noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

It took a while to put together this photojournal of our trip, but here it is, written in photos and comments:

PART 1 - Taipei

PART 2 - Tainan

I learned something very deep about the Taiwanese people during this trip, something that I always suspected in the back of my mind, but when I realized it became pervasive everywhere I looked there.

The Taiwanese are some of the most resourceful people I've met. That is not to say they are practical, logical, or expedient. That is also not to say they can't be wasteful, or excessive. No, they manage to be all of those, and yet still resourceful, with an aplomb that is sometimes both embarassing, and yet charming for ABCs like me (american born chinese).

They are able to find a use in anything, to coop the last iota of utility, intention, even style, taste, or sentiment. You will see a populace obsessed with name brand goods stack them unceremoniously on their body, judging fashion not by the gestalt but by the individual articles of clothing, no matter how gaudily they're assembled. You will see the disembodied head of a beautifully painted mannequin decorate a stack of lumber as if lipstick on the pig did the trick... and yet for them it does.

Many Taiwanese households are utterly infested with items that they insist are useful, be they pens unused in years, disintegrating beta max tapes, or some toy or bowl or cardboard box that hasn't entirely rotted away. They are magpies, they are infinitely matter-of-fact about things. They are democratic to a fault.

As I left the island, I was struck by how little vandalism I saw. Sure, there was plenty of other crime, but it seemed suspiciously lacking in vandalism. I don't think even the scoundrels can stand to see something have its value defaced for no good reason. To the Taiwanese, it simply doesn't make sense. I admire that communal sense of survivorship. And while not creative in the ways I'd boast that Americans are, they can appropriate anything to their lives without fear of disdain. For all the stress and political turmoil on the island, they can, more than almost any in the world, carve a comfortable niche for themselves in a place the Portuguese named Formosa, meaning "beautiful." And if I lived in a place so beautiful, I think I too wouldn't have a care in the world for modern pretenses.

Curiously, that beauty is literally worldwide... the antipode to Taiwan (should you cross through the center of the earth to the other side) is a little Spanish-founded city in Argentina, also called Formosa.

It's been a hectic week here as we fumble over ourselves to entertain Xstine's two sisters. We're trying to strategically hit a representative sample of restaurants and locales for them, so I haven't been able to post much. However, I wanted to share something utterly insane... a PS2 game called Giant Babe. And how. Considering their other titles include winners like Maids Uniforms and Machine Guns, I expect their echelon of game design to revolutionize the world.

It's been a long week for us, and it continues in fashion. Xstine's dad is in town, and we are obliged to keep him and her newly MBA-minted lil sister occupied with the diverse exotic that is the Cali americana. It was quite a challenge to balance their distaste for American prices with their desire for American products, but such contradictory stances are common in the Asian tourist.

In fact, after a night of supping them with fresh caught Half Moon Bay crab, we went late into the nite trying to explain to Xstine's sister the intricacies of Western sarcasm, which for us is a both a style of humor, and also a social tool to introduce potentially socially inappropriate subjects by being literal and rhetorical at the same time. If that sounds confusing, then you must not be American. See? Admittedly that bit of sarcasm comes across poorly on the internet, but it is almost culturally absent from Asia. Her sister's stories of improprieties towards her by us residents often underlined cultural misunderstanding more than actual insult.

I found it funny that while we still could not convince her that the ABC she was dating wasn't necessarily wrong to respond to her comments about Taiwanese girls trying to hook a citizenship through ABCs here with a sarcastic "well what are your intentions then," she hammered in a day's end irony by stating she didn't like the guy anyways, and dated him just to learn English. The Chinese tend to speak very directly about their feelings, or not at all. Rarely do they use jokes as a way to accomodate dissidents. We experienced that once with a Romanian friend as well, whom we didn't know it was inappropriate to rib poke with more risque ribaldry. Perhaps as an ABC myself, I see nothing wrong with what he said, nor find it rude not to want to divulge details about how much I earn, what my parents do, etc. on a girl I may stereotype as golddigful. Unlike FOBs, I won't introduce what my parents do before introducing myself.

How whimsical is other peoples' etiquette!


We'll be busy with Dungeons & Dragons Online and my new remastered Aeon Flux DVD set until the typhoon passes.

Photo albums for DanShui and YieLiu are up, which are pictures we took when traveling with Xstine's dad. He lives in a very tasteful sky-rise apartment in DanShui, which appeared to me to be an area with a higher income or living standard in certain areas. Outside the clusterfuck of Taipei, I guess there are many places like this.

The meeting with Xstine's parents was an interesting experience. Generally speaking, I've always been very comfortable with other people's parents. I give credit to my parents, who traditionalism meant weekly formalities greeting meeting seeing every who's who's who remotely distantly related to any friends and family. While I never learned the Chinese names for the brother of an uncle of a friend's mother, I did gain an acute understanding of Chinese etiquette and the concept of "filial piety" that the Chinese term "xiaoshuen." The term is more dreaded among Chinese scions than you could imagine.

