New year's resolutions for the 2020-2021 academic year

Just noticed my resolutions from last year--that seems like it was a century ago. Not sure I achieved any of the goals I had set for last year, no matter how vaguely I phrased them. I can't blame it all on the coronavirus, though. As I have chronicled elsewhere on this blog, not having a Twitter account doesn't mean that I haven't spent time on Twitter. I just do it, I suppose, less efficiently. (But not having an account does probably decrease my time on Twitter overall because I'm not posting, responding to posts, etc.)

I achieved a couple of things that I didn't mention as goals in last year's resolutions, like developing a new course (Travel Writing), revamping my first-year writing course (which went well), co-writing a successful proposal for a "peer connections" exchange program for the mentoring of incoming international students from China (most of whom, as it turns out, will be participating from China), and figuring out how to put together my son's new bicycle with minimal use of colorful language. 

This year will be a challenging one personally and professionally. My son will be doing his kindergarten classes remotely, which means we'll have to keep an eye on him so he doesn't swipe away his teacher in favor of YouTube videos. I'll be teaching all my fall courses online, which is both a blessing and a challenge because I've never taught first-year writing online before (and I daresay most of the students have never taken an online writing class before, so none of us probably knows quite what to expect). The peer connections project will continue throughout the fall. I might be involved with a couple of other research projects as well. 

I hope to be able to continue posting summaries/discussions of scholarly articles related to communication practices in Taiwan. Those are interesting to me, personally. (I don't know if anyone else gets anything out of it--I might just be displaying my ignorance for all to see in those posts--but I'm learning a lot from reading the articles.) The motivation for doing this came from something I wrote last year when I was preparing to talk to incoming English majors about my career path in English, and I wrote in a brief self-introduction about Taiwan being a place where "communication practices grew out of historical experiences of migration, colonialism, and political marginalization." Being smart, analytical people, several of the students had written questions about this characterization of Taiwan, questions to which I could either give broad, unsatisfying answers or very particular and also unsatisfying answers. So this little summarizing project is an attempt to educate myself in case anyone approaches me with this question again. As I said in my summary of Todd Sandel's chapter on "communication modes" in Taiwan, it's actually incredibly difficult to describe communication practices in Taiwan (or probably anywhere) in any coherent but also inclusive way. (This is something we discussed way back when in my intercultural communication class at Tunghai when we were discussing the overwhelming "whiteness" of some authors' descriptions of "American" communication patterns.) Anyway, if I have time, I will try to keep reading and writing about these articles. If anyone knows of some good articles about Taiwan communication practices (somewhat broadly conceived), drop me a line in the comments!

Speaking of Taiwanese communication practices, I'm trying my hand (my mouth, actually) at learning Taiwanese Hokkien through a website called Glossika. I'm mainly using this site because the Taiwanese lessons are free--they do that for some languages out of their expressed interest in language preservation. I have no idea how "authentic" the language in the lessons is, but I'm not at a point yet that I want to commit to paying for lessons. So far one phrase I've been able to use is "you are lazy," which I say to myself a lot...

Isabelle Cheng, "We want productive workers, not fertile women: The expediency of employing Southeast Asian caregivers in Taiwan"

Number four in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Cheng, I. (2020). We want productive workers, not fertile women: The expediency of employing Southeast Asian caregivers in Taiwan. Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1111/apv.12275

I decided to follow up on that article I mentioned at the end of my summary of Hsin-I Cheng's (2018) article on relational citizenship. 

Cheng begins her article with an anecdote from 2014 of an Indonesian caregiver in Taiwan who told her of being given an injection before her arrival to prevent her from becoming pregnant. Shocked, Cheng decided to try to find out more about this practice.

Cheng focuses on the legislation in Taiwan that casts foreign caregivers as "temporary, supplementary and disposable outsiders" who are excluded from the "national community" (p. 2). 

Taking a top-down approach, the study identifies four major laws concerning naturalisation, residency, employment, mobility and fertility that regulate the lives of foreign caregivers, and analyses parliamentary debates, government policy briefings, press releases and migrant handbooks. It also examines longitudinal social survey results in order to understand how the host society perceives Southeast Asian migrants. (p. 2)

Cheng describes "migrant women’s self-identities as workers, victims, carers and human beings ... [as] deeply entangled" (p. 3). She points to how they are typically discussed in terms of their victimhood and their status as important sources of income for their families back at home. Their sexuality and reproduction, she argues, are not seen as a topic for research due in part to "methodological sexism"; in society, they are more often seen either in terms of morality (in their home countries) or as "a threat to profitability" (from the point of view of their agents) (p. 3). From the point of view of the host state (in this case, Taiwan), "their potential to give birth (particularly to mixed children fathered by local men) ... [leads to their being] considered a threat to the cohesion of national identity" (p. 4). Thus, the goal of the host society (and the state) is to ensure that migrant women remain productive (but not reproductive) as workers who can remain outsiders to the society rather than settling in as residents.  

