More than thirty years ago, two young people came to Taipei to study at National Taiwan Normal University. It was here that their paths crossed, and a new chapter of their lives quietly began.
In 1980, the father was a teaching assistant in the Mathematics Department. There, he met a young woman who was studying English. She would become his wife. What began as an ordinary meeting in a university filled with classes, books, and young dreams became the beginning of a family story that would cross oceans and generations.
Years passed. They married, built a family, and eventually made their home in the United States. Their children were born and grew up in America, far from the streets and classrooms that had once been such an important part of their parents' lives.
Then, in 2007, the parents brought their children back to Taipei. They wanted their children to see more than a famous university. They wanted them to stand in the very place where their parents had studied, dreamed, and first met more than three decades earlier.
Standing together in front of the old red-brick buildings, the family became part of two different generations of the same story. For the children, it was a glimpse into a past they had known only through family stories. For the parents, it was a return to a place filled with memories of youth, friendship, study, and love.
The university looked familiar, yet time had changed many things. Cars moved along the street, trees had grown, and the children stood where their parents had once stood as young students. In that moment, the distance between past and present seemed to disappear.
A family sometimes carries its history not in books, but in places. Returning together to the university where their story began allowed the next generation to see, for one precious moment, where their family's journey had started. In that same place where a mathematics teaching assistant met an English major in 1980, their children could now stand beside them—a living continuation of that first encounter.