My Porn

If you live in a foreign country for any number of years, you are certain to offend people. And the more distant the culture is from yours, the more frequent your offenses will be. There’s really no getting round this. You can use your own language, their language, or a mix of both, but every couple months, in one context or other, you’ll set someone to muttering curses at you under their breath.

Just today, here in Taipei where I live and teach as an expat, I ran into Daniel, a student I’d taught five years ago when he was a senior in high school. I was waiting for a traffic light, and noticed a young man on the sidewalk a few paces away, staring at me gravely but not moving. I finally recognized it was my ex-student. I said Hi to him, he loosened up a bit, and told me he’d just graduated with a degree in finance. I wished him well on his job hunt, but explained that I had to run as I was late for my class. As I stepped away from him to cross the street, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself, wondering if he still remembered the terrible insult I'd delivered him when he was my student.

Given his initial glare as we waited for the light, I was guessing he did remember.

The insult, as usual, was an accident, actually more his fault than mine.

Back in the days when I taught him, Daniel was known in our school for two things. First, he was obsessed with magic. Rather than prepare for exams or finish homework, he spent free time before class performing magic tricks for the other students (who then likewise couldn’t finish their homework). I’d come into the classroom and Daniel would be at the front, in the middle of some trick.

“Uh, sorry,” he’d say, and sit down.

Second, Daniel was hopelessly smitten by a classmate at his high school, a girl who rejected his love and now and then left him visibly on the verge of tears. When Daniel had no one to watch his magic tricks, he could often be found sitting in a funk, staring at the floor or wringing his hands. None of us at our English institute knew who this mystery girl was; we only knew she was ruining his life.

In short, I knew Daniel as a budding teenage magician whose tricks did nothing to sway the unknown beauty he loved and whose picture he refused to show us.

How then did the insult happen?

One day after class, Daniel came up to me at the front of the room to show me a copy of a copy-shop printed magazine. He opened it to a certain page and pointed at a simple line drawing of a girl in a miniskirt on a park bench, sitting in what was supposed to be a seductive pose. There were some lines in Chinese next to the drawing.

“Teacher, this is my porn,” Daniel announced weirdly, pointing at the page.

I thought the drawing wasn’t very good, and as for porn, it didn’t even count. But Daniel was waiting for my reaction.

“Hm,” I said after looking at it for awhile. “That’s pretty bad porn. I feel sorry for you.”

I remember that his face went red at these words, and he clenched his fist, ready to punch me. But since the students had been raucous during class, and Daniel was something of a performer, I thought he was just joking, so I laughed and walked away.

Ten minutes later, after Daniel left for the night, my colleague Erica was putting away papers next to my desk.

“Poor Daniel,” she said. “He’s really totally in love with that girl. He thinks about nothing else.”

“Nothing else except magic,” I said. “Anyhow, suffering is good for art, so maybe he’ll end up being a great magician.”

“Did he show you his poem?” she asked.

And then it hit me. What Daniel had tried to show me wasn’t the lame line drawing of the girl, but the Chinese lines next to it, which I hadn’t bothered to read, and which were obviously a love poem he’d written. And the book he’d shown me must have been his school’s literary magazine, in which he was declaring to the world his true love for the girl. And when Daniel had said to me “This is my porn,” what he really was trying to say was “This is my poem.” So that, from Daniel’s point of view, our brief exchange had gone like this:

“Teacher, this is my poem [which I wrote for that girl I love].”

Teacher reads through poem, says: “Hm, that’s a pretty bad poem. I feel sorry for you.”

Student is mortally insulted, wants to stand up for himself and his love, wonders if he should punch teacher.

But before he makes up his mind, the teacher laughs in his face in front of the whole class, and walks away.

It was all so sad. I knew I’d have to explain to Daniel what had really happened the next time he came to class. But in fact, that night was the last time he ever came. It was end of semester, and he wasn’t taking summer classes.

