Taiwan Today

A microphone, a big-screen TV, a group of friends, and a couple of thousand NT dollars. These are the ingredients necessary for a hot night out, according to K.K. Chou (周國光), a 31-year-old account manager for a Taipei computer company. Put these elements together and they spell KTV, the local version of the Japanese pas­ time, karaoke. These sing-along parlors are fast becoming the top entertainment choice for thousands of city folk.

Two or three times a week, Chou and a group of friends go out to dinner and a neighborhood KTV. There, after renting a room equipped with microphones and a video player, they drink and take turns singing along to a video with soundtrack and subtitles. At first the atmosphere is a bit stiff, Chou says, but after a few minutes (and a few drinks), people start grabbing for one of the two mikes and hoarding it for themselves. Most nights, the singing lasts past midnight.

Such partying requires cash. Accord­ing to Chinese custom, when a group of friends go out, one person foots the bill. Treating four friends to a night out usually runs at least NT$5,000 (US$200) for food, drinks, and KTV. But Chou is not afraid to spend money on fun; he picks up the tab several times a month. In fact, he has spent so much time in front of the karaoke mike that he claims to be a bilingual singer. "Taiwanese or Mandarin, you name it," he boasts.

When not at a KTV, Chou spends his free time and extra cash playing mahjong, a Chinese tile game in which gambling is a major part of the fun. And in recent years, he has treated himself to several vacations overseas. He has traveled to Thailand twice and took a weekend gambling trip to Macao this spring.

As with many young people in Tai­wan, Chou's active and expensive leisure life has been a source of friction with older family members. While he insists that his lifestyle is not extravagant when compared with that of his peers, his par­ents disagree. "The money I spend on lei­ sure is much more than what my parents would spend," he says. His father, an army general, and housewife mother came to the island from mainland China in 1949 and have lived a modest life. "They had some tough times when they first moved to Taiwan," Chou says, "so they have been very cautious with their money. They still save as much as they can for their children, even though they are now retired. Naturally, they want their children to have the same careful attitude about money." But Chou has other priorities. "Nowadays," he says, "enjoying life seems more important than saving money to be used decades from now."

Such different philosophies on lei­ sure life have created one of the biggest generation gaps in Taiwan today. Although per capita income is rising rapidly and the is­ land's personal savings rate still ranks as one of the highest in the world, many older residents-and many economists-are nervous about the increasing willing­ness to spend. The long­ standing custom of saving money for future generations is losing fa­vor. Data from the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting & Statistics (DGBAS) shows that the average personal savings ratio has dropped dramatically in recent years. In 1986, people tucked away an average of 38 percent of their US$3,600 per capita income. By last year, the aver­age Taiwan resident saved 28 percent of the US$10,000 earned. Meanwhile, lei­sure spending jumped from 13 percent of personal income in 1981 to 17 percent last year.

The changes in leisure concepts re­flect changes in society as a whole," says Winston C. Chen (陳照旗), editor-in-chief of Leisure Life Monthly, one of Taiwan's largest recreation magazines. "A genera­tion ago, when Taiwan was an agricul­tural society, people spent most of their time working. Even office workers com­monly gave up vacation time in favor of paid bonuses. Food, clothing, and a house were the main concerns at that time. Spending time and money on leisure ac­tivities was considered a sin."

Chen explains that the rules began to change as the current generation of forty­ and fifty-year-olds were coming of age. Although saving money was a top prior­ity, it was accepted that they would spend a bit on fun. The most dramatic shift in lifestyles came with the current genera­tion of young adults. Says Chen, "They are enjoying the fruits grown by the ear­lier generations."

While people have more money to spend on leisure than ever before, they still face constraints. For one thing, free time is short. Except for a handful of private companies, all businesses require employees to work at least a half-day on Saturdays. The long work week restricts leisure activities since everyone must cram all nonwork activities into Saturday afternoon and Sunday.

