Albert goes to driving school
Part one of a reflection on cram schools (buxiban), parenting, student anxiety, and test-taking culture, which permeates Taiwanese education and society—and beyond
Hello dear readers, happy May Day!
Here in Taiwan, the COVID case count has exploded, breaking the 10,000 daily case count last week. The government has abandoned its “zero-COVID” policy and moved to a “living-with-the-virus” policy. The transition has … not gone well. The government announces new quarantine and self-management policies almost daily, and much of the information is self-contradictory. Most pressingly, the country has seen a widespread shortage of rapid tests, with people lining up for hours at pharmacies to try to procure tests. Our baby’s day-care requires a weekly negative rapid test result before we can send the child to school, but it took us a two-day long wild goose chase before we could get a test. Nonetheless, there are silver linings—so far the vast majority of cases are mild or asymptomatic, and there have been few deaths.
This week, Albert talks about going to Taiwanese driving school. This is the first in a two-part series on driving, Taiwanese test-taking culture, the history of cram schools (buxiban), and parenting. As always, the best part of doing this newsletter is hearing from you! You can write to us any time at ampleroad@substack.com. Please share traumatic stories about test-taking, your parenting philosophies, or thoughts on how to protect children from the corrosive “rug rat race.”
Almost thirteen years ago—yikes!—I passed my oral exams for graduate school. It wasn’t pretty: I was so nervous that I blanked on a basic fact about World War I, and things only when downhill from there. But as soon as it was over, I thought to myself: Well, that was horrible, but at least I’ll never have to take another test in my life.
I was wrong.
Early one Thursday morning in February, I found myself on a charter bus with about forty nervous eighteen-year-olds, headed to the Taipei DMV to take our driver’s license exam. The vibe on the bus can only be described as tense: people flipping frantically through traffic manuals, memorizing rules, regulations, road signs. I’ve been driving for years, but I couldn’t help getting nervous too. My palms got sweaty and my heart beat harder, as though my body were trying to transport me back to the end of grad school. Get it together, Albert, I kept telling myself. It’s just a stupid driving test! Eighteen-year-olds pass this all the time!
I’d really thought I could get out of it. In January I petitioned to exchange my California license for a Taiwanese one—I know people who’ve successfully done this—but the woman handling my case told me in polite but rapid-fire bureaucratese that I wasn’t eligible. I had to ask her to explain three times, and I still don’t actually know why it’s not possible. Seeing that I was flustered and frustrated, she waved me off and scribbled a number on a post-it note. “Call this number and set up an appointment to take the test,” she said. “There’s one every month.”
I was crestfallen. The driver’s exam in Taiwan is notoriously difficult. I’ve heard of people failing it five times. The written test you can at least study for, but the road test is almost impossible; you have to do a reverse S-curve through a narrow obstacle course and parallel park into tight spaces. And there are few things in the world I hate more than parallel parking. (Michelle used to joke that the only time she ever saw me get nervous was when I had to park in San Francisco.)
When I told my father I needed to take the test, he laughed. Forget about it, he told me. It would be easier to convert my citizenship than it would be to pass the test. “It was that hard?” I asked him. He laughed again. He’d never had to take it. He got his Taiwanese license through the exchange system.
Since we’ve been back in Taiwan, we’ve struggled with the idea of getting a car. I’ve never owned one—I’ve been lucky enough to never live in a place where it was necessary—and honestly we’ve been fine here without one: I walk to work, public transit in Taipei is top-notch, and we live right in front of a bus stop that’ll get us to a metro station in ten minutes.
But we’ve also found ourselves multiple times wishing we had a car. Our neighborhood, Nangang, is in the boondocks, far from the center of Taipei. When we take a cab somewhere, we always have a plastic bag at the ready because our baby throws up without a car seat. My father and brother have been taking turns driving my mother to her hospital visits, and I’d like to help relieve their burden—plus, with a car, maybe I could persuade her to leave the house for non-medical excursions, as she doesn’t like to be seen. Michelle’s parents have also been here for several months, and a car would certainly help us ferry them around. So we can’t rule out getting a car, and the first step toward doing that is to get a Taiwanese driver’s license. But what to do? How to get a license quickly?
