How I learned to talk politics with the Taiwanese

When I made plans for my first visit to Taiwan, a friend asked if I needed a visa for that country, then corrected himself. “Is it actually a country? What do I call it?” Despite having lived in Asia for several years by this point, I was a bit ashamed that I didn’t know the answer to that question. Now I realize there was no need for shame – not even the Taiwanese can agree on their status.

Most of us in the West are at least vaguely aware that Taiwan is in limbo, terrified that an outright declaration as an independent country could trigger a war with China, which claims Taiwan as a rogue break-away state that will one day be reclaimed. But it wasn’t until I lived in both China and Taiwan that I really understood the history of this complicated relationship.

The first time I was forced to contemplate the matter in any mindful way was in Shanghai during my first job as an editorial staff member. The magazine was in English with a mostly expat audience. We ran an article on meat-eating habits in China, or something of the sort. What I remember most was the illustration that ran with the piece – a cow with its body sectioned off into its various parts. Instead of being labelled shank, sirloin, chuck, etcetera, they were given names of China’s various provinces.

Every magazine in China is assigned a state “publisher”, which is just a noble euphemism for “censor”. At the last minute before publication of the meat item, our censor noticed that the cow didn’t encompass Taiwan. An amendment was insisted upon.

This incident was regaled for days by the incredulous staff as an example of the most absurd of China’s efforts to include Taiwan in its modern narrative. The joke, of course: What part of the cow could possibly represent islands not attached to the mainland? From what I recall, Taiwan was nonsensically slapped onto the illustration to please the authorities. In the end, though, it rather disparagingly looked like a puffy methane cloud emanating from the cow’s rear.

I had to wonder why this rather trivial matter became a subject of outrage among our mostly Western staff – “How dare they try to claim Taiwan! In our pages!” – considering that there were far more egregious instances of censorship that we gladly swallowed in every issue. I didn’t see the point of getting riled up over having to play along with China’s claim on the region, despite my support for Taiwan’s independence. Let China try to claim Taiwan or Antarctica or Micronesia for all I care. On this file, China has been all talk and no action – and when you look at what action they DO take on other files (jailing and torturing political dissidents, for instance), trying to occupy Taiwan by means of a cartoon cow should have been the least of anyone’s concerns. In fact, such deeds only underscore China’s impotence with regards to Taiwan. While the government in Taipei issues passports, prints its own money, delivers health care and other programs to its citizens, all Beijing can do is draw the island on its maps. China’s failure to govern Taiwan would be less obvious if they didn’t make such a big deal of it, especially when it comes to cartoon animals in English-language magazines. But I digress.

By the outrage that spread through the office, I realized what a strong knee-jerk reaction Westerners are conditioned to when it comes to Taiwan. For those of us foreigners living in China, we gladly didn’t mention “June 4” in public, because I suppose the fallout from the Tiananmen Square sock-hop was an internal housekeeping issue that didn’t affect us directly. But Taiwan – Democracy! Capitalism! – is just too close to our hearts. Growing up during the Cold War in the 1970s, we were habituated to recognizing any country that stood up to Communism as a nation of heroes, even if they were being governed by their own autocratic dictators.

It’s one thing to learn about an issue in classrooms or documentaries, or to understand an argument by reading different viewpoints. But I didn’t have any visceral sense of the situation until I lived in Taiwan for a few months and spoke with friends and their families about how the split from China has affected their lives and relationships with each other.

The Taiwanese are fiercely political and will deluge you with their views if you express even the most remote interest. While those in China will simply echo the standard “Taiwan is ours” rhetoric, the Taiwanese positions are more compelling because they face more complex issues about whether to claim independence, re-join China, or live with the status quo. Let’s put it this way: the Taiwanese are just as biased as the Chinese, but the Taiwanese biases are far more colourful.

Here’s the history in a nutshell: China enters a modern age of sorts in 1912, with the end of dynastic rule. After thousands of years of being governed by emperors, Sun Yat Sen and later Chiang Kai Shek become the country’s first modern presidents. In 1949, When Mao Zedong and the Communists take power in a revolt, Chiang Kai Shek, his military, their families, and thousands of followers flee to Taiwan, where they set up shop as the exiled government of China. The idea is that this displaced government – called the Kuomintang (pronounced Gwo-min-dahng) – will one day rule China again when the Communists are defeated. Both sides – the Kuomintang and the Communists – consider Taiwan territory of China. The only thing they disagree on is who the legitimate government of China is.

But now several generations have passed, and the vast majority of Taiwan’s inhabitants have only known life under their own democratically elected governments. Meanwhile, the Communists only strengthened their grip in China and show no sign of budging.

Flag proposed by Taiwan's
independence movement

Taiwan is now split between two factions. If you speak with Taiwanese who are descendants of those who came to Taiwan under Chiang Kai Shek in 1949, they are more likely to tell you that their ultimate desire is to reunify with China – however, not under Communist rule. If you speak with those ethnic Chinese or aboriginals whose families have been in Taiwan for hundreds of years, they might tell you stories of the interlopers who stole from the inhabitants and distributed the wealth amongst themselves. To some Taiwanese, Chiang Kai Shek is a hero; to others, he was just as bad as Mao.

