Thoth Harris, author of The Montreal Writer’s Storm Sewer wrote an interesting article in response to my first post on Expats Behaving Badly. It’s a great read and well worth checking out. He makes some excellent points on this issue. I’ve enjoyed reading Thoth’s blog for some time now. He’s an excellent writer.
This morning, my friend and fellow co-worker, David, posted his point of view on Mike’s Story. David is familiar with the ins and outs of Mike’s story. For an alternative view, check out his blog.
While reading Thoth’s blog yesterday it came to my attention that some readers may think this is an opportunity to judge and blame others.
Let me clarify a bit for you though. I’m not talking about people who talk loudly and criticize at every opportunity. Naturally, some of us might react in less than flattering light when confronted with a particularly stressful or odd situation. I’ve been guilty of this once or twice myself, my first year abroad in particular, and I’ve felt sorry about it afterwards and made an effort not to let it happen again. A stressful moment is like a lesson and I try to remember the value in each one.
Making generalizations and comparisons are part and parcel of our natural instinct to relate new or strange information to something similar in our everyday lives. We categorize and compartmentalize on a daily basis, especially when living abroad. How we choose to respond to this information is really important in how you will be perceived by others. Personally, I think this is one of the differences between being a tourist and being a traveler.
However, I digress. This is not what Expats Behaving Badly is about. I intend to focus on people who behave in unreasonable and unfavorable ways which include threats, bullying and all around ill good-will towards the people of their chosen country of residence.
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Carrie, it’s ok to make judgments about others. I’ve never understood this rather new phenomenon of thinking that “judging” people stands for weighing the value of their human lifeforce or some such. to the contrary, if more people judged the behavior of others to be acceptable or unacceptable then perhaps there would be less problems of this type. so i judge people all the time. i judge whether or not they are suitable associates. i judge whether or not they would be positive influences on my life, and on my relationship with my wife. this is partly because of a long history in the music business where many people i met were not exactly good associates. if i judge someone to be otherwise, i do not apologize for it. there is nothing wrong with this kind of judgment, any more than if one were to judge the distance of the car in front of them. a more correct term might be “evaluate.” these are simple evaluations. people often try to excuse their bad behavior by putting it off on you for judging them. so be it.
hey Carrie,
this topic is a kinda icky. looking back, perhaps i was a bit too harsh on Mike…but I simply wanted to paint a picture of the situation. it was traumatic and i felt i needed to share my thoughts.
i am, by no means, perfect. by pointing out the many issues, i think it makes it easier to face the situation and see that there was really no other way to deal with it.
i hope that i didn’t come across as overly critical.
-david
MJ,
Thanks for your comments. David is right. This topic is a little icky, but I feel strongly enough about it to stand up for what I believe in. Whether people choose to read these posts is up to them. However, you’ve made me feel much much better about posting. Thank-you.
David,
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what you wrote. It’s all true.
I felt the same when I started posting, but I’ve come to realize that we don’t write about love and light and sugary-goodness all the time. People like Mike really make me angry. You’re right. It is traumatic and his behavior played a huge part in how my week went. I don’t want to be around these kinds of people.
hey Carrie,
don’t sweat it. you are permitted to vent, it’s your site!
i find it odd that the blog feed has chosen not to include these posts on their site…i think it’s certainly relevant to teaching and living in Taiwan.
-david
David,
The blog feed has only featured a few of my posts since I returned. I blog on traveling and South East Asia mostly. I noticed when I started writing less about Taiwan, my posts disappeared. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not.
Your post takes on an interesting viewpoint Carrie. There are a lot of ex-pats behaving badly and that is why they have fled their native country and moved to Asia.
Unfortunately there are also a lot of employers who behave badly and take advantage of ex-pats. At one school we worked at an Australian worker flipped out and fingered our old boss. However, she only did this when she was pushed past her limit and made to do unpaid work. Two sides to every story I suppose…..
remember austin powers? http://dreintaiwan.blogspot.com/2007/03/austin-powers-doesnt-like-to-be-called.html
Hi Andres,
Do I ever! I just don’t understand why people act this way.
David, the Taiwan Blog Feed is completely automated. I made it a year or so ago, when Michael Turton got too busy to continue his “blog roundups”. It’s great that a lot of Taiwan bloggers have added their feeds, but a lot of people add blogs that don’t have anything to do with Taiwan or EFL. I get dozens of requests a week, ranging from outright spam on one end of the spectrum to very interesting journals written by travelers in Italy on the other.
A few bloggers, including myself only put up tag feeds. That way only posts tagged with “Taiwan” or maybe “Chinese” or “EFL” get through. Most bloggers want to promote everything on their blogs, which is fine up to a limit. After Range flooded the TBF with over 20 posts about the Big Brother TV series, and a post about “Britney’s Crotchshot” lodged itself at the top of the recently viewed listings, I started removing feeds that had several consecutive “non-Taiwan” posts in a row.
Now that I’ve figured out how to get a category feed from WordPress.com, I’ve added a feed to Carrie’s Taiwan category.
Carrie, the feed is under your name, so you can log in and alter the feed to include more categories as you like.
Thanks for clarifying Mark. I’ve noticed missing posts from certain bloggers and suspected this might be the problem. I’m glad you’ve corrected the problem.