04.29.09
Posted in Environment, Ethics and morality, culture tagged hired help, Taiwan at 6:31 am by kyrias
My grandmother has a Filipina maid who comes in for 4 hours once a week.
I met her today. She didn’t appear to be much taller than I was, but she was painfully skinny in comparison.
Her name is Venus.
She rather suddenly asked me if I’ve read “My sister’s keeper” and I said yes. We then had a brief dialogue about how it was a good book, but far too sad.
My grandmother mentioned to me that she was currently working illegally after having come here on a now-expired work visa, was sometimes too sick to do the full four hours, is married with children and here being a maid despite having had a college education.
I have never been ashamed of having a maid. Despite the connotations when spoken in American society, growing up in Shanghai meant that it was normal to have hired help. Normal to have someone wait on you hand and foot, complete with breakfast in bed and meeting you at the school bus stop to carry your bookbag if you wished it.
It’s interesting to see how “A yi“, or “auntie” has evolved to meaning the hired help in Shanghai. Amongst the crowd I walked with, we had to specify if we meant a real relative, a friend of the family that was given the honorific, or the maid. It made for interesting conversation dynamics and is a quiet, but potent, footnote on the society I lived in.
I’m not ashamed now that my grandmother pays for Venus’ help either. Grandmama discreetly gifts her with food and other small things, feeds her well before allowing her to go on to her next job cleaning the house of a friend, and tries to find more people to give her jobs. I suspect that her sympathy for this woman’s plight is also some good part of why she has a maid every week and not less frequently.
The feeling I have is much more complex and dark than that.
When I was a child, it not only was normal to have hired help, it was easy to see that woman as an extension of the household. Especially as we had the same older woman who took care of us as if we were her own for seven years. Seven years is both not uncommon and rare, now that we’ve moved past the idea and era of loyal retainers and into an age of pseudo-capitalism.
Then, we knew that it was their job. They were often paid well, ate well with the family, and treated well.
However, this is different; looking upon this woman who is in a foreign country, speaking a language not her own, a plane trip and country borders away from her family, sick and college educated and yet washing floors for a living.
This feels like exploitation.
It feels dirty in a way that having a maid as a child never was.
Regardless that my grandmother attempts to help her. Despite all the kindnesses that the many women of my grandmother’s community might do for her.
Are the people who hire these desperate women actually helping them, or are they part of the problem? And what of the larger question of why supposedly illegal Filipino maids are so prevalent in Taiwan?
I do not know what to think. It is slightly painful to even look this topic in the face. To think that Filipina and maid are somewhat synonymous here.
On a slightly darker note, I mention that there was an old man who killed himself after his long-time Filipina maid finally returned home.
That is another something I have no idea what to think of.
Did he deliberately attempt to keep her with him by not paying her as much as she perhaps needed to return home? What must his relationships with his family be like, if the thought of losing his long-time caretaker was enough to drive him to suicide? What must she think of him, benefactor/patron or someone who kept her paid enough from leaving him but not paid enough to help?
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04.28.09
Posted in life at 5:50 am by kyrias
Taiwan:
Pros:
- Universal healthcare, bitches. Read this post for more eat-your-heart-out.
- Tasty fud. All over the place. I don’t care if they’re not the most sanitary places — those little snack stalls and carts all over the place make this the best place ever if you’re a hollow pit like me.
- Being in the majority of the population is win. There’s something about being a second-class citizen that sort of sinks under the skin in the US which, thankfully, goes away here.
- Family. LOL.
- Cheap vittles. It’s about 50 NT for a huge amount of vegetables. Everything fresh is relatively inexpensive. Makes the grocery shopper in me whimper at the thought of shopping in the US again. Lovely fruit also. There is some benefit to living in the sub-tropics. And everything is not shipped millions of miles.
Cons:
- The bloody weather. Ye gods, but it’s hot here. Sub-tropics for the lose. Not to mention the humidity. Blegh.
