My Corner for Education

Yesterday I went to a dinner function for Easter. An acquaintance who I have not seen for a while greeted me with the comment last night, “So, Taiwan has elected a president.” Honestly, I was so surprised that, for a Canadian senior, a grey hair old lady, who knows very little about Taiwan, she actually read the news about the presidential election. I proudly explained to her all the latest news that I have read about the election.

 

Taiwan is the place that I am very proud to call my motherland because 76.33 percent of the eligible voters turned up at the poll stations to cast their ballot to elect a new president. Listen! It does not matter who your ideal president should be. For all of you, the people in Taiwan, you have exercised your democratic right and also put Taiwan on the stage to prove the democracy at work.

 

 

Now it is about time for all people in Taiwan to show respect to each other as citizens in a democratic world would do to cooperate and help carry out the policies. The government is not going to function properly for you if the political parties could not respect the spirit of democracy, which is the very essence that is significantly different from any country under the communists’ reign. Now it is time for all people in Taiwan to show the spirit of democracy and to live the essence of democracy. Let there no longer be division between brothers, conflict between creeds, and discrimination against tribes. Enough damage and tragedies have occurred but now it is time for healing.

 

I detest people who draw the racial line in Taiwan. For someone like me who have travelled across a couple of oceans, visited a few countries and witnessed discrimination at large, racism is the last thing I would expect to read about from Taiwan. I am not too naive to believe that racism does not exist in Taiwan. I know racism, the root of hatred, is everywhere and this is why, as an educator, I am extremely concerned about this social cancer. Shockingly, I have read so much nonsense online which no doubt (I hope) was all due to the great political divides including the mocking from some of our foreign residents in Taiwan. As the hype of presidential election subdued, I hope people would rationalize their conduct and come to the common senses.

 

Historically, Chinese people, politics and culture, spanned over the massive continent, were divided one time or another due to the barriers of languages, geographic locations and races. Why are we as a collective, after hundreds and thousands of years of history, continuing to commit this political, social and cultural suicide? Didn’t we, as self-proclaimed highly educated nation, learn anything from history?  

 

To my friends and family of all young and old in Taiwan, whether you like it or not as Chinese or Taiwanese, we are all on the same boat in Taiwan. I, for one, might be born only a few decades ago to grandparents and parents who could not speak Mandarin well but somewhere in Chiayi where my ancestral gravestones laid for the last 400 years clearly marked “Fu Jien, Yong Ding” which was the origin of the ancestral homeland. The matter of the fact is that we can not deny our ancestral and racial connections with many other regions in Asia.

 

Being hotheaded with boiling blood can not gain Taiwan any solid ground in the world. Politicians who constantly punch each other and smash chairs only portray the island as an idiotic laughing stock in the eyes of the others. No doubt, Taiwan is facing a global political and economic bully across the Strait, which is not wise for us to hide under the sand like an ostrich and declare no contest to the matter, or to be confrontational with no political backing from the world. We have to gather ourselves together to show the political bully and the global bystanders, who at one time or another deserted us for their own profits, how united and committed we are to find a resolution for the future of all humanity.