Racist Cola

Send in ten receipts for merchandise that will help you act like a racist douchbag

The latest Coca Cola ad campaign in Taiwan is just jaw-droppingly offensive. First, a garden-variety portrayal of Africans as simpletons who go "brrr" in a comically exaggerated manner when they crack into a coke.

You might think, well...OK, it's not really PC, so? For a market like Taiwan without much contact with Africans or much of an internal black population, is it really offensive? Let's face it, we all stereotype cultures/peoples distant from our own. Isn't it kind of unreasonable to import the kind of heightened awareness of race from the US and expect it to apply everywhere?

Then I saw this ad, which clearly and unambiguously crossed the line for me. It is of a local comedy celebrity called "Natto" (納豆), in blackface imitating one of the Africans in the ad. The ad campaign blog asked people to submit their own videos imitating the original ad in return for merchandise including a baseball cap with an afro on it.

This is not an isolated case of racist coke commercials around the world. Here's one from India, and one in Sweden.

Taiwanese music videos of the damned

I've noticed a strange phenomenon in Taiwanese music video...in a disturbingly high number of the videos for love ballads ends with the heroine dying in a number of heart-rending and inexplicable ways. Bloodless car-crashes and wasting diseases reminiscent of consumption are popular exit strategies. Sometimes, the boy dies. But that's much rarer. Anyhow, I've been itching to test out this sweet free subtitling software called Jubler. What could make more sense than to waste a couple of hours downloading Jubler, learning how to use it, and then subtitling one of the sickest examples of the "She Dies" genre of Taiwanese music videos in English and sharing it with the world?

Wait, I have to be up in three hours to travel to Yilan and paddle a dragonboat? *headdesk*

Oh, make sure the subtitles are on when you watch it in Youtube, of course.

Fortune-telling Bureaucrats

OK, I know I already lean too heavily on "news of the weird" type posts and that I promised to put up more thoughtful content, but I just can't resist posting this story. Yes, I wrote the article. But I still can't quite believe that I was getting astrology advice from the Bureau of the National Health Insurance.

Taiwanese Bureau of National Health Insurance plays astrologist

A "whimsical" press release from the Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) ranking longevity according to star signs that attracted massive media coverage has resulted in the threat of a lawsuit from a man who said his wife's state of mind has been adversely affected by the report.

The bureau received a telephone call from a man complaining that his wife's depression had worsened markedly since she read in the papers that bureau figures showed people with her astrological sign, Aries, lived the shortest lives, according to the Chinese language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister paper).

Saying that his wife had been threatening suicide on a daily basis since reading the reports, the man rebuked the bureau for releasing the analysis and threatened to sue, the story reported.

UNDER ATTACK

The bureau has been under attack ever since its astrological analysis of the Department of Health's 2006 death statistics hit the news stands.

The story was the Chinese-language China Times' front-page story on Wednesday and received prominent coverage in most newspapers.

With an average life span of 74.53 years old, Capricorns were said to be the star sign that live the longest, the bureau release said, followed by Aquarius and Libra. The shortest-living were Aries at 73.43 years old, while Taurus and Leo were the next shortest-lived.

Although the release stressed that the analysis was meant to be "whimsical," that did not stop members of the medical community and the public at large from criticizing the bureau over the move.

"In order to maintain the most basic appearance of the bureau's professionalism, leave the astrology to `star princes,'" ran one letter to the editor in the United Daily News on Jan. 10.

The Taiwan Medical Reform Foundation and the Alliance for the Oversight of the BNHI also weighed in publicly with their disapproval.

Bureau officials said that they'd been blindsided by the amount of bad publicity generated by the foray into fortune-telling.

"News from the bureau had been slow, so we took the opportunity to remind people to take care of themselves," said Chung Yueh-yi (鍾越漪), a deputy executive in the underwriting department of the BNHI.

"Aries tend to be workaholics, Taurus tend to be homebodies who sacrifice too much for their families while Leos tend to focus to much on appearances," Chung said, commenting on the three "shortest-living" star signs.

Chung conceded that the release was probably not scientifically sound.

"It's true, we were only working from one year's data," Chung said.

As for those who reacted negatively to the news, Chung said that she was sure that they were in the minority.

"I'm an Aries myself," Chung said "we're naturally optimistic."

show some emotion

Whoa! My feature on Taiwanese emoticon usage habits made it to the front page!

Smilies are so 1990s. Emoticons have evolved to another level in Taiwan after users started making their own animated GIF files and swapping them through chat programs such as the popular MSN Messenger.

To give you a taste of Taiwanese emoticon (ab)use in action, take a look at a screencapture of a recent IM conversation I had, username blurred.

Notes from a weird island

A few strange stories from recent editions of the TT.

Infants given extra month to disavow inherited debt:

The Ministry of Justice said yesterday it plans to amend the Civil Code to give infants a better chance of avoiding debts inherited from parents or grandparents.

Director of the Ministry's Department of Legal Affairs, Chang Ching-yun (張清雲), yesterday told a press conference that the Chiayi District Court last week saddled a three-month-old infant with debts from his dead grandfather.

In order to prevent these kind of incidents from occurring again, the ministry had decided to amend the Civil Code, he said.

Chang said that the current Civil Code stipulates that an heir must plead for an abandonment of debts from his or her dead parents or grandparents within two months of their death if the heir is aware of the debts.

He said the proposed amendment would extend the two month period to three months, giving people more time to decide whether to abandon inherited debt.

Chang added the proposed amendment stipulates that infants or secondary inheritors would be allowed to define their inheritance, which means that if infants or secondary inheritors inherit more debt than property, they can plead to define their inheritance and not have to use property to pay off the debt.

Chang said that the amendment stipulates that infants or secondary inheritors could do so within four months of their parents' or grandparents' death.

It was unclear how the ministry expected infants to plead on their own behalf.

Now that'll really be news...


Taiwanese version of wedgies considerably more exterme:

It was Alex's 16th birthday, and he had just treated his classmates to a round of cold beverages to celebrate when it happened.

"A bunch of my friends hoisted me up in the classroom and gave me an aluba on an open window," said Alex, who declined to be identified by his full name.

Alex was not referring to a misspelling of the Caribbean resort island, but a schoolyard "game" that is popular among local high school boys, as well as those in military service.

In aluba, a boy is lifted off the ground by a group of his peers. His legs are forcibly parted, and the crowd shouts "aluba" as they ram the struggling victim crotch-first into any nearby upright object, such as a lamp post, an open door or a coconut tree.

I wrote this one, haha.

Nice Guys, Taiwanese style

Not only do they have "Nice Guys" in Taiwan, they have a whole internet-based subculture dedicated to nice-guys and their travails. For the uninitiated, when I'm talking about Nice Guys here I'm not using the term as a synonym for "decent person", I'm referring to a perculiar kind of pathology in which a diffident man feel likes he deserves to be with the One Hot Girl because he's soooooo nice to her.

Here's a Taipei Times article from last year detailing the "Nice Guy" phenomenon here that is pretty much a parallel of the kind of "Nice Guys" Marcotte and Majikthise have observed in the field. It seems though that Taiwanese nice guys seem to be even more lacking in the self-awareness section. Here is a poem that pretty much pinpoints the moment where frustration and insecurity gives way to naked misogyny in awful free verse.

【A good man 】
You called me in that anxious emotion,
So I came to your house with no hesitation.
Soon I found that you just needed a low-priced repairer
To help you fix your expensive computer.
For I was a woeful good man,
I did not even complain.
Yet you were such a bitch!
While I repaired it, you with other bad men played sandwich--
Finally I decide to let you know my mind,
Whereas you mercilessly hand me a Good-man Card.
I am a good man, always make my hot face
Nestle to your cold ass--

The subculture these Nice Guys or "Good men" belong to (or is loosely affiliated with) is called "Otaku", although there seems to be some controversy over which subgroups can truly lay claim to the term. A glimpse of the ideal male-female relationship as conceptualized by the Otaku is distubing:

For Akiba-types who can't make the pilgrimage to otaku town, Fatimaid is the place to be. A direct copy of Akihabara's meido cafes, in this fantasy escape, young women wearing French maid costumes pamper customers with exaggerated humility and carefully scripted dialogue — just like the heroines in maid romance anime and comics. "Welcome home, master," says a maid, greeting a guest.