Cheng illustrates this by tracing the history of legislation regarding migrant women caregivers since they have been able to legally come to Taiwan starting in 1992. She first points out that the need for migrant caregivers has grown out of the aging of Taiwanese society, the traditional emphasis on providing elder care at home, and the increasing participation of Taiwanese women in the workplace. While there is a desire (at least on the part of the government) for local caregivers (in the form of middle-aged Taiwanese women), that kind of work has been looked down upon as "dirty, difficult and demeaning" (p. 5), (ironically) through its association with foreign caregivers. The pay for migrant caregivers is also artificially kept down through a government cap on their income. "However," Cheng argues, "this economic cheapness [that makes the migrant women desirable as workers] runs in tandem with the perceived socio-political costs of accommodating foreign women at the prime age of fertility who are seen as the undesirable other" (p. 5).

Cheng looks at the development of four laws that govern the position of foreign caregivers in Taiwan: the Nationality Act, the Immigration Act, the Employment Services Act, and the Labour Standards Act. She points out how these acts developed and work together to render foreign caregivers ineligible for naturalization despite the extensions on how long they were allowed to work in Taiwan (up to 14 years); in effect, they are "permanently temporary" (p. 5, emphasis in original), which benefits Taiwanese society by providing cheap long-term workers while at the same time avoiding the purported "social problems" their presence might bring (problems that Cheng points out legislators didn't define, except for the fear that they would become involved with local men) (p. 5). Criticism of these and other measures to control the movements of migrant women, such as not allowing them to decide for themselves to change jobs, have not resulted in effective policies to protect their rights (p. 7). 

Cheng next goes through the history of required pregnancy screenings for foreign caregivers, which was required for 10 years (until 2002) before coming to Taiwan, right after arrival, and every six months during residence in Taiwan. Caregivers found to be pregnant would be expelled. Although the requirement to be tested every six months was abolished in 2002, it was not until 2015 that the final pregnancy test (the pre-entry test) was no longer required (p. 8). Unfortunately, migrant caregivers are not always informed of their rights because the handbook is only published in Chinese and English. [This makes me want to find information about the status of the teaching of Chinese to migrant workers in Taiwan. (And English, too, although I'm reminded of Pei-Chia Lan's 2003 article (pdf), "'They have more money but I speak better English!' Transnational encounters between Filipina domestics and Taiwanese employers."] The handbook still discourages migrant workers from getting pregnant, warning of "dire consequences" to the mother and the child, particularly if the child is born out of wedlock (p. 8). 

[To add something about Lan's (2003) article: she observes that in 2002, the percentage of Filipina domestic workers in Taiwan dropped drastically, and the percentage of Indonesian workers rose almost as dramatically (p. 155). She attributes this to employers' beliefs that Indonesians are more complaint than Filipinas, a characterization that she associates with social and linguistic factors: 

Indonesian workers, who speak little English in general, are less capable to verbally bargain with their employers. Besides, Indonesian migrants are even more isolated in Taiwan than their Filipina counterparts, who are at least able to retrieve information by reading English newspapers and have affiliations with Catholic churches and NGOs that offer some legal assistance and counseling. (p. 156)

"Indonesian workers in Taiwan," Lan goes on, "... have no choice but to learn Mandarin Chinese or Holo-Taiwanese for the sake of communication. As such, Taiwanese employers get the upper hand in their linguistic exchanges and social interactions with Indonesian maids" (p. 156). This adds another, sociolinguistic, element to what Isabelle Cheng, Hsin-I Cheng, and Todd Sandel have discussed.]

Cheng points out that although the government has changed some policies in response to human rights associations' criticisms and in order to be able to continue to brand Taiwan as a nation "founded on human rights protection" (人權立國), those policies don't necessarily reflect the views of Taiwan's citizens, the majority of whom (according to surveys) view Southeast Asian migrants as undesirable (p. 9). Taiwanese are willing to 'import' Southeast Asian caregivers, but they are not interested in having them become part of society. As Cheng puts it, "Such a scenario makes Taiwan a ‘walled’ migration state (Hollifield, 2004) which embraces economic openness for the purposes of reaping the fruit of migration but ensures socio-political closure in gatekeeping the boundaries of national community" (p. 9).

I would note that of the surveys Cheng mentions toward the end, the most recent one that specifically addressed the question of whether foreign workers should be allowed to become residents was from 2006; She also cites a 2018 survey that asked whether Taiwan should encourage immigration from Southeast Asia--only 8.4% agreed with this idea (p. 9). I'm not sure how this information squares with Sandel's discussion of foreign brides as the "fifth ethnic group," except perhaps to note Cheng's argument that at this point in time, it appears that the state and the populace are evidently not in agreement about the place of Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan. This article doesn't touch on Hsin-I Cheng's point about foreign brides being characterized in terms of their relationships with Taiwanese husbands, in-laws, or children. Perhaps the survey statistic points to a difference between how individual decisions by families to try to carry on the family name are viewed versus how a possible official decision to encourage Southeast Asian immigration on a larger scale would be viewed. I'd have to get a look at the actual questions used in the cited survey. (Unfortunately, the website doesn't seem to be working right now. I guess I'll try to come back to it later to see.) 

