A video about the history of trains in Taiwan

Think I'll watch this when I get a chance. I tried to get my son the train fanatic to watch this with me, but he lost interest because I couldn't translate it fast enough...

Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website

Despite everything, this is why I stay on Twitter (or whatever they're calling it these days). I saw a link to this 1936 short film: 台中州高砂族內地觀光.

It looks like the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website is a great resource. But I'm not sure whether I would have come across it if someone hadn't tweeted about it. 

"Sabbatical" review

Books read since the end of last spring semester (links are to my posts on the books--I didn't post on everything I read):

• Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, eds. Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong
• Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, eds. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks
• Xiaoye You, Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China
• Scott E. Simon, Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa
• Richard Madsen, Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan
• Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940
• Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication
• Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader
• Darryl Sterk, trans. Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Lōa Hô
• A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism
• Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】
• Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration
• Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation 
• Wendy Cheng, Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism

I also read a bunch of articles for the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute session that I attended. And also articles, book chapters, etc., for the papers I worked on during my leave and for the course I'm planning to teach on "rhetorics in contact." 

I didn't manage to read everything on my overly ambitious preliminary reading list, but I did make some headway into it. I suppose I'll go back to that list and read more of it as I find the time to do so. I need to finish up the two papers that I have been working on, too. But first, I need to finish getting my courses prepared before Monday (*gulp!*)...

First "new book in the former native speaker's library" post of 2024!

This afternoon, I went to the neighborhood 7-Eleven and picked up a book I ordered yesterday from the 博客來 website: it's called 《島國知音：台灣問題專家葛超智其人其事》(An Island Nation's Close Friend: Taiwan Expert George H. Kerr's Life and Experiences). It's a translation of 《沖縄と台湾を愛した ジョージ・H・カー先生の思い出》, which was published in 2018. I have a copy of the Japanese book, but I can't read it, so I was excited when I found out a Chinese translation had been published. 

The book is a collection of essays about George H. Kerr by people who knew him (like Kabira Tomokiyo 川平朝清 and Higa Mikio 比嘉幹郎) and people who have studied his life and work (like Su Yao-tsung 蘇瑤崇 and Yoshihara Yukari 吉原ゆかり). It looks like it'll be a good book to read on the flight home!