This is a post that I periodically think about writing, but for some reason I've never gotten around to it. But it's Friday night at 2:00 am, I'm not sleepy and Led Zeppelin just doesn't lend itself to the serious writing process (tweaking my statements of purpose).
Taiwan likes to view itself as a bastion of tradition, which it is, but not in the ways that I would have expected. I admit upfront, this is far from a random sampling, but the results are I think interesting. Taiwan is often portrayed as very family-oriented, with slightly larger families (3 kids) and strong extended family ties. Most of the kids I've polled (so 6B/5A, 3A, and 1A) really do live in a 3-generation household (grandparent(s), parents, and kids). Divorce seems to be fairly rare (even when it should exist, see below) Feelings towards grandparents across the board are very mixed, which I thought was a tad surprising. A few unabashedly hated their grandparents, citing either general meanness or corporeal punishment. Most were somewhat ambivalent, saying that their grandparents were mean to each other (which could make them unpleasant to be around), but okay to grandkids, though strict. Only 2 expressed straight fondness. One told me that she loved her paternal grandmother because she (the grandmother) loved girls, unlike her mother and maternal grandmother who prefer boys.
I hear the prefer boys bit from time to time. Usually it's from female students who feel their brothers are better liked, but it came up at school once when a family decided they couldn't afford two tuitions and chose to enrolled the boy over the girl. That was kind of an unusual case, as it was an extended family situation. The two were kettle cousins living with their uncle. One was orphaned after an accident, and the other was sent there after the parents divorced. This is the only case of divorce I am aware of within the school, although I can't verify how open the kids might be about it. Paul also has a girl whose brother is strongly favored by the parents, but it hard to know how much it is related to gender than the fact that her brother is a freaking genius.
Occasionally, darker sides appear. The principal told me one of my student's mothers was forced by her husband to quit her job at a bank because his mother complained that she was neglecting the children. One of Paul's students has a quite troubled homelife with his parents having "differences over child-rearing" that result in his mother periodically running away. (This suggests something far more serious than the run-of-the-mill "How should we encourage our son's academic progress?" conversation it was portrayed to be, but that's just my view.) We're fairly certain that the principal tried to encourage him in school by telling him his parents would stop fighting if he did well in school. We prefer to exercise more patience and a slightly modified approach.) It's hard when he's picked up in a Lexus SUV not to think about the difference between appearances and reality. Lots of our kids spend 6 or 7 hrs at school, sometimes as many as 9 hrs. And that's just at our school. While I can rationally explain things in my head, it seems very strange for a culture that prides itself on valuing family never to actually spend any time with them.
Audra's of the opinion that for all the appearances and extolling of the virtues of the traditional family system, it's completely broken down and is only held together by Southeast Asian servants working for slave wages. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it does seem like the lifestyles people are leading are conflicting with the values they praise.
Finally, because I don't want to end on a low note, I offer this quality bit of logic, mined from an angry letter at Eric Snider's website: "These days no one seems to care because they’re like “Oh I don’t care”. It doesn't mention oversized fedoras, but then no one can have everything they wish for.
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