I got the wrong survey--that link is to the 2006 survey. The correct (2018) survey is reported on in this article by Timothy Rich in The Diplomat: Rich surveyed 1000 Taiwanese on the web, asking them one of four questions: "Taiwan should encourage immigration," "Taiwan should encourage immigration of skilled workers," "Taiwan should encourage immigration from Southeast Asian countries," or "Taiwan should encourage immigration of skilled workers from Southeast Asian countries." As he reports, questions that included the idea of "skilled workers" scored higher than those that didn't, although "skilled Southeast Asian immigration" was agreed to by only 44.6% of the respondents to that question, and the question about immigration from Southeast Asian countries that didn't mention skilled workers was agreed to (as Cheng notes) by only 8.4% of its respondents. Not being a statistics guy, I can't vouch for his methods (and he's not asking me to!). Web surveys can be a bit iffy, of course, since the respondents are kind of self-selecting. It would have been interesting, for instance, to get a little demographic information about who responded and how he sought out the respondents. I'd like to see if this kind of survey has been conducted with a larger group.

Going back to the 2006 survey that Isabelle Cheng cites, I'd note that there's one question in the survey (questions here; pdf) that asks, "Do you agree or disagree with the statement, 'Foreign laborers who work legally in Taiwan for at least seven years should be allowed to apply for long-term residency'?" (請問您贊不贊成若「外籍勞工在台灣合法工作七年以上，就可申請長期居留」？). Cheng notes that 67.6% of respondents disagreed with the statement in 2006. 

There are more recent surveys, but the questions seem to be different. This 2016 survey asks questions about attitudes towards a son's or friend's decision to marry someone from the Mainland, an overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia, a Vietnamese, or a Southeast Asian who's not of Chinese ethnicity. It also asks questions about whether the government should restrict Mainland Chinese or Southeast Asian spouses from obtaining Taiwan ID cards. Nothing, though, about foreign laborers. 

There are some questions in this survey from 2015 about whether foreigners should be allowed to get ROC citizenship: they divide the groups into "European/American/Japanese professionals" (歐美日專業人士), "Domestic helpers from Southeast Asia" (東南亞的外傭), "Laborers or fishermen from Southeast Asia" (東南亞籍的勞工或漁工), " Let's look at the answers: 

For European/American/Japanese professionals: 

• Should strictly restrict: 26.9% (I'm taking the first column of percentages)
• Should restrict a bit: 24.6%
• Should try not to limit: 45.2%
• (The rest, 3.3%, didn't answer or said they didn't know)

For Domestic helpers from Southeast Asia:

• Should strictly restrict: 47.8%
• Should restrict a bit: 25.7%
• Should try not to limit: 23.6%
• (The rest, 2.9%, didn't answer or said they didn't know)

For Laborers or fishermen from Southeast Asia:

• Should strictly restrict: 51.2%
• Should restrict a bit: 24.3%
• Should try not to limit: 21.6%
• (The rest, 2.9%, didn't answer or said they didn't know)

Notably, the numbers for domestic helpers and laborers/fishermen, while not great, seem a bit better than what Rich found (although of course the questions are different). 

OK, probably no one has read this far, so I'll stop here. But there are a lot of interesting surveys on that site. Might take another look at them some time.

Hsin-I Cheng, "Relational citizenship: Examining Taiwanese membership development through immigrant framing in public discourses"

Number three in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Cheng, H.-I. (2018) Relational citizenship: Examining Taiwanese membership development through immigrant framing in public discourses. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 11(2), 154-172, DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2018.1426778

I decided to read this article to get some insight into one of the questions I had in response to Sandel (2017). Cheng appears to be directly addressing my question when she writes, "This paper intends to discern the ways migrant spouses in Taiwan are discussed in public discourse" (p. 155).

More specifically, Cheng describes her two research questions about migrant spouses as follows: 

How are recent immigrant spouses in Taiwan discussed in public discourses? And, what cultural logic buttresses the constructions of newcomers’ belongingness in Taiwan? (p. 155)

She focuses on the portrayal of female immigrant spouses in print news media, but also conducted interviews with social workers and attended citizenship celebrations for immigrant spouses (p. 159).

Cheng develops her concept of relational citizenship by contrasting the traditional Western concept of citizenship that conceptualizes it in terms of legal rights that are theoretically (though not in practice) portrayed as universal with Donati's (1995; 2011) concept of "societal citizenship" that argues for "relational rights" of citizenship along with the more traditional Western legal rights. To Donati's conceptualization, Cheng adds more Taiwan-specific perspectives on relationships, drawing on the contrast between qing (情, described as "connective feelings" that have "traditionally served as the foundation for Chinese moral behavior" [p. 157]) and fa (法, "regulations and laws"). Noting that "Confucian societies aim to reach harmonious relations ... before employing regulations and laws," she observes that trying to balance these two approaches to "organizing societies ... remains a constant struggle for modern Chinese societies" (p. 157).

In the specific case of immigrant spouses, Cheng argues that foreign spouses (mostly female immigrants coming from China, Vietnam, and Indonesia to marry Taiwanese men) are primarily depicted in the news media in terms of their relationships to the Taiwanese people with whom they are associated (as wives, mothers, or daughters-in-law). Furthermore, she observes that at an Immigration Day celebration she attended, two Taiwanese speakers--a government official and an elementary school principal--described the contributions of the immigrant spouses in terms of their ability to reproduce. Cheng notes that both of the speakers--both women--jokingly lamented that they "cannot compete" with the immigrant spouses' reproductive powers (one speaker calls them an "army of reproduction" [shenglijun, 生力軍]), and she argues that such language "replicates the ethos of objectifying women citizens as reproduction machines," though she doesn't comment on the arguably racist connotations of casting the immigrant women in particular as "reproductive machines" (p. 161).

