So I left Taiwan in 2002 after five and a half long years. For me, the insanity of living in a foreign "country," as different from the United States as anywhere in China tends to be, all just built up until one day, I just felt like I was going to explode. All the emotional repression, the ingrained cultural behaviors that would be just plain wrong where and how I grew up. And the backstabbing, lies and endless no win situations with shady (or as my British friends would say, "dodgy") local "businessmen" trying desperately to make a few bucks off of the demand for English language acquisition in Asia.
Then, there's the constant feeling of literally being totally outnumbered (and then some) in a truly alien environment, where you don't even like the food or most of the often outdated and really rather Medieval, hierarchical customs.
And that ain't the half of it. The constant shoe changing, even just to step out onto a tiny porch or into a crappy little bathroom that doubles as a shower with no shower curtains or anything to separate the spray of water from the toilet and entire floor that gets soaked each and every time you simply take a shower.
Then, there's not being able to walk anyplace where there is no litter on the ground... because there are no public trash cans (in Taiwan, China or South Korea)! And daily having to witness people drop rubbish at their feet (or in Korea, at the foot of TREES is where people throw their trash, IF... they're even careful about where they drop it, that is). And drivers don't just run red lights, they just generally drive, well... badly.
Because in Korea, the overwhelming majority of the people honestly believe they don't have to stop or even slow down when they want to make a right turn on a red light! Sounds like an interesting "culture," huh? Except that if you end up having to pull up to a red light in the far lane and sit there waiting like a decent, law abiding citizen, some impatient, hotheaded Korean will very soon pull up behind you and lay on his horn to try to get you to move forward, out into the crosswalk, usually - WAY PAST THE WHITE LINE YOU WERE TAUGHT IS SO IMPORTANT IN LAW ABIDING WESTERN COUNTRIES! And all so that he doesn't have to wait a total of maybe... TWO WHOLE FREAKING MINUTES (as in 120 seconds), at the very longest, to make his damn right turn! Pregnant lady in the car every single time? Some other type of medical emergency every single time this happens? Nope. It's just your average day in horrifically impatient, self centered "modern" Asia.
Hurry, hurry! Chop chop! Or, as the Koreans say, "bali, bali!" For the Mandarin speaking Chinese it's, "quai-dian, quai-dian!" Yes sir, most Asians just don't seem capable of waiting like little (grown up) good boys and girls. And... just exactly what IS up with that anyway?
Hurry, hurry! Chop chop! Or, as the Koreans say, "bali, bali!" For the Mandarin speaking Chinese it's, "quai-dian, quai-dian!" Yes sir, most Asians just don't seem capable of waiting like little (grown up) good boys and girls. And... just exactly what IS up with that anyway?
And most drivers in Korea either don't use their turn signals at all, or they use them WHEN they are turning. Most Koreans I know, God bless them, flip their signals right when they are already in the process of turning! I try to tell them till I'm blue in the face, "IN ADVANCE, IN ADVANCE, SO PEOPLE KNOW WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO DO!" You know, for SAFETY, for crying out loud! But... it's like pissing in the wind! It's like... swimming against a monstrous, crushing wall of typhoon waves, man! I know I'm here to "teach," but sometimes the overabundance of students (paid clients or more often, NOT) just gets... well, completely and totally OVERWHELMING!
Overwhelming. Now there's a darned good word for Asia in general. Overwhelming.
Overwhelming. Now there's a darned good word for Asia in general. Overwhelming.
But apparently I, a garden variety "foreigner," an expat by any other name, am not the only one who gets so overwhelmed in this kind of overcrowded, polluted, socially overstressed environment. It seems that the native populace gets more than their fair share, too. In fact, the level of passive aggression that this kind of pent up, emotionally repressed and deprived society fosters is often ABSOLUTELY STAGGERING!
In general, most northeast Asian societies dictate that people are not supposed to be outwardly aggressive, so most Asians are taught since childhood to swallow everything down. Hide your feelings. Never show emotion, for God's sake! Emotions are so dirty! So messy and... well, honest, I guess. And we can't have that, now can we!
