When's the appropriate time to cosh an abductor? (Taipei, Taiwan)

In my blog Be careful you don't get abducted: 03 (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/01/be-careful-you-dont-get-abducted-03.html), reader Valerio has left a question: "...what would the appropriate time for coshing be?!...".

    The answer is a bit long, so here's a separate blog for it.

    My reply to Valerio's question above:

    "Appropriate time in a general sense would obviously be when his head was turned, which would make it easier for me since I'm small and female.

    "Appropriate also in the sense of if I thought he was indeed going to abduct me."

    The daughter of my Chief Geologist boss at Conoco Taiwan was 18 at the time in my first year at Conoco Taiwan.  She was blonde and curvy.

    She told me about what happened to her one taxi ride home.

    A lot of expats in Taipei during my two years there (1975–6) lived in an area of Taipei called Tianmu (天母).  Her house was one of those built on the slopes of the hill there, looking down on a huge swathe of Taipei.

    On a taxi ride home one day (evening?), Beth said to the driver when they got to her house, "停 tíng / stop," but he kept going.  She started to use English ("stop!") and Malay ("berhenti!") (her father had worked in Conoco Singapore for a few years), to no avail.

    The driver got to the very top end of the road, which was then just forest around.  As soon as he halted, Beth shot out of the cab and ran down the hill.

    If I'd been Beth in that cab in that situation, that would've been an appropriate moment for me to cosh the driver first from the back seat before I made my escape.

    Of course, I'd need to unlock the car door first before I could run out of the car after coshing him from behind (or the side).

    The frightening bit is:  the locking was controlled by the driver from the lever near his gear stick.  I can't be sure that I'd be able to pull the latch up from its sunken position in the door sill quickly enough, if at all.  I do have vague memories of surreptitiously easing it up on a few trips, just to make sure I could escape when needed, so I think it can be done by the passenger from the back seat as well.

(Taipei, Taiwan, 1975)

Chinese perspective on inter-human relations

The Chinese generally have fairly strongly defined rules about inter-human relations, especially within the family or clan.  You have to show respect to your elders, whether you like them or not, whether they're worthy of the respect or not, etc.  You also have to acknowledge the familial link with them, in the sense of accepting their authority or position, say.

    Back in the 80s, I met a mainland Chinese chap in his 30s at dinner in a friend's house.

    His father had gone over to Taiwan pre-1949, to seek a better life, I think, leaving his wife and fairly new-born son (the man I met at dinner) behind in mainland China, to be sent for at a later point.  Then 1949 happened on the mainland, and the father was stuck on the other side of Taiwan Straits.

    After x number of years, the father gave up hope of being reunited with his wife and son, so he started a new family in Taiwan.  Another x number of years on, he emigrated to Sweden, and sent for his son to join him there.

    I asked the man, "So, how did you feel when you first met your father at the airport?  Did you feel anything for him?"

    His answer was: "Of course!  He's my father!"

    It got me thinking afterwards.  I'd like to have had the opportunity to do a kind of control test on this, like how they do it in science and research.

(from googling) Quote You test the instrument or method on known negatives (e.g., testing a pregnancy test on people who aren't pregnant) to catch false positives. Unquote

    My control test would be:  send a total stranger to the airport to collect him, claiming to be his father, then take him home to live with him for a few years, maybe even a couple of decades.  Then tell the son, "He's not your father," and see if he might feel the same "of course!" closeness to the real father, having built up a relationship with the stranger over the years of living with him.

How would life have turned out? 01 (England / Singapore)

 

A student of mine (in her early 80s) from Lancashire told me that her mother had worked in a textile mill, and expected her to follow suit.

    Just as well she didn't go along with that, for she then went on to lead a very interesting life, publishing articles about her experiences too: teaching English in (alphabetical order) China, France, Singapore, Spain and Switzerland; editing an educational magazine in N.E. China near the Korean border; and is now learning Russian as well.  (She already knows French, Spanish and Mandarin.)

    I used to visit some relatives on my father's side who lived on Singapore's biggest offshore island, Pulau Ubin, where granite quarrying was done.    

    I was then told, aged 9, that when I arrived, a fourth girl, my mother had wanted to give me away to this family, who only had a son at the time.  It was a common Chinese practice to give away children, e.g., to let the child have a better life, to give the childless family a child, or a son-less family a son -- in my case, a daughter-less family a daughter.

    It got me thinking how different my life would've turned out, growing up on that outback of an island off the north-east coast of Singapore, with a family who ran a ferry service between Singapore and Pulau Ubin, as well as a grocery shop.  An environment that was very rural and quite different from my suburban upbringing (English stream Catholic convent school education).

