Multiple Virginity, Barbarian Prince Charmings,

and Other Contested Realities in Taipei’s Foreign Club Culture[1]

Marc L. Moskowitz

Department of Anthropology

University of South Carolina

Abstract: In the following pages I will explore the constructed realms of thought in Carnegies and other Western-style nightclubs in Taipei, Taiwan. These contested realities revolve around notions of local and foreign, feminine and masculine. In examining Taiwanese women’s portrayal of selves as chaste in the setting of a pick-up bar we can explore the complicated web of contradictory messages in which purity is constructed and the foreign is simultaneously exalted and despised. In exploring these issues I address Taiwanese women’s sexuality in relation to the representational appeal of, and ambivalence towards, Western men. This, in turn, ties in with contested fantasies within one social space. The resulting analysis suggests that to reduce club cultures to the singular tense, even in one club, is a conceptual error, for there are several overlapping realities in any given locale.

[Taiwan, club culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality.]

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

(Charles Dickens, David Copperfield 1872: 11)

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.

Letting our past decide our future.

Or we can decide for ourselves.

(Chuck Palahniuk, Choke 2001: 292)

“I don’t want to know,” he says, “because I already know. You yourself created this Town. You made everything here. The Wall, the River, the Woods, the Library, the Gate, everything. Even this pool. I’ve known all along.”

(Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 1991: 399)

If the first quote above seems playful,[2] and the second is paradoxically both cynical and hopeful, the third holds a certain melancholy and despair. In their own fashion, all three statements question not only what is real, but whether reality has merit. And in the end the novelists seem to be telling us that there is no reality; that it is all constructed—their characters, the news, our lives. The will to believe is a powerful thing—creative truths that we present to others and the little lies we tell ourselves to make our lives meaningful. Or is there more? Perhaps in negotiating our realities we discover our true selves by imagining who we want to be. Who is to say that our created truths are any less real than the identities that have been imposed upon us in the social fabric that humanity has patched together to make our worlds—our doctors in white frocks; our professors in caps and gowns.

This is a story of how people behave but also of the ways in which their performance of self complements and contradicts prevailing rhetorics, and the ways in which seeing is a conceptual exercise of both localized selves and foreign others. Taiwan’s associations of club culture with Westernness harkens back to the birth of East Asia’s club scene in 1920s Shanghai[3] when American jazz was introduced by East Indian, Filipino, Indonesian, and Russian bands that played both their own music and Chinese language pop music for the Euro-American expatriate community and elite Chinese.[4] Then, as now, Westernness was associated with decadence because this was the lifestyle that many of the expatriates were living, and because of Chinese and Taiwanese people’s exposure to Hollywood films which were often taken as accurate portrayals of Americans (I. Wong 2002: 250-251).

During this era, Japan-occupied Taiwan emulated Shanghai’s music and club cultures with the full range of celebratory decadence that it represented (W. Jian and Z. Guo 2004). When Japan ceded Taiwan after the Second World War, China’s KMT (Kuomintang) government, fleeing the communist revolution, established itself in Taiwan and both musicians and clubgoers from mainland China came with them. US troops accompanied the KMT and stayed in Taiwan until 1979, creating a nitch for a series of bars and brothels that were established in an area that is still referred to as “the Combat Zone” today.[5] For the most part club culture continued to be relegated to the elite, the foreign, and the peripheral[6] until after the lifting Martial Law in 1987 when Taiwan’s popular culture began to emerge in the public sphere.[7]

The mid-eighties were witness to Taiwan’s economic leap from what was for all intents and purposes a third world country to one of the most vibrant economies in East Asia. For the first time in Taiwan’s history almost everyone in the country considered themselves to be middle class. This happened at such a frenzied pace, and stories of economic success and failure came with such a seeming randomness, that many began to think that luck was more important than traditional values of hard work and perseverance (Weller 1996). In this setting, living for the pleasures of the moment seemed like a rational choice. A new generation raised in affluence embraced this ethos of individualistic cynicism and, with new exposure to uncensored Western mass media in the 1990s, fostered the birth of an age in which self orientation (ziwo, zijue)[8] came to represent liberation rather than selfishness for the first time in Taiwan’s history.

“Foreign Clubs”

By the mid-nineties, dance clubs had become a vibrant part of Taipei’s night life and had extended to mainstream culture. In the mid- to late 90s, the quintessential emblem of Western club culture was a club called TU[9] but with the beginning of the new millennium came the club Carnegies which displaced TU as the most popular Western club, after which TU’s clientele shifted to a college age Taiwanese hip hop scene.

TU’s Western clientele switched to Carnegies for a number of reasons but perhaps the most important one was the space itself. Carnegies is located on the ground level, looking out into the street; it has a two-story high ceiling and one of its walls is made up entirely of a story-high window. Though crowded, it does not have the death trap feel that TU, which is located down a very narrow long staircase that leads to a basement with no other windows or doors, evokes.

