Higher Education, Big Students

Friends,

The last month has been a month of rain for us. At the beginning of August, we visited Seoul, South Korea. It was a wonderful little getaway, though the weather was just as oppressive as Taipei. The streets were beautiful (as seen in the attached picture), meals were exquisite, and the thrill of travel is not quite the same as pre-pandemic, but it was still there. But during our stay they experienced the most rainfall they’ve gotten in 80+ years and really devastating floods . We were very fortunate that we chose to stay in an area of the city that was largely undamaged, but it was very surreal to see on the news water filling a subway station we had passed through days before.

My instinct is to write here some comparison between Seoul and Taipei, to pick apart little differences in the street- and restaurant-level view of the cities, but we were there for such a short time and saw so little of the city that even I am wise enough to see that would not be a meaningful analysis. Instead, a single detail and a paired observation: I had forgotten about waiting areas in restaurants. They are nonexistent in Taipei, as far as I have seen. The most you might get is a chair or two tucked into an otherwise unusable corner for people who are waiting in takeout. And they have them in Seoul, at least in a handful of the restaurants we visited, and I think this detail along with a few others led me to the conclusion that Seoul feels more similar to American cities than Taipei. However, with a little distance and reflection, I think this is not quite true; instead it’s simply that Seoul has space and it uses that space. It sprawls in a way that Taipei does not. Seoul has giant roads and shopping malls that revel in their spaciousness in a way the Sogos of Taipei do not and waiting areas in restaurants and even some open air parking lots, while Taipei is fenced in by rivers and coasts and mountains and thus did not have the same option. And I think a negative framing is to say Taipei is much more crowded and a positive framing is to say so much of what I love about Taipei is possible because it is crowded.

Sorry, one more. The older men of Seoul have remarkably great fashion.

Besides the floods of Seoul, our first typhoon of 2022 brushed against Taipei. Hinnamnoor was going to be big, then was going to be small, then was going to turn and miss Taiwan, then ultimately ran up alongside the island and dropped a huge amount of rain over two days but not as much wind as was feared. Its main influence on my life was to resolve my conviction that our next apartment will have a clothes dryer, come hell or high water. Or high humidity.

Today was my first time teaching a Taiwanese university course. It was anticlimatic — first days are all introductions and syllabi and in this case a diagnostic test that the department requires to be able to show quantitative growth through the semester. Which is, of course, silly in a writing-based course that includes all levels of university students, but, hey, metrics.

The university I will be working for is colloquially known as 台大, tai da, a shortening of 國立台灣大學, which just means National Taiwan University (aka NTU). 大 is big, 學 is learn, and of course you shouldn’t translate them separately but even so it amuses me, because, for example, Taipei Medical University’s name is 台北醫學大學 which if you translated one character at a time would be Taipei medical learn big learn, and my students are all 學生 but when they hit university they become big students, 大學生. And, honestly, I don’t know that much about university life and operation in Taiwan, but over the next year I’ll be getting a crash course. So, below, a cataloging of what I know so far that I can revisit some time in 2023 to see just how wrong my first impressions were.

Statistical differences/similarities: According to my penultimate arch-nemesis and supervillain US News (ultimate being College Board), in the 2019–2020 school year, the US Department of Education recognized 3,982 degree-granting institutions. Of those, a nearly equal amount, 1,625 vs 1,660, were either public or private nonprofit universities, while 697 institutions were for-profit. Taiwan, by contrast, has 152 higher education institutions per the government . Wikipedia lists 53 public and 104 private, so not exactly the same number, but close enough. Per capita, the US has a higher ed institution for every ~82,600 people, while Taiwan has one for every ~155,000 people, though this comparison is a little skewed as I don’t believe for-profit institutions (literal or in spirit) exist on nearly the same level as the US and I’d guess the average campus population is higher, but those numbers are harder to find. Government stats put ~47% Taiwan’s 15+ population as having a higher education degree and Wikipedia says 45% of 25+ hold a bachelor’s or higher , nearly equal to ~45% of the US’s 25+ population having completed an associate’s or bachelor’s or higher (again, not a perfect comparison, but close enough to have some ideas).

