Tag: English

This is my first-time visiting Taiwan. I arrived in Taipei on December 12, 2021. Everything started with a 22-day quarantine. Actually, it was not bad. I was very lucky to have got a hotel room with a window. Not only that, but there is a temple (Jingfu gong) right in front of the window as my view. I was so excited for I have long been interested in Taiwan’s religious culture. I took pictures and sent them to my friends in the US. Everybody thought it was so beautiful. Moreover, I didn’t need to make decisions on what to eat for each meal and did not have to cook at all. I got to try various biandang (bento box) the hotel provided. I took pictures of each. When I encountered some food that I have never had, I sent pictures to my Taiwanese friends to ask and often ended up having some interesting conversations with them (about family, memory, nostalgia, etc.). I guess that’s what food can do and part of the reason why I have been interested in food history and culture. In addition, it was a delight that I could directly communicate on the LINE app with the

It took me more than a year plus three weeks to start my Fulbright program in Taiwan, so I was determined to utilize all the opportunities during my stay there. The pandemic delayed my travel by over a year, and of course I had to go through three weeks of quarantine in Taiwan. My teaching and research are related to tea and culture, and Taiwan turns out to be a tea paradise!   While I have studied tea and culture in China’s Tang through Ming dynasties, I came to Taiwan with no experience in tea making, and only rough ideas about Taiwan’s tea tree species, the variety of teas, and the art of tea. Now having completed my program in Taiwan, I feel so enriched in my knowledge and experience of tea. I followed tea masters to make teas three times, which means, in addition to learning about the process of tea making, I stayed up till 4 or 5 am to follow critical tea-processing steps. I have learned so much about varieties of tea plants, kinds of teas, and the art of tea in Taiwan.  My trips to Alishan initiated my wandering in the land of tea, learning about and

While preparing for my teaching grant at Tunghai University, International College Dean, Dr. James Sims, asked me to design a world history course that introduced students to foundational concepts from history and geography. His request was particularly exciting to me because I have a passion for history, but don’t often get to pursue this interest as a Science, Engineering, Technology and Math (STEM) librarian at the Colorado School of Mines (Mines). As course development began, I knew that as a librarian, I also wanted to incorporate the opportunity to practice research and information evaluation skills in class. From these goals came my course, History and Geography for our Interconnected World. Fulbright scholars with Dr. Nadeau and Tunghai University President Me outside the Tunghai University Library Over 13 weeks, 43 students and I worked our way through approximately 800 years of world history. We utilized the SPICE framework to explore the social; political; environmental [interactions], cultural and economic aspects of history. Covering that amount of content in a single, shortened semester can be very difficult for students to follow. It can also be difficult to connect events, people and cultural developments throughout history to their lives in the 21st century. To mitigate these concerns, I

As a Fulbright China Transfer due to the unfortunately regressive administrative decision that suspended Fulbright program for mainland China and Hong Kong in 2020, I was very grateful to be offered an opportunity to change the destination of my field research to an alternative location. I chose Taiwan, a place I had always wanted to visit, and perceived this to be an important step for me to carry out my long-term goal for comparative studies in socially engaged public art from East Asia, starting with Greater China, which includes  mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. In the past,  my primary  research area  was mainland China and I also had the opportunity to conduct brief field research in Hong Kong and Macau. Taiwan was the only part of Greater China that I had never visited. While I had read a number of publications on socially engaged public art and art-led social activism from Taiwan and have collaborated with a number of Taiwanese scholars through conference presentations and publications, I had no first-hand exposure of the physical, spatial, and sociocultural conditions within which Taiwan artists and art collectives have been working. A six-month research time in Taiwan, I thought, would be

The Fulbright program shaped some of my earliest childhood memories. In 1967, my father received a Fulbright to National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan.  A math professor at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, he and my mother had never been to another country (except perhaps a trip across Niagara Falls to the Canadian side of the border).  They packed up their five children, ranging in age from 2- to 8-years old and traveled to Taiwan.  As a 4 year-old, I attended a local Mandarin-speaking pre-school and spent much of my time riding my tricycle, playing with my siblings and little friends, as well as exploring the environs of our neighborhood.  Snippets of our year and the many adventures we had reside in my memory, perhaps shaped by the hundreds of slides that my father took during our year abroad, but nevertheless an important source of family stories and identity.  From an early age, I understood the joy and wonder of immersion in another culture. The Rungs, Hsinchu, Taiwan, 1967-1968 Taiwan remained connected to my family.  For many years, a globe sat in our home with my father’s faded pen marks tracing our route to Taiwan and a