- The mosquitoes that never seem to die. See above.
- Shipping of books from the US has gotta hurt the wallet. I haven’t been here for a while, think 4 years, but so far as I can tell, the book market here isn’t as sophisticated as the US in certain ways. I’ll have to go to some bookstores and see if I change my mind after further reading — but one of my main problems with finding books to read in Taiwan has always been the hard demarcation between romance/sci-fi/mystery, and whatnot. Not that the US doesn’t have similar difficulties, but somehow, the demarcation in Taiwan feels somehow more gender-polluted than the US. I could be wrong though.
- Family. LOL.
- The politics and politicians. This extends to beyond Taiwan’s non-status as a country, if you’ve paid even the least bit of attention to Taiwanese politics, you’ll know that they’re positively shameful.
- The educational system. Somehow, the same people who are idiots and whores (see above) are in charge of the education system. Key point of this observation is that it would suck to raise children here. The capitalist in me notes that opening a English after-school program might net me a decent amount of money. Said person, however, further notes that if I ever move back here, the chances of me going back to the States is slim to none because the exchange rate is currently 33:1 and only likely to get worse.
US:
Pros:
- Friends.
- Amazon.com.
- Comparatively fresher air. Nicer cities. Taiwan, for some reason, has the most fugly cities.
- ????
Cons:
- Being a second-class citizen sucks. If I haven’t posted about this, I should.
- No cheap tasty fud.
- No family. Being about 30 or so hours away, by plane, from family sucks. For the record, this time we came back to Taiwan, from the time we headed out from the house and the time we stepped into the relative’s house where we are staying — it was 37 hours.
- Everything is expensive. Prohibitively so. Especially in comparison to China and Taiwan. It’s really somewhat ridiculous how expensive fresh vegetables and fruits in the US can get.
- This really isn’t the most friendly place to live if you don’t have a car. I wouldn’t say it’s the most unfriendliest I’ve lived in because China might take that title, but it really sucks to not have one.
China (Shanghai):
Pros:
- You can hire a maid to do all your household chores for about 800 RMB a month the last I checked. All. Including scrubbing the floor on hands and knees if you should so desire. Minions, my friends, minions. All yours for a pittance.
- Cheap fud if you dare the traditional markets. Not so cheap fud if you insist on eating Westernized food. Very good restaurants from all over the world to be found in Shanghai.
- …?
- If you’re an entrepreneur, you can make oodles of money here. Too bad I don’t have the verve and drive to do something here.
Cons:
- Most insane drivers in the world. Ask Caesura. I would never want to drive here, and the sad fact is that you pretty much do need to have a car. Packs of bicycle sharks pretty much make the roads a terror to navigate. And let’s not forget the amount of traffic. I once spent 40 minutes traversing 100 meters of road because of the traffic. Yes, you read that right.
- The housing bubble pretty much makes buying a house as hard as buying one in the States. Considering that China is pretty much still an undeveloped Third World country, that sucks.
- Great Firewall of China. That they deny setting up. Do I really need to say more on this?
- Human rights? What human rights?
- About those female babies…
- Shanghai is really close to Taiwan. Which is in the sub-tropics. So you do the math. Or geography. Whatevs.
- No Amazon. And if I have things to say about the Taiwanese book market, I have worse things to say about the Chinese book market.
As for Japan — I might not really be qualified to speak about it because so far I’ve only really spent about 10 days there. However, since I’ll be spending a month there, it might make it onto this list.
Right now, my thoughts on living in Japan is that:
Why is everything so freaking expensive there? In terms of expenditures, it really felt like I was spending in the US instead of in an Asian country. I really hope that their salaries reflect that, but I didn’t feel ok asking people how much they were making.
Mom and I barely dared buy anything because once we did some quick calculations, the prices almost always left us somewhat shell shocked.
I will say, however, things are really mostly better made there. Almost everything was electronified, prettified, bling-ified, etc. I really want one of those sinks where you have pre-set water temperatures that you can switch between with the press of a button. It would make washing dishes so much happier.
