These past four days have been a trip down memory lane. I'm going to try to organize some of the memories for blogging, though not all in this post. My parents, M and I took a road trip to Hualien, partly as a family get-away, and also to introduce our Taiwanese hometown to a group of my brother's (Albert Wu see here and here) students from France. Albert and his wife are jointly teaching a course in history in Paris, and over the last few weeks they have been taking their students on an abroad research-coursework-fun tour of Taiwan. If you know my father, he tends to try to get involved in some way with any of his sons' projects, and from our perspectives, it's great to get his help and/or just advice (from time to time).
My brother and his wife planned a historical, social justice introduction to Taiwan (I wrote about a visit to Dadaocheng). Important components to understand the complex identities and mindsets of Taiwanese today involves understanding the Eastern coast-Western coast divide and friction between those considered "indigenous" and those with ancestral origins in mainland China. Hualien (花蓮) as well as a few other counties host a number of indigenous tribes as well as descendants of soldiers that arrived on the island with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). My father was the president of Donghwa University (from 2012-2016), and as Donghwa 東華 is the only university in Taiwan with a College of Indigenous Studies (see a video of the student dance group), he helped to arrange a visit to engage the foreign students with the local ones.
During our trip, I was able to help clean up and organize my parent's home. A few things and belongings I digged up I'm sharing here.
Many years ago (from around elementary school to middle school) I learned archery. These images I'm posting bring back numerous memories from my budding childhood to manhood (I guess I can phrase it that way?). This adventure in bows and arrows started at Serchen Fu's (傅斯誠 my classmate) birthday party. There was a child bow at the party and we all got to shoot arrows at a target, to clarify --- a straw mat with colored concentric circles (colored for different points, with higher score nearer the center). After the party, three of us (Serchen, Dick Co 洪東坡 and I) banded together to form an archery team, taught by Serch's (my nickname for him) father, a math professor at NCTU. When I think back on this, I suspect this was a not so covert attempt by the parents to have us all get along! Partly fondly and partly humorously, because we were all cherubic, the team was named "合肥隊". We began training regularly on the weekends and soon enough started to attend various competitions staged throughout Taiwan. While I never won any individual trophies (I did get an award for team spirit), I think back fondly on this as a character building series of life events. In particular, it's no easy feat to hit bullseye (yellow region on the target), or the target for that matter at 100 meters away or greater with blowing winds. When I think analytically about it, the training helps in mental concentration, patience, and perception acuity. Archery training also helps to bring us closer to Robin Hood (this one, maybe this one? --- great movies that I simply wanted to share).
Besides simply having the children get along, perhaps there was a deeper meaning to the archery team. Serchen's family has deep ties to Taiwan (I think), Dick spoke Cantonese at home, and (as I understand it), my father's family has been on the island for many generations while my mother's parents came to the island with Chiang Kai-shek. Archery has probably been an important form of coming of age for many of the youths in the tribes, particularly ones that are based on the mountainous regions of Taiwan, and archery can in some ways also be linked to the Japanese bushido (since Taiwan was previously a colony of the Japanese empire, this might be an interesting read on Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule by a professor at CU around the time I was there, also read this). So the archery team was meant to teach on many levels, the personal, interpersonal, and societal. In the modern era, you know, post sticks and stones, I like to think that sports, such as basketball, soccer, tennis or baseball (and even archery!), have the power to bring people together to play and to share, and also to compete. I still have my bows and arrows, and perhaps someday I'll take them out again and share them with my children.
My brother and his wife planned a historical, social justice introduction to Taiwan (I wrote about a visit to Dadaocheng). Important components to understand the complex identities and mindsets of Taiwanese today involves understanding the Eastern coast-Western coast divide and friction between those considered "indigenous" and those with ancestral origins in mainland China. Hualien (花蓮) as well as a few other counties host a number of indigenous tribes as well as descendants of soldiers that arrived on the island with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). My father was the president of Donghwa University (from 2012-2016), and as Donghwa 東華 is the only university in Taiwan with a College of Indigenous Studies (see a video of the student dance group), he helped to arrange a visit to engage the foreign students with the local ones.
During our trip, I was able to help clean up and organize my parent's home. A few things and belongings I digged up I'm sharing here.
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| I was entrant 61B during the Lu-Chou Archery Association Competition in 1991. |
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| The target is typically a circular straw mat and colored yellow, red, blue as in the image at the center of the pamphlet. |
Besides simply having the children get along, perhaps there was a deeper meaning to the archery team. Serchen's family has deep ties to Taiwan (I think), Dick spoke Cantonese at home, and (as I understand it), my father's family has been on the island for many generations while my mother's parents came to the island with Chiang Kai-shek. Archery has probably been an important form of coming of age for many of the youths in the tribes, particularly ones that are based on the mountainous regions of Taiwan, and archery can in some ways also be linked to the Japanese bushido (since Taiwan was previously a colony of the Japanese empire, this might be an interesting read on Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule by a professor at CU around the time I was there, also read this). So the archery team was meant to teach on many levels, the personal, interpersonal, and societal. In the modern era, you know, post sticks and stones, I like to think that sports, such as basketball, soccer, tennis or baseball (and even archery!), have the power to bring people together to play and to share, and also to compete. I still have my bows and arrows, and perhaps someday I'll take them out again and share them with my children.
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