Of course! :) Though I will say that mastering the language and being familiar with the culture and having the experience of living in a place will help you to 'bridge the gap' better. After many years of studying something in-depth, you will have an easier time to put things in the big picture, I presume. Expertise is important but with "everything being political" and so much part of our daily life's and news cycles, our discipline really is quite different from many others. And people are usually more interested in the big questions while many of us researchers in area studies tend to stick to smaller and medium one's because we can answer those better given we are not in a laboratory environment with our work.
Anyway, I cherish my student days where I was devoting my whole time to studying an "alien" culture. It's trying to nail the jelly on the wall, you try to understand how other people think that are from a very different background than you are. But of course, I'll always be influenced by my own social background, we're all biased to a certain extent. Still, the single most important thing I've tried to learn from all of this is: First understand others feelings and thoughts, then in a second step you can still evaluate them for yourself. And this is where the most interesting dialogues will start, especially if both share this approach! Too much in the world is jumping to conclusions without first understanding the whereabouts.
And much love for Taiwan from me, of course! Big focus of our work :)
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