Vegetables were pretty expensive in the city. It did seem to be of decent quality, but paying about $2 for a small package of greens really hurt. I’ve heard that vegetables are much cheaper in the countryside, but I haven’t lived there so I wouldn’t know. Fruit is also pretty pricy — but it tastes a lot better than fruit I’ve had in the US, so it’s not a bad tradeoff.
Eating out wasn’t horrible, since I like udon enough to live off that. However, it was hard to find anything resembling stir-fried vegetables or salads in the places we ate out at. That was somewhat hard to adjust to because I’ve never really had a problem finding greens in any other country. I kind of got the impression that they ate sea-veggies instead of land-veggies, but it was hard making that shift.
Note, these are observations from a tourist point of view. Even after I’ve been there a month I suspect it’ll still be pretty much a touristy point of view. So take these with about a pound of salt.
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04.27.09
Posted in culture tagged nationalist one-up-manship at 4:22 am by kyrias
So.
I had my teeth cleaned and a wisdom tooth taken out for 15o NT about five days ago. Right now, it’s 33 NT to 1 USD.
Do the math. That’s not even quite $5.
I’ll be going in for another tooth extraction in about a week, and it’ll cost about the same.
I have bloodwork and a kidney scan scheduled for Friday and an x-ray done today. Appointments with two different doctors later, we were only out 1260 NT — $38 dollars.
Whatever else you can say about Taiwan and its problems — at least universal healthcare is nice.
It’s about 600 NT per person per month, according to mom. She says that I might be paying less because of my age or whatnot, but she says it’s not more than 50 NT less.
So that’s what, $18 a month? And in exchange I can go anywhere in the country for any sort of doctor’s appointment and pay about 200 NT per doctor’s visit, including medication.
If you’re between 40 - 65 years of age, you get a free whole-body medical exam at clinics every three years. That includes all sort of things like bloodwork for kidney function and etc.
I honestly can’t see why people get their underwear in such a twist about universal healthcare. So far as I can tell, Taiwan hasn’t gone socialist yet, despite what all the USian fearmongerers say.
BTW, Azora? Every woman gets a free annual Pap smear here. 
Can I bring the results back to the US for BCP? 
Eat that US, eat that and choke on it.
For the record, it’s really hard to love living in the US the more I hear about what shiny things other country has. The list of “better than thou” countries does not include China, however.
Which reminds me, because this is turning into an emo-infested, narcissistic blog, I’m going to post about what places I’ve lived in and where they fall on a list.
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04.24.09
Posted in Health tagged drama-ilama, psychoses at 6:01 am by kyrias
I went in to see the dentist today.
I thought that we were just going in for a check up, perhaps get some cleaning done, get a professional opinion on whether or not the teeth needed to come out, and then out again.
To my immense surprise, after I was hustled away to get some x-rays taken, the doctor told me point blank once I was in her chair that I could have my teeth taken out immediately if I wanted.
I think that was when my heart rate doubled. The hyperventilation would come later.
The doctor pointed out rather coolly that it would be a simple procedure, wouldn’t take much time, and I could have it done whenever I felt up to it.
At that point, I knew that there would never come a time when I would be ready for it.
To be fair though, today wasn’t particularly auspicious, considering that I still have a cold and am woozy from that. I could have chickened out, and I really wanted to.
However, the teeth really needed to go. They were messing up the order of my other teeth, caused headaches on top of fevers, and they were in such an awkward position due to lack of space that I couldn’t brush them properly.
Besides, part of the reason my mother brought me back to Taiwan was so I could get all the work that I needed to get done, done here. Regardless of how poorly Taiwan performs in other areas, at least I have health coverage here.
Universal health insurance, bitch. Take that, U.S. Take that!
In the end, I decided to go for it.
