Wednesday, January 28, 2015
My Chiu grant proposal
Thought I'd post my grant proposal for the summer trip to Taiwan. Here's a link to it (on my Academia.edu page).
Writing group falls apart before it begins
Well, that's depressing. A couple of members of our writing group are bowing out because we weren't able to line up our schedules enough for everyone to meet at the same time (even for a once-a-month meeting). Well, it's partly my fault, I'm sure. I have a pretty tight schedule, so I didn't help matters. Maybe we can still email each other and report on our weekly progress. Maybe I can report on my progress here to whomever happens to stumble onto this blog.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Joining a writing group
So I'm sort of signed up with a faculty writing group. I wasn't able to attend the meeting at which the group's plans were discussed (a bad omen, indeed), but they decided that we would email each other each Friday to report on
[Update, 1/26/15: Looks like they did.]
- time spent writing
- progress made and accomplishments
- challenges faced, and
- plans and goals.
[Update, 1/26/15: Looks like they did.]
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Another blog post about writing blog posts
Back in July I wrote something about trying to start up this blog again, but since then it doesn't seem like I've written very much. I guess a lot has happened since then (mainly our son's arrival) that I comment on in other places, like Facebook. I think I will try again to get back to writing here, though. Here are some thoughts on what I might (or might not) write about:
- Maybe I'll write about things that I'm reading (assuming that I get to read anything besides student writing and baby books). I'm currently reading Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, and I might have some thoughts about that once I get finished.
- My New Year's Resolution is not to go overboard in thinking (and ranting) about Taiwanese politics--that's going to be challenging since we got a TVPad and now I see a lot more Taiwanese news than before--but I might do some writing about Taiwan if I have any thoughts to write about.
- I probably will have some thoughts about Taiwan in relation to George H. Kerr, since I managed to get awarded the grant that I applied for last summer. That grant, from the Chiu Scholarly Exchange Program for Taiwan Research, is going to help fund my trip to Taiwan this coming summer to do some research on Kerr's papers at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum.
- I probably won't write much about baby-related stuff. There are lots of baby blogs out there and I don't think I will add anything interesting to that discourse. Plus I'm not comfortable posting too much personal stuff here. (I do have a running collection of pictures on my school website in case you want to see pictures of the cutest baby in the world...)
- I probably won't write anything about local academic politics (lack of job security prevents me from doing this...).
Sunday, October 05, 2014
No typhoons on the way to Boston...
Friday, September 26, 2014
New book in the former native speaker's library
Gonna be needing this soon...
- What to Expect the First Year, 3rd. ed. (2014), by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel
There are some mixed reviews of this book, but I figure it's a start. The fomer-current-and-future native Chinese speaker has her own books, too. And then there's all the information (and "information") on the web... plenty enough to confuse me...
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Article on a new/old approach to teaching junior-high-level Chinese composition in Taiwan
Chen, Fangyu (陳芳毓). "Without Memorizing Model Essays or Sentences, Students are Taught to Write their own Stories" (不背範文佳句，教孩子寫出自己的故事). Global Views Monthly (遠見雜誌), September 2014. http://www.gvm.com.tw/Boardcontent_26063_1.html (also available as "68位學生教出57位作文滿級分 不背範文佳句，教孩子寫出自己的故事")
This article by Chen Fangyu (陳芳毓) introduces a junior high school Chinese (國文) teacher who took an approach to the teaching of writing that evidently differed from what most junior high teachers do--and that evidently worked.
The Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students (國中教育會考) is an examination given to third-year junior high school students (ninth graders) in Taiwan. It was first given in 2014 to replace the senior high school entrance examination now that Taiwan has gone from a mandatory 9-year education system to a mandatory 12-year system, doing away with the need for a high school entrance exam. The new examination has been controversial, to say the least, but the purpose of this article isn't to criticize the test, but to describe the approach of one junior high school teacher, Zhou Tianyu (周恬宇), to helping students improve their writing--an approach that resulted in 84% of her students getting perfect marks on the Chinese writing portion of the exam, when nationwide, only 1.6% got perfect scores.
