Hello, world!
Where do I even start?! Perhaps with a disclaimer that I’ve never blogged before, so I have no idea what to expect out of Maddie in Taiwan. But you know what they say, momentous life changes call for frequent and sustained long-term documentation.
If you couldn’t assume from this blog’s title, I am spending the year in Taiwan! Descriptive, I know. I am studying Mandarin abroad through a merit-based State Department scholarship program called the National Security Language Initiative for Youth. NSLI-Y provides intensive summer and academic-year immersion programs in a variety of languages around the world—facilitating the study of critical tongues from Arabic and Turkish to Korean and Russian—at no cost to the scholarship recipients, who range in age from ~14 to ~18. I really do mean no cost; even my two checked bags on the flight over were covered!
This trip marks my first ever time in Taiwan, despite this being my third time participating in NSLI-Y programming. My first time came in the summer of 2020; I was offered a scholarship to study in Suzhou, China, shortly before the pandemic upended all NSLI-Y in-person programs. I completed the summer program virtually, logging on to Zoom courses with my Chinese language professors from the comfort of my desk. Still determined to study in-person Chinese, I applied again for the NSLI-Y Chinese summer program for the summer after my junior year. Set to depart for Taiwan in mid-June (China’s pandemic response has meant scarce opportunity for studying abroad in ‘the Mainland’), I scrambled during the spring of 2021 to expedite my visa application process, receive all the recommended shots for East Asian travel, and purchase gifts for the host family I had been assigned to. Unfortunately, only one day after my Taiwanese travel visa arrived in the mail, NSLI-Y announced that the program was virtual as a result of an unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases in Taiwan. Again, I completed the virtual summer program, taking classes at night and virtually greeting my host family, yearning to one day meet the professors and language tutors I met over Zoom.
So now, the time has finally come for me to travel to Taiwan. Third time’s a charm! I will spend the next eight months (September 2022-May 2023) studying at Tamkang University in New Taipei City, Taiwan, living in a dorm on the weekdays and with an assigned host family on the weekends.
Just a few years ago, I never expected to have taken a gap year; it didn’t fit into the calculus of my “life trajectory”, and who could spend a full year away from home anyway? I’m unsure I would even have considered this academic year if not for the two prior summer programs going virtual, but regardless of how I ended up here, I already know these next eight months will fundamentally enrich my personal philosophies and broader lifetime experiences.
Perhaps I’ll document my day-to-day life routines, culture shocks I experience, lessons about language-learning, commentary on the contentious US-China-Taiwan political situation, etc. But who knows! We’ll figure this out together. Thank you for following along with me on this journey.
Maddie