Another factor that reduces leisure time in the urban centers is traffic. In metropolitan Taipei, rush-hour traffic fre­quently triples normal commuting time. It can be even worse on holidays and week­ends; during Chinese New Year, a one­ hour drive to a neighboring town can easily extend to three or four hours. Thus, although Taiwan boasts five national parks, accounting for 8.5 percent of the island's land mass, many people don't dare try to reach them. A common travel horror story entails a family setting out for the beach or mountains early Sunday morning, only to turn around and come home after spending half the day stuck in unmoving traffic. And those who do reach a recreation area are likely to find the place so crowded that swimming or hiking is less than relaxing.

The result is that many people stick close to home. "It would be nice to spend some free time out of this crowded city," says K.K. Chou, referring to Taipei. "But considering the hours I would have to spend on the road, and the congestion in those places on holidays, I'd rather spend my time in the city or just stay home and watch TV."

This thinking, shared by a growing class of people like Chou who have money to spend but demand convenient places to spend it, has fueled a boom in indoor, easy-to-reach, urban activities. As a walk through any neighborhood in Tai­pei will show, the zoning laws separating residential, commercial, and industrial areas are not enforced. Thus, no matter where a person lives or works, there are restaurants, video game parlors, discos, KTVs, and clothing boutiques down the street next door, or even downstairs. The more money neighborhood residents have to spend, the more new leisure activities sprout up.

Eating out, for example, is a major social pastime. Treating friends and fam­ily to a bite to eat is probably the most popular entertainment islandwide. Most neighborhoods have a wide range of res­taurants. An outing could include dinner at a chic Japanese sushi bar or a simple snack purchased from one of the ubiquitous street vendors; the only rule is that no one eats out alone. The Taipei city Department of Public Health estimates that Taipei alone has between five thousand and six thousand restaurants.

Video game parlors are another example of the explosion in indoor rec­reation. The Ministry of Education esti­mates that there are 11,700 unlicensed video arcades in Taiwan, and that number is growing fast. Last March, the minis­try's Department of Social Education re­ ported that three new arcades were given licenses while another forty-five opened up without them.

Even activities that previously took place in the countryside have been brought into town and made accessible. Consider the many indoor shrimping ponds operating in urban areas. Here, pa­trons rent poles to fish out of a concrete pond. To make it seem more like a picnic, families can barbecue their catch on the spot. If the kids get bored with fishing, they can play video games next to the pond instead.

"Taiwan is probably the only island where people choose indoor fishing instead of outdoor fishing," says Winston Chen of Leisure Life Monthly. "The phenomenon accurately reflects leisure culture in Taiwan." The most popular subjects in his magazine are indoor, urban pastimes. Besides traffic congestion and limited free time, air and water pollution also contribute to the reluctance to spend time outside.

To attract patrons who work long hours, most leisure spots are open late into the night. Bookstores and clothing boutiques are commonly crowded with browsers until 10:00 P.M. on week nights, and night markets (streets where outdoor vendors set up shop in the evenings) are packed with people of all ages-even grandparents and kids-until long after midnight. And many night clubs simply stay open all night. Suddenly neigh­orhoods have a lot more to offer. "Diver­sity is the character of modem leisure life," Chen says. "People have a lot more choices than their parents or grandparents."

But the indoor entertainment explo­sion has brought on some problems. For one thing, the vast majority of KTVs, piano bars, and other night clubs are unregistered and unlicensed. That means that they generally ignore safety codes. Thus, the threat of fire has become a serious concern; several blazes in Taipei KTVs ear­lier this year claimed lives. Despite the well-known dangers, many patrons feel as Chou does. He asks, "Where else can we go in a city like Taipei?"

These unlicensed entertainment facilities have also been closely linked to Taiwan's large sex industry. Many unlicensed night spots offer various illegal services. While public frustration is mounting at the lack of regulation of these businesses, one reason that enforcement has been less than effective is that responsibilities are split between so many government agencies. For any KTV parlor, for example, building construction falls un­der the jurisdiction of the construction department, a business license is issued by the Ministry of the Interior, and business practices are overseen by the Minis­ try of Economic Affairs.

