Book Armor Because the Empire never Ended

The “British experience” at the British Council, Taipei

Today I went to The British Council office in Taipei City. The British Council states:

"We connect people with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the UK and aim to build lasting relationships around the world."

My experience was somewhat different. Firstly, the front desk was manned (or womanned) by a Taiwanese woman who claimed to speak English. She explained that the people who know things were at lunch and that she was sat there to impart this fact. Beyond this fact, that the people who know things were at lunch, she knew nothing except how to point towards the seats (orange and circular with vaguely vaginal slits in them).

So I sat.

And while I sat, a procession of British people working for the Council went past. And each of these British people was far too busy with super-important work (invariably featuring the urgent transportation of a coffee cup from one point to another point) to acknowledge my existence, despite my being the only British-looking visitor in a room filled with rowdy Taiwanese schoolkids.

No eye contact, no hello, no nothing.

"This is the true British experience..." I noted to Claudia, who was dumbfounded by how people from your own nation can feel no impulse whatever (or deny this impulse so completely) to interact, however superficially, with you. Particularly in light of the fact that the British Council seeks to represent, presumably, that which is good, about British life. (I don't want to go into it, but surely a Scottish or a North of England council wouldn't be so lacking in common courtesy...)

I muddled through my enquiry with the Taiwanese front-of-house staff, but the experience was unacceptable. I said so.

Later I emailed the Council to thank them for helping with my enquiry (publication of one of my stories in Simplified Chinese) but felt compelled to make clear how objectionable the experience was with regard to the British staff there:

"What is most disappointing to me is that the British people working there, while they may have been busy or on their lunchbreaks, none of them were capable of acknowledging me, of even just saying "Hello" - that is not polite and not a great image to project. It disappoints me that people representing my country believe that it's acceptable to behave in that way."

Building lasting relationships indeed! My lasting impression was of a bunch of anti-social pasty-faced chinless wonders who'd rather die than say hello.

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For those who might entertain the easy rejoinder of this being the pot calling the kettle black, two things:

1) I am not representing Britain and what is best about Britain in a paid position in a foreign land.

2) I am effectively not the same Jason Kennedy who sat there moaning in pubs and bemoaning his lot in the UK. Things change, and the changes I have undergone in my own character only reinforce my feeling that Britain is conducive to make people want to sit and moan in pubs. Why? Perhaps because too many entertaining and creative people are left with nothing much else to do. Really, aren't there exactly enough pubs in the UK to contain just the right number of malcontents, who drink beer brewed at just the right strength to push them further into a state of compliance, so that the misery never manifests as people on the streets demanding something better, but as people on the streets demanding kebabs...

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.