There are currently three main dance clubs in Taipei that are commonly referred to as “foreign clubs”—Brass Monkey, Carnegies, and Vibe. Westerners who go to Brass Monkey and Vibe tend to primarily be English teachers from various countries with an average age range in its mid-twenties. The average age at Carnegies is approximately a decade older than this and includes Western English teachers as well as businessmen. Vibe, which doesn’t open until 2 a.m., inherits the overflow from both of these as well as other clubs when they start winding down.

Today Carnegies is known as the foreign club in Taipei. It is also, accurately I think, known as the most aggressive pick up spot in Taiwan—for many, uncomfortably so. It is chronically understaffed, so crowded on ladies night that it is like making one’s way through a subway during rush hour, and full of egotistical Western men with few real job prospects other than teaching English for an hourly wage. But of all the clubs in Taipei it also provides the greatest cross section of cultures (ranging from members of every ethnic and economic strata of Taiwan, to people from an array of countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas). It also creates an oasis for many Westerners who feel overwhelmed in Taiwan’s new cultural environment.[10] Because of Westerners’ peripheral nature in Taiwan, the foreign clubs are also more permissive of difference—after all, where else in Taiwan can one find several college co-eds voluntarily dancing on a bar counter, squeezed between a gay couple and a seventy-five year old man, all of whom are flanked by men and women from countries spanning the globe? Appropriating Stewart Ewen’s analysis of mass media, it seems fair to say that Carnegies offers a “utopian netherworld […] where the ordinary is—by its very nature—extraordinary” (Ewen 1988: 14).

Dance cubs always provide social lubricant, but this is especially true in Taiwan where cultural mores do not usually offer a venue for meeting people who are not connected in some way with one’s existing social network—this is not a nation of casual conversations in elevators or lines. Arguably, more than any other social space in Taiwan, Western club culture also provides a venue to interact with people from almost every segment of society from home and abroad—ranging from the curious college student there for the first time, to hardened Triads, to off duty hostesses, to reformed heroine addict Germans, to somewhat overwhelmed anthropologists from the US.

For many Taiwanese fans of Western clubs, the service that Carnegies offers, more than any other club in Taiwan, arises precisely from its bad reputation which fosters an environment in which people behave ways they would never dream of in their every day lives. Working with Taiwanese premises about Western thought and behavior, both Taiwanese and Westerners, women and men, act more aggressively than they would ever dream of doing outside the confines of the club.

In this setting Western bars become a symbol of freedom that draws on prevalent perceptions that Westerners are more sexually decadent and free. These images are seemingly confirmed by Western mass media and by the behavior of the majority of Westerners in Taiwan who are recent college grads passing through Taipei for a year or two who quite happily embrace the hedonistic identity that has been thrust upon them.

Carnegies’ reputed combination of sexual aggression and Western imagery is no accident—a point that I will explore in more depth in a moment. It is important to emphasize, however, that even establishments that both Taiwanese and Westerners refer to as foreign clubs have at least an equal number of locals. Similarly, clubs that have large numbers of American-born Taiwanese (such as Luxy, Room 18, or Opium Den) are not referred to as foreign bars. Therefore, the status of “foreign” club is one of image and style more than percentages.[11]

I have singled out Carnegies here because it is the most famous, and infamous, foreign club in Taipei, but most of what I will say about Carnegies in the following pages very much applies to the other two main foreign clubs (Brass Monkey and Vibe, as well as TU when it was the central foreign club in Taipei). This highlights the fact that this analysis is not anomalous to Carnegies, but rather, adheres to a matrix of imagery of the foreign and local in Taiwan.

Contested Space

Dick Hebdige suggests that subcultural locales contain invented fantasies that juxtapose themselves with the constraints of every day life (Hebdige 1979: 79). The prevalent use of the English language is also a part of the imagery evoked in Carnegies in that it allows room to maneuver between two cultures. The substantial investment taken to learn the language marks speaking English as an elite activity,[12] making it more difficult for members of the lower class to explore this realm. It also binds the speaker to transnational hierarchies. Yet, the use of English can also circumvent class and gender hierarchies that are intrinsically expressed when speaking one’s own language (Kelsky 2001: 101; A. Ong 1987: 215; Stanlaw 2000: 99) and allows one to express things that are not normally discussed in one’s own language or culture (Stanlaw 2000: 96). Among the middle and upper classes in Taiwan, especially, there is a marked increase of the use of English names and words in daily conversation—both to exhibit one’s own status and to circumvent hierarchies embedded in the choice of how to address colleagues in Chinese.

