An 11-year-old blind boy has received a “Love Reading Expert” award from the Kaohsiung Main Public Library for reading 161 books last year.
Wu Ching-yu (吳晉宇) did not let visual loss stop him learning, the library said.
Wu lost his vision due to retinal detachment at birth and had to spend his first two years in hospital. He attends a regular elementary school and is progressing well with the help of his mother, Chiang Hui-chun (姜慧純), who quit her job to accompany him in class, and after-school tutoring by a special education teacher for visually impaired people.
Photo: Hsu Li-chuan, Taipei Times
Wu started learning Braille in the first grade and regularly visits the Kaohsiung library, which has dedicated areas for reading and borrowing services for visually impaired people on the fourth floor, Chiang said on Thursday last week.
Every day after class, Wu would read Braille books from the library, borrowing a total of 161 last year, earning him a reading award, she said.
The Love Reading Expert award, which was established by the Ministry of Education, encourages reading and honors 24 winners every year. Participating entities include the National Central Library and all other public libraries across the nation.
Besides reading, Wu also plays the piano, sings in the school choir and loves trains, said his father, Wu Ying-yu (吳盈裕), adding that he likes to visit the High Speed Rail’s (HSR) Zuoying Station (左營) and can listen to broadcasts of train departures and arrivals for hours.
When visiting his grandmother in Taipei during summer or winter vacation, he would insist on taking the HSR so he could listen to and mimic the names of the stations being broadcast in Mandarin, Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), Hakka and English, Wu Ying-yu said, adding that he has memorized all station names and can do wonderful impressions.
After reading The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, Wu Ching-yu aspires to be a talented person like the author once he grows up, Wu Ying-yu said, adding that his dream job is to become a train master for Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp.
Kaohsiung Main Public Library director Pan Cheng-yi (潘政儀) said that the main library and the Sinsing branch (新興) have more than 15,000 Braille books and audio books, and the library has a network of shared resources with other libraries, providing ample reading materials for visually impaired people.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS