On April 24, a bus driver on route BL38 in New Taipei City slumped over his steering wheel and sobbed. A female passenger had accused him of skipping her stop. He insisted she never pressed the stop bell. The argument escalated until the driver, overwhelmed, broke down: “Why are you bullying the driver?! You clearly didn’t press it…”
The two-minute video, filmed by a fellow passenger, went viral across Asia within days. By the time Kan News shared it on Instagram on April 29, it had already been covered by CNN, Channel News Asia, and dozens of outlets from Singapore to Nigeria. It racked up 273,000 plays on Kan’s page alone.
But what made the video truly interesting for our purposes was not what happened on that bus in Taipei. It was what happened in the comments underneath the Israeli broadcast.
What Actually Happened#
The facts are straightforward. The passenger swiped her EasyCard (Taiwan’s transit card) but did not press the stop bell — two separate actions that many passengers confuse. The driver tried to explain: “Auntie, you swiped the card — you didn’t press the stop bell. How would I know you wanted to get off?” He asked another passenger to demonstrate by pressing the bell, and when the chime sounded, pointed out the difference.
The woman pushed back: “You don’t need to be so loud, you’re scaring me.” The driver stood up and asked the bus: “Who was the one talking loudly just now?” He threatened to call the police, then declared: “Don’t bully the driver! The driver has heart disease!” The woman shot back: “I also have heart disease — I had surgery!”
Eventually other passengers intervened. The woman softened: “Okay, sorry, sorry… I did press it, but it didn’t light up.” But by then, the driver had reached his breaking point. He slumped forward and wept audibly.
Then he dried his tears, drove to the next stop, and let her off.
Taiwan’s Response: Empathy, Critique, and a Policy Shift#
The Taiwanese public reaction was largely sympathetic but not uncritical.
The dominant sentiment treated the driver’s breakdown as a symptom of systemic pressure. One widely shared comment captured it: “That’s not losing control of emotions — it’s pressure overflowing. Rear-view mirror, road conditions, bus stops, passenger safety — everything has to be monitored simultaneously. Some breakdowns aren’t sudden; they’ve been building for a long time.”
Fellow bus drivers chimed in with solidarity and dark humor. One wrote: “When I encounter passengers who didn’t press the bell wanting to get off, the one crying is the passenger. You take a week off, rest well.”
But there were critical voices too. The New Taipei Transportation Bureau director said publicly that “both sides should reflect,” a diplomatic acknowledgment that the driver’s reaction, while understandable, was also not ideal. Some online commenters called the breakdown “melodramatic.” Others were more cynical, reading it as strategically effective: “This driver has high IQ — that’s exactly how you should do it.” In this reading, the tears were a power move, not a genuine collapse.
The safety dimension was not lost on Taiwanese commenters either. Some cited the 2018 Chongqing bus disaster, where a driver-passenger fight sent a bus off a bridge, killing fifteen people. A crying driver is still a driver who is not watching the road.
The incident also coincided with another viral bus video from the same week — a Taoyuan bus driver who chased a student down the street after being insulted, abandoning his passengers. Two drivers, two breaking points, two very different responses: one turned inward, the other outward.
Officially, the response was substantive. San Chung Bus Company granted the driver paid leave and psychological counseling. The company chairman promised to personally give him a red envelope (a cash gift of encouragement) upon his return. Kaohsiung’s transportation department went further, announcing that starting May 1, it would deploy massage therapists to fourteen bus stations to give drivers free stress-relief sessions — an unusual policy response to a viral video.
The most revealing official comment came from the Taipei Bus Joint Management Committee, whose executive director identified the single greatest pressure on drivers: not traffic, not passengers, not long hours, but “passengers going online to publicly try the driver.” The fear of being filmed, posted, and judged without context — the very mechanism that made this video go viral in the first place.
The Israeli Comment Section#
When Kan News posted the video, the Israeli response was immediate and revealing. The comments clustered around several themes, all of which tell us more about Israeli self-image than about Taiwan.
“Let him come to Israel, we’ll toughen him up” — This was the most common register: patronizing, half-joking, framing Israeli harshness as a kind of gift. “He needs retraining in Israel,” wrote one commenter. The implication: emotional resilience is something Israel has and Taiwan lacks, and exposure to Israeli reality would fix the driver’s softness.
