Thursday, September 04, 2025

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!