Life During the Pandemic—Chen Fang-ming

In the months following the emergence of Covid-19, Chen Fang-ming, a chaired professor with National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, shared news online about his beloved granddaughter in California. He told his Facebook followers that she was learning to walk, but lamented that the severe restrictions on inter­national travel meant that he could only experience this stage of her childhood by video.

“The course of the pandemic remains unclear and we don’t know when it will end,” says Chen. But he’s keeping busy nonetheless. Now in his final year before retiring from the university, he is teaching the last class of his academic career: “Taiwanese Liter­ary History.” In mid-September, the NCCU Library opened the Fang Ming Chen Library, funded by a donation from Pegatron chairman T.H. Tung. Chen himself gifted nearly 30,000 volumes he had collected over the course of his career. “You have to let go to hold on,” says Chen.

With his background in historical research, Chen speaks confidently about Taiwan’s public health systems during its time under Japanese rule. He tells us that the Japanese colonial authorities established the foundations of public health infrastructure on Taiwan. The colonizers weren’t thinking about Taiwan’s people so much as acting for their own benefit, but Taiwanese profited greatly nonetheless from the reduction in the incidence of tropical diseases.

Comparing the current pandemic to SARS, Chen says: “Taiwan paid a cruel price in the 2003 SARS epidemic, but we remembered the lessons we learned. Taiwan is a civil society. At its most basic, the underlying idea is that I want to live my life and other people want to live their lives—coexistence and empathy. Taiwan’s amendments to its Civil Code, and moves towards gender equality and [acceptance of] same-sex marriage over the last decade and more are manifestations of civil society.” Time magazine recently named President Tsai Ing-wen one of the 100 most influential people of 2020. This inspired Chen to publish a piece in Apple Daily in which he wrote: “The world has noticed Taiwan because we have a healthy political and social environment. Tsai isn’t solely responsible for this; instead, our citizenry has collectively spearheaded this development. President Tsai has been noticed because the civil life of our citizens has been noticed.”