Toshuō

Probably the second most common question I get emailed from readers of this site is this:

“I’m from the US/Canada, I’ve just graduated and I want to teach English abroad and I want to learn some Chinese. Should I teach in Taiwan or teach in China?”

With my experience of having grown up in North America and then spent most of my adult life in Taiwan and then China, teaching in and later running an EFL school, I definitely have some opinions. But there are a lot of factors involved in making a decision about where to live for a year or more of your life and Taiwan and China both have their pluses. Another factor to consider is that the situation for foreign teachers has been changing fairly quickly, especially in mainland China.

What are your goals?

The best place for you depends on what you’re looking for…

Learning Chinese

If your main goal is learning Chinese, then I can unequivocally recommend China, preferably the northeast. Why? Well there are several factors that make learning Chinese in Taiwan harder. First of all, people there speak more English and they expect to speak more English with you if you’re white, black or anyone who doesn’t look like a Chinese speaker. Secondly, it’s not even clear if Mandarin is the primary language of Taiwan yet. A lot of people speak Hokkien (also known as Taiwanese or Minnanhua) as a first language. Furthermore, of the people who speak very little English are more likely to be older and also more likely to be comfortable speaking Taiwanese instead of Mandarin. The issue or regional dialects also comes up in southern China, but in the northeast, pretty much everybody is a native Mandarin speaker.

Another issue is the accent. I know from personal experience that the accent and dialect considered “standard” in Taiwan is hard for a lot of mainland Chinese to understand. This is problem since the vast, vast majority of Mandarin speakers are from mainland China. On the other hand, if you speak in an accent similarly to what’s on TV in China, you’ll be understood on both sides of the strait. Finally, the Chinese characters used in Taiwan are traditional characters, or fántǐzì (繁體字), whereas China and Singapore use simplified characters, or jiāntǐzì (简体字). This means that even if your Chinese study in Taiwan is successful, you may find yourself unable to understand simple words like “car” or “from” when you go to China.

This said, you can learn Chinese in Taiwan (or even back home) if you’re willing to work hard. Another minor plus in Taiwan is that there’s more interesting media to learn from. China has been catching up in that regard, though.

Quality of Life

Here, once again it’s no contest. Taiwan is amongst the best places to live on the entire planet. Life in general is convenient. The island is covered with 7-11s, and you can not only pay your bills there but you can pick up stuff you buy on the internet, too! The government has done an excellent job in terms of public transportation. Taxes are low. There’s universal health care that’s both top-notch and affordable! People are nice. I don’t just say that. I actually lost my wallet on a bus once and the driver found my student ID, called my school, got my number and returned it to me! I can’t even imagine that happening in China. The air quality in Taiwan may not thrill some of us used to pristine Rocky Mountain air, but it’s not too bad.

In China, there are also a lot of people that will be nice to foreigners they befriend. Unfortunately there are a lot more who will try to make a living off of you. I was never scammed in 7 years in Taiwan, but I got ripped off several times in my first week living in China! A lot of restaurants have 2 sets of menus… regular ones, and bilingual ones with higher prices! Racism and nationalism are also significant issues. While there’s a lot of mostly “innocent racism” in Taiwan that’s due to sheer ignorance, I’ve seen more cases of outright hatred here in China… especially towards the Japanese. Sometimes it works out in the foreigner’s favor, and sometimes it doesn’t. Since the two issues of race and nationality are often conflated, it can also make for some unpleasant situations for foreigners of Chinese decent (i.e. “ABCs”, “CBCs”, etc..). I don’t want to make it sound all bad, though. I really do like living in China. It’s just that it requires a thick skin. I’d say that you also need to have a bit more social awareness. You can do just about anything and do okay in Taiwan. In China, it’s easier to piss people off.

One plus for China is prices. As long as you don’t get ripped off, a lot of things can be had for half the price they would cost in Taiwan. Things that usually get all kinds of sin taxes, such as beer or cigarettes are insanely cheap in China! Less than half a US dollar for a beer at a local restaurant is common. A pack of smokes can be bought for about $1.20.

Salaries

This is a factor that has changed a lot in the last few years. When I got to Taiwan, English teaching salaries were two or three times as high as in China. Now, though… you can probably earn more in first-tier Chinese cities. In Taiwan, the salary for new teachers seems to stay around 600NT/hour, which is about 20USD/hour. In Beijing or Shanghai, the average is about 150RBM/hour which is about 24USD. Private classes usually start around 200RMB or 32USD per hour. I have friends making over 300RMB/hour. Housing prices have risen to about the same levels as Taipei, but everything else is cheaper. Purely in terms of money, China is now a far, far better choice. That’s not how it was a few years ago.