Time has blurred some of the lines between these divisions. It was easier to take a clear-cut position back when China was isolated behind the Red Curtain and cut off from modern economies. In those days, Taiwan and Japan were the economic giants of Asia. But China is now open and fiercely capitalist, and they've been able to choke off a large portion of Taiwan's economy. As a result, a massive sector of Taiwan’s jobs and factories are flowing towards the mainland. Given China’s population of 1.3 billion to Taiwan’s 23 million, this has made Taiwan a deferential partner in cozy trading relationships with China.

As a result, Taiwanese are more likely to consider the practicality of their vote. Although a majority of Taiwanese today are pro-independence, enough of them are so concerned about jobs and the economy that they will vote for pro-China leaders. “No reason to poke the tiger,” one friend told me. On the other hand, for those who come from pro-unification families, enough time has passed that many of them don’t feel as strongly as their parents do about the issue, and tend to think that independence wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Regardless, divisions still exist, and you still find families whose political leanings run through their blood. One of my closest friends told stories about his family’s land being stolen by Chiang Kai Shek’s men 60 years ago. Yet another friend, this one from a pro-China family, talked about being ostracized in the schoolyard by other children who said he was not a “real Taiwanese.” He told me: “My family came here 100 years ago. Their families came here 400 years ago. So what? We all came from the same place.”

In Taipei, with my ardently pro-independence friend and his father, we watched a movie called Formosa Betrayed (Formosa being the name of Taiwan pre-revolution). It tells the tale of a Taiwanese academic assassinated on American soil to prevent him from completing a book he was writing about Kuomintang atrocities. It’s 1980, and a CIA agent takes his investigation to Taiwan, where he gets drawn into more intrigue and gets a few history lessons literally beaten into him.

My friend and his father paused the movie at various points to add their own anecdotes to the movie’s narrative. “Yes, this is exactly what happened to us under Chiang Kai Shek!” was the gist of their message. The film ends with a closing scrawl: “Because of the events depicted in this film, Taiwan is now a democracy.” My friend teared up a bit and said, “Please show this movie to your friends in Canada so they understand Taiwan.” When I watched the movie later with a Taiwanese friend from a pro-China family, his reaction to the closing scrawl was, “What bullshit!”

What I found delightfully captivating about these types of conversations was that I had never heard my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver speak so passionately and politically. I suppose there was no reason for them to talk shop about their mother country among Canadians like myself. Even when it came to the whole Taiwan/China dispute, it was something that my Chinese and Taiwanese friends seemed indifferent about, at least on the outside. But in Taiwan, it was revealing and somewhat enthralling to witness the political fervour that bubbles on the surface of their daily lives.

There were times when I felt compelled to take a side. Really, though, it was not any of my business as a foreigner, but this is who I am – I like to know a country by planting some roots and embracing as many aspects of local living as possible. That includes understanding the nation’s issues and politics. As the famous phrase goes, “the “personal is political”, and the Taiwanese are a magnificent example of this adage. Understanding a nation’s politics well enough to form an opinion was my way of feeling a sense of belonging and engaging with the country around me, so wherever I lived I'd pick up the paper and start talking about what I read. (Some friends I made in these places admired this penchant; others found it annoying.)

Nowadays, whenever I read an article in the Canadian press about Taiwan, I don’t react with, “Well, that was interesting.” I’m either agreeing or calling “Bullshit!”

The latter category is how I reacted to this article in a Vancouver weekly newspaper. In it, several Taiwanese immigrants to Canada complain about the gutlessness of powerful nations to stand up to China and officially support Taiwan independence. Reading their statements, I was reminded of something one friend in Taipei told me. When I talked about how my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver seemed so different from the Taiwanese in Taiwan, his explanation was that those who leave to hold foreign passports are more inclined to lay low in a safe haven until the dust settles in their homeland. This means being apolitical and a little bit "disloyal to the cause," or so I was told. So when I read these types of comments from Taiwanese Canadians, such as that Taiwan is “virtually an orphan, and this goes on because all the strong nations tolerate that,” I can’t help but think that it’s not just strong nations that are to blame – you could also say that those who abandoned the cause and fled Taiwan are just as culpable.

Many Taiwanese, such as those quoted in the aforementioned article, want the powerful countries of the world to cut ties with China in support of Taiwan. They want our governments to officially open embassies in Taipei, and our businesses to stop trading with the world’s second-largest economy in favour of the nineteenth largest. This is hypocritical, though, since Taiwan itself has formed many rewarding trade agreements with China, and they've done so with the backing of the people – the ruling Kuomintang party has won two elections in a row on a pro-China platform. Even the pro-independence party, the Democratic Progressive Party, softened its stance toward China to win two elections in 2000 and 2004. Why wouldn’t the DPP declare independence, despite that being their raison d'être? As one friend put it, nobody wanted them to “poke the tiger”.

This is where both sides of the Taiwan/China argument ring hollow. I don’t fault the Taiwanese for being cautious with regard to China. But they must also live with the fact that their approach leaves them open to being claimed by a more powerful country, and currently that’s China. If the Taiwanese want other nations to poke the tiger, they must poke the tiger first and make a clear declaration for the rest of the world to rally behind. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy – China’s official position is to attack Taiwan if it tries to secede (I don’t think it would come to that, but who really wants to find out the hard way?). It’s ludicrous, however, to ask other nations to antagonize China while Taiwan continues to profit from their own cozy relationship with the tiger.

