Taiwan 9: The Degraded Status of Women in the Country of Taiwan, and Other Biases
Throughout the world, in almost every society, men have more importance than women. What was remarkable to me, therefore, in my two months in Taiwan, that women here seemed lower in social status than in Hong Kong or in China, that their own attitudes towards me as a Western woman were more patronizing, that the rich women treated their vulnerable girl employees from the Philippines and Indonesia and Thailand far worse than the Victoria Peak society women in Hong Kong.
That Taiwan, in its historic problems with China, aggressively promotes itself, as a democratic hero of Asia, while flaunting without shame all our laws concerning race, age, and sex prejudice, is something that should be openly discussed in the West and in Asia.
Many young teachers experience Taiwan as their first foreign country, lured by the big dollars, and the idea that it is friendly to the West, with a dash of Chinese culture. I myself grew up in a travel business family, fortunate enough as a child to travel throughout North American, Europe, and the Caribbean, due to an a father who worked for Air Canada, which was then a Crown Corporation of the government of Canada. My father also worked for many international good will groups, from The Chamber of Commerce to the Rotary Club to the World Federalists Association.
When I first arrived in Taiwan, which seemed hard enough in itself, with their attitude that we are all lucky even to get into this jumped-up little banana republic, there was no one not one person at all who said to me, we hope you enjoy your stay in our country…. It seemed to me that every place in the world I had visited included some pretty plain towns in America and Canada, had someone, anyone, who said, we hope you like our town.
I realized later the incredibly self-satisfied, arrogant attitude of these Asians, the richest country, to whom the poor hardworking and honest toilers of Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia come, which explains also their obsession with how you get in and how you get out of this place, They have money and work to offer, and that is all they need to do, never even a smile or an encouragement. A culture created in some existential hell.
A country as rich as Japan and a land as poor as India, knowing they are fabulously interesting on their richness of history, have some social confidence the Taiwanese lack knowing in their hearts even by other Chinese people they are view as having strayed from the Chinese-loving path. On my worst days in Hong Kong or China, I can find something to like about the crazy Chinese, love about their beautiful culture. There were no moments of relief in Taipei. And they don’t seem to care a damn about what others think about, for their wealth alone, they are seen as magnetic by the Asian press.
Firstly, the treatment of other Asian woman by Taiwanese women.
I read an editorial in the paper referring to their treatment. The workers are not allowed even one day of the week off, not even to practice their religious faith. They are not allowed to go to groups of their racial type, and if they become pregnant, they are immediately deported back to their homeland. And, of course, there are suggestions of sexual abuse at the hands of their employers. With a questioning mind, I wonder if a pregnancy could ever be connected to the sexual abuse. Would a rich woman be so cruel as to deport a girl who has been made pregnant by her own husband? I leave it to everyone else to answer this.
What bothers me about the Indonesian woman is not that she works seven days in the week, since the domestic standards are not exactly demanding, with books and papers piled all around and four hanging curtain panels, all mis-matched, many Canadian woman would work a girl much harder to have a flawless home, it is at night that she sleeps in full view of the husband, a handsome and vigourous man her own age, only a blanket over her limbs, exposed to all in the living room, when the lady of the house, the rich Taiwanese wife, could have made a small bed for her in the front playroom where there is a door that closes.
Since I have no one to talk to in Taiwan, my mind ponders overmuch on men and women, love and sex. The cartoonish aspects of the male-female relationship abound, women in tight clothes on tilting heels, men banging into you on their motorbikes.
I think about this family, and I wonder if it is not cruelty, laziness, or tempting fate, but a racism so deep on the part of the housewife that she imagines an Indonesian woman to be of such a lower social caste that she is not physically attractive to a Chinese man.
The coldness of the women to myself as a Canadian teacher I have not seen in my travels, an indifference and a nastiness that manifests in the case of a British couple, teachers, where the man is given special holiday gifts just because he is male teacher, the female teacher ignored except to be humiliated for being a woman.
A friend of mine is fired from a job for being in her thirties, and replaced by a Swede in her early twenties. The reason given….
And
the school thinks they want to see a younger face
This job was four hours a week from an agent called Vivian. My friend looks so young people ask her how many children she is planning on having. Vivian then strangely gave her huge work hours, as the teacher was never given a reason that poor teaching was the excuse, the children clung to her when she left, she thought she was doing well there. The ageist comment so unnerved her she left Taiwan as well. We later figured out that Vivian just wanted to re-arrange her work hours, to free her for two full-time kindie jobs, one mornings and one afternoon.