“In Israel he’d get stabbed / a sandal to the face” — Multiple commenters competed to describe the violence an Israeli bus driver would face — or inflict — in the same situation. “Poor guy, in Israel he’d get stabbed.” “In Israel he’d get a sandal to the face to man up.” “If he were a driver in Israel, he’d probably close the doors on her head the moment she got off.” These comments oscillate between sympathy and boastfulness, presenting Israeli aggression as both a problem and a point of pride.
“You can see there are no wars there” — The classic Israeli framework: the only reason someone would cry over a bus stop argument is because they have no real problems. Wars, rockets, and existential threats are the calibration point. Anything below that threshold is trivial. This comment dismisses the driver’s distress while simultaneously asserting Israeli toughness as battle-tested.
“So gay” — The most concise and revealing comment. Two words that equate a man’s tears with homosexuality, which is itself treated as a slur. A man who cries publicly is not just weak — he is unmale. This comment received no pushback in the thread.
What the Gap Reveals#
The contrast between the two comment sections is not just about tone. It reflects fundamentally different assumptions about what emotional expression means.
In the Taiwanese discourse, the driver’s tears were treated as evidence — of working conditions, of systemic pressure, of what happens when emotional labor has no outlet. The conversation moved quickly from the individual to the structural: driver shortages (Taiwan is short nearly 2,000 bus drivers), low pay, the impossibility of the job. The tears were a data point.
In the Israeli discourse, the tears were treated as a character trait — specifically, a deficiency. The conversation never moved to working conditions. Nobody asked what Israeli bus drivers endure. Instead, the comments performed a kind of national self-portrait: we are tougher, harder, more real. We would never cry. We might stab someone, but we would never cry.
This maps onto well-documented patterns in Israeli sociolinguistics. The dugri (דוגרי) speech culture — directness as a moral virtue, emotional restraint as strength, vulnerability as liability — runs deep. Sociologist Tamar Katriel’s research on dugri speech describes it as a communicative style where straight talk is coded as authenticity, and emotional display is coded as manipulation or weakness. The bus driver’s tears, in this framework, are not a signal of distress but of failure — a failure to be tough enough.
The gendered dimension is equally stark. In Taiwanese public discourse, the driver’s crying prompted discussions about workplace mental health. In the Israeli comments, it prompted discussions about masculinity. The tears were immediately sexualized (“so gay”) or treated as a deficit requiring correction (“a sandal to the face to man up”). The Hebrew word lehit’ashet (להתעשת) — to toughen up, to pull yourself together — carries an explicitly masculine charge. It is what men are supposed to do instead of crying.
There is also a peculiar self-awareness in the Israeli comments that makes them more than simple machismo. “Hahaha, this is hilarious, let him come to Israel — we’ll toughen him up” is not entirely serious. Many of these commenters know that Israeli bus culture is dysfunctional. The humor is self-deprecating: we are the ones who are broken, not him. But even the self-deprecation reinforces the norm — it frames dysfunction as identity, aggression as culture, emotional suppression as national character.
Two Mirrors#
A man cried on a bus. In Taiwan, a country grappling with labor shortages and the mental health costs of frontline work, the video became a policy conversation. Massage therapists were dispatched to bus stations. Paid leave was granted. Structural causes were named.
In Israel, the same video became a mirror. What Israelis saw in it was not a Taiwanese bus driver — it was themselves, reflected back through what they are not. Not soft. Not tearful. Not unscathed enough to cry about a bus stop.
Both reflections are partial. Taiwan’s empathetic consensus papers over the commenters who called the driver melodramatic, and the structural critique can become its own kind of deflection — blaming the system instead of asking whether the driver handled it well. Israel’s self-deprecating machismo contains a genuine insight about living under pressure that most of the world does not understand, even as it forecloses any space for vulnerability.
But the gap between the two is real, and it matters for anyone living between these cultures. For the Asian communities in Israel — Thai workers driving delivery routes, Japanese professionals navigating office dynamics, Chinese students adjusting to Israeli directness — the gap is not abstract. It is the distance between the norms they were raised with and the norms they are expected to perform every day.
Sources: Kan News Instagram, Mothership.SG, The Online Citizen, MustShareNews, CTWANT, Newtalk, UDN
