Sunday, December 31, 2023

Some new books in the former native speaker's library

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

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

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

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Mark Mancall oral history recording

I was about to email Mark Mancall to ask him a question about George Kerr, but I was saddened to find out that he passed away in 2020. Dr. Mancall was a brilliant and thoughtful man--I had a chance to talk to him once back in 2017.

Linked to the obituary is an oral history interview of Mancall. I'm listening to it now where he's talking about his experience studying with John King Fairbank. At around 10 minutes, he talks about how when he was student teaching at Harvard, Fairbank would stand in the back of the classroom and imitate him! Fairbank also made Mancall chop wood. (Beginning to sound like Mr. Miyagi...)

[I revised the first paragraph--my original seemed a bit insensitive in phrasing. My apologies!]

Monday, November 27, 2023

Notes on Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan

Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation. Lexington Books, 2017.

A while back (OK, it was over three years ago--how the time flies!), I was asking some questions about sajiao (撒嬌) and Taike (台客) in response to an article on Taiwanese communication modes by Todd Sandel. This book by Hsin-i Sydney Yueh goes a long way towards answering those questions (and questions I didn't even know I had) about the these two Taiwanese concepts. As usual, here I'm not so much giving a formal review of the book as I am noting down some thoughts and questions that I have after reading it. (I'll link to some reviews below.)

Here are the two questions I had: 

Is sajiao, which Sandel characterizes as a practice "associated with 'Mainlanders,'" not practiced as much by non-Mainlander Taiwanese? Is it practiced much in China? 

Have the concepts of hen Tai (很台) and Taike (台客) become points of pride for Taiwanese? 

From what I got from Yueh's book, sajiao, which she describes as "embod[ying] a set of communicative acts that express the vulnerability and helplessness of the actor through imitating a child's immature behavior" (2), is not so much a Mainlander-vs.-Taiwanese (or waishengren vs. benshengren) phenomenon as it is a Northern Taiwan (specifically Taipei) vs. Southern Taiwan (south of Taipei, I guess) phenomenon. That is to say, sajiao seems to be most successfully performed by Taipei residents and appears to be connected to what Yueh characterizes as "Taipei Chic." Taipei Chic represents a form of cultural capital characteristic of how people in Taipei are represented in the media (especially talk shows)--as "urban, fashionable, and middle-class" people with "standard" Mandarin accents (144-145). This is placed in opposition to Taike and Taimei, which present a "local, rural, and working-class ... image" (144). Taike and Taimei (Yueh focuses on Taimei because she's interested in Taipei Chic vs. Taimei when it comes to women performing sajiao) appear to be from southern Taiwan and usually speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent. According to the media representations of Northerners and Southerners that Yueh cites, being able to sajiao is not part of Southern Taiwanese women's repertoire. 

It should be noted, as Yueh points out, that not all people who embody "Taipei Chic" are originally from Taipei, but that it's more of a style of behavior and speaking that one has to learn in order to "pass" as a Taipei person. It should also be noted that not all Taipei people (women) can be "Taipei Chic." as Yueh puts it, 

The Taipei Chic female's uniqueness lies in a constructed scarcity, in comparison to other Taiwanese (such as taike, and taimei). According to these talk shows, people who live in Taipei are not automatically Taipei Chic. In other words, the geographic location is not sufficient to fulfill the Taipei Chic image. The Taipei Chic identity is a collective standard, aiming to discern the non-Taipei Chic and expel any such people from the group. Many people who have not obtained the ticket ot enter the group strive to become more similar to Taipei Chic. (155)

In answer to my second question, Yueh's book suggests that while the idea of identifying as Taike can be a point of pride for men, women identified as Taimei--at least ones who show up on talk shows--don't necessarily appreciate that appellation, though this appears to be true mainly in contexts where the concept or term is used by Taipei people to judge people from the south. 

Something that Yueh doesn't mention (at least not that I remember) is that, as I understand it, Taipei's population is more "mainlander-dense" than the southern parts of Taiwan. In that sense, it seems to me that the adulation of Taipei Chic and the deprecation of Taike and Taimei might have some of its roots in the historical waishengren perspective on benshengren that the martial law government encouraged (or perhaps instigated). Sandel suggests this in the article I mentioned above, when he associates sajiao with Mainlanders. (At some point I need to read this review of Yueh's book by 莊佳穎, who brings up the Taiwanese concept of sai-nai [司奶] and compares it to Yueh's discussion of sajiao--h/t to Shao-wei Huang for sending me a copy of that article!)

Another point that interested me about Yueh's book was her last chapter, which moves the discussion of sajiao, Taipei Chic, and Taimei from a more interpersonal and mediatized domestic context to the larger context of what these phenomena have to say about Taiwanese identity in relation to Asia. She extends the interpersonal to the political, arguing that elements of sajiao practice have become part of domestic democratic politics in Taiwan. For instance, "Taiwan's political campaigns are full of cute marketing" (173). We see examples of this now, with vice-presidential candidate Hsiao Bi-khim calling herself a "cat warrior" and arguably even former presidential candidate Terry Gou using a "cute" English slogan "Good Timeing," which sounds similar to his Chinese name, Guo Taiming 郭台銘, (not sure why he kept the "e" in "Timeing"--maybe that makes it cuter?). 

Yueh also casts Taiwan's role in world politics in terms of a sajiao position, suggesting that Taiwan's relative weakness in comparison to China could lead to a a re-situating of Taiwan "as a small entity in terms of the global civic society" rather than a part of a "cultural China framework" (174). She suggests that Taiwan could be treated and studied in a transnational Asian context, which would remove the historical burden that Taiwan had during the Cold War to represent "Chinese culture" to the world. 

There's a lot more going on in this book than my notes here might suggest, so I'd of course recommend reading it to see what I've missed!

I didn't find many reviews of the book, but here are a couple of links in addition to the review I mentioned above:

  • Thoughts on Sajiao (by Kerim Friedman)
  • A review in the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (by Amélie Keyser-Verreault) (will download directly)

Friday, November 24, 2023

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

I mentioned this book in a previous post as a "future book" in my library, and now it has arrived. 

Wendy Cheng, Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023)

Here's the summary of the book from the website:
Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s. Often depicted as compliant model minorities, many were in fact deeply political, shaped by Taiwan's colonial history and influenced by the global social movements of their times. As activists, they fought to make Taiwanese people visible as subjects of injustice and deserving of self-determination. 
Under the distorting shadows of Cold War geopolitics, the Kuomintang regime and collaborators across US campuses attempted to control Taiwanese in the diaspora through extralegal surveillance and violence, including harassment, blacklisting, imprisonment, and even murder. Drawing on interviews with student activists and extensive archival research, Wendy Cheng documents how Taiwanese Americans developed tight-knit social networks as infrastructures for identity formation, consciousness development, and anticolonial activism. They fought for Taiwanese independence, opposed state persecution and oppression, and participated in global political movements. Raising questions about historical memory and Cold War circuits of power, Island X is a testament to the lives and advocacy of a generation of Taiwanese American activists.

As Cheng points out at the beginning, the book takes its name from the way that Taiwan was identified by US Navy Intelligence during World War Two, when, as George Kerr describes in Formosa Betrayed, there were plans to "island-hop" from Taiwan to invade Japan. (As I recall, Kerr says that those plans were scuttled mainly because MacArthur wanted to keep his promise to the Philippines that "I shall return.") I'll be interested to see what connections Cheng makes between the "Island X" plans and "Taiwanese student migrants, campus spies, and Cold War activism." 

I want to see how this book supplements some of what I've already read about Taiwanese independence activists in American universities in books like 《一門留美學生的建國故事》, edited by 張炎憲 and 曾秋美, and parts of 《一個家族·三個時代:吳拜和他的子女們》by 吳宏仁. I see that Cheng hasn't used either of those books, though she does cite Wang Chih-ming's Transpacific Articulations, which I've read parts of.

