LIFE AND STORIES:A Tajen University professor is looking for a former student who worked her way through school by being a ‘betel-nut beauty’
The dean of Tajen University’s digital multimedia design department is looking for a betel-nut beauty nicknamed “Hana,” whose life story he said was the main inspiration for his award-winning novel Princess Waves (浪花姬).
Shih Bai-jun (施百俊) said he met Hana about 10 years ago when she was enrolled in one of his night classes.
She always sat in the first row, paid a lot of attention in class and took notes, he said.
Shih said one day, about five or six young men gathered outside the classroom and asked a male student in the class to go out for a talk, which quickly ended in a quarrel. Hana walked outside, took out a NT$500 note, handed it to the leader of the gang and said: “If you don’t go away, I’ll call the police.”
“At the time, I wondered if she was a gangster,” Shih said.
With that concern in mind, Shih had a chat with Hana in the office after school. She told him she was an orphan and made her own living selling betel nuts. She said that with her earnings, she did not have to borrow money and also did not need student loans.
Hana told him that she studied hard because she wanted to be a computer programmer.
“Do you know? If we could make enough money, no one would want to be a betel-nut beauty,” Shih quoted Hana as saying.
Years later, Hana graduated among the top in her class, and had more than 10 computer-related licenses and certificates by that time.
When Shih asked what she planned to do with all the money she would make, Hana said: “I will open a betel nut stand and hire girls without families like me so that they can go to college.”
Inspired by Hana’s story, Shih said he started to write Princess Waves that very night, hoping “everyone could find love, courage and hope in the story.”
In the novel, the main character is an Aboriginal girl named Princess Waves, who helps good people against bad people in 17th-century Taiwan.
Also featured in the novel are two real-life characters — well-known Chinese pirate and trader Cheng Chih-lung (鄭芝龍) and Kuo Huai-yi (郭懷一), who led an anti-Dutch uprising.
Shih said he believed that there are a lot of people who may appear to be nobodies, but are actually heroes in some way. He said he had lost contact with Hana and hoped that the publication of his novel this year would bring publicity that might inspire Hana to contact him.
“I want to know how Hana is doing and if she was able to open her own betel-nut stand,” he said.
Shih’s story has been turned into a graphic novel by Chang Chung-chin (張重金).
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