Summer writing project (Day Twenty)

Writing a bit late. Just got off the phone with my brother, who is one of my best critics. We talked a LOT about my paper and its problems, and he helped me find ways of making it more doable. It's not as ambitious as I originally was making it, but I think that with his advice, I might be able to make a coherent and significant argument. Gotta get started on that later, though, as I have to go to bed now!

Summer writing project (Day Nineteen)

Spent quite a bit of time looking for a statistic in order to finish one relatively unimportant sentence in my draft. That's something that happens so often that academics are always tweeting about how they spent hours reading articles, searching for primary sources, etc., just to write one sentence. It's true, though. In my case, I put a note there and if I stumble across a usable statistic, I'll include it. Otherwise, I'll delete the sentence as it is not vital to my overall argument. 

I also wrote two emails today in which I described my project. This was pretty useful to me because it helped remind me of my main argument and the significance of my project. One of the emails was to someone not in academia, and the other was to someone who's in a different field in academia. I got a good response from the first person, but I haven't heard from the second one yet. We'll see...

I've been reading through my draft, and although there are holes in it, it's not as bad as I had thought. At some point, I should show it to someone to see what they think about it. First, though, I have to find someone who'd be willing to read it! Then I have to develop the courage to share it with them. ("The imposter syndrome is strong with this one...")

Summer writing project (Day Eighteen)

Sitting among my books today, looking at what all these scholars had accomplished--sometimes in languages that were their second or third language (I was looking at one book written in English by a Taiwanese scholar who got her PhD in Japan), I was feeling a bit down in the dumps. 

So I decided to spend some time freewriting to work out the "so what" of my argument. I have a decent introduction that lays out the argument, but I need to work on a conclusion that reemphasizes the significance of my "findings." So I did some work on that--more still needs to be done, of course, along with continued work trying to make sure the organization makes sense. Also some work is needed filling in gaps. 

I also am trying out Google Keep for note-taking. I haven't been satisfied with my current note-taking practices for a while, so I'm going to try this approach and see how it works. 

Summer writing project (Day Seventeen)

One of the things that has been perhaps getting in the way of my writing process (besides my allergies) is the current coronavirus surge in Taiwan. Since we have friends and family in Taiwan, we're quite concerned about what's happening, of course, and this sometimes results in paying too much attention to the minute-by-minute updates provided online and through 24-hour Taiwanese news stations that we are able to access.* I appreciate the daily updates on the situation provided by Brian Hioe at New Bloom magazine, but I realized last night that checking that first thing every morning was putting me out of the mood to write. 

So this morning I decided not to check the news (or even email) until after I had done some work. And it helped! I did some work on the paper, trying to make my argument clearer among all the details I've piled up (this is a problem I usually have--I tend to get stuck among the weeds too much in my writing). I might work on the paper some more later today, but right now am trying to keep my son's attention on his remote kindergarten class.

*I remember when the 921 earthquake happened in 1999, we were in Syracuse and there wasn't anywhere near the access to updated news that there is now. It's hard to believe, but there was no online streaming news video, the Taipei Times had just started its online version, and we could only watch about half an hour of news from Taiwan a day on cable.

Summer writing project (Day Sixteen); another new book in the former native speaker's library

I did some work on the paper today, though didn't achieve as much as I had hoped. I think I made the mistake of looking at the news first before getting into my work, which stressed out and depressed me. Note to self: Try getting into writing before reading the news!

I got a new book over the weekend, which was earlier than I expected to:

Stephen J. Hartnett, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War. Michigan State University Press, 2021.

I started skimming it right away, though. It looks like it'll be interesting and important in the field of rhetoric/communication studies as one of very few full-length books so far about Taiwan. I'll try to post more about it later as I read more of it. 

Summer writing project (Day Fifteen)

I'm writing earlier today because I get my second COVID shot later this morning, and I don't know what shape I'll be in after that. I got up early today and did some reading and writing. Before I went to bed last night, I got an idea (while I was brushing my teeth!) to use something I had presented at a conference about ... ummm... 19 years ago (!) in my paper. There's a portion that's relevant to what I'm working on. The only problem is that someone cited this portion of my paper in his book, so I don't know if I should cite my own paper or cite his citation of my paper... Maybe both. Wouldn't want to be accused of plagiarizing someone who was just paraphrasing something I wrote...