Not sure when I'll get to reading this, though, since I have a lot of reading and writing to do before the end of my "sabbatical" and courses to prepare for next semester...

 [Update, 11/25: I noticed that although Cheng doesn't cite Wu Hung-jen's book, she does cite an essay written by Suy-ming Chou (周烒明), the husband of Grace Wu Chou (吳秀慧), who is Wu Hung-jen's aunt. The Chous were part of the Formosan independence movement at the University of Wisconsin and lost their Taiwanese (ROC) passports as a result.] 

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

To watch: Sayaka Chatani on "Ideology and Emotions: Rural Youth Mobilization in Colonial Taiwan"

This is another video I want to watch. Prof. Chatani has done some really interesting historical work on youth and emotions in modern East Asia. (I used to enjoy reading her blog, "Prison Notebooks," but it looks like it is no longer around...)


Here's the summary/abstract for the talk:
By the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of young men in colonial Taiwan had expressed their loyalty to the empire by volunteering to join the army. Why and how did so many colonial youth become passionate supporters of Japanese imperial nationalism? This talk will discuss shifting socioeconomic conditions, aspirations, and emotions experienced by village youth in Xinzhu Province to examine the process of mobilization. Through carefully reading and interpreting village and personal sources and oral interviews, it shows how the global rise of youth and agrarian ideals, Japan's imperial drive for assimilation, and local social tensions shaped these youth's worldviews and experiences. This process reveals Japan's ambition to build an empire-wide nation (or what I call nation-empire), and the local receptions of that imperial endeavor. 

Saturday, November 18, 2023

To watch: Allen Chun lecture on YouTube

As I mourn the waning days of my "sabbatical" and the feeling that I haven't achieved as much as I should, I'm distracting myself by reading up on some things that might help me figure out the conclusion of the paper I'm working on. (So technically, that's probably not a distraction.) I came across notes on a 2018 lecture by Allen Chun, author of a book I'm finding useful--Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification. I tried to find the lecture, whimsically entitled "Forget Allen Chun," on YouTube, but it's evidently not available. 

I did come across this 2023 lecture by Chun at ANU, which I intend to watch when I get a chance.

Here's the abstract of the lecture:

Social Visibility and Political Invisibility: The Ethnography of a School in Nationalist Taiwan

Beginning as a year-long ethnography of a school in Taiwan in 1990, it provides a concrete point of departure and framework of political-cultural practice for understanding the historical evolution of a system of socialization that resides at the basis of an ongoing process of national identification. This process of national identification has roots in cultural ideology as shaped by changing Nationalist policy and practice to the present. 1990 is also a crucial juncture for viewing a transition from a sinocentric politicizing regime to a Taiwanizing one. My analysis of the school in time and practice, both in the context of education as curriculum and social organization, establishes in my opinion a different critical perspective on contemporary Taiwan. At the same time, it serves as a new paradigm for critical ethnography in cultural studies.

I am interested in this because of its content, of course, but also because I was briefly in Taiwan in 1990 and then returned for a longer (7-year) stay in 1992. (At some point during that period, I did get a chance to hear a talk by Chun at the Academia Sinica, I believe it was. I don't remember his topic, but I remember that he cited Johannes Fabian.) I'll comment on the talk after I've had a chance to view it. 

Update, a few minutes later: OK, where's the talk? This is only the question-and-answer session. Strange...

Monday, November 06, 2023

Question re: "The China Tiffin Club of San Francisco and Bay Area"

I love to run into these kinds of puzzles, but this one has me stumped. I came across a letter written by John H. Falge from The China Tiffin Club of San Francisco and Bay Area, thanking George Kerr for speaking at the Club on Feb. 23, 1950. (A funny part of his praise of the talk: "The points you developed stood out prominently because the talk was just the right length.") 

I'm guessing that Falge is the same person buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  He was evidently in the Navy during WWI, according to these documents that mention him. (In fact, here's a picture of him and his fellow officers of the USS. Wadsworth.) 

Anyway, my point is not so much to find out more about Commander Falge as it is to find out about the China Tiffin Club of San Francisco and Bay Area. Right now Google gives me only one result for "China Tiffin Club of San Francisco," and it's for a 1954-1955 membership directory. To quote the description (in case this page disappears):

From inside front cover: "A purely social Tiffin Club where former residents of the Orient meet to renew old friendships, made 'somewhere east of Suez' and cherished forever."Contains: List of officers Introduction Members List of guest speakers 1952-1955 Constitution and by-laws List of other similar clubsFrom a meeting announcement in the 1/22/1959 Daily Independent Journal newspaper, San Rafael, CA:"Members of the club are 'old China hands,' who meet each month to renew old friendships, eat Chinese food and hear informal talks on the Orient..."

My question is, what is a Tiffin Club (purely social or otherwise)? 

[Update, 11/8/23: Well, to answer my own question, when I looked up "Tiffin" on Wikipedia, I found out that it's a kind of small mid-afternoon meal or snack, kind of like British teatime. the article says this about the etymology of the term:

In the British Raj, tiffin was used to denote the British custom of afternoon tea that had been supplanted by the Indian practice of having a light meal at that hour.[4] It is derived from "tiffing", an English colloquial term meaning to take a little drink. By 1867 it had become naturalised among Anglo-Indians in northern British India to mean luncheon.[5]

So my guess is that the China Tiffin Club is/was a kind of a lunch club whose members were "former residents of the Orient," as mentioned above. Question answered!]

Wednesday, November 01, 2023

Another attempt at National Academic Writing Month

I think the last time I really thought about National Academic Writing Month was back in 2016. As I said back then, I didn't think November was a good month for focusing on academic writing, especially if you're a college teacher in the US. For me, there is always the combined pressure of reading and commenting on student work and the Thanksgiving holiday toward the end of the month, leading up to the end of the semester. 

This year is a bit different because I'm not teaching this semester, so I should be able to do a bit more academic writing. I'm still working on my Taiwan rhetoric paper, though right now I'm waiting on feedback from my mentor. In the meantime, I'm working on a GHK-related paper that has been sitting around since my NATSA conference presentation last July (last last July?). I also need to spend some time developing my "rhetorics in contact" course because I hope to talk to some people about it this month. So I have a few things to accomplish this month, which will keep me busy.

I'll also be kept busy by my son, who managed to break his arm at school last week. He's taking it pretty well, though--probably better than I am. He should be out of his cast by the beginning of December. 

Right now it has gotten colder for the first time this fall (around 39 degrees right now), and I guess the suddenness of the drop in temperature has caught the owners of this coffeeshop by surprise. It's almost as cold inside here as it is outside! 

OK... nothing else to say here right now. Gotta get back to old GHK, who is patiently waiting...

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Notes on Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority

Shimabukuro, Mira. Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration. University Press of Colorado, 2015. 

I read this book to see whether it would be good for the comparative rhetoric/"rhetorics in contact" course I'm developing. At first, I was thinking of just finding a chapter that I could use from it, but after reading the book, I think I'd be more interested in assigning the whole book. It's good for students to see how the author develops an overall argument or perspective as she works out the implications of her study, and I appreciate especially how reflective Shimabukuro is about her research and how the topic of her book connects to various aspects of her life. 