Many of these problems are concentrated in Taiwan's urban centers. A recent survey by Professor Tsai Chi­ yuan (蔡吉源) of Academia Sinica's Insti­tute for Social Science and Philosophy shows that many urban leisure activities are not popular in rural areas. More than half of the interviewees said they had never been to a KTV or MTV (a movie theater where patrons watch a video in a private room), and three-fourths said they seldom play mahjong.

Not surprisingly, watching television and videotapes is the number one leisure activity in Taiwan. More than 98 percent of island households have a color TV set. According to an October 1991 DGBAS sur­vey on leisure activities for people over the age offifteen, 77 percent of the interviewees from 18,000 families named watching TV or videos as their main rec­reation activity. On average, Taiwan residents spend more than two hours in front of the tube each day. In Tsai's survey, watching TV ranked as the top leisure activity for 73 percent of the 1,500 inter­viewees aged twenty to seventy. Listening to the radio was number two (49 percent), followed by window shopping (37 percent), watching videotapes (28 percent), and reading (27 percent). The common message among urban and rural dwellers was that convenience is the key to leisure activities. "The data show that a major factor for choosing leisure activities is convenience," Tsai says. "The easier it is to reach, the more popular it is."

With recreation options re­stricted to whatever is convenient, a growing number of people have decided that the best leisure choice is to leave the is­ land. Consider Shirley Kao (高雪莉), a thirty-year-old government employee who spends her free time studying Ger­ man. It may not sound recreational, but her purpose is pure fun. While most of her classmates joined the language school out of business or academic necessity, Kao says, "I come because I love to travel, and an extra language helps a lot when traveling." Since her first trip to Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany in 1987, Kao has caught the travel bug. Taking a trip every two years since then, she has also visited Greece, Turkey, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and New Zealand. While most Taiwan tourists travel on package tours, Kao travels with friends and sets her own itinerary.

Preparing for future trips has become Kao's chief leisure activity. Before each vacation, she collects information, meets with fellow travelers, plans an itinerary, and arranges for visas, transportation, and ac­commodations. She also reads about the history, art, and culture of the places she'll visit, especially the architecture, sculpture, and painting. After the trip, she has stacks of photos to show friends and family.

Kao's high-priced hobby is one of the fastest-growing leisure activities in Taiwan. Travel overseas has boomed since the ROC government began issuing tourist passports in 1979. Residents made 2.9 million trips overseas in 1990 and more than 4.2 million trips last year. The flood of off-island tourism has not gone unnoticed: More than 1,300 travel agen­cies now operate around the island, tour­ ism clubs have popped up, travel magazines are increasing, and all the ma­jor daily newspapers on the island desig­nate several pages to travel and tourism.

Over the past six years, Taiwan tour­ists have developed more sophisticated tastes in travel as well. During the first wave of overseas travel, most of the tour packages provided by local travel agen­cies followed a predictable recipe that gave travelers only a faint taste of the culture they were visiting. A typical South­ east Asian tour consisted of hustling a group of one hundred Taiwan tourists to four of the five most popular destina­tions- Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines or Singapore-all in one week. Tour groups typically spent hours in a bus, then stayed at each scenic spot only long enough to snap a few pho­tos and buy some souvenirs.

The philosophy on such trips, Kao says, is that more and faster are better. "Tourists don't really care too much about the quality of the trip," she says. "What they want is to eat Chinese food, sleep at the best hotels, and most impor­tant of all, to visit as many places as pos­sible for the least amount of money." These agencies offer very low prices in order to compete, then try to make money by getting tourists to buy expen­sive souvenirs.

But Taipei travel agent Eric Chang (張家棟) believes tourists' tastes are slowly changing. "More and more people are sick of these trips with the fixed, busy schedule and endless shopping," Chang says. "They have begun to care about spending quality time and are more will­ing to pay reasonable prices."

Shirley Kao's 62-year-old mother is one such convert. Having taken package tours to Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States, the elder Kao is ready to travel the way her daughter does. "Now she's asking me to take her along on my next trip," Kao says.

