Transcriber: Bruce Sung Reviewer: Zoe Walmsley
A female colleague asked me the other day,
"What dose it feel like to know that people think you are a weirdo?"
(Laughter)
And not wanting to admit that I didn't know people thought I was a weirdo,
I said: "Well, I think that weirdos look at the world in a different way,
and they try to see a little bit behind that which everybody accepts."
So if that's the definition of a weirdo, then I'm happy to be called one.
So, I arrived in Taiwan 12 years ago,
and I learned about the thing called "betel nut."
And I was really surprised and interested in this
because I'd never come across anything like this before.
And, for the uninitiated, betel nut is in fact a fruit, it's not a nut.
It grows on the areca palm tree.
And it actually is chewed all over Asia.
It's very popular and very common all over Asia.
It is a stimulant.
It contains something called arecoline, which gives you a little bit of a rush.
Chewing a betel nut is little bit like
drinking three cups of espresso coffee immediately after each other.
It needs to be activated,
so it gets wrapped in a leaf which gives it some taste,
and then on the inside of the leaf they put some paste -
a white lime paste which actually activates the active ingredients.
So, this then is a product which doesn't look like very much.
So how do you sell this product to people who are driving by your store?
Right?
You could stand out there and wave your betel nut
but I don't think that is going to work, all right?
(Laughter)
You could put some bright lights on your store,
but hey, every store in Taiwan has bright lights on it,
so that's not going to help very much either.
So, then somebody about somewhere around the 1980s,
hit on the idea of getting a pretty girl wearing a skimpy outfit
to sit by the roadside in your store with the bright lights
and entice passing drivers to come into - and stop, and buy your betel nut.
So, when I arrived in Taiwan,
and I saw these glass boxes by the side of the road
with pretty girls sitting inside,
what did I think?
"Are they prostitutes?"
(Laughter)
"Is it so open here in Taiwan?"
(Laughter)
That was - Obviously everybody has that thought at first.
But I asked my foreigner friends: "What is the story here?"
They say, "No, no, they just sell betel nut,
they sell drinks, and they sell cigarettes, and nothing else."
I'm like, "Oh yeah, really. Right."
(Laughter) OK.
And when I asked the locals,
they all said: "Oh, bad girls, bad girls.
Don't even think about it. Don't even talk about it. OK?
No. They will do all kinds of things in those betel nut stores of theirs."
But then I started looking at this, and I thought,
"How does it work? I don't understand.
How can a girl sitting in a glass box by the side of the road brightly lit
actually engage in sexual activity?"
It doesn't actually make sense.
And so I thought I wanted to find out more about this.
Being a documentary filmmaker, I'm interested in how things work
and how people think and how people operate
what's going on in the world.
And so I decided I'm going to look at this subject, research it,
find out more about it,
and try and tell this interesting and fascinating and totally unique story.
But, as any filmmaker will tell you,
access to your subject is the most important thing.
And I found it very, very difficult to connect up with the betel nut girls.
They did not want to talk to me.
They would generally -
They actually don't want to talk to anybody.
They don't want to be photographed.
They say things like: "It's a shameful job."
They say things like: "My boss won't let you take photos of me or talk to me."
Or they say: "My parents or my family doesn't know that I do this job."
But finally I met one girl by the name of Jane.
At that time she was called Ada,
as Taiwanese girls sometimes do, they change their names.
And she was the first girl to agree for me to take her photo,
to interview her, to tape her, to record her.
And it was really a breakthrough for me.
And I found that she was, in many ways, a typical betel nut girl -
dropped out of school; was doing this job for several years already,
complained about being harassed by men, things like that.
But in many ways she was also against expectations.
She was very smart, and she spoke really well.
And she had a very good unstanding
about exactly what it is that she's doing.
And in that way she helped to introduce me to this business.
And that, in fact, is one of the very first photos I ever took
of a betel nut girl with her consent.
So, (Laughter)
and that's about 2003 or 2004.
So I managed to work out a strategy
for dealing with the betel nut girls, getting them to talk to me.
I would become a customer first.
I would buy coffee and cigarettes from them, chit-chat,
and then if I'd get a feeling that they would be interested to talk,
I'd get a female, Chinese-speaking assistant to go with me,
and we go and chat to them and explain to them what I do.
And I found that when you approach them in that way,
that all of us, everyone here has a story to tell.
that's why we are here today, right? because we have a story to tell.
And if you show a genuine interest in someone's story,
they will generally be happy to tell it to you.
So I wanted to make a film. I couldn't get funding for it.
