This has lingered in my mind since day two in Taipei, yet I’ve been too lazy to write about it. But as my friend K pointed out, this event bears a pedagogical lesson, so I decided to share it with my friends and acquaintances. If you don’t want to read the long prelude, skip to IV.
I. Background
My ex-dormmate D majored in Chinese. We weren’t close back then, but we got closer as we chatted about his worldview on the Messenger. Fast-forward to last spring, he came to visit me. He told me how his views have matured. He had been deeply into postmodern Critical Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Black anarchism, but he realized they harbor serious errors and moved on from them. Yet, one thing hadn’t changed: He still bore much frustration toward the United States and was preparing to move to Taiwan. He remarked, “You see, all the smart people have moved out of the United States!”
II. Incident
Shortly before I traveled to Taiwan, I chatted with D on Messenger. He told me that living abroad made him appreciate his home country, and he can’t wait to move back. I told him I was glad that his view had grown multidimensional, as it should after living abroad. While the U.S. has many problems, it also has many strengths. For example, few countries are as racially diverse as the U.S., and I see that as a strength, albeit with some challenges (and note that I didn’t say “ethnically” because many EU and ASEAN countries are ethnically diverse). So, it’s important to keep tackling problems while promoting strengths, instead of being a defeatist. He enthusiastically clicked the love emoji when I said these.
He happened to live two minutes away from my hostel, so I met him on the first day in Taipei. As soon as we met, he spewed out endless complaints about Taiwan and East Asia in general. As a Black person with really dark skin, he had trouble finding an apartment when he arrived; people on TikTok were mocking how bad his Chinese was; people stared at him at local restaurants. So a month after his arrival, he stopped getting out of his apartment, except when picking up food. He works remotely for a U.S. company, so this was the end of social life in Taipei.
Racism is hurtful, and all the racist incidents he experienced were supposedly real, so I tried to empathize with him. But as I did so, he was becoming more and more shamelessly racist. Here are some of the many things he said: 1. He has only met two people in Taiwan who care about race, and they’re not Taiwanese. Not a single Taiwanese person cares about racial minorities. 2. It’s doubtful that we can call Taiwan, Japan, or Korea “democratic” because Black and Southeast Asians are discriminated against. These nations should be considered tyrannical. 3. All the foreigners who live in East Asia (C/J/K/T) are either complacent White dudes or those who have zero sense of self-worth because living in East Asia is that bad. 4. The U.S. should ban all East Asians from moving until East Asians fix their racist shit because he doesn’t want to live on the same soil as these people. I rebutted his points one by one without denying the presence of racism, but it seemed like he listened only to the part he wanted to hear: That racism exists in East Asia.
The following day, when he figured I was having a good time in Taiwan without him, he tried to guilt-trip me by saying how unfair it was. I, a foreigner just like him, had a good time in Taiwan simply because I was East Asian. East Asians, after all, are racist. I told him, as an East Asian, I wouldn’t expect to blend into a bunch of Italians as readily as Spaniards. Whether you can blend in easily or not, in this case, isn’t about fairness. It’s about familiarity. The morning after this conversation, he sent me an article about how one branch of McDonald’s in China turned away a black person, saying, “These are your people.” I told him that I could empathize with his experience, but I wouldn’t sit down and take racism against East Asians even as a joke. Laypeople in East Asia are relatively new to the concept of race, so they are still wrapping their heads around it. But many are trying, and he should look for like-minded people in Taipei. He was offended by this statement, so he blocked me after saying, “This is not a joke, and your people export racism to the world. I want all your people banned from the U.S.” Again, he was a Chinese major, spent his junior year as an exchange student at Zhejiang University, and loved his major.
III. My observations
There are several things clear about this incident. First, he’s not a sharp thinker, and he was further blinded by anger after the initial bad incidents in Taipei. Second, he had always had a victim mentality. By saying “victim mentality,” I’m not denying the existence of racism in the U.S., East Asia, or any other parts of the world. But his thoughts often went quite extreme. When he was living in NYC, he said he always jumped the turnstile because he’s Black. White people brutalized Black people, and the subway was built by White people. While D claimed that his view had matured, he simply shifted the aggressor from the White people to East Asian people.