So I SWEAR... so many people over here do the craziest, most obvious, incredibly PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE things all the time - from needless, incredibly brash noise making, to bumping into one another, or cutting people off when there honestly is plenty of room to pass by without making bodily contact or inconveniencing a total stranger in any way.
In general, most northeast Asian societies dictate that people are not supposed to be outwardly aggressive, so most Asians are taught since childhood to swallow everything down. Hide your feelings. Never show emotion, for God's sake! Emotions are so dirty! So messy and... well, honest, I guess. And we can't have that, now can we!
So I SWEAR... so many people over here do the craziest, most obvious, incredibly PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE things all the time - from needless, incredibly brash noise making, to bumping into one another, or cutting people off when there honestly is plenty of room to pass by without making bodily contact or inconveniencing a total stranger in any way.
But that wouldn't get any of those pesky repressed emotions languishing way down deep inside out, now would it?
Because you see, there's no outlet. Well, in Korea, there are the drunken weekends that begin as early as Wednesday or Thursday most weeks, but since they don't usually do that in Taiwan, I'll just get back to my original point.
So, most Asians in Taiwan, China and Korea (where I've lived for more than a decade collectively) just seem to OOZE behaviors that would get the holy living crap slapped out of you in most Western countries! Sometimes, it seems like everybody in the region is just tacitly, slyly, provoking the hell out of everybody else, just to see how much crap they can get away with! 'Cause if you reach your limit and loose your cool, EVEN JUST A LITTLE BIT... then, they've got you! Not always, but quite often, there's a gang of frustrated Asians just waiting nearby to release their pent up angst on anyone who dares step out of line!
And it doesn't matter if someone has just totally, blatantly, OBVIOUSLY wronged you. If you REACT, and show what their society considers to be inappropriate emotion about almost anything, YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS CONSIDERED TO BE IN THE WRONG. Because YOU disturbed the usually TOTALLY BOGUS "harmony."
So, everybody over here just sort of pretends all the time. Or... they're really not in touch with reality at all in the first place. I am often left to wonder which is which. Since everything is about appearances and face, face and MORE freaking FACE! And there's nowhere to turn for sanity. Asian cops, for just one example, are quite often bribe taking jokers, who ride around with their siren lights flashing, four "policemen" per car - two in the front, two in the back, so... think about it, where would they have room if they DID need to pick somebody up who was breaking the law? And most laws and traffic conventions are quite similar, or even identical to the ones they are patterned after in western countries. So sorry, but ignorance or differences in "culture" are almost always no excuse.
In more than a decade (collectively, between five and a half years in Taiwan, six torturous months in Shanghai, China, and now nearly five years in South Korea), I have never ONCE witnessed a Northeast Asian policeman do anything more than write tickets, ride around in a patrol car, direct traffic or, more often than not, just look the other way when somebody runs a red light! Which is pretty common in Asia, let me tell ya!
And if you do have an honest to goodness real problem, Asian cops will often try to ignore or even scold you into dealing with it yourself - because their jobs, mind you, are largely a façade... a symbolic VENEER. Which is pretty much the definition of modern Asia: lots of pumped up false pride, with diplomas (honestly earned or not) on the wall, as big and nice a car as you may or may not even be able to afford, and prestige, prestige, and more hollow, shallow, meaningless pride heaped on top of that.
Even junior high schools in Asia are ranked according to how much face or prestige they supposedly merit! "My son go to number one junior high school in this district." So what! Is he supposed to be BETTER than other kids? Is he a freaking movie star? Or do you just need something to brag about to make everybody who doesn't go to "number one school" feel like human garbage?
Oh, well... nothing is real here anyway, except all the frustrations that build up inside of a person after a while. For most of the natives, it's more or less something they learn to deal with in their own, socially acceptable way, I guess. And if not... they literally commit suicide. But if you weren't born in this kind of morass... and you have something resembling a conscience, or... better yet, you just KNOW BETTER because you were born and raised in a more developed country, it all just slowly but surely eats away at you, day by day, little by little.
And that's where I am now. Nearly five whole years on this little... no, GIANT powder keg of a warring peninsula - with only two very brief forays abroad for respite in fully half a decade. "So.. if you don't like here, get out! Go back your country!" God, I wish I had the money to not just "go home" (back to America), but all the extra cash needed to buy a car once you're stateside, and all the money you need to pay for a place to live until you can find a decent job that will allow you to get back on your feet again.... And God knows how long that could be in THIS economy.
Because I did it once before, you know. I left Taiwan, TOTALLY FED UP, UNABLE TO TAKE EVEN A SINGLE DAY MORE in 2002, with something I could swear ought to be diagnosed as a pretty bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, with only a few thousand dollars saved up (which was all I could muster, after paying back debts from a low wage earning life in small towns in mid Missouri), only to land right smack dab back in the lap of parents who were not only not even morally supportive, but pretty much browbeat me out of the house within just a couple of days.
When I threw all my luggage into the used car my father had bullied me into spending half of my meager saving on, and drove away one evening, still jet lagged from living half way around the world for more than half a decade, in a time zone that with TWELVE FULL HOURS different from Missouri, I really had no place to go.
After an even more brief and tumultuous little visit to my youngest brother's house, I was out on the street again, with nothing but the clothes on my back, my luggage, and the car I now owed monthly payments on. I tried to check into a hotel, but was rejected that night because they said I needed a reservation, so I slept in a small parking lot across the street from what used to be the home of an old friend. He'd moved away to California by then, of course. But it was the only place left to go that provided a connection to the life I'd known before heading off to Asia to "teach English" to try to pay off that pesky college loan.
How did I end up back in Asia again? Well, after five years of low wage earning in Columbia, Missouri, I had finally run out of both forbearance and postponement periods for that massive, consolidated college loan. Then I lost my job at the book factory where I'd just barely survived for four years. And the only job offers I was getting were to go back into "teaching."
But not teaching in a school in the US. No way. Even though I had more than five years teaching experience (if you can call it that) in Taiwan, I had (and still have) no teaching degree or certification of any kind (well, I did get a 100 hour TESOL certification online), so it was off to Shanghai, China I went.
Shanghai....
Where do I begin? Between the constant, loud throat clearing and spitting, public nose clearing and overall atrocious hygiene of the average Mainland Chinese citizen, the two whole weeks I was down with food poisoning, the restaurant guy who tried to sell me cooked dog (well, at least it was cooked, I guess), the money demanding local "girlfriend" that I literally had to leave the country to finally get away from, and the fact that I had a total of three different jobs and three different apartments in just shy of six months of mostly downs (with very few of what could even tentatively be called ups) in Shanghai, by that time as winter was beginning to set in, I was ready to hurl myself out the window of the tiny, flimsily built high rise that I was holed up in. But, only after the kindergarten I'd been working at suddenly stopped classes for two whole months.
Without pay.
Running low on both cash and things to eat, I finally, out of sheer desperation, began calling my parents in their tiny, rural town in Missouri once again. After several weeks of them telling me I could just "come home," with me refusing repeatedly because of what had happened the last time we'd tried that little arrangement, I finally had no choice but to simply put myself into their hands once again.
Of course, that didn't work out too well the second time around either. Surprisingly though, it did last five whole months. But after five months out in a relatively remote little town, staying in my parent's hastily arranged guest room, with not even enough money saved up this time to put a down payment on another car (and no way to get a job, because,as my father had so belligerently put it so many times, "you can't get no goddamn job without no goddamn car!" And, "You can't get no goddamn car without no goddamn job!"
Goddamn. Even when I was a very young child, that seemed to be his favorite expression. Well, that and calling me names likes like, "dumb little bastard," "boney ass little shit," and "incompetent." I was all of seven years old when he so thoughtfully bestowed me with that last one. If I'd have truly known what it was to take one's life at that age, I'd have been positively suicidal after he first called me that. In fact, I looked that word up in the dictionary very soon after he first said it to me, and if a seven year old can be clinically depressed, I think I honestly was.
I cried and cried and cried the day I looked up the word "incompetent," and when I got home that afternoon after school, my mother asked what was wrong, and I remember that I went to get the family dictionary and I read her the definition the best I could. I didn't understand all the big words, but I knew, mostly from my father's usually derisive, verbally abusive demeanor and habit of insulting me left and right, that that word couldn't possible be good.
My mother, perhaps to her credit, actually kind of got onto him about it that day. Although I now consider her to be his primary enabler in most cases, mostly because of her frequent cooperation with and overall inability to stand up to, all five foot eight or so inches of the tempestuous, foul tempered, impatient and often verbally cruel and just plain mean man that is my biological father. At any rate, on that day all those years ago, she told him what I'd said immediately after he got home that afternoon.
At the time, I of course, was sitting, moping in despair, on the lower bunk of one of a pair of such beds that were crammed into the tiny room I shared with one elder brother and two younger ones, when my father came storming though the doorway. And God, was I scared.
"Who called you incompetent?" He demanded harshly, which was just his usual way of talking to me. My head dropped to my pale, skinny little seven year old chest, and I simply could not stop sobbing. He repeated the question again several times with increased emotion, as if to get me to either drop the issue altogether, or to simply deny it. I did neither.
After all, I guess I thought at the time, if I really am incompetent, and, as the dictionary put it, "not competent; lacking qualification or ability; incapable: an incompetent candidate," then I guess I just figured I was such a useless waste of skin anyway, so if I was going to die at his hands that day, I might as well get it over with, right? "You did," I choked and sputtered through a torrent of tormented tears. "You... called me... that. You... said I was... un-conscious."
He of course had said that too, and a whole lot of other nasty things, but... he never really admitted that he'd said any of it. To this day, as far as I know, since I haven't seen or spoken to him in more than five years, when reminded of such incidents, he still quips, "I don't remember." Sadly, I do remember. All too well, in fact. So, of course, he didn't even say he was sorry. But then, I never once got a hug when I was growing up. But that day at least, I did get his hand on my shoulder for a very brief and terribly uncomfortable moment or two, as I recall. But just that once.
And that was when I was seven years old. And my father obviously didn't kill me that afternoon. In fact, believe it or not, he seldom ever laid a hand on me. No. Mostly just words, threats of bodily harm, such as, "Goddammit, if you (do this or that), I'll bust your boney little ass, you dumb little bastard." Words, taunts and jeers so mean they seemed to cut right to the bone, where they festered there like an invasive, toxic cancer, or some kind of foreign, savage parasite that feeds off of the host until he is but a hollow shell of a human being with not enough self esteem left to fill the very bottom of a discarded paper cup.
So after five months with my parents in 2008, one month in a homeless shelter (right after I'd nearly bled to death from one of three ulcers which ruptured suddenly one day, for which I subsequently spent a week of recovery in a Missouri hospital), and then four months working two temp jobs to just barely pay for a creepy, dirty little weekly rental apartment in Springfield, Missouri, it was back to crowded, polluted, mind numbingly frustrating Asia again! This time, of course, it is South Korea.
What can I say, but the cold hard truth? The only job offers I was getting in my email inbox every single day during that tough time in the latter part of 2008, were from recruiters urging me to take another English "teaching" job in South Korea. Since I wasn't making enough to save up to pay the deposit AND first month's rent on a regular apartment, and both temp jobs were supposed to be ending by Christmas, on December 10th, 2008, I arrived all by my little lonesome, at the airport at Incheon.
But for an uncomfortably long while, the school didn't pick me up at the airport that morning, as had been promised. And when I called them at the only number I'd been given by the recruiter, I was told, "Look, I don't know who you are, so stop calling here." But that's another really hair raisingly sad and just plain pathetic story in a long list of my unfortunate misadventures here in South Korea (and Asia in general, actually).
