Here Come the Taiwanese Tourists!

On an airplane an old lady tells a flight attendant why she prefers a window seat: "They're cooler since they get more wind."

Don't be too quick to laugh at her for being ignorant of the ways of the world. From boarding a plane to checking in at a hotel, from sightseeing to shopping, Taiwanese tourists travelling abroad will all face situations when a command of Mandarin and Taiwanese are not enough, when many will resort to gesticulation. And even if language poses no problem, in a foreign land you won't at once completely understand the customs. Who can guarantee that you too won't play the fool? The difference between you and her may just be a matter of degree.

One tour group of businessmen's wives were shopping in Zurich when the tour leader said, "Shop along this street and then we'll meet up again two hours later." Who would have guessed that with a few turns in a department store and an exit from the wrong door, they'd be lost. Among a dozen odd women, none could speak a second language other than Mandarin, and so they forlornly held up a piece of paper on which they had written the Chinese characters for "train station" and ran up to ask directions of any Orientals who happened by. Finally, after building up a good cold sweat, they spied their group leader.

Ignorance of German once led to a blooper of humorist Li Nan-heng's own making.

Upon checking into a hotel, he felt like a bath and so he checked out the bathroom first. From his travels in Japan, he was acquainted with thin plastic cords that would extend across Japanese hotel bathrooms to allow guests to dry their underwear. The cord in his German bathroom appeared a little rough and short, and to its right were directions written in German. Not knowing a furz from a fraulein, he just gave it a good yank. The cord didn't extend, so he hung a hanger of wet clothes from the small loop that extruded from the wall. After he left the bathroom, his bell rang and he heard urgent knocking sounds at the door. He was given a start when the door suddenly flew open.

"Is nothing the matter?" a member of the hotel staff queried. Leading him into the bathroom, the employee pointed at the cord and said that it was used to save lives. If you had an accident in the tub, a tug would bring emergency assistance. Li made repeated apologies, but kept wondering to himself, "Why isn't there a sign in English?"

If linguistic and cultural differences lead to farcical faux pas, then the victims can just laugh them off. But a breach of convention that leads to loss of life is no laughing matter. In November of last year, lions killed two students from Taiwan in a wildlife park near Johannesburg. On a whim, the students ignored warnings against leaving one's vehicle and stepped out to take pictures of lions at a distance of two meters. In expressing their regrets, park officials said that in 26 years never before had a lion attacked a visitor. The warnings were written very clearly. Since it wasn't the lions' fault, they wouldn't be shot.

The incident let out of the cage a flock of tales about ROC tourists a broad, stories that leave one uncertain as whether to laugh or to cry.

Foreigners abide by the custom of first come, first served. Once some elderly Taiwan women abroad saw a line of people in front of a bathroom.  How peculiar, they thought, for these foreigners to congregate outside the bathroom! These grandmothers just went right on in, bent down and peered at pair after pair of legs in a fruitless search for a vacant stall.

"Taiwan travellers are fond of displaying their heroic dispositions," analyzes Vicky Ling, the president of the ROC Association of  Tour Managers, who can distinguish Taiwanese from Japanese by merely the way they line up.

The Japanese form neat double lines. The Taiwanese, on the other hand, are always a mad jumble, and their tour director is always scurrying about and getting hoarse, trying to get people's attention over their chatter. "The Japanese tour directors have much more authority," Ling says.

An industry joke has Japanese tourists blindly following their guide into his toilet stall.

Ling points out that in the past there have been some travellers who have believed that a good tour director is one who will sing a few songs or tell a dirty joke or two in the course of the journey. Some tourists have even gone to the extreme of asking their director to bring an electric rice pot and tea set so that they can have tea at night and rice porridge before they take their morning walk. During the three regular meals, of course, they are expected to ask, "Have you got enough to eat? Are you accustomed to the food? Did you sleep well?" Taiwanese tourists ask more of their tour director than they do of their sons.

Still, there's a difference between providing people with a service and being a personal servant. "A tour director isn't, like 7-Eleven, on call 24 hours a day without rest, but is rather someone who fights for the rights of his charges," says Ling. "His professional knowledge should be respected." When members of the tour are making asses of themselves, he stresses, a tour director can't just come out and correct their behavior. Rather he must hope they will get the point by citing hypothetical examples, because "when service is first and foremost, the customer is always right."

