Wu, Shu-hui. Lien Heng (1878-1936): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition. Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 2005.
This isn't going to be a formal review of Wu's biography of Lien Heng. There are two published reviews that I have found:
- Harrison, Mark. Review of Lien Heng (1878-1836): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition, by Shu-hui Wu. The China Quarterly, vol. 187, 2006, pp. 800-802. https://doi.org/10.1017/S030574100639042X
- Salát, Gergely. Review of Lien Heng (1878-1836): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition, by Shu-hui Wu. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 66, no. 3, 2013, pp. 488-489. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43282533
My own thoughts about the book are mixed but generally good. I appreciated how Wu put Lien's life in the context of his times in Taiwan and China. For instance, her discussion of Lien's attitude toward vernacularization of writing relates his perspectives toward both the issue as it was being debated in China (by such people as Hu Shih, Liu Shih-p'ei, and Huang K'an) and how it was being taken up in Taiwan, considering Taiwan's status as a Japanese colony at the time. Lien appears to have viewed pai-hua-wen (白話文, vernacular writing, or "Plain language," as Wu translates it) in Taiwan as combining with the Japanese Kokugo policy to cut off Taiwanese people from their roots. As Wu writes, "Lin Shu and others [in China] promoted classical Chinese to counter the New Culture Movement; Lien Heng called for its preservation to save the Chinese identity in Taiwan" (p. 198).
Wu also gives a good sense of the social and intellectual circles in which Lien Heng moved. Having lived in Taichung for 16 years, I was particularly interested to read about Lien's trips there. He stayed at Lai Yuan (萊園), Lin Hsien-t'ang's (林獻堂) mansion in Wufeng, during treatment for a stomach problem. Lien and his family also stayed in Taichung for 4 years at Lin Tzu-piao's* mansion, Juei-hsüan (瑞軒), near/at Taichung Park. (The Lins eventually donated it to become Taichung Park, according to Wikipedia.)
I was also interested in Wu's description of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao's (梁啟超)'s visit to Taiwan in 1911, particularly in how Liang and Lien communicated with each other. According to Wu, the two (and others who were present during Liang's visit) couldn't communicate with each other orally because they spoke different languages (she doesn't use the term "language" to describe Liang's Kwangtungese and Lien's Taiwanese). They didn't even try to use Japanese to communicate, even though Lien had taught himself the language (though I'm not sure if he taught himself spoken Japanese or just written Japanese). Wu writes, curiously, that "[o]bviously, Liang had not learned to speak Japanese, although he had lived in Japan for more than ten years" (p. 109). I'm not sure why that's "obvious," but maybe their lack of interest in speaking Japanese had something to do with nationalism--not wanting to communicate in the colonizer's language.** They communicated with each other by writing notes (and lots of poems!) in classical Chinese. I wonder what that might have looked like...
The number and topics of poems that Wu mentions Lien and others writing was also interesting to me; it reminded me of something Ron Scollon wrote in a 1997 TESOL Quarterly article on contrastive rhetoric. Discussing the need for a "contrastive poetics" that would take into account genres and the history of genres, Scollon cited Jonathan Spence's comment that some poems from the Tang Dynasty might be comparable to British memos from the twentieth century
as in each case the functional placement of the text is as an officially placed critique of the policies of authorities in higher positions. Such a comparison would depend on first making a linguistic, cultural, epoch-internal contrast among information, critical, and expressive genres in government and official social contexts. (p. 354)
While the poems of Lien Heng and others mentioned in Wu's book weren't necessarily comparable to governmental memos, they do arguably function in broader ways than people in the US might think of if we generally think of poems in terms of creative literary expression.
Wu also discusses Lien's bookstore in Taipei in the context of bookstores in Taiwan during the Japanese period. I had not known about the challenges that Taiwanese had importing books from China during that period. To quote some detail from Wu:
The colonial administrators had an extensive network designed to control Taiwanese thought and they exercised this without consulting the constitution of their home government. Especially onerous was the rigid control of the sale of books. When books arrived from China, they were subjected to censorship at the customs house. Those books belonging to restricted categories (chin-shu) were removed from their packages and confiscated. Usually, the loss from each order was around thirty to sixty percent. Worse was that the restriction standards changed constantly. Very often books became illegal after the bookstores had sent in their orders and it was too late to inform the publishers in China because the goods had already been shipped. It took months for the books to travel to Taiwan. Sometimes customs would pull only one or two volumes from a multi-volume set and make the entire collection impossible to sell. The biggest threat to a bookstore owner was the unexpected inspections conducted by the police. The owner would be fined and imprisoned for several days or weeks if he violated the law, even if his store just held books in storage that were on the new banned list. Chiang Wei-shui's store was often monitored by the secret police because of his political and social activities. (pp. 254-255)
A webpage about bookstores in Taiwan mentions that during the Japanese period, there were only about 30 bookstores in colonial Taiwan. Taichung's Central Bookstore (中央書局) was one of those; the Wikipedia article about the store, which opened up in 1927 (around the same time Lien's store opened), says that at that time, it was the first bookstore in Central Taiwan specializing in importing Chinese and Japanese books and magazines and was also the largest Chinese bookstore in Taiwan. It ran into trouble after the Mukden Incident of 1931.
A couple of critiques: Harrison and Salát fault Wu's book for not discussing some personal aspects of Lien's life in more detail--they both comment on his extramarital affairs that Wu only briefly mentions: Salát, to suggest that Wu could present a more well-rounded (and critical) perspective on Lien; Harrison, to suggest that Lien's relationship with a Taiwanese geisha would open more than "a glimpse into Taiwan's rich social world of the period" (p. 802). I agree with both of these points.
The final section of the book, which summarizes and analyzes Lien's most famous work, The General History of Taiwan (台灣通史), is sometimes hard to follow. While Wu brings in other sources to supplement (and sometimes correct) the narrative that Lien wrote, I found it difficult sometimes to distinguish between Wu's summary of Lien and the additions/corrections she was providing. The section has extensive citations, but it was still not always clear.
Finally, I have to mention that the book could have used some copyediting; the frequent grammatical issues generally don't cause confusion in terms of meaning, but combined with the many typographical issues that a copy editor should have caught, they are very distracting. (In one instance, in what might have been an "autocorrect" error, the book mentions the Ch'ing government's "energetic policy of 'signification'" [p. 355], which should read "sinification"--quite a different meaning!)
Overall, though, I am glad I read this book. Not only did I learn a lot from it, but it has given me some directions for future reading and investigation (such as the history of bookstores and publishing in Taiwan).
*I admit I cannot find reference to Lin Tzu-piao online, so I'm not sure what character "piao" would be here.
** [Update, 11/4/22: Judging from Joshua Fogel's essay about Liang Qichao and Japan, Liang was able to read Japanese and translated Japanese works (themselves translations of works in Western languages) into Chinese. Fogel writes, intriguingly, that
For Liang, the Japanese language was little different from Cantonese. Both were rooted, he believed, in an ancient literary language, wenyan, which had served both countries (and Korea and Vietnam, it should be added) for many centuries. The Hewen Han dufa (Reading Japanese the Chinese way), a contemporary work offering easy access to Japanese for readers of Chinese, was an all-important text for Liang. It not only enabled him to gain quick entry into contemporary Japanese writings and translations; it also substantiated the notion that Japanese could be read as if it were a topolect of Chinese. (249-250)
From Joshua A. Fogel, "Introduction: Liang Qichao and Japan." Between China and Japan: The Writings of Joshua Fogel, Brill, 2015. 242-252. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004285309_017
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