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!]

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. 

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.