Beijing itself is just as full of hot air. If Taiwan belongs to them, then why don’t they send their bureaucrats there to collect taxes, issue passports, supervise the military, print money, and plant their flag on every government building? A country is defined by its ability to control its borders, service its armed forces, and provide for its people. Beijing is unable to do any of these things in Taiwan. So how can they claim it as their territory?

I think it’s inevitable that Taiwan will be forced to re-join China at some point in the near future. Not through hostile means, but economic ones. The more reliant Taiwan becomes on China and its market, the more influence and power China will have in Taiwan’s affairs. Taiwan is already in China’s tentacles, and the merger will be a slow and gradual one. (But I’m also naively optimistic that China will transform over time and adopt some characteristics of a democracy, which would only encourage the reunification.)

For those reasons, I’m uncertain how I’d feel if I were a Taiwanese citizen with a real stake in the game, not just an opinionated foreigner. I would certainly be pro-independence, but I wonder how hard and how loudly I’d fight for it. As much as I’d fear getting too close to China, I’d have the same basic concern about my job and living standard, not to mention a potential war. Although I like to think the personal is political, the modern corollary to that saying should be, “... and the political is monetary”. As governments the world over are taking on more characteristics of being business managers while letting the free market chip away at our social programs, the day may soon come when it doesn’t matter which country we’re a part of. As for China, they're taking a very business-like approach to Taiwan: instead of attacking, they're simply buying them out.

For a better grasp on Taiwan's political realities, this article by Canadian historian Gwynne Dyer, posted just after Taiwan's 2012 presidential elections, gives a succinct and modern perspective on the thinking behind their current relationship with China. 