Writer Li Nan-heng recommends that people going on a tour study their travel arrangements and make their opinions known. At a flamenco dance performance in Madrid, one group of Taiwanese tourists--perhaps worn out from a day on the bus or perhaps unimpressed with the dancing--snored loudly in the front row. "That they could sleep through all that crazy foot stomping," Li says, "shows there was something wrong with the itinerary."

Having paid for the trip, you're going to want to enjoy yourself, but if you expect to transplant your living habits abroad, then you're in for trouble. "It's not a matter of right and wrong," says Li, "but of differences in culture and customs."

Though likewise famous for cuisine, France makes a sharp contrast with China when it comes to the pacing of a meal. Lin Chun-yi, a senior tour director, says first-timers may be unaccustomed to France's "slow approach--enjoying the decorations of the restaurant, the mood of the place, the eating of one course at a time." Those with experience know that eating arrangements on European tours are extremely important because even young people may not be able to stomach ten Western meals in a row.

European-style restaurants serve only bread and butter for breakfast. After eating hard bread for two days back to back, tourists will complain to their tour director, "I just ate one of my false teeth." When they get to Italy and authentic Italian spaghetti tastes different from what they were used to in Taiwan, they think that maybe it wasn't cooked enough and send it back to the kitchen.

"A lot of groups to Europe bring instant noodles with them, and you've got to arrange a meal at a Chinese restaurant in every city," Vicky Ling says. "For Chinese, Chinese food always hits the spot."

Having travelled half way round the world, Chinese still want Chinese food, a desire, no doubt, that benefits the Chinese working in those restaurants.

The Taiwanese, of course, don't have a patent on showing their true selves, warts and all, when they travel abroad. Travelling well as a tourist is an art that has to be learned. Li Ming-hui, the Chairman of the Department of Tourism at Chinese Culture University, says that Taiwan's problem is that it has become rich too quick. Taiwan is surrounded by the sea, and unlike in Europe or the Americas, we can't simply drive across the border to another country. And so we are less sensitive about other cultures.

In the island nation of Japan, it wasn't popular for people to go abroad as tourists until the 1970s. If you asked the Japanese about their impressions of Taiwan more than 20 years ago, they would have been apt to talk about "the strong smell of sulphur," Li says, "because most of the Japanese tourists were coming on sex tours to Peitou." Used to tatamis, when Japanese got on trains or planes, they would immediately take off their shoes and cross their legs. They were even known to walk around hotel lobbies in their bath robes.

Sensitive to the national image, the Japanese government published a small booklet telling Japanese traveling abroad not to urinate on the street when they drink and make merry and not to crouch with their feet on the toilet.

Maybe it's our turn now. Foreign travel is all the rage. The number of tourists going abroad has increased by leaps and bounds in the 15 years since the government relaxed restrictions on going abroad in 1979.

Statistics of the Bureau of Tourism show that in 1987 the number of ROC nationals travelling abroad passed 1 million for the first time. With looser controls over foreign exchange and the opening up of visits to relatives on the mainland, the number of people travelling abroad jumped 51 percent. The year before last the number surpassed 4 million. That means one out of five Taiwanese went abroad that year, a rate higher than in Japan. Foreign travel has become a national pastime.

With an eye on the huge market for overseas travel, British, French, German, Austrian, New Zealand and Australian airlines have all come to Taiwan in recent years to hold talks about establishing direct air links.

More than just by going abroad, Taiwanese have made a name for themselves as world travellers by carrying fat wallets.

Taiwanese tourists are known as big spenders.

In August of last year, tour group composed of Fortune Motors employees and their families landed in an Austrian jail when their credit cards were mistaken as false. Front page news for a while, the controversy only died down after the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a solemn protest, the Austrian minister of the interior made a sincere apology and the credit card company gave NT$4.5 million to the ROC's Consumer's Foundation.

