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.

I started learning how to drive when I was fifteen and a half years old in the US and later drove a taxi part-time in Australia during my uni years. American and Australian drivers share a lot of characteristics which I’ve generalized here, including:

1. belief in “the right of way”
2. respect for traffic laws, signs and signals
3. respect for other drivers they’re sharing the road with
4. respect for pedestrians
5. tendency to drive faster
6. aggressive/emotional driving behavior

The Taiwanese driver has the following characteristics:

1. no belief in “the right of way”
2. selective respect for traffic laws, signs and signals
3. almost no respect for other drivers
4. no respect for pedestrians
5. tendency to drive slower
6. non-aggressive/non-emotional driving behavior

There are a few rules any foreigner coming to Taiwan should know, to help them temper their expectations and hopefully reduce their stress when driving or riding here.

1. There is no concept of “right of way” on the road in Taiwan

This is one of the hardest things to come to terms with here. In fact, I never have and because of that, I find myself swearing in frustration as people pull out in front of me, breaking my way and forcing me to slow down and adjust my path to accomodate them.

2. Don’t expect eye contact with drivers here

This is related to the first rule. In the US or Australia, when somebody is waiting to pull into traffic, you expect to make eye contact with them so that you see that they’re aware of you and they won’t cut into traffic until after you’ve passed. If you don’t make eye contact with them, you’ll probably slow down or honk to make sure they’re aware of you. No such thing in Taiwan, as you pull your hair out in anger and frustration as scooter after car pull into traffic right in front of you with nary a glance at the oncoming traffic.

I’ve never been able to rationalize this behavior. Is it implicit trust or freeing oneself to drive as they please by foisting accountability on others? I have no idea but either way, this type of “head in the sand” driving behavior requires one to trust other drivers to make adjustments for you (a lot of trust when it involves your life) and is extremely dangerous.

3. The shortest cut rules

Given the choice between reversing the wrong way down a street and going around the block because of a missed turn, local drivers will reverse the wrong way down even a busy road to avoid the inconvenience of going around the block. This happens in all sorts of circumstances and you’ll gasp in incredulity as you witness drivers here execute U-turns in front of oncoming traffic, or back 400 meters up the street (slowly, of course) confusing traffic behind them.

4. Size matters

In Taiwan, the bigger the vehicle, the more allowances are afforded to it. The bus does whatever it damn well pleases, then the blue pickup trucks, then the minivans and SUVs, then the sedans, then the little Minis, then the scooters, then the bicycles and finally the pedestrian. Refer to my crude illustration below:

5. Drive aggressively AND defensively

The proverb “the best defense is a strong offense” works great for driving on the roads in Taiwan. Driving aggressively will part the way for you for drivers that are aware of you (SO IMPORTANT – IF THEY ARE AWARE OF YOU – IT’S A BIG IF!), but you always need to be on the lookout for the guy who is not (and there are many). In terms of driving defensively, increase the scope of your awareness to include not just what is legally or logically possible, but also what is just flat-out physically possible.

I’ve had a total of three scooter accidents over the years and they’ve all followed this basic template: at an intersection, car turns right across my right of way and I hit the car. The first two accidents were relatively minor because they happened after a red light turned green, nobody was going quickly. In those cases, I was too aggressive, coming out of a red light too quickly, not letting the larger car make the right turn first. However, the most recent one was potentially serious because the car turned in front of me at full speed, but thankfully (knock on wood) there were no serious injuries. This time I was going full speed and the guy turned right across me from the left lane, forcing me to brake and hit him. I was not a happy camper.

6. Honking does not normally indicate anger

When you hear the horn on the road in Australia, it almost always means somebody’s pissed off like when you took an extra two seconds after the light changed green to hit the accelerator. In Taiwan, the horn is used more frequently, and normally doesn’t have the same emotional undertones as in the West. The horn is used here to get awareness of others on the street that may not be aware (especially if running through a red or doing something equally illegal and unexpected).

7. You can do whatever the hell you want on the road, as long as you do it slowly

That’s the magic “multipass” in Taiwan. As long as you do it slowly so other drivers have time to see what you’re doing and adjust, you can do whatever you want on the roads. The irony here is that the driver that’s doing these maneuvers likely thinks that she’s doing the others on the road a favor by reversing up the street slowly, instead of going around the block and doing things the right way.

