The following is an essay that George Kerr was working on in the mid-1950s about his experiences teaching English in Taiwan. I found it in the Okinawa Prefectural Archives (GHK4C01004) and thought it might be worth typing up here.
Note: I've done some editing to the original document, silently removing strike-throughs and doing my best to make sense of Kerr's own edits to his essay. I've kept his language choices even though some of them might be offensive nowadays. I also hasten to add that I don't guarantee the accuracy of his historical information!
Correctly English in Formosa
On February 1 the Palo Alto Times carried this intelligence:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIED IN FORMOSA
Taipeh, Formosa (AP) -- Just about everyone in Formosa is studying the English language. Bookstores are crammed with textbooks.
Private teachers advertise widely. One says "Correctly English in five lessons".
Eighteen years ago I drifted down to Formosa for six months's study, and stayed three years. To win a Residence Permit and to give myself respectability on the police blotter, I taught something called "A Course in English Conversation" in the Government's schools at Taipei.
Correctly English study and foreign teachers were not something new in Formosa, even then. Pidgin of the "no tickee, no washee" sort was used at the ports as far back as 1858 or '59. Missionaries from London founded a school at Tainan in the 1870's and in 1880 Oxford College was opened at Tamsui by Canadians.
The island was declared to be a Province of China in 1886 and the first Governor, much too progressive for his own good, founded a school in which English was taught for the ben[e]fit of telegraph operators and clerks. Nothing much came of it, for the Governor was sacked, and his successor showed no interest whatsoever in the island.
Immediately after Formosa was ceded to them in 1896 the Japanese began to develop schools throughout the island. About 1908 two Americans were hired to teach the English language in higher schools and the subject became compulsory in all the Middle Schools.
In one of these I taught for six months. One day, in no mood for "conversation" on any theme, I directed my roomful of sixteen-year-olds to write up a simple English dialogue. This they did, and one by one turned in their papers. One of them came up with this bit of candor:
"Last night, were you drunk?"
"I had drunk nothing!"
"You know that Mr. Kerr, teacher of your school, is dying?"
"Dying?" I startled.
"Yes, Mr. Kerr lay dying."
"Who will benefit by his decease?"
"Students, do you think?"
"Very possibly."
Formosa was well off the beaten tourist path before the war, but the permanent foreign community (there were about fifty Caucasians on the island) took on a pattern familiar in foreign communities everywhere in the Orient.
There were three well-defined groups: the missionaries were one, the consular and business people made a second, and remittance men and drifters gone native made a third. Teachers were an odd and independent lot whose social alliances with those three groups varied according to degrees of thirst or piety. Of my immediate predecessors one was at theological school in the United States, one was in a mental hospital in Japan, and two were shacked up in Taipei, each with a bottle and a local belle. Only the Italian Consular Agent who taught Latin at the University and English in the Higher Schools, managed to move easily in all three groups. He was an exotic himself, with a background of considerable note among literary men at Oxford in the early twenties. He much preferred to dream and write of the Renaissance in Europe than to wear the black short which his Party politics and consular appointment required of him.
Foreign language study on Formosa has always been a strange barometer of politics. Just before the war English was not popular: Japan was preparing for the big push to the south, and Formosa was a haven for political refugees and malcontents who were expected to be useful when the great day arrived. Meanwhile they were put to good use as language teachers at Taipei. One of my colleagues was a tall, dour Dutchman from Batavia whose wife loved music. The only thing remarkable in this, however, was the fact that for reasons best known to herself, she turned the music sideways on the rack so that the staves were vertical, and she had to read the notes from top to bottom along each staff and from right to left across the page.
For a short time a fanatic Sumatran taught Malay at my school; he had been exiled by the Dutch for terrorist activities and was cherished by the Japanese. One day he disappeared without a trace or rumor. I wondered if the police at last discovered as I had done that his sympathies were more Muscovite than Japanese. His place was taken by a young Javan whose aristocratic title Radan Mas meant quite literally "The Golden One". There was an Annamese prince in exile, too, whose suite of about forty sides were maintained at Tokyo's expense. The prince himself stayed in close seclusion, a political spare part, as it were, held against the day when the French machinery would break down in northern Indo-China. This man and a number of his loyal followers were Sorbonne graduates, and one of them from time to time taught French. There were Siamese, German and Filipino strays on Formosa, as well, each with a few students taken privately or with an appointment to one of the Higher schools.
