Just for Practice – 80s Diary in Taiwan


Chuang Cje-Kuang

Although Taiwan is such a tiny island, it still has its own tiny history and culture – and these tiny things which seem nothing important to the world are the most precious memories to the residents here. The comic book “80s Diary in Taiwan” drew by Sean Chuang is just a comic diary to record these treasure-memories of Taiwanese in 1976-1990.


Sean Chuang is a famous advertising director of Taiwan and cartoonist is his avocation. He spent more than ten years to finish his last works” The Window”. It is a love story about a young couple during World War 2. The most unique and attractive feature of this work is that there is no dialogue in this book. It only used a series of images to delineate this romantic story. After he finished” The Window”, Sean Chuang spent another four years to finish his latest work “80s Diary in Taiwan”. Actually it is a biography-comic. He used the first person- viewpoint to describe his life in 1980s – and these are the common experiences which shared by all the Taiwanese who lived in that era.
There are so many touching thing in this books, such as the baseball fever in Taiwan, Bruce Lee’s movies, study pressure of the students and the fever of super alloy robot around children. In all these chapters, I was especially impressed by the chapter 2 and 6- the baseball fever and study pressure. 
Although there is a generation gap between the author and I (BTW: I was born in 1988, and the author was born in 1968), I still share the same passion and feeling he has. The baseball fever which describes in chapter 2 began in 1968, when the Taiwan Hongye little league defeated all of its competitors around the world and won the world champion of little league baseball, all the Taiwanese has become so fascinated with baseball. Even today it is still one of the most popular exercises in Taiwan. Due to this baseball fever, lots of high school puts many efforts to train their own baseball players, such as great America MLB baseball players Jian-min Wang and Hong-Chih Kuo are from Taiwan. In addition, the Taiwan professional baseball league is also one of the best leagues in the world which has won the fourth place in the WBSC Baseball World Rankings. All these achievements began with the victory of Hongye little league in 1968. In the age that all people were lack of confidence about our own country, only baseball could make us feel a little pride of our homeland. 
As to the study pressure, I guess that is the common experience which all the Taiwan students have. Since the third year in junior high school (about 15 years old), those young students have to face a sequence of exams and tests which might change their entire life. Those students who got good grades would get into star high schools and then get into those best universities in Taiwan. As for the students who got poor grades, they would get completely different results. That is why all the students who is about to face the exams have to bear enormous pressure. In addition, in order to get better grades most students have to go to cram after school- it means that they almost spend 24 hours in studying and without any time to take a breath. That is absolutely a terrible experience, but I guess it also makes Taiwan young people much stronger and tougher. It trained us how to face and overcome the difficulties in our life- most importantly, to accept the failure.
In conclusion, this comic book completely delineates the common experience and memories of Taiwan people. It is not that kind of official history edited by scholars, but the tiny events and subculture which we all experienced in this island. It sounds nothing but these tiny things actually occupy most of our daily life. If you really want to know this island, buy it- it is definitely worth to keep one.

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