Back in Taiwan, Winston Chen and others in the leisure industry are wondering how vaca­ tioners can be enticed to stay closer to home. Chen is pushing to develop more facilities for outdoor and cul­tural recreation. He stresses that the public lacks the opportunity to spend time and money on activities that offer physical or mental benefits. "Compared to countries of equal or lower economic development, Taiwan is poor in leisure culture," he says. "Leisure hardware and software have not kept up with economic growth."

One trend Chen is happy to cover in his magazine is the introduction of "ad­ venture sports" such as surfing, scuba diving, and sailboarding. Although still on a small scale in Taiwan, these are gaining popularity around the island through classes, rental shops, and clubs. Even gutsier sports such as paragliding and bungee jumping are attracting brave souls not scared off by the danger or the expense. Since the island's first bungee jumping group set up operations in November 1991, more than two thousand people have paid the NT$2,000 (US$80) for the thrill of hurling themselves off a bridge while hooked to an elastic cord.

This adventurous spirit is encourag­ing for entrepreneurs such as Ling Der-lin (凌德麟), president of the Outdoor Rec­reation Association of the ROC and a pro­fessor at National Taiwan University's Department of Horticulture. "We think out­ door activities are better and healthier than indoor ones," Ling says. "We've been try­ing to pull people outdoors to enjoy na­ture." The private association conducts research on leisure-related topics and pro­motes outdoor recreation through seminars, lectures, and group activities.

In encouraging people to spend free time outside, Ling faces several cultural biases. For the older generations who spent much of their lives in outdoor jobs, working up a sweat in the open air has lit­tle appeal. Then too, many women consider tanned skin unattractive and low class. But Ling says these views are start­ing to change. Since the association was founded in 1988, seven hundred people have joined. Members' events are led by botanists, geologists, or other nature spe­cialists, allowing participants to learn something as they picnic or hike.

Boosting art and cultural recreation as well as physical activity is important for Taiwan's leisure life, stresses Morgan Sun (孫國慶), general director of the King Car Education Foundation. The foundation was set up in 1980 by King Car Food Industrial Co. to promote quality recrea­tion. Sun points out that few people in Taiwan have been exposed to the fine arts enough to consider concerts or mu­eum visits as leisure activities. "We think it is very important to educate peo­ple on the right concept of leisure life," Sun says. "And it's better to start with children." Much of his work has been di­rected toward kids. Since 1985, thirty thousand children have attended the foundation's summer and winter camps to learn wholesome pastimes such as folk arts and baseball. "While most schools emphasize intellectual education," Sun says, "we focus on physical exercise, the arts, and group activities."

Attracting people to brave traffic to spend their limited free time at any recrea­tional event is tough, but it can be done. Consider the success of Taiwan's six­ team professional baseball league. Now in its fourth season, the league has gained fans from all walks of life. Last year, the original four teams sold 1.3 million tickets. This season, with two additional teams joining, the league expects to sell two million.

Each team has a fan club. At games, fans sit in a designated section of the stadium, dress in team caps and T-shirts and use official cheering paraphernalia. The most dedicated rent buses and follow the team to out-of-town games. Perhaps most importantly for the future of spectator sports, baseball is popular with kids. Lee Chin-chen (李錦臣), a Taipei sixth-grader, is one dedicated young fan. "I like Huang Ping-yang best," he says, speaking of the pitcher of the Weichuan Dragons. "They call him the gold-armed man." Lee and his schoolmates have been collecting baseball cards since the first season. "I only need three cards to complete my col­lection," the boy says proudly.

Such words are music to the ears of those working to promote a strong, diverse, and healthy leisure culture in Tai­wan. They know the problems that hinder outdoor and cultural recreation-long working hours, snarled traffic, and big crowds-are not likely to improve soon. Thus, fostering enough enthusiasm to overcome these obstacles will be one of the biggest challenges Taiwan faces in its struggle to bring the quality of leisure life on par with its economic achievements.