Zhou, a teacher at Taichung's Daya Junior High School, worked with her two classes of students for three years. Zhou emphasized being able to write from experience, and she tried to teach students to use their experiences in their responses to the exam prompts, which often were focused on personal experiences like "the time I made my own decision" (「那一次，我自己做決定」). Her approach to getting students more used to thinking and writing about their own experiences was to require them to keep a diary.
In addition to having students keep a diary every day, she had them watch videos like Malala's UN speech (in English, I assume, probably with Chinese subtitles) and read the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (in translation, I assume). Then she would ask students to write about questions that connected these international issues and events to their own lives.The point seems to have been to give them practice seeing connections between their lives and the kinds of topics asked about in the exam questions.
She seems to have adopted some of her approach from Erin Gruwell's depiction in The Freedom Writers Diary of her own work with underprivileged students. The article mentions in several places Gruwell's book and the movie based on it. Interestingly, what Zhou is doing is being evaluated--in both the educational system and in this news article--for its effectiveness in regards to a very traditional writing task for Taiwanese students: passing a high-stakes timed essay exam. To that end, Zhou's approach to writing instruction also needs to take into consideration her students' need to be able to write quickly at the same time that they are able to write from their experiences. The article directly addresses this challenge in the following paragraph:
As we can see then, although Zhou eschews the "traditional" approaches of requiring students to memorize model essays or "beautiful sentences," she still provides them with a fairly fixed structure to plug their ideas into. This is distinguished, though, from the memorization/imitation techniques that are often practiced in test-preparation cram schools because Zhou insists on students using their own ideas to fill in the the essays and not on memorization and imitation that she says would destroy students' interest in writing (她說，模仿固然能培養文學性，但一定要寫自己的故事，才不會扼殺學習興趣。).
There are other things I could mention about her technique, such as how she marks the students' writing (the article says she spends three hours a day correcting their lexical and grammatical mistakes). The one thing that I want to focus on in the end, though, goes back to the point I found most fascinating about Zhou's approach--her use of non-Chinese works as springboards for students' writing. In the past, I hadn't heard of other secondary school Chinese teachers in Taiwan who used materials from other countries, like Malala's speech or A Thousand Splendid Suns, as sources. Usually, students have been required to read (and memorize?) texts from China--classical texts in particular, though not exclusively. (I don't have time right now to find sources to support this; I'll try to add something here later--if anyone has any thoughts, please comment.)
I'm tempted to call this aspect of her teaching a translingual or transcultural approach to teaching Chinese writing in the sense that she brings in experiences and texts that cross linguistic and cultural barriers, indirectly showing students that to write in Chinese doesn't require one to operate only within the linguistic and cultural borders of Chinese.
*See David Cahill's 2003 article in Written Communication for more on the qi-cheng-zhuan-he structure; he focuses in particular on how the zhuan, or "turn," as it has often been translated, has been overemphasized and misinterpreted in Western contrastive rhetoric studies, effectively making Chinese writing seem more discursively alien to Western readers than it really is.
This article by Chen Fangyu (陳芳毓) introduces a junior high school Chinese (國文) teacher who took an approach to the teaching of writing that evidently differed from what most junior high teachers do--and that evidently worked.
The Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students (國中教育會考) is an examination given to third-year junior high school students (ninth graders) in Taiwan. It was first given in 2014 to replace the senior high school entrance examination now that Taiwan has gone from a mandatory 9-year education system to a mandatory 12-year system, doing away with the need for a high school entrance exam. The new examination has been controversial, to say the least, but the purpose of this article isn't to criticize the test, but to describe the approach of one junior high school teacher, Zhou Tianyu (周恬宇), to helping students improve their writing--an approach that resulted in 84% of her students getting perfect marks on the Chinese writing portion of the exam, when nationwide, only 1.6% got perfect scores.
Zhou, a teacher at Taichung's Daya Junior High School, worked with her two classes of students for three years. Zhou emphasized being able to write from experience, and she tried to teach students to use their experiences in their responses to the exam prompts, which often were focused on personal experiences like "the time I made my own decision" (「那一次，我自己做決定」). Her approach to getting students more used to thinking and writing about their own experiences was to require them to keep a diary.
In addition to having students keep a diary every day, she had them watch videos like Malala's UN speech (in English, I assume, probably with Chinese subtitles) and read the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (in translation, I assume). Then she would ask students to write about questions that connected these international issues and events to their own lives.The point seems to have been to give them practice seeing connections between their lives and the kinds of topics asked about in the exam questions.
