Greetings from Kaohsiung! I taught a workshop down here today and, seeing as that meant my HSR tickets were free, I've decided to spend the weekend (Brendan will be joining me soon). I'll be doing something similar in Tainan next week.
Anyway, I have a quick little thing to say, a dispatch from the field I guess you could call it.
When I walked in to the office with my co-teacher, it was just at the end of the 90-minute lunch break (12-1:30) which, as many of you know, is a pretty normal thing in Taiwan. Generally you have a half-hour or one-hour lunch, and then lights are turned down in the office and people often rest or even take naps for the rest of the time (I suppose if you wanted to go out to a restaurant you could also do that).
I used to, if not laugh at this, at least smile. My baseline assumption was that people often don't get enough sleep in Taiwan due to crazy working hours and impossible school expectations, therefore they have to nap in the middle of the day. I viewed it as a symptom of a problem.
A lot of expats do this - and I'm not pretending I'm better than they are, because I did it too in this case. They see something different from their own culture and immediately think of ways that it's worse than how things are done where they came from. Perhaps only later, after an initial period of rejection (even mildly so), do many come around to, if not a better way of doing things, a way that works considering how things work in this other country.
And you know what? It is true, working hours in this country are crazy - when you consider yourself as getting home 'early' at 7 or 8pm, that's crazy. And education expectations ARE nuts - children should not be studying at buxibans after school 5 days a week and on Saturday until 10pm or later, and still have homework to do on top of that. It is likely that this does have something to do with the 'lunchtime nap' culture at so many Taiwanese offices.
I have to say, though, that despite all of the above being a real problem, I've come around to the nap time idea. I have a non-traditional work schedule myself, but I sometimes come home from a lunchtime class, carve out a half an hour or an hour to nap, drink a cup of coffee and then continue with my work day.
First of all, napping is not necessarily something people do just because they are under-rested - even when I got a full night's sleep, sometimes after a busy morning and knowing I have a busy evening coming up, I do want more than a one-hour break before I have to be up at bat again for the rest of the day. Sometimes, that extra half hour isn't necessarily needed to sleep per se, but because a 90-minute break is more restorative than a one-hour break. I feel like I really got to give my mind enough time to rest, and I imagine locals feel the same. I don't always sleep - sometimes I veg out on the couch or just order a pot of tea and sit in an armchair in a cafe. I might read a book or pet my cats. I try my best not to surf the Internet, because that's not restful (it is pleasantly distracting, though).
Even if you work a more normal day - let's say you can leave at 6 - I do feel like a longer, 90-minute break is likely to make you more productive in the afternoon, just because you feel like you got a real rest. I know when I have my afternoons free, I feel more effective in my evening classes than when I don't (and I don't always).
Secondly, you've probably noticed this isn't just an office thing. Laborers and workers lay out on the floor in shops under construction or in the shade on sidewalks. I once - and I am not joking - saw one sleeping half in a manhole, with his upper half on the sidewalk, near the Youth Park. People crowd 7-11s and Family Marts to sleep at the tables. Drivers park their taxis or trucks and lean back for naps. I've joked that every coffee shop has to have at least one businessman sleeping at a table with a half-finished cup of coffee for feng shui purposes, rather like the fish tanks you often see near the doors of businesses. He should be oriented to the West or facing the cash register to bring maximum profit to the business.
I have come to kind of admire folks who can just lay out like this, snooze away on a sidewalk or at a convenience store and not give two craps about how they look, whether they are snoring or drooling, who sees them or what sort of germs might be currently invading the skin on their faces. I aspire to have such a "give zero fucks" attitude. I mean, I'm getting there, I already give very few fucks indeed, but they give ZERO, if not a negative number of fucks, and that is really the best goal in life. Before I leave Taiwan I WILL take a nap on a shady sidewalk just to show I've made it, and I am a better person for it.
Of course, it also makes sense given the climate here. Half the country is tropical year-round. In the summer it's straight up tropical in the entire country. In the winter the weather is absolutely depressing in Taipei - all dark clouds and rain and humid chilliness without central heating. I can understand the need for something like a siesta to either restore oneself in the face of yet another day of black clouds and cold rain, or to be still and cool during the hottest part of the day.
So, I acknowledge there are some issues with overwork, both in employment and in school, in Taiwan. I have to say, though, that I've come around to the 90-minute lunches and after-lunch naps. That change not only in how I see these naps but also the fact that I now engage in them when I get a chance has been a good reminder not to look first at why the way a different culture does something is ultimately worse than the way mine (or yours) does, but first to look for how and why it works in a local context. That doesn't mean every practice is ultimately better or just different - my personal pet peeve, scooters that speed on the right past buses that are stopped and letting passengers on and off, which is a risk to the lives of the passengers as well as the scooter driver, for instance, is unequivocally worse - but it's worth considering positively first.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Monday, June 13, 2016
Officially Unofficial: A Review
I thought I was a little late to this party, but a quick look online shows that no, the only other person I can find who has actually reviewed Officially Unofficial (and not on Amazon) is my husband. Seems odd, I would have expected it to have been widely read and commented on in expat circles though not necessarily much outside Taiwan, but okay.
