Laowiseass

Like a good beer, Laowiseass will put itself on ice for the first two weeks of July and travel to the United States, the first time under Obama and recession.
But first, an unwitting commentary on today's Taiwan from the Kaiser Chiefs.

Average day in Taiwan

You know when people in Taiwan say you look ten years younger than you really are and expect you to believe them? Like earlier this month an older couple called my grisled 40-year-old ass 28. We all gained face at the moment, but I flung the ugly truth back at their carefully hidden shit-eating grins because I'm a curmudgeonly foreign reporter.
I used this time-tested easy lie-detector method: If you're sitting with someone for a while, don't let on your real age when they guess low. Change the subject for half an hour and then somehow casually mention your real age or birth year in passing, like "we were just talking about benders and you know I find I can drink as much now at 40 as I could in college". Watch them listen carefully and not flinch. The truth comes as no surprise.

The only footwear a real Taiwan man ever needs

Surveys show that eleven out of every ten native Taiwan men over 40 wear blue plastic bathroom slippers at least 192 hours a week. Here are some of their testimonials:

Perfect for going next door for your daily breaded pork lunch box

Ideal for house chores such as chasing a naughty child with a stick or hammering up an add-on

A great match for weekend drives to the hills to fetch water from the national park springs, release the overgrown family dog or lose the trash

Compatible with any wardrobe, even yours

Why blue? Coz everyone says so

Put your best foot forward, as well as one with two black toenails and half of another missing

TAIPEI - More than 20 millon people in Taiwan demonstrated on Thursday against parliament's passage of a first-ever hair dye quota that limits each person on the island to one treatment per year on health concerns.
Protesters from middle-school students to retired fishermen around the island of 23 million hid their heads in coats and broke mirrors outside the parliament building, accusing legislators of taking away their freedoms and tainting Taiwan's local identity.

"People are going to know I'm 60, not 20," this protester said at break during the rally.

News coverage of the ballyhooed 20th Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary this month reminds me of covering earlier, lesser anniversaries.
Around June 4 every year while living in Beijing I'd try to reach Ding Zilin, a leader in the Tiananmen Mothers group, parents whose children were gunned down as tanks dispersed the student-worker-democracy protests. Every year cops monitoring her line would cut the call as soon as I said I was a reporter. I'd give up after three tries and rely on the Human Rights in China press release (how they reached her I never knew) for updates about massacre survivors.
But one year I got through after a number of tries. I asked Ding Zilin about her son, her tapped line, whatever else was on my mind. Ding, instead of grateful we could finally talk, got pissed off that I was asking questions that were already answered in the human rights group press releases.
I said sorry and severed the call myself. I thought later of the government's boilerplate sass-back to foreign journalists who complain about blocked interviews. It's for your own good, they'd say.

Lai Shin-yuan, center, Taiwan's China policymaker
A year-in-review news conference by the Taiwan government's China policymaker wasn't just the normal bust because she told us nothing new. The mid-May event was a big bust because it was held in English for a group of traveling Western reporters who live in China.
The chairwoman did not speak English fluently enough to play hardball with reporters.
She and two members of her staff attached tense, face-saving smiles and muscled through it.
On seeing white faces in the crowd, Lai and her local staffers may have thought of their Taiwan cram school teachers: Western guys with sandals, khakis and charisma, the only white people most of them ever knew unless they had lived abroad and met others. The teachers probably tried to liven things up with songs, skits and story telling, fun stuff, not press conference material. So English was naturally associated with nonsense rather than reality, allowing students to focus on grammar or pronunciation instead of content. No wonder English, the all-important international language, is also spoken here with children and dogs. No wonder bilingual Taiwan websites display only the most useless content in English, leaving the crème, and the majority, in Chinese only.
So naturally, as long as Western people hear OK English, they clap for you. It doesn't matter what you actually say. They're all English teachers at the core, just as happy to hear you practice when they're taking out the trash, listening to an Ipod on the subway or seeking comment at a news event as when you're paying them $25 an hour for lessons.
As a fellow correspondent pointed out, goofy shame-effacing smiles intensified at the news conference following any nervous mistakes. That's because other non-native speakers were listening critically: classroom competition.
You saw the difference when a radio reporter cut in with Chinese. The goofy smiles fell into straight faces, voices dropped to normal volume (the lower the more confident) and a serious conversation ensued. A language that counts was being spoken.
Another cause for the bust: A lot of the traveling Western reporters knew the Taiwan-China story well enough to have switched places with the chairwoman. They asked tough questions. When the questions weren’t answered, they asked again as her fluency dropped further, replaced perhaps by outrage. Traveling Western reporters are supposed to be dumb guests, damn it, the stuntmen at dinner parties or Ed the Incredible Chinese-Speaking Horse, who knows ten words -- that's amazing! Chinese is so hard to learn! They're not supposed to know what's happening on your turf until you shepherd them to it from the clueless get-go.
Lai should swipe at least one policy from China: Hire professional translators at news conferences for reporters of mixed nationality.

