Walls, cultural and personal

I've had both a series of medical issues these past months, in addition to my usual anxiety and overall executive dysfunction. Add to that a case of writer's block as cliché as it has been severe, and I simply haven't had it in me to face the world as a writer or as much of anything. 

It's not entirely debilitating, and I am not entirely splenetic. I can still work and have a social life, and I wouldn't say the American people voting for President Rapist again has completely broken me. But it's broken me a little bit -- what tiny shred of optimism I may have once clung to has been swept away in the swash of my complete and utter inability to forgive anyone who thought a known rapist would make a great president. Quite literally, if I find out someone I know voted for him, I will never speak to them again. 

In this intense anger and anxiety, various physical ailments and investigations, and not one but two ageing and unwell cats, I've been more reclusive and less engaged. I want to wall the world off, but I've mostly been turning inward, a marked change from my usual extroversion. It's not quite to the point where my subconscious has Cask of the Amontillado'd the rest of me, but I genuinely don't think the world will be okay. 

In an attempt to deal with this constructively,  I've been escaping from the world by methodically making over the smaller back rooms in our apartment. Mostly, I'm trying to make my space more functional  and improve overall flow. There's an aesthetic component to this as well, though. My home office, which my friends call my 'lady cave', is now drenched in a plummy color hilariously called Aubergine Burst. 

This chain of events led recently to a direct confrontation with one of the few things about Taiwanese culture that I don't like, even as I have sought to understand and accept it -- the indirect, high-context no. 

In addition to enplummification of my lady cave, I've been preparing to hang new art. And that's turned into a labyrinthine side quest of its own.

A few years ago, I became the new caretaker of a massive family heirloom -- a thick, heavy tome of my great-grandfather's that was either meant to be prominently displayed in a home library or office, or perhaps on a coffee table. A Historical Atlas of Armenia, published in 1953. I can't read most of it -- my Armenian is still not that good -- but the illustrations are plentiful and...how else to describe them? Luscious. Fine detail, rich colors, metallic accents. Various maps, historical coats of arms, portraits, prints of Medieval etchings, portraits of historical notables, artistic renderings of Mount Ararat, you name it. Slightly frayed at the edges of the binding, the cover a deep wine red with the gold stamped letters ՀԱՅ (among other things), it looks exactly like the sort of thing your Armenian great-grandpa would have had in his study to show off to his friends over a bottle of cognac.

I sought to have four of the most enigmatic images scanned, printed and framed, with the metallic accents faithfully reproduced if possible. The binding on this book is so thick that it cannot be scanned and printed directly, and one fold-out map is too large for the machinery at an average copy shop.

My usual print shop for this kind of work, River Image, seems to have gone out of business. So, asked for recommendations on where to get this done, and received just two replies -- a small custom printing firm in Wanhua that seems to have mostly corporate clients, and Sir Speedy. The latter couldn't do metallic accents, so I hauled my tome across town to Wanhua to inquire at the former.

This printing business is located in a narrow lane otherwise lined with old walk-up apartments. You know the kind -- clad in mid-century tiles in neutrals and greens, with iron window grilles and sprays of plant life in pots both along the road and growing out of cracks in the wall. You'd have to look closely to even notice the existence of a print shop on the ground floor of one of these buildings. Inside, there was so much printed material for various businesses, all beautifully done, that the employees balanced A Historical Atlas of Armenia on top of one pile to inspect the pages I'd selected. 

Then they discussed the matter in Taiwanese. I even understood most of it! The binding was the thing -- the only ways to avoid shadow-casted scans were to cut the binding, or digitally pretty them up. I didn't want to cut the book, and they doubted they could re-bind it well enough. They asked for time to look into how it might be done, which I granted. 

We all agreed the job was possible. They even had metallics! The question was more about how much effort it would require, and what that would cost. 

I got the distinct sense that they didn't particularly want to do it, at least not at a price a single person would pay, compared to a business. But, they assured me, they'd try. We added each other on Line and I went home, bookless. 

