Laowiseass

How can I let a child go into the (calm, warm, life-guarded) water by herself!?
Nice enough woman, I thought at first, as she helped steer my two kids to their bus seats so they wouldn't fall and slide down the aisle like hockey pucks. At that point I didn't know much about how to get a grip on two bold, experimental children at once. When we got to talking later in the ride, the woman wanted to know about how a foreigner could raise Taiwanese children. "You have an accent," she reminded me.
Since then I've started to question people's reactions when I'm out with two girls who don't look like me. Most people eavesdrop with a faint smile or ask a couple of softball questions, then leave us be. Some offer genuine help. You can tell it's genuine because they offer one sentence of dry advice and then go back to tuning us out.
But the woman who questioned my language skills stands out as a distinct third kind of person who we run into on the buses, trains and malls of Taipei. Their type bypasses me, the obviously incompetent foreign father of their country's kids, and talks directly to one of the girls. They're almost always women in their 50s or 60s. One woman told the 5-year-old her pack strap was out of adjustment and that she was wearing too little for the weather. The 5-year-old was fine, and I told the 50-year-old that we could handle both matters ourselves. The headmaster at the girls' kindergarten (female, not far from 50) doesn't trust me to pick out clothes for the children, despite daily battles and brainstorms in the closet before leaving home. I can tell because she saves the full text of her complaints for my wife, who's Chinese. They don't think I can take care of Taiwanese kids.

As postal clerk was sending a registered letter for me last week, a man came up to the counter on my left and asked the clerk to help him, too. The key word is "as." I wasn't finished and there was already someone else the same asking for service. Normally that kind of coarse, impatient behavior is rewarded in Taiwan (likewise China). Most clerks, used to the crass cultural norms of their clientele, slow down their help for customer A to loop in customer B.
There is no such thing as multi-tasking, according to one of my communications profs. People asked to do two things at once simply bounce from one task to the other, in spurts of a few seconds each, until both tasks are done. That means customer A finishes in twice the time expected, while customer B finishes at the same time he would have finished if he had waited for undivided help.
The postal clerk had some inkling of this. So she used an utterance seldom heard in Taipei: I'm serving another customer right now. Get in line.

Author-scholar Yu Jinglu offers this golden explanation of Chinese media's self-censorship in a book chapter called Structure and Function of Television.
"Media criticism cannot be leveled at the fundamental problems of the system; nor can the media criticize top leaders or the leadership above the same rank of the media organization. In other words, a provincial press is barred from censuring central official or provincial leaders."

Our new children (see previous post) won't go to sleep at night unless a parent lies beside them in the same bed. Their foster mothers would accompany them the whole night, despite cramped beds and the children's advancing ages, so the children got used to it. Could explain why family bonds are uncannily cozy in these parts.

Taiwan is rigidly conservative. Elders get respect when they deserve none. Guys propose dates to women, not the other way. Rain makes you sick, all three drops of it. We've heard it all before right here on Channel Laowiseass.
In February my wife and I will adopt two Taiwanese girls, ages 4 and 5 (photo). To qualify, we took a parenting class with five other couples over a month of Saturday afternoons. The other husbands and wives were mostly in their 40s. They also took the class as an adoption prerequisite. Most were straight out of the Ming Dynasty.
Among the lessons learned from my 11 classmates:
1. If possible, don't adopt. Try fertility drugs until retirement age to keep the mother in-law monkey off your back. Blood is stronger than water. It's shameful to tell our own feudalistic agrarian parents that for health reasons you couldn't push out a real heir, didn't care to try until after child-bearing age or just liked the idea of helping the world a bit by taking a child without a permanent home. (Failure to produce a baby was grounds for divorce in ancient China, our teacher noted, emphasis on the ancient.)
2. Hide the fact of adoption from other people. Eyebrows will elevate. Knives will be pulled behind your back. Don't tell your adopted children either, as they don't understand society's niceties and may glibly spread the word.
3. Kids never see adopted parents as family. Blood is again stronger than water, so children naturally flee to their birth families after disputes (I want another cookie!) with adopted parents. Those children may not know the birth parents. If they do, it was for a short, hazy period five, ten or more years ago.
But the lesson I really want to bitch, rant and blog about is the one that crept up on me three months after class, when we started to hang out with our children before adoption. I should have gotten a clue during class. Whenever the teacher, a progressive woman who spent hours rebutting truisms 1-3, asked questions of most couples, the wife answered unless her husband was called specifically. Exceptions were a Taiwan aboriginal guy (not ethnic Chinese) and some white idiot.
When we met our two girls for all or part of six weekends, I left their sides only to use the toilet. I spent an afternoon and an evening with them alone while my wife worked.
Whenever the four of us were together, a pattern became clear: Both girls would look only for my wife when they had something to share, needed help, wanted a hand to hold crossing the street or got restless for any old reason.
Was it my Chinese accent? Did I miss a cue somewhere and not come to their rescue? Do they just chemically bond better with my wife? Charm? Chance?
I asked these questions of the adoption agency and later of the younger girl's adopted parents. (I've not met the other girl's foster father.) They gave the same answer: Fathers don't play an active role in childcare. That's women's work (as any traditional, agrarian society knows).
Twenty-twelve, it's just a calendar heading.
The foster mothers, both around age 60, have been the main childcare providers since either girl had a memory. Foster dads play with the girls and one even goes as far as spanking her. But I'm told they don't bathe, feed, escort, caution or teach. They're not always around. Our adoption agency handler says it will take me about six months to prove that it's 2012 on the world parenting calendar.