But I'm still here after nearly five long years. Still standing, I guess you could say. Yet how, with so little money coming in, literally on the brink of homelessness, did I manage to get half way around the world, all the way to South Korea... to Asia, yet again? Simple. Unlike other English teacher hiring destinations, such as Taiwan, Mainland China, and Japan, South Korea was the only country actively offering paid airfare to "qualified applicants" who were willing to go. As far as I know in fact, South Korea is still the only major Asian country that has to pay poor, dumb, mostly naïve and cash strapped and indebted young college grads to come here!
In my case, of course, it wasn't that I was at all willing, but rather that, once again, I felt that I had little to no choice but to go back to try to work as an English "teacher" in far flung Asia. So, it was either back to the homeless shelter (where they only let you stay for thirty days, UNLESS... you signed up for one of their two to three year long church organization contracts) or the cold winter streets with the other homeless people, or... it was off to South Korea, a place I had long before decided that I never even wanted to so much as visit.
Why did I never ever never want to go to Korea? Well, let's just say that most Koreans don't have a very high opinion of most Taiwanese. And, to be quite honest, most Taiwanese (and other Chinese in general) do not have a very high opinion of most Koreans.
He of course had said that too, and a whole lot of other nasty things, but... he never really admitted that he'd said any of it. To this day, as far as I know, since I haven't seen or spoken to him in more than five years, when reminded of such incidents, he still quips, "I don't remember." Sadly, I do remember. All too well, in fact. So, of course, he didn't even say he was sorry. But then, I never once got a hug when I was growing up. But that day at least, I did get his hand on my shoulder for a very brief and terribly uncomfortable moment or two, as I recall. But just that once.
And that was when I was seven years old. And my father obviously didn't kill me that afternoon. In fact, believe it or not, he seldom ever laid a hand on me. No. Mostly just words, threats of bodily harm, such as, "Goddammit, if you (do this or that), I'll bust your boney little ass, you dumb little bastard." Words, taunts and jeers so mean they seemed to cut right to the bone, where they festered there like an invasive, toxic cancer, or some kind of foreign, savage parasite that feeds off of the host until he is but a hollow shell of a human being with not enough self esteem left to fill the very bottom of a discarded paper cup.
So after five months with my parents in 2008, one month in a homeless shelter (right after I'd nearly bled to death from one of three ulcers which ruptured suddenly one day, for which I subsequently spent a week of recovery in a Missouri hospital), and then four months working two temp jobs to just barely pay for a creepy, dirty little weekly rental apartment in Springfield, Missouri, it was back to crowded, polluted, mind numbingly frustrating Asia again! This time, of course, it is South Korea.
What can I say, but the cold hard truth? The only job offers I was getting in my email inbox every single day during that tough time in the latter part of 2008, were from recruiters urging me to take another English "teaching" job in South Korea. Since I wasn't making enough to save up to pay the deposit AND first month's rent on a regular apartment, and both temp jobs were supposed to be ending by Christmas, on December 10th, 2008, I arrived all by my little lonesome, at the airport at Incheon.
But for an uncomfortably long while, the school didn't pick me up at the airport that morning, as had been promised. And when I called them at the only number I'd been given by the recruiter, I was told, "Look, I don't know who you are, so stop calling here." But that's another really hair raisingly sad and just plain pathetic story in a long list of my unfortunate misadventures here in South Korea (and Asia in general, actually).
But I'm still here after nearly five long years. Still standing, I guess you could say. Yet how, with so little money coming in, literally on the brink of homelessness, did I manage to get half way around the world, all the way to South Korea... to Asia, yet again? Simple. Unlike other English teacher hiring destinations, such as Taiwan, Mainland China, and Japan, South Korea was the only country actively offering paid airfare to "qualified applicants" who were willing to go. As far as I know in fact, South Korea is still the only major Asian country that has to pay poor, dumb, mostly naïve and cash strapped and indebted young college grads to come here!
