In response to Pricsilla

as a long response to your comment:

it- what taiwan means to me- is a question that will stay alive for longer than i'd like it to, simply because it's the most exhausting thing in the world to be caught in contemplations regarding identity, positionality, subjectivity etc. what i find most challenging is that there are some real emotions and feelings involved. for me, it's _not_ a matter of choosing one over the other, but it often does look like one from the outside. but as i was saying, i feel almost equally awkward in taiwan and in here. although in taiwan i can (relatively; comparing with the outsiders such asmigrant workers) effortlessly overlook the awkwardness and strategically merge into the socially centred group of people. yet it does not mean that i don't find life in taiwan alienating, lonely and painful (which was part of the reasons why i came to europe in the first place).

i just had a hot pot party with other taiwanese students at our house last night. probably because i got accepted somewhere and was overally excited about the publishing opportunity, i was unconsciously expecting this occasion to be very enjoyable for me, if not celebratory. but then i realised that i could not agree with their social practices and their implications. for example, people cared more about the food than a good talk and each other's company. it made me feel sad. also, topics circulated among people were self-interested, prejudiced and narrow-minded. i am not accusing them to be who they are not- they are not mean at all. they are just inside their own keyhole, as we all are, but without being aware of this keyhole vision, buying into it as though they had already seen the world. i felt there were so much that needed to be questioned, challenged and discussed without withholding and hard feelings, but it was so impossible.

i think it resonated well when i read what you'd written the other day 'Whenever I meet people from home these days, they seem to me alwaysto some extent naive, timid, and intellectually un-curious'. i agree that most of the taiwanese people i have met, probably like those from other parts of the world too, are not interested or engaged with things taht are not directly connected to their interpretations of life experiences. there's a sense of unitariness that congeals people while it also disappoints and at times irritates me.

about receving university education in tw and n.america, i am sure it makes a big difference. but i am not in the place to make a comparison as i only know one side of the story and however similar the education system in tw is to that in the states, i reckon at least several things to be quite different. the most obvious is the value systems, english language skills (for someone like me doing english lit. for major), the meaning of doing a bachelor's degree and social and cultural hierarchy.

what is valued in tw and america is ultimately diffenrent and of course it is to be reflected in the education/teaching/learning. for one, it's still considered important to memorise things such as who wrote which piece in literature and things as such in tw, but i'd tend to think that it might not be so in the states (at least in auckland, new zealand it was a whole different set of approach and championed close reading more than anything else). i am not ready to judge which one is necessarily better or worse, and i do believe that both of them have shortcomings and advantages, depending on how people cope with it and how things are worked out.

also, 'the meaning of doing a bachelor's degree' is very intereesting. i didn't realise this until fairly recently. in the states i believe entering college has more to do with becoming a person capable of independent thinking and critical understanding, as part of self-fulfillment. but in tw, it's still related to getting a better job with higher pay; making yourself more marketable for the companies- very practical and profit-orienting. it's interesting because this is what the muslim emigrants in the uk generally think about college degrees- that it shall be helpful for their family finanice-wise and facilitate their upward mobility in social class hierarchy, which again will contribute to the prosperity of their family. tw for more than half a century has been a for-all-purpose independent country, and yet its people still feel insecure about the life and tend to believe in education only when it promises competivity and economic wellbeing afterwards. the implication of this might be that tw is still highly dependent on the global policies, markets and western countries' leads in relation to the world capitalist games. in a way, then, tw has not really been out of the soft-power colonialisation.

. . . oh, i think i should try to turn this into an artcle or something. XD i'll just stop here. my mom is online now and we're about to talk on skype.