Sunday, March 10, 2024

Need to watch: Fareed Zakaria's CNN special about "Taiwan: Unfinished Business"

I saw an ad for this Fareed Zakaria special on Taiwan, but I wasn't able to see it when it was on CNN, so I'm recording it and will watch it later.


I saw that some people on Twitter criticized the title, wondering whose "unfinished business" it was--the CCP's? One poster (Isla Island) wrote, "'Unfinished business' parrots Beijing's propaganda that its planned invasion & annexation of Taiwan is part of a 'unfinished Chinese civil war'."

I thought the title was interesting in light of the fact that one of the early titles for George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed was The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business on the Pacific Frontier--and then just The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business. Evidently that title was considered by Houghton Mifflin to be a bit too dry, which is why we ended up with Formosa Betrayed (I really think an exclamation point would go well at the end of that: Formosa Betrayed!). 

Anyway, I'm curious to see what Zakaria has to say. Will it be better than John Oliver's masterful piece on Taiwan, in which he compares it to the "Stanley Cup": "different people keep passing it around and and carving their names on it"? We'll see...


[Update, 3/14: I liked John Oliver's version better.]

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

University of Hawai'i Press has a clearance sale going, so I bought two books--I think they were a dollar each:

I have to admit, though, that I haven't had time to read anything except for student writing since the beginning of the semester, so I don't know when I'll get around to reading these. Ah, for those long lost days of my "sabbatical"...

Saturday, February 03, 2024

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

Not much to say about these yet because I'm still buried in reading student work, last semester's "sabbatical" a distant bittersweet memory...

This last book is outdated, and the reviews I've seen (here and here) have been mixed at best, but I wanted it to see how the author deals with Taiwan's postwar history in the context of communication studies (though he is a political scientist). 

Saturday, January 20, 2024

A video about the history of trains in Taiwan

Think I'll watch this when I get a chance. I tried to get my son the train fanatic to watch this with me, but he lost interest because I couldn't translate it fast enough...

Friday, January 05, 2024

Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website

Despite everything, this is why I stay on Twitter (or whatever they're calling it these days). I saw a link to this 1936 short film: 台中州高砂族內地觀光.

It looks like the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website is a great resource. But I'm not sure whether I would have come across it if someone hadn't tweeted about it. 

"Sabbatical" review

Books read since the end of last spring semester (links are to my posts on the books--I didn't post on everything I read):

I also read a bunch of articles for the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute session that I attended. And also articles, book chapters, etc., for the papers I worked on during my leave and for the course I'm planning to teach on "rhetorics in contact." 

I didn't manage to read everything on my overly ambitious preliminary reading list, but I did make some headway into it. I suppose I'll go back to that list and read more of it as I find the time to do so. I need to finish up the two papers that I have been working on, too. But first, I need to finish getting my courses prepared before Monday (*gulp!*)...

Monday, January 01, 2024

First "new book in the former native speaker's library" post of 2024!

This afternoon, I went to the neighborhood 7-Eleven and picked up a book I ordered yesterday from the 博客來 website: it's called 《島國知音:台灣問題專家葛超智其人其事》(An Island Nation's Close Friend: Taiwan Expert George H. Kerr's Life and Experiences). It's a translation of 《沖縄と台湾を愛した ジョージ・H・カー先生の思い出》, which was published in 2018. I have a copy of the Japanese book, but I can't read it, so I was excited when I found out a Chinese translation had been published. 

The book is a collection of essays about George H. Kerr by people who knew him (like Kabira Tomokiyo 川平朝清 and Higa Mikio 比嘉幹郎) and people who have studied his life and work (like Su Yao-tsung 蘇瑤崇 and Yoshihara Yukari 吉原ゆかり). It looks like it'll be a good book to read on the flight home! 

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Some new books in the former native speaker's library

We took a short trip to Taiwan during winter break, and though most of our time was spent visiting family and friends after not having been here in five years (!), I did manage to pop into a couple of bookstores. Unfortunately, I didn't really plan well for my book shopping--I went to Southern Materials Center (南天書局) when we were in Taipei, and I was overwhelmed! I spend a few hours just looking for books, but nothing was clicking for some reason (or perhaps everything was clicking). When they were nearing closing time, I finally chose five of the books that I had been looking at, almost at random:

  • Taiwan's 400 Year History, anniversary edition, by Su Beng. I had seen this on the Amazon website, but it was about $90. This cost NT$544 after the discount (about US$18!). This is the condensed English translation of 《台灣人四百年史》 by 史明.
  • 簡吉獄中日記Chien Chi's Prison Diaries. I had read about Chien Chi in Shih-shan Henry Tsai's The Peasant Movement and Land Reform in Taiwan, 1924-1951, and I'm also interested in reading diaries, letters, etc., so this seemed like a good choice. This book covers the period from Dec. 20, 1929-Dec. 24, 1930. It has the Japanese original, a Chinese translation (fortunately for me!), and a reading guide by Chen Tz'u-yu (陳慈玉). 
  • 走出閨房上學校Leaving the Boudoir and Going to School, by Ts'ai Yuen-lung and Huang Ya-fang (蔡元隆、黃雅芳). As the subtitle indicates, this book is about girls' education in the Yunlin-Chia-I area during the Japanese colonial period.
  • 三代臺灣人Three Generations of Taiwanese People, ed. by the Taiwan Research Fund (台灣研究基金會). This is a collection of scholarly papers from three conferences sponsored by the Research Fund, covering what they call the Chiang Wei-shui period, the Lee Teng-hui period, and the Tang-wai (黨外) period of Taiwan's history.
  • 臺灣民眾黨特刊,第一冊The Taiwan People's Party Special Issue, Volume One. I'm not sure why I bought this little (tiny!) boxed collection of two books (a facsimile of the first volume and an appendix explaining the history of the (ahem) *original* Taiwan People's Party. 
In the end, I could have bought more books there, but the way I was feeling, I might have bought fewer as well. This trip has taught me to really think ahead about what I'm looking for when I am going to a bookstore. 

I also bought two books at Eslite:
Have to pack my bags to go home now, though, so on that note, Happy New Year!