Laowiseass

Photo intentionally omitted.
I shouldn't pick on TVBS (see title). All six of Taiwan's cable news channels are doing it: since Monday night, airing non-stop images of corpses, bloody survivors, mangled collapsed building parts and sobbing relatives from the Sichuan earthquake.
Most people can literally turn the tube off.
But as part of my job, I can't. I surf those six channels all day in the office to make sure I don't miss a breaking Taiwan story. If I flip off the TV, pun intended, I could get scolded by a supervisor, especially in the unlikely event of a Taiwan news story of any importance to international readers.
So the images on the air slowed down my work. First, the scenes came from China. Having lived there, I could imagine the personality types involved. I would understand their language if I were on site. I knew how the parents of dead kids were reacting, namely a blast of unbridled grief followed by a quick search for someone to blame. It would have been easier to watch if the scenes were unfolding in a country where I had never lived.
Or maybe not. Video of corpses reunited with surviving family members for the first time and shots of half-crushed bodies from any country would have forced me to pause while trying to finish my Pulitzer winners on the day's Taiwan currency fluctuation.
Why are T-V-Blood-Shed and the others on this rampage? They're doing whatever they can to compete with one another for the dopey eyeballs of viewers who have lost control of their remotes. Those channels enjoyed, as usual in Taiwan, no censorship.
But I guess the gritty exposure works for China. Myanmar, where almost 40,000 people have died from a cyclone, lets in few journalists, so nothing from there shows on TV in Taiwan or anywhere else. China, despite its reputation for blocking reporters from disasters, is suddenly letting journalists tromp all over northwestern Sichuan in hardhats to look at the gory rescue work and interview survivors. And via these TV images, China looks the way it wants, which is like a victim in need of compassion instead of criticism.

I squeezed nothing out of a series of Taipei Rotary Club meetings that I attended over the past ten months to seek ideas for news stories.
But one day I sat next to a former board member, code-named "Rotarian Philip" (wonder how a guy named Philip Liang in real life picked that one) and asked him why about 150 "baby clubs" of barely more than 20 members had formed around Taipei.
Everyone in Taiwan aspires to run something, Philip said. If they can't make it to the top of a business, he said, they scale the service club hierarchies, maybe starting as a sergeant-at-arms, rising to president (and after one year falling a notch to the lifetime title of "past president"). Their empire has reached build-out, and power consecrated, if they tell 20 people every week for 12 months whether they're going to eat chicken or fish at a club's dinner meetings. Pretty much anyone with an attendance record can become president when his, or occasionally her, turn comes up in a membership-wide rotation.
I had more power as middle-school class secretary.
Philip had a point. Sole proprietors dominate almost every aspect of the service industry, from laundry to airport shuttle bus services. International chain hotels are notoriously few in Taipei. I've never seen so many different bank names in a single neighborhood as where I live now. But on the job I seldom run into any serious trade associations or commercial interest groups, suggesting that competition may be too stiff to sit on the same board as someone else in your field.
On why Taiwan politicians fight bitterly for limelight, a veteran local newspaper reporter once echoed Rotarian Philip: "Everyone in Taiwan wants to be No. 1. No one wants to be No. 2."
Neither Philip nor the reporter explained why. Is it face? Could it be business exposure? Or are we just seeing more of the quick stardom complex that pervades China? I suspect that this is the case.

Taiwan parliament Speaker Wang Jin-pyng speaks, omega reporters listen

Call the government in Kashgar to ask about the reported arrest of seventy Uyghurs suspected of planning to spoil the Olympic torch arrival and draw attention to their oppressed minority status in China, an editor told me last month when I was working a short stint in the Beijing bureau.
I called the Kashgar city hall switchboard that I got from directory assistance. I also rang two numbers listed on the municipal government website. It was 2:58 p.m., 28 minutes after even the longest lunch break I'd ever heard of in China. Per the unofficial Kashgar time, which is about three hours behind Beijing time, it would have been before lunch hour.
On every attempt, instead of hearing China Telecom's signature beep-ring followed by a human voice, I got 30 seconds of instrumental pop music dominated by bassoons. After those 30 seconds, the line would automatically hang up on me, time after time.

