The Ambassador

A few weeks before I got here, I read a post on Forumosa.com that asked the people there why, if they complain about Taiwan so much, they are still here. One response simply read "Beer and pussy."

Halfway through training, we had a day off. The trainers passed out lists of different bars and restaurants and clubs we might want to visit that night. They followed this with the only time I saw them all be completely serious. They urged us to show restraint and compose ourselves as representatives of our company and our home nations.

There's a Dave Chappelle bit where he explains that, independent of the fact that he is a black man, he really enjoys fried chicken. He feels terribly conflicted, however, because he knows that if he were ever to go into a KFC and be seen by a white person, the white person would think "Look at him. He loves it."

There is a perception among a percentage of the native people here that all foreigners are alcoholic jerks who come to Taiwan to get drunk and take advantage of females, using them then throwing them away. They only ever eat at McDonalds and they only ever drink Taiwan Beer (because it is the cheapest). They are unable to find a job in their home countries, so they come to Taiwan to teach English and make much more money doing that than the average native Taiwanese would make in their own jobs, more even than their Chinese co-teachers who do a lot more work than they do.

Me, I have nothing against McDonalds as a company. The food there is alright for when you need it, and its never caused me any adverse health effects. Its as pervasive here as it is in America, though, so I think if I only ever eat there, then what did I come all this way for? (for the sake of argument, lets forget that the McDonalds menu here is radically different from back home) I've eaten at McDonalds 3 or 4 times since I've been here. I hate that fact. I give myself a pass kind of because I tend to like to go out very late, and there's nothing else open after 10 except for convenience stores, at least as far as I've found. But still, I'm an asshole. One of the amazing things about Taiwan is the tremendous amount of food that there is to be discovered here, and I'm in goddamn McDonalds. More than that, I'm seen in McDonalds, and in doing so, I'm perpetuating a stereotype. I just feel like I can and should be doing so much more.

One day I was sitting in Taichung Park and admiring how awesome it was there. An older guy came up to me and spoke with me in broken English. He asked if I had a girlfriend, and I said no. He told me I would be very popular here. A friend I had before I arrived here tells me that in night clubs here, girls will line up for foreign guys. (Foreign girls don't have it so easy. I'll leave that for someone else to explain) Everyone here pretty much acknowledges that the girls really like foreign guys. I haven't experienced it much, but then I haven't been out much, and the one time I did go out to a place to drink in Taichung, I ended up with a phone number.

Perhaps the reason I don't go out is because I am afraid- afraid that I will once again perpetuate a stereotype, afraid that I will overrely on the bottle to escape whatever pains I get from culture shock, afraid that, in giving up my inhibitions, I will also lose the careful consideration that has brought me to and kept me alive in, if even for a short time, a country so far from home in so many ways. There are certainly dueling perceptions of foreigners here. T-Shirts will often have words in English for the sake of having words in English, comprehension (and good taste) be damned. More than the women issue I mentioned before, oftentimes bars here will allow foreigners free cover and/or drinks. Among the foreigners in my school, the one other single guy once told me "We're rockstars here."

He also explained to me once how, when you think about the time that we spend here, relationships are bound to be unconventional. Foreigners are typically here one, maybe two years. In that time, there's no time for dicking around and only being forward when the moment has passed. Expatriates have a term, the "psycho xiaojie," for the girl who you date for a short amount of time and move on from, only for her to be upset and overly -often maliciously- emotional. The desires of the foreigner and the native are certainly at odds, but understandably so.

Where does this leave me? Caught between wanting two experiences that seem to be mutually exclusive. I have never wanted to be the 'typical' anything. For the sake of convenience, I might adopt what people expect, but given the choice, I will generally choose the less than typical. What is typical, though, about flying to the other side of the world to engage in a culture absolutely foreign from my own? Isn't all of this a celebration of independence and the irresponsibility of youth? Why be hampered by expectations of anything? To survive, I have to shed my own, why then do I hang on to others'?

Moreover, I seem to be perpetually tied to the chess club mentality. This is something easily traced back to my upbringing, with my only social groups being those arising from gifted schools. I never made friends with people in my home neighborhood (partially because I don't think any my age existed), and I kept myself tied to people who, like me, never led any kind of lascivious lifestyle. If there ever were promiscuity or rampant drug use, it was always done by 'those other people' (and though we can all think of some exceptions to this, those people were never considered very highly). Even into college, this largely kept true. And though we were admonished, as far as I can tell, there were never any issues with my training group even on the nights followed by a day off. I learned later that this was actually very atypical, and the reality that I anticipated- resulting from a large number of unsupervised young people loosed at once into a very enabling foreign country -was far more common. (I even heard a story of one of the trainers having to be escorted home early during a final-night celebration)

For me, for whatever reason (trust me, I've gone over many in my head), that's never happened. Do I want it? I know and understand the consequences of such behavior (I wouldn't be here if I did), and that has drawn me away from it whenever I've come close. But I don't like to think that I've ever shut myself off to anything, and that the experiences of people who are just as respectable after as they were before get to experience a bit of life that I will miss. It seems like everyone has 'their time.' I've never had mine. Should I take advantage when it comes, even at the cost of, once again, perpetuating a stereotype?

I actually have spent a lot of time considering myself as a representative of that which I come from. Of Florida, of the South, of America. Largely, though, "foreigners" are all lumped together here. Only among people from other English-speaking countries have I experienced any static based solely on my homeland. I really want to be a good example of an American, and I think among the more nuanced and experienced minds here, the distinction is made between the US and other places. But to the random stranger, the gawker, and the uninitiated, I'm just another guy with round eyes and a big nose. I'm afraid of what that means to them.