A few other thoughts about the book that I think recommend it for my course (or for others to read it!):

  • There's the exemplary way that she uses Japanese rhetorics/concepts together with rhetorics of Americanness in analyzing the rhetorical/literacy practices of the Japanese American internees. For instance, in chapter 6, she describes the writing/rewriting of a petition made by Japanese mothers to suspend the conscription of their Japanese American sons. (At the time, as Shimabukuro explains, the Issei, or first-generation, mothers were not allowed to become US citizens, but their sons, who were Nissei, or second-generation, were American citizens.) Shimabukuro shows how the mothers' petition combines the rhetoric of the "dutiful wife, intelligent mother" (ryosai-kenbo) that had become an important gender discourse during the Meiji era with rhetorics of American citizenship (and even what she calls "proto-model minority" rhetoric) to argue that the Japanese mothers had raised good American sons who deserved better than to be incarcerated in the "internment camps," only to be called up to fight for a country that didn't give them or their families the rights due American citizens. I like how Shimabukuro shows the nuance of the rhetorics in contact here, even showing how the idea of ryosai-kenbo is not some sort of timeless Japanese concept, but that it was a more recent phenomenon itself--and that it connected to the problematic "nation-unifying and empire-building efforts taking place in Japan" (180). 

  • I also like the way that Shimabukuro shows that the effects of these literacy activities stretch across time and intertwine with other literacy activities and rhetorical practices. As she points out, much of the writing that she discusses wasn't "successful" in the immediate sense of changing the mind of the US government. In the case of the mothers' petition, their Japanese American sons were still drafted, and the mothers only received a perfunctory response from Eleanor Roosevelt. (Oh, how you have gone down in my estimation, Mrs. Roosevelt!) In the case of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee's "Manifesto," in which they stated that they would refuse induction, the writers ended up in prison. But Shimabukuro demonstrates how these and other writings, including "private" writings such as poems written by internees, resurfaced or were brought back to the surface years later and served as models or inspiration for latter-day Asian American civil rights activists. She sees the recirculation of these texts as a kind of "relocated literacy" (196, emphasis in original), where there's a "reactivation of that rhetorical-activist force by Japanese American activist-descendants operating in contexts in which the Nikkei community has grown stronger" (196, emphasis in original).

  • Shimabukuro also brings up the concept of "resistant capital," citing Tara Yosso--it's meant to be considered in opposition to Bourdieu's idea of "cultural capital," and it signifies "knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality" (Yosso 80, qtd. in Shimabukuro 199). It appears that Yosso primarily has in mind communities of color in the US, but I wonder if it could apply in other places, too, such as (of course) Taiwan.  

  • Part of the book is a narrative of Shimabukuro's family's (particularly her father's) involvement in Japanese American activism, and by extension it traces the author's own process of developing her research project. I think this makes it more accessible for undergraduates who can thereby see how she did the research rather than just reading the results of that research. It also shows that you can be passionate about your topic and that it can grow from your own experiences, so perhaps it's an angle on doing academic work that they might not be familiar with. 
So I think I've talked myself into using this book in my course, if I get to teach it. It can also tie into a possible archival project I plan to have students do in the course. Coincidentally, Northeastern's Asian American Studies program is hosting a symposium called "Remember! Asian Americans and the Archive" on November 17, which I've signed up to attend.


Thursday, October 19, 2023

Notes on Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

朱宥勳 (Chu Yu-hsun). 【他們沒在寫小說的時候:戒嚴台灣小說家群像】When They Were Not Writing Novels: Portraits of Novelists from Taiwan Under Martial Law. 2nd. ed. 大塊文化, 2023.

Note: This isn't going to be a complete discussion of the book--to do that would probably involve writing a post as long as the book itself!

In this very readable collection of essays, Chu Yu-hsun focuses on the socio-political contexts in which nine postwar Taiwan novelists lived and worked. I especially like the anecdotes that Chu includes about the writers' experiences (such as this one about Chung Chao-cheng's "bold" decision about paper that I posted earlier). Because the book doesn't focus as much on their actual novels or their writing processes, I get the funny feeling (as I did with A-chin Hsiau's book) that many of these novelists spent more time on other activities than they did on writing novels. Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), for instance, goes from editing a literary column in Free China Journal (自由中國半月刊) to moving to Iowa on the invitation of Paul Engle to join the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which Engle directed, and eventually developing an international writing program at Iowa. (Where did she find time to write her own novels?!) 

Chung Chao-cheng is depicted as spending a lot of time developing a network of Taiwanese writers and helping them get published. He pops up in other people's chapters, too, for example trying unsuccessfully to get Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) to allow his work to be published in an anthology of Taiwanese nativist writers (Chen wasn't interested because he was a pro-unification Taiwanese leftist--in fact, judging from what Chu has to say, Chen wouldn't even accept being called "Taiwanese"). 

Other writers cross paths in the book, like Lin Haiyin (林海音), who helped Chung Chao-cheng and other Taiwanese writers get opportunities to translate Western works from Japanese. According to Chu (and this is, from what I understand, a dominant narrative), writers who grew up during the Japanese era had a lot of trouble writing and getting published after 1945 because Taiwan's literary scene became dominated by exiled Mainlanders who were more experienced writing in Mandarin and who tended to exclude Taiwanese writers from getting published. Lin Haiyin, who edited the influential literary supplement of the United Daily News (聯合報), worked with Taiwanese writers to get them published, even editing their work for them at times. She had to resign from this position in 1963 due to the "Captain Incident" (船長事件), in which a poem she published got the author and her in trouble when the poem was interpreted as being critical of Chiang Kai-shek. 

The book also touches on some important martial law- and Cold War-era issues, such as the CIA's involvement in Iowa's International Writing Program, the US Information Agency's involvement in the shaping of Taiwan's literature (what Chu's teacher, Chen Jianzhong [陳建忠], has called "unattributed power" [隱蔽權力]), and the relationship between the battle of literary modernism versus nativism and the martial law regime's emphasis on "anti-Communist literature" (反共文學). 

I'm not well-read enough in Taiwanese literary history to evaluate Chu's claims about all of these points, though. I feel I should read some of the books he mentions in his afterword to get a better understanding. I also think I should read Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's Modernism and Nativist Resistance (1993) and perhaps reread A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan (2021) to have a better basis for assessing Chu's book. 

One problem I do have with When They Were Not Writing Novels, though, is that Chu doesn't cite sources for a lot of what he writes about. I realize this is not an academic book (probably that's what made it so readable!), but some bibliography at the end where he acknowledges his sources would help a lot in determining what his conclusions are based on. I was also a bit confused by his comment in the afterword to the effect that while most the book's judgements about the authors come from existing research on Taiwanese literature, a small portion are speculative based on Chu's own literary experience ("本書關於作家的種種判斷,大多得益自台灣文學研究的既成果;少部分則是我以自身的文學經驗推想的"). This made me wonder which portions were based on which. I think a more extensive bibliography would go a long way toward reassuring me about Chu's conclusions. In the end, though, I do want to reemphasize that I enjoyed the book, and it makes me want to dive more deeply into Taiwanese literature, if only as an amateur.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

"Sabbatical" update

I noticed that I haven't posted anything yet this month, so I thought I should let my reader know that I'm still working on the projects I'm supposed to be doing this semester. I just sent a draft of my paper to my "mentor" (I'm calling him this; not sure he'd agree with the terminology!). The paper is still a bit of a mess--there's too much I want to say in it and a lot I haven't said. But I thought I should get someone else's view of it before I continue working on it.

I also need to work on the proposal for the comparative rhetoric course I'm planning. It has taken the form of a course in "rhetorics in contact" (as in contact zones), where we would look at situations in which two (or more) groups' discursive practices figure into the kinds of interactions those groups have. I have to read more for this to figure out how I might develop a course of this type.

I'm also working on finishing When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】), which I might have something to say about once I've read the last chapter. So stay tuned...

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Notes on A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan

A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism. Columbia University Press, 2021.

It's taken me a while to do some writing about this book because I'm not sure how I feel about it. I read five reviews of it that are generally quite positive, from Tanguy Lepesant, Scott SimonMing-sho Ho, Evan Dawley, and James Baron. (If you want to get an overall summary of the book, take a look at some of these reviews. I think Lepesant's and Baron's are not behind a paywall.) 

