Three new books in the former native speaker's library

I wasn't sure I would be getting these because when I ordered them during the Cornell University Press sale, I never got an email confirmation. But they came today!

• Endless War: Fiction & Essays by Wang Wen-hsing (eds. Shu-ning Sciban and Fred Edwards) (2011)
  
  
• Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 by Seiji Shirane (2022); here's a video of a book talk Shirane gave at the University of Washington
  
  
• Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies by Sayaka Chatani (2018); here's a video of a related talk Chatani gave on "Ideology and Emotions: Rural Youth Mobilization in Colonial Taiwan"

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

University of Hawai'i Press has a clearance sale going, so I bought two books--I think they were a dollar each:

• Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning, by J. Marshall Unger
• Family Catastrophe, by Wang Wen-hsing (translated by Susan Wan Dolling)

I have to admit, though, that I haven't had time to read anything except for student writing since the beginning of the semester, so I don't know when I'll get around to reading these. Ah, for those long lost days of my "sabbatical"...

Notes on Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

朱宥勳 (Chu Yu-hsun). 【他們沒在寫小說的時候：戒嚴台灣小說家群像】When They Were Not Writing Novels: Portraits of Novelists from Taiwan Under Martial Law. 2nd. ed. 大塊文化, 2023.

Note: This isn't going to be a complete discussion of the book--to do that would probably involve writing a post as long as the book itself!

In this very readable collection of essays, Chu Yu-hsun focuses on the socio-political contexts in which nine postwar Taiwan novelists lived and worked. I especially like the anecdotes that Chu includes about the writers' experiences (such as this one about Chung Chao-cheng's "bold" decision about paper that I posted earlier). Because the book doesn't focus as much on their actual novels or their writing processes, I get the funny feeling (as I did with A-chin Hsiau's book) that many of these novelists spent more time on other activities than they did on writing novels. Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), for instance, goes from editing a literary column in Free China Journal (自由中國半月刊) to moving to Iowa on the invitation of Paul Engle to join the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which Engle directed, and eventually developing an international writing program at Iowa. (Where did she find time to write her own novels?!) 

Chung Chao-cheng is depicted as spending a lot of time developing a network of Taiwanese writers and helping them get published. He pops up in other people's chapters, too, for example trying unsuccessfully to get Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) to allow his work to be published in an anthology of Taiwanese nativist writers (Chen wasn't interested because he was a pro-unification Taiwanese leftist--in fact, judging from what Chu has to say, Chen wouldn't even accept being called "Taiwanese"). 

Other writers cross paths in the book, like Lin Haiyin (林海音), who helped Chung Chao-cheng and other Taiwanese writers get opportunities to translate Western works from Japanese. According to Chu (and this is, from what I understand, a dominant narrative), writers who grew up during the Japanese era had a lot of trouble writing and getting published after 1945 because Taiwan's literary scene became dominated by exiled Mainlanders who were more experienced writing in Mandarin and who tended to exclude Taiwanese writers from getting published. Lin Haiyin, who edited the influential literary supplement of the United Daily News (聯合報), worked with Taiwanese writers to get them published, even editing their work for them at times. She had to resign from this position in 1963 due to the "Captain Incident" (船長事件), in which a poem she published got the author and her in trouble when the poem was interpreted as being critical of Chiang Kai-shek. 

The book also touches on some important martial law- and Cold War-era issues, such as the CIA's involvement in Iowa's International Writing Program, the US Information Agency's involvement in the shaping of Taiwan's literature (what Chu's teacher, Chen Jianzhong [陳建忠], has called "unattributed power" [隱蔽權力]), and the relationship between the battle of literary modernism versus nativism and the martial law regime's emphasis on "anti-Communist literature" (反共文學). 

I'm not well-read enough in Taiwanese literary history to evaluate Chu's claims about all of these points, though. I feel I should read some of the books he mentions in his afterword to get a better understanding. I also think I should read Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's Modernism and Nativist Resistance (1993) and perhaps reread A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan (2021) to have a better basis for assessing Chu's book. 

One problem I do have with When They Were Not Writing Novels, though, is that Chu doesn't cite sources for a lot of what he writes about. I realize this is not an academic book (probably that's what made it so readable!), but some bibliography at the end where he acknowledges his sources would help a lot in determining what his conclusions are based on. I was also a bit confused by his comment in the afterword to the effect that while most the book's judgements about the authors come from existing research on Taiwanese literature, a small portion are speculative based on Chu's own literary experience ("本書關於作家的種種判斷，大多得益自台灣文學研究的既成果；少部分則是我以自身的文學經驗推想的"). This made me wonder which portions were based on which. I think a more extensive bibliography would go a long way toward reassuring me about Chu's conclusions. In the end, though, I do want to reemphasize that I enjoyed the book, and it makes me want to dive more deeply into Taiwanese literature, if only as an amateur.

