ABSTRACT
In retrospect, I must admit that my direct enrollment as a freshman in the Department of Chinese at National Chengchi University (NCCU, 國立政治大學) began as the result of great naïveté – and ended in academic failure, with my earning a sixty-eight numerical average for the first semester and, after being kicked out of the ROC military (more on that later), transferring in the second semester to a Jesuit missionary language school in Hsinchu. At the same time, it was through my Taiwan “freshman experience” that I began developing linguistic and cultural fluency in Chinese, decided to make teaching and researching Chinese my career, and, not least of all, met the woman who is now my wife.