A few days later they got in touch: they could do the job, but the total cost would be around NT$40,000 for two color copies each of the four images, on good paper, with gold and silver accents. They wouldn't be able to do the work until January.

Honestly, I very much wanted these prints -- one set for me, one for my sister. But I knew, and I think they knew, that I wasn't about to pay over a thousand US dollars and wait over a month for them. I drafted a message saying I'd think about it for a few days, and I genuinely would, but deep down I knew that it simply was not going to work.

I asked a local friend to check my reply in Mandarin, as I wanted to avoid any inadvertent rudeness. She felt they were "treating the customer like a buffet", and perhaps she was right. She grew up in this culture, after all; I didn't.

But something about the exchange, and the way they responded positively to my reply -- of course we know it's a big expense, we quoted the upper estimate because we want to do the best possible work, and you can get quotes from other printers too -- made me think that they weren't trying to scam me, per se. 

Rather, they didn't want to do a fairly small job for what wouldn't have been much profit, but because they could do it and didn't want to outright reject the project, they quoted a price at which they would take it on, knowing full well I'd say no thanks and look elsewhere. All on good terms, of course. 

I then took the book to Sir Speedy near Da'an Station, and they were able to scan the pages, remove the shadows and give me two sets of pretty good prints (no metallic accents, though) for NT$1400, including digital copies.

I like to think I understood what was happening and responded astutely, but I didn't like it. I knew not to pay that outrageous sum of money, which no one ever expected me to fork over, but I’ve met exists with too much money and too little sense to understand that. 

The fake quote was a way to shimmy out of an awkward ‘no’, but it put me in the awkward position of having to say it was out of my budget, whereas I wouldn’t have found a direct rejection to be awkward. Research shows that when communicating across cultural divides, people tend to develop clearer styles with more nonverbal language to alleviate misunderstanding, so it makes sense to me to do this.

I'd rather be told kindly but directly that they weren't going to take the job. I accepted how the events unfolded, because I had no choice. Just because I can see it, understand it, accept it and respond to it doesn't mean I agree with it. 

Besides, this communication style makes sense to me, not to them necessarily. I’m naturally direct, it’s also my ‘home culture’ (New York). I communicate regularly in multiple languages with people from different cultures, and have done for decades. While I don’t want to make assumptions, they likely haven’t.

And what can I do but accept and work within the culture where I chose to live? Complaining does nothing. One must adapt.

My experience with the print shop reminded me of the other aspects of local culture that I don't care for -- not standing up to toxic bosses, but rather job-hopping to the next toxic boss, and the next, and the next, whenever the current one becomes too unbearable. Doing things one actively disagrees with to avoid arguing with one's parents, including signing anti-marriage equality petitions, not buying homes they don't want you to buy, or even having kids when you don't feel ready (or want them at all). 

In a lot of these cases, I think of them less as passively accepting poor treatment from others, and more as just making a choice that I wouldn't have made, and still wouldn't make even after almost two decades in Taiwan. Sometimes I even see the wisdom -- years ago I expended far too much energy standing up to a toxic boss, but in the end the only real solution was to quit. Perhaps there's something to be learned from declining to make the effort to change a dynamic that probably can't be changed. I'd choose to die on more hills; perhaps that causes me to die more often.

But you know what? I'll still stand up for myself if I think a boss or manager is wrong about something that concerns me. Diplomatically, even kindly, if they're not irredeemable. But at the very least, I will state my position.

All this to say, I'd rather interact in a still-foreign culture in ways that feel a little unnatural to me, to say "I'll think about it" when I know the answer is "no", to respond politely to an outrageous price quote -- understanding and accepting even though I'm not fully in agreement -- than speak to single person who voted for President Rapist.

What is going on with the KMT's foreign language social media people?

