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.]