In my case, of course, it wasn't that I was at all willing, but rather that, once again, I felt that I had little to no choice but to go back to try to work as an English "teacher" in far flung Asia. So, it was either back to the homeless shelter (where they only let you stay for thirty days, UNLESS... you signed up for one of their two to three year long church organization contracts) or the cold winter streets with the other homeless people, or... it was off to South Korea, a place I had long before decided that I never even wanted to so much as visit.
Why did I never ever never want to go to Korea? Well, let's just say that most Koreans don't have a very high opinion of most Taiwanese. And, to be quite honest, most Taiwanese (and other Chinese in general) do not have a very high opinion of most Koreans.
But then... Koreans hate the Japanese, the Chinese and even and especially their aggressive, isolationist, nuke happy, rabble rousing northern brethren (and rightfully so, one would assume). And the Chinese in turn arrogantly believe that since they used to lord over the entire region in antiquity (actually, the Manchus and Mongols did, when THEY controlled China, Taiwan and even, in effect, much of Korea - with Japan often paying tribute), so most Chinese figure everybody else in northeast Asia (including southeast Asian peoples such as the Vietnamese, who were bullied, invaded and occupied by the Chinese for centuries before the French or us commie fighting Americans ever even heard of the place) ought to just bow down and worship at their feet for the magnanimous gift of Chinese culture!
But all that is yet another collection of stories. Disputed facts and figures (among the Asians who so fervently hate each other's guts), facts and figures that most people might find as equally confusing, sad and just plain frustrating as all of the above may very well have been to have to read.
So, here I am, five years later, at the end of 2013, at the ripe old age of 46, with only a mostly useless Bachelor of Arts in "Individual Studies" degree to show for the defaulted college loan I have yet to be able to pay back, even to this very day. Because, believe it or not, most expat English teachers, at the very most, only make an average of about $24,000 US dollars per year in Korea. It's somewhat less in China or Thailand, of course, and the ability to earn even as much as in Korea or Japan has taken a serious nose dive in Taiwan, with their stagnant economy, that actually began to tank in the late 1990s.
Yes, here I am. Often miserable, and feeling trapped yet again in a country, with a totally foreign Confucian culture that is not my own, and never will be, just hanging on to a thread of sanity most days. Just barely. Oh well, I guess I'm lucky that I'm not average age 19 over here, suddenly dropped down into the middle of a warring nation like Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, with only a loaded M-16 rifle at my side for cold, hard comfort.
But there are wars within and there are wars without. These years of my life are all about the wars within this collection of Asian countries with suspiciously similar customs that butcher the unsuspecting western mind with their tiny bits of exploding, culture shock fueled shrapnel and lingering, festering wounds that keep a man awake at night... writing blog entries, just to make some meager sense of it all.
But all that is yet another collection of stories. Disputed facts and figures (among the Asians who so fervently hate each other's guts), facts and figures that most people might find as equally confusing, sad and just plain frustrating as all of the above may very well have been to have to read.
So, here I am, five years later, at the end of 2013, at the ripe old age of 46, with only a mostly useless Bachelor of Arts in "Individual Studies" degree to show for the defaulted college loan I have yet to be able to pay back, even to this very day. Because, believe it or not, most expat English teachers, at the very most, only make an average of about $24,000 US dollars per year in Korea. It's somewhat less in China or Thailand, of course, and the ability to earn even as much as in Korea or Japan has taken a serious nose dive in Taiwan, with their stagnant economy, that actually began to tank in the late 1990s.
Yes, here I am. Often miserable, and feeling trapped yet again in a country, with a totally foreign Confucian culture that is not my own, and never will be, just hanging on to a thread of sanity most days. Just barely. Oh well, I guess I'm lucky that I'm not average age 19 over here, suddenly dropped down into the middle of a warring nation like Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, with only a loaded M-16 rifle at my side for cold, hard comfort.
But there are wars within and there are wars without. These years of my life are all about the wars within this collection of Asian countries with suspiciously similar customs that butcher the unsuspecting western mind with their tiny bits of exploding, culture shock fueled shrapnel and lingering, festering wounds that keep a man awake at night... writing blog entries, just to make some meager sense of it all.
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