Chinese tourists, Taiwan travel agency workers and media clusterfuck at the port of Keelung in March.
Chinese culture is at least 5,000 years old and has produced inventions such as gunpowder and noodles. I'd like to add one more, the clusterfuck.
Who does it better? Take popular museum exhibits in China: clusterfucks. Roads on rainy days: clusterfucks. Airports on holidays: clusterfucks. Holidays: clusterfucks. These situations all involve excitement, uncertainty or both, which are the gunpowder and fire for clusterfucks. Rules are weak and enforcement is missing, the triggers. In Taiwan, a refinery for ancient Chinese culture, public venues and holidays have moved on to less clustering, though still a bit of fucking (off, over, with, around), as people strive to exude more class. But the art of the clusterfuck is being refined in small private groups, again where there's buzz, uncertainty, weak rules and no clear authority. Too often no one knows what to do. Whoever's around quietly checks out other people to see where they might safely pounce on an opportunity.
When I visited the Barbie doll museum in suburban Taipei in March for interviews, my Taiwanese colleagues and our five our six on-site news sources just split apart and did as they wished. No one was introduced and no one tried to gather everyone to make a statement or suggest a plan to get the most out of our meeting. I interviewed whomever I saw. When I went to a new DHL processing center in late April, media flacks, receptionists and floor managers bounced about trying to talk to me all at once about my interviews that day, but with no obvious leadership or clear direction. I retreated to made a phone call, giving the cluster time to decide who the fuck would show me around. At a Taipei dog shelter where I once went (to check myself in, not for interviews), it was hard to tell canines from humans as they all ran about doing their own unknown private things as the unattended new guest just turned his head from side to side trying to figure it out.
I witnessed the motherfuck of all clusterfucks on a tourism bureau-sponsored trip to Taitung for scribes and diplomats in early May. Insert the crème from examples in the previous paragraph. Then I landed on these possible explanations:
1. Real leaders in the cluster want to play safe. They fear being blamed for the possible rash move of taking charge, even if they're the boss, the host or the head PR flack.
2. Line staffers want to play safe, so they fear a backlash from suggesting unpopular action to someone else, especially to strangers, and the stranger (i.e. foreign), the harder.
3. Most people fear standing out among peers and getting batted down, so they don't risk a moment of unncessary limelight by introducing themselves to guests or bystanders, offering outsiders simple info that would help everyone learn who's who at the clusterfab.
4. By remaining anonymous, not disclosing too much of yourself to other people, you can better do what you want without being discovered or interrogated.
5. On tour buses, Chinese and Taiwanese instantly fall asleep when their heads meet the back of a seat, regardless of how long they slept the night before. Those left awake look out the windows and wonder what we're doing.

