Our images of our professors are often serious, and intellectual

oriented. However, our professors were students once, and they may have goofed around for quite a bit. Professor Chiang remembers his goofing days the most. "My class-mates and I did a lot of clowning. We did it for the whole department on lots of occasions. We imitated people like Charlie Chaplin. We NEVER EVER imitate our professors during the shows. We only did that behind their backs! Unless we were very close to our professors, we DID NOT fool around! Some professors liked to maintain strict orders. If a student was just one minute late for class, the student would be ordered to stand in the corner. I wish that the professors could have had more respects from their students then. Yes, they were very strict, but they were kind of like our parents in a way: Over here, the students have the freedom to respect their professors. If they do, their respects are genuine. The relationships between the professors and the students are more like friends. They called each other by their first names. In Taiwan, no-one DARED to call their professors by their first names!" he laughed.

Psychology involves a lot of experiments. Quite a few of them are unusual, some even laughable! "My first experiments was the funniest one I have encountered. I had to teach cockroaches how to run a maze. Cockroaches are night creatures, so we had to do the experiment in a very dark room. It was hard to do such an experiment in a dark and dingy place. We had to transfer the cockroaches from the holding place to the maze, and in the process of doing that, the cockroaches would escape. The building that the experiment was carried out was awfully old and full of cracks in the walls. When I lose the cockroaches, I lose my subjects, and I did lose QUITE a few of these! I feel sorry for those in the building who dislike cockroaches!" he grinned.

There are experiments that students love, and experiments that students hate. For Professor Chiang, he had to help his professor in performing surgery on monkeys’ brains. "We had to drill a hole in the skull and then suck the part of the brain out. We wanted to see the different functions of the brain. After the operations, we sewed everything back together and we observed the results. This part was alright. The bad part was that we had to sacrifice the monkeys. We had to open the skull and take out the brain again. This time we had to slice it to pieces. That was the only way of carrying out the experiments and that was the saddest part. I established a close tie with the monkeys because | had to look after them when they were alive. Because of this, ! decided that there will be no more animal experiments for me. The terrible thing was that the university didn’t have a system of disposing the dead monkeys. What they did was they Wrapped the bodies up with papers and just threw them in the garbage bin outside the building. One day the garbage ‘ollectors found a bunch of dead monkeys bodies and they were orrified!,"

Abraham Maslow, a well known psychologist, was Professor Chiang’s supervisor for his graduate study, It was through Maslow that he found an interest in oriental , Taoism '" particular, "It is a different approach to the social orders of the structures such as why one should respect ones parents and cldcrs. Taoistic approach gives us the freedom to do things we “anted to do, not because we must.”

He has other interests other than psychology. "I am a passionate gardener as well as a passionate fisherman. I like hiking and walking in the woods miles after miles. I like doing all the things that a woodsman do. Right now I am very much into paintings, oil paintings. I do think that colours do express emotions and oneself, although colours aren’t everything. I like to capture my impression of this world on canvas. Taking pictures are not the same. Something is lost. We can’t capture the breeze for example, or the smell. Somehow one has to abstract that from nature and transfer it onto a piece of paper. I guess that shall be my project after I retire," Professor Chiang smiled. "I love the natural surrounding of the Island. So many things remind me of my childhood because I grew up in the countryside. The trees and the streams just to name a few."

"Love at first sight;"a phrase that has often been seen only fictionally, but with Professor Chiang, it became a reality. "My family and my wife’s family knew each other well, but I never knew her. Just shortly before I left Taiwan, I started dating her. This lasted for about a month. I fell in love, and 1 proposed to her. It was a speedy approach, but I had everything planned for the States before I met her. Our families approved, the rest of the family members knew each other already, except for us. We Started courting, and we got engaged. That was the EASY part!! The hardest part-was we had to wait for four years before we were together again in the States. We didn’t see each other during these four long years and we wrote a lot to each other. We didn’t phone each other much, but I remember one phone call, we didn’t talk much and_ it cost me $27.00 then, which is about $300.00 now." They have now been married for 28 years

with three daughters and three grandchildren.

I asked him if he would like to go back to Taiwan to live, he replied "no; perhaps just for a visit. I am more used to the North American climate. Cold does not get to me as much as the heat. Plus I like the countryside and nature. Going back to Taiwan will be like going to a big city with sky-scrapers. things have changed. There is hardly any countryside anymore. When my relatives were here for visits, they would say ‘there are so much space here!’ And also the people are so friendly here."

A friend told me once that in all beauty, there is sadness. Professor Chiang shared with me the delicate beauty of nature that gives him so much joy, and all the miracles that happened everyday without us noticing them. At the same time, he told me about the unavoidable sadness that exists in this world. He stared into space as he told me of the tragic events that occurred daily. "Perhaps they are meant to be. Without sadness, people won't find joy nor beauty,” stated the gentle lover of nature.

Lastly, his given advice for students today is "the most important thing is to find out what you really like to do. Once you have found it, then you can set a goal for your future, or everything else would be meaningless. If you choose an area of study that you are interested in, then, work will become pleasurable.”

The UPEI X-Press

October 25, 1990

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