Currently reading: Cold War Deceptions

I dithered about for a while thinking about what I should read after finishing Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies, but I settled on David H. Price's Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA because it went along with the general time period of the previous book and it also relates to that Kerr paper that I'm supposed to be finishing (I'm almost done with it, I promise!). 

As I indicated in the previous post about the book, I was able to identify the Committee for a Free Asia president, George H. Greene, Jr., that Kerr was talking about in a 1951 letter to Philip Horton, assistant editor of The Reporter. In that letter, Kerr was criticizing the CFA propaganda plans in Asia, which amounted to a repetition of the 'America great, Communism bad' rhetoric of the USIS, which he saw as pretty useless when he was in Taiwan (partly because the actions of the Americans in the aftermath of the 228 Incident didn't live up to that rhetoric). 

Cold War Deceptions has already helped me identify some other people, too, who were working for CFA (the precursor to the Asia Foundation). I already knew that Robert Sheeks, who I wrote about here, worked there, but I hadn't yet identified the "Mr. Stewart" Sheeks was writing to in 1955 in response to a letter Kerr had had published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sheeks criticized Kerr's letter, calling it "a wonderful gift to the communists." Based on my reading of Cold War Deceptions, "Mr. Stewart" probably refers to James L. Stewart, who Price describes as having "deep roots in Asia--having been born to Methodist missionaries in Kobe, Japan, and grown up in Hiroshima. He studied journalism at Duke University before the war. He then served as a CBS war correspondent in China and Burma from 1939 to 1944, later working in Korea for the US Army and the US embassy in Seoul. He joined CFA staff in 1951, remaining with the Asia Foundation until 1985" (p. 9). So he might be someone to look up. 

I also mentioned interest in Sheeks' comment to Stewart that he had given "items of past history" about Kerr to a reporter named Art Goul. I Googled (Goulgled?) Goul, but didn't come across much. There was one interesting item in the Foreign Relations of the United States from 1950, though, where the Chargé d'Affaires in Taipei, Robert Strong, mentioned Goul in relation to the arrest of 19 members of the Formosan League for Reemancipation (Thomas and Joshua Liao's organization--the Liaos were out of Taiwan by then, though). In the telegram, Strong notes,

UP correspondents Art Goul and Bob Miller yesterday tried get information from member of my staff reference FLR, obviously with intent make headline story of machinations of US officials here with Formosans against Chinese Government. Seems to be their intention seize any opportunity discredit this office and Department.

I'll have to see what else I can come up with re: Goul. It doesn't appear that he was the kind of journalist whose papers would be stored in a university archive, but I would like to dig around and see what kinds of stories he might have been writing about Taiwan (and possibly Kerr?).  [Update: Finding more about Goul after I realized I should search for "Arthur Goul" instead of "Art Goul." Rookie mistake.]

The book is also interesting for its discussion of projects like Radio Free Asia, which of course has been in the news recently as a results of the Trump administration's termination of funding for the organization. (It appears they're still operating, though in a reduced capacity.) It's interesting to me that RFA was often criticized as a tool of US propaganda by people on the left of the political spectrum, but it ended up having its budget taken away by a far right administration due to (if I remember correctly) its "wokeness." Haven't seen anything in The Nation about this story, though Mother Jones reported on it (though they focused more on Voice of America). I'm not connected to the X-sphere or the BlueSky-sphere, so I don't know if there are any celebrations going on on the left. 

March slowdown

This is my 901st published post. Only took me 21 years (as of March 20)! 

I've been experiencing a slowdown this month. I've had an on-and-off cold since December (been generally been feeling out of it since, oh, let's say November 5). That and all the grading I've been doing means that I haven't been reading very much. Let's admit it, I haven't read a book (or even part of a book) since finishing Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies back in February. Not sure when I'll start on another book. Right now, besides trying to catch up on grading and other things, I'm trying to get a paper done that was accepted for publication (with revisions) a year ago! (I'm terrible.) 

Back to grading...

Taiwan Roundtable: Bills, Budgets, & Brawls: Understanding Taiwan's Legislative Crisis (Sigur Center)

Something else to watch when I have time (if and when that time comes):

New Books Network interview with the authors of Revolutionary Taiwan

New Books Network has a great interview with Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison about their book, Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order, which I wrote briefly about earlier.  (That's a lot links in one sentence!)

