Taiwan's Linguistic Inscrutability Complex

Yes dear readers, as promised a Cambodia essay is already written. But before posting it here I'm trying to see if I can shake a few shekels out of it. Money doesn't grow on trees here in Penghu (damned few trees, really) and my swiftly-approaching tomcat-hood kitten isn't going to neuter himself.


In the meantime, I'm going to resort to the unheard of by using this blog as a soapbox from which to rail against one aspect of life here that I'm finding increasingly odious. In this entry from many months back I wrote about a brand of chip I'd found in a story in Penghu, pondering aloud whether or not the artwork - which I thought was vaguely reminiscent of Mainland Chinese cultural revolution-era propaganda - might not be part of some cross strait cultural pollination. It wasn't, as it turned out, and a few readers pounced on me on both that and another comment I'd made concerning some Taiwan independence advocates displaying an "Us or Them" mentality.

Again, I was dead wrong about the chips, for which I'd like to apologize, both to the President company that produces them, and to the chips themselves, each bag, individually.


I am sorry, President brand sweet potato chips. I see now that the artwork on your packages hearkens back to early Taiwanese cinema and not, as I had assumed, the Chinese cultural revolution. Plus, you are all very delicious.

But I do want to expand on my second (and more odious, in the eyes of many) opinion that there's a growing sense of "Us or Them" growing in Taiwan's collective unconscious. Maybe not so much "Us or Them," as in "Taiwan or Mainland China," but something more like "Us and Them," with the "them" being "outsiders", anyone who isn't Taiwanese. The way that I've seen this manifesting itself is through language. Taiwan has an interesting linguistic make up; The two most widely spoken dialects are Hoklo, or Taiwanese (that's the language being spoken in my wedding video) and Mandarin Chinese. During the martial law era, Taiwanese was suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek's KMT as a way to foster a more "Chinese" identity among native Taiwanese.
Since the lifting of martial law, Taiwanese has become more widely used, in some parts of Taiwan surpassing Mandarin Chinese as the common tongue. Almost all Taiwanese people can still speak Mandarin, but some prefer to speak Taiwanese.

All this, in my opinion (I'm a blogger, so I'm supposed to have "opinions") is fine and dandy. Like most westerners who've lived in Taiwan a long time, I studied Mandarin and can't speak more than a few sentences of Taiwanese myself, but as an enemy of imperialism I like the idea of once-linguistically oppressed people reverting to their preferred tongues once the shackles of imperialism have been lifted. And I try - really I do - to use Taiwanese when I can, even though that its a hard language to learn (9 tones as opposed to Mandarin's 4).

But over the last couple of years I've had a number of experiences that have made me think that Taiwan's collective unconscious might be painting itself into a linguistic corner.

A few years back, I was doing an article for a HK based paper about tourism on Taiwan's east coast, and had arranged an informal interview with an government official in charge of promoting tourism in that area. I was brought into the officials office by a third party, a guy who owns a really nice boutique hotel not too far from Ilan city. I'd introduced myself in Mandarin, the official responded in kind, and we made some small talk. I got my notebook out, ready to to scribble down any data which might help me to cobble together a story about the region. We weren't three minutes into the interview when the official switched to Taiwanese and started talking not to me, but to the guy who'd brought me. I sat there patiently, and every once in a while the guy who brought me would translate from Taiwanese into English for me. I jokingly told the official that I spoke Mandarin, so we could all just speak together, and he laughed and said that I should learn to speak Taiwanese.

"Ha ha, fair enough" I said, "But I live in Hong Kong, so not much opportunity for that."

The two continued talking, and I left feeling that the guy had been a bit of a dick for not speaking in a dialect that all parties assembled could understand, especially when the non-Taiwanese speaker was a writer trying to do an article about the beauty & accessibility of the very area that the government official was charged with promoting. But, like, whatever...


Now had this been an isolated incident, I probably would have forgotten about it. But over my last year back in Taiwan, I've played "the dumb foreigner" in at least a dozen variations of another pointless linguistic play. One of these happened just yesterday.

I was walking my dog in the park by my building where a trio of city landscapers were having their lunch break. One of them said "Ni hao?" to me, and I replied "hen hao, xie xie. Ni ne?"

Which is Mandarin for "Hello, how are you?" and "I'm fine, yourself?" Pretty standard fare.

One of the other gardeners immediately chimed in, saying in Taiwanese.

"The foreigner speaks mandarin! speak Taiwanese so he can't understand you!"

Which, of course, I understood because the first words you learn in any language are generally me, you, speak, understand and I can't understand."

And anyone who lives in Taiwan knows the Taiwanese word for "foreigner" ("Ah-do-ga" - To my ears, an ugly sounding word).

Anyway, I just stared at the woman for ten seconds, before saying to her in Mandarin "If you don't want to talk to me, just don't talk to me."

"Ha ha...your Chinese is so good!" She said.

"Yeah, Whatever..." I replied, and walked on in a slightly less good mood.

Again, if this were an isolated incident, I probably wouldn't be writing about it either. But over the last year while traveling in Taiwan I've had the same sort of thing happen at least a dozen times. A local person starts a conversation with me in Mandarin and then immediately switches to Taiwanese, or I pass by a group of people speaking Mandarin with each other and, as I walk by, they switch to Taiwanese (usually saying something in Taiwanese like "switch to Taiwanese, a lot of foreigners can understand Mandarin, which is dumb because A, I don't care what they're saying, and B, see remarks about first words you learn above.

I have a hard time understanding this mentality.

Though I've met a few westerners who can speak Taiwanese, such folks are still pretty rare. I'm not sure what the numbers are. If any readers in Taiwan care to elucidate me, I'm all ears, but I'd say that less than 1 in 10 Chinese speaking western residents - people comfortable speaking in Mandarin day in, day out - speak better than a few dozen words of Taiwanese. But by and large, westerners who live in Taiwan live here because they feel warmly about Taiwan and its culture. Once upon a time Taiwan was loaded with western Sinophiles who stayed because life on the Mainland was too politically restrictive, or because they couldn't make the kind of money in China that they could in Taiwan. But for your average westerner who isn't going to China to start a labor union (an activity also against the law for foreigners in Taiwan, BTW) or run through Tienanmen square with a Free Tibet banner, those days are pretty much gone. If you love China, you go to China; If you love Taiwan, you live in Taiwan.
Or you can love both places, and go back and forth (if you can swing the plane fare).

But the fact remains that the majority of non-Chinese who take the time to learn any Chinese dialect, whether they plan to spend most of their time in Taiwan, Shanghai or Singapore, are probably going to study Mandarin. My opinion (again, blogger...got opinions...) is that Taiwanese people are cutting off their nose to spite their face when they make people who like and care about Taiwan feel stupid for speaking Mandarin as opposed to Hoklo.

Anyway, I've blathered way too long. I'd love to hear back from anyone in Taiwan who has opinions about this, or who may have had similar experiences.