Used to be you could ask any Net pal in China for a proxy server and see all the naughty websites droning on about Tibet independence, free Taiwan or the Faloon Goons. But about two to three years ago, the Internet cops in their collective 30,000-person or so wisdom, figured out, from what I can tell, how to foil those proxies almost as soon as they're rolled out.
Today Chinese techno-savants are using a downloadable software called Phproxy, says my American friend D.L. who runs a booming Internet media company in Shanghai. Phproxy essentially gives China-based Web users a direct gateway to servers outside China, where you can surf the big waves without some little brother mom-and-pop cop shop telling you the page cannot be displayed, check to see if your browser is OK. (It's fine, thank you.)
"On my Firefox I installed Phproxy, which is an add-on to the browser and works very, very well," the D.L. testimonial goes. "Google it and you can see it...."

The Minzu Hotel's best offer was ESPN. Apart from watching the Devil Rays beat the Yankees at 0030 hours on my last day of a two-week stay in Beijing this month, my second visit since leaving town in 2006, I saw nothing there or elsewhere that would suggest that China's service sector had gotten even one jerk closer to yanking its head out of its ass.
Notwithstanding, of course, four months left till the Olympics
The room sparkled, of course. Slick wood finishing. Flat-screen TV. Glass panelling around the sink and the shower. The whole west-Central Beijing hotel had just been fully remodeled.
Here's where the fun starts. Some time around the 7th inning I realized that a recurrent splat-splat sound wasn't the crack of bats but a bathroom ceiling leak. The shower stall had leaked since day one for lack of sealant between its two crisp shiny glass panels. The toilet flushed, and due to my spice-and-beer diet I asked a lot of it, but what was with the mirror opposite my throne? Catharsis in watching myself strain to pass hot-pepper oil?
Eight switches protruded from twin bedside consoles. About half of them activated something, and one would shut down the whole room.
An otherwise good trans-national breakfast was pockmarked by irregular coffee pours. Some wait staffers would offer it right away, while others would just stand around and stare at my amazingly empty cup. I saw no way to pour it myself.

Words on this souvenir store door offer a key or three to understanding spotty service in China.
Elsewhere around town, G-mail still worked erratically at local Internet terminals. G-mail had the same problem two years ago when I moved out of Beijing, probably a glitch side effect of a broader Internet configuration issue or some fallout from Gmail's deal with China to block sensitive Google search results.
In nearby Tianjin, where I spent an afternoon guzzling beer, the railway station's Beijing express lane had disappeared, along with the depot itself. Passengers now line up for Beijing tickets at a temporary station in East Buttfuck Nowhere with hordes shoving in giant chaotic line-slash-mobs that could suffocate a guy who gets pressed hard enough in the crowd.
I took a private bus back to Beijing because all I had to do was get on and wait for a dude to take my ticket money. The bus broke down.
Same old, same old. Face (shiny décor) over substance (things that work). No interagency, interdepartmental or inter-co-worker coordination along lateral lines (required for G-mail efficiency or express tickets) due to fear of limelight theft or out of simple laziness (so don't pour me a coffee but say you did).

Beijing officials, left; Chinese public, right
The story is starting to come out in some of the Western media now.
But at the beginning China-based correspondents squeamed on the topic due to a conflict of interest aimed right between their eyes.
The topic is harassment of foreign reporters over their stories on recent bloodshed in Tibet. I mean upwards of 100 calls per day, including some to the unlisted personal mobile phones of individual correspondents, plus a heap of faxes and the occasional effort to jack one's way into a securitized foreign news bureau. These reporters have listened to profanity, sexual insults and the occasional death threat, mostly from anonymous Chinese people claiming outrage over the foreign media's reporting of the 19 to 140 deaths, exact number depending on who you believe or none of the above, in Tibet following a massive riot in downtown Lhasa on March 14.
I won't name the media here, because when I labeled the biggest target in a news article last month, a senior correspondent there got pissed at me. "We're talking about a security issue here!" he yelled on the phone. But in general, I mean the signature big-name Western media outlets that ran video, photos and text with their Tibet stories. One TV network cropped PO'd Tibetans out of a photo of tanks in Lhasa, making it look like Chinese tanks were the only aggressors. A German newspaper labeled a group of troops Chinese when in fact it was Nepali. Thousands of other reports went with fundamentally accurate contrasting versions of events reported by Chinese officials, exiled Tibetan officials, a few eyewitnesses and the humble add-on "our reporters were unable to visit Tibet..."
So the masses were outraged and got the unpublished phone numbers of foreign news reporters. Those reporters didn't want to do stories abour their own harassment for fear of further fanning the shit storm. They wanted to calm back down to where they could answer their phones without some caller using the f-word or the female dog word. But they were crawling out from behind beer bottles in early April to swap hours of theories about the real reason for the harassment. A leading theory was that the Chinese foreign ministry rounded up a few bleating-sheep bloggers to stoke outrage by leaving hotly worded posts -- 550,000 to quote the Beijing Youth Daily on March 29 -- and possibly even to publish key foreign media contacts online. The ministry is the only legal keeper of foreign journalist contact lists. When its job was finished, the ministry could top it off with words to the effect of hey look, our citizens hold the foreign media responsible for the deadly madness in Tibet.