Though this particular insult was mostly the fault of Daniel's poor pronunciation, I know for a fact I’ve also offended more than a few people thanks my faulty Chinese pronunciation. Any Westerner who lives here is fated to say at least a handful of outrageous things in public per annum. It comes from the fact that Mandarin is a tonal language, and if you get the intonation a little wrong, if you sing the words a bit off key, the words become entirely different words.

I knew one Canadian who, when he first got here, wanted to get some aspirin for his cold symptoms. He went into a pharmacy.

“Uhh . . . I have a problem,” he said to the woman behind the counter.

“Yes? What is the problem?” she asked.

“Mm . . . Uhh . . . I fuck cats.”

The pharmacist stepped back from the counter, and the other people present all turned to look at him.

What my Canadian friend had meant to say was: “Mm . . . Uhh . . . I have a cold.” But get the tones wrong, and “have a cold” quickly becomes “fuck cats”.

This is only one of thousands of possible slip ups given the slipperiness of tonal languages like Mandarin. I once left a coffee shop with all the counter girls laughing aloud at me. I’d wanted them to help me grind the beans I’d just bought and couldn’t figure out what was so funny. Later I figured it out. What I’d been saying was: “Excuse me. Do you think you could help stroke me?”

Often enough I leave people laughing or frowning, but still, later on, can’t figure out what I’d actually said.

With more Westerners in Taiwan now, the locals have grown used to these mishaps. It makes for good comedy. But still a basic rule applies: If you’re a man who makes it a decade in a country this foreign without getting punched, you’re already doing pretty well.

E.M.
Taipei

My new book Idiocy, Ltd. is now available at Amazon.

My Shifting Racial "Default": How Race Perceptions are Changed by Circumstance

Some of my peeps: Taipei teens I teach in a Monday night English class.
I'm on the sidewalk in front of a Taipei book store. A woman is walking past, around thirty-five. I watch her approach, glance at her face, and my mind says: "Is that a Westerner? Is that an Asian?"

For some reason my mind can't distinguish. I look at her face carefully, but can't decide. Then, when a few seconds has passed, my mind says: "It's happened again. She's Asian. Of course."

What's it all about? Somehow I know intellectually that the woman is Asian, but can't tell, at the level of immediate perception, that she is.

In fact this happens to me a few times a month in Taiwan. I will look at a man or woman and not be able to tell if the person is local Taiwanese or a Westerner. Then, within seconds, the fugue dissolves and I realize: "Of course. Taiwanese."

The process from confusion to clarity never lasts more than ten seconds. But why does it happen in the first place? And why does it feel so odd to me when it happens, as if there's some kind of deep and nagging confusion going on.

I have a theory. My guess is that people who spend half their life among their own race, then move to another continent and live many years among another race undergo a shift of sorts in racial perception. What happens, I suspect, is that the mind starts to take the facial features of the new race as the "default" human features--with the result that the new race comes to be perceived as one's own; i.e., it loses its aura as "foreign"; one's sense of difference becomes confused.

In my case, my own race, that race I grew up with, is white-bread American. For nearly twenty years I've lived among East Asians.

Please note that I am not here looking at people of mixed ancestry. It's not a matter of people who have evidently Asian and Western blood. The issue here is different.

It's a commonplace that we typically perceive people of another race as all looking similar to each other. So that the white, black or Latino American first arriving in East Asia will walk the streets and half-consciously think: "Wow. These people really look alike." In an extreme version the thought might be: "How do they even tell each other apart?"

Growing up in a uniformly white midwestern American suburb in the 1970s and early '80s, this is a question I occasionally heard about big city blacks: "How do they tell each other apart?" The question, usually stated with a kind of smirk, was of course tied up in complex ways with the racism of that white suburb. Having created a social order that more or less kept blacks in their own city neighborhoods, it became easy for the white privileged class in the suburbs to perceive black Americans as somehow foreign. And that's just what they did. As often the case with racially-marked foreignness, the feeling that "they all look alike" appeared there as well, but this time applied to citizens of one's own country. (Of course this desire to separate, to project a racially different community as also deeply other, is far from overcome in America. Anyone who doubts it need only consider the shameful nonsense our current president has been subjected to. But issues of how race gets ideologically charged, in America and elsewhere, are different from my topic here, so I won't pursue them further.)