Reader, I took a class. I went to a Taiwanese driving school, where besides passing the license exam, I told myself, I could learn to drive a manual transmission, a skill I’ve always wanted. For a month, then, I would spend an hour each day after work driving a beat-up stick shift car that felt like it would self-combust at any moment around an obstacle course in Taipei.
My instructor was straight out of a Taiwanese gangster movie: aviator shades, bomber jacket with double dragon motif, fanny pack slung across the waist, an obscenity every third word. He seemed bemused that a person my age was taking his class, and after spending the first day yelling at me for stalling and lurching and subsequently burning out a clutch, he became very warm. Naturally, in spite of his appearance, in true Taiwanese fashion, he communicated with me via over-the-top motivational Line stickers.
The driving school, I soon learned, has an agreement with the city that lets its students take their tests at the school’s own track. The examiners travel to the school to administer the exam, so you’re essentially paying to become familiar with the test site. What a racket!
My coach had yet another trick up his sleeve. Around the obstacle course, the school had set up unobtrusive green poles to guide you through the notoriously difficult reverse S-curve test. During our first parallel parking lesson, he delivered breathless instructions: “When the green pole lines up with the right grip handle, turn your steering wheel all the way to the right, then straighten out the wheel, look at the left wing mirror, and when you see your left door handle cross the white line turn your steering wheel all the way left. Got it?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had not gotten all of that. Instead, I tried to deflect his question with one of my own: do these principles apply to all parallel parking situations?
He looked at me with pity. “Idiot! Are there green poles in every parking spot? This is just to help you pass the test!”
Lesson one: I had paid for a driving test cram school, not a driving school.
If you know anything about Taiwanese education, you’ve heard about the notorious buxiban, or cram schools. Kids are sent to such schools from a young age, mostly to learn extra math and English. But since test-taking is increasingly ubiquitous, cram schools now cover all subjects, from law and medicine to the arts and, ahem, driving—for all age ranges, from decidedly not-eighteen-year-olds like me to very small children.
We’d already been thinking a lot about education lately. This is the first year since 2017 that I’m not teaching, and I miss the classroom. And Michelle and I have been looking for a pre-school for next year. (The baby’s late September birthdate means she has to wait an extra year to enter the one connected to my work; it’s complicated, don’t ask.) It’s been overwhelming. Even though Taiwan’s birth rates have been declining for years, it’s almost impossible to get a spot in a public pre-school, thanks to the lottery system that takes only about 10 percent of students. The government provides generous subsidies for private pre-schools in an effort to close that gap, which has meant an explosion of options—bilingual, Montessori, bilingual Montessori, American-style. One place we visited had a bafflingly complex curriculum for three-year-olds! Indeed, the cram school approach has infiltrated every corner of society, even down to three year olds.
This is hardly unique to Taiwan. Indeed, research from this January 2022 Commonwealth article shows that we’re far below the top spenders on cram schools, which in 2021 were Russia, South Korea, Shanghai, and Singapore. Most countries have a high percentage of students who attend some form of cram school, and unsurprisingly researchers have shown for the most part they cater to families with high social and economic capital: in an age of globalization and intense competition, it’s a way for wealthy families to help their children stay on top. (Which, it should be noted, has had disastrous effects on the mental health of teenagers. A recent study in the U.S. showed that 44 percent of high school students felt “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” the highest ever recorded; one in four girls has seriously contemplated suicide. And we saw the destructive impact of this culture firsthand in our time teaching in Paris, hearing painful stories of ruthless competition and consoling countless students dealing with anxiety around the pressures of college placement.)
What surprised me about the Commonwealth article, though, is that it’s only in Taiwan and in South Korea that the majority of students sent to cram schools are high-achieving students. In most other countries, the researchers found, wealthy parents use cram schools as “correctives” to give their less performing children a boost, helping them catch up if they’re falling behind in school. Here and in Korea, on the other hand, cram schools are used to cement the advantages of high-achieving kids, to help ensure they destroy their competition. (I’d have to look at the raw data of the study, but I’m sure that if you expanded the definition of “cram school” to any after-school activity you’d find wealthy American families boosting their high-achieving children in other ways, in particular through sports and other extracurricular activities—what economists Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey have called “the rug rat race.”)
How to raise a baby in this oppressive context? Can we even protect her from it? We waffle on this constantly. Sometimes we think we can insulate her from the ruthlessness of this system; other times we already see how social context alters the way we hope to parent—since everyone else is preparing their kid to succeed, wouldn’t we be doing ours a disservice by not doing the same? We’re now considering sending her to an English-speaking pre-school, whereas before we got to Taiwan we hadn’t even considered it. In this we’re also following a native Taiwanese friend who started looking for alternatives with his partner after visiting their original top choice, a public Chinese-speaking pre-school, and finding that it required students to bow down to their parents and wear traditional Chinese clothing.
We don’t know the answer. But we’ve been reading—rereading, in Michelle’s case—Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, gifted to us by a dear friend a few months ago, and certain passages resurface in conversation almost daily. One line has become something of a prayer, a mantra we hope can protect our baby and guide us: “What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.”
Next week, Albert explores the history of cram schools in Taiwan and thinks more about the buxiban-ification of everything.
Mandarin-Language Newsletter Plus Book Club!
For our May book club we’ll read Siobhan Phillips’s Benefit. In June we’ll read Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living. All subscribers are welcome to the book club.
Also, we’re moving book club dates to Thursdays rather than Fridays for the summer. We’ll talk about Siobhan Phillips’s novel on Thursday, May 26 at 6 PM EST and Lisa Chen’s book on Thursday, June 30 at 5 PM EST. Looking forward!! You can email us at ampleroad@substack.com for the zoom link.
This past week our Mandarin-language newsletter published Nick Haggerty’s fantastic essay on Chen Shui-bian (English version here), translated by Michelle Chun-han Hsu. This piece tackles a notoriously divisive topic with grace and in so doing dares to fill a silence that is notable in Taiwanese society. Last week, we published Michelle’s essay on teaching E.P. Thompson and the rule of law (English version here), translated by Grace Lin. It ends with advice for those interested in law school, urging them to “calibrate one’s moral compass” prior to entering. And if you can read a wonderful batch of reader responses to Nick Haggerty and Zito Madu’s essays here.
If you’re trying to opt in or out of the Mandarin-language newsletter, go to “My Account.” Apologies that the Substack interface doesn’t let us to do it on our end. Have a great Sunday!
Ah, this reminds me of my gifted class (資優班 [ziyoban]) classmates. From elementary school to junior high school, I had been in gifted class all the time. And then a class for students gifted in language in the best school of my city. It was so competitive in elementary school and junior high. We had passed through all those IQ test, math test and Chinese test when we entered the class. It was a class of supposedly smartest/highest-achieving students. But most of my classmates went to buxiban. You have to work on mock tests to get prepared for the entrance exam of that primary school gifted class. And then you go to buxiban to get prepared for those junior high gifted classes or elite private junior highs. (And there is a ranking of those gifted classes!) After that you go to buxiban to get prepared for entering the best high schools, and then the best universities. My mom just told me some weeks earlier that one of my elementary school classmate’s mother wanted me to join buxiban as well. The lady told her, half-threateningly, “What if your daughter fail to enter the next gifted class because she doesn’t go to buxiban? You should send her to one before it’s too late!”
Fortunately my parents never forced me into those buxiban.
Please provide a future installment in which Michelle goes to driving school :) Loved reading this!