I'd like to say that coming home to California for a month did exactly what I needed it to do: allow me time and space to re-charge my dwindling energy supply and to sit back and reflect on the directions and improvements I need to take when I return to university. I'm now a little more than three days away from my departure back to Taiwan, and there are some things I'd like to bring to light, that I've been doing or thinking about all of winter break. I think this post might be embarrassingly long.
I had these long, long, and I mean long discussions with my mother (sometimes over tea or coffee and a nice slice of homemade cream tart) while my father was at work and my brother at school. I talked to my mother the most over the course of this month, because she was the one who took me grocery shopping, clothes shopping, and the one who taught me the basics of cooking, things I know I'll put to good use when I return to Taiwan.
My mother is in a sense, a conservative mother. She allows me the freedom to make my own choices and to go my own ways: in school, with friends, and she trusts me with my own time. Whether I'm worthy or not of this trust is another issue that I need to discuss with myself. She loves to lecture me (and I mean this in a positive tone) on the values of family, marriage standards, and the consequences of the choices you make. I love to listen to her. It works out both ways.
A topic that came up early in my visit started with a question. My mother asked me if I had noted any differences between NTU students and myself. Culturally, academically (only too obvious), spiritually—everything. I started a huge rant about how I felt Taiwanese children were immature for college students, and always few years behind American children—not in academics, but in mentality—partly influenced by their upbringing, education, and the way Asian culture raises their children. I wasn't trying to berate anyone. I was merely expressing a sort of frustration—frustration that I felt I couldn't connect with some of my Taiwanese classmates on the same wavelength, that their thought processes were slightly more shallow and less well-rounded than that of some of my American classmates. A worldly view, if you please.
Then my mother asked me, but, do you ever see any of your classmates doing drugs, or going out late to drinking and clubbing and not coming home until 4 a.m. in the morning? I had to admit that the answer was no. Then, she pointed out, isn't that a problem that Taiwanese students, particularly NTU students, have succeeded in avoiding? It's such a problem in American universities that drugs and alcohol are becoming a norm in every college community. But for NTU students, who compose the top one percent of every region in the country, it's not a problem, because it's not the norm, and never will be, with NTU's high academic standards.
She continued to ask me if I felt especially lucky. She pointed out that if I had not been brought up here and made the decision to go to Taiwan for university, I may have never realized how fortunate I was to have been raised in the United States. I may have never realized that the opportunities available to me here are so much better than the ones my classmates have ever been able to reach. I'm sure, she continued, that all of your friends, the ones you deem "immature" or "shallow," would have loved to have been raised in the same place that you were—here. I'm sure their parents would have wanted all the opportunities you had for them, as well. But being raised in the United States, particularly Silicon Valley, a blossoming high-tech community, is a very expensive affair. Not everyone has what you enjoy.
My mother made me realize that night that given the limitations of their upbringing and the way their education system works, my Taiwanese counterparts probably have done their best to get where they want to be. My rather harsh criticism (which I have never disclosed to anyone apart from my family) of them is out of place because it's not the criterion they were raised to value.
It's a lot of food for thought ( to be continued )
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