I am not a big fan of hiking, but I love to take long walks in the city, where I can observe people and see interesting buildings. If I have to go somewhere, I usually go on foot instead of taking the MRT. Yesterday evening, too, I walked from Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei to Xindian.
Before going home I went to Family Mart because I needed toothpaste and milk. While I was looking for the things I wanted to buy I suddenly saw a girl, one of the many girls one sees in Taiwan who will take your breath away. She looked young (I would guess between 18 and 20, but here you never know, she might have been 30, as well). She had a petite, slender body, and long dyed brown hair. Her clothes were simple and reflected the common, and to me inexplicable, Taiwanese habit of wearing winter clothes on the upper body and summer clothes on the lower body.
In fact, she wore a black hooded sweatshirt, which definitely suited yesterday’s cold and windy weather. Below she wore a tiny, really tiny skirt that revealed her gracefully long, slim legs, and high-heeled flip-flops. She was bending over the ice cream compartment, and her skirt was so short I could see a part of her panties.
That girl was so pretty that I just forgot why I had gone to the store in the first place. I began randomly taking stuff off the shelves – a chicken salad, a potato salad, two boiled eggs, a chocolate croissant – none of which I needed. The girl kept standing there, moving gently to the right and to the left, searching for an ice cream. After a few minutes she took one out of the freezer and went to the cashier. I had finished my random purchases and I queued behind her. She asked for a packet of cigarettes. She paid and left. I realised I was buying things I didn’t need, but it was too late to put them back.
In Taipei one sees lots of pretty girls every day, but some of them are just so beautiful one cannot ignore them.
Yet I must think back to the words a netizen wrote a few days ago when that foreign athlete was beaten by a Taiwanese worker on the MRT: “Last time it was also a foreigner (老外) who cursed a bus driver. What a pity that he had the good luck not to bump into such an uncouth worker. PS: This kind of foreigners always have a Taiwanese woman accompanying them.”
The issue of foreign men chasing after Taiwanese females is an old topic that has been discussed many times on the internet. I will come back to it in the future. In this post, I will simply ‘register’ my own personal feelings.
Being a foreigner in Taiwan means that you will hardly make it right. If you like Taiwanese girls, many of whom are not only pretty but dress in such a way that you cannot possibly ignore how pretty they are, you are labelled by some Taiwanese as a foreigner who has come to Taiwan to take advantage of local girls.
If you have a girlfriend, some envious Taiwanese men will think: “He is stealing away our girls, that’s why it’s so hard for me to find one myself.”
If you do not have a girlfriend, though, there will be people trying to set you up with someone. There will be people wondering what’s wrong with you. And there will be girls trying to be with you, whether you like them or not.
For a single male, this can be indeed a schizophrenic and complex environment full of contradictions. The dating issue wouldn’t be so interesting if it did not reveal some interesting characteristics of the specific interaction between foreigners and Taiwanese, and between Taiwanese females and males.
In future posts, I will discuss these issues more in detail.
