At the moment, my emotional circuit is wired such that I can’t feel anger.

On the other hand, it means that I can’t experience ecstasy or a very strong sense of joy as well. After the surgery at 12, I practiced how to feel positive emotions in large doses, but never really consciously trained myself to feel anger at large doses.

Whenever I get upset, my face turns green. There’s no sufficient oxygen. I would faint, so there’s a conditioned response for me not to get upset.

Yeah, I’m physically incapable of feeling anger. I was born with this heart defect, that whenever I get upset...Until I got the surgery at 12, my hardware, the body is not capable of feeling very strong emotions.

Yeah.

No.

The way we do this is by forking the government, setting up alternative schools, making sure that some of those ideas actually worked, and then convincing the curriculum committee, "OK, now we’re just mainstreaming this." That’s the basic strategy.

During my work in the curriculum committee, we harvest the part that actually works in the alternative schooling system and made it the basic education. Of course, I wish I would have that when I was a student.

The good thing about sandbox is that some things actually stood out and proved to be very useful, like this co-learning with students, autonomy, communication, and direct access to Internet, media literacy, and so on.

Just like the FinTech sandbox, it’s essentially educational sandbox, that’s all around Taiwan for the past decade. To be honest, most of the alternative schooling system has their own shortcomings. Some of them are outright failures.

Of course, Taiwan is special in that for the past decade or so, we had a tradition of alternative school -- the Wad of Shula, the Montessori, all those different educational paradigms. We’re, again, one of the first places in Asia that it’s legal and even encouraged to set up ...

Before I was an official minister, I was a member in the curriculum committee, so I literally helped writing that thing.

Yeah.

Yes, certainly.

It’s 2019. It’s the first curriculum that the review board includes those K through 12 students themselves.

For the state examinations, the parents’ relationship, the local curriculum committee school working with local NPOs and social enterprises, all of this needs to happen which is why we’ve been busily preparing this year and next year before the curriculum takes effect.

Second, the teachers need to be able to respond to parents, some of them still expecting a more authoritarian teaching style, and say, "It’s not going to be good for your children if they just obey specific commands. It’s not going to be good for your children."

For this curriculum to work, there’s two prerequisites. First, we need to have even very rural or aborigine, indigenous areas to have broadband access. We build a special budget to ensure that everybody has broadband everywhere, all the schools in Taiwan.

Rather, the teacher’s going to learn with the children with online resources, fully knowing that online, there’s misinformation. There’s harassment. There’s everything. The teacher also shows how to navigate in spite of those issues and show how to do critical thinking.

The lecturer doesn’t work anyway because the students use their phones to check Wikipedia while the lecture is going. We give up the idea of the teachers know everything.

It’s a way for textbook makers, for teachers to design their education methods so that, again, just like what I mentioned about regulation, the teacher is now a co-learner with the student rather than a lecturer.

As part of the three main characters, the communication one, the interaction one, we design a part called ICT and Media Literacy, [Taiwanese] . This literacy is not designed to have just two-hour every week. It’s not a class.

We think the three fundamental characters -- being autonomous, autonomy, interaction, being able to communicate, common good, being able to think in a larger picture -- remains important humanistic values no matter the world or AI changes.

But in the new curriculum, we’re saying we can’t predict the world 12 years from now. Eventually any specific field may be made obsolete. They may merge with another field. They may change.

When we’re designing the new curriculum that’s taking place a year and a half from now, we design so that it’s character based, instead of skill based or capacity based as in previous curriculums. It’s a large break from what East Asian curricula usually do. Usually East Asian curriculum’s designed ...

We’re taking this into curriculum. We’re, again, the first place in Asia that designed this into the curriculum that’s going to take effect the year after next year.

In general, there’s online harassment, not just to transgender but for people in general. It is a problem on social media sites. That’s why we’re working with the K to 12 curriculum to build media literacy, to build ICT literacy into every field so people can grow up learning that ...

Online harassments definitely, but I have a way of troll hugging that’s troll control that’s very effective. People generally don’t see the point of harassing me anymore.

I’m not saying of course we’re having all transgender people the equal pay or that they don’t face harassment daily or anything that people still struggle with. But just for the realm of a transgender politician, I think Taiwan’s one of the most forward places.

Also, I think just by mainstreaming gender, mainstreaming transgender, or mainstreaming these things, by not making it a big deal, it also helps the Taiwan society to just tease apart the gender politics versus the deliberative politics. I would think Taiwan is one of the most tolerant society when it ...

There is a strong emphasis on tolerance and consensus, those Confucian, Buddhist values, in Taiwan. We never see Buddhists initiate holy wars. It’s one of the peaceful attitudes around those things. It’s very interesting.

Taiwan is certainly no San Francisco. But, again, not many cities are San Francisco. But I think Taiwan is generally very tolerating and even promoting of diversity, not only in the Asian or East Asian context, in which case of course Taiwan is the top country for legalizing marriage equality ...

Usually people are now much more aware that are not that concerned of eventually getting to the point where people are generally just respecting of diversity and not seeing it as a big deal.

I also worked and donated on this movement promoting gender awareness online. Transgender or transphobia is just one part of the general misogyny or whatever thing that was tolerated, certainly not promoted but tolerated, in some aligned channels. But I think it’s normal.

When it’s more casual, when it’s on a chat room, when it’s on a conference, there’s many skills that people can learn.

A bunch of friends of mine in the open source community started this Geek Feminism Wiki that talks about how to be conscious of such issues when you walk out of this bubble of online software makers who don’t care about ethnic or race or gender anyway.

No. [laughs] Picture-oriented social media, there’s more and more gender stereotyping and so on going on.

Again, it doesn’t really matter. The Internet developer community cares about your contributions. Of course, when it merges with some offline meetings, conferences, and Instagram...I’m not picking on Instagram, but picture-oriented...

Certainly. Not only the computer doesn’t care about your gender, but also, when I was first embarking in world Web, there’s no Instagram. People mostly just communicated through words.

Yeah, because the computer doesn’t care about your gender.

No, it’s not.

The fanfare has largely died in the first couple months.

Wikipedia claims it. The English Wikipedia community think it’s true.

It is.

Because all those transcripts and recordings are online, anyway, so people come with the ideas of previous discussions already in mind. Everything is subsequent. I don’t have to explain from scratch every time.

Mostly they want to see the regulation either relaxed or clarified. They want to know what the latest development is, and they want to contribute their ideas.

They want to know a lot of the directions of where the social innovation strategy is going. They sometimes bring their own specific cases, like the tele-psychotherapy thing. We actually talk about it in one of the Wednesday meetings.

I have my office hour every Wednesday morning there so people can randomly come and talk to me. Afternoon we have a gov-zero project called vTaiwan, where people have their weekly Meetup there. I attend whenever I can.

There we have a space that’s dedicated to social innovation that’s co-created by a lot of social innovators and social enterprise that was just opened last month. It opens until 11:00 PM every day, including weekends. It’s a very good place for people to gather and share their ideas.

Every Wednesday I’m in the Social Innovation Lab. It’s near the JianGuo Flower Market.