The meaning of citizenship

I was an editor between 2009 and 2010 for a small magazine aimed at Westerners living in Singapore. Given that it was a lifestyle magazine whose goal was for readers to “join your mates” for “fun, friendship, sports, community,” my editor’s letters were not cerebral critiques. I tried to keep it light, but once in a while a bit of cynicism would seep out. On this occasion, I addressed something that was on the tongues of the expat community for about a week or so. I was expecting a rebuke from the publisher – “Readers would be offended by your stance, this isn't what we're about,” or something like that. But my article was printed and it passed in silence. However, the next month’s December editorial was almost pulled because I said I was indifferent to Christmas. Go figure.

~~~~~~~~~

Is the editor ready to take citizenship?

The government set a few tempers alight when it announced that it would be requiring many Permanent Residents to take up citizenship or risk not having their PR status renewed. Letters flew to the daily papers, and not one PR-holder I knew wasn’t at least a little upset. One correspondent to Today newspaper’s letters section summed up much of what I heard. Peter Wadeley wrote that he has a Singaporean wife and two children, one of whom he said would one day be doing his National Service. But no matter. Even though Singapore is his “home country”, he stated that he "does not feel Singaporean" enough to take citizenship.

That makes me curious. Why not? Well, I can understand. I have been here for three years, and the longer I stay, the more apparent it becomes that Singaporeans in general will never accept a Caucasian as a true-blooded local. I can imagine Mr Wadeley’s son will one day complete his National Service and perhaps speak fluent Mandarin, but will forever be seen as an “expat”. One mixed-race friend of mine, a local citizen who looks Chinese but has a British surname, is often chided by cabbies when they arrive at his call expecting a white guy: “Aiya, you not Singaporean, lah!”

But I can see the other side of the issue. Back in our own countries, those who land on our shores have to abide by strict immigration laws, and are usually given a “love it or leave it” response if they complain about the rules and responsibilities they must comply with. So I can imagine the kind of affront Singaporeans might feel when we prosper from their country’s resources and lifestyle, and then turn around and say that citizenship in their nation is simply inferior to ours.

The unspoken truth is that we want the de facto benefits of dual citizenship. We want the jobs, low taxes and standard of living offered by Singapore, while keeping our birth citizenship as a safety net “just in case.” We want the free (or heavily subsidised) health care offered in most of our countries in case we take seriously ill, and the government pensions due to us upon retirement, and so on. Fair enough.

But so long as we fight to hang on to the best of both worlds, we should accept that this gives our host country the right to define the terms of our stay. Personally, I am unsure that I would become a Singapore national so long as dual citizenship is forbidden. But if citizenship were offered to me, I would feel honoured, not angry, and it is something I would not refuse lightly. Living abroad has helped me appreciate the true meaning of citizenship and the responsibilities of belonging to a country – whether that is here in Singapore or the land that issued my passport.

Note: Two years later, Singaporeans would be forming mass rallies in Hong Lim Park to protest against the influx of foreigners to their homeland. One of their key grievances was related to expats dipping into Singapore's wealth and benefits without having to take part in National Service. 

Beggars, choosers, and the new media

I just finished reading a piece in The Globe and Mail by an unemployed graphic designer who is now on welfare and struggling to regain her dignity. "Curious, powerful, capable; pushed down, scolded, reduced," is how she summarizes her current state.

The pathetic irony of this article is that The Globe and Mail, a highly profitable newspaper jointly owned by Canada's wealthiest family (the Thomsons) and the BCE conglomerate, states in its essay guide, linked at the top of this woman's article: "There is no payment if your essay is published."

And there you have it. A media professional whose job was outsourced to India, a single mother on welfare, writes about her plight in Canada's newspaper of record, which does not pay her a cent for her work. Thus continues the cycle of this "curious, powerful, capable" professional being "pushed down, scolded, reduced."

This practice is not unique to The Globe and Mail, though. The paper is only adhering to current market rates for talent, which is zero. It never used to be this way. Blame the internet, I suppose.

I was first exposed to this practice while working as a magazine editor in Singapore. I thought it was abhorrent, but at the time I thought it was just the ethics of media in that region of the world, and I'd have to suck it up until I returned to Canada. The first time I was asked to solicit contributions for our magazine while offering no compensation, I was mortified. I countered to our publisher that no half-decent writer would contribute a travel article or a personal story without being given at least a token payment. And even if they did, I simply had a problem with the ethics of being an editor for a lucrative magazine and not even offering a token honorarium, especially when we're the ones asking for the work.

But what did I know? The publisher informed me that this was the way it had been done since long before I arrived, and she wasn't about to submit to my idealism. As it turned out, my call for submissions yielded a small flood of decently written pieces. What was in it for the writers? The chance to see their names in print and show it off to friends. That was enough.

When I took sole editorship of the company's travel guide that year, a huge chunk of it was made possible not only by generous writers, but by semi-professional photographers who were happy to donate their work. When I needed, say, a photo of an impecunious little girl selling postcards in a Cambodian market (to go along with a story that one of our scribes had related), Flickr came to the rescue when our own stock photo sources failed to deliver. In every such case, I would contact the owner of the photos for permission, and to my surprise, they were always (with one exception) enthusiastic and thrilled. I would offer a free copy of the magazine as compensation.

The irony is that the "old media" (printed magazines) that we were publishing would not have been possible without the advent of "new media". Digital cameras made it possible for our writers to take their own quality photos while on assignments. The internet made it easy to solicit writers who were happy to get exposure for no pay. Blogs also made it simple for good writers to make themselves known to us, who didn't want to get caught up with sticky matters like invoices and cheques. Google and Wikipedia made it easy to check facts and perform research in a matter of seconds or minutes, whereas such tasks would have once required a trip to the library. And while we paid our graphic designers, technology like Adobe InDesign made it easy to crank out multiple titles a month using a couple of overworked design grads, especially when editors such as myself were giving them a head start by doing some basic layouts of our articles in advance.