I appreciated the book because of its perspectives on the literary discussions and debates going on during the 1960s and '70s in Taiwan. I particularly appreciated the many long quotations (translated into English) from a variety of literary figures from postwar Taiwan. Hsiau ties these quotations and figures together into an argument that Taiwan's intellectuals (mostly, though not exclusively, represented in the book by writers in the literary field) moved from viewing themselves as part of the Chinese nation to viewing themselves as Taiwanese, in contradistinction to the Chinese nation. Rather than viewing this transition from an "instrumentalist" perspective, which would suggest that writers decided whether to express themselves as Chinese or Taiwanese depending on which form of identification would help their interests, or from an "essentialist" perspective, which would suggest that writers were always Taiwanese and only pretended to be "Chinese" until it was safe to express their true selves, Hsiau takes a narrative view. In this view, over the generations, writers responded to historical events like the movement to "protect the Diaoyutai islands" (保釣運動), the ROC's loss of its UN seat, etc., by rethinking their relationship with Taiwan and the ROC. As Hsiau says in the conclusion, 

Rather than a fit for an essence, or an instrument for advancing some collective's interest, I view narrative as an embodiment of human understanding that shapes human understanding and emotion in new ways with each generation. The perspective of narrative identity that I have adopted throughout this book could be described as interpretive. Historical narrative for political agents is interpretive in that it is a means of understanding the self in social and temporal context. It is a way of constructing collective identity and motivating praxis. Rather than an essence, there is a set of materials, to which new materials are continually being added, that is used to construct identity anew when the need for new kinds of action arises. There are indeed interests, but they are not calculated coldly; they are instead judged in the warmth of the chapters of the xin, the heard-and-mind that Chinese philosophers have been trying to understand since antiquity. On this understanding, it will not do for us to simply disbelieve the constant apparently heartfelt declarations of Chinese national identity in texts from the return-to-reality generation throughout the 1970s. We have to consider the possibility that if a person says he or she feels Chinese, he or she is at that moment in time. (171-2)

This quote, I think, encapsulates Hsiau's argument, and there's a part of me that agrees with him. Hsiau puts at least some of the responsibility for the "apparently heartfelt declarations of Chinese national identity" on "the power of ideological dissemination" through the educational system. As Kenneth Burke wrote in A Rhetoric of Motives, "[e]ducation ('indoctrination') exerts ... pressure upon ... [a person] from without" and that person "completes the process from within. ... Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (39). The challenge in Taiwan, as the KMT government perceived it, was to make the voice within echo, or speak the language of, the voices from without. 

I'm reminded of a story Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) told about a performance she and her university classmates were preparing for in 1972 upon the occasion of the National Assembly’s re-election of Chiang Kai-shek to yet another term as president. As Lung wrote, 

My deepest memory was about the sentiment of comradeship felt by that bunch of 20-year-olds creating and working day and night, and we walked out in the middle of the night under the moonlit parasol trees to feel the silence of nature, the dreams of our people and the tranquility of the universe. We had no idea what "the leader" was up to, and we had no idea at that moment of youthful romance, a university student had been arrested, detained, interrogated and then sentenced to life in prison for "reading the wrong things" and "saying the wrong things."

Our gestures were exaggerated, our speech tones were artificial, our orations were stuffed with the learned wills of the adults, our emotions were sincere, our beliefs were earnest and our motives were pure, and that was because we had no idea that the most sorrowful darkness was hidden in the shadows of the parasol trees. (translation by Roland Soong)

As I wrote in my doctoral dissertation (many years ago!), Lung's reflections are a reminder that presenting government-approved thoughts with exaggerated gestures and artificial tones does not always negate the possibility of there being sincere emotions motivating the speaker. Yet at the same time, the presence in Lung’s story of the arrested university student is a reminder that not everyone had been convinced by what the schools and society had taught them. Because of this, I'm not sure that I can completely accept Hsiau's conclusions--his argument about the naiveté of  the instrumentalist and essentialist explanations for the Chinese Nationalist rhetoric and its transformation into Taiwanese nationalist rhetoric seems a bit overstated. 

When writing about Yeh Shih-t'ao's (葉石濤) earlier and later literary criticism, Chu Yu-hsun, in When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】), notes that from today's perspective, Yeh's earlier use of sentences like "Taiwan literature is part of Chinese literature" (台灣文學是中國文學的一部分), and "nativist literature is the literature of the Three People's Principles" (鄉土文學就是三民主義文學) would be annoying--and surprising, given Yeh's later Taiwan-centric perspective. Chu points out, however, that Yeh had been jailed by the KMT, which influenced his perspective on how to write. As Chu argues, looking at Yeh's rhetorical organization, after reciting a "party-state mantra," Yeh would follow up with the real point: "but in the context of Taiwan's natural environment and historical background, Taiwanese literature has developed a unique style..." (但是在台灣的自然環境和歷史背景下,台灣文學...形成了獨特的風貌......). The real point for Yeh, Chu argues, was about the locality and indigeneity of Taiwanese literature, but this was something he had to make less obvious, given the martial law context he was writing in. Hsiau would call this, probably, an example of an "essentialist" argument that Yeh was always Taiwan-centric but hid it until he could feel safe expressing it. Be that as it may, Chu's interpretation seems valid to me.

On a related point, this is where I agree with Tanguy Lepesant's critique that Hsiau should have spent more time discussing his methods. I also found Hsiau's explanation of how he was using discourse analysis a bit thin, and in my view, unconvincing. I did not find much in his book that resembled discourse analysis in any form that I would recognize. There was not a great deal of focus on language or language in use, for instance. Perhaps Hsiau is more focused on what James Paul Gee would call "Discourse" rather than "discourse" (here's a summary of that distinction). That is, Hsiau is more focused on "ways of being in the world" rather than on analysis of specific uses of language to communicate or persuade. Chu gives an example above of a more discourse-as-language-in-use form of discourse analysis that focuses on how writers use language and the contexts in which they are using language. While Hsiau's is an important book, I would like to have seen more of this kind of "discourse analysis" being used in it.


Wednesday, September 20, 2023

An anecdote about writing in postwar Taiwan from【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

Was going to do some writing on my paper this morning, but instead read a chapter from When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】). The first chapter is about Chung Chao-cheng (Zhong Zhaozheng, 鍾肇政), a Taiwanese author who helped other Taiwanese writers get their work published during the martial law period, where Mainlanders more easily got published. There’s an interesting anecdote (which comes from a memoir by Chung) of the time when Chung saw an ad in the newspaper calling for submissions for a writing contest. This was sometime in the 1950s, when Chung was probably in his mid- or late-20s, living in his family home in Longtan, Taoyuan County. Although he was interested in submitting something, he paused when he saw the requirement was to write on grid paper (有格稿紙). When he dug around his house for paper, he found some Japanese-style manuscript paper (原稿用紙, genkō yōshi), so he made what he called a “bold” (大膽) decision to use the Japanese-style paper. 

Chu Yu-hsun, the author of When They Were Not Writing Novels, explains that this was a “bold” decision because it symbolizes Chung’s use of his Japanese-era literary foundation to break into the literary world of postwar Taiwan (34-35). Chu points out that writers of Chung’s generation, who were educated in Japanese, had to learn to write in a “foreign language” (Mandarin) before they could even try to write creatively (to say nothing of trying to publish) in Chinese. The different kinds of paper are a material difference but are also symbolic of the writers’ struggle to bring their own resources to the task of writing in a new linguistic, political, and literary environment. 

