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Part 3: Interviews from People in Taiwan
In doing my research I was wondering what people living in Taiwan thought about these subjects.
How much did they think the Chinese, US, Japanese, or KMT had on Taiwanese identity or work ethic? There were a few ideas I had when thinking about who would be best to interview. I knew it would be best to get a diverse sample of interviews to generate as many ideas as possible. I also thought my interviewees should not be limited to Taiwanese people. I also thought at least a few of my interviewees should have some relevance to one of the four major themes I analyzed.
For instance, I thought it would be interesting to see how other people with Chinese backgrounds felt about Taiwan. To learn more about Japanese culture I thought it would be good to find a Taiwanese who had lived here for a lengthy period time or vice versa. For the American influence I thought I would find an American who had lived in Taiwan for a long time and was very familiar with it.
Although I had a questionnaire as a guide what I really wanted was for them to tell me a story. I would also try to focus on a certain aspect of someone’s experience if it was relevant to one of my themes. For instance, if someone had lived in Japan for a considerable amount of time then I would focus on the differences or similarities of Japanese and Taiwanese culture.
Originally I was going to interview an equal amount of older and younger people but later I changed my mind. I realized after my first interviews that older people were much more informative and had much more to say then younger people. Older people would also have much more information and opinionated perception of the 1950s through the 1970s which I thought was more relevant for my analysis. For these reasons the majority of people I interviewed were over 50 years old but I did include a few younger ones. I also wanted to get one or two elderly
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people but this was also difficult to do so. I brought an interpreter to a shop nearby my home where a 96 year old man normally was but he didn’t want to be interviewed. His wife had recently died and he probably did not want to stir up old memories.
In Hill Gates “A Taiwanese Working Class Lives” (1987) it shows perspectives from Taiwan’s working people who would be very elderly or deceased by now. These stories and her research reveal how difficult people had it from the end of Japanese colonial period until she interviewed people in the 1970s and 1980s. Taiwan was so poor before it developed I was surprised to learn things like people were being sold or living in starvation. There is no doubt that the life of working class people was very tough and tumultuous before Taiwan modernized.
This resource also provided a lot of information about how the traditional family structure functioned and the low status woman at that time.
At first I thought it would be best to write out the interviews like a series of stories, and not verbatim. Afterwards I realized that having it verbatim would probably be a better idea since rewording their voices may distort or take away some meaning. For this reason I went back and included quotes of certain parts so people can have a better idea of what they literally said. I also did a follow up of all the interviewee’s so that I could get as much information as possible on my major themes. Not all of their points may be relevant for my analyses but I included everything so people can judge for themselves. I originally thought I would get more interviews which were shorter in length but later I thought getting fewer interviews that were longer and had more content was more important. I’ll begin with the oldest person I interviewed and end with the younger ones. To document the interviews I recorded almost of them first and wrote them out later. In other cases I had my computer with me so I wrote while conducting the interview.
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I conducted ten interviews, seven were female and three were male. One was over seventy years old, five were in there fifties and sixties, two were in there thirties and forties and two were in their twenties. Five had their bachelor’s degrees; four had their master’s degree and one had their PhD. Five were from Taipei or nearby, two were from Kaohsiung, one from Hong Kong, one from the US and one from China. Three were married, four were divorced and three were not married. Half of the respondents were retired and the other half are still working or are studying. At the end of these interviews in my conclusion I have a table of the demographics and overview of my interviewee’s perspectives.
Interviews
Wallace
I met and befriend Wallace at a vegetarian potluck I normally attend at Da-an Park, Taipei, which is held on the first Sunday of every month. Wallace is a fourth generation Taiwanese who was born in Kaohsiung in 1939 to a poor family and had 7 siblings. His mother was a housewife who was illiterate but very clever and if she had attended school she would have probably excelled. His father worked every day as a technician on the milling machine. He was so poor if they had an egg to eat they would split it into four parts. Once in junior high, his teacher bought him two eggs which he never had before which was a very exciting and memorable experience for him. When the 2.28 incident occurred he remembers “I heard the gun and I was nine years old” and “the river in Kaohsiung became red, it became red with blood. They killed so many people and many people just disappeared. My older sister’s finance, he was shot dead. They were already engaged and he just disappeared.” People kept disappearing until the 1980s.
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Wallace served in the army for just one year and then studied mechanical engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu. Most of his teachers were from China and had previously studied in Germany. It was here he also had an American teacher who he really liked.
He taught him English and learned many other things from.
