Top post of 2021

Don't think this will change by the end of the day: I was amused (or is it bemused?) to see that the most-visited posting on this blog from 2021 was a one-word negation of the hope expressed on the last day of 2020 that I would be more hopeful about 2021 on the first day of the new year. I'm not going to link to that posting because I don't want to push up the hits more than necessary; you can just look for a one-word post.

Coming in a distant second, with less than a third the number of hits as Number One, was a posting from July about how to interpret supposedly graphically violent language in a speech by Xi Jinping. Not sure why that got more hits than the other stuff I posted. It's a big mystery. 

Anyway, I don't know what 2022 holds for us. I'm getting too jaded to be hopeful, though. I'm guessing it's more of the same or perhaps an accelerating downward spiral. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, though.

Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements page

When news of the death of China historian Jonathan Spence reached me yesterday, I immediately thought of the acknowledgements section of his massive 1990 book The Search for Modern China. 

It ends with what is to me a most memorable word of thanks:

This book was written, in just about equal parts, either in Yale's Cross Campus Library, or in Naples Pizza on Wall Street, New Haven. I would like to thank the entire staffs of those two admirable establishments for providing two complementary worlds in which to mull over, and then to pen, this record of the past four hundred years of China's history.

I visited Naples Pizza on a visit to Yale about twenty years ago and wondered where Professor Spence might have worked on his book. I imagine him sitting in a booth (though I can't remember if they had booths) "mull[ing] over" notes and documents as he literally "pen[ned]" his manuscript. For me, as for any writer or would-be writer, this image is both familiar and inspirational. Since reading that book in 1990, I have worked in a lot of eating establishments when writing my dissertation or other articles, though I have been neither as productive as Spence nor as faithful to one restaurant as he was. 

I wonder, too, what the staff of Naples Pizza thought of his thanks. It would be interesting to see in one of Spence's obits a quote from someone who worked there when he was frequenting the restaurant. Unfortunately, like Professor Spence, Naples Pizza (later known as Wall Street Pizza) is no longer with us.

[Update, 1/14/23: Just saw this on Twitter--it adds some good detail to what I wrote, like the facts that Spence wrote the book on legal pads and that the Naples restaurant staff called him "Johnny."]

Mary Louise Pratt on the relations of movers to "stayers"

Came across this seven-year-old talk by Mary Louise Pratt on "The Rough Guide to Geopolitics," about travel as relationship of people who are in place (the "stayers") with people who are displaced (the travelers or movers).

She takes this idea from a variety of perspectives. Maybe I can use this video in my travel writing class if I get to teach it again.

End of semester thoughts and questions

It's the end of the semester (grades were submitted yesterday), and I am thinking about how I'm going to teach my first-year writing (FYW) course next semester. I've got some ideas, based on this semester's events and on some related readings I did, for changing the grading scheme to a kind of contract grading approach that has been gaining popularity in the last decade or so. I more or less do contract grading anyway, at least in the sense that for major assignments, at least 50% of the grade is based on labor/process. This will take it even further, though, by making everything complete/incomplete, including final drafts of papers. To me, it's a logical outgrowth of my feeling that final drafts of papers--at least in a FYW course--should not be treated as some high-stakes product that should be weighted more heavily than the process that went into it. So I'm cool with trying out the contract grading approach for FYW and seeing how that goes.

The problem (as always) is in figuring out what to do in the class--whether to adapt stuff that I've done before or go in a really different direction (or in a different old direction). This semester I let students do research on their own topics that they developed in consultation with me. It was a diverse batch of topics, but very enlightening in some cases as to what is on the international students' minds. A sampling of topics written on this semester:

• Boston (public transportation and Chinatown)
• various aspects of social media and technology (pros and cons of social media, internet and online gaming addiction, VR, social media in advertising)
• climate change and the environment (the Brazilian Amazon, climate change and crop production, air pollution, animal extinction)
• politics, race and media (anti-Asian racism, multiculturalism in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hip hop and politics)
• mental and physical health (the uses of melatonin, factors influencing sleep, international students' mental health, Asperger Syndrome)
• various other topics (beauty standards across cultures, pet abandonment, online vs. traditional learning, and others) 

It's always a challenge to work with students on so many different topics, and though I learn a lot in the process about all kinds of things, the process was rather exhausting. So I was thinking, for next semester I might narrow the range of topics they can write on and use some common readings for the research so that I can help them more efficiently with issues such as source usage, critical reading strategies, and other issues.

But then in my course evaluations, I saw this sentence from a student: "He let us choose topics by ourselves which is very good in facilitating inclusive learning." So now I'm back to the drawing board. Fortunately, we don't start classes until January 18, so I have some time to think about this. 

Guess I'd better write something before the month is over

The semester's not over yet, but it has been a tough one. One of the challenges has been teaching in-person again for the first time since the fall of 2019. Another is that we've all had to stand or sit around in masks, which hasn't made the interpersonal part of teaching (where you actually get to see others' facial expressions) particularly effective. Another is that I think we all were trying to come out of our caves this semester, and I don't know how the students felt, but I felt a lot of sensory overload as a result of being on campus again. I tended to spend my time between classes huddled in my office with the door shut. (I didn't curl up on the floor crying, as I had predicted, but I did nap on my chair a few times.)

I didn't get much writing done on those projects I mentioned back in August. I had switched my attention to my Kerr project, but after a conversation with my department chair a couple weeks ago, I felt encouraged to look again at my other project (until I looked at my draft and threw up my hands). Anyway, I noticed a cfp for the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference next June, and I think my paper is at least partially relevant to the theme of the conference. Maybe writing an abstract and a conference paper--having a clear deadline--will motivate me. Will have to see if it gets accepted, of course. If they're interested in hearing some guy pop in every 8 years to talk about George Kerr! (Actually, I wasn't really there in 2014; my paper was presented in absentia--at least I hope it was!)

Saturday morning trip with the little guy

My son and I had some time this morning while my wife was teaching in Quincy, and I had seen something about the Granite Railway Incline Plane on Atlas Obscura, so we decided to check it out. 

As they say on the website, the railway ruins are located in a neighborhood near the highway. Google Maps took us right there.

Entrance to the Granite Railway Incline

Sign providing a history of the Granite Railway Incline Plane (Click to enlarge)

Plaque introducing Granite Railway

Looking up the incline from the bottom of the hill

Looking downhill from near the top

When we got to the top, we walked for a while along a pathway for awhile. We came through the woods to a clearing and found out we were in the middle of an old quarry (see this description on Atlas Obscura). 

The scene from the clearing (apologies for the jerky video!)

The little guy, running as usual

View from the top of the quarry

As we were leaving, we ran into a group of men who were headed into the quarry from another direction. They were either going to film something there or play musical instruments (one guy had drumsticks, I think), or maybe they were going to film themselves playing musical instruments. We didn't hang around to see what they were up to, though. (Maybe we should have!) 

We'll have to go back sometime, perhaps before it gets much colder out.

