Road trip to the south

Opening.
​
“I like this part of the road.”
“This is a children’s choir?”
“Yes.”

“Happy Paradise （快樂天堂）,” Originally published by Rock Records. 
Subtitles in English available.​
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

1.
“Uncle Liu lives in Yunlin, near Hu-Wei high school. From there, he went to Taoyuan to study at Jianguo High School. In high school he asked his classmates if they were going to cram schools. They all said no. And when he arrived— everyone was there.”
“His is very good at Chinese. He remembers a lot of poetry and prose. People asked why he didn’t study literature, the first track? He said everyone chose science or medicine, the second and third tracks.”
“‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘if I were the only one who went to study in the first track’.”
“Whenever he speaks, he speaks in prose, in poems. He is good at memorizing a lot of those.”
“His wife is a Classical Chinese teacher, older than me, born in the eighties. Before her, he had dated another woman in the Teachers College. She went to Sanxia after the exams and became a teacher there— first teaching junior high, then high school.”
“She is now retired.”

“I asked your mom,
‘Why, among so many people in the College,
did you choose me’?"

“And the other day Guanyin Buddha responded me again,
‘she is a picky woman.’ She wanted no one else but me.”

2.
“Your mom told me also, that there was an elder school-sister who took the exam for Teachers College three times just to get in. She didn’t get in. She went instead to NTNU[1].”
“And your mom asked her why she didn’t go to Teachers College if she wanted to teach, she said she couldn’t get in. There was a younger school sister who responded with the same reasons— the grades were too high back then.”
“Were the exam subjects the same?”
“The subjects were the same; only that the joint entrance exams for Teachers College[2] had to be taken school by school.”

Coda.

“When your grandfather learned that your mom went to Teachers College, he was sad.”
“She told him she would go to university eventually. And she did— that's why she did a master’s program.”
“Grandfather was actually quite happy about it.”
​
“有哭有笑 當然也會有悲傷”
“There are tears and laughter, and of course, there is sorrow too—”
“我們擁有同樣的陽光”
“For we share the same sunlight.”
 
*Bell rings*
“Thank you, teacher!”

[1] National Taiwan Normal University

[2] Teachers College, known as Taiwan Provincial Junior Teachers’ College in 1961 and later as Taiwan Provincial Taipei Normal College in 1987, is now National Taipei University of Education. Prior to the 1994 legal reform, the institution trained government-funded students for the teaching profession.