Many Western males who frequent Carnegies speak little to no Chinese. Many Taiwanese women who go there prefer to, and indeed often insist on, speaking English, thereby adding to the Western atmosphere. Indeed, the majority of men and women who frequent Carnegies use their English names when speaking with foreigners. This too is part of the dual existence that Carnegies and other Western clubs offer in that Taiwanese people switch back and forth between using Chinese and English names and spoken communication. This usually reaffirms national and ethnic boundaries but it can also subtly undermines them, such as when a Taiwanese woman becomes more comfortable using her English name with her Taiwanese friends or when a Westerner can hold a conversation in Chinese. For the most part, however, Westerners enter Carnegies for a taste of home and Taiwanese go to sample what they perceive to be a Western transnational lifestyle. Many Taiwanese confirm the Westerners’ sense of superiority because in such settings they treat Westerners as markers of modernity and internationalism, and because in meeting Westerners on their own terms Taiwanese people are at a linguistic and cultural disadvantage.

Yet amidst this seemingly uncontested terrain is a very different set of messages. Most Westerners who frequent Carnegies cannot afford the higher end clubs that Taiwan’s elite frequent. This, and the widespread images of Carnegies as a crass meat market that is decidedly less trendy than the more popular Taiwan style clubs, speaks not only to the history of Western imperialism, but to a modern day statement that puts Westerners, as a category, in their place. Going to Carnegies thereby paradoxically represents both the reification and inversion of traditional Taiwanese dependence on Western business, military protection, and legal and cultural precedents.

Dorinne Kondo demonstrates that economic class and commitment to urban and modern ideals not only reflect a person’s views but shape identities ranging from speech to appetite to emotions (Kondo 1990: 57-75). At Carnegies one is also witness to the ways in which clubgoers discipline themselves to fit images of modern lifestyles, body images, conspicuous consumption, and sexual mores. The US, especially, is often seen as an alternative to Taiwan’s relatively hierarchical society. Thus, the image of America as a social paradise persists in Taiwan (I. Yang 1996: 77)—especially among younger people.[13] Indeed, many people in East Asia continue to see the US as an emblem of gender equality, individualism, and freedom with a seemingly willful disregard of evidence to the contrary (Kelsky 2001: 224).

Andy Bennet points out that the local, like the global, is a constructed fiction drawing on multiple dialogues that include the creation of social spaces (Bennet 2000: 63-64). Similarly, Carnegies is an affordable means of experiencing other cultures. Rather than paying for a costly (in both time and money) trip abroad, that, given America’s fame for violence, is also potentially dangerous, one can simply go to the foreign club and experience it in the safety of one’s own nation.

Chinese dance clubs are emblems of class, participation in global lifestyles, and modernity (Farrer 2002: 293-296; Schell 1989: 355-356). Urban centers such as Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo bind many members of the elite together more closely than with people from rural areas within their own countries and, for many, global citizenship has begun to take precedence over national identities (A. Ong 1999: 2). Whereas Chinese (Iwabuchi 2002: 200; A. Ong 1999: 6) and Japanese (Iwabuchi 2002; Kelsky 2001) elite diaspora have created “flexible identities” through travel abroad, for the majority bound to home by economic constraints, “foreign clubs” such as Carnegies provide an affordable setting to explore alternative lifestyles and identities. Thus, clubs offer people a chance to play with the borders of transnational identities and to transcend class boundaries[14] within their own culture.

Indeed, several scholars have suggested that cultural identity only exists by using foreign cultures as mirrors to understand one’s own culture or self.[15] Just as in leaving one’s home country many Asian women have opportunities to transform themselves, picking and choosing from various cultural alternatives in molding new identities (Kelsky 2001: 121), Western club culture in Taipei allows people to try new transnational identities on for size. And just as going abroad can be perceived to be an opportunity to discover a “real self” (Iwabuchi 2002: 176; Kelsky 2001), Carnegies offers an environment for cultural, personal, and for some, sexual exploration. This discovery of self is of course problematic because it is in large part based on fantasies of the other—creating a utopia that can only exist by strength of will to believe (Kelsky 2001: 224)—yet for many regulars, Carnegies becomes as an important part of one’s identity as a local temple does for the more pious.

In much of East Asia, images of the West have never evinced pure admiration or envy. Rather, they have always been laced with ambivalence about the other and the self, as well as the ambiguous power relations between the two (Morris 2002, 2004a, 2004b; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993: 113). For many, the image of Western decadence associated with such clubs is both appealing and intimidating. Ms. Li, a twenty-one year old foreign literature student at Taiwan National University began our interview by reveling in the foreign images associated with foreign clubs.

If you go to clubs the music is all in English because people like foreigners. If you go to a bar or club you want to listen to foreign music because you feel superior—if you go to a club and they are playing Chinese music you would just walk out. Club culture is just more foreign. That’s part of the reason people like to go, because it is foreign. Young people go to clubs and young people like US culture, so listening to Chinese songs in this context is not fashionable.

At first we didn’t have dance music but now we have better music so you would think there would be more Chinese music at clubs. But I think people still want a foreign experience, that’s why. (Ms. Li. December 9, 2003)

When the conversation shifted from such clubs in the abstract to a concrete experience, however, a strong sense of unease ensued.

