Nearly 35 years ago, a young man fresh out of college enrolled in a summer Mandarin course and bought a one-way ticket to Taipei, hoping to land a job teaching English.
I arrived in New York as a Fulbright scholar with a suitcase full of notebooks and a naïve ambition: to decode the “secret sauce” behind this global cultural capital. I assumed there must be a formula—a replicable,
When I received notification that I was selected as a grantee of the International Education Administrator Fulbright Tawain award, my emotions were met with overwhelming joy and gratitude, but also anxiety.
The three years I spent in Taiwan can only be described as alchemy: a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination. That is not to say the journey was without hiccups or growing pains;
How did I get here? Am I in the right place? After a bad day at work, I decided to apply for the IEA Fulbright award in Taiwan. I had recently partnered with other international universities to develop 3+1s, and
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived in Taiwan. Aside from a few short visits in the past, I knew little about the pragmatics of everyday life here. Taiwan was also a new field site for me, where I was beginning a (relatively) new research project on care and breast cancer.
I am very grateful to Dr. Brian Boyd, the host of this exchange, for giving me the opportunity to visit the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute FPG Research Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill).
The first year of my Fulbright in Taiwan has made me extremely grateful that I will have
a second. Already, I feel that I’ve learned and grown immensely—but if I had to leave Taiwan now,
“Good morning, misty mountains!” exclaimed my 5-year-old son as we walked to his kindergarten soon after our arrival in Hualien. Since then, that greeting has become part of our morning ritual. His middle name,
Taiwanese folk religion, or Taiwanese Taoism, worships hundreds of gods. Most of these gods were imported from China, and if you look at their histories, you will find that long, long ago,