She seems to have adopted some of her approach from Erin Gruwell's depiction in The Freedom Writers Diary of her own work with underprivileged students. The article mentions in several places Gruwell's book and the movie based on it. Interestingly, what Zhou is doing is being evaluated--in both the educational system and in this news article--for its effectiveness in regards to a very traditional writing task for Taiwanese students: passing a high-stakes timed essay exam. To that end, Zhou's approach to writing instruction also needs to take into consideration her students' need to be able to write quickly at the same time that they are able to write from their experiences. The article directly addresses this challenge in the following paragraph:
68個學生程度不一，怎麼教？就像企業以標準作業流程訓練新進同仁，周恬宇也設下寫作4段標準作業流程（SOP）：第1段解題；第2段寫生活經驗；第3 段引申論述；第4段再呼應首段做結論。上手後，程度好的學生自然會打破框架，程度一般的學生也能安全上壘。Roughly translated:
Interestingly, the framework that she provides is similar (if not identical) to the traditional qi-cheng-zhuan-he (起承轉合) four-part structure for Chinese essays. Zhou's perspective on providing a template seems similar to that of American teachers who use the five-paragraph essay framework when teaching primary or secondary students to write.*
[Zhou's] sixty-eight students write at different levels--how to teach them? Just like businesses that train their new employees in standard operating procedures, Zhou established a four-paragraph SOP: first paragraph, the opening; second paragraph, writing about personal experience; the third paragraph, extending the discussion; fourth paragraph, concluding by echoing the introductory paragraph. After practice, stronger students could break [go beyond] the framework, while regular students could safely "get on base."
As we can see then, although Zhou eschews the "traditional" approaches of requiring students to memorize model essays or "beautiful sentences," she still provides them with a fairly fixed structure to plug their ideas into. This is distinguished, though, from the memorization/imitation techniques that are often practiced in test-preparation cram schools because Zhou insists on students using their own ideas to fill in the the essays and not on memorization and imitation that she says would destroy students' interest in writing (她說，模仿固然能培養文學性，但一定要寫自己的故事，才不會扼殺學習興趣。).
There are other things I could mention about her technique, such as how she marks the students' writing (the article says she spends three hours a day correcting their lexical and grammatical mistakes). The one thing that I want to focus on in the end, though, goes back to the point I found most fascinating about Zhou's approach--her use of non-Chinese works as springboards for students' writing. In the past, I hadn't heard of other secondary school Chinese teachers in Taiwan who used materials from other countries, like Malala's speech or A Thousand Splendid Suns, as sources. Usually, students have been required to read (and memorize?) texts from China--classical texts in particular, though not exclusively. (I don't have time right now to find sources to support this; I'll try to add something here later--if anyone has any thoughts, please comment.)
I'm tempted to call this aspect of her teaching a translingual or transcultural approach to teaching Chinese writing in the sense that she brings in experiences and texts that cross linguistic and cultural barriers, indirectly showing students that to write in Chinese doesn't require one to operate only within the linguistic and cultural borders of Chinese.
*See David Cahill's 2003 article in Written Communication for more on the qi-cheng-zhuan-he structure; he focuses in particular on how the zhuan, or "turn," as it has often been translated, has been overemphasized and misinterpreted in Western contrastive rhetoric studies, effectively making Chinese writing seem more discursively alien to Western readers than it really is.
Friday, September 12, 2014
Second week of class
Thursday marked the end for students to be able to add classes. As I thought would happen, the populations of my three classes changed a few times before then. As late as yesterday, three students were added to my "small" class, almost filling it. That class also has a move diverse population, too, in terms of majors, so we'll be able to do more interdisciplinary work.
Friday, September 05, 2014
Speaking of Tunghai...
I see that ten years ago around this time (the beginning of the semester), I was planning a Research Methods course for sophomore English majors in which I was going to have them "examine critically the history and politics of plagiarism while at the same time trying to teach them not to plagiarize." Hmmm... wonder how that worked out...