I went to Carnegies once and I was so scared [by the Western men’s aggressive behavior]! I went there with two Taiwanese female friends one or two years ago—it was my friend’s birthday. But as soon as I walked in I panicked and ran away, I would never go to a place like that alone. (Ms. Li. December 9, 2003)

Ms. Li forcefully demonstrates the tension between a fascination with, and a repulsion of, images of the West in Taipei’s club culture. A Chinese language blog on Carnegies (Blog2 2007) also exemplifies this ambivalence, carrying a wide range of emotions about the club including distain for foreign men, anger at being treated like second class citizens in the bar when it was their country, the defense that the dividing line wasn’t Taiwan/foreign but rather regular customer (and tipper) vs. person just passing through, and excitement at the foreign feel and freedom that Carnegies represents. This conflicted discourse is quite common in conversations about Carnegies—though far less tension ridden among its regulars. In a sense this constructed environment is also familiar to studies of American utopian creations such as Disneyland[16] or McDonald’s[17] in that Carnegies offers an “idealized America.” Aviad Raz refers to Tokyo Disneyland as a “utopian space of amusement” (Raz 1999: 8) that provides a “staged authenticity” (Raz 1999: 154), for example. Whereas the implied utopia of Disney is eternal innocence, Carnegies might be seen as an adult-themed utopian, or perhaps dystopian, space for urban modernity and participation in global transnationalism. Similarly, John Van Maanen emphasizes that the Disney appeal is in the way it sells an “American experience” while in reality being comfortably localized (Van Maanen 1992: 5, 9). Unlike Japanese theme parks which “sell themselves as fictions” (Raz 1999: 154), however, Carnegies promotes itself as reality, but one that is based on multiple fantasies of self and other, tradition and modernity.

At Carnegies, side by side with the exalted images of the West are Taiwanese men and women who want to be in the setting but actively dislike Western men and refuse to talk to them. Taiwanese people commonly go to such clubs with a group of friends and often speak with no-one other than the people they arrive with.

As Rey Chow notes, the dichotomy of the male-gaze/female object of voyeuristic desire breaks down when one considers female enjoyment of viewing others (R. Chow 1991: 20). Similarly, many Taiwanese women I have spoken with at Carnegies list “watching” as one of the primary attractions of the club. In this setting they can gaze at the fetishized Western male as well as the equally fetishized Taiwanese female and laugh at the behavior of both groups as they interact. Several of the regulars told me that they frequent Carnegies and other foreign clubs because they find the outrageous behavior of the foreigners to be amusing. Thus, many of the Taiwanese clubgoers at Carnegies experience the sights of the club rather than interacting with it. Foreignness, then, is not erased but creatively highlighted, thereby taking on new meanings in the local context that help to define Taiwanese positions within their own society (Adrian 2003: 183, 240, 244).

Many people in Taiwan live on the crossroads between transnational and local space (Simon 2003: 147). Many of the Taiwanese at Carnegies are regulars, going there three or four nights a week and often staying until near closing time at four in the morning. At least an equal number, however, pass through in the course of going to and from other clubs, only stopping in for a couple of hours every few months or so. For many, if not most, Carnegies is an occasional stopover for people whose lives are firmly and intentionally grounded in local culture. A small noodle stand and a sausage stand wait outside, further emphasizing the night market sense of bustling life and excitement (renao: literally “hot and noisy”) that is so prized in Taiwan.[18] Somewhat paradoxically, then, Carnegies is a distinctively Taiwanese space, not a foreign one as both Taiwanese and Westerners claim.

Multiple Virginity and One-Night Stands

Women’s sexuality has always held a good deal of ambivalence in Chinese and Taiwanese cultures. One need only glance at religious mythology to see that women were perceived to be sexually and spiritually dangerous (Ahern 1975, Moskowitz 2001, 2004; Seaman 1981, Sangren 1993, 2000). Daoist Bedchamber Manuals, for example, spoke of the extreme medical benefits of sexuality from a male point of view. Yet, far from Foucault’s assertion that the Daoist bedchamber manuals demonstrated a psychological mastery of fear of the chaos that sexuality comes to represent (Foucault 1984: 137), however, there was a clear dread that women would learn the secrets of these arts and use them to sap men dry of their vital essences (Moskowitz 2001, 2004; van Gulik 1974). Traditional beliefs concerning female fox spirits who seduced men and then drained them of their life forces drew on these concepts (Moskowitz 2004)—ideas that were surprisingly resonant in later discourses on issues ranging from prostitution (see Hershatter 1994, 1997) to medicine (see Dikötter 1995; Evans 1997). These dialogues linked the perceived need to control women’s sexuality with a Eugenicists nightmare—warning of the ill effects on her offspring, the nation, and the race should she decide to deviate from her expected role as a monogamous mother. In turn, the fears evinced in these traditional religious and medical discourses still have a good deal of salience in modern Taiwan (Moskowitz 2001, 2004).

