Sunday, February 01, 2009

Possibly Controversial

I got back from Taiwan on Friday having slept about 5 hours out of the previous 48, so I’ve been catching up on sleep since. I plan to write about it in some depth in a series of posts, but I’d like to generalise first.

Taiwan, or rather Taipei, is the China that you know from strolling around China-town, when you try to imagine a whole city with narrow streets filled to the brim with people, lined by neon-signs and food-stalls. It is, at the same time, a trying impersonation of Japan in cuisine (Japanese food often seems to outnumber Chinese food), in cuteness (you will want to brick the fake-baby-voiced young women and soap-opera inflected young men) and in high-technology (home of the leading motherboard and video-card companies, which is awesome…in fact this is not so much an impersonation of Japan, come to think of it).

What I’m trying to say is, it’s a shua-shua hotpot of Orientalist cliché. But as I hope to explain, I don’t find that to be an entirely bad thing.

1 comment:

Paul said...

Someone told me last night Taiwan was Japanese administered for 60 years so I guess there's going to be some overlap. Looking forward to the series of posts to come.