But when I talked to my friend K, he pointed out one aspect I had ignored. At Da’an Park, D said he had always thought East Asian countries had a gracious culture with humble people. And I know how he was deeply influenced by a Chinese literature professor. While I do not know her in person, I presume her classes were well-organized, her teaching was charismatic, and the reading materials were captivating so that he grew admiration toward the Chinese—and more broadly East Asian—culture. So, living in Taipei to him was like suffering from Paris Syndrome (パリ症候群), the infamous syndrome many Japanese people experienced upon visiting Paris when it had such a high cultural currency in Japan. To D and the Paris Syndrome sufferers, these cities were not what they expected. They were places where actual people lived, exhibiting beauty and ugliness alike. And the severe disappointment turned into denial, extreme anger, derealization, anxiety, victimization, depression, and so on (To clarify, D said that he had been in the academic bubble while in Hangzhou, so he had never interacted with “real” locals back then. This was his first time “actually living” in East Asia).
IV. My request to my professor and Ph.D. friends who (are planning to) teach
So here’s what I learned from this incident. Let’s say you’re organizing a course about philosophy or literature from a specific region. Let’s also say that you’re planning to do a close reading of texts rather than discussing the social and political implications of the ideas. I request that you, for the love of your students and the respect of the place, still allot a session or even a half session to discuss the (ir)relevance of the ideas in a real-life setting. If you truly don’t have time, you can leave questions at the end of the last class so that the students can realize, and hopefully think about, the dissonance between the ideas in literary or philosophical canons and the place of origin.
For example, if the course’s theme is pre-Han Chinese philosophy, you can ask about Mengzi’s idea about the political revolution of the people. Does this idea hold any currency in contemporary China, politically and socially? Or is it not as black-and-white as this question? Where would disagreement or complications stem from? You can ask the same questions with the ideas in post-war Japanese literature, Korean neo-Confucianism, and so forth. If you have more time, you can also compare the country to the students’ home country. Do we have similar ideas in our literary or philosophical canons? Do we live by these ideas in our society now? After all, when a big group of people do not homogenously live by certain virtues or utility, it mostly isn’t because they’re evil or stupid. And discussing the students’ own countries serves as a good reminder of this.
Sure, this might seem unnecessary because it should be obvious. To us, who are older and possibly have lived abroad, it’s absurd to conclude that an entire country or region is gracious, courageous, pessimistic, sensual, etc., simply because the literary or philosophical works introduced in the course are as such. But your students are mostly in their late teens and early twenties, and some have never lived outside their home states before coming to a university. In addition, they are highly impressionable and often lack the breadth of thoughts, so doing a great job at teaching can leave them with a deep impression in both good and bad ways. The “good” way is self-explanatory. The “bad” way goes like this: You did such a charismatic job presenting benevolence (仁) in Confucianism so that your students are engrossed in this idea. Somehow, like D, they start to form fantasies about the countries where “仁” originates or circulates. After all, they often talk about “仁” in their politics and social values, so their culture must be gracious and benevolent, right?
Moreover, like D, more and more young people are frantically looking for greener grass because they’re frustrated by politics within. And without much patience, they form a fantasy about another society as a mode of evasion. In the U.S., the trend among young people has been forming a fantasy about countries that are “not White.” As an educator, it is critical to help them think critically rather than getting stuck in this erroneous thought. This would serve three parties: 1. the home country, which is being inaccurately compared to a fantasy la-la land. 2. the student, who would become miserable everywhere because nowhere is the grass perfectly green. 3. The country that is becoming an object of fantasy (and might become the object of hatred). I swear, if educators did this, we would have fewer crappy pseud0-academic monographs about yin and yang and contemporary Asian cultures.
V. Appendix
This incident made me think about the CCP’s grand plan to present China as a harmonious society. If it fails, then it fails. But in some alternate universe, the CCP convinces the citizens of the world that China is far more harmonious than any liberal democratic nation. With high hopes, young people move to China… only to find out that China’s just another place where humans live with some acute shortcomings. Can you feel the resentment and disappointment these people would harbor against China, creating hundreds and thousands of D? When the day comes, we’ll hear young Parisiens scream, “Putain, Pékin. J’ai le syndrome de Pékin!”
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