If you’re planning on a long term stay, it’s possible Taiwan is still better, though. In Taiwan, foreigners can start businesses such as foreign restaurants, clubs or even software companies relatively easily. In China, the only way to avoid having a Chinese partner with 51% control is to set up an extremely expensive Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise. That’s a reasonable solution if you’re IKEA, but not if you’re starting your own business.

The Internet

This really belongs above under “Quality of Life”, but the internet in China is so fucked up that it deserves its own section. Everything cool since 2004 is blocked. Unless you pony up the money for a VPN, you can’t use Facebook. You can’t use Twitter. You can’t use Blogspot or WordPress. You can’t use Youtube. You can’t even access Google Docs or Dropbox. You can have Gmail, but it’s a bit unreliable. Basically, you’re back in 2003.

The bottom line

• If you want to learn Chinese, go to China
• If you want to live the good life, go to Taiwan
• If you want to make money, go to China
• If you the best of both worlds, go to China, learn Chinese well and then go to Taiwan to settle down!

Work is going well. Not astoundingly well, but a solid improvement from a month and a half ago. My student numbers are up, my 3rd semester class has finished reading a 40 page Aladdin book, and I don’t really have any lazy students anymore.

The social life has been good, too. There are definitely some people who have left Taiwan that I miss, but things are good.

In terms of personal study, once again, things are good. I’ve had time to study a bit of Chinese, a bit of Japanese, some philosophy and some finance. I guess being a net-addict has its advantages.

What’s really on my mind though, is a choice. If I sell all my investments, I have an opportunity to start an incubator hedge fund. It would be expensive and it would be risky, but as the 62nd rule of Ferengi rule of acquisition states, “the riskier the road, the greater the profit.”

Since I’m a long-term value investor, running this sort of fund would take about the same amount of time I’m currently spending on researching investments (relatively little), but oh the risk! If my investing performance of the last 6 years is due to skill, then taking things to the next level is the thing to do. If I’ve just been lucky though, I could lose quite a bit by betting that luck will continue.

It’s time for some thinking.

In always like to assume the best about people. Sometimes, though, it costs me.

I live in a 加蓋房子, which is basically a floor illegally added onto the top of an apartment building. As such, I don’t get my own electric bills. Why that legal quandary didn’t slow down the phone company when I asked them to install phone and DSL service this spring, I’m not sure.

In any case, since it is illegal to have separate power bills, my power has been routed through my downstairs neighbor’s apartment. He put a meter on the power going to my floor and then I pay a portion of his power bill, depending on how much electricity I use.

He seemed like a nice guy, and I’ve basically just paid whatever number he said I owed each month, since it always seemed reasonable. Apparently, that was a mistake.

My bill for February and March was two thousand and change, my bill for April and May was four thousand and change, and then my bill for June and July came out to over thirteen thousand. I know air conditioning costs go up in the summer, but $13,455 is nuts. My bills in the winter last year at my old place were the same as this year, and the most expensive summer bill was about $5,500. With no change in my habits, could the bill have more than doubled?

I very nearly just paid it, but I’ve been short on cash and it was a monstrous bill, so I decided to get some more information. The entire bill the electric company sent my downstairs neighbor was 14,484. I went downstairs and asked him about it. He showed me my meter and stood by his calculations.

The problem is, there’s no way that I used $13,455 of electricity and his family of five only used $1,029. Even if they never used the air-conditioner at all, just the refrigerator would use more than that over a two month period.

I called our landlord and explained the problem. Fortunately, he agreed with me that there was no way the power usage worked out the way my neighbor claimed. It also turns out that the neighbor in question had been using the air-con, hasn’t been paying rent for a few months and is on his way out of the building. The

Best of all, the landlord is getting a working meter installed in my apartment, so I don’t need to rely on anyone else’s estimates of what I owe each month.

(Note: This post’s title has hurt some feelings. It was not intended to refer to any specific blogger. In particular, Lonnie at OMB is actually a very generous person in his charity work. This post is an argument against an idea, not an individual.)

Recently, it seems there’s been a sort of obsession spreading through the expat blogging communities. It’s about search engine optimization, i.e., trying to get one’s site to come up as high as possible in search engine results. The idea is to bring in traffic by figuring out how the search engines rank sites and then exploiting that system, or at least making sure of not being ranked artificially low. It’s not really a topic I’m interested in, but I’ve been dragged into this debate. Now that I have, I’ll let let my feelings be known.
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This entry was originally written in 2007. Since then, Taiwanderful has changed significantly and my initial misgivings no longer apply. The site no longer emphasizes monetary considerations on its front page, I believe it now shares 100% of blog post earnings with the authors of those posts, and most importantly the pop-up ads are gone!