I tensed further when the first needle went in. By the end of the fourth prick, I was hyperventilating uncontrollably despite my efforts to breathe deeply. I was shaking so hard that even my feet were noticeably trembling.
Not my most brilliant moment.
At least the tooth came out alright. Now I just need to go in to get the other one out.
I’m so not looking forward to that.
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04.23.09
Posted in Health at 4:11 am by kyrias
The moral lesson here, boys and girls, is to not have dental work done in China.
I’d heard the usual horror stories. You know, the person who went in for a tooth extraction and then woke up to find all his teeth gone and replaced with a set of false teeth and was charged for it. The person who got put under and woke up to find himself not only sans teeth, but minus a kidney or two. But you never really think you’ll be quite that unlucky — until you are.
About what, 6 or so years ago, my brother needed to get braces. He insisted that I get them too, even though my teeth were/are reasonably straight. So as to not appear biased towards one child, my mother acquiesced.
For those that think that my brother has some sort of overwhelming love for me that includes wanting me to look my best — uh no. The little bugger knew that it would hurt and wanted company in misery, and after all, he wasn’t paying.
I decided to go along with it because beautifying work is never a bad thing, and studies have shown that people are more amiably disposed towards people with straight, white teeth.
I asked the dentist if I needed to have any teeth taking out to facilitate the process. Things were pretty cozy in there at the time and I didn’t want to go through the pain and bother of braces and then have everything undone if I had wisdom teeth coming in.
The bastard said no. Even after I pointed out that I might have wisdom teeth coming in, he said that it would be ok.
In retrospect, I should have insisted.
A few years later, as I feared, my wisdom teeth started coming in. Not only did they indeed undo all the work I had suffered for, it turned out that I would have to have at least one of them out because it was half imbedded in my jaw and growing sideways. So it wouldn’t be the usual extraction, it would actually be a surgery.
Tangentially, I’m especially bitter about the undoing of the braces because I actually tore the little membrane connecting my tongue to the bottom of my mouth on my braces once. I couldn’t speak for three days and I still have shivers over the pain. To have that be for nought is enough to make me want to drag the dentist into a dark alleyway on a stormy night.
The day of the surgery, I went in, mostly calm. I’d never been afraid of the dentist before, and I didn’t see how this visit would be that much different. After all, didn’t my own brother have his teeth taken out here also?
Everything seemed to be going swimmingly. The needle went in, I felt parts of my mouth going numb, so on, so forth.
It wasn’t until the good doctor made the first cut that things started going rapidly downhill.
I made some sort of strangled yelp and the doctor stopped in his tracks. “Does it hurt?”
I nodded as much as I could, what with tubes leading out from my mouth and his implements still somewhere too close for comfort.
He nodded, put in another injection, and then proceeded.
It still hurt, even though it was much better than before. At this point, I was starting to get wound up. A while later, it started hurting much more and I garbled something out to that effect.
He paused, and said with some measure of surprise, “Really? Most people are fine with half a needle of anesthesia, and you’ve already have one full needle.”
I nodded emphatically and he just shrugged and gave me another injection.
This cycle repeated itself for the near two hours of surgery. The anesthesia would wear off and he would give me more, but it would never be enough to fully keep the pain away. I was a wreck; between the pain, and the anticipation of more pain, I was shaking harder than a palm tree during a typhoon.
It didn’t help that he was doing wierd things with hammers, picks, drills, the entire arsenal.
They had insisted on telling me what exactly was going to happen, even though I said I would really preferred not to have known. They needed to cut through the gums to the bone, cut through the bone itself, and then extract the tooth.
By the time we were done, my hair was damp from tears and sweat, and I had purportedly gone through 7 needles of anesthesia.
So. The point of all this is: I’m going in to see the dentist tomorrow. I have two wisdom teeth in my upper jaw that are giving me trouble and maybe they need to come out.
Joy.
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04.16.09
Posted in Uncategorized tagged Japan 2009 at 12:59 am by kyrias
Japan wins. Hands down; no prisoners taken.