Here's your wilderness toolkit:
1. Tent
2. Sleeping bag
3. Tin roof
4. Laundry line
5. Paved ground
6. Kitchen unit with sink
7. Fireworks
8. On-site management
9. Rough Guide to Taiwan
10. Hotel next door just in case
Quiz: Which of these ten items did I not see at a campsite in the Chih-pen hot springs resort valley of southeastern Taiwan (see photo)?
Hint: Nature is widely feared or despised on this post-agrarian island.

Before I could say much to my old American friend Daniel at the bar on a working visit to Beijing in late March, Elisabeth was onto us both. I'm in the middle of a story, said the woman who looked Chinese but spoke English with an accent that wasn't Chinese. Listen to me finish it.
Who's Elisabeth?
I didn't know and Daniel wasn't saying that she was the new face of expatriate Beijing.
Later in conversation at the bar located, in typical Beijing fashion, behind a security shack and a construction site but of course raging anyway, Elisabeth and I talked about her Uyghur boyfriend's trouble getting a Turkish visa so he could develop himself professionally in a more ethnically friendly country. The Turks and the Uyghurs, a race concentrated in northwest China, are as close as the Swedes and the Norwegians. The Chinese, who control Uyghur territory, are about as similar to either as Martians. Although that much complication I could handle, at some point I lapsed into silence over my beer due to advanced deep-vein fatigue due to 20 straight work days spread over three cities, two major news events and 39 years of life. Then Elisabeth had the raw nerve to ask how I had been excluded from the larger conversation, which by then had involved Daniel's quiet Russian girlfriend and a Jewish-American architect who I had never met before.
How often does anyone ask that sissy-ass question at a shoot-to-kill, loudest-shot-wins bar conversation anywhere in the world? Expatriate culture had changed in my ex-hometown since I left it in mid-2006, I unmistakably realized.
So I found out who Elisabeth was. She was someone who occurs not only in Beijing but who invariably surfaces in foreign quarters of this wildly internationalized city. A few years ago Brits, Aussies, Yanks and Japanese made up most of the expatriate inflow. But gone are the days when most expatriates were not only lily-white people working as university English teachers, shoot-from-the-hip IT consultants or wannabe documentary film producers. The increasingly grizzled and cynical white folk are losing ground to often working-class Nigerians, South Asians and the likes of Elisabeth Tchoudjinoff, who is from the Republic of Kalmykia, a sparsely populated Russian province above the Caspian Sea populated mostly by ethnic central Asians.
Elisabeth, 25, does not speak Russian. Her family moved to France around when she was born, give or take a small margin of time, so she considers herself French, also her de facto native language. Her father's work took the family to Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong and the United States for a few years give or a take a couple in each place. She lives in Beijing now and designs promotional materials for a wine importer. She speaks Chinese and English. People in this you-look-Chinese, you-are-Chinese society will take her for Chinese. She'd rather speak English or French. I fear that's just that's just the preamble to Elisabeth's resume.
Moral to her story, insular China and the capital's clubby old-guard pack of mostly white pseudo-professionals should get used to new waves of foreigners with complex personal backgrounds, multi-lateral romances and off-color bar-table conversation styles. An old-time Beijing expat friend, a Westerner, told me that Nigerians have taken over Beijing's drug trade from the Uyghurs. South Asians are on the front lines of some high-end hotels. Every third or fourth bar-hopper is a young Turk from central Asia or Russia trying to tap the city's ever-spurting job wellspring. At least one French-Kalmykian is selling wines.