Notes on A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan

A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism. Columbia University Press, 2021.

It's taken me a while to do some writing about this book because I'm not sure how I feel about it. I read five reviews of it that are generally quite positive, from Tanguy Lepesant, Scott Simon, Ming-sho Ho, Evan Dawley, and James Baron. (If you want to get an overall summary of the book, take a look at some of these reviews. I think Lepesant's and Baron's are not behind a paywall.) 

I appreciated the book because of its perspectives on the literary discussions and debates going on during the 1960s and '70s in Taiwan. I particularly appreciated the many long quotations (translated into English) from a variety of literary figures from postwar Taiwan. Hsiau ties these quotations and figures together into an argument that Taiwan's intellectuals (mostly, though not exclusively, represented in the book by writers in the literary field) moved from viewing themselves as part of the Chinese nation to viewing themselves as Taiwanese, in contradistinction to the Chinese nation. Rather than viewing this transition from an "instrumentalist" perspective, which would suggest that writers decided whether to express themselves as Chinese or Taiwanese depending on which form of identification would help their interests, or from an "essentialist" perspective, which would suggest that writers were always Taiwanese and only pretended to be "Chinese" until it was safe to express their true selves, Hsiau takes a narrative view. In this view, over the generations, writers responded to historical events like the movement to "protect the Diaoyutai islands" (保釣運動), the ROC's loss of its UN seat, etc., by rethinking their relationship with Taiwan and the ROC. As Hsiau says in the conclusion, 

Rather than a fit for an essence, or an instrument for advancing some collective's interest, I view narrative as an embodiment of human understanding that shapes human understanding and emotion in new ways with each generation. The perspective of narrative identity that I have adopted throughout this book could be described as interpretive. Historical narrative for political agents is interpretive in that it is a means of understanding the self in social and temporal context. It is a way of constructing collective identity and motivating praxis. Rather than an essence, there is a set of materials, to which new materials are continually being added, that is used to construct identity anew when the need for new kinds of action arises. There are indeed interests, but they are not calculated coldly; they are instead judged in the warmth of the chapters of the xin, the heard-and-mind that Chinese philosophers have been trying to understand since antiquity. On this understanding, it will not do for us to simply disbelieve the constant apparently heartfelt declarations of Chinese national identity in texts from the return-to-reality generation throughout the 1970s. We have to consider the possibility that if a person says he or she feels Chinese, he or she is at that moment in time. (171-2)

This quote, I think, encapsulates Hsiau's argument, and there's a part of me that agrees with him. Hsiau puts at least some of the responsibility for the "apparently heartfelt declarations of Chinese national identity" on "the power of ideological dissemination" through the educational system. As Kenneth Burke wrote in A Rhetoric of Motives, "[e]ducation ('indoctrination') exerts ... pressure upon ... [a person] from without" and that person "completes the process from within. ... Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (39). The challenge in Taiwan, as the KMT government perceived it, was to make the voice within echo, or speak the language of, the voices from without. 

I'm reminded of a story Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) told about a performance she and her university classmates were preparing for in 1972 upon the occasion of the National Assembly’s re-election of Chiang Kai-shek to yet another term as president. As Lung wrote, 

My deepest memory was about the sentiment of comradeship felt by that bunch of 20-year-olds creating and working day and night, and we walked out in the middle of the night under the moonlit parasol trees to feel the silence of nature, the dreams of our people and the tranquility of the universe. We had no idea what "the leader" was up to, and we had no idea at that moment of youthful romance, a university student had been arrested, detained, interrogated and then sentenced to life in prison for "reading the wrong things" and "saying the wrong things."

Our gestures were exaggerated, our speech tones were artificial, our orations were stuffed with the learned wills of the adults, our emotions were sincere, our beliefs were earnest and our motives were pure, and that was because we had no idea that the most sorrowful darkness was hidden in the shadows of the parasol trees. (translation by Roland Soong)

As I wrote in my doctoral dissertation (many years ago!), Lung's reflections are a reminder that presenting government-approved thoughts with exaggerated gestures and artificial tones does not always negate the possibility of there being sincere emotions motivating the speaker. Yet at the same time, the presence in Lung’s story of the arrested university student is a reminder that not everyone had been convinced by what the schools and society had taught them. Because of this, I'm not sure that I can completely accept Hsiau's conclusions--his argument about the naiveté of  the instrumentalist and essentialist explanations for the Chinese Nationalist rhetoric and its transformation into Taiwanese nationalist rhetoric seems a bit overstated. 

