The daughter of a famous author was recently able to fulfill her mother’s dying wish by passing her mother’s 10-year collection of matchboxes to a fellow collector.
In her later years, Hsiung Kun-chen (熊崑珍) — better known by her pen name Ai Wen (艾雯) — loved collecting matchboxes. Before she passed away seven years ago at the age of 86, she often said she hoped to see her collection of more than 10,000 boxes passed along.
Hsiung’s daughter, Chu Tien-tien (朱恬恬), said she searched for many years for the right person before finding Changhua resident Chiang Min-chuan (蔣敏全), who is widely known as a “matchbox expert.”
Photo: Tang Shih-ming, Taipei Times
After making the trip to Taipei to pick up the collection, Chiang said he was pleasantly surprised to find that about 2,000 boxes had been made by the author.
As a fellow lover of literature and the arts, Chiang said he particularly admired the intricate details of the handcrafted matchboxes.
Chiang said he had been surprised to get a telephone call one afternoon from Chu telling him about the collection because he had never met either woman.
Photo: Tang Shih-ming, Taipei Times
When Chu told him that she hoped to fulfill her mother’s wishes by giving him her collection of matchboxes and associated books, Chiang said he was deeply moved and immediately made plans to go to Tienmu District (天母) to collect the items at the end of last month.
“Ai Wen was a famous author. One of her works, titled ‘Road’ (路), even made it into our junior-high school textbook,” Chiang said, adding that it was fate that her collection should end up in his care.
Chiang said he was particularly impressed by the meticulous craftsmanship of 12 of the handmade boxes that portray the animals of the Chinese zodiac.
“Ai Wen collected graphics of the 12 zodiac animals. She then assembled 12 matchboxes from cardboard and affixed the graphics to the boxes. The finished product is quite elaborate,” he said. “There is some responsibility involved with accepting Ai Wen’s matchboxes... Matchboxes are like a keepsake to remember the years by, but people are slowly forgetting about them.”
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
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
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