’re in the mood for livelier-than-usual academic prose,[6] but you probably don’t really need to read it. Between realizing the two most likely meanings of the verb “screw” in this context and remembering the struggles of non-“foreign” nationalists everywhere to counterract a real or perceived “foreign” perception of them as ethno-national girlie-men, you pretty much already get the general idea. That soap opera was a mainland production for a mainland audience about a decade ago, which in terms of life around the Taiwan Strait is a goodly chunk of time. But the issue of screwing foreigners is a pretty hot one in Taiwan as well, though I usually hear it with a different tint and from a different perspective.

“Did you know that 70% of Taiwanese women prefer to date foreign men?” I was recently asked by a very important architect who was taking me and my coworker, My Current Object, out to lunch. This is the coworker I have been following around for the last couple of days, trying to figure out exactly what it is that these people do all day in their office. Although in some ways office ethnography is exactly the wrong thing for me to choose, given my feeling about offices (they kill my brain and suck my energy), in some more traditional anthropological way it may be just right: the whole thing is just so bizarre. How can people live this way? What do they do and how do they justify it to themselves? Real ethnographic puzzlement. My Current Object has been extremely gracious about letting me follow him around as he opens and closes files, holds and adjourns meetings, and goes out to lunch with his friends. The friend that day, the college classmate, was someone quite high up in the firm that had designed and built, and now operates, the glossy building in the urban plan area in which we were having lunch. He had heard of anthropology and found it interesting, thus saving me my normal, flaccid attempt at explanation and justification. This is pretty much enough to endear anyone to me at this point; but he was also a quick, interesting guy in his own right. He brought up the above statistic of unkown origin as a response to my being an anthropologist--an interesting cultural fact for me to try to explain.


[1] As you will probably figure out within a paragraph or so, I am not fond of this area of town. However, I hereby admit that am really into sidewalks. Sidewalks, as I rediscover every time I come back from Taiwan, are one of the things that make America great.

[2] I’m thinking more of The City of Tomorrow (sorry, best I could find) than of the church at Ronchamp, which is one of the most amazing buildings I've ever been in.

[[3] Some somewhat megalomaniacal people have offered some pretty good critiques of these trends and some sometimes hokey-sounding but in my opinion still pretty convincing alternatives of their own. (Scroll past the preaching-to-the-converted bits to where they actually start telling you a little about themselves around mid-page.)

[4] It’s Wong Kar Wai, right, so it’s not like I’m going to not like it; but I wouldn’t go see it twice in two weeks, which is less that I can say for some other stuff he’s done.

[5] Being foreign is more a state of being than a state of belonging, and as far as I can tell it is specifically a state of being-white. Japanese people are not “foreign” but “Japanese” or “Asian;” African Americans are not “foreign” but “black;” and Asian Americans are not “foreign” but Descendents of Where-ever-they-come-from. I’m pretty sure that Turks are not “foreign,” but Hungarians may be. My two favorite uses of the noun and adjective forms of “foreign” (same two characters in different order, 國外guowai country-outside-of = abroad, and外國waiguo outside-of-country = foreign) are: (1) Taipei urban planning administrators who, to bolster the case they are making for why some course of action is reasonable and desirable, often say some variation of “This is also how they do it abroad;” and (2) the little girl sitting next to me on a train on the mainland who finally got over her shyness and leaned over to say, “Say a few sentences of foreign-language.”

[6] Geremie Barmé, “To screw foreigners is patriotic – China avante-garde nationalists.” China Journal 34: 209-234, July 1995.