In a recent dispute between a female Danish foreign exchange student and a local student in a girls’ dormitory at National Taiwan University, it is impossible to see who is telling the truth based on allegations alone. However, people are jumping to conclusions and condemning those involved without knowing the whole story.
The conflict began after a Taiwanese student posted a statement on Professional Technology Temple (PTT) — Taiwan’s biggest online academic bulletin board system — accusing a Danish student who lives next door to her in the dorm of trying to break into her room with a group of alcohol-fueled male students. She added that the Danish student verbally threatened her.
The post generated a storm of anger, with local students immediately posting on PTT the names and nationalities of the foreign students allegedly involved, rendering them guilty without any hard evidence and sparking a protest outside the dorm.
National Taiwan University president Lee Si-chen (李嗣涔) stepped into the fray and said those involved would be held accountable, adding that the university would not rule out suspending its exchange program with the Danish student’s university.
That’s a firm response from the head of the school and will likely go a long way in soothing local students who are angry over a foreigner’s alleged poor treatment of one of their own. But let’s backtrack a little: So far, there has been nothing but allegations. Who is actually telling the truth in all this? The Danish student says she was simply trying to communicate with her Taiwanese neighbor, while the Taiwanese student says she was threatened. Both could be telling the truth, or they could both be misinterpreting what happened.
Let’s look at the Taiwanese student’s story first. It is likely and highly probable that her Danish neighbor was having a bit of an impromptu party at the dorm — a girls’ dorm — with male students that shouldn’t have been allowed in there in the first place. Anybody who has gone to a Western institution of higher education knows that this scenario happens all the time — it has even been the subject of dozens of movies. Hypothetically, they were making too much noise and the Taiwanese neighbor knocked on the wall to quiet them. It’s not unlikely that one, two or more of them went next door to knock on the Taiwanese neighbor’s door, either to talk to her or tell her to quit knocking on the wall. It’s easy to see how this would completely cross the line of polite behavior in Taiwan.
Now let’s look at the story from the Danish student’s perspective: She said her Taiwanese neighbor knocked on the wall any time she did anything in her dorm room. Either her neighbor was too sensitive to sound or the walls are too thin. Moreover, the Danish student said one of her friends was simply trying to communicate with the neighbor when he knocked on her door that night and did not mean any harm at all. The Danish student added that her neighbor was nosy and often peeked into her room.
Looking at both stories, it seems as if the whole dispute arose from a simple misunderstanding that went on for too long. The Danish student was likely not being considerate enough to her neighbor, while it seems the Taiwanese student wasn’t giving her Danish counterpart enough privacy.
The sad thing is that the whole incident got blown out of proportion and dozens of students jumped to the defense of either the Taiwanese or the Danish student, depending on whether they were foreign or not. Lee said after the incident that “conflict between different cultures was inevitable.” In this case, the actions of both sides and the students that support them make that statement a self-fulfilling retrospective prophecy.
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