The reliance on donated labour and DIY technology was even more dramatic in my next position, where I was editor-in-chief of a free custom publication that was distributed to members of a Singapore social club. Where in my previous job we relied chiefly on staff writers, at this new job I was the sole full-time staff member. The only other employee, our graphic designer, was half-time (though often worked full-time hours). The modus operandi here was to never pay for anything, ever. (I exaggerate: we did throw a few bucks a month to a stock-photo agency, which we used sparingly.) When the publisher wanted me to stock up on "stand-by" articles that might never be published, I drew a line and said that it was necessary to offer the writers something if we couldn't stroke their egos by publishing their work in a timely manner. After all, they were only doing this to build a portfolio and see their names in print. If we were going to sit on their contributions for six months or forever, then the least we should do is offer a gift certificate donated by an advertiser. No-go, the publisher said. Didn't want to set a precedent.

The trick to getting people to submit free articles and photos was to be overwhelmingly nice and gracious. Promise a prominent layout, a byline in large typeset, and a free copy of the magazine. And when their work was good enough to ask for more, then I'd pay a huge compliment: "Wonderful article, very poetic and descriptive. Thanks for doing this. I'd be happy to print your next article if you can keep them coming." For the most part, this relationship-building worked well. Until the publisher wanted me to be more demanding and less nice; then I knew my position was untenable.

Here's the thing. There were many significant experiences I had in Singapore where I'd shake my head and say, "That would never happen in Canada." Yet I came home only to find that nothing was really that different here, either.

The way media talent has been devalued is one such example. I started to hear stories about print media in North America relying far more heavily on unpaid internships, with some even charging their workers a fee for the privilege. I accepted the new reality and I pitched my own essays to Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail. To no avail, but I kept trying. Being on the other side of the equation now, I too would have been happy to see my name in print and build a portfolio with some major-media clippings.

I eventually caught a small break when an editor for a local newspaper found my blog. He liked one of my posts and wanted to put it up on the paper's website. No compensation, of course. I agreed, hoping it would lead to paid assignments. It didn't. Some months after the article went public, I had a change of heart, as I was anticipating the necessity of looking for work in Asia again, and some of the opinions I expressed could be a barrier to employment in certain parts of the world. I contacted the publisher and asked if the article could be taken off the site. (I realize that the accepted wisdom is that once something is on the internet, it's there for good. But the article hadn’t been reproduced elsewhere, as far as Google told me, and I expect the cached version to disappear over time.)

The editorial team said, "Our policy is to not remove content," but after a couple of polite exchanges, they said they would delete the article. However, I got a little lecture in the final e-mail. This "represents a waste of our time, money, and energy to devote to something which then gets deleted."

How soon we forget about the days before the internet, when time, money and energy would be devoted to putting something in print and then get thrown in a recycling box and completely disappear from public view after a day or a week. Not only that, every single word in those pages was paid for. Now we're in an age when someone gives us an article for free to distribute on a world-wide network forever, and publishers get their shorts in a knot when the author asks for the delete key to be struck after several months of availability.

The final note concluded: "We will make an exception in this case. However, this would preclude you from writing for us again." That kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not because I want to write for them again, but because they asked me for the piece.

I think back to the gratitude I showed our volunteer contributors in Singapore, because, really, they kept me employed. The more of their work I stuffed into my magazines, the better I looked. "Here's the quality work I can produce on zero budget." If one of my volunteer writers had asked for an article to come off our website, I would have happily complied. After all, their part in enhancing my profile was done, and if my company had been so concerned about time and resources being wasted, then I'd think we could have prevented that by paying a token amount for the work and agreeing to ownership ahead of publication. In the end, we had gotten far more than we paid for.

I do realize how fortunate I was. I'm aware that if I had been dealing with a major organization like The Globe and Mail, my request likely would have been ignored. But this is the thing that gets me: This particular weekly is a left-wing paper that continually challenges the behaviour of major conglomerates, including their competition. This paper helped shape my values when I started reading it as a young adult, and all of the ethics that I carried into my media work were developed by years of reading principled journalists – including the ones in this newspaper, which remains one of my favourites. So to be given a little bit of lip and banished as a future writer, over work that I volunteered to them at their request, just made me shake my head in sadness to realize that this is what all media has been diminished to. Even this paper, which has been a steadfast supporter of labour movements, can afford to alienate contributors over minor matters because they probably have no difficulty finding other unpaid correspondents.

The lesson I've learned from this is that it's not worth it for any writer to give away free content that ends up on the internet. There was a time when a journalist, photographer or fiction writer could break into the industry by donating work to publications. Nowadays, you're not really breaking into anything but a competition with bloggers and Flickr members who will be happy to undercut you to see their name pop up in search engines. Besides, if you're never paid for your writing and you're not one of the lucky ones who gets offered a movie deal for your blog, you'll have to make a living somehow, and whatever you're writing about will only be open to judgment by HR personnel and managers who Google your name.

I've had another thought about that welfare recipient who donated the story of her plight to The Globe and Mail. Maybe she was being clever. Perhaps this was her grand, last-ditch effort to get noticed, and possibly someone will take pity and give her a job. We think that beggars can't be choosers, but the reality of the new media is proving that cliché wrong. So if an unemployed graphic designer is going to take advantage of that to do some begging herself, then good on her for playing the game.

But I have to say, if this is the new paradigm in the freelance racket, where begging and choosing is turning into a defeating feedback loop, I'm not that keen to fight my way into it.