Otherwise, I spent some time going through my paper and adding in some ideas and stuff that I had deleted before. I'm reorganizing it, though, in keeping with my new outline. I hope it's making more sense now than it did before. We shall see...

I don't know if I'll be able to work on the paper over the weekend--it depends on my response to the vaccination. (See, as a writer, you have to deal with all these other things in life, too!)

Summer writing project (Day Fourteen)

Today I wrote an email to a colleague in which I briefly described my project in three sentences. I include that in here because my colleague is Taiwanese and from a different (but related) discipline, so I felt like trying to explain it to her is one way of clarifying in my mind what I'm actually trying to write about. 

Otherwise, I've been reading through Allen Chun's Forget Chineseness to see how he's approaching the idea of Chineseness. I think his approach might be more useful for my project than some others that I've seen. As Chun puts it, "To problematize Chineseness as constitutive of an ongoing historical framework, from a comparative perspective and within a transnational or glocal context, serves to problematize the nature of contexts that invoke Chineseness as an ethnic or cultural problem, among other things" (x). I've already read several of the articles that have been revised into chapters for this book, so I know that his approach and perspective are amenable to my own.

I also read a few reviews of his book from different scholarly journals. Sometimes I find that reading different reviews of a book before I get into the book itself helps me do several things: determine if the book is actually worth reading (either out of quality or relevance to my work or interests); get a sense of the structure and arguments of the book (I tend to get bogged down in detail both as a reader and as a writer); get an idea of some possible shortcomings of the book that I might not notice on my own. Since I don't plan on reading the whole book at this point, the reviews can also help me pinpoint areas of use to me that I might not have noticed from looking at the index or reading the contents page or introduction.

Some people might feel that this is "cheating" or that it will bias my perspective toward the book, but I think this kind of "lateral reading" is worthwhile, not just for websites or memes, but also for published work. Particularly because Chun's book is not in my discipline, I find it helpful to get "insiders'" perspectives on it before I consider reading and citing it in more depth. And while I can keep their points of view in mind as I read from the book, I don't have to accept their conclusions if I find they're different from my own views.

If you're curious, here are the reviews of Chun's book that I read (sorry for the different citation formats and the Northeastern proxies):

• Justin Wu (2019) Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 49:2, 335-337, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2018.1562561
• Gillette, Maris B. 2018. "Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification." Pacific Affairs 91(4):783-786 (https://link.ezproxy.neu.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/scholarly-journals/on-geopolitics-cultural-identification/docview/2166930477/se-2?accountid=12826). 
• Li, Yao-Tai. “Book Review: Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification.” Cultural Sociology 11, no. 4 (December 2017): 540–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975517731079c.
• Carrico, K. (2017). Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification Allen Chun New York: SUNY Press, 2017 xii 284 pp. $95.00 ISBN 978-1-4384-6471-8. The China Quarterly, 232, 1116–1117. http://doi.org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1017/S0305741017001436

Summer writing project (Day Thirteen)

Today wasn't a very productive day, I must admit, despite having a new direction with my introduction. I worked a bit on that, but the problem with introductory anecdotes or "opening vignettes" (besides the fact that Jonathan Dresner seems to hate them) is that there's this battle between making the anecdote complete, making it concise, and and making it relevant. Sometimes some of these are easier to achieve than the other, but right now, the anecdote I thought would be good is turning out to require a lot of work to make it all three. For instance, here's my opening paragraph so far.

In late 2015, Chou Tzu-yu, a 16-year-old Taiwanese member of the K-pop group Twice, was accused of being an advocate for Taiwan independence for holding a flag of the Republic of China (Taiwan) during a television program. After expressions of outrage from Chinese netizens, her management company released a video of a contrite Chou apologizing for her “improper behavior” (Denyer and Xu). One of the ironies of this incident is that the flag she was shown with was for years associated with the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Republic of China, and has only recently been embraced as a symbol of Taiwan. That is, for most of its history, the flag has represented the Republic of China, even when the actual territory controlled by the Republic of China shrank to eventually include only Taiwan and its outlying islands. In that sense, the flag Chou held was a Chinese flag rather than a Taiwanese flag, and the real controversy was over which version of Chinese identification (PRC vs. ROC) was legitimate.

