Girls gone mild

I’ve often pondered the question: What is it that makes so many people stay in Taiwan, while others stay only a moment here? Especially in regards to girls, my friend list here in Taiwan is obscenely short after living here for almost two years. It includes, my best friend here who is in Taipei and I see once a month if I’m lucky, and umm… end of list. The one other person on my list is flying back home tomorrow after only two short months. It just so happens that I had an instant connection with this person and we spent many nights in my apartment sans-boyfriends sitting around with wine, movies and pajamas. Not that I don’t have other girls that I go out with here, it’s just that these are always group or ‘couples going out’ situations with very little actual girl time. Sometimes it makes me quite depressed.

I remember one close girlfriend here (who left a couple months ago) saying “I’m friends with a lot of people here I’d never be friends with back home.” I’m starting to get what she was saying.

If any of my girlfriends said to me “hey I want to move to Taiwan tomorrow” I would say, “come and move right in with me and my boyfriend!” right away, with no thought involved. Does this mean I’m starved for friendship? Am I lonely here? Does this make me strange? Why aren’t there any girls here I can actually make friends with?

I ponder these questions daily as I ride my scooter down Bo-Ai Rd. toward work. Can I answer it? Well, in case you are a girl moving to Taiwan, I’m going to try. Why is it so hard to find girl friends here? And why do so many girls leave and so few stay?

The first aspect of the question has to do with stereotypes here. There are a lot of foreigners. Many, actually most, are guys. The girls who have been here a long time (more than a year, like me) are generally in couple situations with the potential for regular companionship and a comfortable lifestyle. And if you are single? A high percentage of single foreign guys tend to ‘lean toward’ dating Taiwanese girls. I won’t even go into trying to answer the question of why this is the case because then I’ll really piss someone off! So at the end of the day, if you are a single girl in her 20s, why on earth would you come here, when there is very little relationship potential? I’m not saying this is always the case, there are always exceptions. But by your mid 20s, you’re usually thinking about…gasp…the future. And your fertility and youth only lasts so long so why waste several years of that in Taiwan? With no Chinese language background (or willingness to learn) and no family or friends to lean on, and facing a tough workplace, many girls pack their bags and leave in frustration. There’s a larger expat group in many places including Korea and Japan where you can make a lot more money, so they think after a couple months, why stay? The girls who stay in Taiwan who are not in a couple situation I find generally fall into quite a few different groups. Sometimes they are very outgoing, independent, adventurous and willing to learn Chinese (thus, usually I like to try and make friends with them) or they are very introverted, work-focused and sometimes even close-minded. Others just don’t seem to be easy to make friends with. Maybe after being here several years they pick up on some of the Chinese cultural differences and begin to guard themselves and their personal life more.

Which brings me to the second part of answering this question. Of the girls who stay, why do they stay and why can’t I be friends with them? While if you think about the fact that maybe 75% of those girls have boyfriends here, a lot of the time they are with their boyfriends which leaves little girl time. I personally don’t always want to be with my boyfriend, but not everyone is like that. I find it hard to meet someone I can just sit around in my pajamas and feel comfortable with and just chill out. The other thing might have to do with lifestyle differences. I’m just not a huge party girl, and I don’t really always want to go out to the bar and drink every other day. I want to speak some Chinese, try new things in Taiwan and once in a while, even have an adventure. It’s extremely disappointing to arrive in Taiwan and find out how boring some people are and how unadventurous they are. Therefore, if I don’t really get that vibe from a person usually it ends up being an acquaintance situation. But never a close-friendship. Closed-mindedness and unwillingness to adjust really bothers me, because I just think, why would you be here in the first place? That is on one hand, incredibly judgmental of me, because everyone has their reason and everyone also deals with living here in a different way. Some thrive in opportunity, some coast through their time resolving not to be friends with people who will eventually leave and some simply stay at home and watch TV and some work long hours in jobs they hate with the end goal of paying student loans or buying a house (which if you plan on doing that in Taiwan, bank on about 3-4 years of work to save $20-30,000.)

“So, why don’t you just go out and make friends with some Taiwanese girls? They are super nice right?”

Good question.

A few days ago, a guy friend asked me why I didn’t have many Taiwanese girlfriends. I think in an earlier post I mentioned that the obscene level of cultural differences makes it difficult to cross beyond a certain point of communication. On the surface, it’s possible to have the appearance of a relationship but when that deeper level of communication and cultural sharing can never be achieved, it’s a roadblock. For example, it’s very easy to ask a Taiwanese woman for assistance with any part of daily life, or to show you around or tell you about something. It’s almost their civic duty. But when it comes to just ’shooting the breeze’ it just doesn’t happen. Jokes, sarcasm are lost in translation. I have many Taiwanese girl acquaintances, but no Taiwanese-raised close girl friends. I don’t want to turn girls off coming here, because frankly I think it’s awesome. But there is a harsh reality here that is hard to understand at first and you gotta be willing to stick it out at times. Or, maybe I am making too much of this and I just need to try harder.

~ by globalciti on March 17, 2009.