Yet if conceptions of women’s sexuality are still fraught with ambivalence, Taiwan’s modern age has arguably given birth to an era of women’s sexual liberation that has never been seen before in Taiwan. Contemporary Taiwan’s family structure has gone through several dramatic transformations in the last few decades—from extended family living and arranged marriage to nuclear family residences, love matches, and normative premarital sexuality. Women’s growing economic independence in the modern capitalist economy has created what is arguably the era of women in Taiwan. For the most part, men still hold status and wealth, but women have gained freedom to travel, to study what they want in university (which now has astoundingly high acceptance rates for both women and men), and to “play” (wan) without legal sanctions against their sexual activity.

For many women in contemporary Taipei, single life is increasingly seen as care free and pleasurable as opposed to the obligations of married life (Adrian 2003: 89). In 2001, twenty percent of women between thirty and thirty-four remained unmarried—many in this group reported that they intended to refuse marriage altogether (Adrian 2003: 11, 98). By 2002 there was new divorce for every 2.53 marriages in Taipei (Adrian 2003: 94). The divorce rate is lamented by many as a sign of Taiwan’s breakdown of social values, yet it also reflects women’s greater rights to reject the sexual double standards of their adulterous husbands (Farris 1994: 314) as well as a growing disenchantment with other forms of gender inequality in marriage. For many women in their twenties and thirties, sexual liberation is equated with feminist equality (J. Ho 1994) and with being modern, as well as stressing a dividing line between their parents’ generations and their own.

Taiwanese women’s structural position in many Asian families has also arguably resulted in greater individualism than in their male counterparts who experience more pressure to conform to the needs of the patriline.[19] Women still face many constraints, however. Wage labor, for example, frees women from total parental authority but binds them to workplace patriarchy (A. Ong 1987: 113, 186). As has been pointed out in the PRC (Farrer 2002: 325) and Japan (Greenfeld 1994; Stanlaw 2000: 75) club culture in Taiwan provides a space in which women gain a form of empowerment over the men who control their lives in their menial jobs during the day. Importantly, this reverses the male role from an authoritarian figure to the supplicant for her attention—suddenly it is men who are vulnerable and women who are seemingly in control (Greenfeld 1994). Sexuality and participation in modern lifestyles are heavily tied in with consumerism, urban culture, and Western influences, and provide many urban women with a good deal of freedom compared to traditional familial settings (A. Ong 1987: 181, 198-199). Clubbing therefore becomes a way to protest patriarchal control that they experience at home and at work.[20]

Western men are often portrayed as sexual predators on Asian women (Schein 2002: 241), yet many women at Carnegies actively pursue male companionship. One stocky woman in her mid-fifties who used to be a regular at TU, for example, can regularly be seen encouraging twenty to thirty-year-old men (usually American, sometimes Taiwanese) to play drinking games and then escorting them home when they get so drunk they can barely walk (sometimes almost carrying them to their taxis).

In spite of the dramatic changes in women’s power and practice over the last few decades, much of the ideology of sexuality (good women do not pursue sex for pleasure, for example) is still very much in place as a cultural ethos. As a result, women struggle to maintain an image of purity even in the context of pick up bars. Even when a woman consents to go home with a man she will often hastily rush out of the club with the man in tow so that she is not seen—or agree to meet him around the corner so that no one notices them leaving together. Another common tactic is to exchange phone numbers. The woman will then go to the man’s house after her friends have escorted her home, thus maintaining her image of being a “good girl” with her peers.

James Farrer poses the interesting possibility for women in Shanghai that acting filially has shifted from abiding by parent’s morality to not confronting them with one’s own (Farrer 2002: 226). In turn, there is a feeling that belief in a daughter’s relative “goodness” becomes more central than her actual virginal state (Farrer 2002: 236). In other words, one’s actual practices might be perceived to be less important than one’s claims. Similarly, in Taiwan both parents and friends seem to have an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge women’s dating habits (Adrian 2003: 84-88).

Farrer also suggests that the club setting changes normal social rules of behavior and that a discourse of “play” (wan) places one’s actions as performative, thereby evading normal social censure for sexual activity (Farrer 2002: 16-17, 293). Yet in addition to the performance of liberation is an equally important presentation of self as relatively pure (Farrer 2002: 315), or even virginal—as in the case of a Western man I spoke with who went home with a woman from the club TU who claimed to be a virgin even though they had had sex the previous year.[21] Interestingly, many Taiwanese men also struggle to preserve an image of goodness by denying the range of their sexual partners for fear of being stigmatized as being a playboy among the women he courts. When possible, regulars at Carnegies, both male and female, present themselves as if it is their first time going to the bar, or at least significantly less than they actually go. This presentation of self as “good” is therefore central to one’s interaction with others.

