This is the piece I was working on yesterday. It's not complete, but I think I'll just put up what i have now.

The Zero to Hero Syndrome

I hear complaints about this town every day – the pollution, the traffic, the noise, and the heat. About how houses are poorly designed and built, and how ceilings are too low; tables and chairs are too short. Clothes are cheap in price and quality, yet frustration is high in intensity and frequency. Cabbies are mad, but truckers are the real killers. The food is extraordinary, but you’d better use your own chopsticks. Every foreign dude can tell you his first-hand story about a crazy Taiwanese “xiao jie” (literal meaning is Miss/Ms but now it has a similar meaning to bimbos) who tried to get him to stay by faking pregnancy, claiming self-mutilation, or threatening to get her uncles and cousins to beat him up.

Yet we’re still here. Every morning, we linger along the blur line between reality and illusion until we hear the old man’s monotonous voice through the loudspeaker asking for used appliances. We live the city life, trekking through puddles of sweat and tears to jobs that may not suit our liking but provides a very comfortable living. We reflect, enquire, and delineate the indefinite meaning of our being. We congregate with others like us and surround ourselves with only those we like. We try to replicate old life styles, adding Western flavors to life in East Asia with costly trips to Wellman’s or Dean & Deluca. We replace the bitter after taste of soy sauce with the comforting aroma of oregano and basil leaves.

So why do people stay here? For some, it’s because of their Taiwanese spouses. For many others, it’s the easiness of living here. Generally speaking, English speakers don’t have to do much to earn a decent living ‘cause English is a huge business on this side of the pond. As long as you speak the language, you can easily find yourself making the kind of money that you’d never imagine yourself making back where you came from, especially considering the amount of work you do. Better yet, you don’t even need a glowing resume to back you up. No one questions your credentials or abilities. After all, the general understanding is this: “You’ve been speaking the language your entire life, you must know everything there is to know about the language!” You can teach, or you can write. Heck, you can even become the spokesperson for the biggest electronic dictionary company or have your own travel show on TLC.

It's very simple. What makes it so hard to leave is the fact that non-Taiwanese are different. You don’t need to have blond hair and blue eyes to be different. Once you have been identified as “different” by the Taiwanese, you’re exempt from all social customs and the ever-so-delicate rules of interaction. If you use your different-ness well, you can even get away with breaking traffic laws. One’s attractiveness also takes on a different meaning. Average Joes and plain Janes are hot studs and models in the Asian eye, and the novelty almost never wears off. Even if it did, all you have to do is to move to a smaller town and start all over again.

Why leave?

Leaving, for many, means going back to the harsh reality from which we escaped in the first place.

- to be continued -