問我anything with Eszter

[Elizabeth_rb]

On the flip side, many ABC's and ABT's have their own problems with native Mandarin speakers having unrealistic expectations of their language abilities. My wife got pulled aside and yelled at by our tour guide for having "the worst Chinese he'd ever heard" (mine was worse than hers) during our Honeymoon, which isn't really fair. That was down in 高雄， though, so I bet they're not used to ABT's like 台北。

 

That's horrible!  Poor lady!  How very rude that guide was and I hope s/he was dealt with properly.  Hardly a good advert for their company, country or the Chinese world in general....

[Eszter]

In my experience, it's more difficult to find any other jobs than English teaching in Taiwan. It's not impossible though, as I know several friends who are in different trades, but it takes time. But if you're a musician you might be able to find ways, as the live music scene in Taipei is awesome and there are different types of gigs available. My husband used to work as a musician there too, so if you want to send me a private message I can tell you more about it.

[偉爾豆仁]

 

 

That's horrible!  Poor lady!    How very rude that guide was and I hope s/he was dealt with properly.  Hardly a good advert for their company, country or the Chinese world in general....

Ha, hardly. Shortly after that he switched to Taiwanese for the rest of the tour, which neither of us know ANY of (barring some food terms). While I know many Taiwanese people are very kind and polite, there are always jerks in any country, so I'm not too upset about it at this point. I bet if you ask any American-born Chinese, though (or Asian American in general), you'll hear some similar story about an older Asian person being unreasonably rude/harsh.

 

On the other hand, we told our Taiwanese cousin this story and she was appalled, maybe partly because she had gone to the U.S. to study abroad and had experience learning another language as an adult. Either way, she was sympathetic, and we still love the little island enough to want to live there/visit often in the future.