Dr. Chen's Wish



Dr. Chen Junxiong is my good friend. After graduating from Medical School of National Taiwan University, he first worked as a physician in a hospital in Kaohsiung. At the age of 30, he came to Tainan Hospital to serve for 30 years and retired when he was the vice president. Later He opened a clinic in Tainan City. Dr. Chen and my mother are both Taiwanese born in 1927 during the Japanese era, so they are my elders. However, he was very humble. In front of the elders and pastors of the church, he told them that I was his computer teacher, which made me feel very embarrassed. In fact, he was my mentor in many places. In particular, his sincere attitude towards people and things gave me a lot of inspiration, and it also gave me a deep understanding of the talent and bearing of the previous generation of Taiwanese intellectuals.

The clinic of the hospital has a plaque written by Dr. Du Congming with a brush. This is a souvenir that Dr. Chen's teacher gave him when he studied in Japan and obtained his MD degree. Dr. Chen studied state-of-the-art endoscopic medicine in Japan at the time. He has done more than 10,000 clinical cases of gastroscopy in Taiwan. The plaque has hung in the clinic for forty years.

Dr. Chen is fluent in English, Japanese and German. He knew early on that I was working on a Taiwanese voice text-to-speech software. Although he thought this should be done by government research institutes, he was very interested in how I taught computers to speak Taiwanese. He always encouraged me and discussed literal Taiwanese writing with me. For a while, after nine o'clock in the evening, we were chatting in the clinic, using the computer to look up medical literatures, and listening to him talk about his experiences as students. He said that his mother had learned POJ since childhood, and that there was an old Amoy dictionary at home. The dictionary looks old, but it is well preserved.

In 2001, I sent my first Taiwanese text-to speech software to the United States to apply for copyright. The second one was given to Dr. Chen. The POJ version made at that time had no Unicode Taiwanese tone symbols, so it could only be marked with numbers. Dr. Chen said that this seems very unaccustomed, and he asked me to find a way to improve it. In 2008, I used Unicode to show POJ characters, and the digital tones and symbolic tones could be exchanged, and finally achieved Dr. Chen's wish. Unfortunately, he had already passed away when the software of the new version of the POJ was completed.

After Dr. Chen passed away, Mrs. Chen gave me the plaque. Dean Du is an illuminator of medical education in Taiwan, and Dr. Chen is an expert in gastroenterology. Working alone in front of the computer at night, I often think of these two seniors in Taiwan's medical field. They have been serious and upright all their lives, working down-to-earth, making great contributions to society, and being people who truly love Taiwan.