Tag: English

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

Although Fulbright Taiwan is officially named Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, the supported activities are not only about scholarship but also cultural exchange. Doing so, I firmly believe that we scholars can have a deeper understanding of the society, especially when interpreting research findings from a social-historical context that is very different from the U.S. With this mindset, I took my family visiting as many places as we could in Taiwan, such as the Confucius Temple and one of the earliest Baptist churches in Taipei, and interacting with people of diverse backgrounds. For example, we visited “contemporary” farmers, who are also scientists receiving highest academic degrees from the U.S., and stayed in a traditional house in the countryside. (the only thing that I can complain about this visit to rural Taiwan is that roosters woke up at 4 AM!) In a different trip to central Taiwan, when tasting natural honey fragrance (or, fruit-flavor) black tea, I also ran into an award-winning singer performing his soul-touching songs on the deck of droughty Sun Moon Lake. (“…the unique taste is due to insect wound…but the wound makes it particularly tasty…Tea is like people. Wounds can make people weak or can make people stronger.

I arrived in Taipei on January 31, 2021 to begin my Fulbright program in Taiwan. After three weeks of quarantine in two hotels in Taipei, I arrived at Tunghai University on February 22, 2021. My stay in the university was officially over by June 30, 2021 and I returned to the United States on July 2, 2021. In total, I have spent more than five months in Taiwan. Giving lectures is the major part of my Fulbright program in Taiwan. After arriving at Tunghai University, I met with the Dean, Dr. Wen-den Chen, of the College of Social Sciences and Professor Peiyuan Cai. With their arrangement, I had the opportunity to meet the chairs of the departments of sociology, social work, political science, and economics. Later on, I also met with the director of the Graduate Institute of Education/Center of Teacher Education and the chair of the Department of Public Management and Policy. These meetings allowed me to introduce my research and teaching topics to the department chairs and also learn the needs and interests of these departments. According to each department’s interests and needs, I have delivered six lectures to both graduate and undergraduate students as well as the