Attitudinal differences/similarities: Almost every student is expected to aim for university, mostly like the United States. Unlike the United States, your chances of getting into university and even which major you’ll be able to choose are more influenced by what high school you go to (along with tests), which is in turn influenced by what junior high you go to, which means that decisions about which university to go to and what to major in happen much earlier. Because of this, along with cultural differences, students have much less of a say in the decision than in the US, and university is less seen as a place to figure out what career you want than the US, though this is slowly changing from what I understand. Gap years, “nontraditional” students, part-time students, and changing majors or transferring universities is much less common than the US. NTU is, at least in Taipei, considered the number one university across disciplines.

More specific differences: Departments seem much more siloed than the US. In the US, if a biology major needs to take a math class, they take it from a professor in the math department. In Taiwan, the biology department will have a math professor who teaches only biology-specific math classes. Likewise, the writing center in the United States is usually managed by English faculty; here it is an independent entity. This is the only university I’ve been to that doesn’t offer a tuition discount to instructors. I have a TA for a thirty-student writing class, which would definitely be an anomaly in the US. Possibly the most famous academic research institution in Taiwan is Academica Sinica, which actually doesn’t teach courses at all (besides some limited graduate programs that probably don’t have traditional coursework).

NTU’s campus is absolutely beautiful. I mean, goodness gracious take a look at the Maps photos . I’ve visited a few times over the past couple of years, but I’m looking forward to really getting to know it. Not now, though. Maybe when I can get across campus without sweating terribly.

Further reading:

• Does August make you think about a particularly iconic Counting Crows album? Me too. Helena Fitzgerald too. I loved this reminiscence of an album that loomed large in my teenagedom.
• In August of 1995, rival taxi unions in Taipei fought basically a gang war that turned into a riot. I don’t know how to make that sound more like something you should read about . Or, even better, watch the videos ( 1 , 2 ).
• I’ve missed Robert Krulwich’s voice a lot without noticing, until it popped up again in this delightfully simple visualization of how absurd our continued reliance on fossil fuels are.
• I love this New Yorker profile of photographer Lee Friedlander’s portraits of his wife . The photos are stunning, of course, but I also was spellbound by the brief rumination on what it means to be an artist cataloging the life of someone you are intimate with.
• Also in the New Yorker , Hua Hsu’s profile of his father, “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” is a wonderful essay about the different versions of immigration and emigration and love shown over brief faxed messages between Taiwan and the US, but what makes it truly pop are these tiny little exquisite details. When his Dad returns to Taiwan from the United States, he says, “Never again would he have to dye his hair or touch his golf clubs.”
• My favorite Instagram account this month is Taiwanese food photography team “somefoodandelse” . The pictures are much more visually interesting than the thousandth bridge of cheese or hanging garden of noodles.
• Taiwanese food (in America) also got a nice breakdown in the NYTimes .
• We watched and loved Netflix’s Sandman adaptation this month. In my mind, the core volumes of Sandman are Gaiman’s best work, with American Gods and then Good Omens close behind (though my readings of all these are spaced out over almost two decades so who knows if I would stack them the same way on a reread). I was surprised that the series kept the very episodic nature of the story and leaned into some of the weirder concepts. It was not perfect: the middle episodes plodded a little and “Final” episode (Episode 10, there’s an 11 but it’s separate from the rest of the plot) was visually a mess. But, overall, highly recommend and if you do enjoy it I’d definitely say you should check out the original comics as well. Glen Weldon’s review is a good one, though I’m curious if I’d agree with his critique of the comics today.
• Ghost month just ended in Taiwan. The gates to the underworld have been closed once again. There are a ton of write-ups about ghost month traditions here, but the one you should read is of course Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu’s , over at A Broad and Ample Road .

This weekend is 中秋節, Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival. In the US, my favorite holiday has always been Thanksgiving, with its relative lack of commercialism and its reveling in the simple joy of eating good food with people you love. Mid-Autumn Festival is probably the closest thing to Thanksgiving — a time of rest after harvest, a time to eat a lot. There are two things everyone does for this holiday: 1) Eat mooncakes . 2) Barbecue. The first I have completed ahead of the game. The second will be done this weekend, away from the city. There will be karaoke and basketball and a reunion with friends we haven’t seen in a long while.

I’m not going to lie, I will be fishing for compliments about my Chinese and karaoke improving. Wish me luck in my fishing endeavor, and I will in turn encourage you to go fishing for compliments as well.

-g