By Timmy Chen We all want to find an ideal career that we love, that we are good at, and which contributes to society. Few can achieve this goal, but Prof. Perng Ching-hsi has. Returning to Taiwan in 1977 and teaching at Taida ever since, Prof. Perng thinks he made the right choice for his career and had no doubts about it. “In this I have been very lucky. ‘The Road Not Taken’ haunts a lot of people, no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are, but I chose a career that I deeply loved.” Law was originally his first choice. “In high school I thought I was interested in three subjects, Chinese, English, and law, and my first choice was law because I believed in fairness and justice. I wanted to be a lawyer actually, or a judge. But in those days, there was martial law in Taiwan. It was very difficult for someone in law or political science to become successful unless they had a strong political background. You had to be politically correct.”
Why did English prevail? “Fairness and justice cannot be had in this man’s world. And literature tells us why it’s impossible. You have to have God’s grace. It is beyond our reach, maybe an ideal. But literature has also taught me mercy. And I think mercy is above justice.” Disillusioned by DFLL? “I was disillusioned in the sense that I found myself unable to compete with the masters, like Shakespeare, Eliot, and Yeats. Before my time the department produced a many eminent writers, but when they were students the department didn’t offer the same kind of academic rigor we now have. They didn’t have much to read in class. It was a very leisurely way of studying so that they could afford to imagine, to think, to idle. Then after my generation the department was overhauled and produced more scholars, more Ph.D.s than creative writers. I sometimes think there is a conflict between creative writing and academic discipline.” “We didn’t have a lot of attractions or distractions. Today there are so many activities students can engage in. You can have fun in a lot of areas and your energy is pulled in various directions. I don’t think many of our students now are fiercely interested in becoming a professor. Because you have so many things that you can do which are fun, and which also pay.” “In our day, however, we didn’t know what was difficult and what wasn’t. Difficulty was everywhere so it didn’t exist. We just went ahead; we didn’t say 'what if I fail.’ There was no such consideration because there was simply no other way.” Why Shakespeare? “At the University of Michigan I was in the program of Comparative Literature. For my dissertation, I wrote about Yuan Drama, which I tried to put in the framework of Aristotle’s theory of analysis. I tried to say something about Yuan Drama that Chinese scholars or sinologists had failed to see because of their viewpoint. A year later my dissertation was published in the United States. But returning to Taiwan there was no need for me to teach Chinese drama. In fact I had a book contract signed with an America publishing company on Guan Hang-Ching. I had the outline and so on. But returning to Taida I had to teach Freshman English. I perceived the need for western drama so I started teaching Western Drama, not here but as a part-time teacher at National Chengchi University. And eventually there came an opportunity for me to teach Shakespeare. I have always been interested in Shakespeare. When I was junior high school student I read some excerpts in translation such as Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. If something can be so powerful even in translation, I thought, how much greater must it be in the original. And I’m very interested in words: in Shakespeare there are so many wonderful words, puns, rhetorical devices. I was attracted to Shakespeare primarily because of his words. There’s no line in Shakespeare without a play on words. And later on I became interested in the ideas behind them.” How to approach Shakespeare’s plays. “If you start with Shakespeare and if you can survive the first two months, the first two plays, you’ll be fine. I listened to the tapes. There were no videotapes in those days, just audiotapes produced by Marlowe Society, of all the plays.” “Actually my first paper on Shakespeare was a discussion of the Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I chose only one sonnet and tried to see how the various Chinese translators had read the poem and where each of them focused. And I tried to compare them and evaluate them. That made me aware of some of the Shakespeare’s rhetorical devices. When you have seven specialists look at the same text and come up with very essential differences, that makes you more aware of what Shakespeare is trying to say, and how Shakespeare is using poetic diction and poetic forms. That was very useful to me for my study of Shakespearean drama.” Advice to students about career choice? “People often seek advice from people my age. They do not necessarily follow it, of course. Actually there is a poem called "Surplus Commodity” and it goes like this: “The getting is easy. / The giving is nice. / The taking is the tough part about advice.” But I’ll give you some advice anyway, and it is simply this: follow your heart and then work hard. But how do you know where your heart is? If you’re doing something but you are constantly thinking of something else, then perhaps this is not for you. I never seriously thought about changing my career because I’ve been lucky from the beginning. I chose a field which fit me and by God’s grace, I had some talent in it.“ "You don’t have to decide what you want to do right now because if you have enough basic training, and if you are interested in a lot of things, you can explore all your potentials. Try to find out what is best for you. You ought to be given the opportunities to explore.” “If there is all pressure and no pleasure in a job, then why would someone do it? You’d better quit and find something else where you can find at least some pleasure. In your job the important thing to have is a sense of fulfillment. You realize that you have value. You have to have the courage to stand alone, and the courage comes from your belief in yourself, your ability.” The Love for sharing what he loves. “If you’re in love with something and find it very good, you want to share it with someone else. As a professor this is what I do, and I have at least three ways of sharing: teaching, writing, and translating. What could be better than that? a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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