You look Chinese, but ...: 01 (Speaking English) (Taiwan)

 

    I turned up in Taipei on 27 December 1974 to find myself thrown into an ocean of linguistic foreignness.

    There were accents I'd not been exposed to in Singapore.  (Singapore mainly had only the S.E.Chinese dialects, whilst Taiwan had people from regions Singaporeans never got acquainted with.)

    The speed on top of the accent was another problem -- for the first three months, I had to ask them to repeat and to slow down almost every other sentence.

    To them, however, I looked pretty much like one of them, so they expected me to think and behave like one of them.

    The first shock came on my first day at work, when a kind Hunan province colleague (the Administrative Manager's Assistant) took me out during the lunch break to show me where to go.

    Freddie Chen had served in the Republic of China Air Force, fighting alongside the Americans in Vietnam, so he'd picked up quite a bit of English.  He could tell that I wasn't used to speaking Mandarin full-time, so he tried to make me feel at home by speaking English to me.  (I'm sure he wanted to practise his English as well, as did loads of others who knew some English.)

    Our office was on the 7th floor of a block, so we took the lift, already fairly full by the time it got to our floor.  Nobody gave us a second glance as we stepped in.

    At one point, Freddie suddenly said something to me in English.

    The effect was instant:  everyone's head jerked up and turned round, wondering where the strange sounds were coming from, but more importantly, why they were uttered at all.  As far as they could remember when they got into the lift, there were no foreigners inside.  They looked us up and down, from top of head to toes.  No, not foreigners at all.

    When the lift reached the ground floor and people stepped out, one of the chaps (who was perhaps in his 40s or 50s -- I was 21, so anyone above 30 would be old to me anyway, plus I'm very bad at telling people's age at the best of times) looked round to see which way we were going.

    When he saw that we were not going the same way as he (therefore safe for him to throw his comment at us), he said loudly, "中國人放洋屁 / Zhōngguórén fàng yáng pì / Chinese people letting off a foreign fart".

    I understood enough Chinese to feel the deep insult and contempt conveyed in that brief statement.

    I asked Freddie why the man had been so nasty about our speaking English (because it's not an issue in Singapore).

    His reply was, "You've only just arrived.  When you've lived here a bit longer, you will understand."

    That was only the start of my culture shock:  being expected to behave like them on account of my looking like one of them.

    I was to get a lot more of such treatment for the rest of my two years there.

    My poor colleagues in the American oil company, Conoco, had to hear my frequent raving and ranting, especially during my first three months there before I became inured to it, "I hate this place.  If I weren't tied by my contract, I'd go home tomorrow."

(Taipei, 1974)