Mr. Weys told me this story himself.
He had spent some time in Taiwan during the early 1950s, on his way to Japan.
In those days, people in Taiwan were rather hostile to the idea of Oriental women mixing with Occidental men.
When I worked there from 1975 to 1976, I got a lot of abuse: sometimes outright / verbally to my face, often as a side comment, and certainly in the looks and treatment I got. I was working for Conoco, an American oil company, so I mingled with the expat community: people who worked with KLM, Hoechst, Schlumberger, just to name three off the top of my head.
I’d be walking along with my 6’ 6” (=1.98m) white American boss, heading for the coffee house, socially distanced, late morning in broad daylight, no tight-fitting and/or low-cut dress, but people would still glare and then carefully time and position their spitting to land a few inches behind me, right on the spot where my foot had just been a second previously. (I was lucky they were so considerate. It would’ve been more unpleasant if they’d gone for the foot itself, or my face.)
If I was with a white couple, I couldn’t possibly be a “bar girl” given that the wife was present, so I’d get treated like a maid — with disdain or be blanked.
It was this kind of environment that Mrs. Weys, Thai-born and therefore Oriental looking, found herself in when she and Mr. Weys went on their daily journeys to their Mandarin classes.
In the end, she was so riled by the staring and the animosity that they had to take separate buses to their Mandarin classes.
(Taiwan, early 1950s)
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