ROCK SPRINGS — Black Butte High School teacher Chris Clifton recently returned from a two-week trip to Taiwan, capping a four-year cultural exchange partnership between the Rock Springs alternative high school and Kaohsiung Municipal Nanzih Senior High School in Taiwan.

Clifton, who teaches Spanish, world cultures and cultural anthropology, said the Wyoming Department of Education connected Black Butte with Nanzih in 2022. Since then, students from both schools have held five to six virtual meetings per year, discussing topics ranging from school life and hobbies to regional foods and city living. The trip let Clifton meet many of the students he had only seen on a screen.

“It was one of the most heartwarming experiences of my life,” Clifton said.

A Classroom Full of Charades 

Clifton and his wife sat in on two classes of Nanzih students during the visit, a group of ninth graders and an older class he compared to high school juniors. With the younger students, the group played charades, with students acting out Wyoming concepts they had talked about at the previous meeting, including skiing, rodeo and, to Clifton’s surprise, hunting.

“One of them said, ‘I don’t know if I could do this at school,'” Clifton said. The student then acted out hunting, which Clifton told them is a major pastime back home.

Clifton, in turn, had to act out Taiwanese cultural touchstones for the students to guess, including drinking bubble tea and lighting a paper lantern and watching it float into the sky.

The older class, whose English skills Clifton said were good enough that he sometimes forgot it was their second language, set up food and drink tasting stations for the couple. Students explained dishes ranging from a sour, yogurt-like fermented milk drink to a savory tomato smoothie, walked Clifton and his wife through chopstick basics, and sent the couple home with roughly 20 different snacks.

Clifton and his wife brought their own gift in return: bottles of Tabasco sauce, after deciding it captured something distinctly American. The gesture did not go quite as planned. Students, eager to be polite, doused their traditional banana-leaf-wrapped rice and vegetables with the sauce, prompting at least one student to leave the room coughing and several others to gulp down bubble tea to cool their mouths. 

Gift Exchanges and Senior Projects

Years of care packages mailed between the two schools have left a mark in Nanzih. Clifton said the school keeps a display case with items he and his students sent over the years, including a Yellowstone poster and a T-shirt from Black Butte’s principal. 

During this visit, Clifton brought t-shirts, a hat, framed photos of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, and other Wyoming memorabilia to hand out. Nanzih Principal Ching-Yi Hao and other staff presented the couple with gifts of their own, including a card game, a board game and a school banner. Clifton said Hao and other administrators also teach English classes in addition to running the school.

The visit happened to coincide with a school-wide assembly where Nanzih seniors presented capstone projects to roughly 400 classmates, ranging from a 3D-printed sword to an original poem. Partway through, the principal pulled Clifton on stage to address the assembly and thank the students for the years-long partnership.

“That’s what I think school should be, is expanding horizons and making connections with other people,” Clifton said.

Nanzih enrolls about 800 students under a single principal, compared with five administrators overseeing roughly 1,400 students at the high school in Rock Springs, Clifton said. Students eat lunch in their classrooms rather than a cafeteria, bringing their own utensils from home, and the campus features open-air, covered walkways instead of enclosed hallways, he said.

Clifton said the school also has a hands-on lab where students learn about semiconductor manufacturing, an industry central to Taiwan’s economy, and that the school partners with chipmakers to place graduates in internships and jobs after high school.

Outside the school, hosts from the international program took the couple to a Confucius temple, a tea house, a pagoda and a 350-foot seated Buddha statue outside the city. The group also visited a rural lily pad farm, where Clifton said he waded into a pond to help harvest the plants, a regional culinary ingredient.

Broader Connections 

Clifton said Wyoming and Taiwan share an existing relationship through energy trade, noting Wyoming has sought to sell coal to Taiwan, which has limited domestic coal and natural gas reserves and a growing demand for electricity tied to its semiconductor industry. He said Gov. Mark Gordon has visited Taiwan multiple times in recent years as part of broader state efforts to expand energy and trade ties with the island.

Clifton said he hopes to expand the exchange program, including arranging for Nanzih students to visit Wyoming, and plans to raise the idea of department-supported student trips with school administrators and the Wyoming Department of Education.