Brief recap - this is a memoir about moving to Taiwan, working one's way to national and international recognition as a journalist, coming to care deeply about Taiwan, and about Cole's time at the Taipei Times and his not-so-amicable split from them, as well as his own observations of the political and military goings-on from the perspective of a journalist with access to the key players.
First, what I liked about it. I can't find the specific reference but it seems that Cole arrived in Taiwan about one year before I did, and is older than me, but not by a huge amount. Which is to say, we experienced Taiwan at about the same time and at not terribly disparate ages, so it was fascinating to look back at the experiences someone else with a very different trajectory had during a time I was also in Taiwan and also learning how things worked. At many points, reading this filled in the gaps of news events and other important issues I was either too new to know much about or too busy with my own life trajectory to pay sufficient attention to (I wasn't that interested in Taiwanese politics until I had already been here several years - my interest bloomed just as I was starting to realize this could be a long-term home for me). I appreciated this quite a bit.
A few examples: I had been in Taiwan one month when the Red Shirts marched. I went and observed but didn't participate and didn't know much about it (nevertheless, being more knowledgeable now, I am glad to have seen it with my own eyes), so reading about how businesses at times paid employees to participate or donate was of some interest - especially as I went from a green organization (a large chain of language schools) to a blue one (a singularly awful 'management consulting firm' with great clients and terrible management) back to an apolitical-but-greenish-leaning one. I did notice that the blue one was a far worse place to work than the green or greenish ones, though.
I was also a Taipei Times reader when the quality started to suffer and I have to say, that one line in the book about how "readers noticed"...yes, we did. I did. I was one of them. I used to contribute the occasional reader editorial, but don't now.
Huaguang, Losheng sanatorium, Dapu, Want Want's Next Media acquisition? I was there for all of that too although, again, too busy with my own career path to pay as much attention as I should have. Reading this book filled in a lot of very useful blanks.
My mother was a journalist, so it was equally fascinating to me to read about how other journalists got to where they were and how they worked, as well. Although I have a lot of respect for (most) (good) journalists, the kind who really live up to the industry's standards of professionalism, it cemented my choice way back in the day not to pursue that career path. That is not meant as a jab at Cole, the profession, or any other journalists - it's just not for me. The low pay, long hours, poor treatment and lack of freedom and free time to pursue other interests? As a young arrival to Taiwan I was only willing to put up with perhaps one of the above, and now that I'm older I'm not willing to put up with any for any appreciable amount of time. The idea of only having 7 days off per year indefinitely, for example? Not acceptable.
In Cole's shoes I would have flamed out at the Times far earlier than he did simply because I'm not willing to do work towards an item for publication that will make someone else money on my day off, and not willing to put up with much bullshit. I also probably have a shorter temper. If that's what you have to do to break into journalism, then it's not for me and I'm quite happy I realized that early on (when I considered, and ultimately rejected, the idea of double majoring in journalism back in college).
It also helped me better articulate, oddly enough, how and why I chose teaching as an actual career and not something one does for a few years before moving on. It is a career - a profession. One would never call a math, science, history or literature teacher someone who "does it for a few years then moves on" (though some do) - they train to become professionals, and they are. So, when Cole subtly disparaged the teaching profession a few times in this book, as though it were somehow beneath him, it caused me to realize that no - I worked hard for my degree and my job is no less respectable than that of a journalist. It reminded me that I chose this and I trained for it in lieu of pursuing other careers (I used to work in finance, and have been offered non-teaching jobs which I have turned down) and no detractor can take that away. It is not 'beneath' anyone unless they don't know what being a professional educator actually means.
It reminded me, while reading about events that happened while I was busting my butt doing a Delta that, hey, it's okay that maybe I let my political observation slide a bit - I was busting my butt doing a Delta! It is absolutely fine that rather than go down and see the Huaguang protests for myself, that I was reading a book on discourse analysis. That rather than read every article on the Next Media acquisition that I was improving my knowledge of language systems. That it was perfectly logical for me to have been honing my knowledge of training practice and theory, language testing and assessment and various pedagogical approaches as well as doing data gathering on a group of real students rather than watching political events during the lead-up to the Sunflower occupation. I did it for my career, and now it's time to go back and fill in what I missed (you may have noticed that there were a few quiet years on this blog as well - now you know why.)
It was engaging, informative reading providing angles and backgrounds to things I either didn't know much about or missed due to my own studies.
In short, there was quite a lot to like.
Let's talk about the things I didn't like.
I noted there were a few inaccuracies in his portrayal of the ELT industry. Most importantly, that in his time drafting articles for an English teaching magazine, rather than realize that the reason it wasn't fulfilling was because he didn't know what he was doing, he just immediately reverted to the idea that it was "beneath him". Sure, it's easy to think that way if you have no background in second language acquisition, materials or curriculum development, scaffolding, early childhood education (for the articles aimed at kindergarteners), text-based language extraction pedagogy etc., it's easy to think any idiot could do a perfectly good job and smirk at such work. That's why so many such publications (and schools) in Taiwan are sub-par. For a real professional, such work would present a chance to grow and develop text-creation and other curriculum development and pedagogical skills. Simply put, he thought the job was beneath him because he was a hack at that particular job, and the crappy company he worked for doesn't do the profession any favors, either.