(England / Singapore)

Chinese-style discipline: 03 (Swatting flies)

The two children living in the same courtyard in the mainland Chinese drama series (set 1979–92) that I've been watching are given tasks by their teacher to eradicate pests.

    The girl is scrubbing out the sink in the courtyard, so that mosquitoes don't settle and breed.  It's standard practice by the Singapore government to send out health inspectors regularly to check that people don't have stagnant water collecting in the bottom dish of house plants, say.

    The boy is swatting flies, and counting them, to collect bonus points.  (Not sure what he'll gain by the bonus points.)

    This seems to be a common enough Chinese practice, getting children to kill flies.

    I was aged 7 or 8 when the two siblings immediately above me were tasked by my uncle with swatting houseflies, but for pocket money in return.  I'd seen American children in films being paid by their parents to do housework, like taking the rubbish out, which shocked me, as my upbringing says it should be part of their duty as a member of the family.  Yet, my uncle was doing the same with my two siblings to give them something to do during the school holidays once they'd done their homework and revision -- to kill time by killing flies.  

    They were living on grandma's coconut plantation (out in Tampines, near Changi Airport) at the time, which means more flies than in a suburban house.

    In Singapore, we use a kind of broom made from the main veins of coconut leaves.

    Remove the leafy bit on both sides of the main vein.  Tie up the top of a bunch of the main veins, usually about 3ft long, with the untied ends being thin and wispy.  One could leave it like this, for gentle sweeping (e.g., a dusty floor; cobwebs just under the ceiling).  Or chop off the wispy ends, to make a shorter bunch (about 1.5ft long) of thicker woodier twigs, for tougher sweeping (e.g., fallen leaves; blocked drain).  Put a big stick through the middle of the bunch for ease of handling (from a standing position) for things like sweeping litter in the street -- it's a common sight in Singapore, the road sweeper using a broom made out of coconut leaf main veins.  I see from googling that it's called a stick broom or coconut leaf broom stick (among other things).

    The longer version is perfect for swatting flies, because the wispy strands are spread out enough to stun or kill a fly without squidging it and making a mess on the floor or the wall.

    Back to the task set by my uncle:  I think the payment was something like 1 cent for every 10 flies.  Don't forget, I'm talking about Singapore of the 1960s, when something like 2 cents would buy 3 sweets.

    Anyway, at first the counting was done fairly conscientiously, but after a while, even my uncle couldn't be bothered with the details, and just gave a cursory glance at the collection before handing over the sweet money.

    I think that it's a good way to raise children's awareness that money doesn't come that easy, and also that they have to contribute to the workload (free of charge, in my opinion).

(Singapore, 1960s)

Be careful you don't get abducted: 03 (Taipei)

When I got to Taipei, I was met at the airport by the woman from Tainan in south Taiwan whose flat I was going to share, so I was too busy getting acquainted with her and looking out to take note of what the taxi driver might've done.

    The first time I took a taxi back to the flat was a little bit after that, when I'd left the flat in the morning without a coat (it being sunny blue skies outside, and me being conscious of standing out for miles as someone from the tropics, wearing a winter coat when it was sunny), and left the office at 5pm to find it was dark, raining and cold.

    The locking is controlled by the taxi driver, operating a lever by his gear stick -- but I didn't know this at the time, as I'd never come across this before in Singapore (not that taxis were common in my younger days there, anyway).

    All I heard was a click, then I saw the locking latch/knob on the car door sill lowered.  Another episode of the driver locking me into his vehicle (after Hong Kong)!  What was happening?!?

    Not daring to attract his attention by pulling the latch/knob back up, I started to ease out the umbrella surreptitiously from my handbag, getting ready to cosh the man at the appropriate time.

    It turned out to be a common practice in Taiwan (but not all drivers did it and not every single time).

(Taiwan, 1974)

A footnote on the issue of abduction in old China

This is not my own blog, but a footnote blog on the issue of abduction in old China, which reader Valerio had asked about.  It's historical knowledge, lifted from googling.

(from googling) 

Quote

... in pre-1949 China, the abduction and sale of girls for forced marriage, concubinage, or prostitution was significantly more common than boy abduction, driven by deep-rooted patriarchal traditions and economic hardship, though boys were also trafficked, especially later due to son preference, but the scale for girls was historically larger, often involving families selling daughters or outright kidnapping for the marriage market.

Why Girl Abduction Was More Prevalent:

• Patriarchal System: China's patrilineal society valued sons for lineage and labor, but daughters were often seen as a temporary asset, sold for dowries or to improve family finances.
• Economic Desperation: Poor families frequently sold daughters to brothels, as concubines, or into arranged marriages to survive.
• Marriage Market: A significant market existed for kidnapped or sold women to serve as wives (often in polygamous or forced unions) or sex workers, a practice called dianqi (wife-mortgaging) also existed. 