A foreigner, one of tons pouring in from everywhere, peeks into a bar in the old section of town.

While I met with a group of former students in Beijing last week, one of them eyed me from the gut upward and pronounced me fatter than when I had last seen them about a year ago. Literally a second later, another student, who didn't hear the first one's appraisal, photographed me with his eyes and said "you've gotten thinner."
What this means is nothing. Chinese people compulsively say old friends unseen for a spell have gotten fatter or thinner, and it's unimportant which one as long as they say something on the weight subject. They don't even have to look at you to say it.

I jousted with more than 1,000 anxious onlookers near Wangfujing in central Beijing last week to glimpse the Olympic torch on its launch from Beijing en route around the world. I also interviewed some of the would-be spectators, as that was part of my secret mission noted below.
We saw nothing but cops holding us back from nearby Tiananmen Square, where a torch ceremony was scheduled at an unannounced hour that morning. We couldn't uses buses or subway stops around the Square much of the day.
The torch whizzed past in a sealed van, I was told later. No one saw it except state leaders and the very short list of ceremony guests.
"This isn't the people's Olympics," a Singaporean journalist friend said when I bumped into him among the spectators, citing a motto for Beijing's 2008 Games. "It's the government's Olympics."
The government distrusts its people. It hid the sacred flame out of fear that a protester would snuff it out and damage the Communist Party's image.

This blog will break until early April pending a secret mission. Details later.

Baffled by raffles, an obsession at formal Taiwan parties, I begged insight from a new e-friend. The friend, 33, a south Taiwan university professor, offers two reasons why co-workers or co-professionals must choose winners and losers at events held ostensibly to celebrate unity:
"One is a show of thanks by bosses of private companies or the head of institutes, and hopefully the employees go on working hard for them in the next year. The boss also wants to 'show off' how well the company has done over the previous year. They offer employees big money as prize drawings or lotteries as a free advertisement for the company. I call it 'could not loss face'."
My reply: "Westerners are not used to so much focus on that kind of activity at parties, so it has quite taken me by surprise. I can see the corporate largesse and face-saving at numerous spring parties held recently for the media in Taiwan. I also wonder if the prize drawings are connected somehow to southern Chinese culture, which values quick wealth and the randomness of fortune."
My friend didn't reply.

Blame it on the wine. Without the three bottles of red medication that flowed every time the China Airlines planning department head picked up a bottle for a pour, I probably could have exchanged enough business cards and gathered enough news by just circulating around the room for 15 minutes before the airline's annual media party officially started. But the chance to medicate on the job sucked me down into a chair.
I had sworn to myself, and to my bureau chief, that I wouldn't stay for the whole thing. Here's why:
Food: Ninety percent was scooped off the ocean floor. A liberal fifty percent was chewable.
Venue: Dark underground cave carved out for us by the Formosa Regent Hotel. Add low ceilings for maximum effect.
Program: China Airlines lifted it from the Guide to Tacky Taiwan Parties. It started with brief speeches by top company leaders pretending to sound humble but showing off between the lines. We saw dances and skits by a troupe for hire of lithe-tongued, slick-bodied, spiky-haired 20-year-olds in unspeakably clean grunge clothes. The main event was the required hour of door prizes. I tried not to count how many prizes. I knew none of the winners. In all my big institution-versus-media parties here, no one from my company has ever won as much as a free trip to the restroom. We've got to wedge ourselves away from a crowded table and go ask where the bog is.
The good part: Bottomless bottles of wine.
I try to be a cultural relativist, but I just ain't fitting in. I pushed away more than half the food and ignored the program by sustaining a conversation with people around me who were equally unenthused. Un-enthusiasm was why I didn't want to stay past the first 15 minutes. And in recent weeks I had attended these formula-driven media parties held by the president's office, the foreign ministry, the defense ministry and other agencies that I cover.