As a writing teacher, I really liked listening to their discussion early on about their writing process and how they viewed the kind of book they were trying to write. Harrison calls the style of the book that they were going for as "readable academic," where on the one hand they didn't want to write a dense academic monograph but on the other wanted to do justice to the complexity of Taiwan's histor(ies) and identit(ies). He says that that they "landed on" the idea of starting with events from contemporary Taiwan and interpret those events in terms of Taiwan's histor(ies) and culture(s). Chou compares the chapters and style of writing in terms of New Yorker essays that begin with specific stories that "bring the reader in" and then unpeel the "multiple layers" of meaning that make up those stories. She also talks about their limitations as academics that made it more challenging to them to write in this style. They also talked about how they collaborated on the book from a great distance (Chou was in Taiwan and Harrison was in Australia for most of the process, much of which took place during the Covid pandemic.) These are all interesting reflections that I'd like to point my students to when we talk about the writing process, envisioning your audience, collaborating as writers (particularly in online classes where students might not ever meet in person), and reflecting on writing, as well. 

The authors also bring up the image of Taiwan's "spectral presence," which (as I've said elsewhere, I think) is a concept that has come up a lot in my reading lately in relation to Taiwan. I mentioned the metaphor of "hauntings" that are prominent in two books I read recently, Anru Lee's Haunted Modernities and Kim Liao's Every Ghost Has a Name. Derek Sheridan also wrote an article a few years ago about "the spectre of American empire" in Taiwan. The idea that Taiwan itself has a "spectral presence," though, as a country/not-country (in terms of international recognition) that exists in almost a ghostly form outside of time and place is new and insightful to me. 

This blog also got a hat tip in the discussion (which, of course, is the real reason I'm talking about this interview!), citing a post of mine summarizing an article discussing Taiwanese cooking shows. (This reminds me--I haven't written any summaries of communications articles about Taiwan in quite a while!)

Finished Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies

Studying Taiwan before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan was a relatively easy book to read, as most oral histories are, I suppose. I read the English half of it, though I suppose it might be useful to look through the Chinese half at some point to see if there's anything different about it. I enjoyed reading about the anthropologists' experiences in Taiwan and the challenges that many of them faced when trying to do anthropological research there. 

One challenge that came up several times involved language issues. Many of the anthropologists interviewed were quite transparent about how linguistically unprepared they were to do their research; in fact, it was almost assumed that they would not be able to do the research without the help of local assistants. One reason was that they often didn't have the opportunity to learn Taiwanese (Hokkien) at the Stanford program at National Taiwan University, which sounds like it was dominated by teachers with Beijing Beiping accents. Then they'd go into the "field" and find out that no one there spoke Mandarin like that (or spoke much Mandarin at all!). Stevan Harrell expresses his admiration for Emily Ahern/Emily Martin because of how good her Taiwanese was. He contrasts her to Arthur and Margery Wolf, who were not fluent in Taiwanese and had to "hire lots of assistants." (Note that he says both Martin and Wolf "had a big influence" on him.) 

Another interesting point about their methods came up in Harrell's description of Wolf:

Arthur was also very shy. Every time he would interview someone, he would bring along [his assistant] Little Wang, the hoodlum. Every time he went out, he went with Little Wang. Wang would go to the front and speak, and Arthur would shyly stand in the back and smile. He didn't directly ask questions. 

After reading this, I felt a little better about my own stumbling efforts at interviewing people for my dissertation.

Another anthropologist, Burton Pasternak, tells about his first attempts to engage in fieldwork in a rural village after he had spent some time trying to find a village that he could work in. There's an amusing anecdote about him walking into a government office and asking for detailed maps of the area's villages. As he puts it, considering this was in the middle of the martial law period, "It's a miracle I wasn't tossed in the clink right off." He found out that he had to go back to Taipei to get a letter of introduction from the Academia Sinica. Then when he found his village (Datie, 打鐵, in Pingtung County), he and his wife moved in. He writes, 

Here I was, a young and inexperienced anthropologist (in waiting) with meager Mandarin skills in a Hakka village. I suddenly became acutely aware that I had no clue where to begin. I knew virtually no one in the village apart from my incredulous but generous hosts.

