Cho Mu-yung (卓木湧), part of a team of volunteer guides who show visitors around the Legislative Yuan, is one of the few voluntary tour guides in Taiwan who can offer services in Mandarin, Hoklo (aslso known as Taiwanese) and Hakka.
However, he does not have a Hakka background. At 16, Cho moved from Changhua County, his place of birth, to Taipei, where he worked at the Taiwan Railways Administration training institute while attending school.
Having several Hakka classmates, Cho said he picked up the language, and even passed the upper-intermediate national Hakka exam.
After working at the administration for 17 years, Cho retired and dedicated himself to community service, volunteering at the Presidential Office, the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Taipei Hakka Cultural Park and the Legislative Yuan.
“These opportunities were all introduced to me by friends, and I consider them an arrangement of fate,” the 68-year-old said. “These jobs give me the motivation to get out of bed every morning.”
The Legislative Yuan’s school-like architectural style comes from the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), when the building housed the Taipei Second Girls’ High School, Cho said.
Part of the compound, the site of today’s Kangyuan restaurant (康園餐廳) to be exact, was bombed on May 31, 1945, he said.
It was also home the first and third girls’ high schools, with the first keeping the name Taipei First Girls’ High School, while the third has changed its name to Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls’ High School, he added.
The calligraphy on the plaque that originally hung above the entrance to the legislature’s main hall was written by former Control Yuan president Yu You-jen (于右任).
However, the plaque was moved during the 2014 Sunflower movement, so the one that people see today is a replacement, he said.
Giving a tour is about more than simply memorizing facts and numbers, and should be educational, Cho said, citing a time when a child blurted out that the Legislative Yuan is nothing but a place where adults fight.
“The job of a legislator is to speak for members of the public to ensure their well-being, and sometimes they have more dramatic body language,” Chou quoted himself as saying to the child, adding that he explained the process of drawing up legislation in a simple way so that the child could understand it.
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