Cheng points out that relational citizenship in Taiwan means that citizenship for foreign spouses is also conditional. On the one hand, she cites the news story of a foreign spouse who despite overstaying her residency was able to keep her Alien Residence Certificate (which connotes permanent residency, a stage toward citizenship for the foreign spouses). The language of the article emphasizes the need of her four children for their mother (p. 163). On the other hand, she cites another story of a foreign spouse who lost her Taiwanese citizenship for having an extramarital affair. (Cheng notes that the foreign spouse wondered publicly why a government official didn't lose his citizenship for having an affair). The woman, says Cheng, "obviously was positioned in a further, more precarious, and lower hierarchical relation as a citizen compared to those of the male governmental official. ... The compounded effects of racialized nationalism and patriarchy, which controls women's body more stringently, complicated her Taiwanese identity" (p. 162). 

These two examples hint at what Cheng later points about about how citizenship becomes "a moral matter": at one of the celebrations she attended, she observed immigrant spouses being praised for their filial piety and care for their families and their families' businesses. "In these public endorsements," she writes, "marital immigrants are expected to perform duties to satisfy their immediate and distant interdependent groups as a way to enhance their value" (the capitalist connotations of this are not lost on Cheng) (p. 164). 

Cheng also points out, though, the possibilities for multicultural identities and relationships when she describes an immigrant mother and her daughter singing a Vietnamese song together" at a celebration. At these performances," she argues, the "local core value of being an 'ideal' female relational partner is tied to the progressive ideology of multiculturalism, demonstrated through Southeast Asian food stands, games with quizzes on various cultural traditions, and multilingual singing and dances onstage. The displayed relational citizenship reinforces Taiwan's image as a pluralistic society able to strengthen its long-cherished cultural values even within these multicultural families" (p. 165).

Cheng admits, however, that the multiculturalism celebrated in such activities can "depoliticize real differences derived from historical legacies and consequently mitigate political support for certain cultural communities" (p. 166) And citing other research (including a 2015 book by Todd Sandel), she concedes that relational citizenship does not mean that legal citizenship rights aren't important. She also concedes that there are questions about, for instance, "who should be making the efforts to relate to whom" (p. 167). But, she concludes, the concept of relational citizenship could be useful in helping to reimagine "interactions that occur between citizens and immigrants/migrants as [occurring between] interdependent and relational partners" (p. 167). This could help address the discourse around citizen-immigrant relations by emphasizing immigrants' relations with others, as in "immigrant mother," rather than individualistic legalistic identities like "undocumented immigrant" (p. 167). 

The article served my purpose of getting a sense of how foreign spouses in Taiwan are portrayed in public discourse. One thing I didn't mention in my summary was Cheng's contrast between how foreign spouses are more often discussed in terms of qing, while foreign laborers (waiji laogong 外籍勞工) are portrayed in terms of fa--the foreign laborers don't have any rights to permanent residency or citizenship, and there doesn't seem to be any place for them in the concept of relational citizenship. This leads me to wonder, though, how relational citizenship can be applied in situations where the immigrant is not related to anyone--if they are not someone's parent or spouse, if they are not related to anyone in the country they have migrated to. It suggests to me that the concept or use of relational citizenship might be useful in some circumstances, such as with immigrant spouses in Taiwan (though even there it sounds a bit problematic), its range of application otherwise might be rather narrow. 

[Update, 8/22/20: While Twitter-surfing I just saw a reference on Jonathan Sullivan's feed to this open-access article: "We want productive workers, not fertile women: The expediency of employing Southeast Asian caregivers in Taiwan," by Isabelle Cheng. It seems to address some of the problems with the "relational citizenship" model in Hsin-I Cheng's article. Isabelle Cheng writes in the abstract, "‘Bringing the state back in’ to its analysis, this article argues that this legislation is not only market‐driven but socio‐politically expedient in that it sanctions the continued employment of foreign caregivers as productive workers rather than as fertile women, while simultaneously casting them as the undesirable other. Taiwan thus becomes a ‘migration state’ with an open economy but a closed national community." I'll have to read this when I get a chance...]

Interview of Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang on PRI's "The World"

Marco Werman from PRI's radio program The World interviewed Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang today about her role and, more generally, the role of technology and democracy in Taiwan's thus far successful battle against COVID-19. The whole interview is worth reading (and listening to), but there are a couple of quotes that really intrigued me. 

[Werman:] When I think about this intersection specifically of public health and technology — philosophically, what would you say is Taiwan's motivation? 

[Tang:] Well, I used to tweet that in democratic Taiwan, ministers trust you. And radically trusting the citizens, I think, is the main philosophy. Because we're a very young democracy, having the direct presidential election only in 1996, we see democracy itself as a set of technologies that we can tweak and improve so that it’s not just about a few people talking to millions of people but rather listening to millions of people.

This quote strikes me by her characterization of democracy as "a set of technologies" rather than as a value or a political system. I just Googled "democracy as a set of technologies," and the first page of results included sites questioning whether technology would save democracy, kill democracy, or transform democracy, but nothing about democracy as a technology (or a set of technologies). There was a link to a Wikipedia article on "E-democracy," but even that doesn't seem to be getting exactly at the sense that Tang is speaking of the relationship of democracy and technology. I'm not a political scientist, so I don't know how "original" Tang's formulation is, but I find it fascinating for how it casts democracy as something almost pliable--that it can be "tweaked" and "improved," rather than being something frozen in some centuries-old documents.

