Anita’s IceBreaker Speech Tuesday, July 07, 1998

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and honorable guests.

I would like to take this opportunity today to hopefully change some of your misconceptions about products, which are made in Taiwan. In particular, I would like to introduce an excellent, fully functional, multi-tasking capable, and in sum a very dep endable Made-in-Taiwan product – me. I was introduced into this world by two very wonderful people, my parents, in a small city in Taiwan in the late 1960s. Previous models also produced by the same couple include my two outstanding brothers and one sis ter. In other words, I am the youngest of my siblings – a new perfect model. Well, not quite.

The first sign that shows my imperfection came when I was about four and a half years old. There was this nice neighborhood kindergarten which offers excellent afternoon desserts everyday. My second brother, who is two year older than me, would come home and brag about the dessert that he had at school that day. So, I begged and begged and begged my parents to send me to the fascinating school. Just a couple of days before I was to start the kindergarten, I was so anxious about going to this dess ert school that I seriously cut my left index finger while trying to sharpen the pencils I was going to bring to school. As you can see, I now only have nine perfect fingers.

Luckily, that was and still is the only remarkable bodily imperfection so far.. My imperfection, in other aspects of life, however minor and major, does not seem to affect my day-in-day-out operation much -- just like the Microsoft products nowadays. I guess my parents and Bill Gates have something in common!!

Although I could probably go on for hours and about my imperfection, I thought I would offer some explanations about my name. Many of you might have already noticed when attempting to send me an email using Exchange. You were likely to discover that there was no one by the name of Anita Chang, instead, the closest one you would find is "Anita Chiung-fang Chang-Vigo." Anita is the English name I adopted about 10 years ago when I was just fascinated with American Pop Culture, and that I want ed to sound "American" or "foreign." As far as Vigo goes, Vigo is my husband, Stephen’s family name.

Chiung-fang is my Chinese first name. Chiung is a chinese character which stands for "a rare flower said to confer immortality when eaten." Fang, pronounced as fang in Chinese does not stand for "big teeth", rather it means "o rderly" or "squarely". Well, I don’t know what my parents were thinking, it absolutely made no logical sense for a girl to be so rare and beautiful and to be so square.

When my parents "PRODUCED" me, they weren’t exactly thinking of exporting this nice piece of Made in Taiwan product to the United States. In fact, I am the only one from my extended family, included all relatives from my grandparents’ nine ch ildren, to be residing in a place other than Taiwan. I have always been fascinated with America and its people. My mom used to tease me that I would be marrying a "big nose" because I had always preferred bread over rice and forks over chopsti cks. So, here I am, 8 years after I landed in America for the first time, I don’t really call myself a MIT (Made in Taiwan) anymore. Rather, I think of myself as one of those improved automobiles, which combine best parts of the both worlds together int o a new model. And you, my dear friends are the hands that help mold this new creation.