heaven and the Mei-ke

You remember the Tai-ke episode we screened a while back? Well, we’re thinking of having a citational sequel on a related phenomenon, that of the Mei-ke. Meiguo 美國, beautiful country, means America, and a Mei-ke, I guess, would be the American version of a Tai-ke. I’m not sure exactly what this kind of person would be like or what a really Mei-ke situation would entail, yet, but I’m getting an increasingly clear vision. Today one of my friends who is working for the Taipei Internation Documentary Film Festival caught me on msn messenger. She’s in charge of their publicity and a lot of the organization, and she is exhausted because the thing starts on Saturday and everything is down to the wire. The other day while I was coming home from an evening out with friends around midnight, I ran into her in the subway. She was just going home from the office. “These days I usually don’t leave until around three; but as I said to my coworker, I don’t think I can remember ever having been this tired. So I decided to go home early.” I’ve been doing, as I think I’ve mentioned, some editing and some translation for them. It’s an international thing, and they have lots of people coming from abroad (most of the directors, for one thing), and anyway we’re very global around here, so everything needs to be in English as well as Chinese.

So today she caught me on line and asked if I could do the live English interpreting for their opening ceremony Saturday night. (I hesitated for just a second because I couldn’t, off the top of my head, think of what I would wear to such an event.) This feels like a very Mei-ke situation to me, similar to the way that people end up doing TV shows because they are foreign, or even the way that non-native English speakers who don’t speak English very well end up teaching it here just because they look so darn white that no one would ever suspect that their language skills were anything less than perfect. There are weird privileges to being foreign—the biggest privilege among which, in my opinion, is just getting drawn into somewhat strange situations that I would not be drawn into otherwise, and through very little effort on my part, to boot.

Taiwan: heaven for white people who speak some Chinese and want someone else to provide the amusement.