End of 2020

It's the end of 2020, but I can't say I have a lot of hope for 2021. Despite having some vaccines, COVID-19 is still raging--particularly in the US, where "toxic individualism" and governmental corruption/incompetence have combined to give the US the dubious honor of accounting for almost a fifth of the world's COVID deaths, despite accounting for only 4.25% of the world's population. Hard to be proud of that statistic. And it's hard for me to be optimistic at this point. Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow.

We gotta get out of this place...

Watching the news. Even though Taiwan is an island, I feel more trapped in the US than I ever felt when I lived there.

Probably not an original observation, but the US right now is the biggest island in the world, and it's floating away from all of the others...

Father's Day 2016

My father passed away two months ago, so this was my first Father's Day without him here. I was looking around for pictures of him with our son, but there don't appear to be many. There was one that I posted on my website back in 2014 when the little guy was only six weeks old. The only other one that I found was this:

This appears to be the last picture I have of my father with his only grandson, taken on August 28, 2015. I'm not sure why I didn't get any pictures of the two of them together last Thanksgiving. Maybe the little guy was too energetic by then, crawling all over the house at speeds that made it hard for his parents to keep up with him, to say nothing of his grandparents.

It wasn't always like this, of course. When I was little, my father liked to follow my brother and me around with a camera, taking photographs or movies of our activities. Since taking movies with Super-8 film required a powerful light, most of the images of me from that time show me blinking, squinting, and tearing up. (And drooling, though that wasn't related to the strong lights.)

Years ago, he had those Super-8 films converted to VCD format, and I have been able to relive a lot of moments in my early life that he recorded. (When he used to show the movies on the movie screen for friends and relatives, he often liked to show a movie where he caught me crawling along, then suddenly spitting up on the floor. He would then impishly run the movie backwards so that the spit-up would fly up back into my mouth. He often threatened to show it to my future wife--I think he did, in fact. She still married me.)

There are other movies that he took while we were growing up, like one of me in my high chair and my brother putting shoes up on the tray and then taking them off as I looked on in drooling confusion. He filmed little plays that my brother and I put on in the backyard for my parents. Unfortunately all the films are silent, so watching them, you have to guess what we're saying. I guess this is a common experience of those of us who grew up before video cameras were available for the general public to buy.

I am grateful that he made those movies, and especially that he decided to have them converted to video about 10 years ago. Now if we can get to scanning the black & white photos he took in Japan in the '40s and digitizing the 4-track tapes he made in the '70s of our family Easter gatherings...

I intend to write more about my father at some point this summer, but for now I just wanted to post this picture of Grandpa Benda to remember him on Father's Day.

Monday half-formed thoughts and frustrations

I have been keeping a journal on my computer(s) for about 10 years; I started it in the context of trying to work on my dissertation, and I call it "Thoughts and Frustrations." It has been useful to me in working out various issues, writing-related and otherwise, so I've kept up with it fairly consistently over the years, except for a few months when I tended to journal more by hand than on the computer.

I mention this because I've been thinking some about what I would be doing in next semester's ENGW 1102 (First-Year Writing for Multilingual Students) courses. Typically at the beginning of the semester, I ask them to write a journal about their hopes, expectations, goals, and fears (!) regarding the class. Often, students will mention in those journals their frustration over how long it takes them to write as compared with their native-English-speaking classmates. This is even true for students whose writing seems pretty fluent to me. I get responses like, "It usually takes me two hours to write what my American classmates can finish in 20 minutes." Whether this is true or not, it has led me to think about how I can help students become more fluent in their writing. For the coming semester, I'm going to try requiring students to keep journals as a way of building up that fluency. I was fascinated by some things that Mike Edwards wrote about a few years ago on his blog Vitia regarding a pilot course he was teaching that in part required students to use the 750 words website to write 750 words every class day for a semester. He was teaching U.S. citizens, I presume (he was teaching at West Point at the time), but I think this kind of experience would be even more helpful for multilingual students (actually, I'm making the assumption--possibly false--that all of his students were native speakers of English). (I'm also tossing around terms like "native speaker" that are themselves problematic, but I'm just going to use this kind of shorthand here rather than complicate things. These are "half-formed thoughts," after all!)

I don't think I'll require students to use that website, but instead I'm going to ask them to set up a Google Doc to write their journals. I'm going to ask them to share that doc with me, too, because there are journal entries on particular topics that I will sometimes ask them for. I probably won't require 750 words a day, either--probably 500 instead (though they can write more if they wish). But I hope that I'm being faithful to at least one idea that Edwards mentions--that "writing has become almost like athletic performance: it’s a matter of getting it done, putting in the practice, and pretty soon, practice translates into improvement."

