I was taking my morning photowalk the other morning and bumped into a Chinese tourist couple-literally and the woman after bumping into stayed pressed against my side not breaking stride until I said-hey lady give me a break. She nonchalantly moved over slightly. This reminded me of an early experience I had when I first came here. She wasn’t being rude or intentionally aggressive-Chinese cities are so crowded that people don’t have the same concept of personal space as we do in the west. This was a real culture shock when I first encountered it walking around Taipei.

I should mention I’m a good sized guy- 6’ and quite solid (well that was the case then, even more solid now). It amazed me how I ended up bobbing and weaving to avoid the city of Taipei on the sidewalks. Let me explain Taiwanese sidewalks to you. One one side you have a solid row of scooters parked like sardines in a can. If you need to get to the street, unless there is a doorway that someone has placed barricades to keep access open to the street, you’re out of luck. So you might have to walk all the way down to the end of the block to be able to get to the street. The other factor is Chinese people think nothing of stopping wherever they are and chatting oblivious to the fact that they are blocking the flow of traffic and they seem to naturally gravitate towards the center of the space that they’re blocking. You know China in Mandarin is 中國 literally the Middle Kingdom. Hence Chinese people seem to like to be in the middle…

Well after a year of this cumbersome body dodgeball existence I was getting tired of this. You might think well why bother at all? Well again my body size at at least 2 -3:1 and my conscience dictated to me I don’t want to hurt anyone. Still I was getting worn down so I adjusted my filter-now I’d only avoid women and children but men would have to deal with the consequences of carelessly colliding with me. It’s funny, this is so long ago and having moved to the smaller Taichung I haven’t had to deal with this on a daily basis like I did then. Just remembering this gives me some faint cringes from the anxiety this situation caused me.

One other experience in my early days also really tested me. I was at a convenience store waiting to pay for my purchase and some young guy reached across with his item to give to the clerk within millimeters of my face. This absolutely freaked me out and my self-protection warning system went into DefCon 4. I took this very personally and responded by me reaching my hand forward and intentionally brushing against his face ever so slightly. He didn’t even flinch. I’m not advocating aggressive behavior, this was more like a reflex. The problem here again was a perception and awareness of personal space or lack thereof. Perhaps if I moved directly from my native NYC to Taipei it wouldn’t have been so abrupt and jarring. I moved from the smaller, spacier and mellower Tucson, Arizona though. I had already adapted to much more space, slower pace and friendlier more relaxed people.