Western Women in Taiwan - Response

Daniel over at Suitcasing has very kindly responded to my request for him to write something about Western women in Taiwan, and he's approached the subject with the kind of integrity and thoughtfulness typical of his blog and that inspired me to contact him in the first place. I've wanted to write something on this subject for a long time, but didn't really know where to start. I'm much better where there is an element of dialogue to this monologue, so having a piece to respond to helps with the getting going bit.

I've learned a lot over the past year and a half since I left Taiwan and that has a huge effect on my perception of this issue. It also makes looking back at my own behavior more than a little uncomfortable, though interesting nonetheless.

In any discussion of gender in the western ex-pat community in Taiwan, it's tempting to start with relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships, but I want to pick up on some of the other things Daniel mentioned and perhaps expand on them first:

It annoys me that I can't fit into a lot of the clothes that trendy Zhongxiao Road shops sell, but if I tell people, it makes me sound cool and masculine; if a woman mentions the same problem to people, it doesn't sound so cool, does it?

Well no, not if you buy into the thin is beautiful and beautiful is important premise (as Wesern Women are often socialised to do). And much as this is pushed aggressively by the media posse in the West, in Taiwan there's the added factor that many, if not most, Taiwanese women have a naturally slim body-type. I was pretty thin when I was there and though I could find clothes that fit, it wasn't always easy. Shoes were always difficult and I was laughed out of several shoe stores by staff amused by my great clodhoppers. I don't think the laughter was ever malicious, but I did always have to psyche myself up to go shopping and it was frustrating at times. For the women I knew who were larger, it really did suck. What fed into this further, and as I said in my email to Daniel, being in a minority for the first time also lent a level of heightened visibility to daily life and certainly served to make me more self-conscious about the way I looked. I guess this is the part of the experience that Daniel refered to as feeling “special”. Being white in Taiwan was really interesting – I had never been in the situation of a visible minority before. Prior to the experience I had been given to platitudes like 'I don't see colour' .... Easy to say if you think of yourself as not having colour, of that being only something non-white people experience. In Taiwan I became aware of my identity as a white person, last year as a student of Women's Studies I learned to think about it a little more critically. So there's the element of visibility that can certainly make a person more self-conscious, and the element of different body-type which can add to that.

And as a man, you know that you might well meet some pretty Taiwanese girl and decide to stay here indefinitely (and you see a fair number of men who have done that). I wonder if Western women find it so easy to imagine Asia as a long term home.

Sure, during my four years there, I saw many many more men than women settle down in Taiwan. However, it wasn't exclusively so – I knew and still know several women who have been there for more than a couple of years and some who have no intention of leaving any time soon. Still, it is more than likely that the reason why there are more men than women who stay is that more Wesern men marry into Taiwanese society. It troubles me that the perception of why Western women leave is that it is because they can't find a man. I really think that is over-simplifying it. First, 'finding a man' is not the be all and end all to all (straight) womens' happiness. Really it isn't. For my own part, I stayed in Taiwan for three years before I met LJ and actually left after we met. Had we not, I would have probably stayed longer. Finding a man wasn't really any more of a problem than it would have been at home.

Plus, the dating scene frequently seems very lame, to everyone who isn't enthusiastically pursuing it, and it leads to a lot of Western women developing a low opinion of both Taiwanese women and the Western men who date them. The girls are brainless and it's hard to keep track of them, while the men are pigs who are fleeing the mature, real women back in the West.

I don't think I ever had a low opinion of Taiwanese women in general. Between the women I taught as private students and those I knew at work and socially, I met a number of really interesting, intelligent, fun and feisty women. Sure there were some Taiwanese women I met who I didn't like, but that certainly wasn't because of any Taiwanese-ness, I meet lots of people I don't particularly like, I think everybody does. But yeah, I did kind of develop a low opinion of the Western man/Taiwanese women dating scene, and it is kind of related to what Daniel wrote about next:

Being in Taiwan is a kind of paradise, if you're male and white. It's not that every local woman throws herself at you, but if you go to the right nightclubs, you will probably not have many problems. Suddenly, from being nothing special, you are really special...And so lots of white men take the attitude that they are kings in Asia - why look at either the Western or Taiwanese women who are more difficult to get into bed and don't wear high heels? (If you look Asian (and female) and aren't in a midriff baring top, you get ignored by these men too.)

Really it is not all Western men that behave like this, and probably not even a majority. I knew several WM/TW couples who seemed to have great relationships built on mutual respect and affection. But there are lots and lots of Western men who behave horribly in Taiwan towards women. This post is going to be (is already) long enough so I don't want to get into telling too many stories but I witnessed and overheard enough sexist/disresectful grossness towards women by Western men in Taiwan to last me a lifetime. You know, it's quite possible that all of this goes on at home too but for some reason the guys didn't seem to mind talking about it/carrying on with it in front of the Western women they knew. Which brings me to Daniel's next comment, and a question for me:

Gxx, you talked about the "scene", and the places where your friends hung out and picked up more girls... How possible do you think it was to get away from that?...Personally, I find the "foreigner scene" to be so depressing and lame, that I try to avoid it wherever I can - this is easier in Taipei than a smaller city, maybe. I don't go to nightclubs, don't go to the places set up for foreigners, in fact (this is a bit disturbing) I don't have any Western male friends my own age. It isn't deliberate, I would really like to find a male drinking buddy, but I've met so many morons and smug racists, that I have become skeptical of people who look like me...Single men seem to go a bit weird here, or stay at home studying Chinese text books.

