On different tracks
The Taiwan School’s students live all over the area, which makes for serpentine school bus routes.
The buses range far afield and can take as long as two hours to deliver kids to their destinations. To help students who live far away get home at a reasonable hour, the school no longer schedules a full lunch break. Instead, it rushes students through a quick 15-minute meal before they zip off to their next class.
Chen says that the Taiwanese kids travel great distances to attend the Taipei School so they can be prepared to continue their educations in Taiwan.
Avon Wang, head of the Taipei School Parents’ Association, came to Vietnam eight years ago and has a son in the fifth grade. She explains that she chose to enroll him at the Taipei School to better prepare him for Taiwan’s university entrance exam.
Pan Tao-jen says that 90% of those who graduate from the school’s high-school division choose to go to university in Taiwan to take advantage of preferential admissions criteria and scholarships offered to overseas Chinese and children of Taiwanese diplomatic personnel. Many then return to Vietnam to take over family businesses. Given that most of its students hope to study in Taiwan, one of the school’s most important missions is to provide them with high-quality Mandarin instruction.
The Taipei School also runs Mandarin classes every Saturday for locals and students of other schools. Chan Shao-wei, director of academic affairs, says that the Mandarin classes are now in their 14th year. They include children’s Chinese, advanced Chinese, Chinese for international children, and Chinese for international adults, and attract nearly 500 students per year, more than similar classes at any of the other Taipei Schools.
Looking ahead
Changes in the times and the environment have confronted the HCMC Taipei School with many difficulties it has yet to overcome.
For example, teachers have a hard time continuing their professional development and receive few perks, leading to a high rate of faculty turnover. The school’s rented campus is also subsiding at a rate of three centimeters per year, which results in annual repairs to all the buildings. And the school’s severe lack of dormitory space makes it difficult for it to meet the needs of students whose homes are far from the campus.
The school has also had difficulty obtaining study materials and additional reading materials. In the most recent semester, the ongoing dispute in the South China Sea actually left some students without a world history textbook after the book failed to pass muster with Vietnamese authorities.
But necessity is the mother of invention. The students without texts managed to have a great time in their world history class anyway. On the day we visited, the fifth graders were in the hallway holding a “foreign foods carnival,” for which their mothers had prepared a variety of dishes, as a class activity. The Taipei School in Ho Chi Minh City isn’t just building bridges; it is also creating a model for cultural integration.