The restroom of a rest-stop by the highway looks like it was transposed from a 6-star hotel. Yes, I know it goes up to 5 stars only, but really, on a scale of 1-10 in terms of speakers, this restroom would be an 11.
Automatic doors, warmed seats, bidet system, sanitizing gel to wipe the seats off with, palm imprint activated flushing system, and don’t forget the noise maker so people can’t hear you eliminate…
God. I never thought I’d take pictures of a bathroom, but jeez — I don’t care if I looked crazy to all the Japanese people who take this as a matter of course.
And by the way? I never, ever thought I’d be a weeaboo. Oh, how the hubris stings when one falls.
Wooden paneling, and potted plants, oh my.
See the fancy gadgetry? Bidet controls for temp, water force, etc. Sheesh.
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04.15.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged spam at 9:47 am by kyrias
Yes, that “teh” is deliberate.
The title needed that to emphasize the spam. 262 spammy bits in 8 days.
Ye gods. I almost think that blogging about the spam was as if I dribbled blood into shark-infested waters.
Thene, I fished your legitimate Sybilla-wank comment out of 15 pages of comments. 
You’re right. It’s full of fail. But then, anything that has to do with Twilight is usually fail.
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04.13.09
Posted in culture tagged drama-ilama, peanut gallery Japan 2009 at 4:22 pm by kyrias
I think almost every Asian person and a significant portion of the weeaboo population knows about the story of the thousand paper cranes.
For those that don’t, the gist is this:
A girl survives the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima at age 2, only to develop leukemia at about age 12. Her friend folds a paper crane for her when she comes to visit and explains the story about having a wish granted if you manage to fold 1,000 paper cranes. The popular version of the story I read was that she only folded 644 before she was to weak to continue and therefore she died.
Right. The real story, which I remembered vaguely, was that she had finished, and yet died anyways.
So when we visited Hiroshima and the statue of Sadako Sadaki, of thousand paper crane fame was pointed out, I commented in response to “Look, there’s the statue! of the crane girl!” that it’s odd that people still keep folding paper cranes even though it’s been more or less empirically proved that it’s futile.
I got jumped on by all the “it’s for the warm and fuzzies!” people. Which then progressed into the “you’re too young to understand the value of compassion” speech which then somehow evolved into the “you’re too young to understand the value of health” lecture which then mysteriously devolved into the “youth is wasted on the young” and “this concept is too deep for you” spiel.
WTF mate?
Is there a logical progression to that monologue?
I bit my tongue and didn’t engage, even though I really wanted to ask them if they had the number of health problems I do and had. Severe asthma as a child that had me a frequent ER patient, severe allergies, depression, ADD, repetitive UTIs on my body’s whim — really, are you trying to tell me that I don’t “get” how good it is to have a healthy body?
For the love of god and little green apples, the amount of stupid self-preening patronizing that goes on around here is staggering.
Note to self, try not to travel with a tourist group of mostly grandmothers and mothers next time. Or at least not unless their own offspring is there to distract their hennish tendencies.
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04.12.09
Posted in culture tagged FAIL at 12:49 am by kyrias
Or: Don’t travel somewhere you can’t communicate unless you’re a glutton for punishment.
Turns out that my mother and I are stupidly allergic to something in Japan. Methinks it might be the flowers. Or the trees. Think non-stop nose dripping, sneezing, itchy eyes, sinus headache, dizziness — the full gamut.
Ee got some cold+allergy medicine from someone touristing with us. Since we didn’t want to indefinitely mooch off this person for the full 10 days, we decided to pick some up for ourselves at a drugstore.
The problem was, when said person pointed out the medicine to us, the list of symptoms it was supposed to alleviate had nothing to do with either allergies or a cold. Turns out it was some kind of anti-pain medication. This would be FAIL #1.
