I have spent no small amount of time contemplating the habits of what might be considered an “average” Taiwanese person and trying to compare them to that of an “average” American. (Of course, this immediately comes with the problem of generalizing many people to one average, which is unfair. Please allow me the following reflections in the realm of generalization).
Along with eating and working, I find that how people maintain their health especially interesting. Taiwan, like the US, is a first-world, highly-developed society where many people have to make choices about lifestyle which will impact whether they have good health or bad. Good nutrition and bad nutrition is not out of the average person’s control (relatively few people suffer malnutrition due to inability to afford food) so much as choices that they make: Do they eat fried chicken for dinner or at a vegetarian buffet? Do they cook for themselves? Also like the US, many people work jobs where they are not doing manual labor, so instead it is a question of choice to avoid the problems that may arise due to a sedentary lifestyle (as opposed to suffering due to an overload of physical labor). Do many people regularly seek exercise to maintain their health? What kind?
In my mental catalog of observations, I have vaguely phrased all of these questions as the overall comparison of “healthiness”, (which is a grand leap of generalization, so again, please forgive my best attempt at an accurate representation). What follows are some things that I have filed away in this category.
Many things are actually quite similar between the two countries. Taiwanese, like Americans, are all aware of their health as a topic of concern. They know that they generally need to guard against eating too much, and being too lazy. Again, this doesn’t seem to have much of a different feel than in the States, where awareness of the so-called obesity epidemic does not mean action against it – the habits of Taiwanese people are highly variable in how healthy they seem overall.
Multiple times, Taiwanese people have complained to me that Taiwanese food is unhealthy but I will quickly and outright disagree with them. When it comes to home-cooked food, I am confident that the average Taiwanese meal is actually fairly healthy, including a reasonable spread of vegetables along with the rice and meats. What I think these people may have been getting at is the shift away from home-cooked meals in the younger generation, which has been a recent enough trend that I think there is still much concern about it: many younger Taiwanese don’t know how to cook, and if they live away from home than this means that they are going to be treading unhealthier options that are widely available and well-presented. The average restaurant-served meal in both countries is probably contains too much of things that humans find delicious (fats and carbs), so lack of conscious consumption is likely leading to a rise of unhealthy eating.
When it comes down to it, I find that the differences between the two countries are more telling than the similarities. One of the differences I have already touched upon when I talked about how I am quite overtly athletic compared to the average Taiwanese girl. Both cultures embrace healthiness as an aspect of beauty and a balanced lifestyle. But mainstream American culture emphasizes apparent athletic ability. Got muscles? Show ‘em, please. Thinness without muscle tone is hardly desirable. And what is the point of exercise if you can’t compete with it – hence the prevalence of social media to track and share fitness activities. By contrast, Taiwanese ideal of healthy and beautiful doesn’t emphasize overt athletic ability. Skinny without bulging muscles is ok. Many of the most popular exercise activities, such as hiking and biking, are relatively devoid of competitive atmospheres. My theory behind this difference is the long-held reverence for the scholar in Chinese culture. Thus, even now, when it comes to ideal beauty, bulging muscles and overt athletic prowess aren’t necessary.
Another major difference is the activities of the elderly. To begin with, the elderly seem like a much larger presence when I am in Taiwan. I don’t have a concrete evidence for this feeling, but it just seems like there are more old people around. They are hanging out in parks; they are in the alleyway hairstyling salons; they are in the marketplace; they are in the subway. I think this is because there is no place “that old people go”: there is no Florida, there is no Arizona, there are no nursing homes. So instead of disappearing to some haven with other elderly, old folks simply live out their golden years mixed in with the rest of Taiwanese society. And part of those golden years include regular exercise.
Indeed, old folks seem quite active in Taiwan. They are out jogging in parks, playing tennis, climbing mountains, doing taichi, attending exercise classes at community centers, riding bikes, etc. In fact, for most of these activities (that I have just thought of randomly), the bell curve of age seems to be centered around a comfortable 55-ish with far fewer young and old people. Why? The younger generation is “too busy” for exercise. Until one is secure in a position, likely sometime in the late 30’s or 40’s, working culture in generally seems to include 70-80 hours at work per week*, usually as unpaid overtime. This extensive time at work which also contributes to a decreased likelihood that this younger generation is going to go home and cook a meal, further enforcing the challenges that they face for healthy living. This group of younger adults is also possibly caught up in raising kids, which are always a large drain on time and money resources to spend on things like health-related activities. And kids? Forget it. They’re all stuck in cram schools for much of their lives. Based on what I’ve seen college students seem to find time to play sports like basketball and tennis and go for the occasional bike ride. But aside from a few families that I’ve observed out hiking during the New Year’s holiday, I can think of very few times that I’ve seen kids between the age of 10 and 18 out and about for some fun and exercise. Although there was the time when my sister and I stumbled across all the highschool dance troupes that apparently practice at the SYS memorial after dark…
Overall, it is a pretty different picture from the US, in which young kids up through high schoolers run around on fields aplenty, and then young working adults often zealously go through workout plans, get gym memberships and try strange diets. Whether Americans continue to be active through their 40s and 50s seems to be variable by person, and my general impression is that Americans over 60 don’t engage in anything other than walks across parking lots to the mall or the movie theater (okay, actually I don’t really know because of the aforementioned disappearance of elderly from the rest of American society so I feel ill-equipped to really assess how active older generations of Americans are). Oh the contrast, where exercise is a luxury of the elderly in Taiwan (Taiwanese people have also commented on this to me).
Which society is “healthier” is not really a conclusion I can make. Sure, statistics of obesity and other diseases related to lifestyle choices could be dragged out, but these kinds of numbers include several decades of history, and fail to incorporate factors like differences in gene pools. Thus, I find it unfair to claim them as truly speaking to answer this question. But for now, let’s say that I find myself as often out with people 2-3 times my age when I am running in the park in Taipei.
*although, to be honest, watching my Taiwanese friends’ Facebook updates, I’m not convinced that this time spent at work has any particularly strong relationship with how much work gets done.
The dance groups of teenagers also practice at night in the big underground subway tunnels at Banqiao and Taipei Main Station.
I agree with many of your comments about older people and exercise. That is also generally true in China. I think that you see more older people out in parks exercising because they are retired and have the time to do it. They also are trying to stay healthy since the Chinese health care system is not always good. Although there are fewer older people in the larger coastal big cities in China, as many are back in the interior villages, I still see them out in parks exercising.