*****

Speaking of practice and improvement, I've been struggling with a paper that I've been working on--the "second project" that I mentioned the other day. I have written a lot in my "thoughts and frustrations" journal about some ideas that I want to try to address in the paper, but I'm finding that it's really hard to figure out how to actually incorporate those issues into the paper itself. It's not just (as I said before) about hating to write conclusions; it's more that I feel the new ideas are taking the paper in a direction that I hadn't originally intended, and I'm struggling with the feeling that I'm losing control of the paper. I have to decide whether losing control of the paper is something to be avoided at this stage or something to be desired...

*****

I had planned to write a review of Hsiao-ting Lin's Accidental State on this blog, but I see that there's already a good review of it at bookish.asia. I might still write down some thoughts after I've finished the book (which will be after I finish the abovementioned paper). There are a few things in the book so far that I have some issues with. As the reviewer, John Grant Ross, notes, Lin doesn't spend too much time on the February 28, 1947 massacre. I don't have my copy of the book with me, but I also recall that Lin refers to the massacre/incident as a "riot" (or "riots") at one point. I realize that riots were part of the whole incident, but referring to the whole series of events by using the word "riots" kind of whitewashes the acts of the KMT soldiers--both their indiscriminate and "discriminate" acts of killing.

[Update, 5/25/16: Here is the actual quote, from Accidental State:

On the whole, although it cannot be said that economic conditions improved forthwith under Wei Daoming's administration, the situation did not become appreciably worse. Around mid-1948, as one political report by the British consular staff on the island specified, with Wei's skillfulness and diplomacy, the political situation was calm and no discontent had been permitted to become vocal, thus furthering consolidation of Chinese rule on the island. The new economic measures imposed after the riot, notably the lifting of Chen Yi's state socialism, were originally intended both to pacify the native Taiwanese and to fulfill the ambition of making the island a model for the mainland Chinese provinces. It was thus historically accidental that those post-traumatic measures inadvertently laid the foundation for the subsequent formation of a Nationalist island state and unwittingly sowed the seeds of Taiwan's free market economy. Despite some positive signs coming out in the field of post-Chen Yi Taiwan's domestic affairs, in diplomatic terms, the riot, coupled with a worsening situation on the mainland, had inevitably brought about a gradual shift of American policy toward the island. Such a change of policy, in retrospect, played a crucial part in the subsequent development in China's domestic and regional politics. It was also fatefully entwined with the making of Nationalist China on Taiwan. (56, emphasis added)

I'd also note that twice, when Lin refers to a source related to 228, he calls it "one piece of contemporary scholarly work" (42) and "one scholarly work" (55). In both cases, he's talking about Lai, Myers, and Wei's A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford UP, 1991), a work that could at best be called "controversial" (it has been called worse!). Perhaps Lin is referring to this book in this way because the authors (at least Myers) also worked at the Hoover Institution, but it is at least curious, considering that I haven't yet seen him refer to any of his other sources in this way.]

[Update, 7/22/16: I wrote a more recent comment on the representation of the White Terror in Accidental State, available here.]

Writing projects and other frustrations

Since I turned in my grades on May 2, I've been trying to get started on some writing projects for the summer. I'm not teaching this summer, thanks in part to the pay raise that came with my "upgrade," so I decided to make use of my time to read and write--and more generally, to think about life directions at this stage. As my old friend ERG reminded me a few months ago, we've been teaching college students since 1990--over half our lives!

I've completed one mini-project so far, which was to write a few posts here about the writing assignments we worked on in ENGW 1102 (First Year Writing for Multilingual Students) this past semester. In case you missed those posts, they're here, here, and here. (Sorry, but I read something on a writing website that said you should link to your previous blog posts whenever possible!)

The second project that I'm currently working on is a revision of a paper I presented at the Boston MLA conference about 3 years ago; I hope to get that done soon so I can send it to a journal for review by the end of this month. The revision work has been a bit slow going, though, partly due to some confusion about how to end it (I hate writing conclusions!) and partly due to the general lethargy I'm feeling as a result of hay fever. This month has been terrible so far for pollen. So far I'm celebrating little victories like finding my copies of Cold War Orientalism and The Rhetoric of Empire, which I thought were lost after our move last year. Now that I've given myself a deadline, however (the end of the month), I hope that I will work harder on my revisions.

Finally, I hope to develop and work on some sort of writing project in response to the recent death of my father. He passed away in April after a short stay in a hospice, and I've been experiencing quite a mix of feelings since then. After we came back from the burial, I located a CD of interviews that my brother had done with my parents starting in the mid-1990s. I had never listened to them before, and I started listening to one of the interviews from 1995. I was surprised at how my father sounded back then--very different from my more recent memories of talking with him. I want to listen to the interviews more and think about what I might write about him--possibly using the interviews in the process. Maybe it will just be some blog posts about him, but maybe it will be something more developed or "formal." We'll see.