I know I shouldn't use the word "tacky" or lampoon the food, as it were (see photo above from a media bash in 2007), or imply that the raffle dragged on too long. It's their food and no better than any other really. Raffles, a bloodless sport for lazy people, cut to the core of a culture dominated by competition, pursuit of quick wealth or fame and the quirky randomness of fortune. My anthropology profs would lampoon me as ethnocentric if they knew I was writing this. Then again, they live in million-dollar Tudor-style mansions in the quiet Berkeley Hills where they impose white American cultural trends on everyone else. Cultural relativism abroad works for them because they know they can go home in two weeks to prime rib barbecues and cafe lattes.
I prefer something more international, a cross between Berkeley and Asia. I need something from both for maximum comfort. But Taiwan is an island nation run by people with insular habits and little idea that folk from elsewhere might feel baffled, befuddled or even belligerent but too over-bred to say anything about the good-luck fireworks that last all night, illegal but highly tolerated tin-can construction that blocks views and venues and other ideals that were hauled over from China along with attitudes in government that none of it matters even though it's illegal.
Or lack of indoor heat. But winters here are so short.
Or sidewalks so cluttered with vendors, merchant inventory or more illegal construction that you can't walk down the sides of them. But we LIKE happy chaos.
I've gotten a morale boost here from an interviewee, Taiwanese executive search consultant Emily Chen, who lived in the United Kingdom for five years and sees her island's insular tendencies from the perspective of a bigger island. Taiwan, Chen says, needs to make it easier for foreigners to get work permits and should invite mainland Chinese over to learn from them even if it's hip to snub China for its outdated political system. The Chinese try to be world citizens - they offer non-Chinese food at banquets with foreign attendance for example -- though often fall short in otherwise pleasant conversation by insulting the countries where their guests are from.
Taiwan will implode economically without injections of ideas from abroad, Chen further argues. We see the trend already, she says, in the high-tech industry, which is just making stuff-- albeit a lot of stuff -- for bigger-name companies rather than doing much R&D. (Other interviewees have echoed Chen's theme and suggested further that Taiwan TV beef up international news, which now averages two minutes per hour of coverage, so viewers know what's happening out there.)
Foreigners who can chew the un-chewable and weather hours of raffles will get along OK on the surface. I'm doing this now, holding back my culturally un-relativist cynicism, as a member of my company's party planning committee, a job I was forced into because it was my turn. I helped organize an in-house spring party that featured you guessed it, bottom-fed seafood and an hour of prizes in a dark basement venue bounded by a low ceiling and giant shadowy walls. Fortunately, most people in the company are Taiwanese so there's no question that ours is the party formula.
But not every foreigner can bite his chewable lip in the face of insularity. Expatriate friends who work with government agencies on translation or branding or joint hotel management, for example, say that their foreign ideas are often accepted verbally -- out of politeness -- but not put into practice because they didn't come from Taiwan and who in their right mind here would ever think to do it that way?

This in from a college-educated friend, 23 or 24, in a modern part of China:
"My parents told me about a guy the day after I returned home. I did not reject their idea to see him. It was just a 'meeting.' (Laowiseass: meeting, marriage proposal, same difference.) What luck it was that we fell in love with each other this afternoon?! It can't be. (Laowiseass: can't be because it wasn't, you felt vaguely infatuated, that's all, and here's why....) That guy was described just as a millionaire who took charge of some business and that the total amount was up to several millions -- there must be something (Laowiseass: yeah like a scam), or this man cannot be kept single until 26 (Laowiseass: 26!). I am sort of nervous...hoho. Both his parents and mine and my headmaster, the one who introduced me to that guy's family....They want a tall girl who can speak English....They mainly live in the Philippines....), all of them were present this afternoon....What a scene...."

