I don't know what the response in Singapore is like. Apparently my mom and Data didn't know that such a thing actually happened until quite late in the day, when Mark Chen had already apologised. I knew cos' I read Taiwan news and was wondering what the hell was happening. Then my Taiwan flatmate came laughing and asked whether I knew that my country had been called a PLP and a pisai by their dear FM. To which my retort was "yah, so we are pisai, then you are what? "cong zhongguo na ge sai kang fang chulai de gow sai" (ߘgEhoIg盝hj, i.e. a piece of dog poo ejected from the a*s*hole that is China ... well of course this was all in the spirit of humour and my obvious anger at being thus treated by a country as misled as Taiwan. It was all cool.
And then later I thought, how uncivilised that reply was, that kinda just made me the same as the Mark Chen. So this is first and foremost a philosophical question - was that right or wrong? Remember those arguments about how Kerry should not go negative about Bush ... well I think that is crap. The Democrats should be negative, they should tear Bush apart, and then build upon that rotten ash that is sitting on the ground. Those bo ji Democrats.
Then it became a question of the specifics - who these Taiwanese were. And after reading lots of stuff on the web about how Taiwanese reacted diametrically differently in gadzillions of ways to the incident (including some who authoritatively claimed that since Zhuangzi could use human anatomy to describe all sorts of things, why couldn't Mark Chen ...), I've concluded that what Singapore, or what MFA, or what I say is besides the point. The facts are clear. Yes, we are a piece of pisai, a bloody piece that I perhaps just dug out of my bleeding nose if I may add (if not why little red dot). But hey, we are a pisai with a GDP that's larger than the combined GDP of 2/3 of the number of countries with whom Taiwan has diplomatic relations.
And we are also a piece of pisai that at least is ... erm ... not kinda facing daily identity crises. So, perhaps our collective LPs and collective balls would have been exceptionally "song" if MFA had rebutted them, but it's not gonna do anything for our image overseas ... i.e. that respectable image that has Goh Chok Tong playing golf with Bill Clinton (I may add, please A-bian it's not the end of the world if you can't meet the President of the USA, don't cry, don't scream the next time you get on stage you poor boy).
And so we are a piece of pisai, but at least when we say "forget about it" when we encounter labels on our country ... we could, in a way. Once in a while we will make sardonic jokes and deprecating remarks about us being little red dot. That's at least better than some state/country/whatever who cannot "forget about it" cos' they plunge into this crisis about "who are we who are we state country or province?". Taiwan can't forget about their daily existential dilemmas, and perhaps we could forgive them for their desperate attempts at distracting themselves.