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)

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.] 

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. 

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...

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!]

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...