When writing about Yeh Shih-t'ao's (葉石濤) earlier and later literary criticism, Chu Yu-hsun, in When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】), notes that from today's perspective, Yeh's earlier use of sentences like "Taiwan literature is part of Chinese literature" (台灣文學是中國文學的一部分), and "nativist literature is the literature of the Three People's Principles" (鄉土文學就是三民主義文學) would be annoying--and surprising, given Yeh's later Taiwan-centric perspective. Chu points out, however, that Yeh had been jailed by the KMT, which influenced his perspective on how to write. As Chu argues, looking at Yeh's rhetorical organization, after reciting a "party-state mantra," Yeh would follow up with the real point: "but in the context of Taiwan's natural environment and historical background, Taiwanese literature has developed a unique style..." (但是在台灣的自然環境和歷史背景下，台灣文學...形成了獨特的風貌......). The real point for Yeh, Chu argues, was about the locality and indigeneity of Taiwanese literature, but this was something he had to make less obvious, given the martial law context he was writing in. Hsiau would call this, probably, an example of an "essentialist" argument that Yeh was always Taiwan-centric but hid it until he could feel safe expressing it. Be that as it may, Chu's interpretation seems valid to me.

On a related point, this is where I agree with Tanguy Lepesant's critique that Hsiau should have spent more time discussing his methods. I also found Hsiau's explanation of how he was using discourse analysis a bit thin, and in my view, unconvincing. I did not find much in his book that resembled discourse analysis in any form that I would recognize. There was not a great deal of focus on language or language in use, for instance. Perhaps Hsiau is more focused on what James Paul Gee would call "Discourse" rather than "discourse" (here's a summary of that distinction). That is, Hsiau is more focused on "ways of being in the world" rather than on analysis of specific uses of language to communicate or persuade. Chu gives an example above of a more discourse-as-language-in-use form of discourse analysis that focuses on how writers use language and the contexts in which they are using language. While Hsiau's is an important book, I would like to have seen more of this kind of "discourse analysis" being used in it.

An anecdote about writing in postwar Taiwan from【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

Was going to do some writing on my paper this morning, but instead read a chapter from When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】). The first chapter is about Chung Chao-cheng (Zhong Zhaozheng, 鍾肇政), a Taiwanese author who helped other Taiwanese writers get their work published during the martial law period, where Mainlanders more easily got published. There’s an interesting anecdote (which comes from a memoir by Chung) of the time when Chung saw an ad in the newspaper calling for submissions for a writing contest. This was sometime in the 1950s, when Chung was probably in his mid- or late-20s, living in his family home in Longtan, Taoyuan County. Although he was interested in submitting something, he paused when he saw the requirement was to write on grid paper (有格稿紙). When he dug around his house for paper, he found some Japanese-style manuscript paper (原稿用紙, genkō yōshi), so he made what he called a “bold” (大膽) decision to use the Japanese-style paper. 

Chu Yu-hsun, the author of When They Were Not Writing Novels, explains that this was a “bold” decision because it symbolizes Chung’s use of his Japanese-era literary foundation to break into the literary world of postwar Taiwan (34-35). Chu points out that writers of Chung’s generation, who were educated in Japanese, had to learn to write in a “foreign language” (Mandarin) before they could even try to write creatively (to say nothing of trying to publish) in Chinese. The different kinds of paper are a material difference but are also symbolic of the writers’ struggle to bring their own resources to the task of writing in a new linguistic, political, and literary environment. 

The other interesting point is that the genkō yōshi Chung used was probably not that different in format from the paper used in postwar Taiwan, but it might have been different enough (maybe the name of the manufacturer was printed on the paper, for instance) that Chung was hesitant to use it. This might symbolize Taiwanese writers' concern about how Mainlander editors might view their writing, where anything that gave away the author's Taiwanese identity could be an excuse for rejection. Chu also mentions that Chung's use of "bold" might be a sign that Chung is reflecting on something that happened 35 years earlier. Chu thinks that the younger Chung probably had more of a sense of despair at the time.

Darryl Sterk, trans. Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Lōa Hô

Darryl Sterk, trans. Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Lōa Hô. Honford Star, 2018.