Boy Abduction (Different Context):

• While boys were also trafficked, especially under the later One-Child Policy when the demand for sons soared, this was often distinct from the pre-1949 pattern.
• In older China, boys were abducted for adoption (due to son preference) or labor, but the sheer volume of female trafficking for marriage/sexual exploitation was a defining feature of the era. 

In essence, the cultural preference for sons created a huge demand for females, leading to widespread abduction and sale of girls for various exploitative purposes long before the One-Child Policy exacerbated the gender imbalance.

Unquote

The dianqi / wife mortgaging mentioned above would be like modern-day surrogacy.  So did the Chinese invent yet another practice??  (Googling for teaching material one year, in the early 2000s, I found that loads more things were invented in China than we realise.  Common knowledge [to me] Chinese inventions:  gunpowder, fire crackers, fireworks, paper, silk, tea, porcelain.)

典妻（Dian Qi），又称租妻、搭伙，是中国古代一种以契约形式将妻子有偿租借给他人做临时夫妻（通常为生育）的陋习，盛行于宋元明清时期，反映了底层人民的贫困，是封建婚姻制度下对女性权利的剥夺，后虽有法律禁止但禁而不绝，最终在新中国成立后消失。这一习俗中，丈夫以获取财物为目的，将妻子出租，期间妻子承担生育责任，期满后回归原家，子女归典者所有。

(google translate) "Wife-renting" (Dian Qi), also known as "wife-sharing" or "partnership," was an ancient Chinese custom where a wife was rented out to another person for a fee under a contract to serve as a temporary spouse (usually for childbearing). Prevalent during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, it reflected the poverty of the lower classes and represented the deprivation of women's rights under the feudal marriage system. Although later prohibited by law, it persisted and eventually disappeared after the founding of the People's Republic of China. In this custom, the husband rented out his wife for financial gain; during this period, the wife bore the responsibility of childbearing, and upon completion, she returned to her original family, with the children belonging to the renter.

Chinese sayings: 52 (一意孤行)

一意孤行

yī yì gū xíng

"one intent solitary move"

This saying is about being wilful, going one's own way against the rules or instructions.

    On Tuesdays, I teach online a small group of septuagenarians and octogenarians, all overseas Chinese bar one.

    I go through the same routine outlined in the blog Strategies for learning Chinese vocabulary:  01 (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/01/strategies-for-learning-chinese.html).

    For some reason, however, some of them keep giving me the wrong thing, e.g., when I ask the class for the literal breakdown, I will get the final polished-English version.

    Every now and then, they'll tell me that it's because they can't hear me properly, or there is a time lapse because of the not-ideal connection.  I say, "But we go through the same routine every week!"

    This week just gone, I was teaching the Mandarin class from a community centre, which has very good internet signal, plus I had a quiet room for my own use.  (This is because I am teaching an English conversation class for the community centre very soon after my Mandarin class.  The gap between the two classes isn't enough for me to fit in the travelling from home to the community centre, so I have to do the travelling first thing in the morning and teach my Mandarin class from there.)

    Yet, in spite of the excellent signal, for an exercise involving a sentence mentioning a 哥哥 gēge / older brother and a 弟弟 dìdi / younger brother, what came back from one student was a 妹妹 mèimei / younger sister.  Now where did the 妹妹 spring up from??!!

    (Yes, the students know I'll be writing a blog about them.  They learned a new phrase from me for this:  一意孤行 / yī yì gū xíng.  Determined to go their own way, indeed.)

(London, 2026)

This saying goes back to 202–101 BCE, no less, from: 

史記·酷吏列傳 

史记·酷吏列传 

Biographies of Cruel Officials, Records of the Grand Historian

(Grand Historian Sima Qian / 司馬遷 / 司马迁 145/135 BCE – ?)

Definition of the saying: 

(traditional script) 不接受別人的勸告，固執地按照自己的想法去做事，通常帶有貶義，形容人主觀、專斷、獨斷獨行。它源自《史記·酷吏列傳》，原意是拒絕請託，獨立處理公事，後來演變成不聽勸告、固執己見的貶義。

(simplified script) 不接受别人的劝告，固执地按照自己的想法去做事，通常带有贬义，形容人主观、专断、独断独行。它源自《史记·酷吏列传》，原意是拒绝请托，独立处理公事，后来演变成不听劝告、固执己见的贬义。

(google translate) To refuse advice and stubbornly act according to one's own ideas is usually a derogatory term, describing a person as subjective, arbitrary, and headstrong. It originates from the "Biographies of Cruel Officials" in the *Records of the Grand Historian*, originally meaning to refuse requests and handle official business independently. Later, it evolved into a derogatory term for ignoring advice and being stubborn.