The other quote that struck me had to do with the relationship between Tang's spiritual beliefs and her work in politics:

[Werman:] So, calling yourself a poetician, I'm not surprised to know that you're also pretty in tune with meditation, Daoism specifically. How do you think that helps you as a member of government? 

[Tang:] One of the central tenets of Daoism is this way of not doing. When we in the government try to do something, we kind of limit the public sectors’ imaginations. That is to say, when career public servants are deprived of the freedom to innovate because the high-level politicians think they know best, we lose a very important ally in connecting with the public. So, not doing is the most important thing.

From what I remember from my Chinese poetry class way back when, the saying was that when one became a scholar-official, they were Confucian, but when they were kicked out of their position, they became a Daoist. I don't know how true that is, but there seems to be quite a bit of discussion of the role of wu wei (無為) in Chinese statecraft. According to this Wikipedia article, both Confucianism and Daoism have contributed to the concept (or concepts) of wu wei (defined in the article as "inexertion," "inaction," or "effortless action") as both a personal philosophy and as a governmental practice. In fact, Tang's comment about the need for high-level politicians to allow public servants to innovate is reminiscent of the Confucian or Legalist ideas of governance--again, according to the Wikipedia article (I know, I know, but I don't have time to dive into scholarship on Chinese statecraft right now!),

Unable to find his philosopher-king, Confucius placed his hope in virtuous ministers.^[22] Apart from the Confucian ruler's "divine essence" (ling) "ensuring the fecundity of his people" and fertility of the soil, Creel notes that he was also assisted by "five servants", who "performed the active functions of government".^[10] Xun Kuang's Xunzi, a Confucian adaptation to Qin "Legalism", defines the ruler in much the same sense, saying that the ruler "need only correct his person" because the "abilities of the ruler appear in his appointment of men to office": namely, appraising virtue and causing others to perform. 

(I'll keep that in the original formatting--hopefully the links will work.) And later on, to Legalist Shen Buhai 

is attributed the dictum "The Sage ruler relies on method and does not rely on wisdom; he relies on technique, not on persuasions",^[26] and used the term wu wei to mean that the ruler, though vigilant, should not interfere with the duties of his ministers, saying "One who has the right way of government does not perform the functions of the five (aka various) officials, and yet is the master of the government".^[27][28]

How this fits in with democracy is another question, since later on in the article, it is suggested that Shen Buhai viewed the people as in almost an antagonistic relationship with the ruler:

Sinologist Herrlee G. Creel explains: "The ruler's subjects are so numerous, and so on alert to discover his weaknesses and get the better of him, that it is hopeless for him alone as one man to try to learn their characteristics and control them by his knowledge... the ruler must refrain from taking the initiative, and from making himself conspicuous – and therefore vulnerable – by taking any overt action."^[36]

Anyway, I'm getting out of my depth now (and I need to get back to grading). I would like to hear from anyone more well-versed in theories of Chinese statecraft about this, though. I might be completely misinterpreting things! At any rate, read the interview!

Todd L. Sandel, "Communication Modes, Taiwanese"

Number two in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Sandel, T. L. (2017). Communication modes, Taiwanese. In Y. Y. Kim (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (pp. 1-5). John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781118783665.ieicc0149

Sandel's short chapter covers a broad but somewhat idiosyncratic set of language practices and cultural attitudes in Taiwan, from the differences between "Standard [Mandarin] Chinese" and Taiwan Guoyu (台灣國語), to a comparison between language practices/identity in southern and northern Taiwan, to the gendered language practice of sajiao (撒嬌), to the discourse of multiculturalism in Taiwan, to Taiwanese admiration of Japan. In a four-page chapter (the last page consists of cross-references and a reference list), it's a somewhat dizzying trip through Taiwanese culture, but it gives me a sense of the difficulty one might have if tasked with the job of describing in a limited space the "communication modes" of contemporary Taiwan--what to include? What to leave out? 

Some things I learned from the article:

• The term Taike (台客) was originally the way Mainland gang members referred to Taiwanese gang members in the 1960s (I'm assuming he's referring to members of Mainland gangs and members of Taiwanese gangs, since I don't think there were many gangs that incorporated both groups back then--someone correct me if I'm wrong since I'm no expert on the history of gangs in Taiwan.)
• Sandel argues that by the 2000s, "foreign brides" from southeast Asia and China "were recognized as Taiwan’s 'fifth ethnic group,' not a threat but a treasure who could help facilitate connections between Taiwan, the nations of Southeast Asia, and China." He gives as evidence the fact that in the 2016 elections, there was no "anti-immigrant" rhetoric used by any political party as part of their campaign.
• Sandel mentions a movie I haven't seen, Wansei Back Home (灣生回家, 2015), which is a documentary about Taiwan-born Japanese citizens who had to leave Taiwan at the end of World War II. (Actually, I have heard of the film in the context of a scandal a few years ago about the producer of the film, who admitted to having lied about being a Taiwan-born Japanese. Evidently, though, the film itself wasn't falsified.)