The other interesting point is that the genkō yōshi Chung used was probably not that different in format from the paper used in postwar Taiwan, but it might have been different enough (maybe the name of the manufacturer was printed on the paper, for instance) that Chung was hesitant to use it. This might symbolize Taiwanese writers' concern about how Mainlander editors might view their writing, where anything that gave away the author's Taiwanese identity could be an excuse for rejection. Chu also mentions that Chung's use of "bold" might be a sign that Chung is reflecting on something that happened 35 years earlier. Chu thinks that the younger Chung probably had more of a sense of despair at the time.

Monday, September 18, 2023

【台灣演義】episode about Taichung

This is from almost a year ago--somehow I missed it. But I'll post it here mainly to remind myself to watch it when I get a chance...

Monday, September 04, 2023

Something to watch when I get a chance

This looks like an interesting episode of 台灣演義 to watch:


It's about bookstores and publishing in Taipei during the last 100 years. I wrote a blog post last year about bookstores in Taiwan during the Japanese period, so it'll be good to watch this to get more information on the fate of those bookstores. The discussion of bookstores from the Japanese period begins around 15:15. Su Shuo-bin (蘇碩斌), cited in my blog post, is one of the people interviewed.

Saturday, September 02, 2023

Darryl Sterk, trans. Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Lōa Hô

Darryl Sterk, trans. Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Lōa Hô. Honford Star, 2018.

I just finished reading this today after starting it a few months ago, which means my memory of some of the earlier stories is shaky. (One of the advantages and disadvantages of reading a collection of short stories is that you can put it down and dip into it from time to time.) So for that reason, I'm not going to write a review of the book. Besides, there are quite a few good reviews of the book already, such as those of 

  • Willow Heath (who praises both Lōa Hô's stories and Sterk's translations)
  • Tony Malone (who, on the other hand, finds the book "rather academic" and suggests that Lōa Hô "is more important for his role as an influence on Taiwanese literature than for any real genius in his writing")
  • Liz Wan (who points out that Sterk's technique of sometimes translating into colloquial English and sometimes retaining Japanese and Taiwanese [in romanized form] in the stories gives the reader the sense of what the stories read like in the original; as she puts it, "some parts are smooth, whereas reading others feels like walking with a piece of chewing gum stuck to the shoes")
  • T F Rhoden (who notes "Lōa Hô’s playful reproduction of local and artisan-specific dialect in the face of an alien bureaucracy")
  • Vivian Szu-Chin Chih (who brings up how Sterk handles the challenges of translating the short poems that Lōa Hô sometimes included in his stories, concluding that he does an effective job on giving readers the sense of the original)
I know I'll be coming back to these stories to think about his portrayal of the responses to the work of the Taiwan Cultural Association (台灣文化協會), of which Lōa Hô was a founding member, by various members of society. For instance, some of the gangsters ("eels") in “Three Unofficial Accounts from the Romance of the Slippery Eels" (1931) consider the "cultured individuals" of the TCA to be rather cowardly; as one eel puts it, "Yeah, I seen this guy at the podium, spittle flying. But the police just have to say 'cease and desist' and he dutifully climbs down from the stage. That’s how brave he is" (141). Another "eel" says, "You lot! Who knows how many people who do not accept their lot in life you’ve hurt by getting their hopes up when you can’t change nuthin'" (141). 

However, in another story, entitled "Disgrace?!" (1931), a dumpling seller agrees that while the TCA members "yak and yak, and there’s always someone who wants to go and listen" to their speeches, the TCA speakers are brave. He points out that during a speech, "three and a half sentences in, he [a Tokkō from the Special Higher Police] shouts 'Cease and desist!' And if they keep yaking [sic] they'll get dragged off the stage and beaten up. But these guys aren’t afraid of nothing" (124). But Lōa Hô gives a nuanced picture of the Taiwan Cultural Association members, ending the story with a description of a doctor who, despite being a member of the TCA, is "one of the cringers." After the police break up a play at a local temple, one of the officers barges into the doctor's clinic, and the doctor's conversation with him is held up for critique by both the townspeople and, perhaps, the author:
"Working a bit late, today, are you? Been busy lately?" (Said the doctor.)

"Ha ha! Protest if you think it's unjust. If a keibu, a superintendent, is no use to you, you'll have to go to as high as a keishikan, a senior commissioner!" (Said the officer.)

"All right. When I do, shall I commend you for meritorious service? How much more of a travel honorarium do you need?"

"Manma--as it is, no need. Let me tell you something, I've come to a realization: that I'm going to get murdered at your place by one of the rowdies outside."

"I guarantee your safety."

"We didn't just use savage means tonight, but also civil."

"I can also guarantee you'll rise through the ranks."

"Ha ha ha!"

After the officer came out someone went in to ask the doctor what had happened. But the doctor said nothing, just smiled bitterly and helplessly.

Criticism erupted out of the crowd on the street.

"For the police to be able to abuse their authority and then go and act big in front of a man who likes to talk about justice and humanity must really be satisfying, like nothing else."

"Is he proud, that the officer paid him a personal visit?"

It's a disgrace, a great disgrace. Are the people who talk about justice really so helpless when the bullies lord it over everyone? (128-9)
The last paragraph seems to be in the narrator's voice, since there are no quotation marks. Is this meant to reflect Lōa Hô's own frustration with the lack of effectiveness of the TCA? Other stories seem to reflect his feeling that the Association was not accomplishing much (especially after its split into two factions in 1927), and in the introduction to the book, Pei-yin Lin suggests that Lōa Hô's turn back to poetry after 1935 reflected his "low morale" and "sense of isolation" (xix). 

The other voices in the passages I've quoted might also reflect the feelings of the general public about the TCA. Another story, "Going to the Meeting" (undated, possibly 1926) also gives some sense of both the public's and possibly Lōa Hô's own feelings about the Association. The narrator takes a train trip to Wufeng (where Lin Hsien-t'ang, a founder of the TCA, lived) to attend a meeting of the Association. On the way, he overhears conversations between a Japanese man and his Taiwanese counterpart and between a farmer and his friend that reflect the public's ambivalent feelings about the accomplishments of the Association. To the Japanese man's questions about the TCA, the Taiwanese man suggests that many Taiwanese intellectuals "find the members of the association annoying and avoid them" (203). He also suggests that the Association is ineffective because "[t]hey are capitalist intellectuals ... [who] may not have had any profound insight, which detracts from their capacity for active resistance. They'll just hold meetings and give speeches from time to time, that's it" (204). (Sterk suggests that the speaker sounds like a socialist here.)

The second conversation, between the farmer and his friend, centers on the farmer's inability to fight against the government's takeover of the land he plowed for 3 years and the rent they are charging him for the land. When his friend suggests going to the TCA, the farmer responds sarcastically that the Lin family enriched themselves by stealing from the tenant farmers for generations. He obviously didn't expect that the TCA would do anything. Even his friend says, "Rather than striving on behalf of the Taiwanese people, they could be a little less domineering to their tenant farmers, that would be enough" (206)--to which the farmer sarcastically replies, "O-mî-tô-hút" (阿彌陀佛), suggesting this wouldn't happen without divine intervention. This conversation points out a problem Lōa Hô saw (and, he suggests, some everyday Taiwanese saw) with the ethos of the Association, or at least of some of its founding members: their own hands were not necessarily that clean. 

Anyway, the stories do provide perspectives on the TCA that might be useful to me, ones that I hadn't read elsewhere (yet). 

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader

Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader. Cambria Press, 2020.

I started a post about A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, but before I could get into writing it, working out my complicated feelings about Hsiau's book, I picked up Lin's collection yesterday and ended up reading the whole thing in about two sittings. 

