Warm Countries, Cold Countries

After living in a place long enough, it is no longer just something to look at. After living in enough countries, the people in each country turn out to share a typical manner, and that manner shows in small daily interactions long before any guidebook mentions it. A visit is enough to see the sights. Seeing a country’s manner takes longer, for example a year living there on a lease. The countries fall roughly into two groups, warm and cold. This sorting is possible only after living in both kinds of country, because it comes from many ordinary days added together, and first impressions do not supply it.

HCMC seems warmer than most. Manila was warm in its own way: I felt at peace and welcome there. This warmth is hard to list point by point, because it is in how people normally behave in ordinary interactions that are too small to write down. For that reason a person has to live in a place to feel it, and a tourist trip does not show it.

Taipei, Hanoi, and to some extent Tokyo seem cold. I often felt lonely in those countries. Part of this impression comes from a self-bias mindset, where people put their own group first. That mindset exists in every city on earth. In those places it is more noticeable than elsewhere.

Taipei needs a closer look, because it has the opposite reputation: it is famous for being warm and friendly to foreigners. The reputation may be accurate for foreigners who look Western. Foreigners with Asian faces are treated differently. People who look similar to the locals face a bias that Western-looking visitors never encounter, and they are more likely to run into real racism. The warmth in Taipei is real. Locals show it to some foreigners and not to others, and they decide which from the foreigner’s face before the foreigner says anything.

Sorting countries into warm and cold explains a movement toward certain countries that was never planned. After living in America since birth, the countries lived in since then have tended to be warm ones. No decision produced this pattern. It became visible only when looking back at the places where life was peaceful and the places where loneliness built up over time. A person finds out which kind of country suits them by living in countries, without choosing in advance. The wardrobe filter was found the same way.

The warm and cold sorting does not rank the countries. The cold countries have many people who are warm, and the self-bias mindset exists everywhere, Manila included. The sorting has a smaller, personal use: before the next one-year contract is signed, it helps to know whether that year will be lived in a warm country or a cold one.