"Speak power to truth"

As I'm writing this, students in Taiwan are occupying the Legislative Yuan, the parliament in Taiwan, to protest the ruling party's attempt to run through a service trade agreement with China that many fear would harm Taiwan's economy. I have been keeping up with the events through Facebook, reading posts by various people I know and don't know who write or show pictures of the events of the protests, and I feel connected to these events and proud of the students who have stood up for their futures in a way that makes me proud to say that I used to live there. 


I started this blog 10 years ago today (well, actually yesterday) with posts about the 2004 Taiwan presidential election and the protests that took place after that. Now Taiwan is at another turning point in its history, and I hope that this is a time when more people in the world listen to the voices of the people rather than those of the people in power who don't have the interests of the people at heart. A former classmate of mine from Syracuse, Seth Kahn, mentioned to me tonight that rhetoric scholar Lee Artz wrote in a book about activist rhetorics that Seth co-edited that our job is not to "speak truth to power" because the powerful know the truth; the problem is that they don't care. The task facing us, he wrote, is to "speak power to truth." As Artz writes, "Rather than communicating with those in power who benefit from the already known truth of inequality, humanity could be better served by conversations for change among those who would benefit from creating new truths, new powers." This is what I hope is happening in Taiwan, and if it is happening and continues happening, I have hope for Taiwan.

Facing history

Sayaka Chatani's recent post mentioning the idea of running a history/critical thinking summer camp for high school students from Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan reminded me of an Oberlin College graduate's "rep letter" from the '50s about a workcamp and seminar for Asian college students run in Japan by the American Friends Service Committee. (Chew on that sentence for a while...) The rep letter, by Ray Downs, who was an Oberlin Shansi rep at Obirin Gakuen, was reprinted in Something to Write Home About: An Anthology of Shansi Rep Letters, 1951-1988.

In Chatani's post, she wrote that one of the difficulties she imagines with running a summer camp like this is that she doesn't know

how to lead the history workshop to constructive critical thinking, instead of creating the clear-cutting aggressor-vs-victim narrative. (Ugh, this positionality issue, again.)

The rep letter by Downs is concerned with a meeting at the work camp among college students from Japan, the U.S., India, Vietnam, Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Canada, and Hawaii. The leader of the meeting, a Fulbright scholar named John Howes, wanted the participants to discuss tensions that might have remained after the war. As Downs writes (and recall, this was written in 1955),

Howes was interested in bringing emotions themselves to the surface rather than discussing issues in which emotions were involved only indirectly insofar as they influenced opinion. For a time it seemed that he would be unsuccessful. Discussion moved along on a relatively scholarly and impersonal level. I began to think that most of those present, like myself, had ceased to think of the last war except as history, since it all was over before most of them were twelve years old. I asked a question to this effect. I had been wrong. (14)

After Downs asked the question, the participants began to open up about their experiences, telling about how their families and friends had suffered. As Downs writes,

... I think a new dimension had been added to the understanding of all of us. Certainly in parts of Asia the scars of war have not all disappeared with reconstruction. I think we all learned something more of the horror of war in its varied manifestations. (15)

Interestingly, he concludes that the participants were still able "to work and live happily together" even after the stories they told that evening,

and within a day or two there seemed to be a new depth in our sense of community. Before I left I began to appreciate more fully the role of this kind of experience as a means toward the greater end of increased understanding. (15)

I don't know if there are still camps like this, but a couple of thoughts occurred to me in comparing the experience Downs had with Chatani's concern about the "aggressor-vs-victim narrative," both of which revolve around questions about memory and "the scars of war." How did the university students manage to "work and live happily together" only ten years after the war, when they had witnessed with their own eyes atrocities committed by their fellow participants' countrymen? How could feelings about an event become even stronger decades after the event, when most of the survivors had died and the people with the strong feelings had little or no direct experience of that event? Note that I am not trying to be cynical about this.

Tremor...

That was a long one--seemed to go for at least 30 seconds (but I'm not sure). [The TV news said it lasted a minute, but they're also saying it was 7.0 at its epicenter, so I don't know...] I was just starting to read the preface to Vicki Tolar Burton's Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley's Methodism (see, I keep up with what's going on at SU) and I'd gotten to the part where she's describing an engraving of John Wesley's deathbed scene, and... boom! Now I'm afraid to open the book again!

[Update:] According to the Central Weather Bureau, it was two tremors--one at 5:32 and one at 5:38 p.m. I must have felt the first one because I started writing this post at 5:35 p.m.--that was a 6.0, centered in Nantou. (The USGS says it was a 5.7.)

[7:36 p.m.update:] Yet another one just hit. A very short one, though. I saw on the news that someone from the Central Weather Bureau was saying these were adjustments (aftershocks?) related to the 921 earthquake that happened 10 years ago. (!)