L, who called my mother 張老師 (Zhang Laoshi), sent me an email 3 months ago. I told her "我為Zhang Laoshi捏了把冷汗." I really did, after reading the story, even though it happened 50 years ago:
"...I have a Zhang Laoshi story to share with you.
As you recall, our growing up environment in Taiwan was heavily infused with political indoctrination. Communism was simply evil, and the Nationalist Party was the savior of mankind. Then one day (~7th grade) in an after class chat, Zhang Laoshi told us not to accept everything without questioning. She said that for example, Communism itself was not evil. It was a form of socialism, an effort to achieve an idealistic society. Its original propagators Marx and Hegel were all philosophers. Communism only turned bad in the hands of people like Lenin and Mao who used it to aggregate power. But anything can turn bad in the hands of evil people.