The Chinese Character I Couldn't Read: How I Ended Up in Taiwan

Oct 23, 2026 · @Josh Chamberlain

There's a Chinese saying I come back to again and again: 天下無難事，只怕有心人. Nothing under heaven is difficult, as long as you have enough heart.

I didn't know that saying when my path to Taiwan began. At the time, I mostly knew how to get into trouble.

Rejected

When I was younger, I had more energy than I knew what to do with. I got into just enough trouble to matter, and I left a private school in Oregon on both academic and disciplinary probation.

When I came home and applied to the University of Oregon, they looked at my record and said no. I was shocked. I'd been a good student in high school, and suddenly the door to college was closed.

Then I learned there was a side door.

The route most people don't know about

The university let non-enrolled students take up to eight credits per term, and up to 21 in the summer, and those credits would count toward a degree. So I signed up. Two classes at first, then a heavy summer load that knocked out a lot of requirements, then more courses the following term.

Something changed in me during that time. Good grades weren't just about getting by anymore. I had to show the administration who I really was, and I realized that being a student was a privilege. I stopped wasting my energy and started focusing it.

Along the way I built a real rapport with one of my teachers. When I went back to apply as a full student, admissions told me I'd already been accepted. That teacher had taken the time to understand my story and had written a letter on my behalf.

If you're shut out of the formal channels, look into this. Many universities have a similar path, whether it's a credit limit for non-enrolled students or enrolling with an instructor's or department's permission. In my experience, if you go to a teacher, tell them your story and show real interest, they're usually glad to have you.

The writing on the wall

Once I was in, I had to choose a major. Around that time I was training at a kung fu school, which gave all that restless energy a positive outlet. One day I was looking at the Chinese calligraphy on the wall and thought: the writing's on the wall. Everyone says Chinese is the hardest language there is.

My first reaction was that it sounded horrible. My second was that I'd never know unless I tried. I chose Mandarin.

"That's a horrible idea"

My dream was to go study with a kung fu master in China or Taiwan. When I told this to a master I was visiting in Canada, he said flatly that it was a horrible idea. With the language barrier and the cultural differences, he said, I'd never be able to learn.

Maybe he was protecting his own students. Maybe he just didn't understand how interested I was. I didn't mind going slowly. Learning the language was the whole point.

Then I sat in on a presentation by students returning from the university's China exchange program. They described living in dorms with other foreign students, separate from Chinese students. I knew immediately that wasn't for me. I needed real immersion.

I went to my Chinese teacher, discouraged. She reached up to her shelf, pulled down a book about a language program in Taiwan where she had studied, and told me to apply there. Even better, I'd learn traditional characters instead of the simplified ones I'd been studying for two years. I applied, I was accepted, and I went.

田

In Taiwan, every new student takes a placement interview. I'd spent my first couple of weeks cramming traditional characters, but two years of simplified Chinese doesn't convert overnight.

My examiner was an older, very traditional teacher. He wrote a character and asked what it was. I didn't know. He wrote another. I didn't know that one either. Finally, exasperated, he wrote what he considered the simplest character possible:

田

Tián. Field. A square divided into four plots, the farmland at the root of Chinese civilization. The field where crops grow. The field where tea grows.

I didn't know it. He sent me straight to level one.

I was devastated. Two years of serious study, and I was back at the very beginning for three months. But the class was small and the teacher was good, so I pushed ahead at my own pace and worked into the next year's textbook. After three months, I was placed into a much higher class.

Back to the field

I think about that character a lot now. Years later, the first time I ever bought tea directly from a farmer was in a fog-filled place called Deer Valley, standing next to the kind of field that once ended my placement exam. I still buy from a farmer there today.

Everything I do at J-TEA comes from that same stubbornness: going directly to the source, taking the slow route, and having enough heart to keep going when someone says it can't be done.

And during those first humbling months in Taiwan, I heard about an ancient kung fu master who taught in the evenings. That's a story for next time.

Watch the story

Taste the fields

Every tea we sell comes directly from Taiwanese family farms we've worked with for over 20 years. If you'd like a new tea each month, along with the story of the farm and the people behind it, join the J-TEA Tea Club.