My family background has a lot to do with my involvement in the women's movement. I'm one of four sisters, but our father is a very progressive thinker who was always perfectly happy to have four daughters. He gave us lots of love and affection. For our mother, however, having four daughters put her in an awkward situation with her in-laws. I'm the youngest, and she used to tell me that after I was born she avoided her mother- and father-in-law for a whole month because she was pretty sure they would be disappointed in her for not bearing a son. My parents brought me up to have confidence in myself, so when I grew up and realized what a man's world we're living in, I was quite repelled by it. I was unwilling to accept it.

After finishing my bachelor's degree I went to study at the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. It's one of the Ivy League schools, and the tuition is extremely expensive. Most of the professors and students are white, but once you leave the campus you see a lot of black people. Inner city blacks live in grinding poverty, but in the suburbs you see mile after mile of white middle-class neighborhoods with big beautiful homes and lush green lawns.

The situation in the US made me aware of the gap between rich and poor, and I came to realize that race has a lot to do with it. The tension between whites and blacks in America is very obvious, and my academic training gave me a way to analyze the situation and place it in its proper historical context. I learned that gender isn't the only dividing line in society; there are also class and racial divisions.

Standing up for yourself

After seven years in the US, I experienced culture shock all over again when I came back to Taiwan. I became a university professor, but people were treating me as a young girl rather than a full-fledged member of the academic community. In my first year back I was renting an apartment and getting into occasional disputes with my landlord, a 70-year-old man who would wag his finger and say, "Now listen, young girl...." But when I feel I'm in the right, I stand up for myself. When he was being unreasonable, I would point it out. I wasn't attacking him personally, but he felt like I was supposed to go along with whatever he said just because he was older, and because he was a man. I don't see myself as a rebellious sort of person. I'm just very assertive. When somebody tries to take advantage of me, I stick up for myself.

You can't group all women together in one single category, because we're not a monolithic social entity. Housewives, single women, and elderly women all have very different needs. There are all different kinds of women out there. I joined such groups as the Awakening Foundation and the Peng Wan-Ru Foundation because I wanted to climb down out of the ivory tower and get actively involved in issues of pressing importance to women today. As a member of the Peng Wan-Ru Foundation, for example, I have been working to promote the establishment of after-school daycare facilities for elementary students. Working women need these facilities. I feel like I'm gradually leaving all the theories and academic tomes behind and beginning to do concrete work to solve the real-life problems that women face. That's a big change for me. Instead of examining women's issues from the standpoint of theory, I'm now working on concrete problems facing us right here and now.

I still don't know why President Chen Shui-bian picked me for this job. Perhaps he did it in order to deliver on his campaign promise of naming women to fill a quarter of the cabinet-level positions, and I am in fact very honored and happy to play my role as a woman cabinet member, because I believe that gender plays a big role in determining one's individual abilities. Our criteria of what constitutes an able person have long focused on masculine abilities. We have failed to appreciate the special capabilities that women possess.

The view from the street

Taking part in the women's rights movement has helped me gain a better understanding of what people in society at large really need, and how they think. I hope to take advantage of this experience to establish cooperation between the NYC and non-government organizations, which have a lot of energy and creativity. The government, rather than leading, should be standing off to one side and helping NGOs act as the leading force in youth affairs. As I see it, the NYC plays two main roles. One is to promote volunteer activities and the other is to provide youth with ample opportunities for recreation. The question is how to coordinate these two roles. That could be rather difficult. I think the way to accomplish it would be to focus on activities that interest young people, such as nature trips, guided historical walking tours, and family history projects.

In class I sometimes ask my students to talk about their experiences in doing personal photo spreads or family portraits, or to interview their grandparents and write up family histories. The students especially like doing family histories because, having previously read academic studies about how Taiwan has changed in recent decades, doing the histories gives them a much better appreciation of what the older generation has been through. To organize activities that young people will want to participate in, we have to find something that interests them, and that can be difficult. We'll all just have to get together and brainstorm.