My wife and I married in the US some seven years ago. She is from Taiwan, and I am American. Soon before our engagement, she showed me the photo-album she had brought with her to the States from Taiwan. Among the photographs were a handful from her childhood, and among these there was a small black-and-white photo that had been torn into several pieces and then taped back together.

In this reconstituted picture, my wife's family stood before their home. Her parents were obviously very young, and I could see my wife in her mother's arms as an infant. At the very center of the photograph, where all of the tears intersected, was the hardly recognizable face of a Western man. The tears were obviously intended to destroy precisely his image.

My wife told me of this picture that she herself tore it into pieces when she was five. She had no memories of the earlier visit of the Western man-she was only one at the time-but she clearly remembered tearing the picture into pieces because, she said, she couldn't stand the image of this strange intruder standing in the midst of her family.

All of this was particularly amusing to me because of the many implications I could take from it. This was my future wife's first recorded reaction to the sight of a Western man. Of course there was a very intentional irony in her manner of telling me the story of the destroyed photo.

Some months ago we moved here to Taipei. For the first time in my life, I am experiencing life in a city where I am not merely a foreigner-for such was the case while I was in Europe-but a foreigner racially marked as such.

I look very different from the Chinese, and everywhere I go I am aware of myself as visibly foreign. In a big city like Taipei, there is no reason for my passing to cause heads to turn. They don't turn, and I am only slightly more noticeable than anyone else. There is an exception to this, however. The exception is children.

I have realized since I've been here that most small children, when they come in close proximity to me, are simply amazed and shocked by my appearance. Let me note, for the record, that my appearance is not out of the ordinary for a Western man. I have learned, however, that my appearance is enough out of ordinary in the daily life of the average child here in Taiwan to cause a kind of rapt amazement. The reactions show a striking consistency from one child to the next, and have set me thinking about the question of just how children may perceive the foreigner close up.

After considering the different age groups, and taking note on what I've noticed, I've come to certain conclusions which, if they are not really the stuff of anthropology, are nonetheless rather amusing.

Let me begin with the two-year-olds. I run across them all the time: in malls, at street-side food stands, on buses, in the park. If they notice me, they almost always have the same reaction. Their eyes widen in fright, their brows knit in dismay, and they stare at me as if dumbfounded.

What is it they see in me?

I will say with confidence that children of this age do not have the conception foreigner at their disposal. That seems obvious enough. Thus they do not think foreigner when they are looking at me. I would guess that what they see is fundamentally deformity, for this is what their faces express. As they stare at me with their worried little eyes, something like the following is running through their heads:

There is something wrong with this one. Many things are wrong at once. The skin, the hair, the shape is wrong. Does it hurt?

I would even say they experience the same feeling as someone considering a two-headed calf at a carnival grounds. The difference is that these children did not pay the price to enter the tent and so did not have any intention of seeing a monster. Suddenly it happens that there is a monster before them, on the loose, and they don't know what to do.

The reaction of four- to seven-year-olds to me is completely different from that of younger children. They will spot me, look at me for an instant, and then they will retreat. If they catch me getting on the same elevator as them, they will try to stand behind the Chinese adult they are with. Their reaction indicates that I am to a certain extent a known quantity. They do not stare at me in amazement like the two-year-olds: they know me well enough to know that I am one of those; and they sense instinctively that those are pariah. These older children perceive me as a being about whom everything is problematic and thus dangerous. My presence is the presence of a renegade. They know ahead of time that I am likely to break all the codes of behavior, and particularly language.

It is obvious that they do not want to hear me say things to them in Chinese, because they will then be compelled to respond, and they will not be able to respond, because their mind will be fully occupied by my foreignness, to which there is after all no utterable response. And what if it should happen that I take the opportunity offered by their frozen silence to snatch them up and carry them away to some foreign world?

In the States, I worked for a short time as a French teacher. For this reason and also because I love teaching language, I have taken up work here as an English teacher. The students of the institute where I teach English are from nine to fourteen: thus they represent an age group just senior to the four- to seven-year-olds. Most of them who enter my classroom are coming in sustained contact with a foreigner for the first time in their lives. What is interesting to me here is not so much how they behave in the classroom-classroom behavior is after all dictated by rather strict norms and expectations-but rather how they behave just before and after the first few classes.

I should point out that before a class ever has me as a teacher they have already been together as a class for around eight months. During that eight months, they learn the rudiments of English from a Taiwanese-born English teacher. One fine day, however, they notice that it is me standing outside their classroom door and not their Taiwanese teacher. Their glances shift around nervously. They see what looks like their class folder in my hands. For one reason or another, their Taiwanese teacher neglected to tell them that the rough times would begin today. When they finally confirm that it is indeed their class folder in my hands, there is a general uproar of fear and excitement.