A belated RIP to Gary Blankenburg

My brother sent me Gary Blankenburg's obituary this evening. Dr. Blankenburg, who died last year, was a poet and high school creative writing teacher who could be said to be the reason I'm a college writing teacher. (In my darker moments I'd say he's partly to blame for my career...) I didn't go to Catonsville High School where he taught, but I met him through my brother, who worked for Dr. Blankenburg's wife Jo at a Waldenbooks  (remember those?) in Towson. At the time, I thought I was a poet, or I was trying to be a poet, and I must have run into him at one of the Maryland ArtScape literary festivals--I went one year when a young poet named Millie Bentley (a former student of his), who had just published a chapbook, gave a reading. This article from the Baltimore Sun gives a better review of his career than I could.

When I was a freshman in college, I started out majoring in communications, and a professor in my introductory class assigned us the task of interviewing someone in the career we'd like to have (presumably in communications). I thought I wanted to be a career poet, so I got my brother to ask his boss to ask her husband if I could interview him. We met at an IHOP one evening, where he drank coffee and I drank tea, and he told me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should become a college professor. High school English teachers, he explained, don't have time to write because they're spending all their time grading papers. But college professors, they have time to write. I guess that started me on this track. I've discovered, though, that "having" time to write and "making" time to write are two different things. He seemed to make time, which I haven't been as good at doing.

A few years after that interview (can I call it life-changing without sounding maudlin?), Dr. Blankenburg generously published a couple of my poems in the Catonsville Times (hopefully copies of that issue are lost to history) and invited me to give a reading to his creative writing class at Catonsville. I think my reading was terrible, and I couldn't really answer any of the students' questions about writing poetry. I never thought of it until now, but I guess I can say that was my first time in front of a writing classroom. Not a very auspicious beginning, considering my performance, but I would like to thank Dr. Blankenburg for the opportunity. He took my writing and career aspirations seriously, even though I was probably taking them too seriously at the time, and based on that Sun article, that was typical of him. A generous man. Rest in peace, Dr. Blankenburg.

CFP: 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies

Trying to decide if I should submit something to this. Due date: Oct. 20:

The University of Washington Taiwan Studies Program (UW-TSP) will host the 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies from June 27 to 29, 2022.  The quadrennial conference is jointly organized by Academia Sinica and UW-TSP. The WCTS brings together the world’s leading Taiwan Studies scholars to share their research. The 4th Congress will pursue the general theme “Taiwan in the Making,” exploring the processes, forces, and dynamics that made and continue to make Taiwan. 

The 4th Congress will be the first to take place in North America. Previous congresses were held at Academic Sinica in 2012, at the University of London SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies in 2015, and at Academia Sinica in 2018. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 4th Congress has been delayed by one year. 

We are now circulating our Call for Papers. We welcome applicants to propose research papers on Taiwan from the social sciences and humanities. The Congress will highlight a number of sub-themes throughout various panels and roundtables, such as (but not limited to):

• “Worlding” Taiwan: Taiwan in Global Context
• Contested Sovereignty: Taiwan in Comparison
• New Directions in Taiwan Studies
• Consolidating Taiwan’s Democracy
• Gender and Society in Changing Taiwan
• Environment, Ecology, and the Future of Taiwan
• Ethnic Identity and Diversity in Taiwan
• Taiwan History through Primary Sources

These topics are merely examples, and we encourage applicants to submit applications in any field or area of focus broadly under Taiwan Studies.

Important Dates

Abstract submission deadline: October 20 (Wednesday)

Acceptance notification: November 30 (Tuesday)

Presentation paper (6000 words) due: May 16 (Monday), 2022

Abstract Submission

Please submit a one-page long abstract (no more than 600 words) and include the following information: Author(s) Name, Paper Title, Email, Current Position(s), and Affiliation(s) to: [twstudy@gate.sinica.edu.tw]

Accepted participants will be provided on campus accommodations for up to 3 nights from June 27 to 29. Accepted participants traveling from outside of North America will receive up to 4 nights (June 27 to 30). Breakfast and box lunches are provided, as well as dinners on the first two days of the conference.

For junior scholars (PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct faculty, and independent scholars) who do not have access to institutional funding, the WCTS may be able to offer a modest, partial subsidy toward airfare. Details will be arranged after proposal acceptance.

Please refer to the WCTS webpage for further details.

One Marine's War and the Robert Sheeks-George H. Kerr connection

I got curious about Robert Sheeks because of some correspondence he had with George H. Kerr over some materials he was helping Kerr transfer to the Shikiya Memorial Library at the University of the Ryukyus in 1958. The Asia Foundation, for which Sheeks worked, was in charge of purchasing the collection on behalf of the University. This correspondence is located in the Kerr collection at the Hoover Institute. (My thanks to Dr. Yukari Yoshihara of the University of Tsukuba for sharing these documents with me!)

Also in the Kerr papers is a note from "rbs" (probably also Robert Sheeks) to "Mr. Stewart" regarding a 1955 letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in which Kerr traced a history of US-Taiwan-Chinese relations up to that time and predicted "a violent crisis within Nationalist ranks at Taipei" that the US needed to be prepared for. In his note to Stewart, RBS characterized Kerr's letter as "a wonderful gift to the communists." He continued, 

His bitterness has grown, as much because the Department of State did not take his advice as for [sic] reasons connected with the uprising and its violence. Aside from this increased bitterness, he is back in Formosa of 1947 --- as he happened to view it in those days. He viewed everything for the I.P.R. at that time.

Kerr is supposed to be a scholar; he has the whole Hoover Library setup at his disposal. He omitted mention that Formosa was ceded to Japan as part of the spoils of the Sino-Japanese War.  I am sure that this is intentional, and it helps paint the kind of picture he wants to portray of the Formosan, Mainlander, and Japanese roles.

Incidentally, Art Goul [a reporter who worked in China and Taiwn] phoned me this morning to ask about Kerr's background. I gave him a few items of past history which are fairly well known. 

I am curious about the "items of past history" that RBS told Goul about, of course, so I looked up Sheeks and came across this website about him. (I should note that Dr. Stephen Craft of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University told me about Sheeks and the website several years ago, but for some reason I never followed up on that, which will probably be to my eternal regret.) Anyway, the website about Sheets got me interested in the book about him by Gerald Meehl, One Marine's War, and I just finished reading it today after receiving it yesterday. (It's a quick read.)

The book mostly focuses on Sheeks' career as a Japanese Language Officer (JLO) during World War II and his attempts to convince the Marines to let him try to persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians who were holed up in caves on the islands where the Marines had landed to give themselves up rather than fight to the death or commit suicide. It's a fascinating story, but there was only a little in the book about his postwar years, including his time in Taiwan as director of the United States Information Service. That's what I'd like to know more about, as well as his work for the Asia Foundation in the 1950s. Well, I can't criticize a book for not covering what it wasn't intended to cover! Maybe I'll try to contact Sheeks now and see what he can tell me about his experiences in Taiwan (and about his memories of Kerr). 

Monday morning, week four of classes

I'm listening to workmen playing Steely Dan and tearing out some rotten wood from the soffit. ("Soffit" is a word I just learned a couple of weeks ago from my 94-year-old mother.) 

[Update, 9/29: They're now playing the Eagles, interspersed with other music primarily from the '70s. Still some Dan in the mix.

When I was in college in the '80s I was amazed at one administrator's knowledge of the music of the '50s. Now I'm in that administrator's position regarding music that's almost 50 years old rather than "only" 30 years old. Yikes.]

Honest-ish question

How do you write about the cool things you've found in the archives without making your paper sound like it should be titled, "Cool Things I Found in the Archives?"

Scene from pandemic-era teaching

We had a virtual English Department meeting today. After we got off Zoom, we all ran into each other on the way to the restroom.

Something to watch when I get a chance...

The summer is over, so I'm getting ready for the semester that starts next Wednesday. (Yikes!)

I came across this video on YouTube and want to put it here to watch later and share with my reader(s). I thought it looked interesting. It's a debate from 1956 among high school exchange students from the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, and the UK about prejudice.  

What caught me about the beginning of the video (I didn't have a chance to get far into it) is when the moderator asked the students about their own prejudices. When she gets to Raul Contreras, a fifteen-year-old from the Philippines, he directly says he is prejudiced against the Japanese, and glances somewhat furtively at the Japanese girl on his right (Yoriko Konishi) while he explains why. Not surprisingly, his prejudice comes from the Philippine experience under the Japanese during World War Two. He admits he's too young to have really understood it himself, but his feelings come from what older relatives have told him about their experiences. 

Hope I get a chance to watch the whole thing at some point. (Maybe even figure out a way to use it in one of my classes?)

There are some other videos like this, with "debates" from students from different countries. They're from a YouTube channel called ArchiveMC, which has posted a lot of Cold War-era videos.

[Update, 9/4/21: I should add that if you watch the video on YouTube, you'll see in the comments that Raul's daughter has responded to the video and provided more information about his life and subsequent career. It's really interesting! Some information is also given about Yoriko.]

Summer writing project (Week Seventeen): A new distraction for the new year

I finished my grading this week for the summer class just in time to start getting ready for the fall semester that starts September 8. In the meantime, I'm waiting for August 30, when Taiwan's English-language streaming service, TaiwanPlus, starts up. They also have a YouTube channel. It appears that the twelve-part historical drama, SEQALU: Formosa 1867, might be streamed on this channel. If so, I might be persuaded to watch it, despite Brian Hioe's somewhat disappointed review of the first two episodes and despite my own party interested/partly disappointed reaction to the trailer. Here's the trailer:

(After watching the trailer, I asked one of my former Tunghai colleagues if he planned to watch the program. His somewhat abrupt reply: "It is on here, but I don't want to watch it.")

Summer writing project (Week Sixteen): New Year's Resolutions for the 2021-22 Academic Year

The summer is almost at an end (though since I've been teaching for the past seven weeks, it ended a long time ago for me). The soon-to-come beginning of the semester is signaled by two dreams I had last night: the first in which I was back at Tunghai, trying to figure out on the first day of classes where to find a copy machine and whether my FENM (Freshman English for Non-Majors) class was supposed to meet in our regular classroom or the language lab (with a subplot involving the fact that my clothes hadn't yet arrived in Taiwan, so I was teaching without a shirt). The second dream must have been partly inspired by Henri, the tropical storm that is currently in the news: it was the first day of classes, but I slept in and didn't go to school because there was a hurricane and I assumed the university would cancel classes. When I woke up, I found that Northeastern hadn't canceled classes for the hurricane (evidently Harvard hadn't canceled classes, so NU decided they couldn't either). 

Usually at this time of year, I write out my new year's resolutions for the upcoming academic year. If last year taught us anything, it's to not expect the resolutions to mean anything. I think my main resolution for this year is for all of us to stay healthy and avoid getting COVID, which will be enough of a challenge, considering my son and I both have to have on-ground classes (he's starting first grade, I'm in 47th). Other than that, I have those two writing projects to try to resurrect (remember them?) and try to finish before any squirrels run past to distract me. 

I think that will be it. If I get any of these accomplished, you'll be the first to know!

Summer writing grading project (Week Fifteen): More on translingualism

This has been the next-to-last week of class, so I've been reading and commenting on paper drafts, conferencing with students, and doing some grading. It's been busy. I haven't had much time to do anything else, although I do have a few things to finish before the end of the month. (And I need to prepare for the fall semester, when I'll be on campus for the first time since February 2020! Not really looking forward to that, but what can you do?)

One quick addition to what I wrote last week about Bruce Horner and the relationship of translingualism to SRTOL. My colleague Cherice Jones steered me to the CCCC Demand for Black Linguistic Justice, which I had seen before. What I hadn't noticed previously, and what seems relevant to Horner's argument in the chapter I referenced last week, is part of Demand #3 ("We Demand that Political Discussions and Praxis Center Black Language as Teacher-Researcher Activism for Classrooms and Communities!"), where there is a "sub-demand" that:

• "researchers, educators, and policymakers stop using problematic, race-neutral umbrella terms like multilingualism, world Englishes, translingualism, linguistic diversity, or any other race-flattened vocabulary when discussing Black Language and thereby Black Lives."

If I understand correctly, the writers aren't saying that those terms like translingualism, etc., are problematic in other situations, but they specifically point to how these terms ignore race when discussing language--specifically, Black Language. This raises an issue that I hadn't considered before, but now seems very obvious: in arguing that "translingualism sees difference in language—located in time as the ever emerging product of language practices—not simply as the norm but as inevitable, arising even in exact repetitions of conventional usage" (Horner 60), there appears to be a validation of the "inevitable" difference in language and language practice at the expense of the very specific experiences of users of particular languages--specifically, users of Black Language. April Baker-Bell, et al. (the authors of the Demand), tie Black Language to Black Lives in a way that "translingualism" as an ideology doesn't seem (able) to account for. 

I'm still thinking about all this and I'm admittedly no expert, so I'm open to input on this....

[Update, 8/16: And now I realize that Keith Gilyard wrote about these very issues back in 2016! h/t again to Cherice.]

Summer writing project (Week Fourteen): Notes on GHK and translingualism

Not surprisingly, I didn't get anything done this week on my writing project. In fact, on Monday I woke up thinking about George Kerr and that earlier project, and I started getting interested in picking that up again. 

So a question for all of my reader(s): should I put my "main" project aside for a bit and go back to my Kerr paper, with the hope that putting the other project out of my mind for a while will allow me to come to it anew when I do that? These are two very different projects, I need to mention, and for very different audiences. What do you do in this situation? 

I should add that I've been dragging on both projects. You can see from my blog that I've been doing stuff with Kerr for about 10 years or more, and I haven't really achieved much in terms of publications (well, there's that introduction to the Camphor Press edition of Formosa Betrayed, which I enjoyed completing). I think I mentioned that the other project, a more rhetoric-focused project, has also been percolating in my brain for about 15 or so years. I have trouble getting things done, in other words. One of my Syracuse professors once said to me, when I was telling her about my idea for a project, "Everybody has ideas! Some turn into books, and some turn into after-tea chat!" I sometimes think I'm more the after-tea chat kind of idea person... *sigh*

I was also interviewed this week for a project some of my colleagues are working on. One of the questions had to do with what I knew about translingualism, so of course, being who I am (see "academic imposter syndrome"), I prepared for the interview by reading whatever I could about translingualism so I wouldn't sound like I didn't know anything. I even ordered an ebook for the library (which came the next day!) entitled Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing, edited by Tony Silva and Zhaozhe Wang. It's a collection of essays growing out of the tensions between the academic field of second language writing and what I'd probably call the "translingual movement" in composition studies. I read a few chapters of that, including those by 

• Paul Kei Matsuda ("Weathering the Translingual Storm"), 
• Jonathan Hall and Maria Jerskey ("Tear Down the Wall: Institutional Structures vs. Translingual Realities"), 
• Xiaoye You ("The Yin-Yang of Writing Education in Globalization"), 
• Todd Ruecker and Shawna Shapiro ("Critical Pragmatism as a Middle Ground in Discussions of Linguistic Diversity"), 
• Michelle Cox and Missy Watson ("A Translingual Scholar and Second Language Writing Scholar Talk It Out: Steps Toward Reconciliation"), and 
• Bruce Horner ("Language Difference, Translinguality, and L2 Writing: Conflations, Confusions, and the Work of Writing"). 

(I always overprepare for interviews, though it usually doesn't show it in the end!) The chapters gave me a lot to think about. One thing I thought about centers around whether I'd consider my own pedagogy "translingual." I'm hesitant to call it that, particularly after reading Horner's chapter, which disavows the idea that translingualism is exclusively concerned with second language writing (or teaching writing to multilingual students, which is my primary job). In his chapter, Horner claimed that translingualism isn’t primarily about L2 writing, but rather that it’s more closely tied to the Students’ Right to their own language movement and the idea of allowing people with different dialects of English to use their own styles. As he writes,

In other words, while the growing numbers of students and faculty speaking and writing languages other than English may have contributed to galvanizing the development of translingual language ideology, and while that ideology is certainly as applicable to those using multiple named languages as it is to those claiming to use and know only one, that demographic change is not, in fact, the most appropriate conceptual lineage by which to understand the emergence of translingual ideology. (58)

I have to admit that, after I copied that quote in my journal, I said that I found this idea a bit disingenuous, "as though [I wrote] he thinks he owns the term 'translingualism.' (Note that he identifies 'Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach' as sort of the urtext of translingualism in composition studies.) There are a heck of a lot of scholars (as he himself admits) who have used the writings of people using different 'named languages' as part of their research on translingualism." Some of them have collaborated with him on translingual projects, as well.

But, I continued, "if Horner wants to say that translingualism is not primarily related to L2 writing, I’m fine with that. But that leaves us to think about this question of my familiarity with translingualism in my role as a teacher of multilingual students." Along the way in his paper, Horner characterizes translingualism as a "language ideology" that is opposed to the other language ideology (are there only two?) of monolingualism, and that it really applies to both the teaching of "L2"/multilingual writers and everyone else. Whether you teach writing from a translingual perspective becomes, then a political question, or what seems to me to be a moral question. That is, you're either working from a translingual perspective or you're not, and if you're not, you're on the wrong side (of history, of pedagogy, etc.). 

As a lapsed evangelical, I find myself "allergic" to these moral arguments. I'm also resistant because how this ideology is supposed to work in practice is such a murky thing. I found myself more in tune with the "critical pragmatism" discussed by Todd Ruecker and Shawna Shapiro. Critical pragmatism draws on Critical English for Academic Purposes (EAP) "to 'rediscover' the middle ground between the two polarities of pragmatism (which is often framed as assimilationist) and idealism (which is often framed as resistant to linguistic norms)" (141). They show how a writing course (and a writing program) can balance these two motives and avoid the "false dichotomy between conformity and resistance" (147). They even quote Horner and Lu to point out that these translingualists also have a pragmatic perspective at times: Lu and Horner (2013), say Ruecker and Shapiro, "have (re)defined a translingual approach as 'a disposition of openness and inquiry toward language and language differences' (p. 586), including toward standardized English" (147). This sense of translingualism seems closer to critical pragmatism than some of the other stuff I've read about it.

After reading their chapter, I felt a bit more clear about what I'm doing in class--what I'm already doing that could be seen in this light (whether you call it "translingual" or "critical pragmatism") and what I could do to make my course more "open" to language and language differences. 

Well, that was a longer update than I expected to write. And it got way off whatever it was that I thought I was going to write. But that's OK. I recommend looking at Silva and Wang's book, though, if you have access to it and you're interested in the "debate" between SLW and translingualism. 

Summer writing project (Week Thirteen)

Lately, I've been putting more time into writing these notes than I've spent on the paper itself, so that's a sign that I should cut back on my once-daily thoughts and frustrations regarding my summer writing project (which will probably extend into the winter, at the rate I'm going).  

There's not much to say for this week; most of my working hours have been devoted to teaching and reading student work. This past week was a busy one because we're finishing up one project and starting another. The course seems to be going smoothly, though. I haven't talked with many students (I think I chose the wrong time for office hours), but I've met with a couple of students (virtually) outside of office hours and had good conversations with them.

Talk around the academic Twitterverse has been around the various plans (or lack thereof) concerning how universities will open up in the fall. My school plans to require everyone (vaccinated or not) to be tested once a week if they're coming in at least once a week. I think I like that idea, although I am not eager to go back to campus at this point, with the spreading delta variant on the loose and an unvaccinated first-grader at home to worry about. I realize there are people who need to go back to in-person classes for all kinds of reasons. I just hope that my program and school can give instructors flexibility to do what they need to do, too.

Anyway, we'll be in August soon, and I have a couple of things to do in August (in addition to teaching and preparing to teach in the fall). I probably won't have time to work on my paper for a good long while. We'll see...

Summer writing project (Days Fifty-Seven through Sixty)

"Seventeen years I've wanted that little item and I've been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest... well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only... five and fifteen seventeenths percent." 

(For years I've been wondering what "five and fifteen-seventeenths percent" means; fortunately, someone explained it on one of the two entries on their blog(!).)

The last few days have been filled with commenting on student work, setting up groups for the second project in my class, a doctor visit, all kinds of errands, and not a whole lot of writing. Time away from a project can lead in at least two directions--primarily, the distance can enable you to think anew about it and have new perspectives on what it is that is troubling you (OK, me) about it. That can either make you/me see a new path toward finishing it, or it can lead to despair over ever being able to do it or the feeling that it's an impossible or even wrong-headed task. 

So now I'm rethinking the whole thing (again). This is definitely not going to be writing my journal article in twelve weeks...

Summer writing project (Day Fifty-Six)

I'm back to doing some primary research--close reading of a text I'm using as an "exhibit" (in BEAM terms) to see if I can use it as evidence for what I'm arguing (or part of what I'm arguing, anyway). Also had a good email exchange with my "virtual writing partner" or "writing accountability partner" (I think I'm going to have to acknowledge him in my paper if I ever get it published!)

Tomorrow is going to be devoted to reading student drafts of their first assignment. Might not get to my own paper. (Not that I'm complaining. Reading their drafts is a major part of my job, after all!)

Summer writing stalling project (Days Fifty-Four and Fifty-Five)

Not much to report here. Yesterday's work grading had to be put off to today because my internet was out all day yesterday.  Also found myself looking wistfully at a different paper I haven't worked on for over a year but is now looking more attractive to me than my current paper. [Insert meme of that guy... you know who I mean...]

Summer writing walking project (Day Fifty-Three)

I did some grading today and then had a little time to work on my paper. So my son and I drove out to Medfield to check out the old Medfield State Hospital, which we've driven by a lot but never visited. Turns out it's a pretty big place! We walked all around the grounds and I took a few pictures. (Unfortunately, I only know one of the buildings: the chapel.)

Here are some of the pictures. I think you can click on them to make them larger.

Here's the chapel.

Poem on the side of a wall.

The porch needs some work...

[Update: This was the female nurses' home.]

I took some other pictures, but I want to go back and take some more, I think. (I'm sure there are millions of pictures of the Medfield State Hospital on the web, though.)

So that's how I spent my day! It was a good day for my son and me to run around, considering it has rained every day so far this month.

[Update: I found this old map of the hospital grounds. And some information from the Town of Medfield about what they're thinking of doing with the property.]

Summer writing project (Days Fifty-One and Fifty-Two)

I was too busy deleting mails from my school's in-box yesterday and neglected to catch up on this. (I was just doing that in between approving students' choices of scholarly articles for their first assignment.) It was interesting reading my school's evolving response to COVID--I'm tempted to keep those emails just for historical purposes.

Anyway, today I had some time to look over my paper. I read through most of it slowly, making comments in the margins. It was depressing in some ways because I can see that there are places where I need to do a lot of work; it goes off in all kinds of directions. But I also see some promising spots, if I can corral the rest of it together. Mostly, I got the sense that it is worth working on, which is a good feeling.

Summer writing grading project (Day Fifty)

Fifty days into my summer writing project and I feel like I've basically given up on it. I've got to do something, though, to try to jump-start this thing and force myself to make some progress on it, even if  it's just a few millimeters. (Did I ever tell about how when I was in elementary school, Jimmy Carter was president and wanted to convert the US to the metric system, so we learned the metric system instead of whatever the other system is called [the 'Murkin system?] So we learned centimeters and milliliters and all that sort of thing. Then, of course, Reagan became president, but I don't think we ever learned the other system in school, so I still don't know how many quarts there are in a mile. Anyway...)

[Update: Ah, I see now it was Gerald Ford who signed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. Well, it was probably expedient to blame the whole thing on Carter anyway.]

Summer writing grading project (Day Forty-Nine)

Today I did some grading and other teaching-related work. It's going to be an intense seven weeks, so I don't know how much writing I'll get done. We'll see... 

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Eight)

I did my presentation today. I found I'm a bit rusty giving conference presentations (just noticed from looking at my CV that before today I hadn't done one since 2015!). I think our panel went well, though I wish I had not talked so much and had given the audience more of a chance to share their ideas. Oh well, next time...

Now the second summer session has begun, so I move my focus to teaching. I will try to work a bit on my paper, maybe trying for a half hour or so a day if I can get up early enough in the morning. Wish me luck!

Summer writing project (Days Forty-Six and Forty-Seven)

Forgot to write last night--today this is going to be short. I'm doing a bit of tuning up to my presentation for tomorrow because I want to make sure I have a clear focus that distinguishes what I'm talking about from what other people whose subjects overlap with mine will have talked about. 

On another topic, I see that my friend and fellow Kerrdashian Yukari Yoshihara has published an article about Kerr in American Quarterly:   

Yoshihara, Yukari. "Postwar American Studies in Asia and Its Prehistory: George Kerr and Taiwan as an American Frontier." American Quarterly, vol. 73 no. 2, 2021, p. 349-354. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/796806.

Be sure to read it!

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Five): Current events and my project

Since yesterday, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about one particular "idiom" (chengyu) in Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party--the line where he says that the enemies of China will find themselves crashing into a steel wall formed by the bodies of 1.4 billion Chinese; he uses the phrase 头破血流, which literally means "head break blood flow." The question in the tweets I've been reading, though, is whether this phrase is supposed to be taken literally (someone, whose tweet I unfortunately can't find now, compared it to idioms like "raining cats and dogs"). Frankie Huang suggests we should take it in the spirit of the famous ST:TNG episode where Picard tries to figure out the allegorical language of the Tamarian ship captain; that is, the broken and bleeding heads are not meant to be taken literally. She goes on, in fact, to suggest that taking the phrase literally is actually a purposeful act of misunderstanding driven by a bias against Xi or, more generally, China. 

This has made me think again about my reaction to some of the postwar Taiwan elementary textbook passages I've been reading, and whether I'm reading too much into them. I mentioned the "urban warfare" lesson in a 1946 fourth-grade reader that struck me (and my wife) as pretty violent, and this all started with a lesson from 1956 that I translated years ago about Yan Haiwen, a Chinese pilot who kills himself rather than being taken by the enemy soldiers. But I'm starting to rethink my response what I'd consider the graphic violence of these stories. Going back to 头破血流, a thread by Chenchen Zhang arguing that the emotional valence (if I'm using that term correctly) of the language of Xi's speech and, I guess, Chinese nationalistic discourse in general, is more important to think about than one four-character chengyu. 

I think with Yan Haiwen, I understood this on a certain level when I wrote about it in my dissertation (and in this paper, if I ever finish it)--I thought about this story in terms of Suzanne Keen's theory of strategic empathizing, where student readers were taught to admire and identify with the feelings and motivations of people like Yan Haiwen. In this case (and perhaps in the case of the urban warfare story), it's perhaps important to turn away from the horror I feel reading about the violence and to the feelings that the writers are trying to evoke from readers. 

That all said, however, I'm resisting the idea that there's one "right" way to read these stories (or the chengyu in question in Xi's speech). Different readers will interpret these texts differently, depending on their positionality. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, for instance, might be properly accused of reading 头破血流 too literally, and it might be said that since I'm not the primary audience for this speech, I don't have the right to interpret it. On the other hand, in our globalized world of instantaneous worldwide communication and immediate translation, it seems to me a bit naïve to think that there's only one audience for any big speech like this. After all, this part of the speech is also serving as a warning to the enemy, so in that sense it's at least partly addressing that potential enemy.* And as Bessie tweeted in response to Frankie Huang's post, for a Taiwanese person, it's hard to assume "good faith" on the part of the speaker when Taiwan is under constant threat of violent annexation by that same speaker. So interpretation also has a lot to do with how you see yourself in relation to the speaker. (I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.) Even in postwar Taiwan, stories like those of Yan Haiwen might be read differently by Taiwanese students as opposed to Mainlander students. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I would be able to test this at this point. One thing I'm constantly looking for is stories of people's experiences of schooling at that time.)

Anyway, this is what looking through Twitter got me thinking about today. It's useful to think about this, and it gives me another perspective on what I've been working on, but it also reminds me of my own place or position in this project I'm working on (and possibly why it's taking me so long to finish it!). 

*Then again, when my son is playing dangerously on the stairs, I sometimes tell him to be careful or he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. That's pretty graphic...

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Four): The importantce of proofreading!

I just found that 1999 paper that I wrote on doing research on the internet. It was published in a 2000 volume of essays on communication and culture that was edited by the conference organizer. When it was published, I was unhappy with the proofreading because the student worker who did the copy-editing decided (or followed the Word recommendations that decided) that the word "Internet" should have a "The" in front of it every time. So my paper, originally titled "Internet Research in English: Problems and Solutions for EFL Students," became "The Internet Research in English: Problems and Solutions for EFL Students." That's not too bad, but then there were also sentences that ended up looking like this: "What problems might EFL students have regarding research on the English The Internet?" I also had two figures that I wanted to include, but for some reason the same figure was inserted in both places. (By the way, to show you how old this paper is, here's the figure--a screenshot of Infoseek's search results for "computer virus":

Now doesn't that bring back memories? No? Oh well...)

One thing that I can't blame the copy-editor for is this gem of an overlooked placeholder that I left in the final draft, to wit: "'Paper' publishing is a demanding process that involves many people, a good deal of money, and complicated apparatuses of control and stuff." I believe I was referring to print publishing (not sure why I called it "paper publishing"), but I really love the "and stuff." Lucky my language wasn't a bit more colorful...

OK, back to working on my presentation. And a reminder to myself to proofread carefully!

Upgrade (II)

As of today, I am now officially a full Teaching Professor at Northeastern. It's not a tenured position, but there's some job security in that I'm now on a five-year renewable contract. Mainly it means that I can finally order some new business cards...

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Three, I think)

I spent today working on my presentation for next week. Got some slides revised, but I need to figure out if my whole presentation will fit within the 20-minute time limit. Guess I need to finish my script and try it out. I can always take out an example or two, I suppose.

I realized the other day that I had talked about a very similar topic all the way back in May of 1999. Similar problems that we have today with the internet (back then, though, we called it the "Internet"). The more things change, ...

Summer Non-writing Project (Day Forty-Two)

I managed to make three screencasts for my summer class today, so I guess I achieved something. My videos are not at all professional, but at least I've graduated to the point where I can edit out my "ummms" and coughs (well, most of my "ummms"). I've seen some colleagues' and friends' videos, and I can only be depressed about my own. But, as I told one of my friends, not depressed enough to want to do better(!). Actually, I guess my videos aren't that terrible. The only thing students have complained about regarding the videos is that some of them are too long (around 20 minutes sometimes).  

In addition to working on my course, I took a drive this evening. Saw this interesting cloud formation. (It didn't rain, though.)

Summer writing project (Day Forty-One)

I did some thinking about my topic and paper today, but mainly I was working on my course materials for the class I'll be teaching next week (!).

I also "attended" a webinar on Taiwan Studies, "The State of Taiwan Studies: A Roundtable Discussion on Methods and Directions," run by the Fairbank Center. The panelists were:

• Jaw-Nian Huang, Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
• Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
• Kevin Wei Luo, Doctoral Fellow, Hou Family fellow in Taiwan Studies, Harvard University
• Lev Nachman, PhD in political science, UC Irvine

The discussant (who actually didn't get a chance to say a lot, but raised an important question for the panelists), was Ching-fang Hsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

There was a big emphasis among the speakers on Taiwan's geopolitical relations and status and the importance of studying Taiwan in terms of these geopolitical considerations. As Lawrence Yang put it (and this might not be an exact quote, but pretty close): Taiwan can be seen as "both an outcome of geopolitical mediation among empires or Taiwan itself as a medium by which powers create geopolitical mapping." 

The question that Professor Hsu brought up at the end concerned how China should be situated in Taiwan Studies. This is an interesting question (and potentially, the question itself was even more interesting than the answers themselves), and it's something that probably a lot of people studying Taiwan wrestle with. (Prof. Nachman mentioned this, too.) Both this question and the emphasis on geopolitics have confirmed to me that I've got a good idea for this paper that I'm writing. (Though they also remind me that I have to make sure I actually make a clear argument in the paper!)

Here's the YouTube video of the panel. 

Summer writing project (Day Forty)

Been mostly working on my presentation today (among other things). Went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking into an example regarding an essay from a paper mill that a student had put in their preliminary bibliography. Does being from a paper mill make an essay a bad source for an undergraduate research paper? (Well, it's not the best source, but what kind of bad source is it? For instance, how does it compare with a Wikipedia article as a not-ideal source? I have my ideas, but what do you think?)

Anyway, all that led me to read the Wikipedia article about essay mills and eventually to my copy of Edward Waldo Emerson's Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (1888, 1916), in which Emerson the younger reveals that his father and uncle were part of an informal essay mill when they were in college in the early 1800s:

If the Emersons could not get enough writing to do in the ordinary course of work they sometimes took contracts outside. An anecdote told me of [Uncle] Edward by his classmate shows how the brothers eked out their finances.

Mr. John C. Park says: --

"I and some others used to make a little money by writing themes for those who found it harder. The way we used to do was to write out any ideas which occurred to us bearing on the subject, and then, having cut the paper into scraps, to issue it to the various buyers to use in their themes, condensing and improving all the best of it for our own. Well, one morning, ----, your Uncle Edward's chum, came out and stood on Hollis steps and called out, 'Look here, fellows! I've got something to show you. I want you to listen to this and tell me if it's worth fifty cents,' and proceeded to read what Emerson had written for him. You see he had come down in his style to make it possible for the professor to believe that the theme could have emanated from ----, and in his endeavors to do so had written so humbly that ---- himself doubted if it were worth half a dollar." (26)

Early essay mills... Wonder if they were water-powered...

[Update, June 27, 2021: Yikes! I just did a Google Scholar search for an essay mill, UKEssays.com, and found that papers from that site are actually cited in some scholarly articles!?]

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Nine)

After my meeting this afternoon, I spent most of my time reading Chang and Holt and working on my course materials for the upcoming course. In other words, nothing exciting going on here.  

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Eight)

Managed to write a sentence on my paper today--and it was mainly a quotation. Ah well. Tomorrow I have a meeting, but I might also have some time to work on the paper.

I spent most of the day designing my Canvas site for my Summer 2 course. This is the second time I've taught this particular course online, but the last time was my first time using Canvas, so my design of assignments and modules wasn't very good. Hopefully my new approach will be able to last awhile. 

