Our Kerr biography has a (tentative) title!

Found out the other day that one of the titles in the running for the GHK biography has been approved by the sponsor of the book, the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. The tentative title is  《葛超智傳記：亞洲、冷戰與一段未竟之志》 (roughly, George H. Kerr: Asia, the Cold War, and an Unfulfilled Ambition), and it should be coming out early next year. It's co-authored by Professors 蘇瑤崇 (Su Yao-tsung), 泉水英計 (Hidekazu Sensui), 吉原ゆかり (Yukari Yoshihara), and me. More details when I know more!

Four new books in the former native speaker's library

I got a collection of four small illustrated books about old Taichung, 《臺中舊城》, which includes 

• 「宮原武熊的一天」(about Miyahara Takekuma, a Japanese ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in Taichung),  
• 「和平日報：二七部隊」(about the Taichung-based newspaper I've been combing through for my research on 蔡鐵城),
• 「臺中公園-前世今生」(about Taichung Park), and 
• 「1960's 綠川點點滴滴的日子」(about the cleaning up of the Lü Chuan [Green River] in downtown Taichung).

These books also have maps of old Taichung that I guess you can use to find the places discussed. Wish I had time this trip to visit Taichung and take a look at those historical sites.

 

From their website, 臺中舊城生活博物館, it appears that they've published other books about Taichung, too. 

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Writing from Taipei now. It is miserably hot and humid, but I walked (walked!) the 1.1 km (OK, I'm a wimp to complain!) to 唐山書店 (and now I see that they have a website and I could have just ordered from it...). I bought one book I had planned to get and another that I discovered there.

呂東熹，《二二八記者劫》，玉山社，2016.

This book has a chapter about the Ho-p'ing Jih-pao (和平日報) newspaper that Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng wrote for before 228. Part of that chapter is about Ts'ai himself; I've already read it online, but I want to read the rest of the chapter (and the whole book) for context about journalists and newspapers during that period. 

徐秀慧，《戰後初期（1945-1949）台灣的文化場域與文學思潮》，稻鄉出版社，2007.

The title interested me, and I saw some footnotes mentioned the 和平日報, so I decided to buy it.

Still have some more books to buy in the coming weeks. Gotta pace myself... 

New ebook in the former native speaker's library

Just downloaded Evan Dawley's new book Taiwan: A People's History to my phone (the print copy isn't available yet). Hopefully, I'll be able to read it on my flight to Taiwan (tomorrow!). I'm looking forward to it.

Here's an interview with Dawley about the book:

Revisiting my dissertation

As I have mentioned a couple of times, I'm going to be participating in a roundtable on the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association in China and Taiwan. I got an email early this morning that suggested that we are supposed to submit our presentation materials by July 5, which was a bit of a surprise. But I happened to have time today to do some work on it. So I woke up and got going on it. 

The actual presentation (which I haven't done much of even now!) is only supposed to be five minutes long, but I also want to be ready for the roundtable discussion. We have worked up some questions that we'll discuss, so I spent the day going through them and drafting some responses. Doing that required me to read through parts of my dissertation and some of my dissertation notes from 15+ years ago. Some people have told me that they're horrified when they try to reread their dissertations, but I don't feel that way. Oh, there are some cringey places in it, and I've found more typos than I care to think about, but generally reading through it is a pleasurable experience. (As I told my brother, I think it's because my dissertation is so full of quotations of people who are smarter than I am!) 

Reading the dissertation also brings back memories of the process of writing it, which was also (generally speaking) enjoyable. I have heard people talk about how their dissertation process was painful, and I'm sure there were painful aspects to mine, but I actually enjoyed reading and studying the archival documents, interviewing former Shansi reps, and putting it all together.* It wasn't all roses and cheese (to borrow my 11-year-old's phrase--don't ask me what it means!), but maybe because I took so long to write it (9+ years), I had time to "live" with the documents and the interviews and use them to sort of create a virtual Oberlin Shansi world in my mind. Rereading my dissertation brings all of the experience back to mind. It also allows me to make connections between what I knew then and what I have learned since then about Taiwan and about US-Taiwan relations through my work on George Kerr. I think the continued learning and making these connections is something that keeps me alive and keeps my few remaining brain cells working!

*Though it got a little scary when I started having dreams about Nicolas Cage helping me with it...

Summer activities

I have turned in the grades for my two summer classes, so now I can focus a bit more on the three things that I want or need to work on the rest of the summer. A little update:

• Introduction to Rhetoric. I've got readings and a general schedule of activities mapped out, but there are still a few blanks to fill in. I'm meeting with the regular instructor next Thursday on Friday so we can talk over my plans for the course. I'm going in a bit of different direction from the one she takes, but she's OK with that, and there aren't any strict departmental expectations for what students should cover in the class. (Obviously it has to be an introduction to rhetoric, though!) I've been adapting what I did for the "Rhetorics in Contact" course that I taught a couple of years ago. I'm not doing a heavy focus on archival research this time around, though (too many students to take to the archives this time). I'm also planning to bring a lot more reflection into the course by ending it with a reflective portfolio project rather than a big essay.
• Academia Sinica conference. I started a PPT (Google Slides) for this, which I'll fill with mostly images (I don't like slide presentations that are text-heavy, though once in a while I fall into that trap). One thing that has been troubling me about this is that my prepared remarks are supposed to be only 5 minutes max. Not sure what I can say in 5 minutes. ("5 minutes" always reminds me of this 1980s-era Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza ad, which I mostly remember because the woman in it reminds me of my cousin's ex-girlfriend...)*
• Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng (蔡鐵城) project. Am "scraping" all I can find about him from various archival websites. (By the way, this website from the 國立公共資訊圖書館 is really cool! Tons of digitized old newspapers, Japanese era books, etc. I'm probably the last person in the world to find it, but in case I'm not, here's the link.) Am realizing how big and difficult a project this will be for me, but I'm realizing that I need to keep in mind what I was telling my students last year about the need to be patient and go slowly. I'm working with all sorts of materials and technologies (like the website above) that makes this research, but a lot of this just takes old-fashioned patience, planning, and ... (I need another word that starts with "p"--"persistence"?).

BTW, the GHK book is at the publisher getting proofread. When I know its publication date, I'll post it here.

* OK, now I want to have pizza for lunch...

Thoughts about 《大濛》(A Foggy Tale)

My wife and I watched A Foggy Tale on Netflix last night, and I became my usual blubbery self, of course. I don't want to give away anything because I hope a lot of people watch it while it's available. But a few thoughts:

There were ways in which it reminded me of Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters, with the main character traveling from rural Chiayi to the sort-of big city of Taipei to retrieve something for her family. Unlike Li Liu in Sneider's book, who is going to retrieve his family's god, Ah-yueh (黃秋月) in the movie is on a mission to retrieve the body of her brother, Yuh-yun (黃育雲), who was executed--evidently for having the "wrong thoughts." 

The movie begins in 1953, which coincidentally is the year Sneider's novel was published--it was also the year that Ts'ai T'ieh-cheng (蔡鐵城) was executed. (Ts'ai also had a little sister he evidently loved a lot.) I saw that A Foggy Tale was filmed in various locations around Chiayi, which I guess were able to stand in for parts of Taipei in the 1950s. Coincidentally, Ts'ai had connections to Chiayi, as well. 

Without giving too much away, A Foggy Tale, like A Pail of Oysters, portrays its main characters as navigating the thin line between agency and helplessness. The characters do their best to act within the limitations and unpredictability around them. Ah-yueh is scammed almost immediately after arriving in Taipei and almost sold into prostitution, but she's rescued by Chao Kung-tao (趙公道), a rickshaw driver who's a former soldier from Kuang-tung. After being conned once, she's suspicious of Chao at first, but slowly comes to trust him. He's got troubles of his own, being suspected of having Communist connections, but he tries to help her raise money to collect her brother's body. This gets him into further trouble, unfortunately. It reminds me of how in A Pail of Oysters, Precious Jade's attempt to help her friends (who were, like her, trafficked into prostitution) escape eventually backfires on her--and her brother. In that kind of environment, it's difficult to predict the effects of your actions. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

I think I'll watch the movie again while it's still available, if for no other reason than to absorb its representation of 1950s Taipei before I visit 2020s Taipei this summer.

Summer plans

The spring semester is over here--and just in time, as a hay fever-driven lethargy has overtaken me, making it hard for me to concentrate on whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing right now. I have two online courses to run in May-June ("Summer A," which used to be known as "Summer 1"), though, so I need to get ready for them. I've got one prepared, but I need to go through the other one and update it, and then make a few screencasts before classes start May 6. (I hope I can talk without sounding like I have a stuffed-up nose.)

After the Summer A classes are ready, I need to get back to work on preparing for a new course I'll be teaching in the fall: Introduction to Rhetoric. The regular professor is going to be on leave, so I'm taking over. While there are no set-in-stone content requirements, the course description reads as follows:

Introduces major concepts, traditions, and issues in rhetorical studies. Explores topics such as the range of ways that people persuade others to change their minds or take action; the relationship among language, truth, knowledge, and power; the role of language in shaping identity, communities, and cultures; and the use of rhetoric for activism and advocacy. Focuses on rhetoricians and rhetorics from diverse traditions, emphasizing contemporary and interdisciplinary approaches to investigating a wide range of rhetorical artifacts.

