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Formosa Daughter¡¦s Award ceremony
celebrates achievers
By Loa Iok-sin / Staff Reporter
The recipients of the Garden of
Hope Foundation¡¦s Formosa Daughter¡¦s Award pose for a picture after the award
ceremony yesterday.
Photo: CNA
The recipients of this year¡¦s Formosa
Daughter¡¦s Award yesterday showed the world what they can achieve despite
encountering serious challenges in their lives.
¡§I was so bad at math [in elementary school] that sometimes I had to ask six
times before I could understand why a math problem was solved the way it was,¡¨
Chen Yi-hsuan (³¯©ÉÞ±), a recipient of the award, said at the ceremony hosted by
the Garden of Hope (GOH) Foundation for the ninth year.
While she used to find math confusing, Chen, now a seventh-grade student at Chia
Hwa High School in Chiayi City, was given an award for her achievements in
science and technology.
Chen, who has taken part in various science fairs and contests, said she later
became good at math thanks to her father and a teacher named Lin Chun-nan (ªL«T¨k),
who never lost patience when explaining a math problem to her, even if it took
hours.
¡§I¡¦m the kind of person who cannot understand something in the abstract and I
need someone to show me how the answer came to be,¡¨ she said.
On one occasion, Chen said, in order to explain why 16 divided by eight was two,
her father bought 16 tomatoes from a nearby supermarket and showed her how each
group would end up with two tomatoes when the tomatoes were divided into eight
groups.
¡§Some teachers would get mad when I couldn¡¦t understand a simple math question.
Had it not been for Mr Lin and my father¡¦s patience, I wouldn¡¦t have become so
interested in math and science,¡¨ she said.
Her curiosity led to her participation in science fairs.
¡§I wanted to know how everything becomes how it is, I don¡¦t want to just ¡¥learn¡¦
something from textbooks, I always want to do it myself when there¡¦s a chance,¡¨
Chen said.
Tung Hsu-fang (¸³¦°ªÚ), another award recipient, overcame something that was much
more traumatic ¡X the suicide of her father.
¡§My father was a very nice father, he was a doctor, he was very nice to me and
never got mad at me no matter what I did,¡¨ Tung said.
¡§However, he was always in a bad mood, because he suffered from depression,¡¨ she
said.
One day, when Tung was nine years old, her father killed himself after a heated
argument with her mother.
¡§I was in shock at the time, not knowing what to do,¡¨ Tung said. ¡§I started to
search for the reason why he would do that and I wondered if someone in the
family had done something wrong to deserve this tragedy.¡¨
She searched for the reason for five or six years, until one day she realized
the search would be fruitless because what has happened has happened.
¡§At the beginning, I always told people I was fine, even though I felt sad
inside, but then I realized that I had to find something else to do so that I
wouldn¡¦t be so focused on my sorrow,¡¨ she said.
At the age of 15, she joined the girl scouts and since then, she has slowly
learned to walk into the crowd again and even learned how to lead a group of
people.
¡§I now know how not to think about something that cannot be solved and to look
to the future,¡¨ she said.
Apart from Chen and Tung, 12 other people received the award yesterday and were
honored at a ceremony in Taipei.
¡§You know, before, girls weren¡¦t able to achieve as much because of gender
inequality and discrimination,¡¨ GOH executive director Chi Hui-jung (¬ö´f®e) told
the audience. ¡§But now, it has become more than a gender issue; a lot of girls
cannot do what they are capable of doing because of the unequal distribution of
social resources, especially if they live in relatively remote areas of the
country.¡¨
¡§This is something that the government should try to solve,¡¨ she said.
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