First week of classes over
We had a short week this week because classes started on Wednesday, but at least I got a chance to meet (most of) my students. During this week it's a little hard to get into the serious work of the semester because class populations can change a lot. I have two classes that are full, but one is still filling up. (Well, it's about half full right now--or half empty?)
That smaller class is going to be interesting, too, because its focus is on interdisciplinarity, but most of the students are engineering majors. (Probably because of scheduling issues.) I suppose that I can consider civil engineering and electrical engineering as different disciplines, though, even though they're in the same college.
I've given the classes some small assignments for over the weekend; we'll see how they do on those. The two sections of interdisciplinary writing are reading John Swales' chapter on discourse communities (from his 1990 book, Genre Analysis).
I plan for us to talk Monday about discourse communities and disciplinarity. We'll see how it goes! Later on we'll be reading a more recent chapter about discourse communities by Anne Johns. In the business writing course, they'll be brainstorming possible topics for their first project, a research report on a "hot" topic in their discipline/profession.
It was really hot in Boston this week, and one of the classrooms that I have two classes in was particularly sauna-like. I think the air conditioning didn't work. It reminded me of the good old days when I taught at Tunghai's College of Arts building--I remember that during the first couple of weeks of classes, there would be sweat dripping from my forehead when I was teaching. Hopefully they'll fix the air con before Monday!
That smaller class is going to be interesting, too, because its focus is on interdisciplinarity, but most of the students are engineering majors. (Probably because of scheduling issues.) I suppose that I can consider civil engineering and electrical engineering as different disciplines, though, even though they're in the same college.
I've given the classes some small assignments for over the weekend; we'll see how they do on those. The two sections of interdisciplinary writing are reading John Swales' chapter on discourse communities (from his 1990 book, Genre Analysis).
I plan for us to talk Monday about discourse communities and disciplinarity. We'll see how it goes! Later on we'll be reading a more recent chapter about discourse communities by Anne Johns. In the business writing course, they'll be brainstorming possible topics for their first project, a research report on a "hot" topic in their discipline/profession.
It was really hot in Boston this week, and one of the classrooms that I have two classes in was particularly sauna-like. I think the air conditioning didn't work. It reminded me of the good old days when I taught at Tunghai's College of Arts building--I remember that during the first couple of weeks of classes, there would be sweat dripping from my forehead when I was teaching. Hopefully they'll fix the air con before Monday!
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Beginning of fall semester
Next Wednesday (9/3) will be the first day of classes, and marks the beginning of my fourth year teaching at Northeastern University. Time flies! This semester I'll be teaching two courses that are somewhat new to me: an advanced writing course for students in the business school and a new advanced writing course focusing on interdisciplinarity.
The first course isn't completely unfamiliar to me because most of the previous advanced writing courses I've taught have been largely (though not exclusively) populated by business majors. I'll be a bit more focused on some business-related genres, though, than on the kinds of academic genres I used to teach.
In the second course, we'll be focusing more on academic writing. This course will ideally be populated by students from a lot of different majors (though it looks like in one section of the two sections I'm teaching, most of the students are from the business school--more on the reasons for that later). Students will start out by investigating their disciplinarity discourse communities and sharing with their classmates the discourse conventions of those disciplines. Then we'll move from there into working with classmates from a different major on an interdisciplinary research project. We'll be trying to figure out how to go beyond the conventions/discourses/blinders of our individual disciplines in order to investigate topics or problems that themselves aren't limited to one discipline. This course is new--in the past, there was a general course in writing in the disciplines, but the focus wasn't so much on interdisciplinarity.
For both of these courses, I'm teaching the multilingual sections (traditionally called the SOL [Speakers of Other Languages] sections, for people whose native languages aren't English). In the past, there wasn't a multilingual section of the business writing course, but we found that most of the students in the multilingual sections of the general course were business majors, so we decided to open a special course for multilingual business majors. There's only one section for that course, though, which is why, I think, the interdisciplinary course is populated primarily by business majors (who might be surprised by the focus of the course--we'll see...).
We'll see how these courses go. Perhaps I'll post more about them later...
The first course isn't completely unfamiliar to me because most of the previous advanced writing courses I've taught have been largely (though not exclusively) populated by business majors. I'll be a bit more focused on some business-related genres, though, than on the kinds of academic genres I used to teach.
