About

You might notice that the address of this blog includes "jonintaiwan" and wonder, is this guy in Taiwan? No.* I moved to the States from Taiwan in 2011, after living there for the better part of two decades (starting in 1992, with a three-year break from 1999-2002 when my wife and I went to graduate school in the US). But out of nostalgia (or laziness), I haven't changed the URL.

I did change the title, however. For most of its life, the blog was known as "Notes of a former native speaker," sort of a play on the subtitle of Eric Liu's book, The Accidental Asian (which I admit I still haven't read!). Once we moved here, though, I wanted to change the title, and settled on the bilingual pun "外 not" (pronounced, roughly, as "why not").

As you'll see, when I lived in Taiwan, the blog was more geared to talking about life in Taiwan. So you'll see some posts about typhoons, temples, spiders (!), donuts (?!), and, ummm, stool (😝). This reflects not only my life in another country, but the fact that in those pre-Facebook days, blogs were more of a place for interacting with friends, virtual and otherwise. Nowadays most of my "day in the life of" posts are on Facebook. [2019 update: Not any more. I deleted my FB account in 2017.] So the content now is mostly related to either my teaching or my research. I know, it's a lot duller than reading a post about how I spent my lunar new year with my in-laws.

One thing that I've continued to do is to list selected books that have entered my collection. ("Selected" in the sense, perhaps, that I'm trying to impress people?) I've probably actually read less than half of those books, but I keep buying. I also post notes on some of the books that I've read, like

• Hsin-i Sydney Yueh's Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation
• Mira Shimabukuro's Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration 
• Chu Yu-hsun's (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels (他們沒在寫小說的時候)
• A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism
• Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China
• Yang Tsui's Never Give Up: Yang Kui's Resistance, Labor, and Writing (永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作)
• Shu-hui Wu's Lien Heng (1878-1936): Taiwan's Search for Identity and Tradition
• Sakinu Ahronglong's Hunter School (trans. Darryl Sterk)
• Shih-shan Henry Tsai's The Peasant Movement and Land Reform in Taiwan, 1924-1951 
• Tehpen Tsai's Elegy of Sweet Potatoes
• Louise Erdrich's Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors
• Akemi Johnson's Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa
• Ilona Leki's Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development
• Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961
• Sun Kang-i's Farewell to the White Terror (走出白色恐怖)
• Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters (here, here, and here [sort of])

I also write almost obsessively about George H. Kerr, author of Formosa Betrayed.

A couple years ago, I also started an infrequent series discussing scholarly articles about communication in Taiwan. 

*I do, however, spend a frightening amount of mental energy mapping my current surroundings on my recollected map of Taichung: "This road is like Taichung Harbor Road!" "This restaurant reminds me of the corner tea house!" There's got to be some name for this mental condition. See also translingual aphasia.