They call it an economic miracle. I call it a cradle-to-cubicle assembly line. If you grew up in Taipei in the 90s and 2000s and your brain didn't naturally hum like a calculator, the system didn't just fail you—it declared war on you. For the creative, the rebellious, and the entrepreneurial, the city wasn't a home. It was a factory floor where "imagination" was treated like a manufacturing defect.
1. Pre-Processing the Components
Let’s be honest about what the Taiwanese education system actually is: it’s a massive, state-sponsored pre-processing plant for TSMC workers. The goal isn't to create thinkers, artists, or disruptors. The goal is to produce high-tolerance, low-friction components—human beings who can sit in an office for hours, follow a manual to the letter, and never ask "Why?"
The system prizes endurance over intelligence and conformity over creativity. From age six, you are inducted into the cult of the Standard Answer. Can you sit for 12 hours? Can you memorize 4,000 characters without questioning the logic? If your vision was too wide for their narrow lens, you were branded: Lazy. Unfocused. A problem. But you weren't a problem; you were just a high-performance engine being forced to idle in a parking lot because the track was too small.
2. The "One Right Answer" Lobotomy
Then came the mental grinding. The 2000s Taipei schools were obsessed with the Entrance Exam (kind of like US' SAT but Taiwan has one for entering high school and one more for the university). The entire system was a "cookie-cutter" machine that only valued rote memorization. Beyond rote memorization, the system functioned as a test of vigilance, checking if you were careful enough to follow the narrowest instructions without a single deviation.
As a creative thinker, I thrived on ambiguity, on the "what if," and on the messy connections between ideas. But the system only rewarded the Standard Answer. Because I refused to stop asking "Why?" and start memorizing "What," I was labeled.
"Lazy." "Unfocused."
They saw a kid who couldn't finish a repetitive worksheet and called him "unintelligent." They didn't see the high-performance engine idling in the parking lot because the track was too small. I wasn't bored because I was lazy; I was bored because the system was decades behind my curiosity.
3. The Final Polish: Chipping rust in the Navy
Then comes the military—the final stage of the foundry. Whether you were on a base or stuck on a destroyer in the ocean, the message was the same: Your time is not your own. For an entrepreneur, time is the only currency that matters. To have a year of your prime "stolen" to chip rust off a ship or march in circles is a soul-crushing theft of potential. It is the system’s final attempt to break your independence before handing you over to the Taiwanese corporate giants. By 2010s, the Navy wasn't "defense" to us; it was a floating prison designed to teach us that resistance is futile. It was the final attempt to hammer the "nail that sticks out" back into the wood.
4. The Detonation: From "Lazy" to "Innovator"
The irony? That "lazy" kid they criticized is the same one who detonated with energy the moment he hit the West.
The "rebellion" they tried to shame out of me became the greatest asset. In the world of startups and high-level engineering, the "Standard Answer" is worthless. Innovation happens in the friction. The "unfocused" kid became the "inventor" because he was the only one in the room who knew how to look outside the box the Taipei schools tried to bury him in.
Like the song Somewhere I Belong (yes, I’m a Millennial, let me have this), I finally found where I belong. It just happened to be a decade too late and the trek to get here has exhausted the health, the energy, and the very youth I should have been using to enjoy it. I’m finally out of the machine, but I’m covered in the soot of the factory.
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