I've learned firsthand that in any case the perception of "similarity" in the features of a different race is by no means hardwired. It wears off quickly with contact, and may even reverse. Yes, eventually people of one's own race may come to look more and more similar to each other. Doubt it? It's happened to me in striking, almost unsettling ways.

Living in Taipei, I try to get back to the States once a year. Once when I flew back to Wisconsin, and was waiting in the Milwaukee airport for my father and sister to pick me up, I got a bizarre lesson in the depth of the racial-perceptual shift I'd undergone. In sat in the arrivals hall, people approaching from down a hallway. With the second or third 30-something blond woman I saw approach, my mind said: "There she is: my sister." When she got closer, I saw it wasn't. In fact the woman wasn't even very similar to my sister. Odd. And she had to get quite close for me to realize.

Next: "That's him: my father."

No. It was just a white American man in his sixties, who, as he approached, really did look quite a bit like my father; but no, as I analyzed the features, I realized they were actually quite different.

So what gives? I false ID'd two more sisters and three more fathers before I started to laugh at myself. In terms of perceptions of white Americans, I realized, I'd actually become Asian myself. Aside from the different hair colors and different sizes (fat or very fat) all these white Wisconsinites looked pretty much the same to me.

This is just one of the anecdotes I could bring up. Many times my perceptual grasp of Western faces has proved suddenly not as sharp as it should have been.

And now here I am in Taiwan, in a country where nearly everyone has black hair and dark eyes and olive or ivory skin, yet I almost never mistake people at a distance. To me they all look quite distinct from each other. And in fact my mind occasionally gets confused as to whether they are not actually part of my own tribe--as with the woman by the book store.

Ideologies of race have proven to be one of the most poisonous of cultural phenomena, and we are unfortunately far from done with the challenge they pose. Yet there are other levels of racial perception, where racial difference is first noticed and marked--"Those people are different from me and my people"--and these levels too seem to be in some degree a construct of sorts, though in this case I'd say they're a kind of cognitive construct rather than an ideological one. I'm sure this question has been studied, though I haven't tried to research it. It's this cognitive shift that I've experienced firsthand. (The ideological shifts I've experienced are another matter: a long learning process that continued through university and beyond, and probably still continues.)

Interestingly, it seems to me that the ability to distinguish racial difference (or at least the perception that such difference is meaningful) only begins in the late toddler stage. It's only approaching age three that children begin to see people of other races as "different", sometimes different in a troubling way, as I know very well from the curious but frightened looks 3- or 4-year-olds often give me here. Infants never. To Taiwanese infants I am obviously just a person: they don't notice my odd facial structure or skin tone as marks of (problematic) difference.

I've raised a various points here, which may have been a mistake. My main questions remain: How is it that our minds construct the basic paradigms of sameness and otherness between different races? How does my sometimes confusing experience relate to these perceptions of sameness and otherness? Where is the fluidity and where the solidity? Do we all carry a somewhat unstable sense of a "default" human race in relation to which others stand apart in difference? Is (as is likely) evolution somewhere in this mix?

Heady questions, and no, I haven't done the work even to look into answers that may have been proposed by anthropologists, etc. I'm just a guy on a street in a foreign city noticing his mind in occasional fugue.

In conclusion I should point out that I understand very well that many people who read this piece will have good reason to say: "Hm, it must be nice being able to consider racial difference from such an easygoing vantage point. It wasn't like that for me." I'm aware of this distance--that it is a heavily charged one--one that makes it somewhat inappropriate for me even to write about what I've noticed. Yet I write anyway. Readers are welcome to tell me if or where I've been insensitive. Aside from in that initial step of writing. Which may in itself be insensitive enough.

Haakenson Sighting: Check

About 5 p.m. the drizzle coming down and I'm standing under an awning in front of a Taipei supermarket. Across the pavement loping toward me is a slim funny-looking Western guy with his Asian wife. He's wearing a black leather cowboy hat which doesn't really match his red windbreaker. The two are carrying big bags of groceries--snacks it looks like, probably bought to celebrate the Chinese New Year--and I watch them approach as I puff from my one small cigar for the day.