Moral of the story? Get your facts right before you write about a profession you know nothing about.
And finally, okay, look. This author didn't care for the book being in the third person, which creates not only wonky referencing but a sense of pomposity that just doesn't need to be there. It was a poor narrative choice that detracted - and distracted - from the otherwise very interesting story, she said. But, beyond that...how does she say this?
When a fairly large section, and several passages interspersed later through the narrative, reference how much one has read in such a way as to come off as bragging about how well-read one is rather than telling a good story about a journalist's life in Taiwan which is all I really want to read about, one comes off as...well...also a bit pompous if not outright sybaritic. I didn't think those paragraphs added much to the overall story. He's a good journalist and well-read, we get it. If he had interwoven observations and references based on his wide and diverse reading it may have come off a little better. As it was I was not terribly interested in paragraphs about all the stuff he's read. Great. I've read a lot of it too. Do you want a gold star?
That, and his disparaging of English teachers (discussed above) and bloggers (discussed below) were the book's greatest weaknesses. I would not go so far as to say it caused me to dislike Cole. I have respected and will continue to respect his excellent work, and having never met him, it is not fair for me to make any such judgments. But, you could say it put me off a bit. I can see why Ben Goren called him "alienating", although I have no such personal story to corroborate that. That said, we have a rather large number of mutual friends, people I respect immensely, so perhaps he is more likable than he at times comes across in this book.
As for the bloggers, because I seem determined to make this review as long and messy as possible, I find a lot to disagree with. There are plenty of idiots, but there are also plenty of excellent Taiwan bloggers. I won't go so far as to group myself in with them - at the end of the day I'm a loud woman with opinions and a platform and that's about all, and I write Lao Ren Cha for personal pleasure rather than to try and get readers - but it is quite unfair to imply that excellent personal blogs that comment on politics, such as The View from Taiwan, Letters from Taiwan and Frozen Garlic are amateurish or beneath Cole's own work (I do not imagine that my blog was in any way considered as an instigator of those comments, simply because I assume Cole doesn't read it, nor, given my proclivity for sailor-mouthed vulgarity, should he necessarily do so!) What really bothered me was his assertion that such people, who don't have the access he does, "shouldn't" have a voice. To quote my ever-oratorically-appropriate cousin, you can fuck right off with that.
Nobody gets to decide who "should" and "shouldn't" have a voice. That's for a bygone era. Now, everyone with a computer and rudimentary writing skills has a platform, but that does not necessarily mean they have a voice. You can get a free blog and write what you want, but if what you write is crap, nobody is going to read you (or at least not anyone in any great enough numbers to matter). The readers decide who has a voice or not with their clicks and eyeballs. The downside of that is not that unqualified people comment, but that qualified people feel reduced to creating clickbait headlines and going after angles that will hook readers rather than the story people actually need to know. That's why Taiwan is so often shoehorned into stories about China. In the end, though, good people do tend to stand out and get readers, and incompetent ones don't get read and don't get link-backs. The readership tends to sort the wheat from the chaff pretty accurately I'd say.
I'd also like to note that towards the end of the book he writes about how mainstream media is failing and alternative media is increasingly becoming the place to turn to. Wouldn't that also include personal blogs?
Such comments, again, only serve to put readers off Cole's larger narrative by dint of making him seem like a less likable, more priggish person than perhaps he is.
I'm also curious who these bloggers who "revile" him and other journalists are. Seems to me most decent bloggers are big fans of Cole's work, myself included. He seems to group them in with the "white wise men" he so often references, but I honestly don't have a clue, blogger-wise, who he is talking about unless there are a ton of blogs I haven't noticed. For now, though, I feel like he's describing a world at odds with my observations.
A few quibbles before I finish this.
I was happy to see in the Afterword that he changes his previous "the KMT is not so bad, they are a modernized political party functioning in a democracy" into something more realistic. I may strongly dislike the KMT as a whole, but I do realize that individuals within it are not all necessarily evil, corrupt, chauvinistic or incompetent. I also appreciate that not everything reported as done by the "evil underhanded KMT" went off exactly as it was reported by pan-green publications and that not all pan-green politicians are great people or good leaders.
However, the idea that the past is the past and now they're a perfectly normal political party? No, again, you can fuck right off with that. A normal political party doesn't withhold transitional justice or try to ignore-away its past the way the KMT has. They don't keep records from the Martial Law era sealed to a large degree and hold the line that victims and their families - many of whom still don't know what happened to their ancestors - should just forget it and move on. As the descendant of genocide survivors who are also being told to "just forget it" by the Turkish government, in my gut I feel that that is simply not acceptable and is proof that the KMT is not, and likely never will be, a normal and modernized political party.
Furthermore, this idea that these "white wise men" Cole references parroted the DPP party line for years, which was both self-serving and self-defeating, and that they called the youth and their critics "brainwashed" by the KMT. Certainly a few did do that, but what I saw during the Ma years was those "white wise men" (who all seem to think they're freakin' Confucius) towing the KMT, not the DPP, party line! It was all about how ECFA was good (it wasn't), the economy was bad under Chen but good under Ma (not true), that closer ties with China was invariably and in every situation a good thing (wrong again), the DPP were "troublemakers" (nope) and pro-independence "agitators" were the "brainwashed" ones, and the students impetuous and naive. All that nonsense. Maybe it was because I stopped reading the Taipei Times soon after its quality dropped, but unless I'm living on a different planet, the commentary he heard and the commentary I heard was quite different indeed. Any given Economist article on Taiwan from that time period will show you what I mean.
