Rooted in Taiwan, Connected with the World

I completed my read of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a memoir of the early legal career of Bryan Stevenson. The major conflict in the story is between Stevenson and the rampant corruption in the justice system that had emerged as a result of America’s contentious racial history.  The book was published in 2014, drew a wide readership and won many prizes. I bought it 3 years ago but had left it on my bookshelf due to my new passion in classic works of world literature. Having studied six of Shakespeare’s plays in the past four months, I decided to digress a bit and opened this long-shelved book and was attracted by Bryan Stevenson's bio: an American lawyer, social justice activist, law professor at New York University School of Law, and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and, the most interesting of all, his birthday is only a few months different from mine. This closeness attracted me and I read it through in the following days. I was particularly fascina...

I met with my fellow Toastmasters last night, and delivered a prepared speech titled My  Vision and New Hats . This was the second speech I had to deliver, following the first one I made on October 5th, to complete the project of my learning Pathways. The name of the project is "Develop Your Vision", which has been a favorite topic of mine. Preparing and delivering these two speeches allowed me to reflect on the life journey I have made, wearing different hats and achieving many milestones. It also allowed me to visualize my journey still ahead and the roles to play, or the hats I will wear as my speech title suggests. Then, we had a meeting theme that everyone could easily relate to, for it is a main, if not sole, reason why we're all sitting here as Toastmasters: public speaking. In answering the theme question: "How do you overcome the fear of speaking in front of a group of people?", I wrote down the key words: prepare, rehearse, open energetically, and smil...

I visited Taiwan New Cultural Movement Museum twice in the past week. The Museum is a historical building, constructed in 1932 as the new site of Taihoku North Police Station (TNPS) which had grown significantly since its inception in 1920 and needed a larger site. The building has been re-purposed multiple times after the end of World War II (which marked the end of the Japanese colonial period for Taiwan), and finally became a museum in 2018. It hosts exhibits, lectures, theaters and other cultural events year round with free admission, and has been my favorite museum. The current exhibit is about the police system of Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, with four lectures scheduled for last weekend. Thus, I enrolled in the lecture taking place last Sunday morning, with two speakers covering two topics, "tele-communication systems" and "governing and isolation policy for indigenous peoples", respectively. The lecture was very informative, particularly the g...

I just completed studying my sixth Shakespeare play: The Tempest . Initially considered a comedy, the work was later categorized as a romance, so now I've experienced my third genre of Shakespeare's plays, after tragedy and comedy. I chose this play because it's one of Shakespeare's most studied works in the Western world, though it's little known in my country.  I don't know why it's so but even I myself had never heard of it until recently.  Then, as part of my pre-study research, I was surprised to learn that the play, exceptionally rich in its themes and symbolism, is one of Shakespeare's most adapted works, and is a must read for undergraduates with an English literature major in the US and the UK. The story begins with Prospero, Duke of Milan, who was too absorbed in his books, losing his dukedom to his brother Antonio. So it starts with a tragedy in which Prospero is forced into exile on a deserted island with his three-year-old daughter, Miranda,...