A friend of mine told me that when he was a child, he once won first place in a speech contest. When he presented the award after returning home, his father threw it to the ground, shouting that it was useless.
All his father valued was top performance in exams — nothing else mattered.
This obsolete ideology, which prevails in many families in Taiwan, is arguably a legacy of the civil service examination system in imperial China.
At a recent cultural conference, film director Wang Hsiao-ti (王小棣) said: “When the Ministry of Culture reports during the Interministerial Meeting on Cultural