Working in Taiwan
How my jobs in Taiwan compare to my work-life in America.
There are many English-language articles that criticize Taiwanese work-life and workplace culture. This is not just limited to Taiwan, mind you — there are denunciations of work cultures across East Asia, from Japan to South Korea to China.
I was aware of these narratives before I accepted two internships in Taiwan in the summer of 2018: two months with a city government and two months with a university. And I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit they weighed on my mind. I was a foreigner coming into a work environment where the spoken language wasn’t my mother tongue, and where the tacit cultural expectations weren’t ones I was familiar with. (Granted, I am not unique in that there are millions of people working in my native country with this very experience.)
So, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that the positions I had were nothing like the scary articles. My jobs in Taiwan were responsible for some of the best experiences I’ve had in my whole life, but I didn’t have enough distance to analyze them until now that I am in a somewhat analogous situation in the United States.
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For the past year and a half, I have worked for a government agency in California. While I had worked a variety of jobs in the United States before my current role, both the position and industry were quite similar to my government job in Taiwan, which naturally eases my ability to make comparisons. While I can’t speak for some totalized, objective comparison between the two societies (if such a thing could exist at all), I can share my anecdotal observations about work culture.
Office Space
Perhaps the most apparent difference between my jobs in Taiwan and the United States was the physical office space. I say obvious because the differences in layout affected how people moved about and socialized.
In my current job (and in my previous office jobs) in the United States, most of my day is spent in a small room. Each full-time worker is separated by four walls at minimum, and sometimes by entire floors. There are points when I leave my room, such as for meetings or for lunch; but, a majority of my work hours are spent alone. Even now while I work in a “temporary” stay-at-home environment, I don’t notice that much of a difference between working from home and at the office.
My experiences in Taiwan were a stark contrast. For both roles, I spent my days in large open rooms. In the government job, I shared my workspace with at least fifty other people. While there were dividers between each person’s desk, I could walk up to a coworker for a question or just to chat at any time. Directors had separate offices, but in both roles, my managers were within ten-second walks from my desks. This resulted in an environment that was not always the quietest place to work, but I had no issues with concentration when I needed to complete tasks. In fact, I often felt more energized after short breaks.
The types of spaces where I worked produced very disparate day-to-day experiences. Psychologically, I feel much lonelier in my American office job than I did in Taiwan. This is not, however, solely related to space.
Interactions with Coworkers
Even though I was a foreigner in Taiwan, in an internship role, and was, for better or worse, treated differently than my local coworkers, I felt more like a part of the team than a single cog in the machine. This feeling was reinforced in a plethora of ways, but I mainly attribute it to socialization.
My Taiwanese coworkers were very present in my everyday life. In both the government and academic positions, there were many instances where coworkers would come by my desk to chat or ask me questions, and I formed the habit of doing the same to them. We ritualized group meals to the point where it felt weird to eat alone on a workday. This didn’t stand out to me at the time, but I have realized that this happens much less frequently in my current and past American jobs.
In particular, the government coworkers around my age really brought me into their social circle. We would go get breakfast in the mornings and often ate lunch together either in the office or at nearby restaurants. When I felt unwell one day, two of my coworkers went and bought me medicine over the lunch break. We had such a good relationship that when I returned to visit Taiwan that winter, we eagerly met up for a reunion dinner.
My current American job is quite different. While I absolutely adore my manager and have a close working relationship with her, I have noticed that the pool of individuals I interact with at work is quite limited. There are a number of coworkers I know around my age, but we rarely hang out at or outside of work when compared to my time in Taiwan — even before California’s stay-at-home orders went into effect in March 2020. In fact, while I have worked in my current position for eight times as long as I did in the Taiwanese positions, it took me over a year to get to know even a comparable amount of coworkers.
This is not to say that I don’t enjoy interacting with my American coworkers, but rather that there are more challenges in doing so. In fact, it is a pattern that I noticed for all office jobs I’ve had in the United States. Considering the close bonds I formed when working in the service industry, and my relationship with my current manager, who I often see at work, I would tentatively surmise that the difficulty has less to do with something abstract (e.g., culture) than simply the physical environment’s impact on human behavior.
