Flipping through the dictionary, there are at least 190 Chinese characters with “woman” as the radical—everything from nouns and verbs to interjections and conjunctions. If you look at the definitions, you see that they cover an enormous spectrum of meanings. Just reading through them can teach you a lot about how women have been viewed in Chinese culture.

In screening candidates for this issue’s cover story, about women pioneering “new frontiers” for their gender, although there was some hesitation and contention, we were all very clear that we didn’t want to feature women from privileged backgrounds. Instead, what the women we chose all have in common is the approbation of their peers, indomitable resolution, and passion about their aspirations.

We also were clear that the qualities they should demonstrate include a straightforward and unpretentious love of life, perseverance that allows them to turn expectations in the workplace upside down, and that inner solitary sense of purpose that enables people to change the world. They had to have a certain bearing, presence, loftiness.

The heroines that we portray in this issue are all outstanding yet humble, feminine but with backbones of steel, elegant but not delicate. They are modern incarnations of forebears like Hua Mulan (a legendary sixth-century woman warrior), Qiu Jin (a famous martyr of the anti-Qing revolution), Wang Zhenyi (a pioneering woman scientist of the Qing Dynasty), and Tan Yunxian (a female physician of the Ming Dynasty).

The act of writing is now routine and mundane. Yet today, when we have fallen prey to the addiction to mobile devices, it seems more and more difficult to bother picking up a pen. But the act of writing Chinese calligraphy has historically been a kind of spiritual exercise, a kind of inner cultivation. Young people today are reproducing these ancient lessons with a contemporary twist. Gripping their implements in their fingers, and deftly applying nibs to paper to produce pearls of beauty and polish, young people doing calligraphy with fountain pens are shaping a “new frontier” of their own.

Each written character is like a painting, and also an x-ray into the soul, a “resumé” of the individual’s personality. This issue of Taiwan Panorama guides readers through the winding twists and turns of this youthful calligraphy, knowing sorrow and joy, delight and sadness, pain and pleasure.

Finally, we look at some cultural frontiers. In our “Southeast Asian Focus” series, we have an article on authentic Thai cuisine in Taiwan and another on Yadrung Chiou, a woman from Thailand, now living in Taiwan, who is active in fighting for the rights of foreign spouses. And on the theme of “Aboriginal Heritage,” we talk about museums dedicated to the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, including their architecture, artifacts, faith, rituals, and attire.

Values determine the scope of one’s aspirations and horizons, large or small, near or distant. Today, women are gathering their courage and deciding for themselves where their “new frontiers” are going to be.