That isn't as difficult as it might sound, for despite feeling the title might give, this book is fairly short--it contains an introduction and only six stories, comprising less than 200 pages. The six stories are all from the Japanese colonial period, five from what Ye Shitao calls the "mature period" (1926-1937) and one from what he calls the "war period" (1937-1945). (Actually, it's not clear if Long Yingzong's "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees" if from the mature period or the war period--it was published in 1937. I've counted it as being from the "mature period.") Two of the six stories--Loā Hô's "A Lever Scale" and Zhu Dianren's (zh) "Autumn Letter"--were originally written in Chinese. The other four--Yang Kui's "The Newspaper Boy," Long Yingzong's (zh) "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees," Wu Yong-fu's (zh) "Head and Body," and Wang Chang-hsiung's (zh) "Sweeping Torrent"--were written in Japanese. 

The stories were all pretty interesting, if not entirely polished (I assume this was the case in the original languages, not just in the translations), and the book made me hope for more translations of fiction from Japanese-era Taiwan.* One thing that I appreciated about the stories is where they provided sensory details about what life was like. Sometimes you get this in biographies or other non-fiction, but fiction writers seem more likely to include that detail to make you feel like you're there with the characters. (Probably the "show, don't tell" principle at work.) For instance, when Chen Yousan, the main character of "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees," arrives at the home of a colleague, he is described as "remov[ing] his sweat-soaked underclothes" and "wringing them out," something I can definitely imagine doing after walking under the hot September sun in southern Taiwan. 

Together, the stories give a variety of perspectives on what it was like to be Taiwanese under Japanese colonialism--for some, the barely suppressed rage; for others, the self-doubt, the desire to become fully Japanese balanced with the sense of second-class citizenship. 

*I've since ordered a copy of The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction since 1926, published in 1983.

[Note: This post is necessarily short and sketchy--my 8-year-old keeps asking me if he can spray paint something in the garage that he's working on, and I don't have that much bandwidth anymore at the end of a very tiring summer... Looking forward to my "sabbatical" that starts Sept. 6!]

Friday, August 18, 2023

Notes on Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

I finished reading this last Friday, but it has been a busy week. As I mentioned before, there were a couple of negative reviews of this book. One the things that one of them complained about was Lu's use of her own personal experience, especially in the first chapter, "My Family Caught in the Cultural Revolution." Howard Goldblatt calls the first chapter "a nearly fatal distraction" and defends his arguably "churlish" response to Lu's reminiscences by arguing that

(1) [i]n the quarter century and more since the Cultural Revolution ended, with the death of Mao and the convenient indictment of the Gang of Four, dozens of memoirs (with "J'accuse" in evidence far more than "mea culpa") have appeared in English, along with numerous scholarly and journalistic works on the GPCR; one more may be of some psychological benefit to the author, but it essentially duplicates what others have already written, often with more power and evocative effect than the chapter of the book under review. (2) As I stated earlier, the inclusion of a personal memoir in a work of scholarship invests the entire project with an undesirable patchwork quality. (p. 170).

While it's true that there are already a lot of Cultural Revolution memoirs (many of which are cited by Lu), it's my feeling that Goldblatt is a bit off in his evaluation, largely due to what I'd say is a misunderstanding of the book's primary audience. Goldblatt characterizes Lu's audiences as "linguists interested in the study of rhetorical symbols and their impact on national citizenries, and those interested in China's modern history, such as scholars and 'China watchers'" (pp. 170-1), ignoring the obvious audience of rhetoricians, many of whom might be more focused on Western rhetorical traditions and practices and might not have read those "dozens of memoirs" that he mentions. Furthermore, different disciplines have different standards for the inclusion of personal experience in scholarship. While not all books in rhetorical studies include chapters on the author's related experiences, it's not unheard of, and it can sometimes be seen by scholars in the field as an important way of demonstrating the author's positionality in relation to their topic. In fact, a review of the book in Argumentation and Advocacy suggests that Lu's memories "give the book a human quality and make Lu's own feelings toward her subject clear" (p. 116), and a review in Rhetoric & Public Affairs argues that the "experiential context drives Lu's inquiry and indeed sets this work apart from (and above) other scholarly treatments of the period" (p. 506). 

I find myself more in agreement with one of the critiques by Michael Schoenhals: he argues that Lu's adoption of both the weak and strong forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the former being that language influences thought and the latter, that language determines thought) is not particularly helpfully used in explicating the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution. As Schoenhals suggests, Lu's book seems to ask readers simply to accept that the Chinese people of that period lost their ability to think for themselves because of the language used in political slogans, wall posters, revolutionary songs, etc. For instance, Lu argues that "the use of violent language leads to violent action" (p. 89). While I'm inclined to believe her (particularly in the aftermath of January 6, 2021), I feel as though Lu is counting on us to believe her rather than explaining to us how/why this could happen. Her example of the persecution and murder of Bian Zhongyun, a high school principal in Beijing, shows a correlation between the violent rhetoric and her torture and murder by the Red Guards (p. 89), but as the old saying goes, correlation ≠ causation. Did the violent language in the posters cause the Red Guards to torture and kill Bian? How do you prove that? I'm not sure what kind of evidence I would want to see, however. (And I'm not sure Schoenhals is, either.) Perhaps I should look at some of Lu's other sources, such as her citation of Hannah Arendt on "the banality of evil." It might be that bringing in some of the other theorists that she cites in her literature review, like Burke, McGee, or Wander, would better support her argument here. (She does this later in her discussion of political ritual, where she cites Rowland and Frank on "rhetorical violence [that] often leads to societal violence" [qtd in Lu, p. 146].) 

One interesting point about the idea that people lost their ability to think for themselves is that Lu also gives examples of people who were still able to think for themselves. For instance, one of her interviewees says, "I never knew what other people thought about the [political] rituals and bizarre things going on during the Cultural Revolution. I considered some of them problematic and foolish, but I never dared to say so. I couldn't speak my mind and I didn't trust what other people said, as I was afraid of being betrayed or persecuted" (qtd. in Lu, p. 150). This raises a question about whether most people had no "inner thoughts" or whether there were many people who were just afraid to express their inner thoughts. 

I also have to agree that at times, the book seemed more descriptive than analytical. For instance, there's a description of a "big character poster" (dazibao) at a barbershop:

The cornerstone of the Cultural Revolution was the shared political understanding that everything deemed proletarian was moral and ethical while everything deemed nonproletarian was evil and harmful. This formula could even be applied to a person's hairstyle. Hairstyles considered bourgeois or revisionist were regarded as harmful to society and strictly prohibited. Liang (1998) recounts the following example of a wall poster seen in front of a barbershop: '"Only heroes can quell tigers and leopards I wild bears never daunt the brave' [Mao's poem]. For the cause of the Cultural Revolution, this shop will not cut hair that parts from behind, or in the middle, or that is less than one inch short, as these hair styles are nonproletarian. The shop does not provide hair oil, gel, or cream. The shop does not provide hair blowing or temple shaving services for male comrades, nor perms or curling hair services for female comrades" (125). The practice of starting a poster with one of Mao's poem was a common feature of poster writing, employed both as a stylistic device and as a justification to legitimize the action. (p. 78)

I think this description of the wall poster could have been enhanced by an analysis of how the poem was being used. Why was that particular poem chosen to head the poster? How did it legitimize the actions of the barber? (And if there's no connection, that might also be interesting to discuss, since it might signal how randomly quotations from Mao were being used in the big character posters.)

Ben Krueger, author of the Argumentation and Advocacy review, notes a failure in Lu's comparative approach: "Her comparisons of the Cultural Revolution's rhetoric to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union seem particularly pedestrian" (p. 117). I have to agree with this, too. There are gestures toward comparison with other rhetorics, such as Lu's discussion of militaristic terms, where she notes that "Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discussed the use of war metaphors by U.S. presidents to distort realities and constitute a license for policy change" (p. 91), but the comparisons often don't go beyond this kind of quick reference. 