The quotation in my sentence, by the way, was from Chang and Holt. I've only gotten through a couple of chapters, but thus far I'm finding the book informative and useful for my project. My only complaints are that sometimes the translations read a bit awkwardly and that some of the Chinese-language sources are not very helpfully cited in the bibliography. For an instance of the latter, here's a typical citation for a newspaper article from 聯合報:

Tang, X.-m. (2008, September 25). What era is it now! Anti-communism and recovering nation saunter into history. Retrieved from United Daily News, online, available at: www.udndata.com

Since they were unable to give a URL that would take readers directly to the article (which sometimes happens), it would be good to give the title in Chinese as well as English, so that readers could find the article more easily. I'm guessing that the first part of the headline is something like, 這是什麼時代！But the title in Chinese characters or pinyin would help. The odd thing is that sometimes they do provide pinyin for some titles. 

Anyway, that's enough complaining for the day. As I say, I've gotten a lot out of the book so far.

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Seven)

Not much to say for today. I spent most of my time working on my online materials for the summer course I'll be teaching in July. Will try to do some work on the paper tomorrow, though I also have to work on that presentation. Multitasking!

An exhibit for Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing classes?

This ad for Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Dr. Chris Jones has been blowing up Twitter (is that how the young people say it?).

I'm thinking about using it in my Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing course because of its interdisciplinary connections (how he combines faith and science in his discussion of time, for instance, and how he brings in his multiple degrees in physics, nuclear engineering, and urban planning). Also because of how his personal history is combined with the history of the United States. I don't have time to tease out all of the fascinating connections he's bringing into this ad right now, but there are a lot of them! Maybe my readers can point some out in the comments?

(h/t)

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Six)

Today I got up at 2:30 in the morning, thus entirely throwing off my sleeping schedule for the foreseeable future. I had an idea to take another look at an "exhibit" source I had quoted and discussed in my draft, and I found that there was a bit more that I could usefully say about that source. I was also able to attach that source to the book I'm currently reading (Chang and Holt). So I knocked out a couple of paragraphs on that before breakfast. 

Since then, between naps, I have been thinking about whether I should bring into this discussion a conference paper that I wrote about 20 years ago. (The only problem is that someone cited my conference paper in his book, so now I'm not sure if I should cite him citing me!) What I have in it would complicate what I'm talking about in the current paper, but it might do so in a useful way. We'll see...

I also did a bit of thinking and writing and assembling of documents for my July conference presentation. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to be talking about, but I need to get the presentation organized.

Finally, I came across a thread from Anicca Harriot on Twitter about some citation-related tools that I hadn't seen before. 

• Connected Papers, which maps out the network of a particular academic work, its academic sources, and the academic publications that cite it
• Scite, which analyzes how academic works are used in the publications that cite them (uses a slightly different set of terms than "BEAM" [see "exhibit" link above])

I tried two of them on an older article (*sigh* when does an article from 1996 get classified as "older"?) and came up with some interesting results. For the article, Yameng Liu's "To Capture the Essence of Chinese Rhetoric: An Anatomy of a Paradigm in Comparative Rhetoric," I got these results:

• From Connected Papers, I got this cool map. (Hope the link works!)
• From Scite, I got some results, but I haven't set up an account yet to see what they actually are. Looks like they could be interesting, though.

Anyway, another couple of tools to play with (and perhaps show to students in my Advanced Writing classes when we're working on literature reviews. (I've had mixed results when showing them the Web of Knowledge; these look like they might be more user-friendly.) I want to go back to Anicca's thread to look at the other tools she's introducing. Always love it when generous scholars share the tools they're using with the rest of us! Thanks, Anicca! You're a blessing!

Tomorrow is today! (Or, rather, it was today) (Day Thirty-Five)

Well, it didn't quite go as I expected. Woke up at 5:00, but ended up spending hours on other business that needed to get done. I did spend some time thinking about how I've sort of lost my way on my project and how I can find my way back. Ended up reading some more in one of the books I'm using as a source and thinking about how I could use it. And, overall, thinking about why I'm doing this. In the end, I think I'll keep working on it and see what I can do instead of giving up (again). So, onward and upward!

Summer's running out of steam project (Day Thirty-Four)

So as I mentioned yesterday, I took my son to his kindergarten graduation today. He's been doing remote learning this year. Today they had all the remote classes show up for an outdoor graduation, though the "ceremony" was held within the individual classes. But there were a lot of people there, especially for someone who saw (some of) his classmates only once before. I think we both ended up with sensory overload as a result, and took long naps after coming home. (I'm guessing this does not bode well for when I have to go back to teach on campus in the fall. By the end of the first day, you'll probably be able to find me curled up in a fetal position on the floor of my office...)

Anyway, that's all to say that I didn't work on my writing project today. But there's always tomorrow! (Until there isn't.)

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Three)

I printed out my draft today to take a look at it overall. Wendy Belcher recommends doing this in her book, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Particularly when you're trying to make sure that your argument is coming through, you should put the whole paper in front of you to figure out if what you're saying is clearly supporting your argument (and that you make it clear how your evidence supports your argument). Mine needs some work on that, I fear... 

More work on that tomorrow, after I attend my son's kindergarten graduation...

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Two): Looking for old Guoyu textbooks

Saw a guy on Twitter say that he read a bunch of articles to write a footnote that he'll probably end up deleting, and I thought, "I need to compete with this." So today I've been on that Taiwan eBook website looking for elementary school 國語 (Mandarin) textbooks. I've found a few, but not what I'm looking for (I'm mainly interested in first-grade texts to compare with that one I found a few days ago).

I found these books, though (among others):

• 初級小學適用國語第八冊 (for fourth grade, published Nov. 1946)
• Lesson One is "我們是中國的少年" (We are Chinese youth)
• Lesson Two is "怎樣做新台灣的少年" (How to be a new Taiwanese youth)
• After some chapters on Koxinga and Taiwan, there's this amazing lesson called "巷戰" (which I'd translate as "urban warfare"). I was reading it to my wife, and she couldn't believe how violent it was, especially for a fourth-grade textbook. Here are some samples: "Everyone is both nervous and excited; they see their dear commanders and brothers [comrades] one by one injured or killed, but they are not sad; they are full of passion [hot blood] to take revenge for their dead." Then there's stuff about a soldier blowing up the enemy but accidentally killing one of his comrades, which makes him both excited to have killed the enemy and sad to lose his friend. 
• 高級小學國語課本第二冊 (for fifth grade, published 1949)
• This has some interesting lessons about Chongqing and Wuhan (even though this is a book for students in Taiwan, it appears they're trying to make students care about the mainland). Also there's a lesson about 伊資 (who turns out to be James Eads), a self-taught engineer who built the first bridge across the Mississippi. The textbook's introduction mentions that they want to interest students in engineering among other things. (In keeping with the Three People's Principles, of course.)
• 初小國語教科書第二冊 (for second grade, 1938)--this text was actually for students in China, so I won't spend as much time on it right now)
• 初小國語教科書. v.1 (I'll look at this later, too)

I've also Googled around looking for some, but evidently I haven't found the right combination of keywords to get what I want. Did find this interesting blogpost: "那些年我們讀的教科書──紀台灣二次政黨輪替." Gotta keep an eye on this blog--unlike the last one I found, this one seems alive still. 

