Sun Han is a pretty little miss from Hangchow who grew up on the shore of West Lake. She has a cute face with a fair complexion and speaks with the soft and mellifluous accent of the Wu dialect.
"Are you used to Taiwan?"
"It's okay."
"Do you miss home?"
"Uh-huh."
"What do you do then?"
"I write a letter."
Sun Han's father is an automotive assembly worker, and her mother works in an electric appliance factory. "My father's in Peking, my mother's in Hangchow, and I'm in Taiwan. We're split up in three different places," Sun Han says with a touch of sadness.
She arrived in Taiwan just last October, by virtue of her maternal grandmother. Her grandparents, in her view, are "serious and strict." "I don't understand my grandfather's accent very well," she says, and she once told one of her teachers there was a generation gap between them.
Her life at school is just fine. "The students and teachers are all very nice to me," she says. Her classmates sometimes ask her strange questions though: whether women on the mainland all work in the fields, for instance, or whether no one in the countryside eats salt. And the boys ask a lot about airplanes and artillery. "I don't think people know much about the mainland," she says.
And Taiwan? "It's more advanced and it's richer, with more cars and stores... But the social mores are better on the mainland." When she says social mores, she means law and order.
"She doesn't seem to like people saying she's from the mainland very much," her guidance counselor, Li Su-chiu, says. But Sun Han is admired and respected by her teachers and fellow students. "She's all alone here, but her grades have always been good," Li relates. "She didn't make the top ten in her class in the monthly exam when she first came here, but a month later she moved up to number three and a month after that ranked eighth in the whole school. I often cite her to the other students as an example when telling them to work hard and get ahead."
But Sun Han herself doesn't pay much attention to all that. What she cares about most is when her mother can come to Taiwan. "She's already gone to Hong Kong to get ready for coming here. Can people read your magazine in Hong Kong?" Sun Han writes down her mother's name and address for us in hopes she can read the article about her soon.
[Picture Caption]
Sun Han eats one of the boxed lunches provided by the school every day. (photo by Huang Lili)
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