The regular professor has given me access to her materials, which are, of course, excellent, reflecting her years of teaching the course. I think I need, though, to develop the course in a way that fits my own expertise and teaching style. I'm working on that now, and I hope to talk to her soon to see what she thinks of my ideas. She might be able to help me avoid some possible wrong turns I'd take! More on all this in future posts, perhaps.

In addition to the course development, I'll be going to Taiwan this summer for a conference at Academia Sinica in August. I'll be part of a roundtable on "Oberlin Shansi in China and Taiwan: The Transformation of a Transnational Educational Mission." I'm supposed to talk about how martial law-era Taiwan and Tunghai University were depicted in the campus letters reps in Taiwan sent back to the Oberlin community. It'll be interesting to revisit that period of my academic life when all I seemed to think about was that hardy band of young Oberlin grads who were teaching English in Taiwan and teaching Oberlin about Taiwan. 

I might also try to do some research while I'm in Taiwan, but right now I'm not sure what I want to do research about. I was initially interested in the story of Ts'ai T'ieh-cheng (蔡鐵城), whom I first read about when working on a presentation about the White Terror for students who are going on a study-abroad trip to Taiwan this May. Ts'ai, who was born in Ta-chia (大甲) in 1923, reported for the Ho-p'ing Jih-pao (和平日報) in central Taiwan before becoming involved with Hsieh Hsueh-hung's (謝雪紅) "27 Brigade" (二七部隊) after the February 28 Incident. In 1953 he was executed. His story (here it is in Chinese, an excerpt from a book entitled 《二二八記者劫》) was very moving, particularly the part where he wrote a note to his younger sister the night before he died. 

A note that Ts'ai wrote to his sister the night before his execution: “Dear little sister: Do you know? On the night before I leave this world, you are my only companion. I took out your photograph and looked at it again and again. Ah, I hope—" And then the ink is smeared, perhaps by tears. Some believe the missing words were "that you grow up smart and beautiful."

I thought about doing more research on his life and his reporting. The National Central Library appears to have microfilm of the Ho-p'ing Jih-pao, so I might take a look there if I get a chance. I'm still working out what my whole purpose would be for doing this research, though. Maybe I won't know until I see the newspaper microfilm. That's how it goes sometimes, right?

Taiwan Studies+ 2.0 symposium reflection

Yesterday, I attended the "Taiwan Studies+ 2.0" international symposium at Harvard. I found all of the presentations really fascinating, even (especially?) when I didn't know anything about the topics. There were presentations about video games, noise pollution, Japanese-era mountaineering, representations of Indigenous people in ecological literature, capitalism, the "semiconductor shield," diasporic Taiwanese activism, ROC/Taiwan relations, and transitional justice, among other topics. 

Sitting there, I realized how much about Taiwan and Taiwan Studies I don't know. But it was an inspiring feeling rather than a depressing one. It reminded me that my own perspective on Taiwan--one that I've acquired through drilling down on a very niche topic (the life and writings of George H. Kerr)--is in need of these encounters with other perspectives so that I'm not stuck in my GHK bubble. Part of that is becoming more aware of how Taiwan is represented in various academic disciplines, not just history. 

One of the questions that came up in the final discussion was about the current status of Taiwan Studies. There was the positive feeling among participants that they don't have to explain Taiwan as much in their articles as they used to (what I've called the "shaped roughly like a tobacco leaf" approach to writing about Taiwan). At the same time, people expressed concern about how to represent Taiwan in relation to China and to global events, and one participant spoke eloquently of the urgency of representing Taiwan during a period of wars and the potential for war in the Taiwan Strait. I'm reminded of a rhetoric scholar from Hong Kong who wrote on social media a while back that a paper they had written about Hong Kong was rejected with the response that Hong Kong was a dead subject. Hopefully, this won't happen to Taiwan or to the people who study Taiwan.

GHK bio updates

A couple of updates about the George Kerr biography:

• We have a publisher! (I'm not going to reveal the details yet, though. I'm not sure we have signed a contract yet.)
• The MS went out yesterday to be reviewed. Evidently, though, we have more time to work on it as we wait for the reviewers' comments. (I have some hopes about some of the things I'd like the reviewers to say, but I won't go into that here.) 
• As I might have mentioned, this edition of the biography will be in Chinese. I'm hoping, though, that we will be allowed to have an English version done at some point. This is something we'll have to work out with the publishers, I suppose. If you have any suggestions for an English-language publisher, let me know!

OK, now that it's off to the reviewers, I should use the waiting time to get some grading done...