I have a few things to say about noting that a journalist was "female" without that adjective being necessary, the ridiculous Taiwan/Israel comparison (don't get me started on that) and the unnamed-but-we-know-who-it-is reference to Ralph Jennings (the short of it is that my reasons for disliking Jennings have nothing to do with his wife, whom I hadn't known and don't care is Chinese). I'll save all that for another time, maybe.
I'll end with this: despite its flaws, it was an engaging book and quite fascinating to read about someone else's experiences in Taiwan just as I was having my own, very different, experiences. I enjoyed some but not all of the autobiographical elements, overall wanting to know more about Taiwan. So, in the end, I have to say it has whet my appetite for Cole's next book, Black Island, which I have the feeling I will enjoy even more.
Brief recap - this is a memoir about moving to Taiwan, working one's way to national and international recognition as a journalist, coming to care deeply about Taiwan, and about Cole's time at the Taipei Times and his not-so-amicable split from them, as well as his own observations of the political and military goings-on from the perspective of a journalist with access to the key players.
First, what I liked about it. I can't find the specific reference but it seems that Cole arrived in Taiwan about one year before I did, and is older than me, but not by a huge amount. Which is to say, we experienced Taiwan at about the same time and at not terribly disparate ages, so it was fascinating to look back at the experiences someone else with a very different trajectory had during a time I was also in Taiwan and also learning how things worked. At many points, reading this filled in the gaps of news events and other important issues I was either too new to know much about or too busy with my own life trajectory to pay sufficient attention to (I wasn't that interested in Taiwanese politics until I had already been here several years - my interest bloomed just as I was starting to realize this could be a long-term home for me). I appreciated this quite a bit.
A few examples: I had been in Taiwan one month when the Red Shirts marched. I went and observed but didn't participate and didn't know much about it (nevertheless, being more knowledgeable now, I am glad to have seen it with my own eyes), so reading about how businesses at times paid employees to participate or donate was of some interest - especially as I went from a green organization (a large chain of language schools) to a blue one (a singularly awful 'management consulting firm' with great clients and terrible management) back to an apolitical-but-greenish-leaning one. I did notice that the blue one was a far worse place to work than the green or greenish ones, though.
I was also a Taipei Times reader when the quality started to suffer and I have to say, that one line in the book about how "readers noticed"...yes, we did. I did. I was one of them. I used to contribute the occasional reader editorial, but don't now.
Huaguang, Losheng sanatorium, Dapu, Want Want's Next Media acquisition? I was there for all of that too although, again, too busy with my own career path to pay as much attention as I should have. Reading this book filled in a lot of very useful blanks.
My mother was a journalist, so it was equally fascinating to me to read about how other journalists got to where they were and how they worked, as well. Although I have a lot of respect for (most) (good) journalists, the kind who really live up to the industry's standards of professionalism, it cemented my choice way back in the day not to pursue that career path. That is not meant as a jab at Cole, the profession, or any other journalists - it's just not for me. The low pay, long hours, poor treatment and lack of freedom and free time to pursue other interests? As a young arrival to Taiwan I was only willing to put up with perhaps one of the above, and now that I'm older I'm not willing to put up with any for any appreciable amount of time. The idea of only having 7 days off per year indefinitely, for example? Not acceptable.
In Cole's shoes I would have flamed out at the Times far earlier than he did simply because I'm not willing to do work towards an item for publication that will make someone else money on my day off, and not willing to put up with much bullshit. I also probably have a shorter temper. If that's what you have to do to break into journalism, then it's not for me and I'm quite happy I realized that early on (when I considered, and ultimately rejected, the idea of double majoring in journalism back in college).
It also helped me better articulate, oddly enough, how and why I chose teaching as an actual career and not something one does for a few years before moving on. It is a career - a profession. One would never call a math, science, history or literature teacher someone who "does it for a few years then moves on" (though some do) - they train to become professionals, and they are. So, when Cole subtly disparaged the teaching profession a few times in this book, as though it were somehow beneath him, it caused me to realize that no - I worked hard for my degree and my job is no less respectable than that of a journalist. It reminded me that I chose this and I trained for it in lieu of pursuing other careers (I used to work in finance, and have been offered non-teaching jobs which I have turned down) and no detractor can take that away. It is not 'beneath' anyone unless they don't know what being a professional educator actually means.
It reminded me, while reading about events that happened while I was busting my butt doing a Delta that, hey, it's okay that maybe I let my political observation slide a bit - I was busting my butt doing a Delta! It is absolutely fine that rather than go down and see the Huaguang protests for myself, that I was reading a book on discourse analysis. That rather than read every article on the Next Media acquisition that I was improving my knowledge of language systems. That it was perfectly logical for me to have been honing my knowledge of training practice and theory, language testing and assessment and various pedagogical approaches as well as doing data gathering on a group of real students rather than watching political events during the lead-up to the Sunflower occupation. I did it for my career, and now it's time to go back and fill in what I missed (you may have noticed that there were a few quiet years on this blog as well - now you know why.)
