Betelnut Beauty

Up there on the top list of questions people ask me about my Taiwan visit is the question of – “what’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen while you were in Taiwan?”.
I’ll have to be honest with you, I don’t like questions like that, questions that sound like “so what was your favorite place?” “what was the most interesting/beautiful/etc, country/city/place you’ve seen?” or the awful “what was it like over there?”. But after I’ve been here for a while, sharing my experiences about Taiwan, there is this one peculiarity about Taiwan that I find to be totally fascinating.

When I arrived at Taiwan I was confused and scared. Even after reading the little I found about Taiwan, it was clear that I arrived at Taiwan with no idea of what it’s going to be like. All I heard about Taiwan was from some guy in Australia and another fellow in Bangkok that Taiwan was their number one favorite place of all times and that Taiwanese people are warm and welcoming. Same thing happened in Laos, as an Irish guy kept talking about Vietnam as his ultimate place. I decided back then, against all previous plans on going to India, to go tour Vietnam for a few weeks, and I ended up staying there for 4 months. While in Australia I was invited to come spend a few weeks with friends in India, but once again gave that up for for 2-3 weeks in Taiwan where I thought I’ll figure out what I’m going to do next.

First night in Taiwan, I’m at the airport, I see all those strange symbols with no English whatsoever, everything seems very quiet and organized. I somehow manage to understand that I need to take a bus to downtown – somewhere called Taipei Main Station – and to figure out what to do from there. I had myself a new Lonely Planet that I searched for in Bangkok for over a week, which gave very little information for the bankrupted backpacker that I was. I got on the bus, very impressed by the fact that it had working A/C, a wide seat and a personal TV screen for each passenger, and stared out at everything in amazement. Everything looked very different, the traffic, the structures, the people, the atmosphere. Even on the one hour ride from the airport to Taipei I managed to register endless things that intrigued my curiosity and that got me very excited.

One of the things I noticed on that one hour ride was that at certain places there where small “shops” on the side of the road, in bright colored fluorescent lights and a completely transparent glass wall that you could see right into. It took me a while to realize what was so strange about those places. Inside those small shops were girls selling something I couldn’t see, and those girls were all half naked, usually just in underwear. At first I thought I’m imagining things, being on my male-own for too long, and then I thought maybe it’s local prostitution – but that didn’t make much sense. Since I haven’t seen that again throughout my first weeks in Taipei, I almost forgot about that mystery, but later on – when I decided on staying longer in Taiwan and registering for Chinese class I got to see some more shops just like that in Taipei’s suburbs and that’s when I was explained about Taiwan’s weirdest thing ever – The BetelNut beauty.

Wiki explains that :

“Betel nut beauties, or betel nut girls (檳榔西施, pinyin: bīnláng xīshī), are scantily-clad young women selling betel nut on roadside kiosks in Taiwan. A uniquely Taiwanese phenomenon, they are named after the legendary beauty Xi Shi from the Spring and Autumn Period of ancient China.
Taiwanese betel nut kiosks, heavily decorated with bright neon lights, are most common on highways and suburban roads in the western part of the island, such as around Taichung. The main clientele is composed of truck drivers who chew the mildly addictive nuts for the stimulant to help them stay awake on long trips. The high profitability of betel nut production and commerce has led to a multiplication of such kiosks, and as competition for customers’ attention increased, the girls staffing them have been wearing less and less. This eventually led to the point in 2002 when local governments began to ban excessive nudity in betel nut kiosks, first in Taipei City, then in neighboring Taoyuan County. As of 2004, although betel nut beauties still exist, they are more modestly dressed than they were in previous years.”

(… more can be found on Betel Nut Beauty in Taiwanderful)

Most of the Taiwan blogs I read, written by foreigners, have special sections about Betelnut Beauties. Even the serious ones discussing Taiwanese politics have an obsession with this Taiwanese phenomenon, taking photos of Betelnut girls where-ever they see them, exchanging photos, videos and experiences. It is quite shocking to see such a thing in a society that’s perceived to be very traditional in comparison to other cultures in the world, and a very interesting subject to discuss, not only in relation to Taiwan, but also globally.

Imagine that you’re arriving at an unknown country, say, the US of America, and that they have this unlogical habit of taking some plant called tobacco, wrapping it up in paper, and smoking it to death. Now, everybody knows that smoking those things called “cigarettes” isn’t good for them, but they do it non-the-less because it calms them down and gives them more energy. At some places it’s considered to be very cool and sociable. If that was hard enough to believe, try picturing that the way those became so popular was through sex related advertising like banners with half naked girls smoking that stuff posted everywhere, and you see them on the side of freeways everytime you take a short drive. From the little you’ve heard about that America place you’ve gathered that it’s pretty conservative society with over 90% of the population believing in God (in God they trust), most of them go to church every Sunday, and that their number one political issue is about banning abortions because of God’s word. Interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?

Betelnut is an unhealthy substance that causes mouth-cancer and that pumps up your brains with energizers that it wasn’t meant to handle naturally. Some Betelnut girls are of poor social rank who are using their very attractive looks to sell a product in a provocative way. Yet, there’s something especially intriguing, almost magica, about the Betelnut Beauty phenomenon and about the way the Taiwanese society treats it. I think it’s that it shows you that you can never ‘know’ a society and that you should never assume anything or take any ‘fact’ you heard for granted.
There are so many things in Israel that I still don’t understand after a lifetime of living here, things that would look shocking to tourists and students coming here for a few months, things that I don’t even pay attention to anymore.

Betelnut also addresses another very popular issue. The few questions ranking higher in frequency than the one I’ve started with here allow a very interesting say about Israelis, or at least the Israelis that I meet – like “How are Taiwanese and Sex? open? close? outgoing?”. Over here, and it’s not just friends, people feel free to ask me everything about Taiwan and Sex, even very personal questions, in a very direct way. If there’s a way to insert Sex into a conversation about Taiwan or anything else for that matter, then you can count on people here to find it. Combining it with Taiwan only gives it a little extra twist.