I tested this theory at Carnegies[22] by asking twenty women, whom friends pointed out as regulars, how often they went to the club. Twelve of the women responded that they went every month or two, six of the women said that it was their first time, and only two of the women admitted to going on a weekly basis. Just to test the boundaries of their claims, I replied to each of them that I had seen them at the club on “Ladies’ Night” (the previous Wednesday). Eleven of the twenty women, including four of the six women who had said that they had never been there before, confessed that they had been there on that day (three days earlier). Thus, it is fairly evident that many women at these clubs try to project an image of being “good” to the extent that it is possible as a tactic to maintain the respect of others.

Ambiguous and Ambivalent Readings of the Western Male

Women’s self presentation at Carnegies, as at other foreign clubs, is intrinsically linked to the often contradictory images of Western men[23] that can be found in much of East Asia in that the Western male is the focus of admiration and contempt, disdain and envy.[24] John Van Maanen notes that in Japan, for example, Westerners are given respect but only with the understanding that they remain distant (Van Maanen 1992: 23). He points out that this separation is naturalized in Tokyo Disneyland by giving foreign accents to witches, goblins, and ghosts (Van Maanen 1992: 23).

The term “foreign devil” (yangguizi), though rarely used in Taiwan today, is readily understood to reflect the Caucasian’s pale complexion and their status as something not quite human. In contemporary Taiwan one hears terms such as “big nose” (da bizi), “old outsider” (laowai), or simply “foreigner” (waiguoren) which literally means “outside-country person”—all of which are used more or less interchangeably with “American” (meiguoren). Tellingly, “foreigner/outside person” (waiguoren) is commonly used to refer to Americans even when the speaker is in the US. These terms share the placement of “foreigners” as outsiders in a generic category. Even positive views of Westerners tend to be fairly ethnocentric in that they typecast all Western men into one general category.[25]

Asian sexual objectification of Western men portrays them as physically larger in all the right places, ranging from analogies of Nazi masculinity (Farrer 2002: 32) to stereotypes of African American (Cornyetz 1994: 127; Kelsky 2001; Morris 2004a) and Caucasian American (Brownell 1995: 186) brute strength. In addition, it is believed that Western men lack morals, and are generally (and generically) decadent. The behavioral ethos in Carnegies seemingly confirms these images so that perceived racial differences are naturalized rather than seen as the cultural constructs that they are.[26]

In mass media and daily lives, the Western male is also represented as a foreign barbarian—an unmannered savage who could never hope to learn the Chinese language or proper Chinese etiquette. Though one sees a marked American influence on Taiwan’s media, it also serves to reify racial difference between East and West by portraying Western men as sexually rapacious (Andrews and Shen 2002: 146), destroyers of traditional morality, or depicting them as being closer to beasts than the civilized Taiwanese (Morris 2004a).[27]

Coexisting with these negative images in Taiwan, and much of East Asia, the Caucasian American male is often seen as a prince charming with all the symbolic nuances of wealth, leisure, and gentlemanly manners that go with the image. For three or four years, beginning with the release of Disney’s movie The Little Mermaid (Allers et. al. 1997), for example, the number of Taiwanese women who chose the name Ariel as their English name increased exponentially. In this movie, Ariel was the mermaid who fell in love with a human prince and gave up her mermaid status to be with him. Many of the Taiwanese women I spoke with who chose this name identified with the romance of the other as well as their parents’ stern opposition to this choice.

Little Mei, a twenty-five year old English teacher, sums up the ambivalence towards Western men quite succinctly:

You know, in Taiwan a lot of girls want to date foreigners because it’s a status symbol. They walk down the street with the foreigner and think, “See, I’m someone special because I’m with a foreigner.” It’s really sad. (Little Mei. December 5, 2003)

Little Mei recognizes Western men’s enviable position in global and local hierarchies but also evinces a fairly commonly expressed contempt that subverts this very dynamic—remember, also, Ms. Li’s fear of Westerner men in an above quote. Inherent in this discourse is a culturally sanctioned bias embedded in the interpretation of individual agency and responsibility.

Given Western men’s behavior it is perhaps surprising that Taiwanese men are not more resentful. Taiwanese men do express some resentment with each other, though they are usually too polite to confront Western men directly. One occasionally hears a Taiwanese mutter, “the foreign moon must be brighter” (waiguo de yue bijiao liang) to refer to the preference some women have for Western men, for example.[28] Yet on the whole Taiwanese men take Western male behavior in stride because it is thought that they are only behaving according to their natures. Perhaps more importantly, there is an extremely widespread perception that Western men only date the least attractive and most promiscuous Taiwanese women. Thus, at the same moment that these Western men are creating fantasy dramas around their perception of their own prowess, their actions attract a good deal of mirth on the part of many Taiwanese men and women.

Importantly, selective perception of “natural” impulses can also be seen in purely Taiwanese relationships. If a Taiwanese husband cheats on his wife with another woman, for example, the reaction in Taiwan is almost universally to lay full blame on the woman who “tempted” the husband away—the husband is rarely held responsible because it is thought that men are by nature controlled by their sexual impulses.