Would love to hear some more observations in the comments!

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.

1. I speak pretty good Mandarin Chinese now

I came over to Taiwan with two main objectives: 1) to learn to speak workable Mandarin Chinese and 2) to get filthy rich as a web designer / developer. I’ve achieved the first goal. (pause) Thanks to my teachers at the Chinese Culture University (文化大學) and all my colleagues and managers at my company, as well as my Taiwanese friends, I can speak strong conversational Mandarin. Still working on the filthy rich part.

2. I’m less judgmental

When I first landed, I, like most ABCs and half-Chinese/Taiwanese, was gripping on to what I was familiar with and throwing judgments left and right: laughing at all the rough English, effeminate guys, weird foods, crazy fashion, girls with cutie voices, etc. By now, I’ve bonded with many of these great people with rough English, learned how to enjoy the weird food, and laughed with the girls with cuties voices. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that early, uninformed judgments can cut you out of the fun, experiences and relationships that can help to expand your mind and broaden your perspective.

3. I can eat any part of any animal

Literally.

4. I’ve learned to be more frugal

The value of money is Taiwan is higher than it is in the West. Watching friends and co-workers save on their daily expenses has really influenced me to be more practical and frugal in my spending. (Exception is gambling, but I won’t get into that since I always lose)

5. I’m a crazy, fucking driver

Even though I’m still raging inside like a maniac every time I hit the roads on my trusty scooter, I’ve started to harmonize with the local traffic flow. I can now cut through traffic, smash through those red lights and turn right across multiple lanes like the best of them.

6. My English is worse

When I play “Words With Friends” with my friends in the US, I get outclassed (looking at you, Justin). Instead, I can only compete with my Taiwanese friends. I also find that I’m always searching for words and sometimes it’s actually easier for me to articulate in Chinese than it is for me in English. WTF.

7. I want value for money

When I pay for something these days, it doesn’t matter whether or not I need everything they promised, I will make damn sure that I get everything out of them that they promised so that I didn’t get ripped off and so that they didn’t make any extra money off of me. Holy crap, I’m a local. It’s like when I go to watch a classical concert here, I will clap with everybody else to see if we can get that fifth encore out of the soloist, to make sure I squeeze every NT out of the ticket price.

8. I feel like a local

Going back to the US or Australia, I almost feel like a tourist and coming back to Taiwan is like coming back home.

Just eight years and look at all these changes. There are probably a lot more that I’m unable to see with all my blind spots. Regardless, I raise my glass to Taiwan – 乾杯!

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.

One of my close Taiwanese friends says that kids here are brought up with competitive thinking from a very young age. The strategic principles detailed by the famous treatise “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu (孫子兵法) are apparently introduced in a more palatable format when kids are still in grade school. The end result of this type of upbringing is not an environment of collaborative learning, sharing, etc. It is an environment where people at the very best don’t work with each other, at the worst, work against each other. Now, scale that thinking up when it comes to a family, a company, or a country.

Where the game is always about more than the game

One thing about living in Taiwan that has taught me a lot is the strategic boundaries of games here. We recently had a team-building activity in our company. It was a challenge which divided our workers into smaller groups and the group which won would receive a small cash reward. One of the  very first things the game-master brought up was something along the lines of “don’t sabotage the game for other teams.” I’m not sure if I’m too old or boring, but it was just a team-building exercise, the reward money was not substantial (less than 500 NT), so I just assumed people would appreciate the exercise for what it was and play fairly. The game-master, knowing the kind of competitive thinking of the locals, had to make her warnings up front to encourage fair play. Maybe I’ve been away from the West for too long, but I figured most people would understand the purpose of the exercise was not to win, but to extract whatever team-related lesson they were trying to impart.

As such, the game in Asia often is goes way beyond what happens on “the playing field.” In fact, I think a lot of people here spend more of their time strategizing about the meta-game (conditions, backroom stakeholders, other external forces which the spectator doesn’t get to see) than the actual “on field” action.

Extreme competitiveness ≠ Open Source

Anyway, back to the point of this post: Open Source couldn’t have come from Asia because the competitiveness ingrained in the culture here teaches the opposite lesson: don’t share working knowledge because it could help those who are not on your team, because they are / could be your competitor. This precludes “naive” doings such as releasing source code for the masses or helping somebody else improve their project. That said, I do know people here that do enjoy working on Open Source projects, but the culture here means the movement would never have started here.