The government wouldn't give money for a film
that promotes this part of the Taiwanese culture.
But eventually it sort of transformed itself into a photography project.
2007, I had my first photo exhibition.
And for some reason, that photo exhibition just sort of hit a nerve.
And the media picked it up and went crazy about it.
This foreigner, being in Taiwan, and looking at betel nut girls,
and showing Taiwanese people something about their culture,
and looking at it in a different way,
the girls became very famous,
and the stores down the road complained that I hadn't photographed their girls,
because these ones are getting more money.
(Laughter)
And so it went.
Discovery did a program on them,
and National Geographic did some stuff,
and some of them ended up on TV shows.
And it was really just interesting.
As I say, it really just hit a nerve.
I started to get a very good idea
about what people in general think betel nut girls are,
and what the realities are.
And I found that they are different things.
And I found that the betel nut girl issue
has many, many layers;
it has many, many sides;
there are no simple and clear answers.
And those are the kinds of things that I enjoy dealing with,
and having conversations about.
It's all about the conversation.
So let's see, what is the betel nut girls business in?
Is it prostitution?
Is it girls who actually are just prostitutes?
Is the business run by gangsters?
The girls are all exhibitionists? They all like to show off?
Or not?
Is it some deep-seated and long-running culture expression in Taiwan?
How about female exploitation?
Are these girls exploited or are they not?
On the scale of exploitation that perhaps all of us have to deal with,
where do they fall?
Is it maybe a form of female empowerment? Who knows?
Is it just a blight on the landscape and a heath issue, a health problem?
Is it just a job like any other?
Or is it actually a form of urban art?
So, the answer lies somewhere along in that whole spectrum.
So let's take the first one, prostitution.
As I mentioned,
doing business in a glass cage is probably not going to actually happen.
But I do believe that, in general,
the business is not, in fact, around prostitution.
The business is around a pretty girl sitting in a glass cage
and selling betel nuts girls - betel nut, um -
(Laughter)
Freudian slip there -
(Laughter)
etc., to passing motorists.
Is it a business run by gangsters?
Well, if you asked to take some of those bosses' photos,
they'll say: "Yeah, but just don't show my face."
So yes, there are certain elements.
But I find these days, more and more, the stores are actually run by women.
So this woman in red is Ada's former boss.
And she runs the business completely by herself
together with their Indonesian maid who helps to prepare the betel nut there.
Some of the other women like May, for instance, manages the store.
She manages three other girls and the store.
The boss almost never comes there.
She's totally in charge of the place there.
Do the girls have some element of exhibitionism to them?
So, for sure, girls like to dress sexy.
They have competitions with each other to be sexy.
So sometimes, in some places, in some areas they will look like this,
or they would look like this.
And then all the girls in the street complain
because they have to compete against that.
And they don't like it, all right?
This, for instance, was quite an interesting incident.
One of the few times that I saw
really sort of overt behavior from a betel nut girl,
because normally they're very prim.
They're sexily dressed but their behavior is very prim.
This was during a typhoon about three or four years ago.
The girls were actually working in the middle of it.
I stopped and took photos. It was amazing.
This girl was like jumping up and down all the time,
and the wind's catching her dress, lifting it up.
After two or three times I'm like,
"You're doing it on purpose, aren't you? I could tell."
(Laughter)
But, generally speaking, as I say, the manner is actually quite prim.
It's that balance between being sexy and yet being somehow innocent
that I think men find interesting too.
How about culture?
So Taiwan,
or betel nut has been used in Taiwan for hundreds of years
by the Aboriginal people,
it's a part of their love rituals, marriage rituals,
and also just simply hospitality, you know.
When somebody visits your home, you are supposed to give them betel nut.
And there has been some research done.
My friend Daniel did his PhD.
And he had some really interesting information about
during the Japanese period, for instance,
betel nut was completely eradicated in Taiwan.
Only the Aboriginal people could have one or two trees in their area
to keep going
because the Japanese wanted to stamp out this habit.
But after the Japanese left, there was a resurgence in betel nut.
And it became, to some extent, a very Taiwanese thing to chew betel nut.
It became part of the Taiwanese culture.
And even more recently, we have this idea of "Tai-Ke," right?
which is very Taiwanese.
It's very earthy; it's very down-to-earth.
Of course, there's a large group of people who call it low class.
But people like this guy, for instance,
he's the chairman of the betel nut business association in Taoyuan area.
I interviewed him, also from my phone.