Some things I have questions about:

• Is sajiao, which Sandel characterizes as a practice "associated with 'Mainlanders,'" not practiced as much by non-Mainlander Taiwanese? Is it practiced much in China?
• How inclusive is the multicultural discourse in Taiwan? How do most Taiwanese people feel about viewing "foreign brides" (外籍新娘) as part of Taiwanese society?
• Have the concepts of hen Tai (很台) and Taike (台客) become points of pride for Taiwanese, as the term "queer" has been co-opted by the LGBTQ+ community? (This also leads me to wonder about the communication modes of the LGBTQ+ community in Taiwan.)

Jan Blommaert's blog

I'm very late coming to this, especially considering Jan Blommaert has announced that he has been diagnosed with stage-four cancer, but I found out about his research blog, Ctrl+Alt+Dem, not long ago. 

A lot of interesting material there, including videos Blommaert has made about a variety of topics related to his research. As he has said in a retrospective post, 

I saw it as part of my duty to subvert that system [of academic publishing], to share and distribute things usually not free to be shared and distributed, and to do so early on with recent material. For making old texts widely available is good and useful, but the real need for scholars in very large parts of the world is to gain access to the most recent material, to become part of ongoing debates, to align their own research with that which is cutting-edge elsewhere. And the academic publishing industry does brilliant, truly majestic efforts to prevent exactly that.

His blog is a great example of how this can be done. 

[Belated Update, May 20, 2021: Jan Blommaert's obituary from The Guardian, Feb. 8, 2021. RIP.]

More on the Norwood meteor

I wanted to say more about what I found about the Norwood meteor story that I came across last night. 

I did a little research-Googling and came across an article from the October 9, 1909 Bridgeport Evening Farmer that gives a better idea where the Nickerson farm was. 

The Bridgeport evening farmer. (Bridgeport, Conn.), 09 Oct. 1909. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84022472/1909-10-09/ed-1/seq-5/> 

A short notice in the October 23, 1909 New York Dramatic Mirror notes,

They have the famous Norwood Meteor at Austin and Stone's [Dime Museum] this week, but it does not interfere in the least with the Mahetta girls on the attractive bill, headed by Barney and Cleopatra.

The Science articles that I mentioned in my previous post (plus a few more I came across since then) give more details about the "meteor." Frank W. Very, who was an MIT graduate and at the time the director of the Westwood Astrophysical Observatory (which seems to have been somewhere around what is currently Xaverian Brothers High School), wrote the first scientific discussion of the meteor. In his first article, "Fall of a meteorite in Norwood, Massachusetts" (published Jan. 28, 1910), Very tells of a "meteoric stone [that] fell to earth on the farm of Mr. W. P. Nickerson, of Norwood, Mass." He gives his estimates of its measurements, including its volume (1.75 cubic feet), weight ("perhaps 275 pounds"), and density (2.5). He describes its structure and its odor, and compares it to other types of rock and pronouncing it "entirely different from any meteorite on record." 

Very describes where the rock was found and the conditions surrounding its finding: "The bolide [large meteor] fell vertically through the bars of a gateway, breaking every bar and burying itself in the sand directly underneath to a depth of three feet." He notes that Nickerson and a neighbor from Westwood both attested to the rock's heat after it was exhumed. He tries to account for the vertical fall of the meteor by speculating that "if the angle of the path [of descent] is a high one, atmospheric friction and impact retard the meteoric velocity to so great an extent that gravity gets the victory, and the last part of the meteor's fall is vertical." While he admits there is no evidence that meteors usually hit the ground vertically, he argues that "[t]he present instance is so well authenticated, that it seems worth putting on record." Finally, he notes that several people in Norwood observed a falling object the evening of October 7.

The next article in Science, "On the so-called Norwood 'meteorite'" (published Feb. 25, 1910), by Edmund Hovey of the American Museum of Natural History, calls Very's conclusions about the meteorite "entirely erroneous," calling the rock "a characteristic glacial bowlder of a basic igneous dike rock." He cites a microscopic analysis of a slice of the rock and another geologist who compared the rock to a "rock type from Essex County, Mass." 

In addition to the analysis of the rock, Hovey brings into the discussion the testimony of Nickerson, calling it into question. He notes that when he visited Nickerson, the rock was being displayed in a "dime museum" in Boston. He says that while Nickerson's testimony to him was similar to what Very had been told, Nickerson added that there had been "a bright flash of light" on the evening of Oct. 7. Hovey argues, however, that a meteor the size of the specimen in question would have created a much larger light, "illuminat[ing] the region over many square miles with almost the light of day, ... but no such occurrence was reported from Norwood." Finally, Hovey cites his "sixteen years" of experience with claims about falling meteorites to conclude that he is not as convinced of the genuineness of this meteor as Very was.

In the March 18, 1910 issue of Science, Very wrote an article calling "The Norwood 'meteorite' a fraud. How meteoritic evidence may be manufactured." He concluded that, after further research, the rock was not a meteor and that "the whole thing is a cunningly devised fraud." "In order that investigators may be on their guard against similar deceptions," he announces, "it seems to me desirable to put the facts on record."

Very begins with a testimony of a witness not mentioned earlier, a "trained hunter with excellent powers of observation" who gives a detailed account of seeing a bright object falling from the sky and "in the direction of the Nickerson farm" at around 6:24 p.m. on Oct. 7, 1909. Some of the details that the hunter is supposed to have given seem a bit technical, such as the observation that as the object fell, "[t]here was an increase in apparent size in the ratio of not over 3 to 1" and that the object "gave off numerous white sparklets on either side, about as bright as Polaris." (If these observations were indeed those of the hunter, it might indicate that people were more observant back in 1909 than they are now!) Very admits that although other people in Norwood confirmed many of the hunter's statements, "singularly, I could find no witnesses from surrounding towns after assiduous search." 