It was engaging, informative reading providing angles and backgrounds to things I either didn't know much about or missed due to my own studies.
In short, there was quite a lot to like.
Let's talk about the things I didn't like.
I noted there were a few inaccuracies in his portrayal of the ELT industry. Most importantly, that in his time drafting articles for an English teaching magazine, rather than realize that the reason it wasn't fulfilling was because he didn't know what he was doing, he just immediately reverted to the idea that it was "beneath him". Sure, it's easy to think that way if you have no background in second language acquisition, materials or curriculum development, scaffolding, early childhood education (for the articles aimed at kindergarteners), text-based language extraction pedagogy etc., it's easy to think any idiot could do a perfectly good job and smirk at such work. That's why so many such publications (and schools) in Taiwan are sub-par. For a real professional, such work would present a chance to grow and develop text-creation and other curriculum development and pedagogical skills. Simply put, he thought the job was beneath him because he was a hack at that particular job, and the crappy company he worked for doesn't do the profession any favors, either.
Moral of the story? Get your facts right before you write about a profession you know nothing about.
And finally, okay, look. This author didn't care for the book being in the third person, which creates not only wonky referencing but a sense of pomposity that just doesn't need to be there. It was a poor narrative choice that detracted - and distracted - from the otherwise very interesting story, she said. But, beyond that...how does she say this?
When a fairly large section, and several passages interspersed later through the narrative, reference how much one has read in such a way as to come off as bragging about how well-read one is rather than telling a good story about a journalist's life in Taiwan which is all I really want to read about, one comes off as...well...also a bit pompous if not outright sybaritic. I didn't think those paragraphs added much to the overall story. He's a good journalist and well-read, we get it. If he had interwoven observations and references based on his wide and diverse reading it may have come off a little better. As it was I was not terribly interested in paragraphs about all the stuff he's read. Great. I've read a lot of it too. Do you want a gold star?
That, and his disparaging of English teachers (discussed above) and bloggers (discussed below) were the book's greatest weaknesses. I would not go so far as to say it caused me to dislike Cole. I have respected and will continue to respect his excellent work, and having never met him, it is not fair for me to make any such judgments. But, you could say it put me off a bit. I can see why Ben Goren called him "alienating", although I have no such personal story to corroborate that. That said, we have a rather large number of mutual friends, people I respect immensely, so perhaps he is more likable than he at times comes across in this book.
As for the bloggers, because I seem determined to make this review as long and messy as possible, I find a lot to disagree with. There are plenty of idiots, but there are also plenty of excellent Taiwan bloggers. I won't go so far as to group myself in with them - at the end of the day I'm a loud woman with opinions and a platform and that's about all, and I write Lao Ren Cha for personal pleasure rather than to try and get readers - but it is quite unfair to imply that excellent personal blogs that comment on politics, such as The View from Taiwan, Letters from Taiwan and Frozen Garlic are amateurish or beneath Cole's own work (I do not imagine that my blog was in any way considered as an instigator of those comments, simply because I assume Cole doesn't read it, nor, given my proclivity for sailor-mouthed vulgarity, should he necessarily do so!) What really bothered me was his assertion that such people, who don't have the access he does, "shouldn't" have a voice. To quote my ever-oratorically-appropriate cousin, you can fuck right off with that.
Nobody gets to decide who "should" and "shouldn't" have a voice. That's for a bygone era. Now, everyone with a computer and rudimentary writing skills has a platform, but that does not necessarily mean they have a voice. You can get a free blog and write what you want, but if what you write is crap, nobody is going to read you (or at least not anyone in any great enough numbers to matter). The readers decide who has a voice or not with their clicks and eyeballs. The downside of that is not that unqualified people comment, but that qualified people feel reduced to creating clickbait headlines and going after angles that will hook readers rather than the story people actually need to know. That's why Taiwan is so often shoehorned into stories about China. In the end, though, good people do tend to stand out and get readers, and incompetent ones don't get read and don't get link-backs. The readership tends to sort the wheat from the chaff pretty accurately I'd say.
I'd also like to note that towards the end of the book he writes about how mainstream media is failing and alternative media is increasingly becoming the place to turn to. Wouldn't that also include personal blogs?
Such comments, again, only serve to put readers off Cole's larger narrative by dint of making him seem like a less likable, more priggish person than perhaps he is.
I'm also curious who these bloggers who "revile" him and other journalists are. Seems to me most decent bloggers are big fans of Cole's work, myself included. He seems to group them in with the "white wise men" he so often references, but I honestly don't have a clue, blogger-wise, who he is talking about unless there are a ton of blogs I haven't noticed. For now, though, I feel like he's describing a world at odds with my observations.
A few quibbles before I finish this.
I was happy to see in the Afterword that he changes his previous "the KMT is not so bad, they are a modernized political party functioning in a democracy" into something more realistic. I may strongly dislike the KMT as a whole, but I do realize that individuals within it are not all necessarily evil, corrupt, chauvinistic or incompetent. I also appreciate that not everything reported as done by the "evil underhanded KMT" went off exactly as it was reported by pan-green publications and that not all pan-green politicians are great people or good leaders.
