A smart kid of my remote relative is a graduate from the top-notch boys' high school and the college in Taiwan, majoring chemical engineering.  Gosh, chemical engineering, that is the subject I had never thought of giving it a try while I was in the same high school as he, though later I got into the same college as he did. 

In my days, a boy like him must have been categorized as the ultimate winner of a successful life according to mundane standard, of course.  After graduation, they could join big chemical compaies as specialists, or go abroad for further studying and then join a chemical tycoon like Dupont.  At least they would not be like us, non-professionals, who had to start with being an ordinary office clerk, or a junior-high teacher. 

Yesterday my brother told me that kid is now a ground staff of an airliner, and his main job is ushering passengers into different class counters at the airport.  Obiously it doesn't take a chemical engineering graduate to do such a "low-end" job.  But a friend of mine, who is still working at the same airliner, told me all of the counter staff of the company are university graduates or above.  He also revealed a "secret", or "submerged rule", that only those employees with master degrees are hired as full-time staff, while those of bachelor degrees can only be part-timers. 

Maybe those young guys of new generation have had different mindset from ours, maybe they are complacent with their lives of "little but positive happiness", but the undeniable truth is Taiwan now has had too many people scrambling for too little jobs open to the market, or too little competent people for too many high-leveled or painstaking jobs that require higher qualifications, or both.

You may attribute the bleak future of our children to the rise of China's Mainland, the skrinkage of Taiwan's exports that made Taiwan more and more relying on sevice sectors, the shallowness of domestic demand of this tiny island, and so on, which have trapped our economy in a state of irrevocable doldrums.  But as you know it, and everybody knows it, we can only boil down the ills to only one word "DU", either Taidu or Dutai.