When I asked him why Taiwanese work so hard he said “all the Chinese people in the world work hard. They work hard throughout East Asia, even harder than the local people. I think it’s because of the culture (long pause) because of Confucian, Confucianism.”
In his late 20s he moved to Taipei and first worked with a Japanese electronics company for a few years. Later he worked for an American electronics company where he spent most of his career at. “American’s company compared to a Japanese company, an American company was more human.” He thought that “a Japanese company and a Taiwanese company were very different. The Japanese are very strict and tight control, they are afraid of their technique, they keep their technique. They don’t want their technique to be learned by Taiwanese so all the R&D and all the key positions were Japanese. But the American’s were more generous and they teach Taiwanese all the techniques. So the industry technique is not in Taiwan. Mostly they are from the United States and not Japan.” His job with the American company paid really well but in the early days he worked six days a week until it was changed to five days. He retired when he was 60, which was16 years ago, and since then he has lived near south of Taipei in Wulai in the mountains by himself.
Wallace has two sons and a daughter who all live in Yonghe, Taipei, with his ex-wife whom he visits once a week. Only his daughter is married and has a daughter and his two other sons are single and work really hard as software engineers. When I asked him if work has
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changed over the years he laughed and said “work has changed a lot, from the time of his parents, Taiwan is very poor, the economy is not developed. At that time life is very tough and hard.
When I was a kid it was a very hard life, we hardly have meat to eat.” They had only a small amount of food and even if he had an egg he could only have one quarter. He said “I only eat a full egg when I was second year in senor high school. My teacher, my Chinese teacher, took me to the school restaurant and he offered me two boiled eggs” (he laughed and was very excited about this).
When I asked him how the economy changed in his generation he said “at that time Taiwan industry start to grow, especially in the electronic, the Japan come, the American company come, the radio, the TV.” Things are different these days because the cost of living is so high that people don’t have many kids like in his parents’ generation. His parents had to work super hard to survive, feed their kids and to give them a better future. Today people work more for themselves and many families just focus on getting the best life they can for one or two kids since it’s so expensive. For instance his one granddaughter attends an expensive bilingual school which is NT$180,000 a semester. It’s more expensive then the cheaper public schools but this will provide her with a better education and edge over other students. When I asked him if he thought Taiwanese worked too hard and should relax more he said “I think so. My sons, they work for a Taiwanese high tech company as software engineers and they work too hard” he exclaimed and shook his head.
He believes there were deep divisions between the Taiwanese and Mainlanders in the past. The Chinese from the mainland had taken control of the government, held key positions and could get assistance easier. This created a lot of resentment between the Taiwanese and Mainlanders until Lee Teng-hui became president in 1988. Chiang Kai-shek was a very bad
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government and was very bad for Taiwan. The only good thing for Taiwan was they brought some good teacher, good scholar to Taiwan like his English teacher and some good scholar to university.” In school “he learned a lot about the history and geography in China. I think we developed a bad feeling about China. For the Communist period the Cultural Revolution was a very bad thing. Mao Tse-tung, actually at the beginning I respected very much. The cultural revolution was a very bad end of his life.”
Wallace has been more for the DPP and never supported the KMT. He hoped President Chen Shui-bian would be good, but it turned out he was a big disappointment. He believes the best thing for Taiwan is to reunite with China and it’s not necessarily a good or bad thing but something that should happen. He worked for five years in China and when I asked him if the culture was the same there as Taiwan he said it was “very different and I think they are
traditional, but the work culture is the same, the culture is different, the Communists and the democratic government are different.” He was in Xiamen at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in Beijing and he only knew what was going since he was able to get
reception from television stations in Taiwan.
Wallace also talked about the environmental problems in Taiwan. He mentioned that the mountain his dad worked on, Shou Shan or (Monkey Mountain) used to be higher but a cement company cut it down for raw materials. He then talked about the American factory in Xindian, Taipei, called General Instruments that was an enormous company that employed more than 10,000 people at one time. Since they made many kinds of heavy metals they ended up polluted the nearby river so much that the fish died; it will take a long time to revitalize. Before the factory was there you used to be able to see clear water.
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He also mentioned how the Japanese and later the KMT also killed all the Chinese giant Cyprus tree’s around Taiwan which were valuable. The trees are so valuable it is believed that one tree could pay for someone’s living expensive for a life time. Tourists would probably love to come to Taiwan to see these beautiful trees but, now mostly cut. He believes Taiwan could have more tourists but the government has not done enough and he does not think Taiwan is globalized enough.