Update, Oct 16, 2013: I am aware that my story is just one tiny drop in a very large, quickly filling bucket. The pattern of writers being insulted and shunned for putting some value on their work is endemic throughout all hemispheres and various levels of media. Here's just one example (Academic calls Philip Hensher priggish and ungracious for refusing to write an introduction to his guide on Berlin). If widely respected authors are enduring this, there's no hope for freelancers or those trying to make a name for themselves.

Dear Taiwanese friends; here's why we can't pronounce your names

It's easy for us in the West to take for granted that Asians feel compelled to assume English names when immigrating to our countries. In fact, our culture demands it. While we're accommodating to all the Diegos and Stanislavs and Gethsemanes who come from other distant corners of the world, for some reason we refuse to cut any slack to Dong Hyun, Zhen Yi, or Yusuke. "Can I just call you John?" is what most of us would ask.

I've generally been sensitive about the names I use for my foreign friends. When I become close to someone, I'll ask what their native name is. Half the time, my acquaintance prefers his English name. "Don't ever call me Ming Han. Only my mom calls me that, and usually when she's mad." The other half the time, I get a response like, "I love my Chinese name. I only picked an English name because I felt I had to, so I'm really happy if you call me Wei Cheng."

"Patrick" and "Alan"

There was a telling moment when I was staying in Taiwan. My friend from Malaysia, Shen Siung, came to visit me and my friend Tzuching. These were the names I had always known them by. Yet when they met, they called each other Patrick and Alan. Here I was trying to respect their culture by using their proper Mandarin Chinese names, but even with each other, these two Chinese men reverted to English names. I was astounded. I looked at them both and asked what was going on.

Shen Siung said, "You Westerners don't know how to pronounce our names properly." But you guys aren't Westerners, I replied. After some more probing, I got what he meant: Western culture imposed on them spellings that even they couldn't understand. The confusion was borne out of the antiquated and byzantine system of romanization that Taiwan and Malaysia had adopted. During the discussion, I came to realize that I had been mispronouncing their names since the days when I first met them, and they were too polite to correct me.

Learning Chinese in Taipei

The method of romanizing Mandarin Chinese used by the Taiwanese was invented in the mid-1800s by academics named Wade and Giles, and thus it was unsubtly christened the Wade-Giles system. However, the system recognized by the International Organization for Standardization is a creation from the mid-1950s called pinyin. Because it was developed by China's Communist government, the Taiwanese shunned pinyin to distinguish a separate identity from the mainland. Fully adopting pinyin would have been seen by many as a form of linguistic treason. (Pinyin has been used to some degree in Taiwan for the past decade, but more about that later.)

Consider the grief that this stubbornness causes. Coming back to my friends Shen Siung and Tzuching, here are their names in pinyin: Shan Xiong and Zi Jing. Actual pronunciation: Shan Shee-ong and Dz-Jing. Neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin represent an exact phonetic transliteration (the linguistic term for "translating" a character-based language into a phonetic alphabet), but which one do you find more accurate?

Learning pinyin, a writing
assignment from week-one
of Chinese class.

To be frank, there is actually no single perfect system of transliterating Mandarin Chinese into our Roman alphabet. That's because there are subtle sounds in Mandarin that don't have an English equivalent. (In linguistics, these sounds are called phonemes.) For instance, our ch phoneme comes from placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth, coming out like chuh. In Chinese, there are two ch phonemes – one similar to ours, and another made with the tongue extended closer to the teeth, sounding like chee. It's the same with sh – one from the front of the mouth, another from the back.

The challenge in romanizing Chinese is to imagine new letter combinations that represent these different phonemes. Between Wade-Giles and pinyin, the most accurate in many people's opinion is the latter.

Many aspects of Wade-Giles resemble a bit of a linguistic joke. Take, for instance, Peking. That was the old spelling of China's capital city before the nation formally adopted pinyin in the 1970s. (Peking was actually a French-missionary spelling, not Wade-Giles, which would have been Peiching, but still an interesting example.) I had always been curious as to why China changed the name to Beijing. But, in fact, bay-jing has always been the pronunciation. 

In Taiwan, however, they continue to insist on phonetic spellings that often bear no relation to actual pronunciation. The city of Kaohsiung is one good example. Kow-see-ung is how I always spoke it. In fact, it's closer to gao-shee-ong. And did you know that Taipei is actually tai-bei? In fact, there is a method to the Wade-Giles madness, a formula to explain how "k" becomes "g" and "p" becomes "b", but it's not worth explaining here, as it remains understood only by academics. The Taiwanese layman generally has no clue as to the workings of the nation's transliteration system.

This is not to say that pinyin is flawless. With the example of Kaohsiung, the pinyin spelling is Gaoxiong. The "x" would throw off native English speakers. It's not easy to intuit that it represents a sh phoneme. However, here's what pinyin does to make the learning and intuition of the system easier: it makes use of redundant Roman letters to represent phonemes that aren't replicated in English. While the letter combination "sh" in pinyin represents its English equivalent, "x" represents the softer sh with the tongue extended. Similarly, "ch" is self-explanatory, but "q" is the letter that represents ch with the tongue moved toward the teeth.

Wade-Giles is misleading by taking common letters and changing their vocalizations. Let's look at Kaohsiung again. The sound of the letter "k" in English is made with a burst of air but no vocalization. The letter "g" is like "k" but with a vocalization. Why should the "g" phoneme end up being represented by the letter "k"? Again, we can look at Peking (Peiching) and Taipei – the "b" phoneme (made with vocal chords) ended up being represented by the letter "p". You will find this replacement of vocalized and non-vocalized letters and phonemes all throughout the Wade-Giles system.

When pinyin needs to use a letter to represent a phoneme not found in English, it uses letters with similar English phonemes, making the pronunciation of a word easier to intuit. With that in mind, look at the difference between Tsingtao and Qingdao, the same Chinese city before and after pinyin was adopted. Neither has a completely intuitive spelling for native-English speakers. But the former version uses "ts" for a soft ch phoneme, and "t" (non-vocalized) for d phoneme (vocalized). In pinyin, the temptation might be to pronounce Qingdao as king-dow, but once you learn that the "q" is a soft ch, it's not as hard to wrap your head around that as it is to think of "t" forming a d phoneme. The old spelling of Tsingtao has the potential for a reader to misunderstand two phonemes, whereas the pinyin Qingdao only offers one misleading phoneme. It's not perfect, as no language system is, but it does the job more efficiently.

So that explains the problem Westerners have pronouncing names that use the Wade-Giles system. We meet Mao Tse-Tung and we pronounce his name phonetically. In fact, it's not t-see-tung but dzeh-dong. (Wade-Giles even changes the phonemes of the vowels by using tung for dong.) The pinyin spelling, Mao Zedong, is more likely to elicit a correct pronunciation, making Mr. Mao less likely to say, "Just call me Dave."

