Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday inadvertently made a discouraging remark to a group of children when she received win-ners of this year's International Mathematics and Science Olympiad competition.
Lu, who was supposed to offer words of encouragement to win-ners of the Olympiad for elementary school students, used a teasing Chinese saying, telling the young guests: "You are intelligent in your childhood, but you may not be great when you grow up."
Taiwan won three gold medals, three silver and one bronze in this year's Olympiad, held in Jakarta, Indonesia.
PHOTO: LIU HSIN-DE, TAIPEI TIMES
"You won the competition today, but you have to do better next year," she said. "Remember, the waves behind drive on those before. This is a small step for you and there are more lying ahead. If you succeed, it will be the success of the country and Taiwan."
Lu told the youngsters that she envied them because they could travel abroad at such a young age and admired them for winning so many medals.
"When I was your age, my family was so poor that I walked bare-foot. I did not have my first pair of leather shoes until I was 12," she said.
"Most people were poor back then. It may sound ridiculous to you, but we had to carry our own chairs to school because there were so few of them," Lu said.
Lu thanked her parents for letting her attend school and said that when she absorbed herself in reading, "knowledge makes me realize I am not a great person and sometimes makes me forget that I am a woman."
In a separate event yesterday, Lu met with a Korean writer who had penned a book about her.
The book, Daughter of the World, was released in July and its Chinese translation is scheduled to hit the shelves tomorrow.
The publisher is planning to translate the book into Japanese and English. The publisher also hopes to see the book turned into a movie.
Ryu Min-joo, the author of the Korean blockbuster TV epic drama Jewel in the Palace (大長今), was invited by Lu to the Presidential Office to talk about her new novel, which is based on Lu's life story.
When Lu was asked which Taiwanese actress should play her in a movie version, she said she would make a perfect candidate herself.
"It sounds like a pretty good job for me after I finish my term in office on May 20, 2008," she said.
While the book was about Lu's life before she became the nation's first female vice president, Lu said that she was thinking of writing a book about her vice presidency after she retires.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater