Taiwan is multi-racial
Taiwan is a multi-racial society and Taiwanese of all races have the right to speak the national languages. Those who come to live in Taiwan and refuse to speak a word of Taiwanese, Mandarin or any of the national languages are egocentrics.
Despite being Taiwanese citizens, my children, because of their racial features, are pointed at, pinched, heckled, have obscenities barked at them in English, racial slurs yelled at them in Mandarin and Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), and as Martin de Jonge described so eloquently (Letters, June 2, page 8), are treated as zoo animals on a daily basis.
A simple trip to the supermarket can be a nightmare because some people (and I stress, only some) will not leave us alone. Such acts are considered assault, harassment, and/or racist attacks in other countries. My wife and I do our best to tolerate it, but this does not make it right.
Last summer, my sister-in-law went to my sons’ supposedly “bilingual” kindergarten and saw our then four-year-old standing to attention in the courtyard in the hot, midday sun, tears streaming down his face. His aunt asked the school what he had done and we eventually got to the bottom of what had happened: He was being used as a marketing tool for the school because of his racial features.
As apparently was routine, when prospective parents arrived that day during nap-time, he was woken up and asked to speak with the parents, who were told he was a “foreigner.” He balked and spoke Mandarin, embarrassing the school, and was punished. Needless to say, my boys are now home-schooled.
But there is hope. Just today my sons started playing with a boy and his sister at the swimming pool. After the boy went to whisper something to his mother, his mother smiled and I heard her answer in Mandarin: “Sure their hair and eyes and skin are different, but they are people just like us. You can play with them.”
They then played happily together, speaking Mandarin and bits of Taiwanese and English as probably many Taiwanese children their age do.
MATTHEW LIAO
Taichung
Ma no fan of democracy
In his June 4 op-ed piece, “Bullets over Beijing,” in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof recounts how 20 years earlier he stood at the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square and watched as Chinese troops opened fire and slaughtered hundreds of unarmed students.
In Kristof’s account, everyone was terrified and no one dared to help the injured, who writhed in pain in the 100m space that separated the crowd from the soldiers.
At the end of his article, Kristof writes this paragraph: “In Taiwan in 1986, an ambitious young official named Ma Ying-jeou [馬英九] used to tell me that robust Western-style democracy might not be fully suited for the people of Taiwan. He revised his view and now is the island’s democratically elected president.”
That Ma has always been ambitious is incontrovertible. In fact, he now seems to have his sights set on holding the post of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman while simultaneously serving as president.
In addition, Ma was indeed democratically elected to the presidency, winning by a substantial margin.
But Kristof is wrong when he purports that Ma has “revised” his stance on democracy. There is absolutely nothing in Ma’s political record to indicate that he has revised his view even slightly.
There is no evidence that Ma has had a change of heart in regard to the suitability of democracy for Taiwanese.
On the contrary, his actions would seem to indicate that he has hardened his heart and even developed a hostility toward democracy and human rights.
MICHAEL SCANLON
East Hartford, Connecticut
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS