Finished Revolutionary Taiwan; on to Taiwan Travelogue

Just finished my third book of the year--Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison's Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order. I think it provides a good introduction to Taiwan's complicated place in the world today, including some historical background for that place--or its "out of place"-ness, as they describe it. 

They begin with a description of what vote-counting is like in Taiwan--a description that was depressing to me when I think about how impossible such an open and peaceful vote-counting would be in the USA. (Although I was there in 2004 when the response to Chen Shui-bian's victory was not particularly peaceful. Who can forget Chiu Yi's attack on the Kaohsiung District Prosecutor's Office?) The vote-counting is symbol of Taiwan's maturing (mature?) democratic process, but as the authors demonstrate, this democratic process is happening in the context of a precarious state of existence. (I'm surprised there's not yet a book about Taiwan entitled Precarious State--get to work, people!)

One part of the book that I especially liked was their "close reading" of Taipei City's martial-law-era road-naming practices. Not that familiar with Taipei, I didn't realize that someone had actually laid a map of China over a map of the city to figure out what to rename Taipei's streets. (This part of the book reminded me of the article about TV cooking shows in Taiwan that I read a few years ago--particularly the part about Fu Pei Mei. I see there's a new book about her, too.) 

The book ends, interestingly, with an epilogue that introduces a critique of dominant--and parochial--Taiwanese attitudes toward Indigenous Taiwanese and "new Taiwanese" immigrants and foreign laborers, arguing that this parochialism needs to be overcome in order for Taiwan to really move beyond being seen as a "Chinese democracy." As they conclude, "the choice to cultivate a more diverse and eclectic national community today--one that will extend Taiwan's connections to communities and countries around the globe--lies with the people of Taiwan" (p. 159).

Around the same time that I finished Revolutionary Taiwan, I got my copy of Taiwan Travelogue in the mail. I decided to read this award-winning novel next. I have already finished the first chapter, and I'm loving it! (It makes me hungry, though--so much about Taiwanese food!)

Something to watch when I get a chance

This looks like an interesting episode of 台灣演義 to watch:

It's about bookstores and publishing in Taipei during the last 100 years. I wrote a blog post last year about bookstores in Taiwan during the Japanese period, so it'll be good to watch this to get more information on the fate of those bookstores. The discussion of bookstores from the Japanese period begins around 15:15. Su Shuo-bin (蘇碩斌), cited in my blog post, is one of the people interviewed.

Interview with Jonathan Lerner, author of Lily Narcissus, published

bookish.asia has published an interview I did with Jonathan Lerner about his new novel Lily Narcissus. I had fun talking with him about his writing process and how he does research for his writing. As someone who isn't a fiction writer, I'm fascinated by the differences in how their novels come together. Lerner used the word "unconscious" a few times, telling me, “I only found out what was going to happen to these characters as I unfurled the story.”

The interview is accompanied by some nice color slides of Taipei that Lerner's father took between 1957 and 1959, so check it out--and then buy his book!

Some notes on bookstores in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period

In a previous post about Lien Heng's biography, I mentioned interest in the history of bookstores in Japanese-governed Taiwan. Here I want to get down some notes on the odds and ends I have come across in the process of trying to learn more about this fascinating topic. 

I mentioned in the previous post that according to a website about independent bookstores in Taiwan, in 1927 there were only about 30 bookstores in Taiwan. Central Bookstore (中央書局) opened in Taichung in 1927, Lien Heng's Yatang Bookstore (雅堂書局) in Taipei the same year. (Lien's bookstore only ran for two years before it had to close down.) Chiang Wei-shui's Culture Bookstore (文化書局) had opened a year before in Taipei. Huang Mao-sheng's Lan-chi Bookstore (蘭記書局) opened in Chia-I in 1917. These bookstores focused mainly on selling (and in some cases publishing) Chinese-language books. As Chen Hsiang-lan writes in an article about the 100th anniversary of the Lan-chi Bookstore, owner Huang Mao-sheng took considerable risks to publish and sell Chinese-language books during the Japanese period. As with the bookstores run by Lien Heng and Chiang Wei-shui, Huang's bookstore/publishing venture was primarily concerned with passing on knowledge of Chinese culture and language, as can be seen from the picture below of some of the  Chinese textbooks published by Lan-chi Bookstore. Another article published in 2017 recommends a book about the history of the store: 《記憶裡的幽香——嘉義蘭記書局史料文集百年紀念版》.

Source: 「百年蘭記書局 曾經是嘉義精神地標」

Somewhat confusingly, a 2020 Taiwan News article describes the reopening of "Taiwan's oldest bookstore," but that bookstore isn't Lan-chi or the Japanese bookstore I'll discuss below. It's the Regent Store (瑞成書局), which the authors say opened in 1912 and is the oldest bookstore in Taiwan that is still operating. The store's website has a video (in Taiwanese and Mandarin) telling the store's story.

This is what I've found (so far) about five of the Chinese language bookstores in colonial Taiwan. There were also of course Japanese bookstores. Hui-yu Caroline Ts'ai's 2013 article "Diaries and Everyday Life in Colonial Taiwan" in part describes colonial bureaucrat Utsumi Chūji's (內海忠司) preference for a bookstore in Taipei called Niitakadō Bookstore (新高堂), which she describes as "the largest bookstore in Taiwan" (p. 152). 

Source:「〈臺北城中故事〉府前街與新高堂：村崎長昶的生意人生」

According to Ts'ai, 

Niitakadō was also well known for issuing textbooks, reference tools, photograph collections, postcards, maps, and many other items. His [Utsumi's] taste for books also reflected an aspect of the marketing strategy of books, which was developed to cater to the growing needs of Japanese communities in Taiwan. An expanding readership on the island - across race and generation - was constructing "Taiwan" as a subject of Japan's empire. (p. 152)

Ts'ai writes that Niitakadō was built in 1912, but this article claims it was founded in 1898 by Murasaki Chōei (村崎長昶). This article by Su Shuo-bin (蘇碩斌) and Lin Yueh-hsien (林月先) agrees, explaining that the original stationery store became a bookstore (renamed 新高堂書店) in 1900. According to Su and Lin, what instigated the explosive growth of Murasaki's business was the excitement in Taiwan (presumably among the Japanese residents, but possibly also among the Taiwanese) about the Russian-Japanese war. The sale of magazines about the war led to the sale of books, and Murasaki's bookstore grew more and more profitable. 

Su and Lin mention three other bookstores that opened around 1898 in the same area of Taipei: the Namiki Bookstore (並木書店), the Taiyōdō Bookstore (太陽堂書店), and the Shirotani Bookstore (城谷書店).* All three of these stores went out of business, though, for various reasons, though other stores moved in. Su and Lin note that Murasaki was fairly conservative in his selection of what kinds of books to sell; he didn't want to get on the bad side of the government. Niitakadō took over the business of supplying elementary school textbooks and also took over the book purchasing for Taipei Imperial University, Taipei University, and Medical College, and dominated the textbook market in Taiwan. (Su and Lin's article is an interesting read, and I highly recommend it. It's an excerpt from a history of Taipei: 《臺北城中故事：重慶南路街區歷史散步》.)

I also found pictures of the 太陽號書店 [Taiyōgo] bookstore, pictured below. According to an article from 2015, it later became the Taiwan Commercial Press (臺灣商務印書館), but that has moved away from its original location. 

Source: 臺灣舊照片資料庫

Here is a picture of the interior of the store:

Source: 臺灣舊照片資料庫

I'm going to end this here. I hope the links to the other sources are useful! My apologies if I didn't mention your favorite bookstore from the Japanese colonial era! Let me know about it in the comments!

*Please correct my romanization of the Japanese names of these stores if they're wrong. 

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

This is a two-volume boxed set, published privately in 1966 by Felix Tardio while he was in Taiwan. The first volume, Mr. Tardio Sees Taiwan: A Critical Look at the Physical Environment of Taiwan, consists of essays, poems, and some drawings about Taiwan's architecture. Volume Two, Mr. Tardio Draws Taiwan: Sketches of Taiwan, consists of reproductions of drawings that he did of the physical environment. I went in search of this book when I saw it mentioned in A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through international Networks, 1960-1980. According to the printing information inside Volume One, the print run was 600 copies, and mine is copy number 546. It's signed by the author.