A recent grad from China reaches new heights.
I got an MSN message this weekend from a former student who now studies in Singapore. The graduate of Beijing Broadcasting Institute is already looking further ahead. She's applying to work as a trainee for LMVH and knocking on the doors of other European brands seeking Chinese publicity talent. She balances that application with another to do one of her graduate study semesters in France. She has vacationed in Phuket. She hangs out with Westerners and other Chinese people. She plans to see a whole lot more of the world. And she's only probably 25 or 26.
This student is no accidental tourist. Chinese society conditions her generation and just about everyone else's to think ambitiously. Ambition may be necessary. Countryside dwellers, for example, struggle in urban jobs to make money for sick family members. Once the medical bills are paid, the urban laborer keeps laboring to earn enough to build a new house to help more relatives. The same ambition, which just happens to help the country move ahead, also offers an anesthetic against getting really bummed about intractable poverty, corruption, injustice or cruel and senseless competition. No matter how shitty things get, your mission is clear: keep studying, working and making contacts to move ahead.
The move-ahead spirit further tends to quell that disquieting postmodern confusion about what to do in life, e.g. whether to major in anthropology or English or whether to teach overseas for kicks before launching a career at home. It's assumed in China that you'll strive for money and social status, first for yourself and then for family.
Will ambition drive China if the place modernizes to where just about everyone is assured basic comforts? Looking at Taiwan, I'd say not. After 20 years of relative prosperity, Taiwan is too busy enjoying ease and convenience to push anyone anywhere. The same day my former student MSN'ed me, I got an e-mail from one of my wife's former students in Taipei rolling his eyes about Oh I guess it's time to apply for study abroad and find some university professor to write that smarmy recommendation letter. His mother has complained that this guy doesn't push himself, but her complaints are the good-natured, pro forma type.
I seldom meet anyone in Taiwan with ambitions like those of my former student from Beijing. I hear older people grouse about the lack of a perfect democracy or about a stagnant consumer economy but with little urge to make a difference. Younger people are, as they said in the American '60s, turned off, tuned out and convinced that life is "wu liao," which means meaningless.

Narnia, a fictitious land of film fame, exists for real in the minds of a nation, the name of which has been omitted here to stimulate reader imagination.
In the movie, a group of children venture through a door of their house into the snow and find themselves mixed up with sub-human, sub-animal like beings, some cool and some not but all sort of freaky. They make it home safe after a good romp and are admonished by adults (the foreign ministry?) to stay there.
Moral of the story for citizens of our mystery nation who go abroad: The world outside is a fantastic place, full of endless possibility and beings that are either tame or hostile but ultimately unsafe and unworthy of your own kind.

You can normally hear the following sounds in cities around China and Taiwan. They are as common as the whoosh of passing cars and surges wind through the trees.
Loudest at the top where it belongs:
1. Firecrackers. Imagine a car falling off a 20-story building and hitting the street under your face. Every five seconds. 24 hours a day. 15 days straight from Lunar New Year's Eve. Is your new year happy yet? (Paper, sticks and other firecracker refuse should be left in the street, by the way, because as we all know in Chinese societies, someone else will come along to pick that up.)

Beijing after midnight on Lunar New Year's Eve 2008
2. Indoor demolition. Someone clobbering a wall to pieces in the flat below you so he can rebuild it.
3. Outdoor demolition. Mechanized wrecking of outdoor buildings; brick walls for maximum effect.
4. Earth ramming. Quake? No. Construction equipment thumping the crap out of the ground.
5. Unloading of iron. Trucks dropping scaffolding bars or pipes onto pavement.
6. Indoor drilling. Comes across as someone's day-after burrito and beer fart straight in your face, even if it's on a remodeling site six floors below you.
7. Indoor hammering. Remodeling noise in packed apartment and office buildings that ranges in pitch from a faint knock at your door to a battering ram on your ceiling.
8. Road-surface digging. Common jackhammers meters away from common apartment buildings.
9. Metallic screeching. Welding. Soldering. Metal slicing. The sound eeks across streets, parks and school yards to penetrate your window-sealed living room.
10. Idling trucks. The running engines of big rigs parked in dense neighborhoods shake homes and offices as they wait for a haul.
Legal disclaimer: A lot of these activities are illegal, for the sake of public peace. They are generally restricted to anybody at any time and any place. Ask your local police precinct for details.