Brief interview for RTI's "Taiwan vs. the World" posted

Julien Oeuillet, who moderates the "Taiwan vs. the World" program on Radio Taiwan International, interviewed me for an episode about books to read to understand Taiwan. I'm talking, of course, about George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed. My interview isn't until 35 and a half minutes in, but I also enjoyed the interview with Jason Patterson and Matthew Ryan on marketing in Taiwan. It was quite informative!

Formosa Files interview about George Kerr and Formosa Betrayed posted!

I'm so far behind in posting this that the Formosa Files folks have already posted two new podcasts since my interview! But in case you didn't catch it, I was interviewed by John Ross about Kerr and Formosa Betrayed. The podcast (greatly edited but still a bit long at close to an hour) is here. While you're at it, check out their other episodes--they're always fun and interesting to listen to!

New book in the former native speaker's library

The Island: A Personal Account of Taiwan’s Extraordinary Transformation, by Mark O’Neill (Earnshaw Books, 2023).

OK, I said this wouldn't happen, but I heard about this book on the Formosa Files podcast where they interviewed the author. I'm looking forward to reading it, but right now I have to get back to grading!

Here's a review of the book from the Asian Review of Books.

Heaven Does Not Block All Roads

Just finished reading Anna Beth Keim's Heaven Does Not Block All Roads: A History of Taiwan Through the Life of Huang Chin-tao. I really enjoyed it; although it has a lot of endnotes, it doesn't read like a dry academic book (apologies to writers of dry academic books!). It reads like a novel or a work of creative non-fiction. 

I especially appreciate (again, as a writing teacher) the epilogue where the author takes us into the interview setting where she had the opportunity to talk to Huang. As reader(s) of my 2007 paper on Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters will know, I have a strong interest in how scenes of translingual, intercultural interviews are portrayed, both in fiction and non-fiction. So I was pleased to get a view of the scenes of Keim's interviews with Huang.

I don't have much time today to discuss the book in more depth, but if I have time later, I'll come back to this.

Formosa Delayed: George H. Kerr’s Struggles Writing About Taiwan

My article about the pre-life of Formosa Betrayed has just come out. Here's the abstract if you don't feel like clicking on the link:

George H. Kerr did not publish Formosa Betrayed, his 1965 book about the Guomindang’s early rule over postwar Taiwan and U.S. inaction during the 1947 massacre of thousands of Taiwanese people, until almost twenty years after those events. While scholars and pundits hold various theories about the reasons for the apparent delay, few have paid attention to Kerr’s attempts to write about Taiwan for the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) in the early years of the Cold War. Between 1947 and 1952, Kerr worked on two books, one arguing for the importance of Taiwan to postwar reconstruction in the Western Pacific, the other a more “polemical” study about the 1947 massacres that he had witnessed as a diplomat in Taiwan. Correspondence between Kerr and IPR Secretary-General William L. Holland reveals that several factors prevented Kerr from publishing an account about postwar Taiwan when it might have made the most difference – his inability to meet the IPR’s scholarly, objective expectations; his concerns about the IPR’s reputation during the McCarthy era; and the developing consensus in the United States that Taiwan was no longer a contentious issue. This article also explores why Kerr later constructed a different narrative about his failed publication efforts.

I'm glad that it's out, and I'm looking forward to any response that I get. Now back to the biography of Kerr...

George H. Kerr, on "Correctly English in Formosa"

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 aides 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.

Research Update

Last week I received the proof of my paper about George H. Kerr that will come out in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations by the end of this year (I hope!). It's about his struggles to write about what he saw and experienced in postwar Taiwan--the events leading up to and immediately following the March Massacres of 1947. I was able to locate correspondence between Kerr and William Holland of the Institute of Pacific Relations that cleared up (though not entirely!) what happened to prevent the earlier version of what eventually became his most famous work, Formosa Betrayed. I'll let you know when that comes out.

In the meantime, I'm still working with my colleagues from Taiwan and Japan on the biography of Kerr. There have been some delays in the process (as is inevitably the case, I think), so I'm not sure when the book will be out, but it will probably be done next year. (Fingers crossed!)

I've also been invited to take part in a roundtable next summer about the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association's work in China and Taiwan. If our proposal is accepted, it'll be a chance for me to reconnect with the research I did (and the people I worked with) on Shansi in Taiwan. The last piece I wrote about that research was published in 2013 in a collection about Taiwan church history. It's interesting that this is coming back again at this point in my life. I wonder where it will lead...

[Update, 12/1/25: The proposal for the roundtable was accepted! Yay!]

"Representing Taiwan in DC: How Taiwanese Americans Can Bridge Culture and Policy"

This looks interesting...

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.