I just finished reading this today after starting it a few months ago, which means my memory of some of the earlier stories is shaky. (One of the advantages and disadvantages of reading a collection of short stories is that you can put it down and dip into it from time to time.) So for that reason, I'm not going to write a review of the book. Besides, there are quite a few good reviews of the book already, such as those of 

• Willow Heath (who praises both Lōa Hô's stories and Sterk's translations)
• Tony Malone (who, on the other hand, finds the book "rather academic" and suggests that Lōa Hô "is more important for his role as an influence on Taiwanese literature than for any real genius in his writing")
• Liz Wan (who points out that Sterk's technique of sometimes translating into colloquial English and sometimes retaining Japanese and Taiwanese [in romanized form] in the stories gives the reader the sense of what the stories read like in the original; as she puts it, "some parts are smooth, whereas reading others feels like walking with a piece of chewing gum stuck to the shoes")
• T F Rhoden (who notes "Lōa Hô’s playful reproduction of local and artisan-specific dialect in the face of an alien bureaucracy")
• Vivian Szu-Chin Chih (who brings up how Sterk handles the challenges of translating the short poems that Lōa Hô sometimes included in his stories, concluding that he does an effective job on giving readers the sense of the original)

I know I'll be coming back to these stories to think about his portrayal of the responses to the work of the Taiwan Cultural Association (台灣文化協會), of which Lōa Hô was a founding member, by various members of society. For instance, some of the gangsters ("eels") in “Three Unofficial Accounts from the Romance of the Slippery Eels" (1931) consider the "cultured individuals" of the TCA to be rather cowardly; as one eel puts it, "Yeah, I seen this guy at the podium, spittle flying. But the police just have to say 'cease and desist' and he dutifully climbs down from the stage. That’s how brave he is" (141). Another "eel" says, "You lot! Who knows how many people who do not accept their lot in life you’ve hurt by getting their hopes up when you can’t change nuthin'" (141). 

However, in another story, entitled "Disgrace?!" (1931), a dumpling seller agrees that while the TCA members "yak and yak, and there’s always someone who wants to go and listen" to their speeches, the TCA speakers are brave. He points out that during a speech, "three and a half sentences in, he [a Tokkō from the Special Higher Police] shouts 'Cease and desist!' And if they keep yaking [sic] they'll get dragged off the stage and beaten up. But these guys aren’t afraid of nothing" (124). But Lōa Hô gives a nuanced picture of the Taiwan Cultural Association members, ending the story with a description of a doctor who, despite being a member of the TCA, is "one of the cringers." After the police break up a play at a local temple, one of the officers barges into the doctor's clinic, and the doctor's conversation with him is held up for critique by both the townspeople and, perhaps, the author:

"Working a bit late, today, are you? Been busy lately?" (Said the doctor.)

"Ha ha! Protest if you think it's unjust. If a keibu, a superintendent, is no use to you, you'll have to go to as high as a keishikan, a senior commissioner!" (Said the officer.)

"All right. When I do, shall I commend you for meritorious service? How much more of a travel honorarium do you need?"

"Manma--as it is, no need. Let me tell you something, I've come to a realization: that I'm going to get murdered at your place by one of the rowdies outside."

"I guarantee your safety."

"We didn't just use savage means tonight, but also civil."

"I can also guarantee you'll rise through the ranks."

"Ha ha ha!"

After the officer came out someone went in to ask the doctor what had happened. But the doctor said nothing, just smiled bitterly and helplessly.

Criticism erupted out of the crowd on the street.

"For the police to be able to abuse their authority and then go and act big in front of a man who likes to talk about justice and humanity must really be satisfying, like nothing else."

"Is he proud, that the officer paid him a personal visit?"

It's a disgrace, a great disgrace. Are the people who talk about justice really so helpless when the bullies lord it over everyone? (128-9)

The last paragraph seems to be in the narrator's voice, since there are no quotation marks. Is this meant to reflect Lōa Hô's own frustration with the lack of effectiveness of the TCA? Other stories seem to reflect his feeling that the Association was not accomplishing much (especially after its split into two factions in 1927), and in the introduction to the book, Pei-yin Lin suggests that Lōa Hô's turn back to poetry after 1935 reflected his "low morale" and "sense of isolation" (xix). 