Similarly, stereotypes concerning sexually rapacious Western men create a markedly biased interpretation of events. One example of this occurred when I was at the foreign club Carnegies with a group of Taiwanese friends. Little Hua, one of the women in our group, reacted particularly strongly to the actions of the foreign men at the club:

Americans are really sleazy—just look at those foreigners hanging all over those women! (Little Hua, November 22, 2003)

The fact that the women were also “hanging all over” the men, and that scantily clad women were voluntarily dancing on the bar did not seem to cross her mind. Thus, one is witness to a selective perception of self and other—the foreign men are defined as “sleazy” and the Taiwanese women are invulnerable, and invisible, to Taiwanese critique.

I had a similar conversation with Mr. Tao, a forty-two year old Taiwanese male concerning his friend who was an American lawyer.

It made me so angry. When I arrived at his house his secretary was getting ready to leave. Her hair was wet so she had obviously just taken a shower which meant that she must have spent the night there. And he also had a girlfriend from Taizhong there at the same time. It was really too much! Then he asked me to drive his secretary to the metro station when I was leaving. Foreigners are really too much—they have no morals at all!

I pointed out to him that the women in question were willing participants, and that the secretary had a steady boyfriend that she was cheating on. He responded:

Sure, Taiwanese people like sex too but they keep it private. But [the American lawyer] doesn’t even try to be discreet about it. I don’t care what he does—I just don’t want to get involved with it. When he asked me to give his secretary a ride, what could I say, ‘no’? It’s like he was rubbing my face in it. And he doesn’t understand how much this will hurt his reputation at work. They won’t say anything but they will think, “Hey, this guy has no morals in his private life so we can’t trust him with business deals.”[29]

As with Little Hua’s account, Mr. Tao directed all blame at the Western male and ignored the complicity of the Taiwanese women the lawyer had relations with. Just to push the issue a bit further I pointed out that many Taiwanese businessmen frequented hostess bars and brothels as part of business. He replied:

Yes, but that is in a certain setting and only involves the male colleagues who do the same thing. [The American lawyer] just doesn’t understand, you can do anything you want to do but keep it private—don’t rub it in everyone’s face. (Mr. Tao. December 6, 2003)

Throughout much of Asia, Westerners represent a dangerous sexualized other and are often blamed for increasing sexual decadence, the rebelliousness of youth, and the breakdown of a larger moral order at home (Farrer 2002: 22-26). In this rhetoric, sexual decadence is commonly thought to be ushered in with the immorality of modernity (Brenner 1998; Farrer 2002: 27). As has been noted for India, in Taiwan the West represents a sexual freedom that influences local sexual mores and adds to the dialogue between tradition and modernity (Mankekar and Schein 2004: 358-359). Women’s erotic desire is thereby associated with Western influences and becomes a prime focal point for discourses on the disintegration of traditional values and the dangers of modernity (Mankekar 2004: 408). Inevitably, then, these discourses reify perceived differences between the East and West (Mankekar 2004: 427) and women’s sexuality becomes a nodal point for constructions of masculinity and femininity that links to economics, culture, and politics (Mankekar and Schein 2004: 358). The above accounts align women’s sexuality as a sign of societal crisis but blame that female sexuality on Western men. This suggests a three tiered level of discourse in which Taiwanese men’s values are conceptually bound to tradition, the Western male with modernity, and women on the precarious line in between.

East Asian objections to Western culture cannot be solely linked with sexual hedonism as it may at first seem—these countries are full of the sex trade after all (Atkins 2001: 111, 118; Simon 2003: xi). Instead, foreignness appears to be the key factor, in association with the public nature of the club scene as opposed to the more sequestered walls of prostitution houses or hostess bars. Little Hua’s and Mr. Tao’s focus on Western men’s lack of discretion confirms the idea that perceptions of Western immorality has as much to do with not fulfilling proper public behavior as with sexual activity.[30] Prostitution in Taiwan neatly separates the virgin from the whore whereas club culture, and Western men’s lack of discretion, draw attention to the realm in between. Because male honor is often based in part on maintaining an image of women’s purity, in this cultural context it is logically consistent to see prostitution as more moral than sex that women enter into for pleasure. Several Taiwanese women have told me that it is better for a husband to sleep with a prostitute than with a woman who is not a prostitute, for example, because it is seen to be natural that men want sex and a prostitute is less likely to tempt the husband to leave his wife.

At first glance, the foreign club scene seems like a fairly clear example of Western male exploitation of Asian women. Yet to assume that local women are victimized by callous but powerful Western males is a trope that ignores the voices of the women involved (A. Tsing 1993: 214) and reifies the West/Other dichotomy with the implication that the West is superior (Kelsky 2001: 229). As several scholars have suggested, even in intensely patriarchal settings women have a good deal of room to maneuver.[31] As has been documented for the PRC (Farrer 2002: 33) and Japan (Kelsky 2001: 134-142), local women in Taiwan are active agents in such courtship and use images of Western men to critique their countrymen or to explore new sexual identities. Karen Kelsky problemetizes the stereotype of Western men exploiting passive Asian women by exploring the ways in which Japanese women pursue Western men for their own ends. She suggests that the appeal is not precisely Western men but that the West represents modern transnational identities (Kelsky 2001: 4). Similarly, it has been suggested that the Western male is less important as an individual than as a means of escape or as a critical examination of men in one’s own country (Cornyetz 1994: 127; Kelsky 2001: 9, 22, 54). Thus, dating Western men can be conceptualized as an “act of revenge” against men in one’s home country (Cornyetz 1994: 127; Kelsky 2001: 186).

