Park and her family

By Wendy Lin
Campus Reporter

International student Myeong Hwa Park from Korea has been the everybody-ought-to-know character in the Department of Special Education (SPE) because the 43-year-old soccer mom is working on her degree only for her sick son.

"My 13-year-old son is suffering from infantile autism.  I decide to work on this degree from SPE because of him,” Park said.

Park said that her son was diagnosed with infantile autism when he was four years old, after she discovered that her son could not clearly express what he wanted and what he said did not make any sense.

"I want to learn as much as possible to help my son.  I want to help him make himself understood by others,” the Korean mom said.

Park is from Daegu, Korea.  She met her Taiwanese husband in the UK in 1988, got married in 1989 and relocated to Taiwan with her husband in 1994 and began to learn Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center.

In addition to her sick son, Park and her husband also have two daughters of six and 15 years old.

With her constant efforts, Park said that she can be very proud to tell everybody that her son would be able to help her with dishes whenever she was away for errands.

"I have to make sure that my son knows how to survive by himself when he is all alone by himself someday,” Park said.

In addition to her position as a full-time mom, Park, in the meantime, is doing her best as a full-time student as well, although she admitted that she could not actually finished all the reading assignments every time.

"I will be telling a lie if I tell you that I can finish all my housework and all my assignments from school at the same time,” she said.

As a freshman of SPE, Park is trying to survive from courses such as Statistics, Sign Language, Psychology, etc.  She said that she would feel upset every now and then as her fellow freshman students.

"I cry sometimes,” Park said.  “It really frustrated me when I really could not understand the lessons after I worked so hard and studied so hard for them.”

Park’s efforts, however, were confirmed and affirmed by her instructors and classmates.  Lin Yi-ching (林宜靜) from her class described Park an "aggressive character” in classes.

"She is always asking a lot of questions.  She just never quits,” Lin said.

SPE Associate Prof. Hu Shin-tzu (胡心慈) said that Park is a student who would never be satisfied easily.

"She would always approach the teachers with her questions or whatever obstacles that got in the way of her study,” Hu said.