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.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying sites can’t be busy. If there’s a lot going on in the site (Taiwan’s Yahoo! portal is a good example, as is the technology forum mobile01.com), you need to surface that content on the homepage. On other sites for small businesses or small organizations however, focus is important so that people are able to get the information they need or do whatever tasks they need and get out. Unfortunately, it comes back to point 2 I made in the first post: Web design in Taiwan is focused on business image, rather than users and business goals. And one day a few years back, I came to the realization what that image was: the night market.

The Taiwanese night market is an orgy of colors, smells, sounds and people all crammed together in a narrow street. Up until ten or so years ago, this was the main nighttime entertainment besides sitting at home watching TV. A stall at the night market will have one or more of the following features:

• A long queue of eager customers
• Scores of products
• Something moving to catch your eye
• Something fragrant to catch your nose
• Something loud to catch your ear
• Colorful display

The real drivers here are population density and competition. Everything is squeezed together in a small area and stalls which offer similar goods are very competitive. The pressure to stand out amongst the cacophony and the competition means for a never-ending game of one-upmanship.  If you try to map this type of thinking to web design, you get:

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

1. Design is not respected in Taiwan

This attitude may be changing slowly thanks to the impact of Apple products in Taiwan, but basically being a designer in Taiwan means lots of work for very little money. Design here is treated the same as commercial artwork – it’s seen as a commodity with little importance (“drawing pretty pictures, anybody can do that”). How does that translate when you’re dealing with clients?

• They don’t listen to your informed guidance and often will push to have their design changes implemented even if they go against the goal of the design (“the boss’s girlfriend likes pink” -type stuff)
• You can’t charge by the hour here – this is a particularly painful point, because the client believes it’s her right to make as many changes over the course of the project thereby diminishing your already meager hourly average. I did have a client where we did charge for extra changes, but this was agreed beforehand and even if the extra charge was minimal, it did help to reduce the number of changes. However, most clients here don’t get that paradigm and just think it’s their right.
• They don’t really understand what you do, so you’ll get comments from clients like “I want more design” which just boggles the mind.

The worst part about this first thing is that there are a lot of low-cost web design providers that charge less than 50K NTD (~1600 USD) for a site and use cookie-cutter templates and other ways to reduce their costs. The drive towards the bottom means that the quality of most websites in Taiwan is pretty shocking and will continue that way until general understanding of design improves. The guys working in these el-cheapo web-shops are focused on quantity and speed, and don’t normally have the time (or onus) to study better methods.

2. Web design in Taiwan is focused on business image, rather than users and business goals

When you talk with clients about their website, it’s always about their business and the image they want to project. You’ll also find that your clients rarely have any business goals in mind when deciding to get a website (our competitor has one, so we need to get one, too). As a designer, it’s your job to bring the focus of the client back to the user and on the business goals they want to pursue. Normally, they’re thinking: Flash intro, lots of colors, visitor ticker, and any other bright, flashy widget they can stick on their page. You need to rise above this kind of thinking and put the focus on the right track, otherwise, there will be a lot of time wasted and frustration after they realize that the website doesn’t get them a return on investment.

3. Taiwanese web developers don’t love web standards

This is improving as more Taiwanese developers are working for companies like Yahoo!, but for a long time, Windows was the only OS in Taiwan. A lot of prominent local websites (even government ones!) only work or “work best” in Internet Explorer and up until the smartphone explosion and the rising adoption of Macs, that wasn’t a problem. However, this is a new day and age, and when your site’s navigation uses Flash (as a lot of bar, restaurant and hotel sites do) – say goodbye to your iPhone user who’s trying to get information while they’re on the street trying to decide what’s for dinner. There is a growing group of talented front-end engineers in Taiwan, but the vast majority of web-site builders here don’t have much awareness of standards, especially semantic HTML. They don’t really get what the tags are for (granted, they are markers for English language constructs), and it shows in their tag selection.  It also means that if you are writing solid, semantic HTML for a Taiwanese website, by default you’re going to boost their search engine ranking because a lot of sites are still using table-based layouts and Flash.

