At it again

It may be hard to start anew, but we often forget the lessons of the past and are thus allowed to move forward with more rewarding mistakes. I am "at it again" writing this blog, which begins in in December because I accidently erased it. I am "at it again" living abroad because I I erased from my memory the continous miscommunication and confusion of it. Luckly you can sit back in the comforts of your native language and culture and enjoy my adventures, hopefully with a laugh or snicker.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Another Taiwan Mainland difference

When planning for my teacher's class last week I looked for a topic that I though would be appealingto the teachers, one that could span many levels and one that I was interested in. I came up with the idea of ancestors and family history. I knew that many people on the mainland were interested in their family history and knew about it quite far back. I also was curious what my co-workers families were doing when the Qing fell and when the KMT took Taiwan as well as during the Japanese occupation period. Well the topic fell flat on it's butt. They did fine talking about their brothers and sisters and parents but many couldn't go beyond that. The just knew that at some point (200 or so years ago) their families had come over from Fujian. According to a few of the teachers if you were successful in Taiwan you would go back to Fujian and if not you were a failure and lost contact with the Fujian part of your family. Another person felt that since in the past many people died, life was not so worthy of being kept track of in the geneology sort of way. So now I know. I did learn that my perception that most of the people in education (I gleaned this from lord knows where) had family who came over with the KMT, was pretty clearly wrong.