Taiwan and its Thirst for Education: Impressions of an East Asia Novice
My personal history is inherently international, as someone who had grown up in Germany and moved to the US first to study abroad and eventually for graduate school (a Ph.D. in Latin American history). But I had never traveled to any place on the Asian continent other than eastern Turkey! I had no clear expectations of what I would encounter in Taiwan. The only familiarity I had with East Asia was from general news coverage and conversation with my colleagues at the University of Mississippi, where I direct the Croft Institute for International Studies. The Institute’s program and faculty have a strong focus on East Asia: we offer Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as languages, require our majors to spend a semester abroad in the country where their chosen language is spoken, and host the Chinese Flagship program in our building. We have long had Chinese language instructors from Taiwan, but it was not a country that our Institute focused on until the recent tensions between the US and mainland China when all of our student programs moved from China to Taiwan. I was curious to learn about this place struggling for political recognition. After the two weeks spent there with