What I noticed first off the plane was that her dad gave me a more familiar handshake, a lengthy one. Our custom here leans towards a firm and brisk shake, rather than a a long grasp, so I can say that was the only facet of the meeting that threw me off. He was an experienced and worldy business man, however, and after the initial reservation grew very warm when talking about things he was proud of, and things he disliked. I was appreciative that he was so observant of way the Asian civilization had changed, customs had mutated, and while one could hardly expect him (or my parents for that matter) to be happy about Xstine and I living together without declaring marriage intent, he was very aware of it being a superior method for marriage retainment. Last week's Economist showed how the divorce rate decreased as marriages happened later and couple lived longer before making the big step. Social disapproval of this important courtship period has contributed to a society more conservative than the American society, and yet with an similar percentage of divorces.

Other than that, we talked mostly about China, Taiwan, and stocks (of which he was earned an understanding of which most of Taiwan, being mere speculative gamblers, do not have). Like my Uncle William, I've realized that worldy business men have a more balanced view to preach despite what they practice. It is a tremendous step away from the world view of my Grampa's generation, where all white men are to be feared and China will be a rising dragon to dominate the world because of its 10,000 year history, and into a more courageous light that accept there is much to learn from gaijins.

I'd like to reference Kishore Mahbubani's excellent book Can Asian's Think? that offers clarity in the debate to rectify the Eastern and Western perspectives. His argument for the East to accept responsibility for its lagging development vis a vis its Western counterparts, and not blame the West for tangible but exaggerated and irrelevant past transgressions, seems to glimmer brighter and brighter behind each successive generation. He hopes, as I do, that a day when the East embraces, not contrapositions but its idealogical differences, will a synergy between formed, for it and us, for me and them. In short, I can see where Xstine gets her lovable skepticism for anachrononisms anonymous.

Nerd par excellence Sirlin, the man who can never stop telling us about the life lessons he learned form being a pro Street Fighter 2 player, and the creator of a site about game design, always gets on my nerves. But usually, he's got a seed of truth sequestered in his geekspeak, and this rant about WoW is, for the most part, summary of why we quit.

Let's not talk about the lowest depths of hell each soul logs in to delight in on the PvP servers, the torture and abject disregard for life and decency of the weaker player. Honor system... what a fuckin' euphemism for wholesale slaughter. Let's talk about why it exists. It exists because Blizzard has set an example for arbitrary rules. This is ok, this is not, that is not, that is ok. Sirlin is exactly right in that their abuse of their own ToS has left a culture that respects no boundaries, except those profitted from and still under the radar.

In a sense, this form of control has yielded Blizzard a co-conspiring consumer, complacently paying away and assuming fault when their flawful system offers yet another exploit. Xstine and I dealt with this since beta, and we learned that there is no which way about it. It's completely at Blizzard's behest.


Which brings me to this picture. And ones like it.

Having lately read Dogs and Demons, I felt that, despite the book's failings, it is essentially correct. The Japanese society too is held in a thrall of social control so cleverly surreptitious that it permeates every level of the ladder. When asked at a job interview what he would do to improve the company, one applicant responded immediately by saying "Goodday" and being polite to all.

Like World of Warcraft, arbitrary rules have become culture. The Tea Ceremony, once a simple and spontaneously hallowed ceremony, was turned into a veritable manufacturing process post-WWII. And taking the way it is today as "tradition," no one is able to deviate from a cultural paint-by-numbers given to the people by the state. Same goes for flower arrangement, today an ugly cyborg completely devoid of the awe of nature it once had.

And just like WoW, there is a need for an outlet. When I looked around Gadgetzan, I saw Nanking. In Japan, where everyday every hour every moment you are stapling your life and hopes to your work or your study, tossing away personal achievement in their world of kamikaze sacrifice, your identity warps. In WoW you see unbridled violence, often the dishonorable repeat killing of the same person by the same hunting party to the point where the person logs out, resolving to do the same when he is empowered one day. I was shocked at the things I did in-game, having considered myself a chivalrous gamer. In Japan, violence and perversion is enacted in hentai, love motels, the streets of Shinjuku, the noise scene.

It's funny that we embrace Japan in the West as "hardcore." We think of them as extreme, pushing the limits for all cultures. We don't see a school system that abandons all but the highest scoring, condemning unsatisfactory detritus to a shameful future. The "world's most advanced educational system" in which you study more and make less progress? In Japan, talent is defined differently than America: it is the ability to get along with others. The ability to conform. Women in particular are disposable, becoming housewives, eschewing the path their education suggested. We don't see a workforce that has words describing "death by work exhaustion." We see their lone company of creativity, Nintendo, and then ignore the lack of imagination that led to a befuddling collapse in economy.

We've confused their outlet with their strength.

At the entrance to Onyxia, my first raid, I realized what stupidity it was to have waited for two hours for forty idiots to assemble and be wiped within an hour. I realized that moment that WoW was headed in a direction that would never recognize the feats of one person outside its unspoken rulesets. I realized that if my raid had survived, I wouldn't have been any more satisfied, as Blizzard would continue to heap more hitpoints on more lowpoly models for bigger and bigger player mobocracies to attempt an extraction of fame. I realized that anime's lure was addictively drawn glistening eyes and intricate robots, and permutations thereof, which after a certain volume, began to insult my intelligence. I have not yet regretted leaving Azeroth, for it lies in the hands of confused, fate-wrought masses, much like Japan.