Very then goes on to give the "real facts," which involve a vaudeville show proprietor who bought a rock that was purported to be a meteorite that had fallen in New Hampshire and changed the story: 

Accordingly, the stone (previously heated?) was taken to Norwood in an automobile, by night, and deposited on the farm of Mr. Nickerson, who was in the secret. I have talked with one of the employees of the dime-museum, who confessed that he was the man who broke the bars in the night. 

There's another discussion of a possible rocket that was fired from a balloon to give the impression of a meteorite falling. I guess this is what Very meant when he called the fraud "cunningly devised." He concludes with another detailed description of the rock (perhaps to regain face after having been fooled by the story of the meteorite?) 

The next article in that issue of Science is "The Norwood meteorite (?)" by G. F. Loughlin, who is mentioned in the preceding article as having helped Very identify some of the minerals in the rock. Loughlin also describes the rock, noting among other things that "the ground mass has suffered marked corrosion, such as is produced by swamp waters," and concludes that "[i]t remains ... for the meteorite specialists to decide whether or not a newly fallen meteorite may be similar in mineral characters to hydrothermally altered terrestrial rocks." Finally, he writes,

Professor Very's argument that the stone is a meteorite is based, in short, partly on absence of kaolinization and ferruginous staining, but chiefly upon the verbal testimony cited in his article; the writer's argument to the contrary rests on the altered character evidenced by mineral relations, and the swamp-corroded surface, which coupled with the point of discovery, are at least suggestive of fraud. (link to Wikipedia added)

Very appears to have been fortunate that his article was printed in front of Loughlin's, since the latter raises the possibility that Very was fooled by the fraudsters. Loughlin's second letter to the magazine (and the last one I'll cover here) is just a note published April 15, 1910 to distance himself from Very's March 18 findings. As he puts it, although he did help identify some minerals, "as is apparent to any petrographer, I am in no way guilty of the extinction angles recorded by Professor Very, or of the novel method of determining the composition of the feldspar." Loughlin is evidently referring to a paragraph in Very's article in which he describes the extinction angle of the rock. I have no idea what either Very or Loughlin are talking about, but from Loughlin's tone in the letter, it sounds as though he is not impressed with Very's methods. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) 

Evidently the Norwood meteor was a big deal, and I'd be surprised if Win Everett didn't write a column about it. Unfortunately, at present I don't have access to his columns, but maybe when this coronavirus business is over, I'll pay a visit to the Norwood Historical Society to see. I found reference to a Boston Post article from 1921 that might have mentioned "the Norwood meteor hoax," but I don't have a Newspapers.com account. 

I'll come back to this at some point in the future to make sense of all of this. (Maybe after I've done a PhD in geology...)

Sources:

• Hovey, E. (1910). On the so-called Norwood "meteorite," Science, 31(791), 298-299. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1634570
  
  
• Loughlin, G. (1910). The Norwood "meteorite''. Science, 31(798), 580-580. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1635222
  
  
• Loughlin, G. (1910). The Norwood meteorite (?). Science, 31(794), 418-419. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636138
  
  
• Meteor breaks farmer's fence. (1909, Oct. 9). The Bridgeport Evening Farmer, 5. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84022472/1909-10-09/ed-1/seq-5/
  
  
• Vaudeville correspondence. (1909, Oct. 23). The New York Dramatic Mirror, 24. Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?id=f_JNAQAAMAAJ&lpg=RA16-PA24&ots=e7N4NWZiN1&dq=%22norwood%20meteor%22&pg=RA16-PA24#v=onepage&q=%22norwood%20meteor%22&f=false
  
  
• Very, F. (1910). Fall of a meteorite in Norwood, Massachusetts. Science, 31(787), 143-144. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1634788
  
  
• Very, F. (1910). The Norwood "meteorite" a fraud. How meteoritic evidence may be manufactured. Science, 31(794), 415-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636137
  

Some sources about Norwood, MA

I'm preparing for the fall semester--I'll be teaching two sections of First-Year Writing for Multilingual Students and one section of Travel and Place-Based Writing. At least two of these classes will be fully online (we'll see what happens with the remaining one), which means that the students taking these courses will probably be scattered around the world--though some will probably be in Boston.

For Travel Writing (and possibly for First-Year Writing, as well), I've been thinking about a project in which students would introduce their hometowns or the places where they currently live to each other. This was something that we did somewhat indirectly in last spring's Travel Writing. I found out some interesting things about Norwood when I was working on these projects along with the students. I did a Google Slide presentation about Ellis Pond, an artificial pond nearby. I also discovered a book about Norwood that collected newspaper columns written by Win Everett, a local journalist, during the 1930s. 

On my latest search, I found three four "new" (new to me) sources about Norwood that look pretty interesting:

• Fanning, P. (2010). Influenza and inequality: One town's tragic response to the Great Epidemic of 1918. University of Massachusetts Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk99j
  The "one town" is Norwood, MA. This seems like a timely book, given our current pandemic.  A past president of the Norwood Historical Society, she has also published a more general history of Norwood. Here's a profile of Fanning about the influenza book.
  
