A class of ladies, with varied backgrounds, life experiences, and they share one thing in common: their love of learning! Translated…
This is, an “International School”, with the students from various parts of the world, enrolling, Ukrainian, Polish, and the northeastern Asian descent, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, and most were from Southeast Asia: Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Cambodian, Filipinos, etc., etc., etc.
After three years of learning, from the thirty-seven phonetic alphabets, to now, being able to read, comprehend, and to appreciate the poets, and classics in Chinese, they’d worked hard, learning, and their spirits, moved the teachers. As the new semester started, there are, the thirty plus classmates, who, due to work, or families, and marriages, couldn’t come back to class again. But, those ten classmates who’d persisted, learning, all the way to the third grade, they had that passion, and a fitting amount of knowledge base, they became like ten twinkling stars, brightened the night skies of Ming-Yi Makeup School in Hualien.
For the three years, these classmates were accompanied by the wind, the moon, the clouds, the thunderstorms, as they learned, the three Taiwanese elderly women, and seven migrated ladies, they walked, hand-in-hand, living their dreams, using the characters.
“Grandma Owl” was hit by a car on her way home to school during the first semester of her third grade year, in order to be in the graduation photo, having a cervical spine fracture, she showed up, bald, with the cast on her right left, and her bandages, laughing, with the fellow classmates, having a time of her life.
And, “Grandma Black Cat” and “Grandma Pretty” are fitting grandmothers who watched over their grandchildren and their households during the day time, and can only find the spare time in the night to enjoy being students.
The seven other migrated sisters, are young enough to be the grandmas’ daughters or granddaughters, during the day time, they’re undertakers, assistant at the fried food stand, waiting tables at the breakfast shops, nursing home kitchen staff and workers, and they also worked as wives, mothers, and only at night, are they allowed to, temporarily, leave these roles behind, and embrace their love of learning, in the language and the culture.
These ten women were symbols of strengths in women of Taiwan, they’d shouldered up ten separate families, and they are also, a symbol of how a melting pot Taiwan is, and this summer, they walked across the red carpet, stepped on the stage of their graduation, and, received the important certifications of their lives, their elementary school graduation certificates, congratulations to each and every one of them, for fulfilling this, specific milestone in learning of theirs.
And so, this, is a class made up of women from various backgrounds, they are very dissimilar in their lifepaths, but, they shared that one thing in common, the love of learning, and because of this love of learning, it made them into, friends.