Honestly, I didn't particularly want to get away from a lot of the expat scene while I lived in Taiwan. It would certainly been possible to do so, and there were times when I distanced myself a little. Truth is, I met a lot of wonderful people while I was in Taiwan and many of them were people out there teaching English like myself. I made friends for life, both men and women. The elements of that culture that I find so problematic were outweighed by the positives of my own experience and circle of friends. I think I should make it clear that I'm not saying this is true of all expat communities in Taiwan or elsewhere, but I believe I was part of a very special and lovely group of people at a particular time and in a particular place. I also met a lot of fantastic Taiwanese people who mixed with the expat community – and it was interesting to learn that for many Taiwanese women this is more than a little risky when it comes to their “reputation” among their peers and family. As someone who has taken more than a few risks with her own “reputation”, I respected these women for their choices. Okay, so clearly there is a difference in experience if one chooses to hang out in the expat “scene” but I don't think that simply eschewing it in favour of a complete immersion in Taiwanese culture is all that simple and all that much of a solution. After all, the expat community has become a part of Taiwanese culture as the country becomes more multicultural, it's not British or American culture – it's particular to the country it takes place in.

But I'm digressing a bit here, I wanted to talk about the situation for Western women in Taiwan. And I want to answer the questions Daniel posed:

How much do you think Western attitudes to the dating scene relates to us seeing Taiwanese people as lesser? If you had been living in Italy, for example, would you have warned an Italian girl about her cheating English boyfriend? These things are very hard to un-entangle...

I don't think I ever saw Taiwanese people as lesser. My boss was Taiwanese, my landlord, the doctors I saw...I guess as a teacher I was in a position of authority with my students. Had I been dating a Taiwanese man I would not have seen him as lesser, I didn't see my Taiwanese friends as lesser. But I know what Daniel means – perhaps the experience does bring out the colonialist in some foreigners. The second question relates to something I wrote in my email to Daniel when I tried to explain my own experience as a western women in Taiwan. I said that often I felt frustrated because I would see Western men, both friends and simply acquaintances, cheat on their Taiwanese girlfriends and that this bothered me because it often made it difficult to make friends with these women seeing as I felt unable to speak up and let them know what was going on because I suspected that this would invoke some kind of negative response towards me. And you know, writing that again makes me realise that this was really what I could have done to try to change some of the things that bothered me. But that's the wisdom that a year away will give you *wry grin*. Would I have behaved differently in Italy? I don't think so. I do think my reticence was connected to being overseas though – in a place where I didn't have any family, was single and (certainly at the beginning) often felt quite intimidated by the whole experience. There, friends were all important, and it was much more attractive to maintain the status quo than to risk ostracism.

Actually, I did experience a kind of mini-ostracism or 'ostracism-lite' at one point. What was interesting about that was that it came mostly from the male community and was because of something (admittedly stupid and insensitive) where I treated someone I had dated badly. As women, I think, we are raised and socialised to 'make nice', so that we are encouraged both not to make a beef about inequalities or injustices and to bear double-punishment if we do. But back to Daniel's questions...

And also, how often did the Western men start off as playboys and end up tied down with one girl? Still cheating irregularly on her, of course, but essentially turning into homeboys, because it was easier? I know some women who teach English in a small town in Thailand, and they've found themselves warning the Western men, rather than the Thai girls - the latter were far more frightening, in the long run.

Of course I knew a lot of men who were playboys and eventually settled down. I don't think that this implies any sort of frightening-ness on the part of the Taiwanese girls unless you think of settling down as involving some kind of scary trapping process (which I don't). I certainly don't think of Taiwanese women (or any adults for that matter) as innocent lambs to the slaughter though.

I guess what I think makes it more difficult for Western women than for their male counterparts in Taiwan (and this is only from my experience) is that, as women, we are socialised to be conscious of our appearance, to some extent equate our prettiness with our self-worth and that in Taiwan we are extremely visible and thus the subject of a scrutiny (and subsequent criticism) that is even higher than it would be at home. Add to which, for straight western women (I would love to hear what it is like to live as lesbian western woman in Taiwan) the dating situation is also different. I don't think Western men are not interested in Western women while they are in Taiwan at all, I just think that the high visibility of WM/TW couples and the lack of WW/TM couples, and the very open gross behaviour of some of the men can create negative dating conditions, and generally contribute to the frustration of living in Taiwan for a Western woman. So, as I said before, I don't think it is just the plight of not being able to get a man and thus being miserable but more that, in my case at least, I was faced with situations and behaviors that I hadn't experienced at home and was ill-equipped to deal with.

If I went back would I immerse myself more in non-expat related Taiwanese culture? Probably. But more importantly, if I went back I would speak up more about the crap I saw and heard about. Because I'm no longer scared of the negative connotations of being a feminist, even in a country where women are especially not encouraged to be outspoken, nor authority challenged. The prospect of a negative response to our challenges to the status quo exist to keep us quiet. And I have bitten my tongue enough.