Tardio's bio is printed at the end of Volume Two:

Mr. Felix Tardio has been in Taiwan since 1963. During that time he served as Assistant Professor at Tunghai University in 1963/64, Associate Professor of Architecture at Tunghai in 1964/65, and one semester each at Chung Yuan College and the Chinese Culture Institute in 1965/66.

The summers between school years were spent travelling in Asia, Europe, and the US.

He received his education at the Department of Architecture of the University of Notre Dame and at the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Pennsylvania, Mr. Tardio worked for various Architects in New York for five years prior to coming to Taiwan, and now considers New York City his home.

There doesn't appear to be much else information about Tardio online, but from what I can find, he was born in 1934 and died in Pennsylvania in 2011.

These books have been mentioned in a book by 李志銘 entitled 舊書浪漫：讀閱趣與淘書樂. Joseph R. Allen also quoted from Tardio in his book, Taipei: A City of Displacements, calling his depiction of Taipei's architecture "scathing" (44).

More on this as I (gingerly) page through it...

Update (5/5/17): A Facebook friend pointed to me this (Chinese-language) discussion on Facebook. The poster has done me the favor of scanning the images from the second volume. Some of the discussion is about the locations of the buildings in the drawings, but there's also some discussion about Tardio, including a link to pictures of Tardio when he was in college. They're interested in finding out how they might get the rights to translate and publish the book, but Tardio is dead and apparently didn't have any descendants.

Here is Lynn Miles on Tardio (from A Borrowed Voice, pp. 22-24):

... Felix Tardio ... was bringing his teaching stint at Tunghai to a close so that he could devote full time to the writing of a book on Taiwan's architecture, which he found fascinating, delightful, ridiculous and dreadful. By early spring 1966 Tardio had moved to Taipei, where he burned the midnight oil, putting the last touch to his drawings, soon to become the book-length companion to a volume of drawings that had been accepted for publication by some Taipei printing house which probably had no idea what it was getting into. Both of them were to be a critique--serious in the prose but riotous in the Art--of Taiwan's Architecture (both A-words capitalized throughout). ...

... Felix was holed up in a funky Japanese-era hotel, the Fukuo, at 13 Hsinyang Street, just off Kuanchien Road, in the old Japanese-built section of Taipei between New Park and the railway section. I still have a vivid mental picture of the morning sun glancing off the huge waxy leaves of some tropical tree just outside his window. Tardio had his windows thrown wide open to catch the early spring air, but leftover winter chill still called for multiple layers of clothing. Big of build, he wore a turtleneck sweater under a corduroy jacket, elbows sporting patches, pocket full of pens. His trademark was a full, handlebar mustache and dark curly hair, reminding some of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and others of the American comedian and popular talk-show host, Groucho Marx.

But when it came to humor, he was squarely in the Groucho Marx camp. He kept Jack [Cooper] in stitches with his tales of ongoing battles with Government Information Office censors over the deletion or "correction" of every last word. He showed us some of the passages which the GIO deemed impermissible. Naturally, all of them were criticisms of the ruling powers--these "misunderstandings" of his that in their eyes needed "correcting" before the book could go to press.

The discussion of Tardio continues on page 24, but I want to encourage you to get a copy of the book--it's fascinating reading overall. Contact Dr. Linda Gail Arrigo if you're interested.

Weekend trip

We had some time off yesterday, so we took the High-Speed Rail (HSR) to Taipei yesterday. We could only get a one-way trip, and we could only get seats on the 7 o'clock train. But that turned out to be OK.

People like to take pictures when the train is coming. Here's one guy trying to fit in his family and the train. I love that photographer's pose. Looks like he's in training for the next Matrix movie....

The trip was smooth and quick--we left right at 7:00 and arrived in Banqiao (or "Banciao", as they write it) 53 minutes and 25 seconds later. (In contrast, the bus we took from Taipei to Taichung last night took about 2 hours--and I think the driver was speeding the whole way.)

We spent the morning at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum. Quite a sobering experience. (There's also a "virtual museum" that contains a lot of the pictures that are on display at the museum. Unfortunately, it's only available in Chinese.)

Coming back to Taichung, we felt kind of jealous of Taipei's MRT system, though we know how much people in Taipei suffered during the construction of the subway. But we're hoping to see something like it in Taichung one of these days...