Uniformed race sensors guard the doors of massive hotels like this one in Taiwan.
Yeah I know I've beefed on this subject before but goddamn I'm going to do it again.
My Nokia mobile phone automatically prints a capital letter after every period in a text message or a Web-based e-mail. It assumes that periods always mean ends of sentences, regardless of those that follow intra-sentence abbreviations or other truncated words such as U.S., i.e. or etc.
So I'm a U.S. Citizen rather than a U.S. citizen, i.e. The period after S prompts a capital C, which is illogical, wrong etc. According to standard grammar. But the big C would stay if I didn't manually change the phone settings to all lower-case letters. My more intelligent word processor put a green squiggly line under the fragment after etc. In that last sentence because it's sensitive to subtleties.
Sensitive to subtleties, there's a concept that, to say it politely, hasn't become a raging fashion in the ethnic Chinese world. A white Caucasian face is a period. The sight of it prompts hotel clerks to check a box somewhere that says "give room 2206 an English-language paper in the morning." It triggers flight attendants to shut off Chinese-language farewells to a stream of mostly Asian deplaning passengers to say one English "thank you, goodbye" and then revert to Chinese after the dot passes. White means English. Asian, Chinese. Period.
I can get lower-case letters after periods by pressing a couple of phone keys to cancel the automated caps function after it appears. Caucasians can ask service staffers to cancel their automated English and speak Chinese, as almost every foreigner who lives around here long enough can do and, because of their daily exposure to the language, often better than the other side's seldom practiced textbook English. What you can't do in either case is get the first crack, because both Nokia and Chinese service staffers know you better than you know yourself.

One or two of these heroic deeds highlights about every block in Taipei.
When the cabinet decided this year to dig Taiwan out of recession with a New Deal-style, job-intensive infrastructure development plan, I knew the moral of the story before the gavel banged: A Chinese society once again realizes its reconstruction wet dream. Throughout Chinese history, people have filled a void in their hearts, their gonads or somewhere by taking apart very, very large objects and rebuilding them. On one level, there's a historic need to replace decaying jerry-built stuff, and what's not jerrybuilt? There's also face: The more you reconstruct, the fancier you look and the more respect you get. Add to that little concern for externality: pollution, blocked roads, noise et cetera et schmetera. A quick study of Beijing's Forbidden City reveals one rehab, remake, or structural revolution after another over the centuries. A tour of almost any building in modern Beijing, from a snack shack to the triple-terminal airport, leads to something being torn apart and remodeled, redecorated or all out rebuilt.
Every culture, of course, has its obsessions. One that I know drools over guns, cars, suburban homes, pit bulls and Christian righteousness. I won't say which one.
Anyway, Taiwan's cabinet didn’t have to, like, hire a consultant or anything to figure out, hey let's rebuild shit. Mass reconstruction will offer a disillusioned public the illusion of progress, give kickbacks to ruling party constituents in the construction industry -- a trend throughout the advanced third world -- and, more importantly, go a step further toward fulfilling Chinese people's manifest destiny to complete a jerrybuilt but shining tower to the moon. Taipei denizens will not say holy shit look at all that blight, but rather holy shit that bridge was old it's about time they replaced it (though they have no idea how old it really is). So over just the few months, barrier walls, rebar, beams, dirt, cement and loud, idling trucks have stormed Taipei's roads, bridges, parks, parking lots, airports and stadiums. The town looks so much like Beijing, how will the People's Liberation Army know when they've reached Taiwan to conquer it?