Earlier today, activist and journalist Roy Ngerng wrote a fairly anodyne tweet about how the Tsai government had "built Taiwan's relationship with other democracies" so that Japan and the US were aiding Taiwan quickly, without Taiwan having to surrender its sovereignty or dignity to China. 

The Kuomintang, on their official account, responded the way a CCP sock puppet might -- as you can see from the cover photo.

It's already in the local news, where you can also see some of the more polite replies. 

At first, I believed it was most likely a trigger-happy intern who had forgotten to log in to their personal account and accidentally went after Ngerng on the KMT's official account. That in itself should be enough to get them fired. At best, it meant that this was the kind of person the KMT employed: willing to spew hateful word salad co-opting the social justice language of the left to make nonsense arguments, and not able to make a particularly coherent case.

What's more, the language read exactly like the CCP's United Front and fifty-cent bots, as many pointed out:

The entire comment is incoherent -- calling Ngerng, who is not white, a white supremacist for talking about help that Japan (a non-white country) and the US gave to Taiwan. It's not worth analyzing very deeply, but the part about anime in particular is as questionable as it is incoherent. There are entire subreddits full of people who believe all anime is pornography (so, My Neighbor Totoro is...huh?), but even if that were true, it's irrelevant here. 

There's another less popular line of thinking that anime is some sort of artistic way for Japanese, who want to fantasize about being "more Western" without having to say so, to enjoy and imagine themselves as having "Westernized" bodies and forms through anime. This could what be what our questionable tweeter meant: that one might answer "you're accusing me of white supremacy, but Japan's not white", with a prepackaged "they wish they were white and that's white supremacy, because anime!" retort.

The whole argument is of course pure bullshit, but it could be what he meant (I am almost certain the rogue tweeter is a 'he', because the entire International Department is male, as we'll discuss below). It sounds like the sort of pseudo-intellectual trash one might pick up in the same discussion spaces where one picks up phrasing like "muh Japan".

In any case, that's the best possible scenario. 

At worst, it implied that the KMT hired one or several people to manage its social media whose other job was to operate horrible troll accounts that spew this kind of rhetoric in an attempt to ruin any attempt at meaningful discourse while being completely impossible to argue with. This is an intentional tactic that political interests pay for -- especially the CCP -- and it is so toxic and oxygen-sucking, it's like trying to duel with quicksand.

I'm not sure it matters if there is one person or many working for the KMT to engage in this sort of discourse online. I'm not sure it matters if this was meant to be a personal tweet posted from the wrong account. Whoever wrote that tweet has exposed themselves as having a vicious, angry and problematic personality who is willing to deal with people in the exact same way as a pro-CCP troll might. The KMT hired them anyway.

What's more, the KMT has previously made statements in support of US-Taiwan ties and thanked Japan for their donation of over a million vaccines. So, such a jaw-dropping, unprofessional response by an official organization to a fairly benign tweet is...eyebrow-raising. It just doesn't make sense. 

Within 45 minutes the tweet was gone, and a poorly-worded "sorry if you were offended" apology posted by the official account. That reply was also deleted and re-posted:

To be fair, the original "apology" had a typo in it, and the new post fixed that. The goal might not have been to delete all the angry replies. That was the effect, however.

This got me wondering: what is going on in the International Affairs department of the KMT? Because either they're running a whole online troll operation, there's a massive internal tug-of-war, or they have at least one reckless person who can't do their job properly, and who holds some pretty horrifying views. 

Of course, it's not hard to find out who works in this department of the KMT. Lee Ta-jung is the director, and is associated with Tamkang University. There's nothing odd there. Shen Cheng-hao doesn't have much going on either. He appears here with his colleague (whom I'll talk about in a minute) on a show about how the youth feel about the US election, but frankly, I haven't watched the whole thing. Ho Chih-yung has ties to the National Policy Research Foundation and National Tsinghua University. Although I doubt I'd agree with any of these guys -- and yes, they are all men -- on political issues, they don't seem like people who would log into the KMT's official Twitter account to incoherently harass a journalist over an anodyne tweet.

Then there's Tang Cheng-wei. Here he is -- again in the local media ETToday -- making sexist remarks about President Tsai on a Taiwan News article about her winning the John McCain prize. He insulted her by calling her a virgin, and a loyal dog of the US. Seeing as until very recently the US seemed to prefer the KMT, that's an odd comment. He also insulted others who disagreed with him:

It's interesting to me that he wonders why people would bring up the KMT, when he works (or worked) for the KMT. 

Anyway, he continues with his anti-West, anti-foreigner talk:

He also implied that respected writer and analyst J. Michael Cole is a "Canadian spy" hired by President Tsai for that reason (Cole stopped running Thinking Taiwan when Tsai was elected, and there is no indication that he used his previous intelligence training in that role. He is open about his previous intelligence career).

This is strange disinformation to spread by someone working for the KMT, as the KMT insists that the DPP is the one spreading fake news.

Update 6/12/2021: Interestingly, this is all breaking now, even though his comments were made a month ago. The local reports don't connect him to Thursday's tweet, however, and say he stopped working for the KMT in March to do military service. That's odd. These are all from the past few days -- you can find them yourself if you'd like. I've included a screenshot to show you how recent all of this news is:

The only report of his comments about Tsai that dates from the actual event just calls him a "former" consultant and offers no other details. While I am fairly sure when I read that article two days ago it didn't say he was a "former" anything, I could be mistaken. It's also possible my memory is correct but the writer was wrong. The article about the "International War Room" is from February. 

I cannot offer any interpretation of this; I'll just leave it here for you.

Furthermore, Tang's anti-foreigner behavior is interesting, for someone who wrote at great length about how great America is on his own Facebook page in 2018: 

...I'm not going to bother with screenshots of the whole thing.

America is a diverse and multicultural country, while also being majority-white. How does this square with his anti-foreigner comments a month ago?

Remember, this person is (or was) partly responsible for KMT outreach to foreigners. Why would the KMT hire someone who hates white people to help them try to appeal to the rest of the world? I mean, I get that white supremacy is a massive problem, but if your goal is international outreach, this isn't how you do it.

He mentioned in the video above that he's a Trump supporter. This should not matter in relation to the issue at hand, but Trump himself is associated with white supremacy and "America First!" rhetoric, so it's a mismatch with his anti-foreigner, "loyal dog to the US" stance on President Tsai if he supports a strong US otherwise. 

This is a person the KMT chose to take on in their International Affairs department. This is a person they entrusted with part of their goal of international and foreign-language outreach. 

A known (former?) employee of the KMT making online comments about the president of the nation -- childish, trollish, sexist and highly inappropriate given his job -- should be enough to raise questions. 

Of course, Tang has the same right to freedom of expression as anyone else. Nobody is going to arrest him over his horrible comments about Tsai. But freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, and others have just as much right to point out that his personal comments don't look good when you consider his job. If I go online as Jenna and say "X", and someone writes about how the woman behind Lao Ren Cha said "X", that's all within the bounds of freedom of expression. The same applies here.

To be clear, we don't know who was behind the offensive and frankly uncalled-for and line-crossing tweet to Ngerng; perhaps it truly was an intern, and if so, I can only hope that that intern has been fired already. That tweet happened on Thursday, so whoever wrote it still had access to the KMT's official account just a few days ago. That is not acceptable.

However, regardless of who wrote that tweet today, one thing is clear: the KMT has in its employ at least one (and possibly several) highly problematic people who are causing multiple embarrassments, and who perhaps are not the best choices for communicating with the English-speaking public or representing the party. If they want to be taken seriously as the opposition, and maintain a dignified online presence, they really must do better than this. 

Today's tweet -- whomever wrote it -- crossed a line. Tang's comments about Tsai last month crossed a line. How many lines must be crossed before they address what is obviously a recurring problem?