In the second course, we'll be focusing more on academic writing. This course will ideally be populated by students from a lot of different majors (though it looks like in one section of the two sections I'm teaching, most of the students are from the business school--more on the reasons for that later). Students will start out by investigating their disciplinarity discourse communities and sharing with their classmates the discourse conventions of those disciplines. Then we'll move from there into working with classmates from a different major on an interdisciplinary research project. We'll be trying to figure out how to go beyond the conventions/discourses/blinders of our individual disciplines in order to investigate topics or problems that themselves aren't limited to one discipline. This course is new--in the past, there was a general course in writing in the disciplines, but the focus wasn't so much on interdisciplinarity.
For both of these courses, I'm teaching the multilingual sections (traditionally called the SOL [Speakers of Other Languages] sections, for people whose native languages aren't English). In the past, there wasn't a multilingual section of the business writing course, but we found that most of the students in the multilingual sections of the general course were business majors, so we decided to open a special course for multilingual business majors. There's only one section for that course, though, which is why, I think, the interdisciplinary course is populated primarily by business majors (who might be surprised by the focus of the course--we'll see...).
We'll see how these courses go. Perhaps I'll post more about them later...
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
I'll get back to this after I get my grant proposal done...
王乾任: "尊修辭而輕思辨的美文寫作教育，害死台灣"
I do agree with this comment from him: "寫作是專門技能，國文老師一定會教寫作的假設，其實很奇怪，卻少有人會質疑--something I'm glad to see written in Taiwan... something that some people haven't realized in the US, either...
[Update, 8/31: No time to write about the article... sorry...]
I do agree with this comment from him: "寫作是專門技能，國文老師一定會教寫作的假設，其實很奇怪，卻少有人會質疑--something I'm glad to see written in Taiwan... something that some people haven't realized in the US, either...
[Update, 8/31: No time to write about the article... sorry...]
Sunday, August 03, 2014
Bad writing habits
I'm still working on the grant proposal. And questioning myself every step along the way. And skimming library search results and Google Scholar search results for sources that I won't have time to read before the proposal is due on the 8th. (And writing blog entries!) All the bad habits that come up when I (and I imagine a lot of other people) have to write something. I have to remember this moment when I'm teaching in the fall.
Friday, August 01, 2014
August first
I've got a grant application due soon that I've been half-(w)racking my brain over and half-avoiding, and I came across this post that I linked to back in August of 2007:
I love this description of the writing process by Tom Shroder, Editor of the Washington Post Magazine:That's about how I'm feeling right now...
I'm sure there are writers who don't find writing to be a bone-crushing, nausea-inducing festival of self-loathing. I just don't happen to be one of them. Faced with a blank screen and a deadline for even the shortest, simplest piece, I am seized with the overwhelming desire to clean out my garage. Or do anything other than writing (up to and including root canal).
The problem seems to be standards. I have some. And I'm terrified I can't live up to them. I've found that to make myself write anything at all, I have to begin by lowering my sights, and simply try to write something bad. Don't even write, I tell myself, just type.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Another old Chiang Kai-shek joke
Liked this one when the former native Chinese speaker (why do I still call her that?) told it to me long ago. This version is updated to 2000:
蔣介石去世後，不可避免的在天堂遇見了國父孫中山先生，壯志未酬身先死的國父孫中山，非常關心中華民國的狀況，於是問老蔣：『我死後中華民國有沒有行憲啊？』
蔣介石馬上回答：『有啊！有行憲，有行憲啦！』
孫中山又問：『那第一任總統是誰？』
蔣介石回答：『是我。』
孫中山心想，老蔣一統江湖，確實當得，又問：『那第二任呢？』
這時老蔣不太好意思說還是自己，可是又不太想說謊對不起老孫，於是回答道：『于右任，﹝余又任﹞。』
孫中山高興的說：『不錯，不錯，書法家當總統，文學治國，那第三任又是誰呢？』
蔣中正腦筋一轉，機智地答：『吳三連，﹝吾三連﹞。』
孫：『嗯，輿論界有人出任總統，也好，那下一任又是誰？』
蔣：『趙元任﹝照原任﹞』
孫想了一想說道：『很好，語言學家當總統，那第五任呢？』
蔣：『是，是趙麗蓮﹝照例連﹞。』
孫中山開心的說：『太好了，連教育家也做總統了，那國家可真是越來越進步了，那第六任呢？』
到第六任，蔣介石已經有點詞窮了，於是隨便嗚拉的說：『伍子胥﹝吾子續﹞。』
這時孫中山有點不解了，問道：『怎麼春秋時代的古人也能跑來當總統了呢？』
老蔣只好不慌不忙的回答：『同名同姓啦！』
聽了國父若有所悟，慍中含笑的說：『該不會是林憶蓮﹝您亦連﹞吧』
老蔣尷尬假裝耳背的說：『....是啊，俺也喜歡吳復連﹝吾復連﹞.....』
國父聽了火氣更高了，怒聲說道：『你乾脆改名叫﹝連......佔﹞！』
接下來應該是.. 老蔣也發火了,大聲說:"隨便(水扁)啦..........."