  
• Fanning, C. (2010). Mapping Norwood: An IrishAmerican memoir. University of Massachusetts Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk3d9
  The Fannings are brother and sister--Patricia Fanning and Charles Fanning--who grew up in Norwood. (I don't know if their other brother Geoffrey wrote any books about Norwood, but I see that he passed away in 2019. My belated condolences to the family.) Googling Charles Fanning, I found a speech he gave about growing up in Norwood. 
  
  
• Very, F. (1910). Fall of a meteorite in Norwood, Massachusetts. Science, 31(787), 143-144. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1634788
  This short article (or letter) describes "a meteoric stone [that] fell to earth on the farm of Mr. W. P. Nickerson, of Norwood, Mass." overnight Oct. 7-8, 1909. Now I'm going to have to find out where that farm was. I have some old maps of Norwood that I have found online, so I'll check there first. 
  
  
• Very, F. (1910). The Norwood "meteorite"' a fraud. How meteoritic evidence may be manufactured. Science, 31(794), 415-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1636137
  I came across this article when trying to find out where W. P. Nickerson's farm might have been (no luck with that so far). It seems Very did some more research and discovered the whole affair to be a fraud and that Nickerson was in it. There's another article following this one entitled "The Norwood Meteorite (?)" that I haven't looked looked at yet. Oh well, I was going to look for the farm where the meteorite fell, but now I don't know that I have to.

I'll have to skim through the two books to learn more about Norwood and to think about what students might be able to find that's comparable.

Sumei Wang, "Radio and Urban Rhythms in 1930s Colonial Taiwan"

I'm going to do some blogging about scholarly articles I've found related to communication practices in Taiwan. I thought I'd start with this one because I saw that there's an exhibition on the history of communications technology in Taiwan that has opened in Taipei. 

Wang, Sumei. (2018). Radio and urban rhythms in 1930s colonial Taiwan. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 38(1), 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2017.1285152

Wang's article traces the rise of radio broadcasting in colonial Taiwan, from its beginnings in 1925 through the 1930s, which is her main period of focus. She makes the argument that although some scholars see the mass culture created by media like radio as "an instrument of social control and a vehicle for the promotion of hegemony" (p. 159), the advent of radio in Taiwan was more than that. Along with  phonographs, newspapers, cafés, dance halls, and theaters, radio created a consumer culture in Taiwan among the urban middle class. At the same time, she argues that radio contributed to a shift in the rhythms of Taiwanese culture by bringing a standardized way of telling time from the public sphere and into the home. (Until 1921, "clocks were synchronized according to the sound of a cannon fired daily by the military at 12:00 p.m." [p. 153].) Wang points out that "[a]fter the advent of the radio in Taiwan, every day at 11:59 am and 9:20 PM, immediately before the end of broadcasting, the radio announcer began a count- down: 50, 40, ... 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 s. The audience gradually became used to the temporal order provided by the radio" (p. 154).

Wang also discusses the programming provided on station JFAK, Taipei's first radio station that was established by the Taiwan Hōsō Kyōkai (THK). 

 

JFAK Radio Tower (原台北放送局放送亭), New Park, Taipei

She notes that the station did not only broadcast programs about Japan: 

Because the population of Japanese residents numbered only 270,000 in Taiwan, compared with the five million native Taiwanese, THK acknowledged that, to increase the number of radio subscribers, the programmes had to attract Taiwanese listeners. Therefore, programmes on Taiwanese music, history, entertainment, and business information were introduced. The radio station also invited artists to perform their music in real-time broadcasts, and reviewed newly released pop records (p. 151)

Not only did some THK programs have a Taiwan focus, but  

[o]n 9 September 1934, THK produced the programme ‘Taiwanese Evening’, made available to listeners across all of the Japanese territories, and it later became a regular monthly show. This revealed that Taiwan was not only a passive receiver situated on the fringe of the Japanese Empire; on the contrary, through radio broadcasting, it could transmit its own culture to the mainland, and thus was also an exporter of culture. (p. 151)

Wang's article goes beyond radio, however, and in fact it is sometimes a bit challenging to understand the reason that radio is the focus of the title and abstract--there's also a lot in the article about newspapers, phonographs, and even bus schedules and their contribution to urban life and "structured punctuality" in 1930s Taiwan. At the beginning of the article, Wang proposes to use Lin Huikun's (林煇焜) 1933 serial novel Inviolable Destiny (《爭へぬ運命》, later translated into Chinese as 《命運難違》) as evidence for the common role of radio in urban life in colonial Taiwan. However, many of her examples from the serialized novel have to do with other 

rich depictions of urban life at the time. For example, buses, taxies and bicycles pass through busy cities; viewing movies in theatres was a form of popular entertainment for urban residents; and young females could visit public spaces unaccompanied. All of these examples indicate modern life in metropolitan Taipei. (p. 155)

Overall, though, the article does a good job of depicting urban life in 1930s Taipei. It reminds me of the book 台灣西方文明初體驗 (Taiwan's First Experiences of Western Civilization), by 陳柔縉 (Chen Rouxin). And it has introduced me to a new work of Taiwanese fiction that I would like to read some day. (《命運難違》is available in Chinese translation, though it comes in two volumes. Maybe I'll buy it next time I'm in Taiwan...)