Snapshot of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 2004: Foreigner laughs with friendly local, life goes on.
Bloodshed, massacre, crackdown and cover-up. We’ll hear those words in the approach to the twenty-year anniversary of whatever happened on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989. We'll hear them a lot. China will do its best to ignore the date, removing any nostalgia protesters and slapping away foreign media reports as efforts to smear China by bringing up the buried and forgotten past. But no one can stop the tirade of clichés, and words are just the first kind. I refer more to the statements, accusations and forecasts, all of which have been aired at least once a year around this time since 1989.
An unpublished interview with Taiwan-based June 4 activist Wu'er Kaixi raised the most salient conceptual clichés. Here are some bullet points (yeah, tasteless pun).
1. Democracy activists from 1989 "exiled" (i.e. left to avoid prison time) to other countries can't go back to China to see their families, who aren’t allowed to leave China.
2. China is as repressive now as it was then, maybe more so, despite economic liberalization and the freedom to pursue wealth.
3. So many tanks, so much blood that day. The west gate into town, the actual square, the hospitals. It was bloody. Did I mention blood?
4. No one knows how many people died on June 4. Several hundred? More?
5. Survivors of those killed want government apologies, compensation and recognition but instead will be silenced if they ask too loudly, or in public, for any of it.
6. The sort of political dissent that led to student protests in 1989 is still brewing, but the would-be leaders keep getting sent to jail.
7. Join our candlelight vigils (when was a vigil not candlelit?), visit our websites and write a pressure letter to bring June 4 to China’s attention.
So the bureau chief laughed when he heard the sum of my Wu'er Kaixi interview. It's not about whether he or I sympathize or not. It's about having heard it all before.

I expect to hear about more of the following as mainland Chinese tourists steam into Taiwan, pushed by governments on both sides to spend tourist money here:
On Sunday night in the southern city of Taitung, about 10 middle-aged men, officials from Hubei province of China, filled a large restaurant with an hour of drunken shouting over a dinner of aboriginal food such as salted wild boar and betel nut flowers. The Taiwanese restaurateur asked them to shut up. They invited him to drink instead. The waitresses, all from Taiwan, looked on, passively angry. Their two local tour guides tried to avoid eye contact with anyone. The owner apologized to my wife and me, the only other customers at first, telling us what we sort of knew already: Those are Chinese officials. Taiwanese are generally quieter, more courteous.
Chinese officials know they own the world. Government propaganda says so and they’re the government. The world needs China now anyway, as countries and even Taiwan go before Beijing Boss Hog with tail between legs seeking trade that can help pull their economies out of the dung heap. Ordinary Chinese tourists in Taiwan have snuffed out cigarettes in the wrong places and in one case chiseled initials into rocks at a geologic preservation park. But tour guides keepm them in line on the whole. They live lower on the hog in China anyway and know their place.
For officials, I propose leashing them, per the example in this photo.

"There are a billion stories in the Naked City, this has been one of them," my friend Roger wrote from Beijing last week. "Two days ago, I jumped in a taxi at noon to head down to Kempinski Deli for my coffee break, and as we got close to the intersection between China Daily and the Sino-Japanese Hospital (it's a much larger intersection than it used to be, now twice as wide) the traffic started slowing down and was diverting partly to the side access road for some reason. As we got up to the intersection, I saw why: There was a middle-aged man sprawled out in the middle of the intersection, clearly dead, with blood running out of his head, and his bicycle sprawled nearby, clearly the loser in an altercation with a car, and a young woman standing over him using her cell phone. Perhaps she was the driver of the deadly weapon. And the cars continued to stream by although making a detour and the usual number of people gathered to witness albeit at a reasonably safe distance so they wouldn't be pulled in the decidedly un-dramatic drama." (Photo intentionally omitted. This is a family blog, damn it.)

There's something new to fight over in Taiwan's hotpot parliament: babes. Local TV reporters are shoving for the chance to catch the legislature's "spicy sisters”, Taiwan slang for a group of exceptionally babe-a-licious lawmakers with a sharp-tongued opinion about nearly everything.

They began crossing the stage in early 2008, when the number of legislators declined by half, raising the profile of those remaining, and as both major parties added women to their slates. Today the spicy sisters make themselves available (no, not in that way) to the media, if only for quickies; add peppery sound bites to oily spats, occasionally perform in mockery at news events and, in one case, fessed up to an affair that sizzled across the airwaves.

