Taiwanese Puppetry as a sub-culture

Many of my friends are infatuated with the Pili Puppetry series. Two of them draw drawings featured with characters that have appeared in the Pili series. I love to watch those series as well. Personally, because I have watched Pili puppetry with my father since I was seven. I had deep affection to it, which has accompanied my childhood till now. To me, the pronunciation of Taiwanese is very different from the use of Taiwanese I use in my life. It sounds more scholarly and educated. Sometimes, I really wonder how the script-writers come up with diverse use of vocabulary and complex plot. It is very fascinating to me because listening to the utterances from each character is one enjoyment. For different groups of characters the pronunciation differs. There are different word choices for characters to indicate the same thing. By listening to the conversation, you can simply identify which group the character belongs to.

For my friends, they adore the design of the puppets. For them, each puppet is a piece of art. The delicate clothing, weapon, and hairstyle of each character show how creative the production team is. They also invent different poems, theme songs, names for attacking skills for their characters. Thus, creating a new character is not an easy job. And the successful establishment of a character makes my friends crazy. They all adore the creativity and originality of the production team. When there is a comic expo, many people dress themselves like characters in the puppetry series to pay tribute to the characters and their makers.

I think Pili really does a great job in making the puppetry appealing to younger generations. I have heard from my father that Pili employs college students to write scripts and perform theme songs for characters. With the employment of young generation, I think Pili can keep absorbing new energy and create more fascinating plot, songs, and characters.

Sharon Zheng

My thoughts over Chinese Calligraphy

Each student in Taiwan must have the experience of practicing calligraphy in class. To me as an elementary school kid, it was such a torture that I wanted to escape. To write a good calligraphy, posture was extremely important. We were asked to hang our wrists up in the air and move our arms steadily, which for me was a task. My right arm got sore in several minutes. What’s worse, if I wrote bad calligraphy, the teacher would punish me by hitting me on the hand with a strict. That was the reason why I was afraid of practicing calligraphy. Writing a good calligraphy requires plentiful patience and practice. I still remembered that I envied classmates who could write beautifully. It was an honor if someone could be picked by the teacher to represent the whole class to attend the competition.

However, my attitude changed. Somehow, as I grew up, I found calligraphy artistically beautiful and worth practicing because it could train my concentration on things. I adored the structure of each character and develop my interest in imitating the strokes and the structure of characters with ball pan. Even though I still wrote bad calligraphy, I could write beautifully with ball pans. I even tried to buy models for calligraphy for myself to imitate with ball pan. In the course of imitating, I found much peace within myself and could concentrate more on what I was working on. Each character has to be balanced and you have to be steady enough to write characters properly.

Now, I do think that writing calligraphy is a good way to train oneself to be concentrated and stable. It takes efforts to memorize the whole structure of a character. I feel very peaceful and sharp when practicing writing. When I finish duplicating one model, I often feel a sense of achievement. Whenever I feel upset or anxious, I will sit down in front of my desk and start to write something until my handwriting becomes steady and straight. It is said that you can judge one’s disposition and mood by looking at the handwriting. I often look at my own handwriting. If it is very careless, I would take one model out and start writing. To me, practicing writing calligraphy becomes one way to cultivate my patience and disposition.
Sharon Zheng