註：吳復連是台灣著名棒球選手。
其實原來只到伍子胥，後來又有狗尾續貂，笑果差了點。笑話太長有 時就會疲乏了。
The fifth "John" who lost China
This is an old joke that people more educated about US-China relations than I am probably all know, but I got a kick out of it. In a review of John Paton Davies' autobiography, Roderick MacFarquhar writes,
In the 1950s, the late John King Fairbank, the dean of modern China studies at Harvard, used to tell us graduate students a joke about the allegation that a group of red-leaning foreign service officers and academics—the four Johns—had “lost” China: John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John King Fairbank himself. What the McCarthyites had forgotten, Fairbank said, was to finger the fifth “John”: John Kai-shek.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Another addition to the former native speaker's library
(I'm not sure why I'm still calling myself "the former native speaker...")
The National Geographic Magazine, January 1945. (Vol. 87, no. 1)
The reason I bought this old copy of National Geographic is that it includes an article by Joseph W. Ballantine entitled "I Lived on Formosa." Ballantine later wrote Formosa: A Problem for United States Foreign Policy as well as a book on speaking Japanese.
I looked around on the web to find out what I could about Ballantine. According to the dust jacket of his book, he was in charge of the American Consulate in Taiwan in 1912. Other sources mention that he was born in 1888 in India, so that would mean he went to Taiwan when he was 24. According to this source, though, Ballantine was a Vice and Deputy Consul in Taiwan from 1912-1914.
I came across this paper written by Richard Bush last year; part of it discusses Ballantine and, interestingly, also starts out with Bush's discovery of the National Geographic article.
"I Lived on Formosa" introduces Taiwan in the context of the island's role in World War II, mixing descriptions of the island, its products, and its population (including its "fierce head-hunters") with depictions of US bomber attacks on airbases, a list of some of the POWs held on the island, and speculation about the potential for using Taiwan as a steppingstone to Japan. (If you haven't heard of the POW camps the Japanese had in Taiwan, here's a link to a memorial website with details.)
Besides that, two themes stand out in Ballantine's article. One is how badly the Japanese treat the Taiwanese, and how much the Taiwanese are looking forward to getting out from under "the heavy yoke" of Japanese rule and "reunit[ing] with their fellow Chinese of the mainland." Because he spoke Japanese, Ballantine writes, "I soon saw with what harshness and contemptuous arrogance the Japanese regarded and treated the subject Chinese." Later on, he writes that "Jap policemen have long arms, regiment the populace, pry into everybody's private affairs, interfere with religious services, teach school, and even try to control the thoughts of the people. Prevention and detection of crime with them are merely incidental functions."
Another theme concerns the lack of Westerners in Taiwan. He describes a "secluded" life with other Westerners, noting that in the winter, "often we were unable to get together even a quorum for bridge." A subheading in the article announces, "Few Europeans Ever Lived Long on Formosa." In Ballantine's defense, it's likely he didn't write those subheadings, but he does write that "no white man's venture here ever lasted long" without mentioning Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay, who lived there for almost 30 years.
Finally, there's a certain quality of timelessness to Ballantine's article--the sense that he is describing in present tense scenes he witnessed and people he met decades earlier. Indeed, I haven't found any evidence that he spent any time in Taiwan after 1914. Yet none of his stories of meetings with Aborigines or discussions with Japanese officials, etc., indicate when they happened. It is as if nothing (except for the war) has changed Taiwan in the three decades since Ballantine lived there.