Try it with this Wade-Giles name: Hsien Chiu. Did you say huh-see-en chee-oo? Now in pinyin: Xian Jiu. I bet you're closer to the actual pronunciation: shee-an jee-oh.

I am not a linguist and I have not done any studies or serious readings on this subject. I am in no way an expert. However, I think my layman's observations are probably more relevant than an expert's opinion, because you shouldn't have to be an academic to pronounce the name of the street you see on a map, or a city you want to visit, or to greet a new friend or employee.

I should also state that I have simplified Taiwan's linguistic predicament in this post for the sake of clarity. It's actually more of a mess than I let on. Taiwan did adopt something called Tongyong Pinyin between 2002 and 2008, which was a sort of compromise that would have allowed Taiwan to ditch Wade-Giles while not conforming to mainland China's system. Standard pinyin (called Hanyu Pinyin) has since been adopted officially, but the government continues to abide with a jumble of systems – in Taipei (Wade-Giles) you can find Jhongjheng Road (Tongyong Pinyin) and visit the Xindian district (Hanyu Pinyin) or take the train to Tamsui (Wade-Giles). Birth certificates and passports in Taiwan, as far as I can tell, are still being issued mostly with Wade-Giles transliterations.

All of this just creates unnecessary stumbling blocks for those of us who are learning Chinese and must use some form of romanization to grasp pronunciation. Westerners living in Taiwan can regale you with stories about the inanity of signs being replaced and re-replaced, and systems being adopted, modified and reverted, depending on which party (the pro-China KMT or the pro-independence DPP) is in power, which county or city you're in, or which constituency is most vocal about its preference at any given time.

In the meantime, here's my advice for any Chinese person dealing with Westerners. If you absolutely want to ditch your Chinese name, by all means, take an English one. If you like your Chinese name and you have a Wade-Giles spelling, adopt a pinyin rendering (or even something more phonetic if necessary). And if we still can't pronounce it, teach us. After all, if you took the time to learn our entire language, we can take the time to learn your name.

A return to yesterday

I'd always had a hard time letting go of the CBC. Like a first relationship, I always remembered this job as my first and fondest. Bouncing around various departments on temp contracts for eight years was a wondrous experience. You see, the CBC was a vital part of Canada's identity for its first 60 years or so, and growing up in this country meant being influenced by the broadcaster in some shape or form. Even when the CBC wasn't being Canadian, it was not Canadian in a very Canadian way. The fact that we could watch British sitcoms and arty US films on a major network, for instance, set us apart from the Americans. And when we watched Sesame Street, we knew if we had tuned into an American channel or CBC based on the second-language skits – Americans had Spanish-speaking puppets, we had Kermit le Frogge.

During my broadcasting course at BCIT, I started to feel more disinterested and unresponsive to commercial radio, and my dial drifted toward CBC Radio more frequently. CBC Radio, unlike the TV side, was one of those things I had neglected pretty much my entire life. It was such a revelation just to hear interesting people talk every day without obnoxious commercials and loudmouthed sportscasters. When I mentioned to my BCIT instructors about my choice of station on my drives to and from school, I was told, “Get your mind off CBC right now. You'll never work there. They're unionized, and they do things very differently from the stations you're going to work at.”

Upon graduation, I submitted only one job application – to CBC Radio. As luck would have it, they had a temp opening in their "tape supply" room. Now, where else would anyone get a job splicing used, heavily edited recording tape into fresh product? Or spooling new, un-encased tape into empty reels? Or fast-forwarding miles of used tape through a reel-to-reel to check for quality? Twice a day, I'd make my rounds, through the newsroom, the current-affairs studios, producers' offices and edit suites to collect used tape. It was a surreal job, and I got to take my breaks hanging out with David Wisdom as he produced his uber-cool after-midnight show Nightlines, or in the back of the Studio 5 control room on my lunch hours watching Fanny Keefer host Almanac.

When that temp contract ran out, I was shuffled into other jobs as vacancies demanded – program assistant for Vicki Gabereau for a year, music programmer for a few shows, and even picking up freelance production work on weekends. But the one area of CBC Vancouver where I was assigned the most was the record library.

While the work in the library could be tedious and wearisome (lots of data entry and re-shelving), it was also one of the most stimulating parts of the building. The library was a salon of sorts. Production staff from a wide variety of shows, from current affairs to pop to classical to news, would randomly flit in and out of the library, roping us into a wide gamut of conversations. There'd be the Afternoon Show producer who'd come down and say, "We're interviewing a UFOlogist, so, can you think of any good songs about flying saucers?" Or the news guy who practically busts the door down in a panic: "Jim Henson just died. Where are the muppet records!?" And the languid Gabereau music guy who never needed any help, because the show was pre-taped and no one was in a panic there.

The library was the heart of CBC Radio. It was our community centre, our church, our confessional. It wasn't where the shows were made, it wasn't where the action happened, but it was the only place in the building that brought everyone together, and always in random, serendipitous ways. When someone had something to get off their chest, whether office politics, world affairs, union politics or just a bit of gossip, it was we librarians (and whoever else was in earshot) who became their sounding boards.

And there was music around. Always. Whether it was a producer skimming tracks in a listening booth, or head librarian Judy sampling the programming in her office, or soon-to-be-head librarian Johnny pulling out an old easy-listening record at the end of the day, this library was not a shhhhhh zone.

Fast forward through 15 years. I'm laid off due to deep government cuts. I land work with Health Canada and become the accidental medical case manager (work I never imagined doing, let alone being good at, but it broadened my mind while paying the bills). Ten years after that, an itch to get back into media and do some travelling found me working as a magazine editor in China and Singapore, with a brief stint studying in Taipei.

You'd think that with all that life experience, now being in my 40s, I would have put the CBC of my 20s well into my past. But there was something about the place that always called me back. During my work for the feds, I freelanced on-air for the occasional pop-music show. When the feds went on strike a couple of times, I found some work back in the library covering for holidays. When I came back for the Olympics between jobs in Singapore, I got a couple of days of grunt work for some of the live special programming. I could have thought, “Magazine editor, overseas resident … why am I running to Staples to buy Jian Ghomeshi coloured file folders?” Because I never, ever got over that CBC feeling from when I was 21. The CBC still felt, as it always had, like a very egalitarian place, where people (for the most part) worked collectively on projects they were proud of, and less like a hierarchy of individuals.