The guy comes closer and I notice he's also sporting white-rimmed glasses under the cowboy hat.

Then the guy comes closer again and I realize it's a high school classmate of mine from my home town, Harland, Wisconsin. It's Paul Haakenson, who I run into once every ten years.

Paul is now teaching Chinese to expat kids in Asia. His work has taken him from Taipei to Jakarta to Hong Kong, and soon, he tells me, he'll be moving again, to Singapore. He's back in Taipei to visit his in-laws for the Lunar New Year.

I last ran into Paul about ten years ago on the north side of Taipei. Starbucks had come to Taiwan and I was sitting in one of their shops when I saw a guy at the register with a teeshirt with the name Haakenson on it--a name familiar from my high school days. I got closer and recognized him. Paul explained that he was living and teaching in Taipei. I hadn't even realized it. I'd also been teaching in Taipei for a handful of years.

I ran into Paul about ten years before that (which would be about 1992) on the outskirts of a Grateful Dead concert in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. I was taking my Taiwanese wife to see the Dead as part of her American enculturation, and Paul showed up near our car. I think it was then that I learned he'd been studying Chinese in university. Was he married yet then?

But still my clearest memory of Paul comes from around ten year before that (1982 or so) in the basement of Scotty Berendt's house back in Hartland. It was a high school party, and Scotty had been impressing the hell out of us on his drums. Paul was promoting a cassette he'd brought of a band I'd heard of but had never listened to: the B-52s. The song playing--which is forever linked in my mind to the image of Paul Haakenson in a yuppy plaid shirt grooving in a Wisconsin basement--was "Quiche Lorraine." I hated yuppies in those days and hated everything that smelled of the country club (still do: see here), but Paul redeemed both himself and his shirt by being a weird fringe kind of yuppy. And I soon came to love the B-52s, which I continued to listen to up through their Cosmic Thing album. Only a few months ago I called up their brilliant "Private Idaho" on YouTube after hearing the song at a pub.



I've no idea of Paul's impressions of or memories of me. Did he notice that I've finally aged, as I noticed he has? We are both in our mid-40s, and wrinkles are making their tentative early maps round our eyes. He mentioned he'd read some of my online posts (I occasionally email links out to my whole address book, and his email's in there too) but I'm not at all sure these emails aren't just an annoyance to him. His politics or his social or religious ideas--I've no idea of these things. All I know is I'll run into him ten years from now and there will still be that white-bread midwest impression the name Haakenson can't help but bring with it, combined with the odd fringe element Paul always seems to sport: the faint weirdness intended, perhaps, to laugh at the white-bread in himself: the B-52s mystique, the Chinese, the black cowboy hat--and what will it be in 2022?

See you then, old classmate.

Buy Paul's CD here:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/groovipauli

You've been in Taiwan too long if . . .

1. You stop conjugating verbs.

2. You look both ways before crossing the sidewalk.

3. You turn left from the right lane.

4. 70 F feels cold.

5. You see three people on a motorcycle and figure there's room for two more.

6. "Squid" sounds better than "steak."

7. There are more things strapped to your motorcycle than you ever put in a car.

8. You drive on the shoulder to pass traffic.

9. The main reason you stop at a 7-11 is to buy tea eggs.

10. Firecrackers don't wake you up.

11. You can distinguish Taiwanese from Hakka.

12. You consider fish chins, drunken chicken and black fungus to be normal menu items.

13. Taxi drivers are considered "good drivers."

14. You've seen versions of this list before.

15. You stop and look both ways before driving through a red light.

16. "A", "an" and "the" are optional parts of speech.

