About 20 people were over at our place for a little party Sunday night and they wanted a slideshow of our families. So we borrowed the school’s data projector and had a powerpoint slide or two for each family member.

When my brother’s photos came up we heard some of the ladies whispering in Chinese, “他很帥!” (“He’s very handsome!”) They had no idea we could understand that phrase. And everyone wanted to know if he was married. They also said the girls were like movie stars and dad reminded them of a famous actor but they couldn’t remember the name. And they all thought mom and dad looked so young.

We hear the “[some white person] looks like [some movie star]” a lot… I wonder if it’s because they watch so much Hollywood and to them white people all look pretty much the alike? One of my dad’s black friends in college used to joke, “All you honkies look the same!” Maybe there’s a little of that going on over here. …Can I say honky?

Anyway, we also have a family tradition on my side of including a “dinosaur picture” in every photo op. Our Taiwan friends thought that was hilarious and wanted to do one. As you can see, dinosaurs in Taiwan are apparently more cute than fierce, but everyone had fun.

Chou-chou just sulked in the corner for three hours. Wouldn’t even sit still for a picture. I don’t think she’d ever seen that many people at once before and it kind of freaked her out.

No – we’re not in the throes of culture shock. Here’s Kishore Mahbubani’s explanation for that title in his own words:

It represents essentially two questions folded into one. The first, addressed to my fellow Asians, reads “Can you think? If you can, why have Asian societies lost a thousand years and slipped far behind the European societies that they were far ahead of at the turn of the last millennium? …”

The second question, addressed primarily to my friends in the West, is “Can Asians think for themselves?” … Most Westerners cannot see that they have arrogated to themselves the moral high ground from which they lecture the world. The rest of the world can see this (10).

He goes on to make the point that, if there is to be any meaningful discussion between Asians and Westerners, then we’ve got to quit assuming and acting like our civilization is morally superior (60-61). And that the virtually unstoppable economic and demographic forces currently in play guarantee that “the West” will have to take the worldview of “the Rest” seriously sooner or later.

Can Asian’s Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West is basically the geopolitical opinions and predictions of a career Asian diplomat in which he highlights the vast gulf between Eastern and Western minds. Since I’m not personally into the politics and comprehend even less about economics, the book’s value for me is that it’s the perspective of an educated Asian who’s familiar with the West and has spent a lifetime engaged in cross-cultural/international dialogue. I think his question to us is worth considering – and soon we (as a culture) may not have the luxury of ignoring it anyway.

The nature of the world we live in will increasingly require of us (Westerners) to be open to having foundational assumptions/values of our culture questioned by people who don’t and never have shared those assumptions/values.

If we in “the West” are ever going to afford those in “the Rest” a base level of respect and dignity (as in, we’d dialogue with them as equals), we’re going to have to give up a lot of cherished assumptions. Or we’ll at least have to allow those assumptions to be questioned and take those questions seriously. Many of our cultural “sacred cows” (“freedom,” individualism/individual actualization, democracy, etc.) are precisely what many Easteners have issues with. These guys criticize individualism, freedom of the press, the way we do “human rights” – and they’re serious:

…when I tried … to challenge the universal applicability of democracy, human rights, or freedom of the press, I discovered that these values had become virtual “sacred cows.” No one could challenge their instrinsic worth. Worse still, when I persisted I was greeted with sniggers, smug looks, and general derision (59-60).

And this was his reception at Harvard.

My point is not that it’s wrong to believe that our culture’s particular values are right. But how can we suggest ways of thinking and living (as the West continually does), assuming that our culture’s particular values are morally superior and universal, when we can’t even comprehend why other cultures object to our ideas in the first place?

If we truly value and respect people, then we’ll take other people seriously even when they really really don’t see eye to eye with us. Eventually we (as a culture) may not have a choice anyway.

And perhaps “the Rest” have perspectives worth listening to? Perhaps, just perhaps, we shouldn’t necessarily assume that the Western approach to life is the best possible approach to life?

Related articles:

• Can Asians think? The struggle of Asian societies to thrive in the modern world while maintaining their cultural heritage. By Kishore Mahbubani.
• “Can Asians think?” Singapore’s ambassador to the U.N. talks about his controversial new book and the gulf between Western and Eastern minds. By Suzy Hansen (Salon interview)
• It’s True. Asians Can’t Think. Until it abandons its twisted Confucianism, the region will trail the West. By Sin-Ming Shaw (TimeAsia).
• ‘Do Your Own Homework’: Asian Students Should Learn to Think for Themselves. When a Vietnamese American author fields anxious e-mails from high school students seeking help with their English essays, he reflects on Asian conformity and the American ego. By Andrew Lam (Pacific News Service).

Pronounced:
n? sh� w? d� zi l? de hu� ch�ng
Literally:
“You are my stomach’s worm” / “…the worm (parasite) in my stomach.”
Means:
“You know me inside-out.” Zhi-ling said this when Jessica recently finished her sentence for her.

This day hike included thousands of steps (going up), big spiders, butterflies, and an impromptu tea party on the side of mountain with a group of very friendly strangers.

You can read about this hike here:

• Taiwan Tea Party!

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We just had a really fun afternoon out, which we needed after a few solid days of reading and typing online assigments. We went on another day-hike, this time on the Zhinan Temple Hiking Trail, and stopped for lunch at a nearby smaller temple that had tables and chairs and hardly any people. We’d packed sandwiches, oranges, and mooncakes.