When I returned from Singapore for good in 2011, word got out that I was looking for work, and Johnny (now the lone librarian after several years of cuts chipped away at the large staff) called me up with an assignment. The good news – he needed someone in the record library for a few weeks. The bad news – the job entailed dismantling the collection of records and CDs, and archiving the valuables before auctioning the rest of it off.

These few weeks were full of emotions surreal, beautiful, sad, and poignant. From the time I left the CBC at age 29 to being called back at age 45, I was certainly a changed person. Not just more mature and with enhanced skills, but having been both scarred and bettered by new careers and exposure to different parts of the world. This part of my past should have been well behind me. Coming back to work amongst the stacks of records and compact discs, doing the work of my youth – it should have felt like one grand backward step. Instead, it felt otherworldly. This institution was deeply embedded into my identity, seamlessly flowing through childhood, my student years, and my working life. Of course it was devastating to see the library taken to pieces, just as most of the CBC building on Hamilton Street had been transformed through the years. Yet, no matter how much of a mistake I believed it was to dispose of the library, I'm glad I was back for its final days.

How much this place, this room, had haunted me. Stepping back into it, after all I had been through in my life, was almost illusory. There was my handwriting still on the signs and shelf-tagging. The desk, a bulky thing probably handmade by the TV stagecraft department, still had all the same scratches and pen marks indelibly etched into it. The chairs hadn't been replaced. The clutter in the drawers and cubby-holes hadn't changed. The same tattered recycling box was still under the desk. Funny how things like scrapes or dents or recycling boxes are not meant to make any impression whatsoever, but the memories that come back when you see them again after 20 years! Even the phone still had my voice on the outgoing message, back from the day in the early 90s when voicemail came to the building.

A couple of my friends in Singapore responded to my Facebook posts that I was demeaning myself by doing menial labour, or "janitor" work, as one of them put it. Of course, they knew me as the well-off magazine editor. Now they were seeing me sitting on the floor, sorting through stacks of musty records. But their comments only underlined the reasons why I left that country. The Singapore work culture is ruled by kiasu, a local term that roughly means "fear of losing face". Meaning, if you're a professional, you're not caught dead doing minor tasks or manual labour best left for a secretary or cleaner. For instance, going for lunch with sales staff at one magazine I worked for, we could not find an empty table at the food court, except for one cluttered with dirty dishes. To their horror, I picked up the dishes and wiped the table with a napkin. "Don't do that!" one of them said. "Let's find another spot," said another. Although we ended up with a clean table without waiting, one colleague said I had made a spectacle by doing "the uncle's work". That's just one of many illustrative stories of kiasu that I came home with.

I was not the only former employee to be brought back for the library project. Two retired producers were also brought on board for their expertise, both of them well-regarded not just at the CBC, but in the local arts community. So here we all were: a former librarian, one of the city's top recording engineers, and a respected jazz producer, all using our respective expertise in pop, classical and jazz to select prime specimens for archiving, mucking about in stacks of records and having a blast. This is how my work abroad enhanced my appreciation for life in Vancouver – I was now back in a place where I didn't have to fear for my social status based on the job I did or how I appeared to others. Sitting on the floor of the library, rummaging through old records, not only was I happy to be back "home" in the CBC, but I was also relieved to be amongst familiar colleagues who could be both professional and laidback.

Our jobs required us to look at every single record on the shelves, a collection going back to the early 1960s. You can imagine, all of us music lovers, finding massive distractions amongst our work. I ended up volunteering a few hours or days here and there to make up for the time spent listening to weird discoveries in one of the listening booths.

All of us who worked on this sad project lamented the mistake of disposing of such a massive library, yet our attitude was: "If it's a done deal, then glad we're the ones doing it." On the one hand, I could see the corporation's reasons. With so much of the library's contents digitized and accessible to studios across the country on their Virtual Music Library, the physical libraries were becoming largely redundant. On the other hand, it was only the compact discs, dating back to about 1990 or so, that had been ripped into the VML. It wouldn't have cost the corp much to have a librarian spend a year digitizing some of the rare vinyl. Instead it was boxed up and shipped to CBC Toronto, where, we surmised, the collection might likely sit untouched for several years.

The value of this "redundant" library was underscored while I was boxing up a stash of local discs by Vancouver bands. There was some labour trouble brewing in our transit service, and a producer came down looking for a particular song he remembered about a bus strike in the 1980s. A few North Vancouver kids had released a single called "Stranded in the Park", sung to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark". (Flip side: "Born in North Van".) I just happened to have that single by Boss and the Bandits in pile in a listening booth, after having given it a spin myself. The occasion prompted one technician to grab some of the collection and digitize it himself before our local treasures ended up in an inaccessible box a few thousand miles away.

The items we selected to save barely scratched the surface of the entire library. When we finished our project, the reason for the corp's haste became apparent – after the collection was auctioned off to the highest bidder, the library was converted to retail space. When the CBC Vancouver “bunker” was built in 1971, it was on the far outskirts of downtown, where there was no demand for real estate. Today, it's on the edge of trendy Yaletown, and every part of the building that can be sold off or rented out has been converted and parceled out. The parking lot is now a condo called TV Towers. The library was just the latest casualty. One day soon, I suspect, as programming continues to get cut and become centralized in Toronto, the entire building will be gone.

But where the parking lot was not missed – nor the plaza that became a sandwich shop, nor the cafeteria replaced by private offices – the library was the unofficial heart of the radio operation. Now that it's gone, I can finally put the CBC behind me. While I would go back if I had a chance, I no longer feel any calling or attachment to the place.

After all the transformations made to the building and the culture of CBC Vancouver, the loss of the record library is the last straw that renders the place unrecognizable to me.