And yeah, he's very typical of that very go-getter, businessman kind of guy,
and who's prompting his business in everything
and very proud of being Taiwanese.
The girls themselves have a certain manner which I find quite interesting.
Just a little bit of idea from the way they talk, and the way they react.
(Video) (Chatter)
(Video ends)
This is just to show again
that the betel nut girls can sometimes wear very little clothes
but can actually be shy.
And it's also about the boundaries that they set up for themselves.
I found that these girls very strict, very clear
about what they're prepared to show,
and what they're prepared to do,
and what they're not.
And for instance,
Ada, one day, came out of her store when I stopped,
and she was wearing her usual pretty see-through top,
so you could see her bra, but with a short skirt.
And when she stepped out, the wind caught her skirt and sort of blew it up.
And I thought, you know, nothing of it,
but she was so ashamed,
she crouched down with her face in her hands
because she was so embarrassed.
I was really surprised by this,
but I realized that there was a boundary that had been crossed
in that moment being I stopped there,
and her skirt blew up so that one could see her underwear.
And so I found that really interesting.
The girls have to deal with things like harassment from customers, for sure.
The guys will talk to them, they'll try to get them to go out with them,
things like that,
or will try to touch them sometimes.
And also, occasionally, some of the girls complain
that guys will stop their cars and will actually expose themselves to the girls.
So one of the girls, Shao Wen, has this board on her wall,
so she will write the registration number
of any cars of any guys that give her trouble
so that next time when they come, she just doesn't go out of her stand.
Most of the stores also have security cameras.
And the word on the street is,
if you give a betel nut girl trouble, her boss will see to you.
(Laughter) And then -
Shao Wen, who actually also owns her own store,
also has something else that she can use in case anybody gets frisky,
though she does say she's never had to use it.
But then I also like to show a little bit more closely sometimes,
show the girl and give you the opportunity to stop and look,
because normally you'd just drive past, right?
All your interactions with betel nut girl would be fleeting,
would be just driving past -
those of you who don't buy betel nuts from betel nut girls.
So just looking at her and seeing this girl,
this is like two o'clock in the morning,
and you can see the hours are getting long.
It tells you something, it shows you something about the person.
Then, others, for instance,
you can see there's a friendliness, there's a happiness -
I have not met any betel nut girls
who complain about being coerced into doing this job
or coerced into wearing clothes in a particular way.
The turnover in the stores is very high.
If she doesn't like what her boss wants her to do, then she just goes.
She goes to the next store.
There's not a problem with that.
OK, about the health issue,
I would just like to say very clearly
that chewing betel nut is not good for your health.
It's a very strong part
of getting esophageal and mouth cancer
for people who use it a lot.
You do have to chew it a lot.
It's not like you chew one and you are going to have cancer tomorrow.
And especially when combined with cigarettes, it's definitely a major issue.
So in that part I want to say very clearly
that I support the troops but I don't support the war.
My issue is about the girls.
And most importantly then,
I just want to say
when you look at the girl's interaction with the customers there ...
girls getting bored...
Oh, of course, I always take some photos to the girls
to show them or to give to them.
They like that.
And - just going to skip through -
OK.
And so, I think the conclusion I want to come to
is that this business has many, many layers,
and just as with life.
Somebody asked me before I started, when I was preparing for this,
they said, "So, what is this idea worth spreading?"
You know, the TED "ideas worth spreading."
"What is the idea worth spreading about the betel nut girls of Taiwan?"
I thought that's actually a very good question.
And so what I want to say is that in today's world,
we are living in a world that is increasingly polarized.
We are constantly being told that things are black or white.
With the information age, we have more and more information,
but somehow the conversation is getting lost,
the nuances is getting lost.
So, what I do with the betel nut girls is to look at all the layers -
realize that there's a spectrum from black to white
on all those issues that I mentioned.
And it's not all good and all bad on any one of those.
And I think if we can keep the conversation going -
I have people come to me and say:
"I think you should stop taking photos of betel nut girls
because it's a bad image for Taiwan" or "bad for them" or whatever it is,
I'm happy to be part of that conversation.
That conversation doesn't have to end.
And while we are having conversations,
we can find the best solutions
to the problems that face us like climate change,
like leaking government information,
like going to war, you know,
all the things we are dealing with today.
Because while you are having a conversation,
while you are talking, you cannot swing a sword.
So, I'd like to invite all of you to consider the grey areas.
Consider all the lovely layers that there are in the world
and not just accept the given on any one side.
And let's all be "weirdos" together.
Thank you.
(Applause)