"Other People, not me..."

The narratives that we tell ourselves never cease to amaze me.  There appears to be a disconnect between the experiences of the self and the experiences of others.  During this past year I have been consistently confronted with two canned stories in particular that, despite their constant repetition, still get told as if this time it will somehow be unique.

I have read a few articles online about the current state of economic affairs in the USA. As well as hearing some first hand accounts from people back home or from people who have chosen to run away from it (i.e. show up here in Asia looking for work). Among the many bewildering claims that people have made there is one meme in particular that strikes me as disappointing...

It’s the average people stories; specifically  the articles that interview the previously hardworking average citizen that is now forced onto welfare/food stamps. The interviewees tell the tragic tale of how this came to be and then, without fail, they make a point of letting everyone know that they are not like "those other people" on public assistance who are lazy and just want to milk the system.  No, the interviewee just fell on some bad luck and needs a little help right now, but in general, they are still against public assistance and think people should go out and get a job.

Well, if people should go out and get a job, then what is their problem? Why don’t they go out and get a job? Oh wait, that’s right, they just fell on some hard times and need a little help, but that obviously can’t be true of anyone else during these glorious of plenty.

The second narrative concerns the stories that foreigners in Taiwan tell about each other (read: themselves).  Foreigners here often claim that most foreigners come to Asia for a set of standard reasons:

1. They have no marketable skills and can’t get a job back home.

2. They are weird and cannot fit in socially back home.

3. They have a bad case of "yellow fever." (A strong attraction to Asian women due to orientalization. Many claim it is partially caused by an inability to attract women back home, thus leaving the men no choice but to rely on their own exoticism as foreigners in order to find a mate.)

Most often these memes are repeated in a disparaging manner and are directed towards other foreigners.  Rarely (though it has happened) a foreigner will openly admit that they fit into one of these categories themselves.  In those few cases it is interesting to note that sometimes the list will still be derogatorily directed towards other people.

Leaving aside the issue of yellow fever for a moment, I wonder why it is deemed such a terrible trait to not fit in where one is born? If someone can find happiness living in a foreign land why is that a mark against that individual? - Especially among a group of people who have done just that!

Now, I know.  I have done the obligatory reading on social theory and identity.  I can see what is going on and on one level I do understand it.  What I don’t understand yet, is why we can’t move beyond this selfish narrative. 

Do Taipei Expats = FFXI? Part 3: Temporality and Social Risk

I think it was the lack of a long history of shared experiences with my FFXI guild that accounted for some of the social patterns that I witnessed there. When guildmates arranged meetings with each other they were essentially making arrangements with strangers or very new acquaintances.  Therefore, there were little to no feelings of obligation or any real accountability to encourage people to follow through. Whereas in my WoW guild, there were both obligatory feelings and accountability that could potentially follow a person through the game and beyond.

In Taipei, the vast majority of foreigners I have met fall into just 1 of 2 categories: Chinese language student or English language teacher. The students are mostly here for 1 semester to a year, and the English teachers often sign one year contracts. On occasion someone will stay longer or talk about settling in Taipei permanently, but most often a foreigner’s time here is expected to be temporary. This expectation is reaffirmed frequently in the way in which people talk about “back home.”

The temporary nature of this community then is not unlike the FFXI guild. The guild, being a very new community, lacked deep interpersonal connections. In Taipei there has been an expat community for years, but any one given foreigner is likely to be a new arrival and is not likely to stay. So not only does a foreigner here lack roots, but it is known (or assumed) that they will not stay here to establish roots. This may then explain the lack of a sense of obligation to others in the community and a lack of accountability.  Whatever bad blood may come between two people, the likelihood that either one or both will leave at anytime reduces the social risk to both.

Going back home becomes akin to logging off. At anytime a player can log off and walk away from their computer if they are having a problem. This is not to say that this is how people in my FFXI guild always dealt with their problems, but the possibility existed and was sometimes used. Many of the expats I have met keep just enough money set aside to buy a plane ticket home, thus always having the option to leave. This in turn further supports the temporality of the community. 

Do Taipei Expats = FFXI? Part 2: Foundations and Expectations

The first MMO I ever played was FFXI, and being the newbie that I was, I joined with a social guild that had no hardcore aspirations. Even though this guild was social in nature, people still preferred to team up with guildmates rather than join pugs, and so I would occasionally make plans to be online at a certain time to group with guildmates for whatever particular goal we were all after (usually simple grinding).

I quickly learned, however, that just because someone says they will be online doesn’t mean that they will be. In fact, the act of making plans seemed only marginally more useful than randomly logging on and hoping there would be people available.

This was very different from my next guild experience in WoW, where I joined with a long established group of people (the group was centered on a website and collectively moved from game to game).

In this guild, when someone said they were going to be somewhere it was safe to assume that they would be there. If something unexpected came up to prevent someone’s presence, the group would be informed through one of the various communication channels the guild had available.

Given the differences in these two guilds, I believe that was the deeper level of shared experiences (i.e. the longer history) of the WoW guild that led them to be more socially (and emotionally) interconnected and accountable to each other. This is not to say that the FFXI guild did not have shared experiences, but this particular social group was very young and thus had not yet had enough time to establish strong bonds.

This is not unlike the culture of the Taipei expats that I have met. Granted, I have different expectations of different people, established over time as I get to know them; but it is often the case that if I have plans with someone, the chance of them following through is only marginally better maybe.

Do Taipei Expats = FFXI?

I came to Taiwan under the delusion that I would be (that I should be)spending all of my time with local gamers. That is, after all, what my dissertation is going to be focused on. There were two factors that hindered this goal, however. First, I stayed in a guest house and second, I went to school to study Mandarin. These two factors dominated my early social life in Taipei and both necessarily meant that I was predominantly meeting foreigners.

Interestingly, my first Mandarin teacher often commented on how this was a natural development (and once even suggested a romantic prospect for me) based on the idea that since we were all Americans (we weren’t all Americans, but locals will sometimes, I have noticed, use ‘American’ as synonymous with ‘foreigner’) we all shared a common culture and therefore could more easily relate. What my teacher could not have known was that the expat culture is not the same as the culture back home.

This fact became blatantly obvious to me very shortly after arriving in Taiwan, but it took me sometime to fully digest what this meant. This was in part because it took me sometime to become adequately acculturated, and I needed to do that before I was able to start seeing the differences between people’s actions within this culture and people’s discursive descriptions of this culture.

After I got over the initial novelty of Taiwan, Taiwanese culture, and expat culture, I came to realize that the expat culture here bugged me. It was a partially subconscious annoyance, however, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until I realized that I have been through this before… when I was first being acculturated into the MMO culture of FFXI.

Ok, this blog post is way too long as it is. I’ll flesh this out in the next post.