Making and eating sweet potato strips (蕃薯籤) during WW II

My wife recommended this video to me. On my YouTube, there are English subtitles in addition to the Chinese subtitles. So even if you don't understand Taiwanese, this should be understandable, I hope. 

It's about what the grandmother and her family ate when she was a kid during World War II: sweet potato strips (蕃薯籤). It gets into the history of wartime Taiwan--what ordinary people experienced. 

She mentions the May 17, 1945, bombing of the Keishu Sugar Plant (溪州糖廠 [Chinese]) in Changhua. This was part of the series of bombing raids the US conducted on Taiwan in the last years of the war. Here's an interesting article on that history and how it was buried during the time that the KMT wanted to deemphasize the fact that the US was bombing the "enemy"--Taiwan wasn't part of China at that time. In the video, the grandmother talks about how terrifying it was back then. People would sit around in the courtyard of their traditional Taiwanese homes and say, "We're all here tonight, but we don't know what will happen tomorrow."

"Taiwan’s Latest Food Trend: The Return of Movable Feasts"

This looks like a good short video for a future class I might work on (once I get everything else done)...

This is a good video, too, although I don't like the way the interviewer jumps between the two interviewees, Clarissa Wei and Bobby Chinn. 

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

T. C. Brown, Made in Taiwan. Proving Press, 2025

I heard about this book via a LinkedIn link to this review by David Frazier. Because my dissertation was about the experiences of a different group of young people who were in Taichung--some around the same time as Brown--I'm curious to see how his impressions of Taiwan compare to theirs. 

The young people I wrote about were Oberlin College graduates who were teaching English at Tunghai University for two years as part of a fellowship program run by the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association. While I know that some of the "reps" (as they called the Oberlin Shansi representatives at the time) visited the Ch'ing Ch'uan Kang (清泉崗, also known as CCK) military base mainly to buy American products at the PX. There was some association between some reps and the servicemen there too, as I recall.

Interestingly, I just received an invitation to participate on a roundtable discussion about Oberlin-in-Taiwan next summer. Stay tuned for more on that...

My on-ground teaching starts tomorrow. Wish me luck!