The other voices in the passages I've quoted might also reflect the feelings of the general public about the TCA. Another story, "Going to the Meeting" (undated, possibly 1926) also gives some sense of both the public's and possibly Lōa Hô's own feelings about the Association. The narrator takes a train trip to Wufeng (where Lin Hsien-t'ang, a founder of the TCA, lived) to attend a meeting of the Association. On the way, he overhears conversations between a Japanese man and his Taiwanese counterpart and between a farmer and his friend that reflect the public's ambivalent feelings about the accomplishments of the Association. To the Japanese man's questions about the TCA, the Taiwanese man suggests that many Taiwanese intellectuals "find the members of the association annoying and avoid them" (203). He also suggests that the Association is ineffective because "[t]hey are capitalist intellectuals ... [who] may not have had any profound insight, which detracts from their capacity for active resistance. They'll just hold meetings and give speeches from time to time, that's it" (204). (Sterk suggests that the speaker sounds like a socialist here.)

The second conversation, between the farmer and his friend, centers on the farmer's inability to fight against the government's takeover of the land he plowed for 3 years and the rent they are charging him for the land. When his friend suggests going to the TCA, the farmer responds sarcastically that the Lin family enriched themselves by stealing from the tenant farmers for generations. He obviously didn't expect that the TCA would do anything. Even his friend says, "Rather than striving on behalf of the Taiwanese people, they could be a little less domineering to their tenant farmers, that would be enough" (206)--to which the farmer sarcastically replies, "O-mî-tô-hút" (阿彌陀佛), suggesting this wouldn't happen without divine intervention. This conversation points out a problem Lōa Hô saw (and, he suggests, some everyday Taiwanese saw) with the ethos of the Association, or at least of some of its founding members: their own hands were not necessarily that clean. 

Anyway, the stories do provide perspectives on the TCA that might be useful to me, ones that I hadn't read elsewhere (yet). 

Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader

Nikky Lin, ed. A Taiwanese Literature Reader. Cambria Press, 2020.

I started a post about A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, but before I could get into writing it, working out my complicated feelings about Hsiau's book, I picked up Lin's collection yesterday and ended up reading the whole thing in about two sittings. 

That isn't as difficult as it might sound, for despite feeling the title might give, this book is fairly short--it contains an introduction and only six stories, comprising less than 200 pages. The six stories are all from the Japanese colonial period, five from what Ye Shitao calls the "mature period" (1926-1937) and one from what he calls the "war period" (1937-1945). (Actually, it's not clear if Long Yingzong's "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees" if from the mature period or the war period--it was published in 1937. I've counted it as being from the "mature period.") Two of the six stories--Loā Hô's "A Lever Scale" and Zhu Dianren's (zh) "Autumn Letter"--were originally written in Chinese. The other four--Yang Kui's "The Newspaper Boy," Long Yingzong's (zh) "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees," Wu Yong-fu's (zh) "Head and Body," and Wang Chang-hsiung's (zh) "Sweeping Torrent"--were written in Japanese. 

The stories were all pretty interesting, if not entirely polished (I assume this was the case in the original languages, not just in the translations), and the book made me hope for more translations of fiction from Japanese-era Taiwan.* One thing that I appreciated about the stories is where they provided sensory details about what life was like. Sometimes you get this in biographies or other non-fiction, but fiction writers seem more likely to include that detail to make you feel like you're there with the characters. (Probably the "show, don't tell" principle at work.) For instance, when Chen Yousan, the main character of "The Town Planted with Papaya Trees," arrives at the home of a colleague, he is described as "remov[ing] his sweat-soaked underclothes" and "wringing them out," something I can definitely imagine doing after walking under the hot September sun in southern Taiwan. 

Together, the stories give a variety of perspectives on what it was like to be Taiwanese under Japanese colonialism--for some, the barely suppressed rage; for others, the self-doubt, the desire to become fully Japanese balanced with the sense of second-class citizenship. 

*I've since ordered a copy of The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction since 1926, published in 1983.

[Note: This post is necessarily short and sketchy--my 8-year-old keeps asking me if he can spray paint something in the garage that he's working on, and I don't have that much bandwidth anymore at the end of a very tiring summer... Looking forward to my "sabbatical" that starts Sept. 6!]

Poem by Chen Li 陳黎: 〈蔥〉

I was at a Zoom panel discussion with Shawna Yang Ryan (author of Green Island) and two other speakers. One of them, Professor Sujane Wu from Smith College, mentioned this poem by Taiwanese poet Chen Li (陳黎):

I thought it was an interesting (and moving) piece of writing describing translingualism and the experience of growing up in Taiwan under Nationalist colonialism.

Chen has an English translation of the poem on his website.