If anyone knows where I can find some books from a bit later--like the 1950s, I'd be grateful!

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-One)

Did make a small amount of progress on my paper today, but I do need to pick up speed if I'm going to finish a draft of this by the end of the month (or the end of the summer?!). Also sent an email explaining my topic for the conference presentation that I'll be doing next month, so I consider that part of my writing. (See Concurrent Session 5 on July 7 for the summary of our panel's topic.) Also had a small family medical issue today that took us away from home for a while. That's taken care of now, more or less.

Back to work tomorrow? I hope!

Next on my reading list

I'm sure my dear reader is dying to know which book I'm going to read now that I've finished A Son of Taiwan. I'm still working on John Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, but that's sort of leisure reading. (Sorry, Professor Shepherd!) I've decided to read Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China, by Hui-Ching Chang and Richard Holt (Routledge, 2014). I've read some of it before but never the whole book. 

And as I mentioned in a previous post, the book is notable (to me, anyway) for being a rhetorical study that is published in a Routledge series on Taiwan rather than rhetoric or communication. I was looking to see if Stephen Hartnett had cited it, and it appears he doesn't, which is odd since his book is also about the rhetoric of China-Taiwan(-US) relations. I would think that Chang and Holt's book would be quite relevant. One possible reason that it slipped through his radar is that, from what I can tell, the book has never been reviewed in any communications-related (or any other) journals. (I'm judging this from a search of my library database. If anyone can find any reviews of this book in a scholarly journal, please correct me.) I wonder why this book doesn't seem to have been reviewed. It also has been cited only 25 times, according to Google Scholar. Could it have fallen through the disciplinary cracks? 

(By the way, I really wish A World of Turmoil had a bibliography--it was very hard to check through its endnotes to see if Chang and Holt had been cited. Maybe in a future printing/edition?)

Summer reading and reflecting (Day Thirty)

For various reasons, I felt kind of down today--I'm getting frustrated with my writing project, and I was also sad to find out that a colleague was resigning. So I mostly did some reading today (except for when I was having a meeting with another colleague about how we are going to revise a course--that went well). I read four stories in A Son of Taiwan, one of the books I mentioned yesterday. Some of them deal with men who have come back after getting out of prison for political "crimes," and others appear to be more metaphorical takes on the White Terror period. One thing that I got from reading these stories (like Li Ang's "Auntie Tiger") was the feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time. As Li Ang writes in one place,

"It was an era of mad people and beggars. We did not witness the massacre, we did not see piled bodies or bloodstains, and even Third Uncle seldom passed on his tales. Our fear came from having been taught that one could not believe even what one witnessed, for there had to be a conspiracy by enemy spies." (130)

Li uses this idea to describe various rumors that spread about the Taiwanese Communist Xie Xuehong, who tried to lead a rebellion against the KMT in the wake of the 228 Massacres. The rumors (and Li's story) tie her strength and leadership--and mysteriousness--to her sexuality, which is also depicted as strong yet mysterious. As this is a work of fiction, however, I feel I have to read a biography to find out what is true about Xie. I have a biography written by Chen Fangming, but I haven't had time to read it yet. In the meantime, I can read the article by Ya-chen Chen about her that was listed in the Wikipedia references. It's about Li Ang's portrayal of Xie. 

One thing I wish the editors would have done with the book (besides proofreading it a bit better) was expand the introduction. I noticed that that they didn't include any publication dates for the stories, for instance. I'd like more information about the stories, particularly Ye Shitao's, which appears to be extracts from a longer work and is a little hard to follow. 

Two more stories to finish. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on my paper, too.

[Update, 6/12/21: I finished the book last night. A correction: The publication year for one of the stories, Lee Yu's "Nocturnal Strings," was given (1986).] 

Summer writing reading book-buying project (Day Twenty-Nine): New books in the former native speaker's library

A few more books have been added to my collection, which may come in handy as I do my writing. Two of them are from the "Literature from Taiwan Series," that is published by Cambria Press in collaboration with the National Human Rights Museum, National Taiwan Normal University, and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. (I want to visit those two museums once I get a chance to go back to Taiwan.) 

• A Son of Taiwan: Stories of Government Atrocity, ed. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin (2021)
• Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror, ed. Ian Rowen (2021)

These are obviously collections of short stories written during or reflecting on the White Terror period. 

The third book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, is a collection of essays by some major figures in and scholars of contemporary Taiwan:

• Taiwan's Struggle: Voices of the Taiwanese, ed. Shyu-tu Lee and Jack F. Williams (2014)

Hopefully I'll be able to dip into some of these books as I work on a couple of projects during the next few weeks before I have to start teaching again in July.

Summer writing reading project (Days Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight): Elegy of Sweet Potatoes

Let's just admit it. My mind is more on reading than it is on writing. Especially when I keep getting good books in the mail. Tuesday (Day Twenty-Seven) I got a copy of Tehpen Tsai's Elegy of Sweet Potatoes in the mail. I finished reading it today (Day Twenty-Eight). I think the last time I read a book this quickly was when I read A Pail of Oysters about 15 years ago. I think this book is about twice as long as Oysters, but like the former, it's highly readable and engaging. 

Shortly into the book I realized that "sweet potatoes" (plural) must refer to all of the young Taiwanese men who were caught up in the Chinese Nationalist Party's sweep of Communists, rebels, people with "wrong" thoughts, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and people who associated with the wrong people (who, in some cases, implicated them in illegal activities or thought crimes in order to extend their own lives). I realized that while Tehpen Tsai (lightly fictionalized as Youde Tsai) is the main character through whose eyes we see part of the White Terror period in 1950s Taiwan, the book is really about the "sweet potatoes" (again, plural), whose lives were for the most part destroyed by the KMT. It's also about their families who, while mostly staying in the background, show through in some scenes (such as at the beginning and end of the book when we see Tsai's family's reaction to his arrest and return), in the letters that the prisoners share with each other, and in the conversations the prisoners have about their families. One prisoner suggests that if he is ever sentenced, he will divorce his wife if the sentence is longer than 10 years so that she and their child can have a better life. Tsai's family shows up in some photographs, as well--the look of joy on the face of his wife, Panto, in the last photograph is particularly moving. 

The book is packed with details and people (I need a list of characters to help keep me straight, especially since some characters are called by more than one name). Although it's not an academic history, you get what feels like a first-hand experience of what it was like to be be imprisoned during the White Terror. (The pecking order for where the prisoners in the overcrowded cells--the newest prisoner usually had to stand next to the toilet--reminded me of Wang Wenqing's (王文清) story, 「獄中獄外的人生」published in 《秋蟬的悲鳴:白色恐怖受難文集》.) I was surprised by how much the prisoners were able to talk to each other in some of the prisons and by the fact that they were able to sing Japanese and even Communist songs while their fellow prisoners were being taken away to be executed.

An informative essay by Michael Cannings about the life of Tehpen Tsai also needs to be read to get a more complete understanding of Tsai and his story. It gives background to the historical period and more details about Tsai's life that are only touched upon in the book--particularly his life post-imprisonment.