My Fulbright Year in Taiwan

Stacy has to get a new national ID card, and you can only do that in your “home town.” For Stacy, that means Tainan (down south). Usually, when women get married, their home town switches to her husband’s. However, Stacy’s situation is a little different. Although she’s married (to me, of course), her husband is a foreigner, so he doesn’t have a home town in Taiwan. Therefore, for purposes of her national ID card, she is still single. What about her two children? Well, let’s just say that they don’t exist. For purposes of the national ID card. If they did exist, then they would have to be classified as being born out of wedlock, and that’s just not a place where I want to go.

So Stacy had to go down south to Tainan so that she could do the paperwork for her new ID card. The boys went with her, so I’m alone up in Yilan for the long weekend. I miss them, and our small apartment suddenly seems really big. But it’s also not a bad situation, because I have to prepare for the Fulbright orientation next week.

For most of the scholars who were awarded the Fulbright to Taiwan, the grant period begins in September. But because we needed to train our ETAs in the Yilan English program before the school year begins, our program began at the beginning of August. However, we’re still Fulbright scholars, so we have to go to Taipei for an orientation next week. It seems kind of weird to get oriented a month after we arrived, after already have gotten oriented, but common sense doesn’t always factor into decisions made by large organizations, so there you go.

The Director of the Fulbright program in Taiwan invited me to speak to the other Fulbright scholars about the education system in Taiwan. It’s a great honor to be asked to speak, but it’s also a little stressful. Over the weekend, I will take some picture of schools, collect some detailed information, and try to put together an informative, interesting and entertaining presentation. I am not worried about being bored this weekend.