However, the idea that the past is the past and now they're a perfectly normal political party? No, again, you can fuck right off with that. A normal political party doesn't withhold transitional justice or try to ignore-away its past the way the KMT has. They don't keep records from the Martial Law era sealed to a large degree and hold the line that victims and their families - many of whom still don't know what happened to their ancestors - should just forget it and move on. As the descendant of genocide survivors who are also being told to "just forget it" by the Turkish government, in my gut I feel that that is simply not acceptable and is proof that the KMT is not, and likely never will be, a normal and modernized political party.
Furthermore, this idea that these "white wise men" Cole references parroted the DPP party line for years, which was both self-serving and self-defeating, and that they called the youth and their critics "brainwashed" by the KMT. Certainly a few did do that, but what I saw during the Ma years was those "white wise men" (who all seem to think they're freakin' Confucius) towing the KMT, not the DPP, party line! It was all about how ECFA was good (it wasn't), the economy was bad under Chen but good under Ma (not true), that closer ties with China was invariably and in every situation a good thing (wrong again), the DPP were "troublemakers" (nope) and pro-independence "agitators" were the "brainwashed" ones, and the students impetuous and naive. All that nonsense. Maybe it was because I stopped reading the Taipei Times soon after its quality dropped, but unless I'm living on a different planet, the commentary he heard and the commentary I heard was quite different indeed. Any given Economist article on Taiwan from that time period will show you what I mean.
I have a few things to say about noting that a journalist was "female" without that adjective being necessary, the ridiculous Taiwan/Israel comparison (don't get me started on that) and the unnamed-but-we-know-who-it-is reference to Ralph Jennings (the short of it is that my reasons for disliking Jennings have nothing to do with his wife, whom I hadn't known and don't care is Chinese). I'll save all that for another time, maybe.
I'll end with this: despite its flaws, it was an engaging book and quite fascinating to read about someone else's experiences in Taiwan just as I was having my own, very different, experiences. I enjoyed some but not all of the autobiographical elements, overall wanting to know more about Taiwan. So, in the end, I have to say it has whet my appetite for Cole's next book, Black Island, which I have the feeling I will enjoy even more.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Of false flags and outdated self-congratulations
Okay. So. That crazypants video of a woman (Hung Su-Chu, not to be confused for my non-Taiwan readers with Hung Hsiu-chu, the KMT Chairperson mentioned below) who seems to be allied with fringe groups in the pan-green camp berating an elderly KMT veteran. Ugh. I don't think I need to say that such behavior is disgusting and unbecoming, and that people with these beliefs represent an infinitesimally small minority of Taiwanese, the vast majority of whom are, like most people, better than this.
There has been a lot of discussion on a.) what this says about the fringe elements of the generally green side and the bigotry many of them display (which is a provably true phenomenon - they aren't off the hook because they're on generally the same side I am, and it's one major reason why I've started having a lot more faith in youth activists and the New Power Party of late) and b.) whether this is a 'false flag' fake scandal manufactured by pro-unification fringe elements on the other (blue) side, as evidenced by an old online post by Hung talking about how pro-independence people are seeking to divide and lie to the Taiwanese (at least that's the best I could get from that incoherent mess of a post - she does not seem to support at all the petition linked to) and talk that the woman's parents were also a part of the KMT diaspora. The idea would be to make the pan-greens, currently in power, look bad both to the Taiwanese and as fodder for Chinese media - though as I mention below, I'm less concerned about that latter point.
On the other hand a friend of mine pointed out that this woman has been involved in deep green fringe groups for awhile - although the group she is said to belong to, the Taiwan Civil Government, claims she is not a member (also check this link for good discussions of positive identity). I would also note that gossip is gossip, and images of status updates can be photoshopped (though I am not sure this one is - she sounds genuinely nuts, to the point that all I can tell is So, what of it?
I don't know - but I do think the truth is important. I've heard a few calls for taking this at face value first because the evidence isn't quite enough to say it's definitely an opposition attempt to discredit the entire green camp by manufacturing a scandal involving one of its crazier outlier groups, and second because redirecting conversation to whether it's a 'false flag' operation or not takes away from the conversation about bigotry on the pan-green side, as fringe as it may (or may not) be.
I'd say that the evidence isn't enough for me to believe it's a fake-out, but there is just enough for me to not wholeheartedly believe it is genuine. Assuming that this was a genuine ideology-motivated attack and refusing to consider that it might not be is just as jejune as a knee-jerk reaction among those of us who ally with the 'greener' end of the political spectrum that it MUST be a manufactured scandal just because the bad guys are green and so are you. It's deciding what you believe based on what you want to say, and how you want to appear, rather than actually considering what may have happened.
This is especially true if one is intent on avoiding looking like a pan-green apologist or knee-jerk defender who will cry foul at any criticism of that side, and so decides it must be genuine. Pointing out that it might be a fake-out might make you seem like just that sort of apologist!
Which, of course, is not true at all. Pointing out that one incident of green bigotry may be a false flag operation is not the same at all as saying that pan-greens are never bigoted (just as pointing out that Republican attacks on Hillary are unfair does not make one a Hillary apologist, or equate to thinking Hillary is 100% great. The two are not the same, not even remotely, and it's facile and stupid - perhaps even weirdly dogmatic but to a wholly different ideology - to conflate them when they are so clearly not identical worldviews).