ABOVE: Reporters keep a safe distance from sources in the Taiwan foreign ministry.
This photo is about all I won from the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs spring festival reception for journalists in early February.
One guy from a competing foreign news wire won a boxed gift based on the lucky words on a tag that fluttered out of a popped balloon.
Two people from the same Taiwan TV station got bigger prizes, which were either wrapped or impossible to see from where I sat -- at the head table facing back at a crowd of 100 and into ceiling-mounted stage lights.
Some other scribe pedaled away on a new bicycle.
The gift giving, spliced with dicey music and dance acts by ministry officials, went on for more than two hours. We're in Taiwan, where it's a national law to sing, dance and hold a raffle before the spring festival, i.e. the Lunar New Year.
On the way out the ministry staff handed each of us a box of dried beef. I declined mine, lying that I don't eat the stuff. No, I went on, my wife doesn't eat it, either.
But I did drink the ministry's party wine, which I know wasn't too expensive because I had seen the same brand in common supermarkets, and ate the ministry's buffet dinner. I even went back to the column of hot stainless steel vats for seconds.
In my strict American B(r)ible of Journalism, we can take food from sources but cannot accept other valuable freebies. (One newspaper where I worked in California asked all reporters to donate source gifts to an in-house raffle for charity.) We buy meals for sources, as well. If I get the runs from the foreign ministry party, later I can treat the foreign minister to chili peppers prepared by a chef who doesn't wash his hands.
Things work differently in Taiwan. State organs have money to blow and divine that it can't hurt publicity to wine, dine and outshine (by dominating the stage) the scribes, local journalists say.
The president and the speaker of parliament also handed out high-value spring festival prizes to journalists. I couldn't refuse my presidential party favor, a pair of mugs, because the president's spokesman was watching me as I passed by the handout desk, and I need a favor from him later. Our humble acceptance gives the giver face, and to be honest I am using one of those cups as I write this post. A few other reporters emceed the president's raffle award ceremonies. A newcomer wouldn't know who was a scribe and who worked for the head of state. Because our agency interviewed the speaker one on one, I couldn't refuse his box of Honduran coffee, which to be honest I am drinking now out of that presidential office cup.
How do Taiwan journalists take bribes to the next level? I saw one TV spot of the normally sober, grayish-looking foreign minister singing karaoke in his purple shirt against a purple backdrop along with his nonchalant wife and his son who kept making monkey faces. TV cameras at the presidential bash aired the host-of-honor's seldom heard shrill laugh. I didn't write about either event. Still, I should have given the foreign ministry face by accepting the box of beef, but that night I was struck by an American B(r)iblical revelation.

Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party keeps getting accused of not doing enough over the past eight years, since it captured the presidency. Citizens also complain that the party has ignored problems with the domestic economy.
The photo below from Danshui in Taipei County debunks both ideas.
You can see that the party has changed the name of its postal system from Chung-hwa (zhong hua) Post, which reeked of backward Communist China, to Taiwan Post. To save public money and help the economy, the postal service painted the word "Taiwan" over the word "Chung-hwa" instead of producing a batch of new signs.

Tourists in Neiwan, a Hakka village in Hsinchu county, find all basic merchandise waiting for them on this road right outside the railway station.
Whenever they could, my former students in Beijing would do nothing for half a year while waiting for an overseas grad school application to come through. After the paperwork had been filed, fees paid and tests taken, they'd wait a couple of months for admission offers. Once they had accepted an offer, they waited a few more months for the first semester to start. They'd live with parents, happily jobless, because their parents didnt want them to work too hard as their ancestors did and simply because they could get away with it in the short haul before classes started.
Looking to Taipei for clues about China's future, I see these former students as pioneers.
As part of the dominant modernism in Taipei, which some of my ex-students' families have also started to enjoy in China, young folk do anything for convenience. They (fellow office workers in my building) take an elevator to go three stories despite clean, well-lit stairwells. They (my language partner, son of family friends, news sources) confess proudly to hating aerobic exercise. They (most local journalists) don't voluntarily socialize with people who look or speak differently than they do, i.e. people who might make them communicate on some level they're not used to. They (co-workers) won't take two steps in the lightest of rain without an umbrella.
Obviously I over-generalize. I know people who work out or enjoy meeting the alien kind. A few realize that a few raindrops on the skin dry up without making anyone sick. But most people I've met are still living out the previous generation's post-poverty dream of enjoying modern convenience to the point of rot. Taiwan was poor into the 1980s. Some Taiwanese argue they still live on meager means. No one wants the next generation to return to the tough agrarian past. "We can all recall the poor past, and no one wants to go there again," a Taipei shopkeeper told me when I asked him in late 2006 about a down-home retro look that had been sneaking into the fashion code.
Nowhere is lazy modernism more obvious than on the road. Roads not move cars and scooters, but also offer free "stopping" (what Americans would call double parking and what bicyclists would call a reckless road hazard). They stop for ready-made boxed meals, betel nut chaws and travel souvenirs. Storefronts and vending stalls line up as close to the road center as legally possible, spurning setbacks or landscaping, to snag passers-by who can stay seated, motor running, while making a purchase. Road clusters occur in urban cores as well as in tourist areas that are suppose to enshrine natural scenery or aboriginal culture.