While it is possible to see it as the awakening of a consumer consciousness, the incident would not have occurred if Taiwanese were not spending huge amounts of money abroad. On this occasion, members of that ill-fated tour group were buying Rolex watches. Many Taiwanese travellers have a special fondness for watches that can serve as a symbol of status and position, such as plain or even diamond-studded Rolexes. Taiwanese tours to the "watch kingdom" of Switzerland are even more certain to have stops at watch shops.

In order to serve these big spenders, the watch shops of Lucerne have employed clerks from Taiwan, so now you can use Taiwanese to buy a watch in Switzerland.

In looking back on the credit card incident, Greg Hsieh, the executive vice president of Fortune Motors, says that matters we may regard as inconsequential are what foreigners will remember.

"We mix up tourism and shopping." Take the buying of watches or jewelry. Hsieh points out that in foreign stores salesclerks deal with one customer at a time, sitting face to face and looking at one item at a time. Taiwanese tourists enter a store en masse and when one of them is finished looking at something he'll ask what others think of it, passing it along for someone else to see. When salesclerks see everyone fingering NT $200-300,000 watches or diamond rings, passing them back and forth, they can't help but get a little nervous!

Y.C. Chiang, the acting director of general affairs at Fortune Motors, says that when Taiwanese buy, the first person thinks about it long and hard, because "he's scared of paying more than he should," but when the others see him buy, they'll quickly follow. When a tourist sees his fellows boarding the bus with goods he missed, then he'll feel ill at ease--almost embarrassed--that he has flown so far without anything to bring back and will beg the driver to wait just another ten minutes so he can run and buy them too.

Chiang says that on one tour he bought a pocket knife for about NT$300 in Germany. When his tourmates saw it, they also thought it would make a good gift. The result was that they cleaned the store's display case out of 30 or 40 sets.

With economic hard times in America and Europe, Taiwanese tourists laden with cash are naturally very welcome there. Some expensive European boutiques hang out front the flags of the countries whose tourists buy the most from them. As Taiwanese spending has grown over the last few years, the white sun, blue sky and red earth of the ROC flag has started adorning the front of some Swiss watch shops and Italian leather and crystal shops.

Statistics of the central bank show that tourists have been breaking the record for the amount of foreign exchange taken abroad year after year. Do you know how much money people from Taiwan took abroad in 1992? US $7.2 billion, and this only includes the money spent abroad, not the air plane tickets that were bought in Taiwan. Of course, the US$7.2 billion was not entirely spent by tourists. Included in the figure is money taken abroad by students going for short-term study, money taken abroad on business trips, and the expenses born by athletes training abroad. Yet no matter how you slice it, most of those going abroad are tourists.

Since 1987 the amount of money spent by Taiwanese abroad has risen every year. In 1989, the figure stood at US$4.922 billion, in 1991 US$5.678 billion. National income has only increased 46.8 percent over the last five years, while the amount of money spent abroad has risen 114.99 percent.

The Taiwanese have already replaced the Japanese as the biggest spenders among Asian tourists.

Just take Hong Kong, which Taiwanese travellers regard as a "shopper's paradise." According to statistics of the Hong Kong Tourist Association, of the HK48.3 billion spent by tourists in Hong Kong in 1992, HK$18 billion was spent by Taiwanese. Since the Taiwanese made 1.64 million visits to the crown colony that year, that means that the average amount spent was HK$7200 com pared to only HK$6800 per visit for the Japanese. Taiwan's tourists are Hong Kong's "biggest money bags."

While spending money abroad makes Taiwanese welcome, what's worrying are frequent stories of how easy we are to sucker. One Taiwanese in Hong Kong talked the price for an emerald ring down from HK$12,000 to 3000. When he returned to Taiwan, he discovered that it was actually plastic.

And so a small number of tourists have been described as "having more money than sense."

Li Ming-hui, who is the director of the Department of Tourism at Chinese Culture University, stresses that "you've got to adjust your attitudes as you move from one country to another." If you go somewhere where prices are lower than in Taiwan, you don't want to keep saying how cheap things are. "When people hear you say 'cheap,' they'll immediately raise their prices." Make comparisons locally instead of comparing back to Taiwan. On mainland China, 500 renminbi equals NT$2500, which might be what most people make there in one month.