So when morning arrived, I took my notebook and tentatively left the compound, like a young bird finally leaping from the nests on his first flight. There I was in the street. People stared at me, and I looked back. So what's next? Fortunately, our hosts had anticipated all this and instantly took me under their wing. They brought me back into the house and suggested that perhaps they could introduce me to some villagers just to get me started, which they promptly did.  And those people introduced me to others. So gradually, I met and interviewed every family in Datie. With very few exceptions, they were to become friends. Gradually, they came to believe that I was harmless, and, in return, I was provided a constant source of amusement. 

(Hmmm... I don't know if he means he was amused or if he means he was amusing. From my own experience, I'm guessing the latter!) 

There are a lot of other interesting and entertaining anecdotes and observations in the book, but I want to end by mentioning something that Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang and Derek Sheridan write in their introduction to the book--mainly because it echoes something that I wrote about in my dissertation about the Oberlin Shansi reps in Taiwan. Yang and Sheridan contrast the experiences of the American Cold War-era anthropologists ("in waiting," as Pasternak writes) with the suggestion by some critics that as Americans, they were "lackeys of American imperialism." "In fact," they write, "it was sometimes the opposite" since they were often critical of the US role in Asia. Yang and Sheridan continue,

So much has been said about the relationship between "power" and knowledge production." Yet this sort of abstract theorization usually falls short of illustrating the complex processes that actually took place on the ground, processes that involved a web of intricate personal relations, individual choices, and delicate human emotions. 

This reminded me of something I had written in a paper about the Oberlin reps at Tunghai, that there is a danger in automatically mapping individual encounters between people onto a template of international relations; it's that danger of "situating [an individual's ]acts of cultural translation solely within a framework of American attempts at global expansion—a framework that risks considering those acts predictable in their motivations, their contents, and their effects. Unpredictability, or surprise, is an important element of encounters, as [Oberlin rep Judith Manwell] Moore describes them, as these experiences open up possible futures just as they are made possible by people and institutions with multiple, overlapping histories." While the Oberlin reps weren't anthropologists (at least most of them didn't have that kind of training), like anthropologists, they were attempting to understand others and communicate that understanding to "other others." I think they would agree with Yang and Sheridan's observation that "what individual anthropologists [or Oberlin reps] learned and experienced in their field sites is often more complicated and profound that the information published in their works." 

Back to Long Ying-tai's book now? Hmmm... I actually have an urge to read this book I've had for a while about the history of Taiwan's No. 1 Provincial Highway. 

Pioneering Taiwan Studies workshop videos

I see that the U of Washington Taiwan Studies Program has posted some videos of its "Pioneering Taiwan Studies" workshop from last November. Last night, I watched the one where Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang presented about the history of Western anthropologists in Taiwan. The conversation afterwards among the senior anthropologists (such as Hill Gates, David K. Jordan, Stevan Harrell, Robert Weller, etc.) was interesting and at time entertaining. (At one point, Jordan complained about the IUP "Stanford" Chinese language program at National Taiwan University, which he claimed was very unfriendly toward University of Chicago folks.) 

I'm looking forward to watching some of the other videos, and I've decided that I'm going to put Long Ying-tai's book aside in favor of the book Yang introduced (and co-edited), Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan. It's an oral history, and it looks really interesting. 

One thing I wonder about (which I imagine no one brings up) is possible connection between these anthropologists and the Oberlin Shansi reps at Tunghai University. I know that William Speidel, former Shansi rep to Tunghai, ran IUP in Taipei for five years from 1975-1980. Maybe some of the later anthropologists in this book ran into him. Would love to hear from anyone who knows anything about this.

Taiwan Studies Pioneers, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang

From Nov., 2024:

Presented at the University of Washington: 

The recent publication of Studying Taiwan before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan (Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 2024), co-edited by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Derek Sheridan, and Wen-liang Tseng, offers an oral history volume of a generation of anthropologists who pioneered Taiwan Studies.  This panel will be an open, group discussion of the volume. It will begin with a background of the project from co-editor Dominic Yang, followed by an open discussion to all participants.  We will ask that participants read parts of the volume before the workshop in preparation for this discussion.

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Associate Professor, University of Missouri 

Niki Alsford, Professor of Anthropology and Human Geographys, UCLan

James Lin, Assistant Professor, University of Washington

This event was made possible by the generous support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.