Who returns the foreigner nod?
7 groups of non-Taiwanese you meet in Taiwan
There are a lot of whitefaces in Taiwan.
At least 95% of the local population claims Han Chinese ancestry, but it doesn’t take much to find Yanks, Brits, Canucks, Aussies, Euros, and so on, particularly if you know which pockets and crevices of the island to venture into.
I lived in Taipei for 13-plus years and ran across 7 different batches of non-Taiwanese:
1. Expatriate businesspeople and officials
They work in Taiwan for 2 or 3 years, just long enough to move up the ladder within their global corporation or to complete their government posting.
Their kids go to international schools and play soccer on the weekends, with Mom making weekday trips to Costco.
They replicate, best they can, the life they lived in the suburbs of Chicago or Copenhagen, with the added bonus of a live-in nanny, a cleaner coming once a week, and, maybe, a house with a beautiful view and a pool in the mountains above Taipei.
2. Men who go full Chinese
At the opposite end of the foreigner spectrum are the Sinophiles.
Though Taiwan has its own, distinct way of life, different from mainland China, there are still elements of Chinese culture within Taiwan.
There are foreign men who love that culture.
I knew an American who lived in Taiwan for decades. He moved all over the island, was fluent in Mandarin, did tea ceremonies, wore Tang suits, and wrote calligraphy.
Minus leading a revolt, he was the T. E. Lawrence of Taiwan.
It is hard to spot these men because they tend to hang out with locals only though.
3. Teachers
My people.
Despite repeatedly telling family and friends in Canada that I taught at private schools in Taiwan - including one that offered the International Baccalaureate (IB) program - most of them were certain I taught English as a second language (ESL) in Thailand.
They had visions of me lounging on a tropical beach, cold beer in hand, when I actually lived in the earthquake-prone, perma-humid, concrete maze of Taipei.
Unless you were sent by your company or your country, nearly every foreigner who comes to Taiwan teaches ESL at some point.
Being an ESL teacher is a fun and low-responsibility lifestyle for foreign men.
Get a scooter, a local girlfriend, and drink your face off any night of the week.
Leave your job at an ESL school whenever you want because there are always jobs at other ESL schools.
Maybe you even manage to scrounge together enough cash with your boys to rent a beach-side spot each weekend and barbecue with the crew.
The main problem with this hedonistic lifestyle is that guys get trapped in it and never escape, like Peter Pan in Neverland.
It’s kind of expected that a 24-year-old will lead this type of existence, but very sad when it’s a 57-year-old graying divorcee, with kids, still trying to run with the wolves.
Then there are the strivers.
These teachers figure out that bouncing around ESL schools is a professional dead end, with the same set of problems on repeat, so they grow up and make the jump to a public or private school.
Maybe they do an online teaching certification or, like me, return to their home country for a year of in-person teacher training.
The next level strivers lock their eyes onto the international school circuit and teaching in countries throughout Asia and Europe as a route to way more bank.
4. Business-owning Westerners
Usually men, they come to Taiwan on a whim, teach some ESL, and marry a local.
They tend to be disagreeable, hardworking types who don’t want anyone, especially the Taiwanese owner of an ESL school, telling them what to do.
So, they open their own business.
Most Westerners have to partner with a local to start a business (that’s where the Taiwanese wife is useful) to get permits and licenses and to have someone who can read official documentation and communicate with the government.
Most of these men open a restaurant or… their own ESL school.
5. Missionaries
I met regular missionaries who daylit as teachers, and they were well-meaning folk, though Taiwan, for some reason, does attract its share of fringy Christians.
I liked the Mormons.
They wore matching bicycle helmets, tucked-in white collared short-sleeved shirts, and gray trousers, plying the scooter-filled streets on fat-tired mountain bikes.
I didn’t mind talking to them, always curious to hear their sales pitch and to be handed some wild pamphlet I could read later on the toilet.
These young men from Utah were electrified at the prospect of talking pro football or basketball with a fellow whitey for a few minutes.
6. Young people studying Mandarin
I was always jealous of these guys and gals.
They were, somehow, both calm and cocky, as if the sounds they made with their mouths were wholly natural and the way God intended them to be, blonde-haired women or fit men with beards talking Chinese at a table full of locals their own age.
Rightly so, they made me ashamed, too.
These college-aged students had put in 6 months or a year of dedicated study to properly learn the language, while I had been in Taiwan a decade-plus and only had a smattering of words. My daughter was embarrassed when I tried to say, “Thank you" in Mandarin to her school crossing guard and squeezed my hand sharply as we walked by.
Thankfully, for my ego’s sake, I didn’t encounter these young people too often, as they congregated in the winding neighborhood alleys near the university they attended.
7. Seasonal ABCs
American-born Chinese (ABCs) make their yearly appearance in Taipei during the 3 weeks or so around Christmas holidays. You might see a smaller cohort of them in May, once their university has let out for the summer.
The platypus of Asians, no one knows how to categorize ABCs in Taiwan.
As soon as they open their mouths, locals know ABCs aren’t like them and the older generation of Taiwanese can be direct and harsh, criticizing them for their limited language ability or informing them that they are lazy or haven’t been educated properly (most Taiwanese place high value on formal, academic education).
On the surface, ABCs kind of look like every other person on the island.
Yet even from a distance, there is some difference between ABCs and Taiwanese, something in the way they walk, their clothes, their hairstyles, that mark them as dissimilar, particularly the ABC men.
ABC men look sturdy, put-together, and stride with purpose, while their Taiwanese cousins often appear either bloated and out of shape or waifish and exhausted, like a curt breeze will sweep them up beyond the stratosphere.
The foreigner nod
It’s simple.
As you walk past a fellow foreigner in Taiwan, if it’s just you and that person on an uncrowded street, you make eye contact and nod once.
If you’re feeling especially social, you might even smile, throw out a “Hello.”
That’s it.
I like the foreigner nod.
I like that it is an efficient way to acknowledge someone, a way to say, “I see you.”
Of course, there were foreigners who didn’t return my nod.
I get it.
Why should we make eye contact with each other and mouth, “Hi.” Just because we’re both from Western countries?
We wouldn’t nod at each other on a subway in Berlin or when passing in Toronto.
But the best part of the foreigner nod was giving one out, seeing if it was returned, then trying to guess what group of non-Taiwanese that person belonged to, based entirely off that one, tiny interaction.