17. You wear out your horn before your brakes.

18. The police call you to get information about other foreigners.

19. You know which place has the best noodles and duck meat at 3:00 a.m.

20. You speak Chinese to your foreign friends too.

21. You own a karaoke machine.

22. You leave the plastic on all new purchases.

23. Forks feel strange.

24. The shortest distance between two points involves going through an alley.

25. People don't see you for months, and when they do, they don't ask you where you've been.

26. You hear Chinese remakes of Western songs before you hear the originals.

27. You stare at other foreigners.

28. Over half of your clothes were bought at night markets.

29. You become an expert on bug zappers: the best brands and where to get them.

30. You have an arsenal of subtle verbal dodges to deflect taxi drivers from prying into your personal life.

31. You know which turn signal should be on when reversing the wrong way down a one-way street.

32. You get homesick for Chinese food while away from Taiwan.

33. Praying at a temple for a winning lottery number becomes a regular thing to do.

34. Other foreigners give you a funny look when you tell them how long you've been here.

35. You can't think of any good reason to leave.

36. The Statute of Limitations has expired and you still don't go home.

37. You understand that smiling and nodding is Chinese body language for "Go away and leave me alone."

38. You've spent more time on the island since 1990 than most of the Taiwanese you know.

39. Locals are surprised to find out you can't vote in the upcoming election.

40. You never bother to ask locals questions like: "Is that north of the park?" or "Is that on the east or west side of the campus?"

41. Pizza just doesn't taste right unless there's corn on it.

42. Your preferred parking spot is on a sidewalk (and you get upset when someone else parks there).

43. Most meaningful conversations take place in doorways or on slow-moving motorcycles.

44. Your job title has more than three words.

45. You think the service in restaurants isn't that bad.

46. You're always the first on the elevator to hit the "door close" button.

47. You start cutting off the gravel trucks.

48. You eat squid on a stick.

49. You no longer send home bizarre and humorous articles from the paper.

50. You think of walking down the sidewalk as a sport.

51. You spend more time driving on the lines instead of in between them.

52. You read books from back to front.

53. You start to like Kaoliang more than XO.

54. You think packs of dogs are cute.

55. You are back in your home country and you say "hsie hsie" instead of thank you.

56. You think that all babies have flat heads in the back.

57. You think that $3,000,000 NT for a golf club membership is a steal.

58. You drive like this all the time.

59. You think that Taiwan is really trying to protect endangered species.

60. Your pinkie nail is over one inch long.

61. You catch yourself telling a taxi driver to hurry up.

62. You hum along to the tunes in the taxi.

63. You think walking up Yangmingshan looks like fun.

64. You think it's normal for people over 30 to zigzag down the sidewalk.

65. You can tell the difference between spring rain, plum rain, and the rainy season.

66. The last time you visited your mother you presented her with your business card.

67. You can tell, just by looking, which moon cake has the egg in it.

68. You feel nervous and giddy when you get around fresh air.

70. Everything you own is pirated.

71. You get used to the habit of not paying any tips while traveling.

72. You can read and write romanized Chinese in three different systems.

73. The red light is merely suggestive to you.

74. You greet people by inspecting whatever they're carrying or telling them how fat they've gotten.

75. You can no longer tell the difference between a cracker and a cookie, or toast and bread.

76. You stop telling people about the giant cockroach you saw.

77. Metal scaffolding at construction sites seems much more dangerous than bamboo scaffolding.

78. You can tell the difference between different foreign accents in Chinese.

79. Your parties have an agenda, but your meetings don't.

80. Getting in an accident, you tell the ambulance driver which hospital to take you to.

81. You stumble going up a flight of steps that are all the same height.

82. Rats are considered "wildlife."

83. You salt your fruit.

84. You don't much mind drinking beer with ice cubes in it.

85. You don't expect to get workable directions, whether in English or Chinese.

86. You wear your coat backwards when riding a scooter.

87. You make elevators go faster by boarding first and taking over the controls.

88. You're very concerned about not losing face.

89. The words "Ice Cream" never enter your head when you hear the garbage truck.

90. You don't feel comfortable using a urinal unless there's a woman mopping the floor behind you.

91. You say "Wei?" instead of "Hello?" when you pick up the phone.

Any you'd like to add to this list, feel free to do so in the comments. --E.M.