Pulse of the Neighborhood, Part 1

It’s almost Halloween. Shadows are darker, fingers grow longer, and what’s that around the corner? Don’t look. Keep your eyes down, you don’t want to know what’s out there….

This is definitely not just a holiday for candy and costumes. There are stories, too. Many stories. And so welcome to part one of our new miniseries, Pulse of the Neighborhood. Here, the tales of Taiwan crawl out of forgotten nooks and crannies and come to life.

The Jump Rope Girl

It was in the late hours of the evening that I heard a familiar whipping sound outside the window. Peering out, I saw a girl under the sole streetlight in the alley below, gracefully whirling a white jump rope in arcs around her. I shook my head—when I was her age, around fifth grade, my parents forbade me from entering that deserted alley. For good reason too, if their words were anything to go by.

Long before our family had come here, perhaps even before our apartment was erected, another family of three lived in the area. The child, a girl in first, maybe second grade, loved jumping rope. Every day after school, she’d toss her backpack to her room and thoughts to the wind; grabbing her rope, she’d run to that very alley. Her sanctuary. Her parents were displeased, to say the least—how dare she fool around without before her grades got off the ground?

As time went on and schoolwork increased, her parents started actively banning her from doing such a meaningless activity; being the stubborn girl she was, she snuck out anyway. Every time her parents caught her, the skies rolled with the furious slaps of a beating; thunder would clap to her cries of anguish, and neighborly windows clanged shut in willful indifference to what went on in that household.

Still she snuck out. Double whirls, triple whirls, criss-cross… it was the one thing she was good at.

Her parents weren’t entirely to blame, if one were being honest. It wasn’t that they inherently disliked the activity; in fact, they had already gotten a shiny new rope in preparation for her birthday. But to them, as societal conventions dictated, scores and grades were a prerequisite to everything.

There were scarcely any quiet days back home after that. Every night, there would be shouting matches; every so often, punches. Then came the day her father was fired due to budget cuts. As he passed the alley on his hazy way home, he heard the vehement slaps of rope on pavement. Fury boiled up inside him. Without a thought, he tossed his briefcase of unemployment documents aside. Indeed, his daughter was jumping rope again. Shame, shame on the family!

“What do you think you’re doing here?” he yelled. In two strides he had yanked the rope from her trembling hands; in one twist he had folded the rope into a whip, and the lashes began. Across her legs. Her back. Her heart. She sobbed as he struck, again and again, until—Snap!

The rope hooked itself onto a rusty nail jutting out of a nearby wall, and under the stress, it tore itself in two. He spat on the ground and threw the remains into a dried sewer ditch by his feet, and dragged the bruised, heartbroken girl back behind the doors of a cold house. That night, in front of her desk, she looked at her books uncomprehendingly. The welts had receded, but with every flip of a page, her heart ached for her discarded rope a little more.

People are creatures of habit, and stubborn children all the more so. The next day, she went straight to the alley after school. On her knees, she uncovered the two lengths of jump rope, and tying them together, she started to skip. Again. Yet now it was far shorter than the length she was accustomed to, and just as she was on the brink of rediscovering her rhythm, eyes closed in ecstasy, she tripped. Her left calf rubbed hard along the ground, the skin peeling into spots of blood.

Her immediate reaction wasn’t pain, but terror—surely her parents would find out—and without hesitation she ditched the knotted rope, picking up her backpack, ready to run for home. Just at this moment, the hum of a scooter engine perforated the afternoon air, and she panicked at the thought of this being her dad, catching her red-handed only the day after the last beating. Sparing no time to be careful, she bolted to the middle of the road, hands poised in surrender, a prayer of apologies in return for an answer of forgiveness. But it wasn’t her father. It was just another young man, not expecting a girl to leap out and freeze like a deer in headlights, and there was no time to swerve or brake or react or—

There wasn’t even a slam. “Squish” was all she made as the vehicle connected with her frail torso; with a crunch followed by a light oomph she was tossed into the dark shadows. Her rope lay mere meters from her bloody, broken form. The only living person who knew what happened rode off on his scooter, praying the authorities would never catch him.