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A while back, I noticed that Forumosa, the largest community site for foreigners in Taiwan, had a new guide for Taiwan. It’s called Taiwanease: The Knowledge, and it’s a wiki, which means that anybody can add articles to it and edit it. This sort of site usually takes a lot of work to get going, but once it’s big enough there will probably be quite a few people volunteering their time and knowledge to make it a better site. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, which has grown into an absolutely gigantic, non-commercial online encyclopedia.
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A couple of days ago, I took a taxi to my buddy Martin’s place. Right before the turn onto the alley I wanted to go onto, an illegally parked car pulled out in front and to our right, so we couldn’t turn before the light turned. Beep! The meter jumped up from 90 to 95. Not wanting to sit in a taxi behind a red light, I pulled out a hundred and gave it to the driver. As I waited for change, he told me I needed to pay 110. “But, the meter’s only 95!” I said. He then explained that there was a $20 surcharge during Chinese New Year. Fair enough, I thought. If I had to drive a taxi during Christmas break back home, I’d expect to be paid a bit more than usual, too.

There is no Chinese New Year surcharge, of course. One would think that after living in Taiwan for four years I would have realized that. Oh, well.
Update: There’s a fare increase, but only certain taxi companies are implementing it. Of the four times I’ve taken a cab since the new fees started, only one charged me. Ask if there’s an extra charge when you get in the cab.

This week has been busy. Simon’s classes started their vacation last weekend, so it’s just been the secretary and me at school. There have been a ton of odds and ends to tie up; everthing that needed to be done before the break had to be done this week. I gave retests to students who needed them, I talked with parents who were considering signing their kids up for my classes, and I got all of my students’ homework problems sorted out.

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Longtime readers of this blog will know well that I’ve never really suggested coming to Taiwan and teaching EFL purely for financial reasons. In fact, I’ve always found it a little hard to believe very many westerners, especially Americans would be able to earn anything like what they could at home. Now that the NT has been weakening against pretty much everything but the US dollar, the situation is a little less rosy for non-Americans as well. Canadians haven’t been hit too hard, but the deal really isn’t as sweet as it used to be for Europeans.

	Euro	UK	Australia	Canada
NT per	42.2	62.5	25.4	28.7

The average salary for EFL teachers in Taiwan is about $600NT per teaching hour. For most teachers, this means about there’s about half an hour of unpaid prep work for every two hours of teaching. The “real” earnings of a teacher here is about $480 per hour.

Earnings per hour	Euro	UK	Australia	Canada
600 NT (per class hour)	14.22	9.60	23.65	20.90
480 NT (real earnings)	11.37	7.68	18.92	16.72

Considering that teachers rarely teach over 30 class hours per week, this isn’t a lot of money by western standards. Taxes are reasonable, though. Short term teachers have to pay 20%, and longer-term teachers almost pay less (unless they have unusually high earnings). I’m not sure if these taxes are less than what a British person earning 800 pounds a month would have to pay, though. I think Taiwan is still an easier place for teachers to save money than Japan, but it doesn’t compare with working at home quite as well as it used to.

True to my Rocky Mountain roots, I shop on quality and price, not on brand. If I have a choice between two things of equal quality but one is brand name and more expensive, I take the cheaper, off-brand item. If I have a choice between two things of equal price, but one is a lesser quality item from a well known brand, I take the higher quality, off-brand item.

In other words, I don’t fit in too well with most Asian shoppers. In a land where I see women with brand-name handbags that cost more than this computer on nearly a daily basis, and where even my eight year old students obsess over the brand of their pencil cases, I stick out like a sore thumb. Pretty much anything in a department store costs 50% more than it would back home, and things bought at smaller markets are of erratic quality and can’t be returned. There aren’t many stores that are inviting to a price/value optimizer such as myself. There is one, though.
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My search for a laundromat hasn’t been easy since moving to Zhōngxiào Dūnhuà. This area is way too upscale for its own good. There are about 8 laundromats within a reasonable walk from where I live, but seven are dry-cleaners. That means they want $40 per item of clothing, and that it would cost me about $1300 per week to do my laundry. That’s as much as some people living in cheaper areas pay for rent! Obviously, there’s no way I’m going to pay that kind of money just to wash my clothes. The remaining laundromat is one that charges by the kilogram, $200 per kilogram. As I figure it, I have about 4 kilograms of clothes to do each week. While 800 bucks beats 1300, and they’ll fold the clothes for me, I still can’t afford that kind of craziness.
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