Ke Wei-chih is originally from Zhejiang Province, but war and disorder carried him from place to place from early childhood. Now aged 70, he says "I've been an 'outsider' all my life. " When people away from their home province don't understand the local language, they may easily be taken advantage of. For instance, when he was in Sichuan, as an outsider someone tried to charge him 2 Yuan for a book whose official price was clearly only 1 Yuan.

Such bitter experiences made Ke Wei-chih very much aware that learning the local language is an essential survival technique, and so after arriving in Taiwan he insisted that his children learn Taiwanese dialect, just as he had learnt Sichuanese when living in Sichuan. "My children can all speak fluent Taiwanese and Hakka." At that time he brought his whole family to settle in Hualien, which has many Hakka residents. Not facing a language barrier, most of his children later married local people.

In 1958 Ke Wei-chih was appointed headmaster of Hualien's Mintsu primary school. He discovered that 90% of the pupils at the school were from army families, almost all of them Mainlanders who could not speak Taiwanese. "The only thing those Mainland children could say in Taiwanese was 'motherfucker.' " Recognizing that these children lacked a "survival tool" for living in Taiwan and would suffer for it later on, he decided that the school would teach Mainland children to speak Taiwanese.

"Actually we had no teaching materials in those days. All we did was to encourage the children from local families to take the lead in speaking Taiwanese out of class, and have a few kids come up on the stage during morning assembly and give a little talk in Taiwanese, " says Ke Wei-chih. This did not meet with any opposition from the children or their parents, yet when the National Language Promotion Committee got wind of it they took the view that he as a member of the Committee was publicly going against the "National Language policy," and they sent up a report recommending he should be disciplined and have a demerit recorded against him.

Having a demerit slapped on him for teaching his charges a "basic survival technique" was not something Headmaster Ke was going to take lying down. He appealed straight to Taiwanese-born Ke Ting-hsuen, who was Mayor of Hualien County at that time, saying "You're Taiwanese yourself; I'm teaching the kids to speak your own mother language. If you really want to discipline me for that, just go ahead and see what comes of it!" Mayor Ke saw the strength of the argument and pigeonholed the demerit application until the matter was quietly dropped.

That was decades ago, and Ke Wei-chih has long since retired and his pupils of those days have grown up and embarked on every kind of career imaginable. But they haven't forgotten their old headmaster, and they often come to chat with him. Could the reason be that as well as a lot of useless facts which they could happily forget again once the exams were over, Mr. Ke taught them something really useful?

Taiwanese Opera or Ketzai Hsi was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in early Taiwanese society. Its spirit only shines through when performed in Taiwanese dialect. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）

It would be wrong to think that broadcasting is only in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Hakka. To meet the needs of the aboriginal peoples, programs in their native languages are gradually making their appearance.