Yesterday, a perfect Reddit storm arrived: a video of a white British YouTuber and his Taiwanese girlfriend being harassed in abusive racial terms by a Taiwanese man on the Taipei subway. The Taiwanese man chews out the YouTuber, Christopher Raymond Hall (YouTube name: Dr34m Lucid), calls his girlfriend a whore, and yells at him to go back to his home country. The white guy defends himself in fairly fluent Chinese before leaving the train.
The video — harassment! bullying! racism! a language-fluency twist! — hit the top of Reddit’s /r/videos section Thursday morning and went hugely viral in Taiwan, racking up more than 1.5 million views. “I’m pretty sure [the bully is] just the Taiwanese version of /r/niceguys” — a subreddit demonstrating that men who think they’re single because they’re too “nice” often aren’t — one commenter says. “It’s much easier to convince yourself that it’s because foreigners ‘steal’ all the women, than consider that maybe you’re just not that attractive,” another adds. “There are xenophobics and assholes in every ethnic groups” [sic].
It gets even better — viral justice has been served. Thanks to the internet-driven attention, the Taiwanese man, whose last name is Liao, was arrested and presented on national television as an embarrassment to his country. (It’s unclear what the charges are.) “Had the video not gone viral no one would have ever cared,” said a Redditor who “lived in Asia for many years as a minority.” Sounds … familiar. According to the Straits Times:
He passed the footage to the police, but they were unable to agree on which police station should take up the case. Because it happened on the train, it is supposedly under the jurisdiction of the station where they got on the train. “To date, it has been three weeks. The police are still pushing the case back and forth between each other,” he said. The man, who was not named, was arrested on Nov 12, Taiwanese media reported.
Enjoy this saga — nothing this perfectly Reddit will happen again until someone’s girlfriend cooks him an elaborate meal that they then donate to homeless veterans (PICS INSIDE).