Chen Ying (top), Cheng Li-wun (center), Yeh Yi-chin (bottom)

Barista makes sea salt coffee at Taiwan's 85C coffee shop chain.
Taiwan invents nothing. Businesspeople shun the risks. Office workers in conventional creative fields can’t stand standing out. Government officials panicked by recession preach "innovation" but don’t lead the way, fearing that local media (sticking to their own tired mold) will criticize any new action simply because it hasn’t been done before.
This is what I used to think. But now I see Taiwan's ennui eroding.
Two months ago I interviewed a Taiwan coffeehouse chain called 85C about its salted teas and coffee. The sea salt drinks are selling well, the 85C flack convinced me, and if we didn't invent them someone else in the ominously competitive take-out coffee store business might. Salted coffee tastes like drain water, but it's the thought that counts.
The locally-managed 7-Eleven chain in Taiwan began last year selling the unlikely trio of paperweights shaped like Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, drawing interest off what they saw as a new fascination with history due to recent Taipei-Beijing detente. Hi-Life, Family Mart and the others hadn’t thought of the idea. No one on this long-standing anti-Communist island wants a Mao figurine even on their toilet bowl, let alone on a desk, but the thought counted.
And in Taiwan's divided (though KMT-skewed) parliament, legislators have displayed live crabs, dressed in panda suits and smashed a cane over the podium to make points in front of a dozen some bored TV reporters who otherwise might ignore the session, or be forced to cover its content rather than theatrics. Sure these MPs have no substantial forward-looking ideas, but thoughts count.
What a coffee shop, a convenience store and parliament have in common: Whenever the cost is low, the competition fierce and the risk of public ennui high, people in Taiwan will stick their innovative dicks out as far as any Edison, Freud or Gates.

When I visited the south coast of Taiwan last year to look into a nuclear power plant that shoots extra-warm cooling water into a recreational patch of ocean, I interviewed a woman who said, sarcastically, "If a Taiwanese person can't see the danger, there is no danger." She was dipping her toes into water near the outtake. Her kid was wading in it. Snorkelers were floating past.
Her comment covers not only Taiwan. It spans the strait to China. The denial of hidden dangers naturally burbles up in both places, because their common culture prizes outward appearance over whatever's behind it. At least that's my shallow analysis.
When homeowners in new apartment towers around Beijing started calling me in 2002 to tell the South China Morning Post, my employer then, about being duped by developers, I initially sympathized. Developers, probably knowing that buyers wouldn't look for hidden dangers, had decorated walls and floors but left holes in the less visible pipes and window seals, omissions that became obvious when living rooms turned to lakes. But the homeowners could have asked about those details if they were less busy being dazzled by the fake crystal chandeliers or wood look-alike floors. Some homeowners had bought units based solely on advertising brochures issued years before any ground was broken on the apartment towers.
Back in Taiwan, bicyclists have pressured the Taipei city government not to enact a helmet law, a transportation official once told me. Who could imagine having his very own head split open and smeared across the side of a bus? Buses are heavy in these parts. Passengers weigh them down by standing ear to ear in the aisles, even on the steps, with butts mashed against the driver's cube. Any hidden danger of being trampled in the impossible event of a sudden stop, fire or ditch plunge?
Beijing once raised a tiny red flag. After 37 people were trampled to death on a foot bridge during crowded Lunar New Year festivities in 2004, Mayor Wang Qishan announced that it was illegal to pack so many people into such small spaces. Right as he gave the warning, commuters packed onto buses like sardines. The deadly stampede was already water under the bridge.

These feel collosal right now. No reason they won't feel even better at 8 a.m. tomorrow in the office.

Livejournal is blocked again in China, along with Youtube and porn sites, an informed expatriate friend in Beijing said today. Why, he asked me. Either for technical or political reasons, as usual, I assured him, and we'll never know which for sure.

Taiwan's team high-five in the Doha Asian Games, 2006
A headline in Asian media on March 23 said Japan had beat the United States in baseball and would face South Korea in a final round in the World Baseball Classic. Whoever wins the Classic, which has already eliminated Cuba, Taiwan and China, will become a world champion of baseball.
In September a lot of the same teams will go to bat again in the Baseball World Cup, another international championship. When I moved to Taiwan in late 2006, the national team here was killing regional rivals in the Doha Asian Games.
None of these teams can ever win The World Series. Only Major League Baseball teams can join The World Series and all but one, the Toronto Blue Jays, is localized to a city in the United States, which we know already lost in the Classic. Still, around October, we'll learn not that Japan or Korea or Cuba dominates the sport, but that the title goes to Boston or Tampa Bay or Los Angeles.

