Journal

Again, this was the dream I had the other day.

I was back in the high school, standing in the crowd of student with my school uniform on. Silence overwhelmed every corner of the campus. An old men went onto the platform, picked up the microphone, and then began his long speech.

“No matter what happen. It is very important to obey your teachers' words.”
“The only thing you need to do is study, study and study.”
“We have to be responsible to your parents because they expect us to push you students hard.”
“You are the students who are about to get involved into the war. Thus you have no rights to have fun.”

Obviously, the air was filled with the impatience of the students toward the lengthy speech. However, no one really showed his/her true emotion. I felt very uncomfortable in the crowd. My face turned red and I couldn't help but my body kept shivering. I sweat a lot and I could feel that there was a flow of anger coming up to my throat. I raised my hand, suggesting that I would like to talk in front of the crowd. The old men saw me, but he chose to ignore me and continue his speech. I waved my hand. He saw me waving but still ignore my request. I waved again. This time with the exaggerated movement and I made some noise. Someone came to me and told me not to be so rude. “Why did you say that I am rude? I raised my hand to show that I want to talk instead of interrupt him directly. This is polite enough.” I talked back.

Suddenly, a group of men in black pushed away my classmates to get into the center of the crowd, and dragged me away. Hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes witnessed the whole incident, but did nothing.

Three days later, I was being dropped out of the school because they claimed that I was too disobedient to be taught, and I insulted the teachers at school, which is unacceptable behavior for them.

--

The story was an actual event happened to my friend. My friend who was studied in Penghu was dragged away from the assembling because he wanted to talk to the principal in front of the students.

The situation was quite similar to my dream. The only difference is that he wasn't being dropped out of the school. However, after the incident he was constantly “cared” from teachers and 教官. His friends treated him indifferently. Furthermore, it became regular that he had fights with his family. Everything changed.

I think the dream shows my feeling of insecure and anxious about what I was doing and my future. As an activist in the campus, it is very common to receive mock and disapproval. Sometimes I became very upset because it was as if I were only one who was insane and crazy about fighting for fairness and justice. The feeling of loneliness always frightened me. Although I have friends who have the same ideal and passion as I do, I still feel frustrated when things didn't go on as the way I thought.

In addition, as a junior student now, it is the time that I should think about my own future. Before I entered Fu Jen Catholic University, I was planning to become a translator. But after I've taken the English-Chinese translation courses, I found out that it will be hard for me to make a living by simply doing translation. In other words, working as a translator will not make the end meet. Afterwards, I thought working as an interpreter might be good. Thus I took the Introduction to Interpretation course. However, interpretation was not as interesting and easy as I thought. It is really a tough task to transfer between the two different languages and the two cultures either in writing or speaking. Although I constantly received compliments from my teachers and classmates on translating and interpreting, I think these are not the things I'm that interested in. I want to find out something that I'm really interested in and that I will fully devote myself into the field.