There were several places in the conclusion where she makes predictions that, from the perspective of 2023, I could only respond to in the margins with "Oh well..." In her last paragraph, Lu writes that "one thing is certain [about China's future]: the age of ideological totalitarianism is over" (p. 205). I see that there is now a new preface to the paperback edition, written in 2020, in which she expresses concern that younger Chinese will not learn about the Cultural Revolution and that "such rhetoric of polarization, dehumanization, and violence in the name of morality and justice will be evoked, escalated, and manipulated again in China or elsewhere in the world on a similar scale" (p. xii). She also notes the chilling language of Trump during the 2016 election, which she says reminded her of the Cultural Revolution.  

Despite all of these criticisms (or complaints), I did learn a lot from this book, and reading it also made me reflect on what was going on in Taiwan during the same time period. Some of the rhetorical features of the Cultural Revolution, such as the violent, ugly language, the attempts at brainwashing, and the use of political ritual, deification of the leader, etc., were similar in Taiwan during the martial law period. Like Mao, Chiang Kai-shek was called by such epithets as "the nation's savior, the helmsman of the era, the great man of the world" (民族的救星、時代的舵手、世界的偉人). And as I mentioned a couple of years ago in relation to Li Ang's story, "Auntie Tiger," there was a "feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time." So was Taiwan's martial law period different from the Cultural Revolution in kind or just in degree? How might the rhetorics of these periods be compared?

Next up: A-Chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, which might give me some insight on how Taiwan moved from Chinese Nationalism to Taiwanese Nationalism. 

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Todd Sandel, "Linguistic Capital in Taiwan"

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

Sandel, T. L. (2003). Linguistic capital in Taiwan: The KMT’s Mandarin language policy and its perceived impact on language practices of bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi speakers. Language in Society 32(4), 523-551. DOI: 10.10170S0047404503324030

This is an article I came across a long time ago but that I thought I should revisit in relation to the paper I'm working on. Sandel's article goes beyond analyzing language policies in postwar Taiwan or surveying Taiwanese people about their language attitudes to look more closely at how changing language policies and language attitudes are realized in everyday contexts--the choices people make regarding language use and the decisions they make about passing on language practices to the next generation. Together with Donna Ching-Kuei Sandel and his research assistants, Sandel interviews Taiwanese people about their language practices in the home in the context of the schooling they received--specifically the language policies they experienced in school. His focus is on families that use the Tai-gi language (also known by several other names, such as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiyu, and [problematically] as Minnanhua/Southern Min). 

Sandel divides postwar primary/secondary school language policies in Taiwan into three stages or generations. The first generation he identifies are Taiwanese who went to school between 1945 and 1975, during which they were required to speak only Mandarin and were punished (sometimes physically) for speaking fangyan (topolects--commonly called "dialects"--like Taiwanese, Hakka, or one of the Indigenous languages). Sandel's interviewees typically spoke Taigi at home but were suddenly forced to speak only Mandarin in school. 

Typically, according to his interviewees, they raised their children primarily in Mandarin rather than speaking to them in Taiwanese because they knew the pressures their children would feel at school. This resulted in a generation (the second generation that Sandel identifies) that spoke little Taiwanese. This generation, who went to school from about 1975-1987, were primarily monolingual Mandarin speakers, although Sandel points out that due to changes in language policy, more are now trying to learn to speak Taiwanese.

The third generation that Sandel identifies went to school at a time when the Mandarin-only policy was scrapped. Indeed, although Mandarin is still the language of instruction, students since the 1990s now have courses in "local languages" (also called "mother tongues"); however, the success of those programs has been threatened by the emphasis on learning English and on other factors (see, for instance, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies vol. 5, no. 2 for several articles about language and society in Taiwan). Among the parents of this generation, Sandel finds two different perspectives about whether to teach both Taiwanese and Mandarin in the home. While some parents feel they'll learn both languages naturally, through interaction with family and in the neighborhood, others feel they need to teach their children to speak Taiwanese, especially if they want them to speak without a "mainlander" accent. These different opinions seem to connect to whether the interviewees are primarily located in more rural/"small town" areas or in more urban areas. 

Sandel connects his findings to Bourdieu's discussions of habitus, which Sandel sees as a "product of the whole history of its relations with markets, or, in Taiwan’s situation, with succeeding colonial and ruling governments that defined the values of the language market" (p. 548). At the same time, however, Sandel agrees with Bucholtz, who argues that "one of the problems of Bourdieu’s theory of practice is that its insistence on the unconsciousness of practice 'reflects a general attenuation of agency' (1999:205)" (p. 548). 

In other words, his [Bourdieu's] theory explains why individuals respond to changing market values and unconsciously instantiate the dispositions, or habitus, of Taiwan, but it does not explain how or why individuals can consciously conform to, resist, or moderate a set of dispositions. ... Thus, we also need to consider the situation in Taiwan through the lens of its language ideologies. In doing so, we find evidence that a cluster of concepts is at play on this island, including perceptions of what is “true” or “good” for society, divergent perspectives within society, and individuals’ articulations of beliefs that rationalize or justify language structure and use. (p. 548)

I think Sandel's division of school language policies in postwar Taiwan can be useful to my project; my focus is primarily on writing, but I also need to consider language ideologies and policies regarding spoken language.  

Friday, July 28, 2023

Next up on my reading list

Taking a second look at the reading list that ChatGPT created for me (discussed here), I realized that not only did ChatGPT not actually work through the entire list of comparative rhetoric sources that I had provided, but that it also "lied" about how it had organized things. For instance, while it says it "started with some articles that introduce the concept of comparative rhetoric and translingual approaches to meaning-making, such as Cushman's "Translingual and Decolonial Approaches to Meaning Making" and Cousins' "Self-reflexivity and the Labor of Translation," it actually listed Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics first, followed by Rhetoric in Modern Japan, and then Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Hmmph.

Anyway, I've decided that after reading Culp's Articulating Citizenship, I'll read Xing Lu's Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, at least in part to get a sense of what was going on "across the pond" (from Taiwan) during the time period I'm working in. Lu's book got mixed reviews, but I'm going to try to read it with an open mind. (Michael Schoenhals described himself as "profoundly bored by what has to count as one of this century’s least successful works, so far, on a most important topic"(quite a judgement on a book published in 2004!)--at least Howard Goldblatt admitted that some might find some of his own objections to the book "churlish"!) I'm hoping this book is better than a book on language and politics in Taiwan that I never finished reading because, toward the end, I felt I was just reading a list of examples without much analysis (a "taxonomy" of language examples, basically). Wish me luck!

Notes on Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship

Culp, Robert. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

I'm not sure where I first heard of this book, but it turned out to be very useful for thinking about my own project on Taiwan in at least two ways. One way was expected--Culp takes a close look at some of the secondary school language textbooks used in China during the period under investigation, which was something I wanted to see in order to think about how I am discussing elementary-level language textbooks in Taiwan. Culp notes a change from the earlier Republican era production of textbooks, which allowed for a range of political and social perspectives to be presented, to the post-1927 period, during which 

the Nationalist government quickly promulgated regulations requiring submission of textbooks for approval. ... Detailed curriculum standards coupled with regular review of textbooks and increasing institutional oversight led to a progressive standardization of textbooks over the course of the Nanjing decade. (p. 50)

The earlier textbooks, as Culp points out, included readings on social issues from a variety of perspectives, such as "Zhou Zuoren's descriptions of utopian socialism, Cai Yuanpei's anarchist writings on integrating work and study, Hu Shi's calls for individual autonomy, and empirical analyses of social inequalities" (p. 140). This range of perspectives was replaced after 1927 by "readings that celebrated the Nationalist Party, called for party and state guidance in gradual processes of social leveling and reform, and promoted an ideal of young people's dedicating themselves to national development and social service" (p. 148).