Mom didn’t want to buy it, as she didn’t think that taking something that wasn’t supposed to cure what we have is a good idea. I argued for buying it even just for the potential placebo effect because I didn’t want to spend the next god knows how long sneezing my brains out slowly.
So, we tried asking the store assistant. They had no clue. Not one. We tried writing out the Chinese words for pollen and allergy. At first they still looked confused, and then after much gesticulation and broken Japanese on the part of one of our tour-mates, one of them handed us a tube of rash ointment. Cue Fail #2.
Certain of the rest of the peanut gallery (the other people in the touristing group) tried to tell us that we actually had colds and should be wearing face-masks to stop contaminating other people and that we should just take cold medicine. Fail #3 appears for a cameo and exits stage right.
Mom gets her way and I flounce off because I was near to shouting at her. Note, I did not raise my voice, much. The thought of spending a few days in an allergy fog makes my temper a bit chancy.
I look around, half to distract myself, and half in a last-ditch attempt to find something that might work. My eyes alight on a little sign saying “Solution for pollen” or “Pollen antidote”. Absolutely furious at this point, I made an sincere effort to point it out as calmly as possible. Fanfare for Fail #4 because the bloody store assistants apparently have no fucking clue what their store carries. This is particularly fail because there was a sign pointing to all the different allergy medications.
As we leave the store, one of the peanut gallery mentions how it must be my Western edumacation that makes me disagree publicly with my mother and Fail #5 shows up and bitch-slaps me in the face.
So much fail in less than 30 minutes. For the love of God. Ugh.
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04.10.09
Posted in culture tagged East meets West, friends versus family at 2:26 am by kyrias
Note: If any of you RL people want to talk about this post, we can when I get back, ‘kay?
I’ve recently realized that a lot of my current East meets West problems stem from the disapproval I get from my friends. It’s not easy dealing with one faction being irritated with you, and it’s harder when suddenly it seems that no matter what I do, I piss someone off.
It has actually been an on-going argument, between what they think I should be doing and what I actually do.
Right now, my mother is attempting to force me to move back home.
I don’t want to. I’m pretty adamantly against this idea. I’ve spent a week or two at her house before and the idea of living there long term terrifies the fuck out of me.
It’s in the suburbs, ergo I’d have to get into a car in order to even pick up a newspaper. My parents treat me like a child — when I’m living in the house my mom still orders me to bed, not to mention the other myriad ways in which I must still defer to her judgement. I’d feel cut off from the rest of my social circle, and believe me when I say that a life in which my only contact is with my immediate family is not really one I’m looking forward to.
That said, I’m unemployed.
Considering that my parents would almost definitely allow me to move back out once I got a job in Boston proper, there’s no logical reason to say “no”.
In fact, considering I’d be living there free, there’s a number of reasons to say yes. One of which is the 40k debt that Caesura and I have between student loans and credit card debt.
To be honest, I don’t really understand why I’m getting so much disapproval from my friends about this. They seem to think it’s reasonable and ok to berate me about my purchasing habits but suddenly when it comes to “emancipation from the parents” it’s ok to make a financially stupid decision simply because “I feel like it”.
So wait, I can’t buy that $400 dress that I’ve been coveting for two years just because I feel like it, but it’s perfectly reasonable to be going further into debt to stay in an apartment with my friends simply because now suddenly it’s about not being slavishly obedient to your parents and all that.
The fact is, I don’t have a job. I don’t even have a volunteer job. I actually have no reason to stay in Somerville and continue to spend money on food for me except that it makes me happier. Fact is that Caesura would still be paying for my share of rent and utilities because that’s how things will be split up, so we’re not saving that much. Even so.
Well, guess what, sweetcakes? If I can’t buy that $400 dress just because I feel like it, then perhaps I shouldn’t be spending that money simple because I feel like it.
My parents have said that if I get a job, they’ll drive me back to Boston proper immediately.
It’s not as if they’re going to chain me kicking and screaming to their house if I have a legitimate reason to be in Somerville.
So really, what is your issue?
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