Widespread images of women being exploited by men are also based on the assumption that women’s sexuality is to be surrendered, not enjoyed. There is a danger of portraying women as not having sexual desire of their own (Echols 1983; Willis 1983), however. As James Farrer states for the PRC, participants in club culture do not conceive of themselves as passive victims that are sexually marginalized by the West, but rather as active participants in modern global youth sex culture (Farrer 2002: 293).

Westerners are on the periphery of Taiwan’s society so that Taiwanese women can safely do things with them that would normally bring societal censure when with a Taiwanese male. A twenty-two year old legislative aid confirmed this point:

My [two female] friends like meeting foreigners at Carnegies because, well, if a girl just wants to play (wan) it is easier with foreigners because there are less complications—because that’s usually all a foreign guy wants as well. So you are meeting on a common ground. (Miss Sun. April 14, 2007).

Dating foreign men can also prove to be strategically advantageous to Taiwanese women in that Western men are less likely to meet the women’s husbands or lovers, or their husbands’ and lovers’ friends.

It is widely believed, however, that one should be wary of marrying Westerners because of their famed moral shortcomings—they are too selfish, too unreliable, and too immoral to be taken seriously as marriage prospects. Of course this might be exactly what one wants from a short term tryst, but actual marriage to foreign men is often viewed with suspicion and can label women marrying them as promiscuous. Thus, marrying a Westerner paradoxically brings both status and shame.

Clubs can also be used for upward mobility—this is true on both local and transnational scales. Properly played out, a working class woman in Taiwan can hobnob with the offspring of the rich and dance side by side with the famous. To the degree that physical attraction is a form of symbolic capital, she also has the potential to court and be courted by elite men whom she would not normally meet in her daily life.[32] This is a strategy that many hostess bar employees have used in upward mobility with both Taiwanese and Western men. As a few examples, I have met a Taiwanese aboriginal prostitute who married an American MBA student, another aboriginal woman from a small coastal town who married an aspiring American doctor, a hostess who was engaged to a Dutchman of Taiwanese descent and CEO of his own company, and another woman in her twenties who was engaged to a middle-aged Taiwanese businessman sporting designer suits and driving a Mercedes Benz. This is not to suggest that their relationships were financial transactions but that the economic power became part of the romance in what may or may not have involved sincere feelings of love (Constable 2003). Such clubs also serve to familiarize women with foreign culture or to meet foreign boyfriends with an aim to leave their home countries (A. Ong 1999: 50, 156).

In much of East Asia, marriage to Western men is a substantial move up economically. Yet Taiwan is on a more equal footing with the United States than most Asian nations. While it is true that the average Taiwanese person makes less than the average American—with a per capita GDP of US$29,000 (CIA.Taiwan 2007) vs. US$43,500 (CIA.US 2007), respectively—there are many affluent Taiwanese involved in the urban Taipei nightlife who dramatically outshine Americans in conspicuous consumption. Also, America’s famed violence, racism, and a perception that people are more emotionally distant than in Taiwan, is increasingly motivating people to return to Taiwan though they expected to emigrate to the US. This is not the dating culture of the implicit power structure of American elite vs. indigenous/colonized poor that is described in studies of other nations such as the PRC (Constable 2003; Farrer 2002), the Philippines (Constable 2003), or Thailand (Hamilton 1997; Manderson 1997). This economic ambiguity also allows for greater flexibility in the images of the American male that I have outlined above.

Conclusion

Taiwan’s Western clubs offer an ideal setting to explore the contradictory images associated with Western men. This ties in with the ways in which some Taiwanese women maintain quite traditional views of themselves while others explore different “Western” identities. In such settings, one sees that Taiwanese women try new identities on for size, keeping what they like, and discarding the rest. In this fashion, individuals’ performances in club settings become vibrantly real parts of their lives, and playing with Western identities reveals itself, not to be an act of unadulterated admiration as it might first seem, but rather, to be the equivalent of slumming it for an evening.

Taiwan’s club culture identities thereby shift on several axes: female/male, local/foreign, home/abroad, rural/urban, poor/elite. The different fantasies co-existing in Carnegies and other foreign clubs create multiple worlds, analogous to several glass cages dividing what from the outside might appear to be one conceptual space. Taiwanese women’s manipulation of images of purity, and the varied conceptions of Western men, mark the metaphorical boundaries, however, so that one can no longer pretend that there is one unified social reality at work.

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