Ignoring the fact that I'm not sure I even believe that last sentence, my problem is how well this will introduce my real topic. Can you guess what my paper is going to be about from that introductory anecdote? Maybe I should go back to my original introduction, which, while a bit duller, is at least more relevant.

Summer writing project (Days Eleven and Twelve)

Knew I forgot something yesterday...

These past two days have been somewhat uncomfortable (high pollen counts) but also helpful. I worked out an outline (again) to help keep me on track, and I came up with another idea for the introduction, though I have to work out the details.

Tonight I attended a webinar run by the University of California at Santa Barbara's Center for Taiwan Studies. It was a discussion of historiography of Taiwan; the speakers were Chang Lung-chih, Leo Ching, and Seiji Shirane. It was very educational to learn how historians of Taiwan are approaching the study of Taiwan's history in dialogue with the histories of the region and other parts of the world (such as the Caribbean). I missed the other "Taiwan Talks" sessions this year, but I hope they continue them next year now that they're on my map!

Summer writing project (Day Ten)

I didn't write much of anything today, but I finished reading Evan Dawley's book, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s to 1950s. I learned quite a bit from it, and I like how his focus on the development of one city through the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist periods is tied to the formation of a Taiwanese ethnic identity and also to other trends and related histories, such as the disparate histories of social work in Japan, China, and Taiwan and the various stances toward and uses of religion in these three places. Social work and religion have been two areas of Taiwanese culture that I've never given enough attention to, but this book helped me to see that I need to explore them more. 

My main reason for reading the book was to see if it could help me in my current writing project, and I think it will. I'm not going to go into detail about it at this point, but I think I can draw from this book some examples that pertain to rhetoric, so I think I will work them into my paper. We'll see how it goes. 

I'm trying to decide now which book I should read next. I think I'll read Bi-yu Chang's Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan next, though I will have to see if I should read through the whole book or just focus on some of the chapters. I might also dip more into Faye Yuan Kleeman's Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. And maybe also Allen Chun's Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification, which also might be relevant. I've read some of the articles from which Chun's book developed, but I want to see what might have changed from the previously published versions of his chapters. 

Oh, and I suppose I should do some writing, too, in the midst of all this reading and skimming. I wouldn't want that the only written product that grows out of all this work is a bunch of blog posts about my writing/reading process...

See you Monday!

Summer writing project (Days Eight and Nine)

Neglected to post anything here yesterday. Not much to say, though, for yesterday or today except that my hay fever is keeping me from being able to think clearly. I'm almost finished reading Becoming Taiwanese, and I've been picking up some good ideas from the book that I can cite in my paper. Will try to work tomorrow...

Summer writing project (Day Seven)

Today wasn't a good day for writing for me--my hay fever (and the medicine I take for it!) had me lethargic and foggy-brained all day. I did some reading in Becoming Taiwanese as well as a bit of Faye Yuan Kleeman's Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. Chapter 6 of her book covers language policy in Japan and colonial Taiwan. Some of this is also covered in Eika Tai's 1999 article, "Kokugo and Colonial Education in Taiwan." Gareth Price also discusses some similar points in his book, Language, Society, and the State: From Colonization to Globalization in Taiwan. I'm curious about what they have to say about how proficient Taiwanese were in the Japanese language by the end of the Japanese colonial period.

Price, citing A-chin Hsiau, says that by 1944, 80% of Taiwanese were proficient in Japanese. As he notes, though, "this must be taken with some caution; the Japanese would have had political motives for inflating the extent of assimilation to convince both themselves and their Taiwanese subjects of its success and, as we shall see, colonial authorities constructed political and socio-economic incentives for residents to claim Japanese proficiency" (p. 126). Kleeman says that by 1941, 57% of Taiwanese "could comprehend Japanese" (p. 142). Tai also cites the 57% number and notes, as Kleeman does, that this number doesn't mean that these people were fluent or proficient in Japanese. As Tai notes, for instance, "in the streets of Taiwanese cities, where Japanese needed to communicate with local Taiwanese who spoke little Japanese, these two groups of people together invented a pidgin Japanese in which Japanese words were put together in a Taiwanese order" (p. 129). Kleeman also gives examples of how the reality of Japanese usage differed from the image provided by that 57% number.

Anyway, back to work on my paper tomorrow, assuming my allergies don't knock me out again.

Summer writing project (Day Six)

I did actually end up doing a little writing over the weekend--mostly on Saturday, and it mostly consisted of putting back some material that I had taken out on Day Three. But I think I've put it in in a way that's more connected to my overall argument. I added some more today (though not as much as I'd like to). I'm skimming through some books and looking for another to look up some citations. More of that tomorrow...

Summer writing project (Day Five)

So today I didn't wake up early enough, but I did have a productive meeting with my colleagues in my faculty mentoring circle, "How to Get Published." We were talking about our goals for the summer and the hurdles we have to overcome, and without getting into too much detail, I'll just say they gave me some good advice and reminders about how I should be thinking about this whole process of academic writing and publishing. 

I was also reminded that I have another summer writing project--a presentation for a conference in July! I need to get some work done on that, too! It's on a completely different topic, but I've presented on something related to it before, so maybe it won't be too hard to do.

I'm not going to write these updates on the weekends--I'll give you a break! See you Monday!

Summer writing project (Day Four)

A little late on writing this. Apologies to all my reader.

I did get up earlier today, but I only got a paragraph written. Not much, huh? Maybe I'll pick up speed on it soon. 

Meanwhile, I read more of Becoming Taiwanese for inspiration. Back to work tomorrow!

"Now what enemies do we have?"

In the third chapter of Becoming Taiwanese, Evan N. Dawley goes into some depth discussing a Lunar New Year banner hung in the Jilong Customs Assimilation Association (基隆同風會) meeting hall in 1935. The purpose of the Customs Assimilation Association (CAA) was to promote the assimilation of Japan's Taiwanese subjects to Japanese culture, though there was less a sense, at least at the time the CAA was established, of a need to eradicate all non-Japanese practices than there was a kind of negotiation between local practices and the norms of the Japanese metropole. For instance, Dawley notes that a "mild critique" of local religious festivals is "couched in a Confucian morality that must have been familiar to Jilong's islanders" (151). 

The banner at the CAA building is another such negotiation, according to the author. After translating the couplets on the banner, one of which reads, "With the same sentiments and origins, we enforce military preparations and encourage culture and learning, why should we fear that our enemies will run wild?" (154), Dawley argues that the couplets represent a negotiation between "their Chinese heritage and their accommodations to Japanese rule" (155). Going into more depth about the reference to "enemies," he writes, 

The reference to "enemies" (hu'er [胡兒]), a term with an ancient application to supposedly uncivilized groups beyond the state's borders, was [155||156] perhaps the most telling statement of their independent consciousness. On one level was the question of just who these enemies were. Just across the Taiwan Strait lay Republican China, where the central government did not have firm control over all of the provinces, but the centralizing regime at times threatened Japanese interests; to the north of the area under Nationalist Chinese rule lay Manchuria, an ancient homeland for China's enemies, including some historical hu'er, where the Japanese Army ran a puppet state through the last Manchu emperor and challenged Chinese sovereignty. Which group corresponded to the enemies who might run wild? At no time had [local Jiling elites] Yan and Xu overtly displayed the sort of anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism that flourished across the strait and motivated the "half-mountain people" (banshanren) who left Taiwan to fight Japan in China. They would certainly not have risked referring to Manchukuo as an enemy in the presence of Government-General representatives. It is more likely that both the ongoing fragmentation in China and the potential danger of a more unified nation under Nationalist control sparked the metaphor, but even so the message did not favor expansion, since these enemies gave no real cause for concern. Yan and Xu subtly challenged those who saw Taiwan as a bastion for further imperial conquest, and they did so by relying on an old Chinese worldview of external threats, and on the language of literary Chinese, which connected them to their cultural background rather than to contemporary Japanese nationalism. (155-6)

I like Dawley's interpretation of the rhetoric of "enemies" in the couplet. I hadn't heard of the term hu'er before; when I looked it up, another thought occurred to me. I saw that one of the definitions of the term notes, "清 末 民 初泛用為對外國人的蔑稱" (meaning that hu'er was used at the end of the Qing and the beginning of the Republican period to refer more generally to foreigners). I wonder if Japanese were ever called hu'er...

This couplet reminded me, too, of another place where I saw "enemies" referred to: in a sixth-grade Guoyu textbook lesson from 1956. In this lesson about a Chinese war hero named Yan Haiwen, "the enemy" is never referred to by name, just by the appellation, "the enemy" (in this case, using the term diren [敵人]). At the end of the lesson, students are asked, "Who was China's enemy at that time? Now what enemies do we have?" In the textbook, the writers are vague about the identity of the enemy in order to force students to emphasize that the Japanese were the enemy of China at that time, and then through the second question, to identify with China by answering the question about the enemies "we" have now. For Taiwanese sixth-graders in 1956, whose older relatives (including siblings or parents) might have served the Japanese military in some way, to be associated with "China's enemy" in their Guoyu class must have been traumatic. 

Summer writing project (Day Three)

Overslept this morning, so I didn't make much headway on my project so far. One thing I did decide to do, though, was to save my work as a new file and then delete everything after the (somewhat long) introduction I mentioned yesterday. I did that because I felt that the current draft, a lot of which came from a 2005 conference paper and a chapter from my dissertation, was no longer reflecting what (I think) I'm trying to do. So I decided instead to start from scratch. I can always go back to previous drafts to copy relevant parts into the new version when necessary. 

Right now I'm reading Evan N. Dawley's book, Becoming Taiwanese. I just finished the third chapter, in which Dawley explores how social organizations in Jilong mediated between the residents of Jilong (both islanders and Japanese settlers) and the shifting approaches the Japanese colonial government was taking toward Taiwan. He ends the chapter with the suggestion that it's in the context of the 1930s-era push for assimilation in the expanding (and increasingly intolerant) Japanese empire that we can begin to see "Taiwanese" "as an ethnic group that obtained cohesion and sought survival within the confines of the Japanese Empire" (160). 

Anyway, back to work...

Summer writing project (Day Two)

I was up a bit late last night, so I woke up a little later than I had planned. Last night, there was a panel discussion online about the Diaoyutai movement of 1971, and I wanted to tune into that. It turns out they recorded it, so it might end up on their website at some point in the future. There were some "old veterans" of the movement who talked: Liu Ta-jen (劉大任), Chang Hsi-kuo (張系國),  and Shaw Yu-ming (邵玉銘). There were also some scholars who discussed their research on the movement. Chang couldn't stay for long because he had a heart operation today(!). I wish him the best!

So to my writing--yesterday I was complaining about my introduction, which was not taking me in the direction I was hoping to go. This morning I found a way to cut to the chase and get the introduction to where I wanted it to be. The problem, though, is that my introduction is about 1165 words, which is almost 1/6 of the maximum length of the paper (the journal I hope to send this to requires articles to be at most 7500 words). So I will probably have to cut that introduction down at some point. But first I need to get the paper written; then I can decide how it needs to be cut down. Wish me luck!

Summer writing project (Day One)

During the past year, I joined a group at my school that was working on writing research articles. We were using the book, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks by Wendy Belcher to help us through the process. One thing we liked about the book is that it's actually more realistic than its title suggests--for me, the 12 weeks has stretched out into something closer to 36 weeks and counting. 

I also found that I wasn't able to keep up with the writing, so I'm now coming back to my paper after a two-month hiatus. (Sorry, Dr. Belcher!) I have a couple of months to work on it before I have to start teaching again (I have a class to teach starting in early July), so I'm going to try to see if I can finish a solid draft by then. First step is to remind myself of what I was writing about!

I reread my introduction draft this morning and was excited at what I was working on, though at the same time I feel as though the introduction is taking me in a different direction than I was originally thinking. That is, it seems to be introducing a different paper from the one I thought I was working on. I'm now considering what I should do about that. One part of me wants to continue on this introduction and see where it takes me, but another part of me wants to go back to the draft of the body of the paper (which is a bit of a mess) and see how I can work my way from there back to a more suitable introduction. Probably I'd have to rewrite the body as part of that process, but I'll have to do that anyway. 

If I did the latter, I suppose I could keep the first introduction for another paper. I like it, though, and at least part of it seems relevant to what I plan to write about for this paper, but I'm not sure how to tame it to get it to move me to where I want to be. 

Well, this is the first day of the summer writing project, so I guess it's OK if I am working through these kinds of questions at this "early" stage.

I'll try to continue with these vague blog posts on my writing process throughout the summer. At least it might force me to keep getting up early and doing some writing.