When the top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan got the munchies (whether he was stoned I'm unsure) during his news conference last week, he excused himself from the head table to snag a saucer of cookies from the refreshment table a few paces away. Two spokespeople and two aides looked on as he grabbed the grub and returned to the head table to continue an answer to someone's question.
After the event, when everyone else was gone, a Taiwan-born journalist friend raised her eyebrows, dropped her mouth and asked how could that have happened. In Chinese culture, she said, aides or spokespeople should jump up like volcanoes to get cookies for the diplomat, their senior. The diplomat and two spokesmen were American, but his aides were Taiwanese. Even if feeding higher-ups isn't in an official job description in these parts, my friend said, it's assumed. He's your boss damn it and you should make him comfortable.
It was nice to see the diplomat serve himself, she added.

Taiwan women make clothes for Barbie dolls just 'coz they can and want to. They sell a few costumes, but that's not important. The women stand out.
In a book I just finished, Miss Garnet's Angel, the main characters, from England, share the goal of preserving an obscure piece of Venice history. Two of their fiction friends were from the United States. Other friends were Italian.
In China, grizzled farmers link up with well-groomed urban lawyers and foreign advocacy groups to urge that the government quit grabbing land without paying a fair price for it.
Causes are like religions. They can unite familiars and strangers, old-timers and newcomers, people who previously had nothing to do with one another.
Here in Taiwan, people go to school, go to work, sell a service, shop by day on weekends and eat seafood at night. These are solitary or limited-size group activities, some necessary and some fun. They are not soul-searching, service-above-self activities. They are not causes. Taiwan has no great causes except perhaps the perfection of its already stable democracy.
Citizens regard the government as the island's main charity, reducing the need or the appeal to form private ones. Most Taiwan NGOs that I know of, for example upstart political parties and environmental groups, lack the scale to raise funds or do research.
It'd be easier in Taiwan as a foreigner if I shared a bigger-than-me, bigger-than-you cause with a group of Taiwanese. The cause would blur racial lines as we linked up in fighting for it.
A Taiwanese translator, probably a year or two under 30, who I met at a dinner party called the island's population "shallow." I'd say it's just at the middle stage of the pre-modern, modern, post-modern cycle. As a modern society emerging from decades of tough pre-modern poverty, Taiwan wants to enjoy its comforts without thinking too much. When the comforts get old, causes will appear and with them depth.
Of course, I'm thinking as I re-read this post a couple weeks after drafting it, it'd help if people quit praying to themselves (ancestors, lineage) and turn to something larger. I don’t mean religion, although I could mean it. I mean community. I mean causes. I mean knowing the world doesn't start and stop at the temple of your own bloodline.

Taiwan police arrested a 58-year-old American man last month because he was wanted in California on child molestation charges, a cop on the case told me. Local TV showed police dragging him into a paddy wagon bound for a foreigners-only jail in the Taipei suburbs.
As I, this guy's fellow countryman, walked around Taipei a day after the high-profile arrest, I exchanged the usual pleasantries with Taiwanese merchants and upbeat eye contact with strangers in the street. No one associated me with the suspected molester, who reportedly planned to stay in Taipei past his U.S. court dates and open a kindergarten. He and I after all weren't mass-produced with templates and cookie cutters by an American baby factory.
If the man had been popped in Beijing and I as a fellow white guy walked around town the next day, merchants would give me hard looks and one-word, if any, replies to questions. People in the streets would stare harder than usual. Taxi drivers might refuse me rides. Media would come out with editorials saying what's been on everyone's mind since they were schooled under communism to believe that Westerners belong to a united front gunning against China. See him, the papers would say and the people would agree, he proves that the West as a whole is still out to bully the Chinese, historic victims of foreign aggression.