Once all the students have seen me and verified just where I will stand while I wait for the previous class to finish with the classroom, they will usually form up into groups and begin squealing and pushing each other. On several occasions the game has been to push your classmate over by the foreign teacher. This game is best played against a classmate who has just arrived and hasn't yet noticed me standing there. This in itself is not so amusing, and is rather predictable. What is more amusing is a different game, a game I've seen played only once since I've been a foreign teacher, but one that through its very uniqueness defines all the other reactions of all the other Chinese children who've met up with me.

The game was played by a girl named Cindy. I believe she is around 8. It was just before the first day I was to teach her English class, thus the first day she would have a foreign teacher. I was standing and reading through my lesson outline while waiting for the classroom to open up. Suddenly Cindy's face was right next to me, jostling the notebook I was holding. Her lips were pressed firmly together and her fists were clenched against her sides. She stood stiffly to her full height and glared defiantly right into my face, refusing to turn away. She was even blocking me from seeing my notes.

Cindy was obviously trying to "stare me down." It was an outrageously daring move, and it appeared to me even more daring when I compared it to the fearful behavior of other students in front of their first foreign teacher. Because my mere presence as a foreigner was in itself a kind of provocation, Cindy had to demonstrate that she was not afraid. Far from afraid, she was in the attack mode.

Cindy managed to keep up this game for about twenty seconds, after which she could hold out no longer. She burst out laughing. She stood there a few seconds more, trying to regain her composure and return to her serious stare. But this second time the stare was even more strained, and she couldn't hold it as long, but burst into laughter again and ran back to join the other students.

While demonstrating to her whole class that she was by far the most daring, Cindy demonstrated to herself that the boundary between her and the foreigner could be played as a game, and that in fact the struggle to get close to the foreigner was the very stuff of giddy hilarity.

I must admit that Cindy's little game made me think of her as a sister, and that the look on her face as she broke into laughter was immediately familiar to me as something of my own. I myself am attracted to foreigness as a challenge to my sense of balance. What's more, I am likely to break into laughter and joking when the seriousness of the other's presence begins to seem dull and heavy. As an expatriate here, I see Taipei as a provocation to be played out as a game. The fact that I am still a beginner at Chinese means that I have a long way to go in this game, and this in itself is enough to cheer me on.

The foreigner new to a city is often shuffled between a nagging desire to retreat and a firm intention of holding his ground. These two rub most harshly against each other in those everyday situations where communication doesn't work, where it is obvious that one has made a mess of what one is trying to get across. But these situations in themselves are attractive to a certain type of person. This type of person, given the chance, is likely to become a traveler.

Cindy's daring in staring me down was in some respect the antitype of all the reactions I had gotten from children so far. That it ended in hilarity had an irresistible effect on me. I am not ashamed to admit that the actions of a child can be important to my happiness-in this case, my happiness as an expatriate in a foreign city. Cindy's laughter in some way redeemed the fifty or so farcical encounters I had had with children since my arrival: all those ridiculous little dramas that occurred between myself as image and the Chinese children of Taipei. It was after Cindy stared me down that I first thought consciously about what children's reactions to a foreigner might mean. How may these reactions, so consistent and predictable from child to child, relate to the general problem of foreignness as we think of it in the adult world?

Whether there is more wisdom in engaging the foreigner or more wisdom in hiding around the corner is up to everyone to decide for themselves. I am of the race that opts for engagement and play, but I can also see good reasons for maintaining one's balance. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that learning is more likely to result from engagement than from balance. In my own case, it was only Cindy's courageous little game that illuminated for me the importance of the other children's behavior in my understanding of the world. By walking boldly up to me, she reminded me that fear of the foreigner also has as its secret concomitant a desire to overcome that fear. This recognition returned me again to thinking about that tension experienced by the expatriate between the nagging desire to retreat back to one's own country and the dogged intention to stay where one is. And it suggested some common ground between the fear and fascination I see written on the face of the two-year-old who comes upon me in the mall and my own fascination with the specter, every day repeated, on sidewalks all around me filled with "foreign" Asian faces.

p.139

In early days in Taiwan, people were filled with curiosity and trepidation at the appearance of a foreigner; the person second at left in the photo is the Westerner referred to in the article.

p.140

The author in a photo with students at the English supplementary school; fourth at left is Cindy.

p.141

A photo of the author and his wife in Taipei.

The author in a photo with students at the English supplementary school;fourth at left is Cindy.

A photo of the author and his wife in Taipei.