Today I celebrate one whole year of playing servant to the loaded citizens of Taiwan.
It all started exactly a year ago—September 4, 2005. A man e-mailed me and asked if I was interested in some extra cash. By extra, he meant “more than what you’re getting from whatever sidelines you have.”
The job: People from Taiwan send in their articles, theses, college application letters, dissertations, and even company memorandums for me to “fix” their faulty English grammar and sentence construction. By faulty, I mean unpleasant fourth-grade level English.
And it hasn’t been easy.
Aside from the occasionally piercing task of trying to find some sense in the works I read, the job entails an extreme amount of research. Every month, I’d receive at least six to seven pieces on topics I’m not familiar with at all. There was this paper on the Navier-Stokes equations used to solve the aerodynamic flow over an aircraft. And this college science project on the neurophysiology of visual perception, mammalian brain neuroanatomy and cell-level neurophysiology. And the most challenging so far, a university thesis presenting superconductivity as a macroscopic quantum state of "Cooper pairs."
But, it’s been very fulfilling. A Taiwanese lass sent a thank-you card after she passed Stanford, a lighting company gave me a small lamp and seven light bulbs of different sizes after I “sanitized” their company’s constitution and by-laws, a group of college kids scanned their 3rd prize science fair ribbon and gave me a copy. These small deeds permit me to overlook the pain of splurging hours reading about calculating Pi, environmental neurotoxic substances, or bioluminescence.