Perhaps there is truly no justice under these skies, for his prayers were answered, but her corpse lay in that fetal pose of praying for salvation. By the time her father found her on the asphalt, it was far too late. He didn’t even see the tied rope; through bloodshot, tearful eyes, he saw only the cold body of the daughter he’d lost.

Local news called her “The Jump Rope Girl” after that. The alley was sealed off with a metal gate. Since that, the alley has stayed silent but for the occasional birdsong, unaccompanied by the happy giggles of a girl that once lived there. Until one day, when her mom was treading home with a basket full of groceries, she thought that she heard the joyful chirps of her darling girl again; she ran over, calling her name in relief and in sorrow, and furiously slapping on the metal gate—only to be met with nothing. The path was empty as always. No girl. Stifling a sob, she slowly walked the last lane home, and was greeted with a sight of pure terror.

Her husband hung in midair, tongue swollen and rolling out from asphyxiation. Lifting him up by the neck was a noose made of their daughter’s old jumping rope—all the wears and tears were there, except this time it wasn’t knotted back together, but whole and unbroken. On the floor was a slip of paper. It wasn’t a suicide note, but her baby girl’s naïve, wavy handwriting.

“I’m sorry, daddy. Can you fix this for me, please?”

The Story Behind the Story

A few days ago, there was news of the fourth student this year to commit suicide while at University of Toronto. Two summers ago, a senior at the most prestigious girls’ high school nationwide made the news by doing the same. These are but two instances, and there are countless more. Even in my tiny social circle, I know more than one person to have attempted, or at least considered, similar acts.

I’d like to talk about the girl’s death. Or more specifically, the indirect cause of her death; namely, a warped take on education.

In Taiwan, the climb to get into a top university is almost based entirely upon grades, as briefly mentioned in my previous post. And to many parents, only by getting into a top university can their children get a “good job” and “brighter future.” Extracurricular activities might as well be slacking off. As such, they push their children to excel academically, one way or the other. The merits of such academic pressure nowadays are debatable, but digging into history, it is obvious this social norm originated from the effects of colonization over the Han (漢人).

In old colonial days, only the well-educated had any method of conversing and bartering with the colonizers. Farmers had no choice but follow whatever was dictated by the rulers, while the knowledgeable at least had a shot at appealing for a better life. Running even deeper was the fact that most successful revolutions were led by intellectuals. History is written by those who can write, so to speak, and since until the last generation or two Taiwan was still mainly a farming nation, the notion that only a top education can lead to a good living is rooted in Taiwanese society.

Not to offend anyone, but this may also very well be why the “Asian education” meme-slash-stereotype more or less holds true nearly anywhere on the continent; most countries here were colonies for a large part of contemporary history, and therefore the populace have deduced that not rising to the top of the societal ladder is a death sentence.

I’m getting off track. Back to the case on our education: due to the notion that a good education was necessary for a good life, universities started proliferating in Taiwan in the past few decades. With this sudden abundance of colleges, the top schools cut down their acceptance rate to combat over-saturation; plus, there are only so many resources, and combined with age-old conventions of “the few prestigious schools,” the not-so-top universities remained rather low on educational rankings. This resulted in a nonstop loop of trying to squeeze into a top school, passing this grind down like a bedtime story, and the next generation going through the same squeeze. The academic bottleneck continuously tightens in the same treacherous cycle.

This overbearing pressure is what inspired me to draft this story, with the girl being indirectly pushed to her death, along with so many students being pushed to the verge of breakdowns. And again, we can’t completely blame the people who exert this pressure. It’s the environment in which our parents and their parents before them were brought up; to many, it’s the only reality they know.

But look around at the shifting times. A good career is no longer reliant on a flashy degree. At the end of the day, life finds a way, and so do students here, as well as all around the world. Be it through a startup, an organization, a magazine, or research opportunities, students are going above and beyond to challenge traditional values of education. Back home, this still results in the occasional quarrel with family, sure, but slowly and steadily, things are changing.

Modern problems require modern solutions, after all, and I suppose this is a hurdle for our generation to overcome.