(I see there's an interesting book entitled Presenting America's World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945, that might discuss this kind of thing.)
The National Geographic Magazine, January 1945. (Vol. 87, no. 1)
The reason I bought this old copy of National Geographic is that it includes an article by Joseph W. Ballantine entitled "I Lived on Formosa." Ballantine later wrote Formosa: A Problem for United States Foreign Policy as well as a book on speaking Japanese.
I looked around on the web to find out what I could about Ballantine. According to the dust jacket of his book, he was in charge of the American Consulate in Taiwan in 1912. Other sources mention that he was born in 1888 in India, so that would mean he went to Taiwan when he was 24. According to this source, though, Ballantine was a Vice and Deputy Consul in Taiwan from 1912-1914.
I came across this paper written by Richard Bush last year; part of it discusses Ballantine and, interestingly, also starts out with Bush's discovery of the National Geographic article.
"I Lived on Formosa" introduces Taiwan in the context of the island's role in World War II, mixing descriptions of the island, its products, and its population (including its "fierce head-hunters") with depictions of US bomber attacks on airbases, a list of some of the POWs held on the island, and speculation about the potential for using Taiwan as a steppingstone to Japan. (If you haven't heard of the POW camps the Japanese had in Taiwan, here's a link to a memorial website with details.)
Besides that, two themes stand out in Ballantine's article. One is how badly the Japanese treat the Taiwanese, and how much the Taiwanese are looking forward to getting out from under "the heavy yoke" of Japanese rule and "reunit[ing] with their fellow Chinese of the mainland." Because he spoke Japanese, Ballantine writes, "I soon saw with what harshness and contemptuous arrogance the Japanese regarded and treated the subject Chinese." Later on, he writes that "Jap policemen have long arms, regiment the populace, pry into everybody's private affairs, interfere with religious services, teach school, and even try to control the thoughts of the people. Prevention and detection of crime with them are merely incidental functions."
Another theme concerns the lack of Westerners in Taiwan. He describes a "secluded" life with other Westerners, noting that in the winter, "often we were unable to get together even a quorum for bridge." A subheading in the article announces, "Few Europeans Ever Lived Long on Formosa." In Ballantine's defense, it's likely he didn't write those subheadings, but he does write that "no white man's venture here ever lasted long" without mentioning Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay, who lived there for almost 30 years.
Finally, there's a certain quality of timelessness to Ballantine's article--the sense that he is describing in present tense scenes he witnessed and people he met decades earlier. Indeed, I haven't found any evidence that he spent any time in Taiwan after 1914. Yet none of his stories of meetings with Aborigines or discussions with Japanese officials, etc., indicate when they happened. It is as if nothing (except for the war) has changed Taiwan in the three decades since Ballantine lived there.
(I see there's an interesting book entitled Presenting America's World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945, that might discuss this kind of thing.)
Monday, July 28, 2014
summer 1985, allentown pa
Here's a poem I wrote about Uncle Erich back in 1985 after I spent a summer in Allentown living with the Salomons and working at Salomon Jewelers:
summer 1985, allentown pa.
uncle erich the watchmaker
comes home from the iga w/ ring
bologna
& $5.22 worth of
fruit & cereal & a-
treat to get his 1/2 priced 5lb bag of
granulated sugar
uncle erich the watchmaker
stands up from the table &
pronounces
the meal "sehr gut" as
he reaches into
the refrigerator for the ring bologna
then returns to his chair and eyes the
the bologna closely
uncle erich the watchmaker
begins cutting a piece of bologna off
the ring, separating the thin slice
from
the ring carefully, as if he were
opening the back of a mid-19th century
pocket watch.
uncle erich the watchmaker
brushes mustard on the slice, surely
thinking he's cleaning the back of
that
railroad watch & we sit tensely
for a
moment, hoping he doesn't go up to his
workroom & dry the bologna in
sawdust
before popping it into his mouth
Uncle Erich (Erich E. Salomon), 1919-2014
Here's a newspaper article that was written in 1990 about their family business in Allentown. (I'm going to paste it here in case it disappears from the website.)