I will be adding to this list as I think of more, but until then, I’m looking forward to reading about other people’s experiences in the comments section.

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.

Open Graph’s website says that currently, Facebook and Mixi (the Japanese social networking service) are the ones consuming this metadata. It’ll be interesting to see if Google will acknowlege this format in the future (if they’re not already). At the very least, adding Open Graph metadata to your HTML will improve the appearance of your content on Facebook when people ‘like’ your page or post it as a link on their wall.

One of the basic four datum that you add to your page is type. The problem is that there are so few types, even at a general level, I can’t see how they expect to classify all content on the web into these types.

There are a total of 34 types for all content on the web. In the business types, there are only the following five types:

• bar
• company
• cafe
• hotel
• restaurant

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.

The open-all-day-everyday 7-11 chain has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan, allowing you to complete the following tasks (this is not exhaustive, feel free to add more in the comments):

1. Buy cold food, hot food, cigarettes, alcohol, batteries, groceries, coffee, tea, condoms, toiletries, HSR tickets, computer games, electronics, magazines, books
2. Pay bills, parking tickets, other government fees (like auto insurance)
3. Pick-up and send packages (with some e-commerce providers, you can select your local 7-11 as a delivery point for you to pick things up later – this is especially useful when you don’t live in a gated community with a front desk)
4. Print documents, photos
5. Fax documents
6. Use the internet
7. Use an ATM

Whenever I visit Australia or America, I feel the bitter pangs of estrangement from my local 7 (Taiwanese just use the English word “seven” to refer to a 7-11 store). If you live in Taipei, you are rarely more than a 5-minute walk from a 7 or other convenience store.

Other Examples of Convenience in Taiwan

Public health is a great example of how convenience is implemented well in Taiwan. When you go to a public hospital here, you can see a specialist, have a test or an an x-ray, go back to that specialist where she’ll bring the results up on her computer, have a diagnosis, pay and then pick up your medication in a single afternoon. Contrast that with Australia, where you’d have to go to an x-ray provider (likely to be a car ride away and on another day), then go pick up the x-ray yourself and bring it back to the specialist on another day, then go somewhere else to pick up your medication. You’d have to pay the bills separately, as well.

Public transport is also very well implemented in Taipei. The 悠游卡 (you1 you2 ka3, public transport payment card) is a fantastic example of an efficient, scalable payment platform. Starting with the MRT system, the plastic, rechargeable card, which you swipe when entering and exiting a station, was later expanded to include the bus system. Now, the 悠游卡 can be used to pay for things at 7-11 and to pay for rides on special tourist attractions (like the ferries that go between Danshui and Bali). The Melbourne train system pales in comparison with its paper-ticket-based platform. Even though you can use the Metro tickets on trains and trams, you need to keep a paper ticket in good shape, even if you have an expensive long-term ticket (disclaimer: this may have changed in the last few years). In addition, in Melbourne you are punished if you don’t have the correct ticket or if you don’t have enough for the trip. In Taiwan (and in Korea and Japan), you can just pay the difference at the destination stop before you exit through the turnstiles.

Convenience Gone Wrong

Sometimes the penchant for convenience plays out badly, and nowhere worse than on the roads here. If one stood at an intersection and observed for only 5 minutes, they would be witness to:

Taipei is the most convenient place I’ve ever lived. It’s a small metropolis where almost everything is available within a 15-minute drive. Widely-used public services are designed with convenience in mind and the benefits are obvious when compared with Australia. That said, when taken to the extreme, especially in individual behavior, it can be annoying or downright dangerous.

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,

cette journee ne sera pas suffisante.

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.

Before we jump whole hog into this, I think there are some things to consider:

1. Whose queries are these? I have no idea from which regions Google takes its samples
2. Google censors its queries, so queries using racist epithets are censored from the auto-suggest
3. The questions about certain prejudices and what demeaning racial terms mean bolsters the observation that prejudices are really passed down, they are learned behaviors and attitudes

There are probably some more things that will bubble up eventually, but for now, here are the results:

Why are mixed…

Why are chinese people…

Why are black people…

Why are mexicans…

Why are jamaicans…

Why are australians…

Why are italians…

Why are vietnamese…

Why are koreans…

Why are french people…

Why are indians…