Hierarchy
Relevant to discussing work relationships, a topic often brought up in the internet attack articles and attributed to “culture” is workplace hierarchy. This topic caused me the most trepidation on my first workday in Taiwan; however, it proved to be hollow anxiety, for I experienced scarcely any differences in terms of relationships with my bosses.
Don’t get me wrong: in both work environments, hierarchy makes its presence felt. I definitely knew when my input was wanted or when I should report my findings to my boss; but, my experience of the dynamic in Taiwan was not very different than in the United States. Contrary to what listicle think pieces say, I observed plenty of cases where coworkers questioned one another — or even became embroiled in heated debates — virtually irrespective of job title. This wasn’t so different from my experiences in an American context. In fact, my stint in Taiwanese academia felt quite similar to the work environment I had in an American graduate school.
All things considered, I did eventually notice a few differences in norms. At both of my jobs in Taiwan, if the manager stayed late, others would not take off until they left. This was usually related to project deadlines — for instance, I remember that my government coworkers collectively stayed late the week before an important meeting with politicians; however, it was not a series of individual choices, but an expectation that all employees stay late. In my current role, how late you stay depends upon your individual workload and seniority. The higher up the chain of hierarchy you are, the more likely you will need to work overtime; however, newer employees are expected to leave after they have worked their required hours. I should note that I have experienced a work culture in the United States where this was not the case. That role was for a start-up tech company, at which working overtime was a given rather than an exception.
Another difference that comes to mind was the practice of gift-giving. During my time working in the United States, I’ve never experienced my superiors bestow gifts upon me; in fact, at my current job, doing so could be seen as nepotism and provoke legal action. In Taiwan, both of my bosses gave me gifts when my time with them had come to an end. While the practice initially surprised me, I interpreted the actions as a sign of appreciation for our relationships, as both gifts carried intention and seemed to have been thought-out in advance. The practice fits into a broader sense I had of hierarchy in the Taiwanese workplace: beyond being your leader, your boss also had a personal relationship with you.
Work Hours
Perhaps another key difference between my experiences in Taiwan and the United States was work hour expectations. This is not to say that I worked significantly more hours in Taiwan than I do now or in previous American jobs, but rather that the cues and assumptions for when to stay longer were different.
My current hours are atypical in the American context in that they are extremely standardized, especially when compared to any job I have worked before. At my level of employment, you are not allowed to work over a certain amount of hours per pay period, which provides consistency in expectations and, in my experience, helps mitigate burnout. Whether rhetoric or not, there is also a significant focus on “work-life balance” at assemblies and in employee surveys.
In my short stint working in Taiwan, I do not remember much open discussion about work-life balance in the workplace. While the offices’ atmospheres were overall positive and enjoyable, I do remember feeling pressure to be present at the office for as long as my other coworkers were there. This translated to both short days (less than six hours) and long days (over nine hours), depending on the work that needed to be done. In academia, the expectations were slightly altered in that I wasn’t always required to be on campus for work, but that when I did go in, I needed to stay as long as my coworkers did.
Conclusion
The time I spent working in Taiwan gave me a new perspective to analyze the jobs I’ve worked in my own country, as well as critique the narratives I’ve seen in Western media. Given the positive statements I’ve written, I want to stress that the point of this article is not to deny the existence of problems in the Taiwanese workplace; after all, I am in no position to do that. I was an intern, a non-native speaker of Mandarin, and a white outsider in a society that recognized me as such. That is not to say that I felt like an alien — my Taiwanese friends, coworkers, and managers all treated me with warmth and respect. But I know that I am merely one person and an outlier in the “normal” Taiwanese experience.
I decided to write this because I felt like the articles I have read about working in Taiwan painted a picture that I did not experience. There is an outdated, colonial tendency in the Anglophone press outlets to denigrate aspects of Eastern cultures as if they are inferior to Anglo-American societies, whether it be about politics, social issues, or work culture. There were many aspects of my jobs in Taiwan that I found admirable or better than the conditions I’ve experienced in the United States, and I think it is worth cutting through the pablum to draw attention to them.