Culp also includes examples of student writings published in student publications to show how they were taking up the ideas expressed in their textbooks during those different periods. I'm having less success finding student writings for my project, though I have come across some. Hopefully, I'll be able to find some more examples as I continue to work on this.

The other way in which the book is useful is that it reminds me of the necessity to connect what the KMT  was doing with education in martial law era Taiwan with what it had developed in Republican China. What did the Nationalists bring over to Taiwan in terms of their literacy and civic education beliefs and practices, and how did they adapt that to the context of postwar Taiwan? How much and in what ways did they see the Taiwanese students as similar to and different from the students on the mainland? 

These are some of my thoughts about the book right now--here are a few reviews of the book that I came across, if you want more detail about Culp's arguments:

  • Borthwick, Sally. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1945Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 69 no. 2, 2009, p. 443-450. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jas.0.0028
  • Liu, Jennifer. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1942China Review International, vol. 18 no. 2, 2011, p. 179-182. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cri.2011.0047.
  • Tsin, Michael. ROBERT CULP. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 291.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2007. Pp. xvi, 382. $49.50., The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1500–1501, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.5.1500 
  • Weston, Timothy. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1942. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 68, no. 1, 2009, pp. 260–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20619685. Accessed 28 July 2023.

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Yameng Liu on "Translation and the Disciplinary Development of Rhetoric"

"Translation and the Disciplinary Development of Rhetoric" was a talk given by Yameng Liu about 12 years ago at Hong Kong Baptist University. I haven't watched the video yet, but I plan to. I'm currently reading Liu's chapter in Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks and decided to look him up through Google. I haven't been able to find any more recent information about Liu, however. 

Here's the abstract for Liu's talk:

While a rhetorical perspective on translation has started to attract scholarly attention, translation's impact on the disciplinary development of rhetoric remains unexplored by practitioners in the fields concerned. Even a cursory look into rhetoric's long history, however, would turn up much evidence of translation's crucial role in shaping up the conceptual and institutional contours of the art of persuasion. And questions such as "how key rhetorical concepts became translated from one language into another" or "when and what seminal texts were rendered available interlingually to rhetorical practitioners in different cultural contexts" actually point us to a more intelligent understanding of the way rhetoric has been constituting itself as an important area of studies. 

[Update, 1:48 p.m. Just finished watching the talk, and I found it very interesting. But the second question/comment from the audience (at around 1:27 on the video) made me a bit uncomfortable...]

Thursday, July 13, 2023

Dog days of summer

My "productivity" has slowed down a bit since the beginning of the month. Though I did finish reading a book (Scott Simon's Truly Human), that was actually the result of a sleepless night after an outpatient procedure. I'm working on reading another book, Robert Culp's Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940, reference to which I came across somewhere or other last month. I haven't gotten far into it, but I think it'll be useful to me for thinking about my own project. 

Speaking of that project, I was having a lot of trouble making any progress on it recently, until my wife told me to go the library and try to do something, which I dutifully did. I managed to write about 750 usable words for a new introduction to the paper after clearing my throat for about 2000 words. It's not a complete introduction yet, but I am somewhat satisfied for how I managed to fuse a few streams of thought together to give a better sense of the "so what" of my paper. I've had a lot of trouble with the "so what," but I feel more confident about it now. (I'm sure the voices of doubt will emerge at some point, though.)

I'm also thinking about the undergraduate comparative rhetoric class that I'm supposed to propose as part of my fellowship leave project. As I mentioned earlier, I have been considering using Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao's article about the Opium Wars as a course reading; this made me think about the possibility of focusing the course in terms of something like "rhetorics in contact" in contexts of imperialism, colonialism, semicolonialism, etc., rather than a course where we would just read about ancient rhetorical traditions or "treatises." Of course, the trick in doing a "rhetorics in contact" course would be leading the students through the interpretation of what was coming into contact. The Garrett/Xiao article does a good job of the interpretation; another article I can think of that does something like that is Mary Louise Pratt's article on contact zones. I'll have to see what other examples I might find of this approach, if I decide to take it. Suggestions are welcome!

So my dog days are not a complete loss; I'm getting a bit done, just more slowly and more piecemeal than I'd like. But slow progress is better than no progress, I suppose.

Monday, July 10, 2023

Notes on Scott E. Simon, Truly Human

Simon, Scott E. Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa. University of Toronto Press, 2023.

This isn't going to be a full-on review of Simon's book. I want to mention one thing about it that I found interesting, given what I've been reading this summer about decolonizing comparative rhetoric (part of Simon's project involved decolonizing anthropology).

While I was reading this book, I came across an article by Dominique Salas, "Decolonizing Exigency: Settler Exigences in the Wisconsin Winnebago Mission Home," from Rhetoric Society Quarterly. One of Salas' arguments is about how the settler colonialists who were running a school for Native American in  nineteenth century Wisconsin were "manipulating time" as part of their project of making the students see themselves as part of the colonialist Christian history. That is, the Indigenous peoples' history becomes part of the church's history of the working out of the Christian God's plan for the world. This manipulation of chronos allows the settlers to ignore settler colonialism as the problem/exigency and treat the Indigenous people themselves as needing to grow or develop as part of the (settler) Christian society. The manipulation of time and the exigency treats the Indigenous people as sharing a common heritage with the white settlers, while at the same time viewing them as children in need. 

After reading this article, I was struck by Scott Simon's depiction of the role of Christianity among the Indigenous Sediq in Taiwan because he also discusses the change in orientation toward time (and space) that resulted from the Christianization of Indigenous Taiwan. Simon casts this, however, in terms of churches "help[ing] orient individuals in time" (p. 188). He writes, 

Due to the annual cycles of biblical readings, people can imagine themselves as part of a human history progressing from the creation of the earth, through the fall of Adam and Even, the tribulations of Jewish prophets, redemption through Christ, and finally to a promised messianic future for all. Many Presbyterian pastors combine these teachings with traditional myths; for example, where the first man and the first woman emerged from a giant boulder called Pusu Qhuni, is the actual site of the Garden of Eden. Others embed their own history within the timeline of Christianity, contrasting the headhunting past to their post-conversion lives. (p. 188)

As Simon argues, comparing the Indigenous experiences of Christianity in Taiwan to that of his native Canada, "Christianity and colonialism are intertwined in history... . Taiwan is unique only because that historical process is refracted through a very different history of Japanese and Chinese colonialisms" (p. 191). While agreeing that there are culturally imperialist aspects of Christianity in Taiwan, he points out that "[i]n some ways, conversion [to Christianity] is a clever strategy by the least powerful in the society to seek alliances with even more powerful outsiders. Conversion can thus also be a way of seizing agency, of maintaining the host position in the mountains rather than conceding territory to Han-controlled Buddhist monasteries or Taoist temples that are often built on mountains in China or in non-Indigenous parts of Taiwan" (pp. 191-2). 

The idea of agency is important here, I think, because it moves us away from thinking about only what the colonizers are/were doing and to thinking about what the Indigenous people might be doing with what they encounter. It reminds me of Mary Louise Pratt's discussion of "transculturation," in which "members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by dominant or metropolitan culture" (p. 36). As she notes, "While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for" (p. 36). In the case of the Sediq, as Simon points out, they have used one cultural form from the "metropole" to balance that with the pressures coming from other dominant cultures (the Japanese during that period and the Han since 1945). (I should add that Salas states specifically that in her article she focuses on "the reality the settler has crafted not to bypass Indigenous agency and sovereignty but to elaborate on the totalizing force of settler time" [p. 109]. As she notes, Indigenous voices "have largely been reduced to silence" in the archival record [p. 109].)

Anyway, that's just one small point that came from reading this book and thinking about it in relation to other texts I've been reading. There's a lot more going on in this book, and I probably can't do it justice. My suggestion is that you read it yourself. It's well worth the investment of time!

* See also what Jonathan Clements has written about the book.