Taiwanese travellers' stingy attitudes about sums both large and small is difficult even for other Taiwanese to understand. In Europe they'll buy three or four NT$700-800,000 watches at one go without batting an eye, but when they discover that they'll have to pay for going to the bathroom or for a glass of water in restaurants, some people will get very unhappy. Lin Chun-yi, an experienced tour leader, describes it by saying, "The Taiwanese are rich penny pinchers."

If so much money has been spent by Taiwanese abroad, what have they spent it on? Japanese apples, Korean pears, Chinese medicine, tea pots and ink-slabs from the mainland, clothes from Hong Kong, leather goods and watches from Europe. . . "When you see what someone brings in, you know where they've been," says Cheng Shou-yi, the director of the Taipei Customs Inspection Group of the Ministry of Finance.

In reality Chen Shou-yi believes that the scene of people loaded down with goods from abroad is not frequently seen any more. "In the past when they brought too much foreign alcohol with them, they would drink it at the airport. But this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore." Noteworthy incidents of late have included tourists bringing back large crabs. When they didn't pass customs, the travellers angrily set them to crawl about the floor.

A bank that issues credit cards has made a commercial about two tourists from Taiwan, one of whom who goes to the Middle East where she takes a liking to a wooden horse, the other to Italy where she shows an interest in a mural. The foreigners in the commercial say, "You're from Taiwan, then you should get extra special treat ment" and "You're from Taiwan; then you won't want just these."

Intelligent people who go abroad will of course know what it is that they themselves want: to leave happily and come back safely!

[Picture Caption]

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Travelling abroad to a country of your choosing, where you can relax and expand your horizons, has become a national pastime.

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Foreign travel differs from touring in Taiwan. If you make an uproar when you're supposed to be quiet abroad, you're liable to get nasty looks and indirectly tarnish the national image. (drawing by Lin Hsin)

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When entering a wildlife park such as this South African one, you've got to respect the posted warnings: Don't leave your vehicles or make loud noises that might startle the lions. Breaking the rules will only put you at risk. (photo by Huang Li-li)

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Punished for breaking laws at home, you'll become a laughing stock when breaking the laws of social convention abroad.

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Are ethnic differences revealed just from the way people line up? The Taiwanese are scattered about in every which direction (left), while the Japanese, listening for the instructions of their tour director, have formed a neat double line (above).

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The number of Taiwanese travelling abroad and the money they spent there from 1987 to 1992.

Sources: The Central Bank of China and the ROC Tourism Bureau

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On topical tours, which are all the rage, stops at museums are de rigueur. The signs on the wall prohibit taking photographs with a flash.

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"When entering a country," the Chinese saying goes, "inquire as to its customs." Making a point of collecting information before you go will add to your fun as well as your understanding of local customs. (courtesy of Tsai Chih-pen)

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The shopper's paradise of Hong Kong is the favorite destination of Taiwanese, but let the buyer beware. When purchasing jade, take a good long look or ask for the opinion of a professional.

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Returning home, laden with packages and a heart full of joy. Even more than leaving home happily, it's important to come home safely.

When entering a wildlife park such as this South African one, you've got to respect the posted warnings: Don't leave your vehicles or make loud noises that might startle the lions. Breaking the rules will only put you at risk. （photo by Huang Li-li）

Punished for breaking laws at home, you'll become a laughing stock when breaking the laws of social convention abroad.

Are ethnic differences revealed just from the way people line up? The Taiwanese are scattered about in every which direction （left）, while the Japanese, listening for the instructions of their tour director, have formed a neat double line （above）.

On topical tours, which are all the rage, stops at museums are de rigueur. The signs on the wall prohibit taking photographs with a flash.

"When entering a country," the Chinese saying goes, "inquire as to its customs." Making a point of collecting information before you go will add to your fun as well as your understanding of local customs. （courtesy of Tsai Chih-pen）

The shopper's paradise of Hong Kong is the favorite destination of Taiwanese, but let the buyer beware. When purchasing jade, take a good long look or ask for the opinion of a professional.

Returning home, laden with packages and a heart full of joy. Even more than leaving home happily, it's important to come home safely.

Wu Tzu-dan, head of the New York Office of the Coordination Council for North American Affairs, has a deep sense of responsibility towards his work of promoting the ROC's entry into the UN.