I know exactly what kind of work I want. It has to involve machinery. I'm nuts about it! I've loved mechanical gadgets ever since I was a kid. I often took appliances apart at home to figure out how they worked, and then I'd try to figure out how to put them back together. That's why we had a lot of things sitting around that were useless even though they were still new! My father always said, "Well, it's not like he's being bad. If he breaks something, we'll just buy another one." But I'll have you know that his investment paid off. I designed laser guns when I was in junior high and sold them to classmates.

After graduating from junior high I entered the department of mechanics at Hsieh Ho Polytechnic Vocational School to learn about technical things. As a second-year student I passed the test for a class B technician's license. The test was really for people who had already entered the working world. A lot of my classmates still hadn't passed the test for a class C license.

After I finished with military service and started looking for work, I discovered that there was no way to find the kind of job I wanted with only a degree from a vocational high school. The help-wanted ads were always looking for mechanic's assistants or sales staff. Like a lot of my classmates, I had thought of applying to work as a mechanic at Toyota or Fortune Motors, but that wasn't what I was really interested in. Besides, a lot of my classmates quit those jobs pretty soon because they were so exhausting.

My first job involved clerical work at a travel agency. It was pretty interesting, but the base pay was only NT$18,000 per month, and if you didn't make a sale to 80 customers per month they would dock you NT$3,000. For every customer after the 80th, you'd get an extra NT$100. How in the world can you live in Taipei on NT$15,000 a month? There wasn't any future in it, so I found this job at the flower shop advertised in the paper. I decided to study for the entrance exam for a three-year vocational college. I figured if I could test into a vocational college I'd be a step closer to my dream of working in equipment maintenance and repair, and if I didn't pass the test, at least I'd have learned how to run a flower shop, and then I'd be able to open a shop of my own someday.

I took the entrance exam for China Institute of Technology because students there can do internships at high-tech companies. If you impress people during your internship you won't have any problem finding a job after you graduate. They just recently announced the results of the entrance exam, and I passed.

I lived in Argentina for a while as a junior high student, so I never learned English or Chinese very well. I know very well that I'll have to deal with competition on the job, so I have to improve my language skills. After the school year starts I'm going to hire a private tutor.

What's that? You say I'm good-looking and wonder if I've ever considered getting into the entertainment industry? I'm not interested in that kind of fluff, and besides, we've already had one entertainer in my family. My older sister was "discovered" when she was in junior high and she became a TV idol, but she eventually came to feel that life in front of the camera was too fake, so she decided to get into behind-the-scenes work. Everyone in my family supported her all the way. In your personal life, on the job, and in everything, I think that you should be a person of substance.

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Wu Han-chang, age 23.

Graduated from a three-year vocational high school, where he studied mechanics.

Currently employed at a flower shop.

With unemployment on the rise, new entrants to the job market are feeling much more pressure than they might have a few years ago. The job fairs held every year by the government always attract large crowds. （photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang）