When Mother was young, she picked up the nickname “Little Pendant.” She was 152 centimeters tall and weighed 42 kilos. I’m afraid those statistics are actually a bit inflated. Well, she might have been a delicate and tiny gem of a mother, but she not only was “Mom” for three children, but had her work cut out for her as a middle school teacher and housewife as well. She had so much to do that she seemed to be living two lives at the same time. One wonders where she got her physical stamina. If we measure her according to the usual standards of virtuous wife and Super Mom, Mother was certainly one of a kind.
    As I remember the scene, our home was rather much in a state of perpetual disarray. There were piles of clothing all over the place, and newspapers and magazines lying everywhere. Shelves, cupboards and all sorts of nooks and crannies were not so very clean. Dust more or less just accumulated. Washing machines in Taiwan life in the 1960s were uncommon. People would have a laundry lady come right to the home. Mother would get off work, come home, and gather up the clothing after it dried. She would toss the whole pile into a rattan chair. We three kids would dig through it all and retrieve our pants, our socks and whatnot, never knowing there was any need to fold anything properly.
    Mother lacked the patience required for fancy cooking. The most common sight on our kitchen table was a big pot. She just threw everything into that massive bowl of steel and set it to boiling. Take her “flour dumplings luxury pot” for example. She would pour in broth from boiled spareribs, add shredded turnip and carrot, followed by beaten eggs and fish balls. After boiling this concoction, she would use chopsticks to cut the dough into small pieces and throw them into the pot and the dough would expand in the scalding water. She would then turn off the stove and everyone would get a big bowl, complete with rice and vegetables in a discombobulated mix.
    And when it came to someone’s birthday, there was sure to be a “big assorted noodle luxury pot.” Again there was plenty of soup, but this time whipped up in a bowl into which Mother added slices of meat, dried daylily, black tree fungus, beaten egg, and all sorts of bean curd. When it was all done, she added a few spoonfuls of cooking starch. All of this we ate with noodles, and it was an all you could eat affair. “Does it taste okay? Get it while it’s still hot.” Mother would talk like that to us kids and to Dad too. We all held our big bowls of noodles and sipped the hot broth, never once doubting her words.
    Mother may have been a bit less than perfect in her house keeping, but it was completely the opposite when it came to her teaching. Put simply, she was enthusiastic with a capital “E.”
    Unlike almost all other Chinese literature teachers, she had no fear of correcting student compositions. She particularly lost herself in their weekly diaries. Sunday mornings she was a sight to behold, her back upright in a chair at her desk, her concentration totally fixed as she meticulously corrected her students’ words with the flourishes of an old fashioned “mao bi,” a Chinese writing brush pen. She put the proper characters in place of the wrong ones, helped to revise words and expressions and then, at the end dashed down a volley of comments. Her responses in the weekly diaries of her students were especially prolix. You could see whole patches of her words, and row after row of bright red ink. She often said the thing she most enjoyed was reading those weekly student diaries. She said it enabled her to understand what they were really thinking inside their heads. It was an especially good opportunity, she said, to dialogue with the silent students in her classes, the ones who kept their thoughts to themselves.
    “If the right word comes to someone at just the right moment, sometimes it’s the best thing that could happen,” Mother would say.
    In those days, everyone had to take an entry examination to get into a middle school or high school, and the teacher’s performance would be judged by the success rate. Mother had a rule that students had to come to school a half hour early every morning just so she could keep an eye on their personal study situations. Then after class, as soon as the students finished cleaning up the classrooms, one by one she checked their work before letting them go home. Although she taught Chinese Literature, she kept close ties with other teachers. She spoke with them often to know how her students were doing in their classes too. She knew which students were having trouble in certain courses and would assign those who were sailing through to tutor them. When the latter showed progress, both were rewarded and encouraged. She was also intimately involved with her students’ daily lives, offering counsel to those who were unpopular as well as those with emotional difficulties. To every one of her charges she gave something special. If a student’s misbehavior was simply too unimaginable, she personally went to visit the family. She would talk with the parents in search of a way to save the student. They couldn’t have been more grateful, and did all they could to go along with her suggestions.
    Mother sincerely liked to teach. She might have been small in stature, but she had an unusually loud and ringing voice. It came hurling through the air and even students in the back row heard it clearly. In my professional life, I have met several students taught by Mother, and one of them described her in these words: “When Teacher Tsao was teaching, she was the happiest person you could imagine, just bubbling over.”
    Another said, “What I remember the most was that when she read classical poetry for us, she was so into it that it was like she was in a drunken daze and had fallen right into the words.” I almost blushed when I heard that.
    There was never any question that being a teacher was work or just a job for Mother. Teaching filled her with happiness and profound personal satisfaction.
    In whatever Mother did,...