Wallace said Taiwanese people liked the US because of the help it gave Taiwan in the past but was annoyed how the US interferes in Asia, too much, in a bad way. For instance he felt that the incidents between the US and North Korea was really about China’s frustration with the US. “They want to fight back! The US is not right and they’re not going about it the right way and it’s not good for the world. They should cooperate more with the other countries and the world economy.” He thinks that North Korea is a puppet of China and, the Chinese feel like they are being surrounded by the Americans, this is a sign they want to break out. He doesn’t believe there will be a war. Yet if it happened, the US would mostly probably be the initiator.
Cynthia
Cynthia is from Taipei in her 50s and is a mix of Taiwanese and Chinese she considers herself to be middle upper class. She has a Master’s degree in computer science. She has six siblings, and is the oldest one. Her mother was a housewife and her father was an owner of a factory. In the early years, she believed there was more of a division between Taiwanese and Chinese, she believed animosity was strong until the 1970s when things became more mixed.
Cynthia graduated from National Taiwan University in 1979 and worked two years before heading to the US where she got her Masters and was a part time teaching assistant. It
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was there she married another Taiwanese man and had her first child. After having her child she stayed home for two years before working again in 1988 for two more years in the US. She liked working in the US because of the fixed working hours and overtime pay. At that time she worked with the railroad company, Northwestern Transportation in Chicago, which had a good pension plan. Her future prospects were great there and her boss even told her she could be promoted to a manager within seven years. She wanted to stay in the US which she thought would be a better future and life for her, but she sacrificed this for her husband’s career. He got his Ph.D. and his career looked better in Taiwan so they both returned which is a regret she has.
Later in Taiwan she worked part and full time from 1990 until she retired in 2008. She normally worked more than eight hours and sometimes even on the weekend which annoyed her husband since he would be stuck with the kids. In Taiwan her work was based on finishing a project, and always new projects were coming up so she was always busy. Therefore, she believes most people are not happy with their job and that bosses ask too much of employees.
Yet, she supposed every company has a different culture.
Her parent’s generation worked to support society and their family at that time. Now people work longer and make less money and it is harder to buy a home since the housing rates have risen. She believes “Taiwanese work hard because it’s in their nature to work hard no matter if it’s in school, work or anything else. They learn this work ethic through their family and education.” Taiwanese probably do work too hard, and the family is very important and plays a strong role in Taiwan. If she had a million dollars she would still work which is why she’s currently volunteering teaching students for free. She tries to take one day to do a leisure activity with her husband every week or two. When she is free she sometimes watches television shows about culture, talk shows, politics, or about the universe. Her philosophy is ping an, ping
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fan which is a famous saying which means, ‘safe’ like in marriage, health and family and
“ordinary” meaning you don’t want to be famous and you should be content with what you have.
Her view about China is not negative and not a bad thing if reunited. Japan used to have a large influence like for her parents who knew some Japanese but not much anymore. They made things like the infrastructure in Taiwan but the influence on work is probably not a large factor.
There are many influences in Taiwan from South Korea. Many countries have an influence, and not one is so much more significant than others.
Chinese culture has a large influence on the culture which is mixed with Taiwanese.
Confucianism has a major influence, but the religious influence like Buddhism probably does not have such a large effect. Daoism influences more daily aspects of life. The KMT used to have an influence on work, before but not anymore. She believes the ‘strawberry generation’ is more lazy then previous generations. They want more money and to work less and want something close to their home. There’s a saying qian dou, shi shao, li jia ji, which means a lot of money, less working hours, less responsibility, and near to home. She agrees the parents are at fault for making them like this way and that technology and economic changes have also made people weaker. Kids are spoiled and do not work while in school so they do not have chances of learning some hard lessons in life. They don’t have to learn how to make money, or how to solve problems since their parents provide a good environment and money for them. Parents usually support their children financially until they are married.
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Wanda
Wanda was born in 1953 into a family who had migrated from Shanghai, China, to Taiwan in 1949. Her two older brothers were young when they arrived in Taiwan, and she also has a younger sister who obtained two Master's degrees and has lived in the US for more than 30 years.
Her father, since his 20s, was a secret agent working for the KMT to defend against the Japanese and Communists. Before the Vietnam War he was sent there as a official diplomat to train Chinese Vietnamese. He trained them to infiltrate China by going through the border of Vietnam to Guangxi Province to obtain valuable political information. Since her father was a
Her father, since his 20s, was a secret agent working for the KMT to defend against the Japanese and Communists. Before the Vietnam War he was sent there as a official diplomat to train Chinese Vietnamese. He trained them to infiltrate China by going through the border of Vietnam to Guangxi Province to obtain valuable political information. Since her father was a