About 3/4 the way through our meal, a group of 9 Taiwanese showed up with a big tea-pot, a propane single burner like what you take camping, and a bunch of leftover Moon Festival goodies. They were laughing and having a good time. We could hear them talking about us, but all we could tell was “foreigners” and “English,” which they repeated a lot. They talked fast, and some of it was in Taiwanese (not Mandarin). Suddenly, we hear a tentative, “Hallo? Hallo!” “Tea? Good?” They ended up inviting us over to join their tea party.

We hit it off pretty good at the start by sniffing the tea and asking, “Oolong Cha?” Judging from their response, they were pretty excited to see that we at least knew a little about tea (it was oolong, by the way…and very good oolong at that!). We love the way they serve tea here. One person is the designated tea server, and it’s their job to keep refilling the tea pot and refilling everyone’s tea cups whenever they need it…your cup is almost never empty!! They also stuffed us full of mooncakes and other goodies, notably some Hakka sticky rice gooey things…one with a salty pork/taro filling and another with a red bean filling, except we don’t know the name for those yet. We had some different flavours of mooncake than we’ve experienced so far, including peach, orange, and strawberry. Those were really delicious!

We had so much fun getting to try all our Mandarin (which is not very much!), and had enough to talk a little bit and ask about stuff. They had so little English that it was nice to have to rely on our Mandarin for once. One of the guys decided to call his daughter in the middle of the tea party, and give the phone to us so that she could practice her English. I think she also was clarifying what we were doing and the name of the place we work, so that she could tell her parents in Chinese. We must have been with them for well over an hour, and talking for most of that time (which is pretty good for how little Chinese we know!)

Photos from the hike are here.

Happy Moon Festival, Taibei!
(Tái běi, zhōng qiū jié kuài lè!)

Rooftop BBQ with friends.

Houston recently posted What the Feminist Movement can learn from Islam, about an article written by an Islamic woman that criticizes Western attempts at social development in other countries aimed at ‘raising’ the status of women according to the ethnocentric assumptions of Western feminism. Not the kind of thing you hear every day in Western media, I imagine. Richard Nisbett offers another such critique from the outside in The Geography of Thought.

Consider this a warm-up to the personal identity post. Nisbett ties the following back to the basic differences of perception regarding objects and their contexts, but I won’t attempt that here.

We tolerate an awful lot of poop in the public sphere, to put it mildly, because we value individual “rights” so highly. We buy Voltaire’s “I disagree with what you have to say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” I’m not saying we’re wrong, necessarily, but it sure is interesting when you can start to understand why many people disagree – or don’t hold that value as highly as we do. Parts of the West have recently spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives on the assumption that everyone will value our brand of “freedom” if given the chance. The truth is: everyone won’t. And it’s long past the time we started trying to understand why.

Can you imagine how our insistence on freedom of expression could be considered by some to be a morally objectionable violation of human rights?

It is also important to recognize that East Asians and other interdependent peoples have their own moral objections to Western behaviour. When East Asian students become comfortable enough to speak out in Western classrooms, they will often express bewilderment at how much disorder, crime, and exposure to violent and sexually explicit images in the media Westerners are willing to tolerate in the name of freedom. They perceive these issues as entailing human rights because rights are perceived as inhering to the collectivity rather than the individual (199).

Some people value social stability and the elimination of harmful content from the public sphere more than they value a Western degree of freedom of expression. Some don’t assume that in a “free market of ideas,” the “right” ideas will always win out over the harmful ones in the long run. And their view of our society is great support for their opinion.

Something I find so interesting – and I’ll have to talk and read some more before really putting any ideas together – is our supervisor’s take on why democracy and rule of law (courts, etc.) aren’t really fitting that well in Taiwan. The cultural factors he’s brought up are fascinating, but more on that after I read and ask some more questions.

Pronounced: yu� b?ng
Literally: moon cookie
Means: moon cake. Right now during the Mid-Autumn Festival, what everyone is giving, receiving, and re-gifting but almost no one is actually eating.

I’ve stepped up on my observations of the local scooter literature. Here are my most recent ones from my walk in the park this afternoon.

Duke: The best racer you are from now on.
Easy: best partner for your life.
Jockey: Join us to ride it!
Jog is fascinating to you.
Jockey: Jockeys ride us!
Going: More you look, more you like it.
Duke: The modern scooter citizen.
Freeway: A scooter you can live with.
Freeway: The shape you want to be in.

Taking a Break

The holiday schedule in Taiwan is, of course, a bit different than N.America. Today we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival), which means we’ll be headed to a couple of barbeques, and we’ve also been sampling traditional and non-traditional (ice cream!) mooncakes. As a result, we don’t have to work today. We do have to work on Saturday, but only the morning class, since so many of our students will be out of town. Also, upcoming next Tuesday is Taiwan’s “National Day” which is also a holiday. That wouldn’t make a big difference for us, as Tuesday is our regular day off….except, the government made a last minute decision to declare Monday a holiday as well, so that everyone could enjoy a 5 day weekend. So, except for Saturday morning, we don’t teach again until Wednesday! And, we’ll have an additional day off next Saturday, because all of our students will be going to their regular schools in order to make up for their “holiday” on Monday, so they won’t be available for our classes.

We’re going to make sure to get out and go hiking and see some stuff…but unfortunately, we won’t get to play too much. Our courses have started and we are swamped with homework and reading, so we’re going to take this chance to get caught up (and maybe even ahead by a little bit!).

Pronounced: zh?ng qi? ji�
Means: Mid-Autumn Festival (aka the Moon Festival, which is this Friday).