Of course, we can all agree on one thing: that Taiwanese on both sides, or shall I say all sides, of the political playing field, by a vast majority, find this sort of behavior disgusting, and whether or not the woman in question is the real deal doesn't change that either way, she is a terrible person who did a terrible, shitty thing. That's true even if she's a faker.
So why does it matter? Because:
1.) This particular incident does not need to be genuinely motivated by political ideology for people to have that conversation about pan-green bigotry against the KMT diaspora and its descendants, because this one incident possibly being fake doesn't mean there is no bigotry in the pan-green camp
2.) Assuming the actions and sentiments behind them are genuine just because you'd rather have the above conversation about pan-green bigotry, as I've said, is facile and self-serving.
3.) Opposition attempts to discredit the other side, no matter where they are coming from, are a real problem and they do happen. Deciding to pretend they don't exist for your own rhetorical purposes just makes it easier for them to continue. There is a precedent for this sort of thing - I was present when gangsters tried to stir up arguments, setting off firecrackers and bothering Sunflower supporters outside of the Legislative Yuan in 2014. I'm not a reporter and I'm not a part of the movement - more of an observer, supporter and interested party - so I got the hell out of there and joined supporters on another section of road because I know I have a bit of a temper and there was no reason to stick around only to fly off the handle and possibly get deported. But, I was there, I saw it happen, I heard the information coming from the crowd on who these people were and what they were trying to do, so I know this is a thing that fringe groups on the other side *do* engage in.
That is also a conversation worth having, and an important one, as many in Asia (and not just Taiwanese - foreigners too) don't recognize these deliberate actions when they take place. They too take the news at face value and then wrinkle their faces in disgust at those 'racist DPP' (nevermind that the DPP had nothing to do with this attack, Hung is said to be involved with the Taiwan Civil Government, who are true nutters). Hell this sort of thing happens in the US (can we say "Benghazi"? I suppose it's a blessing that that has died down and the scandal that has taken its place at least has a real issue at its center). People - all people - need to learn to recognize it and consider the news accordingly.
Frankly, I find the former more interesting than the 'bigotry within the green camp' discussion, simply because I feel like it's already been had, and it's starting to sound repetitive and self-congratulatory.
Are there racists and bigots and awful people who align with the pan-green camp? Of course.
Is this a problem? Yup, but increasingly less so as these folks become more and more fringe. The mainstream has changed course for the better.
Should we do something about it? Yup.
Like what? Well, push for more progressive values and inclusivity on both sides.
Arguably that is something happening more quickly on the green side, as evidenced by rhetoric from the DPP on transitional justice and better inclusion of minority groups, the undeniably socially progressive views of the New Power Party (come on guys, drop the resistance to changing laws regarding working in Taiwan for foreign professionals already and you'd have my unqualified support!), the generally (though not entirely) green support of marriage equality, which was dead in the water under a KMT-controlled legislature, and the unified-yet-pluralistic and inclusive student movement which has true progressivism at its center. The folks running the show now are not the same Hoklo nationalist "KMT go home" bigots who had perhaps more power than they should have during the Chen years.
So...as I see it, that conversation has basically moved on. The things we need to do to improve our own side are already clear, and are already being acted upon. If anything they've been known by the student activists for quite some time and we older, often foreign commentators are behind the times.
Unless anyone has anything else to add.
What are we not doing that we should be to eradicate bigotry among those on our side of the political spectrum?
How can we better educate people to recognize manufactured scandals and false flag operations so we don't sit, politically neutered, as otherwise bad people pretend to be saviors and angels (I'm not that worried about Chinese news - if they didn't have a manufactured scandal they'd fabricate one that was never actually implemented. They're going to suck no matter what)?
Why can't we have BOTH conversations? Are we really so dumb and single-minded that we have to pick one?
And isn't this why the truth matters?
There has been a lot of discussion on a.) what this says about the fringe elements of the generally green side and the bigotry many of them display (which is a provably true phenomenon - they aren't off the hook because they're on generally the same side I am, and it's one major reason why I've started having a lot more faith in youth activists and the New Power Party of late) and b.) whether this is a 'false flag' fake scandal manufactured by pro-unification fringe elements on the other (blue) side, as evidenced by an old online post by Hung talking about how pro-independence people are seeking to divide and lie to the Taiwanese (at least that's the best I could get from that incoherent mess of a post - she does not seem to support at all the petition linked to) and talk that the woman's parents were also a part of the KMT diaspora. The idea would be to make the pan-greens, currently in power, look bad both to the Taiwanese and as fodder for Chinese media - though as I mention below, I'm less concerned about that latter point.
On the other hand a friend of mine pointed out that this woman has been involved in deep green fringe groups for awhile - although the group she is said to belong to, the Taiwan Civil Government, claims she is not a member (also check this link for good discussions of positive identity). I would also note that gossip is gossip, and images of status updates can be photoshopped (though I am not sure this one is - she sounds genuinely nuts, to the point that all I can tell is So, what of it?
