Note: This post has been cooking my head for ages. A recent accident finally pushed me to complete this post in the hope that it might help others in Taiwan. (Image below is not of my accident).
Since moving to Taiwan more than eight years ago, I have played the part of pedestrian, rider (bicycles, scooters, motorbikes), and driver (cars, minivans). No single characteristic of Taipei gets the blood up faster or more reliably than the traffic here; it’s has been a continual source of frustration and flat-out exasperation living here. Read the rest of this entry »
Today marks the end of my eighth year in Taiwan. Eight is considered an auspicious number in Taiwan so it’s a great time to pause and lay out how Taiwan has made its impact on me.
I really enjoyed this post by Jade on Wai-Taiwan: “Someone Else’s Stew.” It’s a nice piece about the cultural appropriation that all visitors take part in and how it can go wrong.
An excerpt:
Occasionally, it felt like they were speaking as “experts” about the country that they had (briefly) lived in and were outsiders to. At one point someone said, “I don’t know why, but [ethnic group] just loves to eat [type of food] with their meal.” I cringed. Several times. Throughout the entire dinner.
Being mixed but also somebody who comments on Taiwan and its culture a lot, I think I stand as both an outsider and an insider. I come up with lots of theories about the way things work here and try to guess their motivations and history, but basically, my perspective is that of an outsider. I have done my fair share of cultural appropriation during my time here, but I think my experience here and my heritage helps me to seek out the least ridiculous of explanations.
That said, I think cultural appropriation is a process of learning about a culture. Our first instincts are to map a new culture to our own understanding of the world, in order to find parallels. This is a flawed process, but I believe it allows people to “fail forward,” leading to better understanding each time a dissonance is exposed. I think the problem is when you’re early in the process of learning about a new culture and you have to share what you know with others without really understanding that new culture – that leads to lots of cringe-worthy moments.
One of the greatest things about the internet is the Open Source movement. Incredible shifts in collaborative working as demonstrated by sites like GitHub are some of the greatest manifestations of this philosophy. It is exactly that kind of collaboration which requires one to work towards the “greater good” that makes me think that the right conditions to spawn an Open Source-esque movement would never have occurred in over-competitive Asia. Working in a corporation in Taiwan has provided me with insight into the type of cutthroat competitiveness that is part of the culture here. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned here is that any sort of co-operation which requires sacrifice of competitive advantage is considered naive or foolish.
In part one of this series, I gave some background about web design in Taiwan. In this part, I will expound on why I believe Taiwanese web sites always strive to have a very busy homepage with as many colors, animated widgets, and images as you can cram. This stands in stark contrast with Western design thinking which emphasizes simplicity and focus. Read the rest of this entry »
This series of posts are going to focus on how I rationalize what I consider to be poor design choices in Taiwanese websites. Before I begin with the first topic, I’ll set up the series with some background observations that I gained during my time as a developer in a small web design studio here. Most of our clients were small businesses, so that has a huge impact on my experiences. These are just my opinions and would love to see some discussion below in the comments to see how they hold up against other people’s experiences.
Screen capture taken from the Taiwanese government site Culture.tw
Open Graph is Facebook’s attempt to standardize a layer of descriptive metadata to all content on the internet. Being a fan of semantic movement Microformats, I’m trying to bring this to any sites that I develop these days.
The “Things I Hate About Taiwan” posts (#1, #2) have generated quite a lot of vitriol in the comments section, so I’m going to balance some of it out with a positive post about Taiwan.
After living in Taiwan for more than seven years, it has become apparent to me that one of the main drivers of public and private decision-making in Taiwan is convenience. Convenience dominates in almost all parts of life here, and is probably best represented by that all-night friend: your local 7-11 store.
I used to work at the Chicken Kitchen in Miami (I think it later became Starr’s Chicken Grill or something). Most of the staff were Haitian or Guyanese immigrants. I was studying French in school at the time and my Haitian co-workers spoke creole. One co-worker, Franz, seemed to have a knack to seduce women. Hoping to pick his brain for secrets on how to sweet-talk a girl, I asked him for a sample of his persuasive prose. He produced the following for me on a scrap of notepaper:
C’est avec un coeur recuplis de joie et d’allegresse et que je propite aujourd’hui de vous dire quelque chose,
je t’aime mon amour,
et je t’adore,
parce que hier je t’aime aujourd’hui je t’adore demain se sera pour toujours pour toujours;
si je pourrais dis l’amour que j’avais dans mon coeur pour vous,
Thanks to Elie who commented on a previous post, I was introduced to Gdumb.com which uses the auto-suggest feature in the search bar as an indicator of some of the most ridiculous search queries you could imagine. Elie’s own post about it explores three partial queries: “Why is Israel…”, “Why are Jews…”, and “Aliyah is… .” The results are very interesting and a transparent* indicator of the attitudes and questions that people have.
* As transparent as Google is.
This being a site about mixed identity, the next obvious extension was to try plugging in queries containing racial identifiers. Read the rest of this entry »
