Why a 20-minute evening walk became the lifesaver for my Taiwanese student
The timer on Wei’s phone went off at exactly 7:00 PM, the time we agreed would end his study block that day. But he didn’t move. He was staring at a math worksheet that had been crossed out and rewritten three times, the red pen marks like small wounds on the paper. The rest of his desk was cluttered: a half-empty bubble tea, a stack of mock exam answer sheets, and one sticky note that said “93 days left” in his own handwriting.
I stood in the doorway and said, “Time to go.” He didn’t answer. I said it again. He finally spoke, voice flat: “If I don’t finish this, I’ll fail tomorrow.” The teacher had announced that a new mock test would be given the next morning, and the results would be used to assign after-school remedial groups. Wei had scored 12 percentile points lower than last month, and the teacher had already sent a message to the LINE parent group: “Please take this seriously. We need to discuss options.”
That’s when I turned off the desk lamp. He blinked, shocked. “Mom, what are you doing?” I held up his jacket. “We’re going out. Just around the block. Ten minutes.” He started to argue, but my hand was already on the doorknob. In the end, he followed because he didn’t know what else to do.
It was a Tuesday evening in October. The air on our Taipei street was still thick with exhaust from the rush-hour scooters, and a food stall down the alley was beginning to grill skewers. Wei walked with his hands in his pockets, looking at his feet. For five minutes nobody said a word. I didn’t try to fill the silence. Then he said, slowly, “The teacher said that if we don’t improve this month, we won’t be allowed to take the advanced math section.” I nodded. I didn’t tell him that he should work harder, or that his cousin had finished an entire review book already. I just said, “Hmm.” After another minute, I said, “Your dad wanted to know if you want hotpot for dinner.” He almost laughed. For the first time in hours, his shoulders dropped about two centimeters.
That walk changed something. Not in one night, but over weeks. We started walking every evening after dinner, same route, same brick path around the elementary school. The only rule we had was that we didn’t talk about school. If he brought up an exam or a teacher or a grade, I would listen without giving advice. I wouldn’t say “That’s fine” or “Don’t worry” or “You should try a different study method.” I would just say “That sounds hard” or “Oh?” and let the silence hang. Sometimes he would comment on a dog or complain about the humidity. Once he spent the whole walk explaining the plot of a video game I didn’t understand, and I let him. I wasn’t his tutor during those 20 minutes. I was just his company.
It wasn’t easy at first. I grew up in this educational system too. I remember staring at my own desk until midnight, convincing myself that rest was a reward I hadn’t earned. As a mother, everything in me wanted to say, “If you just spend one more hour studying, you’ll feel better.” But what Wei needed was not more time at his desk. He needed a break from the constant state of being evaluated. In Taiwan, a child is never just a child. They are an above-average student, a falling-behind student, a student with potential, a student who needs remedial help. The score is the first thing we ask about. The score is how we say good morning.
Walking does something that no lecture or pressure can do. It moves the body, which helps burn off cortisol. It gets sunlight into the eyes, which helps reset the sleep cycle that many Taiwanese students destroy by studying until two in the morning. And it puts space between the child and the subject – not distance to avoid learning, but distance to see it more clearly. When we walk side by side, there is no face-to-face confrontation. A parent walking next to a child feels less like an examiner and more like a companion. That might sound small, but for a student who has spent eight hours being tested and drilled, the absence of expectation is almost a kind of medicine.
I adjusted things as we went. Some nights Wei was too tired and said he just wanted to lie down. I didn’t force him. But on those nights, I noticed he did worse. He’d sit back at the desk, stare at a word problem, and then get up to eat a random snack. So we compromised: shorter walks. Ten minutes. Even a slow loop to the nearest convenience store and back counted. He could keep his earbuds in, if he wanted, but most nights he took them out after a while and started talking about something.
There was one evening that stands out. Wei had gotten back a history exam that he thought he had failed. The teacher had written “You need to work harder” on the top in red ink. Wei started talking about it, his voice shaky. “He doesn’t even read what I write. He just looks at the answer key.” I let him vent. Then he said, “My friend’s mom said that if he doesn’t get into a good high school, he might as well life go.” I gritted my teeth. “That sounds like a really heavy thing to hear,” I said. He nodded slowly. We walked in silence for a minute, and then he said, “At least you don’t say that.” That was the closest he had come to telling me that my silence was doing something.
Eventually, the walks became unremarkable. They stopped being a “intervention” and just became part of our routine. He would put on his own windbreaker. I would grab my keys. We would go out, see the same dogs, the same old man selling scallion pancakes, the same group of junior high students kicking a ball against the school fence. The exam pressure didn’t disappear. Mock tests continued. The LINE messages from teachers continued. But something in Wei’s body changed. He still got frustrated, but the frustration now came with exits. At the end of the walk, I could see him decide to return to the desk, and sometimes he would actually sit down and finish the assignment without tears.
I’m not writing this to say that an evening walk cures Taiwanese students of exam anxiety. It doesn’t. The structural pressure remains – the rankings, the cram schools, the impossible standards. But a walk is not about fixing the problem. It’s about making the problem survivable. It gives a child a daily reminder that their worth is not only measured in percentile ranks. It gives parents a chance to do something instead of just worrying. And it gives the mind a chance to wander, to drain the day’s poison, to see a street corner in the semi-darkness and remember that the world is bigger than the exam next week.
We still walk most nights. I notice Wei now glances at the clock around 7:20 and sometimes stands up on his own. “What if you walk alone tonight?” I asked once, thinking he wanted independence. He shook his head. “It’s not the same.” So we go together. I don’t know what will happen when the actual entrance exam arrives next spring. I don’t know if this will be enough. But for now, the evening air, the scooter noise, the strange comfort of walking in the same direction without having to say everything – that’s the one thing I can give him that doesn’t come with a grade. And that feels like a small victory.
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