讀書人的酸味; Voluntary population control based on utilitarian ideology

So I've been reading 魯迅 (Lu Xun) in my Advanced Chinese Reader course and when we were reading a literary criticism of his short story, “孔乙己," the author mentioned 讀書人的酸味, which prompted our teacher to talk about 與人寡合, which means that these educated scholars living in their ivory towers cannot communicate with the average Joe. Our teacher essentially said that she was like this and that it is so tiring have to deal with the crass, base Taiwanese people when she leaves the school. Then she went on a tirade about living in Taiwan amongst these philistines and then chided herself for expressing the aforementioned 酸味 (literally sour taste). And it's funny because I'm also finding myself frustrated with people taking rudimentary Chinese courses at Shida even though they've been here for the same time or longer than me. I know it sounds pompous but reading short stories or novels by 魯迅 and the like just opens up a whole new perspective that was closed off to me when I was studying intermediate Chinese ( learning about sentence patterns, grammatical structures and order, and memorizing vocabulary).

Before taking this course I had started to get weary of studying Mandarin, the rote memorization of vocab lists and phrases and reading random poorly written dialogues or essays, but now that we are reading a critical writer that challenges the very society he was born in, coupled with a teacher that demands independent thinking and open debate, well it has reignited my interest in learning Chinese as well as studying Chinese literature. She was discussing how short the history of modern, colloquial Chinese (白話） is and how 魯迅 essentially bridges the gap between the two as he and Hu Shi promoted the development of colloquial Chinese (白話）and it's evident as the words used in his works are very rarely seen nowadays. And even the words that are still used today are pronounced and used differently in his literary works.

When I started this entry I had some idea of what I wanted to write but somewhere along the middle of it I lost my train of thought and ended rambling about my interest in modern Chinese literature...oh well.

Oh tomorrow we will continue reading "藥" ("Medicine"), which is about a mother, who in efforts to save her son afflicted with tuberculosis, takes a 饅頭 (white flour bun) and uses it to soak up the spurting blood effusing out of a freshly decapitated criminal and feeds it to her dying son...

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I just remembered what I originally wanted to write about. Our teacher was telling us that even though she teaches for a living she has raised two idiots as sons, but she didn't do a huge disservice to society because she only had two children. She also said she was against the idea of her son attending university but her husband insisted; she said that her husband still has a traditional outlook on life. She also said she is against the whole idea of graduate school as well. She thinks only people who cannot work end up in grad school. She said Roosevelt Road and Heping Road are filled with people with doctorates walking around. And she continued to say that they have not helped society but instead have only increased the unemployment rate. Oh and she attributes the low birth rate in Taiwan to people being self-aware of their lack of self-worth and contribution to society. She said since they know their children will be nothing but a burden on society, thus everyone chooses to just not have children. Haha I like her cynicism.