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Taiwan Diary: Foreigners
Apr. 10th, 2023 03:16 pmI admit, I kind of like being an obvious foreigner. I'm certain there's a layer of privilege that I don't see or know how to examine because it gets mixed up with being a solitary older woman who is much fatter than the general population. On one hand, I feel pretty safe here, barring getting run over by a scooter. On the other, I'm constantly uncomfortable in my skin. The chair I'm sitting in right now is one of the office chairs provided by the school. It has arms and they dig into my thighs and hurt. I had to swap out the one at my desk for a different style because I kept getting bruises.
The thing I like about being obviously foreign is that people are generally pretty kind when I make mistakes. And I don't mean things like blatant cultural disrespect and obnoxious behavior. I mean things like letting me fumble with the Mandarin I'm learning and then either switching to English (more people here speak English than in either Minsk or Shenzhen, which is really helpful), teaching me some new words (thank you to the lovely cab driver who taught me how to say the name of my school), or patiently working with Google translate. This didn't happen as much in Belarus because I looked a lot like the locals, so a lot of people would just speak Russian and not be very patient as I tried to get Google Translate up and running.
I very much appreciate the baristas at my usual Starbucks who generally don't even fuss with my order (although I sometimes will have a craving for a different thing but I'll take what they give me because it's nice they remember me). Quite a few of them speak moderate to really good English. But yesterday, one of the girls who is the most fluent was completely flummoxed by two white men who came in. My SBUX is right by the Sheraton, which is pretty much the only nice hotel in Zhubei, so it's where all the business travelers tend to stay, and they hang out at Starbucks a lot because it's familiar. Now, I'm assuming the men I saw yesterday were businessmen. I had seen one of them a few nights before at a restaurant nearby, dining with two local men. I didn't eavesdrop on them because I was really invested in eating the delicious chicken shawarma the restaurant serves. But I did notice the foreigner was Scottish. Yesterday, his companion was the one who completely threw the barista for a loop, because he had the broadest, most Yorkshire accent I have ever heard in my life. Of course, I took my earbuds out and tried to eavesdrop. Unfortunately, the cafe was pretty busy, and they sat across the room from me, but the snippets I could make out sounded like rushing water running over tumbling rocks in a riverbed. Honestly, it was absolute gibberish to me. When they tried to order, the barista pulled out the English menu for them, and the Scottish man ended up ordering. It was fascinating!
The thing I like about being obviously foreign is that people are generally pretty kind when I make mistakes. And I don't mean things like blatant cultural disrespect and obnoxious behavior. I mean things like letting me fumble with the Mandarin I'm learning and then either switching to English (more people here speak English than in either Minsk or Shenzhen, which is really helpful), teaching me some new words (thank you to the lovely cab driver who taught me how to say the name of my school), or patiently working with Google translate. This didn't happen as much in Belarus because I looked a lot like the locals, so a lot of people would just speak Russian and not be very patient as I tried to get Google Translate up and running.
I very much appreciate the baristas at my usual Starbucks who generally don't even fuss with my order (although I sometimes will have a craving for a different thing but I'll take what they give me because it's nice they remember me). Quite a few of them speak moderate to really good English. But yesterday, one of the girls who is the most fluent was completely flummoxed by two white men who came in. My SBUX is right by the Sheraton, which is pretty much the only nice hotel in Zhubei, so it's where all the business travelers tend to stay, and they hang out at Starbucks a lot because it's familiar. Now, I'm assuming the men I saw yesterday were businessmen. I had seen one of them a few nights before at a restaurant nearby, dining with two local men. I didn't eavesdrop on them because I was really invested in eating the delicious chicken shawarma the restaurant serves. But I did notice the foreigner was Scottish. Yesterday, his companion was the one who completely threw the barista for a loop, because he had the broadest, most Yorkshire accent I have ever heard in my life. Of course, I took my earbuds out and tried to eavesdrop. Unfortunately, the cafe was pretty busy, and they sat across the room from me, but the snippets I could make out sounded like rushing water running over tumbling rocks in a riverbed. Honestly, it was absolute gibberish to me. When they tried to order, the barista pulled out the English menu for them, and the Scottish man ended up ordering. It was fascinating!