The sign behind Ma here says "reform." Reform could lead to an ass kicking. It's best to what's being done now. Safety first.
People in Taiwan know it's safest to be safe.
When at work, say as little as possible in case truth gushes out and someone remembers.
When asked by a teacher to answer an open-ended question, give an answer someone else has already given.
When it's 25 degrees Celsius out with a light breeze, wear a sweater, down jacket, scarf, face mask and ear muffs.
Safety first. Or your ass may get kicked.
And when voting, choose the person who's already in office.
I heard over the past month a whole vault of arguments for why President Ma Ying-jeou was likely to win reelection on Jan. 14, which he did. For me, one reason overrode the rest: Incumbents just don't get chucked out of office in Taiwan. It wouldn't be safe.

One of my professors was explaining one day this semester about why Taiwan seldom uses entertainment-based ads to spread messages to the public. Other countries come out with video clips to dissuade people from unsafe sex or texting while driving, for example. They don't enunciate the central message but assume you'll get it anyway -- and remember it better because entertainment is fun, a deterrent to counter-arguing.
What do we get in Taiwan instead? Posters tell us to NOT DRIVE AFTER A DRINK and WEAR A FACEMASK IF WE'RE SICK already, damn it. Television commercials advise us to vote for someone in national elections because he's responsible or backed by someone who is. My favorite campaign ad just said, "Make the right choice, vote for so-and-so." Speaking again of illness, commercials for flu meds often say use this product so you feel better.
Why not instead use indirect entertainment such the French ad that stars a dancing graffiti dick that can't get any in the urinal till he puts on a condom?
The prof, who is Taiwanese, said it's because the inventor of any such ideas in Taiwan would be afraid of results so spectacular that she wouldn't be able to match them with a better ad after effects the first wore off. That slip would make the inventor, presumably at a government office or PR firm, look bad by looking good. So it's best to remain mediocre all along, even if conventional ads don't do as much good.
We can't have a situation where some bright line staffer is trying to explain to a boss why short-term success is better than none at all and that we just need to double up our office's brainpower to come up with a new campaign a year later. That situation would involve a subordinate challenging the instinctual reactions of a boss, a punishable violation of the Ming dynasty-era relationship hierarchy that pervades China. You can’t change that hierarchy. Twenty-twelve, it’s just a suggestion that appears on desk calendars.

The cartoon cop is saying "you get a big fine for drunk driving." Entertaining or what?

My friend in Hangzhou wrote this prose about the city known around China for its giant West Lake and verdant university district.
"All the time, every road is in construction. So much noise and dust everywhere. And all the old buildings are replaced by the new ones, even at the old campus of the university. The university is moved to the new developed area and the old places were sold for the real estate. But if you take a look at the unviversity in other countries, such as Oxford or Harvard, they are all kept from generations.
"Have you heard that they moved to another place?
"So it is a quite surprising way for the construction in Hangzhou. OK, forget it. We cannot do anything about it. We can only adjust and be accustomed to it."

The four characters in yellow mean "parking prohibited."
This blog post title comes from Asustek Computer. The PC maker used it to describe its private cloud services. The motto means that customers can get into their secure cloud whenever, wherever and with a PC, phone or whatever.
The real meaning became clear to me only after the Taipei-based firm's finished a news conference last week to unveil the cloud. When the event ended, some 30 reporters bolted from their seats and scattered around a large, dark auditorium to ask random questions of random, scattered Asustek execs for up to 30 minutes before anyone else could get the same exec's attention. There was no organized Q&A where every scribe had a fair chance of being picked.
Of course a local firm would design a motto appealing to local tastes (putting aside its claim to be an international company). Any reporter could interview any exec, in any part of the auditorium, using whatever audio-visual device by just squeezing into the pack and turning up the question-asking machine gun so high that no one else could get a shot in.
Speaking of local tastes, outside the auditorium, it was fine for drivers to park any car, any place at any time. For Lunar New Year in January, Taipei's firework laws will allow the use of any explosive device anywhere at anytime, operated by anyone. Meanwhile, city construction codes let any person build or demolish any building anywhere, at anytime with any kind of equipment.
And when in a restaurant, any customer can float past anyone else's table to take photos with any device. Any child can run in circles around the tables of strangers, who should oblige them at any time by scrunching in their chairs so the little dudes can pass.
Does Taiwan remind you of any other place, at any other time, like maybe a big land mass 160 kilometers offshore stretching from way back when through past our lifetimes? People in both places, at all times, enjoy a lawless, bustling veggie market in any context.

Earthmovers to the rescue

I wrote a letter to the Taipei mayor on improvements to our neighborhood pocket park. Our mayor this week helped the anxious folk in our little ward by ridding that park of some dangerous green life forms that had grown from the ground, distorting its ideal flat shape and grey color.


Safety barrier around the slain pests