One of my Formosan students was inspired with poesy fairly early on in his acquaintance with the King's English. Two months after he joined the ranks of my classroom public I left the island, and this, in 1940, was his parting sonnet:
To Going Away Mr. Kerr
Dear, dear, my dear Mr. Kerr,
On the way home you are,
Good-bye! The day I said,
It made my mind very sad,
Learned times only several,
But for me may be practical;
Always humor you are,
Keep your health clear,
Remember me for ever,
Write me if can some letter.
Great you become I hope,
Crown get on your top!
Five years later I returned to Formosa, in uniform, to witness the Japanese Surrender at Taipei. The press took some note, and within a day or two a messenger appeared at my quarters, bringing gifts of fruit and a letter enclosing this welcome:
Meet Teacher Again!
Peace comes over the world,
Begin sing all the bird,
Storm now stop its raging,
Waves become quite their suaging.
Our teacher come back here again,
Delightful flower at once bloom begin,
Seems grow a little old man,
Yet he's a kind and gentleman.
Don't lose our dear teacher,
We have a good chance on here,
Talk about, all day long,
Indulge in dance and song.
Thanks god for meet in this way,
Keep we be good always.
We can study with dear Teacher,
Please don't forget me forever.
Japanese was the one common language useful throughout Formosa in 1945, but for six weeks or so it was infra dig to use it. Anyone with a smattering of the official dialect used at Nanking could hang out his shutter and fill any available classroom space with "Correctly Mandarin in Five Lessons". Five lessons would have been about enough, for by the end of 1945 the Formosans were disillusioned; "return to China" had turned out to be a return to the lawless condition of the 19th century mainland. The island had been handed over by the Generalissimo to a political General and a rabble of carpetbaggers.
Throughout 1946 Formosan leaders openly sought for some form of United States or United Nations intervention which would rid them of the carpetbagging mainland Chinese and cut them off from the perils and confusions of the mainland civil war. There was a pell-mell rush to study English. English language magazines appeared like mushrooms in a hothouse; radio programs carried English conversation day by day. One of my former students reported to me that his ancient grandmother had given up trying to learn Mandarin and had demanded his tattered English textbooks instead. Tucking her bound feet under his old desk, and with her thimblepipe beside her among the elementary grammars, she was trying earnestly to learn English. In correctly English letters came in to the Consulate asking for concession rights at airfields which America would use, so sure were the Formosans that the United States would move soon to protect the island from further dangers in the mainland war.
On February 15, 1947 a widely representative group of Formosan leaders prepared and presented to the Consulate a petition to the American Government asking for a joint United Nations trusteeship for the island and ultimate independence from all mainland Chinese controls. They sought then the status which the President and the Government at Washington now seek. The petition's English was poor but could not conceal the desperate sincerity of its appeal. The Consul thought the whole thing laughable and silly.
The Nationalist Government did not, however, Two weeks later there was a general uprising on Formosa, and again there were efforts to invoke American interest and attention. On March 8, 1947, heavily armed forces landed from the mainland. In the slaughter which followed thousands of Formosans were killed or driven from the island. Among the first to die were the men who had led openly in the appeals for American help.
Interest in Correctly English abruptly died away for the political barometer was at work again. There was to be no more public nonsense about American intervention or United Nations interest.
Chiang's situation after 1949 brought a change. Today, in desperation, for Formosans correctly English is a must again.
George H. Kerr
Palo Alto, California
----
This is rather roughly written--perhaps that's why Kerr doesn't seem to have published it--but I'm struck by his appreciation of the "desperate sincerity" present in the the Taiwanese petition. (If I were telling him to revise it, I would have suggested adding an example from the petition.)
The essay takes a typical but nonetheless emotional route from lightheartedness to tragedy--from Kerr's amused (or bemused) memories of his students and colleagues to his reflections on the tragedy of the March 1947 massacres and the role English and Americans played in that tragedy. I can appreciate his recognition of the Americans' inability to see through the language to recognize the seriousness of the Taiwanese efforts. Or rather, perhaps, the Americans' belief that the level of the petition writers' English reflected their intelligence.