At the art museum, I notice young boys playing with the computers, noticed by the guards for three or four hours, long past the thirty minutes allotted time, the next day, when they are empty, after I stay one minute past my time, the Chinese guard comes rushing over, pointing to his watch. Even the street musicians, unlike Mainland China, are only single men. In China, there are many women tearing about in police and security outfits, never in Taiwan, and in China, the street actors and musicians include an equal mix of confident and generous female performers, supported by their artistic brothers.
In the beginning of socialism, at least for a brief moment, many good things happened for Chinese women; the end of foot binding, the end of unwanted marriage, the end of multiple marriage, the closing of brothels at Shanghai. In Taiwan, the rights of women become like the word democracy itself, something that no ever fought for courageously, as the reformers of England and America went out to risk being killed, to stand against children working in grim Victorian factories and industrious honest lower-class women dying of too many childbirths in New York tenements, the Taiwanese must define them against the Mainland as being fighters against socialism, bad Communism, and therefore paste these words in vain all over their society, just like they paste Versace and Levi-Strauss and Esprit all over their bodies.
It is the name that counts, not the content.
When I think of how we protect our own Chinese from racism, and other biases, it makes me sick to see these things in Asia.
The British couple encounters Nigerian teachers downtown, who say they are leaving and not coming back, due to racism.
This is blunt and not hidden. For example, schools ask directly, are you black or are you white, when the teacher calls.
I refer the web-site called www.tealit.com to anyone in the West wishing to research themselves, one school presently is advertising for Caucasians only, and in the letters section, there is an eloquent letter from a young American woman, what we are told is the favourite teacher, who also happens to be black. She is well educated, and her thoughts are expressed most articulately.
Let me spell this out, a black American who has been to Barnard or the finest American school will not be hired over some European back-packer with a fuzzy accent, shaved head, jewellery through all his orifices, going out to bars every night to check out easy Taiwanese girls, because she is black. Normally I would not begrudge young transient wanderers their work opportunities; it is the prejudice here against women, colour, and age. Some unqualified teachers make excellent teachers, if they have greater tolerance and flexibility for being in Asia.
Those who rave about Taiwan should have told the rest of us, and saved us the air fare, though we most be responsible for ourselves, it seems that any white male, even uneducated, and with no clear speaking voice, can be the pet of the Taiwanese, so buy those tickets, guys. The women are not as choosy as the Hong Kong sophisticates, make no demands except a penis and a white skin, and therefore you can have the time of your lives. Your good karma is there, those of us who are the wrong sex, the wrong race, or the wrong age, should just count ourselves out of the Taiwanese gravy boat.
The good people of the United States of America, and there are many, should know these things too. Another story is the increasing use of spying cameras in the Taiwanese schools. These are Internet spying cameras that allow rich parents in Europe or America to tune in on the classroom performance of their kids teachers.
This is so shocking to me; I hope it is shock to someone else. The teacher will become like a cleaning lady, or a gardener, or a chauffeur, stripped of all authority, repeating books brainlessly, terrified to say boo to a mouse, the children on top of them completely, and yet even in this they are schizoid, the teacher is too firm, the teacher is not firm enough.
I have never been fond of the word nouveau riche, since most people in Canada or America usually are nouveau riche. It is a meaningless phrase.
Except in the case of the Taiwanese, they are the people in the world who most exemplify this accusatory phrase. Oliver, my friend, who was born in a stone hut, is never ashamed of his background, and we go everywhere with the old parents, out of respect for family, respect for age. In Taipei, their insecurity over how far they have come, from stone hut to Versace, manifests itself in the obsession with immediately establishing the Confucian one-up one-down attitudes. They are rude as the rudest anywhere, with a thin coat of urbanity, much crueler to their female servants than the rich ladies of Victoria Peak, and the women too insecure that their husbands will leave them in a few years for a second and even third wife domestically set up for a low price in Mainland China.
The women are so fallen a people they joke about this trend, giggling at their own humiliation.
I can see that the farther the husband goes economically, the closer this day of multiple marriage will arrive, therefore the women has a vested interest in holding back the career of her man. If I have thought of this, some of them must think of this too.
All in all, the rich overcrowding of Asia in its domestic sense is a lot to understand, the woman does not leave the husband when he takes more wives, though that is changing in Taiwan, the nanny who is guarded seven days a week around the clock, the teacher stared at through the Internet surveillance spying cameras.
They have stronger immune systems here; the small things that might kill me, they can just ignore.