FOC in the ROC

What I want, when I think about it, is to be a DVD. Slot me in a greater Chinese city and if I can, I will switch audio tracks. In Hong Kong I wouldn’t be caught dead saying leui (Straits Cantonese for money); I say chin. In Singapore I speak a less singsong Mandarin to taxi drivers so they will stop taking me for a Chinese karaoke hostess. In Taipei I would never say bu yao jin la (Straits Mandarin for no problem); I say mei shi’r to sound more pan-blue or mei guan xi la to sound more pan-green.

Even so you can be caught out. Touring Taiwan last week – junket: great way to flee the office – I fooled everyone with my pirated northern accent, everyone but a girl in the group who could tell my accent wasn’t purebred. “Your accent…you curl your vowels like a northerner…you lengthen your vowels like a Taiwanese.” Oh, she heard me. I could tell her accent was a hybrid as well, of soft Malaysian and hard Taiwanese tones. Takes a crossbreed to catch a crossbreed, as the saying goes.

And when it isn’t the accent it is the semantics. On the coach trips from Kaohsiung to Tainan to Taichung I made friends with a girl and two guys from Zaobao, Wanbao and My Paper, all birds of a Chinese-speaking, Everybody Speaks Nonsense-watching, Chinese-singing feather. Naturally we flocked to a KTV on our only night in Taipei (for the record, there are a few more Cheer Chen songs in Taipei than in Singapore but also more time-eating ads, which play at the end of each and every song). But before we could get to our mikes, there was a staff member to get through to, a girl who said we would have to spend such and such an amount as per package. So could we have shui, we said. Shui was free, would we have something else, she said. But we didn’t want food, we wanted shui, we said. Shui was free, she said. We kept running round in circles when it clicked: Water. She meant water. She didn’t mean beverages, as we had in our coffee-shop Chinese.

For all the Taiwanese TV we watch, all the imitations we do of Tsung-tsung’s imitation of Chen Shui-bian, we aren’t quite plugged in, no. Or we are, but DVDs storing one layer too many of data will act up, break down, stop. I will have to work on my game.

One night in the Starck-esque Grand Victoria in Taipei, FOC.