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.
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.
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