Resisting the narrowing of the nation’s exam-based education system is no doubt something many teachers have attempted, but few have been successful, especially 10 years ago.
So in 2007, when Fengli Elementary School principal Jacky Chang (張世璿) was casting around academic circles for a keynote speaker for a teachers’ convention on creativity, it was not surprising that only one name came up.
“Su Lan (蘇蘭) was different. She was unafraid to do the unexpected. She believed in educating the whole person. She wanted to open people’s minds, and she used music, poetry and films to touch people,” said Hsu Chen-wen (許貞雯), a teacher.
Photo: Courtesy of Charng Jinn Digital Co
Su did not disappoint.
“Usually when there are speeches, half the audience ends up leaving. With Su, the number started at 60 and steadily grew until we had no more seats left. After three hours, the audience was fully engaged and she was still going strong. She nearly missed her flight back to Taipei,” Chang said.
Su was based at Minsheng Elementary School in Taipei at the time, specializing in teaching creative writing and poetry recitation to students of all ages and teachers.
Not long after, she was invited as a “master teacher” to give lectures across China and Hong Kong by Chinese educational institutes that were keen to implement her strategies.
Hualien-based Chang was perhaps one of the last of many adults and children whom Su inspired in her lifetime.
By the time she died on May 24, 2012, at age 53, Su had written books of poetry for children, been a radio presenter, film critic and judge and TV judge.
A month-and-a-half before she died, she had introduced Chang to a friend, Jessica Lu (盧亞芝), as a “poet-principal, who can really write,” asking Lu to continue her own encouragement of Chang’s writing, which had started two years earlier.
Su had said that the night she first heard Chang’s verse, she was at rock bottom.
It was Christmas Eve 2010, and her second marriage was over. Breast cancer had returned, this time accompanied by ovarian cancer, which had killed Su’s mother when Su was just 16, and would eventually kill Su herself.
However, that evening, through a powerful role-playing exercise, she was finally able to resolve the loss of her mother, which she had been carrying all her adult life, and her continual need to prove herself worthy of her mother’s love.
Chang read to the group his poem Love and Death, about the power and fickleness of love, which starts: “Never believe a woman’s heart, nor a man’s tongue.”
Su asked Chang to send her a poem a day for her feedback and from that day on, the poems flowed. One poem became three or four daily, amounting to more than 500, in a process that sustained Su in the final year of her life.
In Shadow Flower, inspired by a black-and-white photograph of bald-headed Su, left fragile after undergoing chemotherapy, Chang begins with the line: “Not every flower lives under the sun.”
Lu says Su, a master of collecting and sharing life’s treasures, would be overjoyed about the publication of Chang’s poems.
When she thinks of Su, Lu said she remembers the bao dai (寶袋) — bundle of treasures — that Su would give her when she would return from Vietnam, where she works.
Inside, rather than expensive food or gifts, were things you cannot put a price on: reviews of new books or music, up-to-date listings for Taipei’s performance venues and newspaper or magazine articles about inspirational people trying to make a difference, all carefully highlighted by Su.
“You go on with life, and over three, four months, you almost forget everything. Yet someone like Su will make the effort to pick out all the good stuff for you,” Lu said. “Life is you collecting good things. What you filter out at the end: that is your life.”
A collection of poems by Chang is to be released in audiobook form with an English translation by Lu, on July 1, which was Su’s birthday. More information can be found online at www.sulanteach.net.
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