I don't know - but I do think the truth is important. I've heard a few calls for taking this at face value first because the evidence isn't quite enough to say it's definitely an opposition attempt to discredit the entire green camp by manufacturing a scandal involving one of its crazier outlier groups, and second because redirecting conversation to whether it's a 'false flag' operation or not takes away from the conversation about bigotry on the pan-green side, as fringe as it may (or may not) be.
I'd say that the evidence isn't enough for me to believe it's a fake-out, but there is just enough for me to not wholeheartedly believe it is genuine. Assuming that this was a genuine ideology-motivated attack and refusing to consider that it might not be is just as jejune as a knee-jerk reaction among those of us who ally with the 'greener' end of the political spectrum that it MUST be a manufactured scandal just because the bad guys are green and so are you. It's deciding what you believe based on what you want to say, and how you want to appear, rather than actually considering what may have happened.
This is especially true if one is intent on avoiding looking like a pan-green apologist or knee-jerk defender who will cry foul at any criticism of that side, and so decides it must be genuine. Pointing out that it might be a fake-out might make you seem like just that sort of apologist!
Which, of course, is not true at all. Pointing out that one incident of green bigotry may be a false flag operation is not the same at all as saying that pan-greens are never bigoted (just as pointing out that Republican attacks on Hillary are unfair does not make one a Hillary apologist, or equate to thinking Hillary is 100% great. The two are not the same, not even remotely, and it's facile and stupid - perhaps even weirdly dogmatic but to a wholly different ideology - to conflate them when they are so clearly not identical worldviews).
Of course, we can all agree on one thing: that Taiwanese on both sides, or shall I say all sides, of the political playing field, by a vast majority, find this sort of behavior disgusting, and whether or not the woman in question is the real deal doesn't change that either way, she is a terrible person who did a terrible, shitty thing. That's true even if she's a faker.
So why does it matter? Because:
1.) This particular incident does not need to be genuinely motivated by political ideology for people to have that conversation about pan-green bigotry against the KMT diaspora and its descendants, because this one incident possibly being fake doesn't mean there is no bigotry in the pan-green camp
2.) Assuming the actions and sentiments behind them are genuine just because you'd rather have the above conversation about pan-green bigotry, as I've said, is facile and self-serving.
3.) Opposition attempts to discredit the other side, no matter where they are coming from, are a real problem and they do happen. Deciding to pretend they don't exist for your own rhetorical purposes just makes it easier for them to continue. There is a precedent for this sort of thing - I was present when gangsters tried to stir up arguments, setting off firecrackers and bothering Sunflower supporters outside of the Legislative Yuan in 2014. I'm not a reporter and I'm not a part of the movement - more of an observer, supporter and interested party - so I got the hell out of there and joined supporters on another section of road because I know I have a bit of a temper and there was no reason to stick around only to fly off the handle and possibly get deported. But, I was there, I saw it happen, I heard the information coming from the crowd on who these people were and what they were trying to do, so I know this is a thing that fringe groups on the other side *do* engage in.
That is also a conversation worth having, and an important one, as many in Asia (and not just Taiwanese - foreigners too) don't recognize these deliberate actions when they take place. They too take the news at face value and then wrinkle their faces in disgust at those 'racist DPP' (nevermind that the DPP had nothing to do with this attack, Hung is said to be involved with the Taiwan Civil Government, who are true nutters). Hell this sort of thing happens in the US (can we say "Benghazi"? I suppose it's a blessing that that has died down and the scandal that has taken its place at least has a real issue at its center). People - all people - need to learn to recognize it and consider the news accordingly.
Frankly, I find the former more interesting than the 'bigotry within the green camp' discussion, simply because I feel like it's already been had, and it's starting to sound repetitive and self-congratulatory.
Are there racists and bigots and awful people who align with the pan-green camp? Of course.
Is this a problem? Yup, but increasingly less so as these folks become more and more fringe. The mainstream has changed course for the better.
Should we do something about it? Yup.
Like what? Well, push for more progressive values and inclusivity on both sides.
Arguably that is something happening more quickly on the green side, as evidenced by rhetoric from the DPP on transitional justice and better inclusion of minority groups, the undeniably socially progressive views of the New Power Party (come on guys, drop the resistance to changing laws regarding working in Taiwan for foreign professionals already and you'd have my unqualified support!), the generally (though not entirely) green support of marriage equality, which was dead in the water under a KMT-controlled legislature, and the unified-yet-pluralistic and inclusive student movement which has true progressivism at its center. The folks running the show now are not the same Hoklo nationalist "KMT go home" bigots who had perhaps more power than they should have during the Chen years.
So...as I see it, that conversation has basically moved on. The things we need to do to improve our own side are already clear, and are already being acted upon. If anything they've been known by the student activists for quite some time and we older, often foreign commentators are behind the times.
Unless anyone has anything else to add.
What are we not doing that we should be to eradicate bigotry among those on our side of the political spectrum?
How can we better educate people to recognize manufactured scandals and false flag operations so we don't sit, politically neutered, as otherwise bad people pretend to be saviors and angels (I'm not that worried about Chinese news - if they didn't have a manufactured scandal they'd fabricate one that was never actually implemented. They're going to suck no matter what)?
Why can't we have BOTH conversations? Are we really so dumb and single-minded that we have to pick one?
And isn't this why the truth matters?
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