Brothers' Careers Mark Changing Times In L.v. Remembering
Erich E. Salomon, 70, is a watchmaker and clockmaker in that order.
His brother Gerhard, 64, is a clockmaker and watchmaker, with his skills in clocks.
"I make house calls," Gerhard says, "for grandfather clocks."
In their father's day, these were jobs in which the master craftsman actually made the watch and the clock. Today, they mean repair and restoration, which sometimes includes making parts.
"We get some basket cases," Erich notes.
Both men have been in these crafts for more than half a century in downtown Allentown. And both lament they are in dying trades.
Erich digs out a trade magazine to show a help-wanted ad for a watchmaker at up to $1,000 a week.
To further prove the point, the Salomon brothers note that Erich's son Rick at 32 is one of the youngest watchmakers in Pennsylvania.
When Rick trained in the mid-1970s at Bowman Technical School, Lancaster, the oldest watchmaking school in the country, there were 25 in the program. The latest class had three.
Gerhard's three sons didn't want to go into this work.
For the Salomons, the family business started with Ernest Salomon, Erich and Gerhard's father, in Germany. Ernest was a master clockmaker and watchmaker, going through a four-year apprentice program and building a clock from scratch to complete the training.
That clock still hangs in the shop.
Ernest had his own jewelry store for 17 years in Germany. Then, he and his wife, Emma, and their two young sons came to America and to Allentown in 1928.
For a brief time, they lived near the top of the Lehigh Street hill. Then, the Salomons moved into the third floor of 606 Hamilton St. The Ebbecke Hardware Store was on the first floor.
Ernest worked for three years for Faust & Landes Jewelry Store, 728 Hamilton St., Allentown, until he was cut to one day a week because of the Depression.
He told landlord John Ebbecke that he was going to move because he couldn't afford to pay the rent.
Ebbecke said, "I don't want you to move. Start in business for yourself. I'll see that all my friends will give you work."
So in May 1931, Ernest Salomon opened his shop on the second floor at a workbench he brought from Germany, the same one Erich uses today.
"There was no lease. It was just one of those gentlemen things," Erich says. "When we could afford to, we started to pay."
Erich, then about 12, served as a translator for his father with the customers. He wrote orders. He learned the trade -- at no pay -- as did Gerhard a few years later.
Gerhard laughs, "When you worked at home, you didn't get paid."
For money, Erich at 14 got a job Saturdays at Allentown's Center Square Market, selling butter, eggs and cheese.
"I didn't ask the pay," he remembers. "I worked from 5:45 a.m. till 9 p.m. and got the magnificent sum of $2. I worked there until I was almost 20."
Gerhard delivered newspapers and worked for a news dealer at 7th and Hamilton streets in Allentown. He made $25 one summer in the late 1930s.
"I thought I was rich," he says.
Their father died in 1940, with $35 in the kitty. They decided to continue the business. Their mother, a seamstress, pretty well controlled the purse strings.
"I saved some money and bought some watches," Erich says. "Little by little, the business grew."
The partnership worked. And after each married, the spouses also became a part of the business -- Erich's wife, Lucy, working behind the counter and Gerhard's wife, Dolores, serving as bookkeeper.
Ebbecke died in the early 1940s. But his hardware business continued until October 1966. Then, the Salomons moved to the first floor.
"We were here six months before we signed a lease," Gerhard says.
Ebbecke's son-in-law, attorney Charles Helwig, told the Salomons he wanted them to have the building. In 1974, just before Helwig died, the sale was completed.
The store has 150 working clocks, including 25 grandfather and 40 cuckoo. The striking of noon is a noisome event.
Rick and Gerhard are the partners now. Erich had to step aside at 65 so he could collect Social Security. So his son is now his boss.
Rick says many old family jewelers have done so well that they've educated their children out of the business -- to be doctors and lawyers.
But he says there's a real satisfaction in this craft, despite the long hours, especially in fixing a watch or clock after a customer comes in and says, "I've had this all over the place, and no one wants to touch it."
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Thoughts about this blog and other things
So after coming up with this cool (well, at least in my view it's cool) new title for my blog, unfortunately I haven't made much use of it. Part of the reason is that I've been really busy with teaching and writing for conference presentations (did one in March and one in April and was supposed to do another in June--did it virtually); another part is that I've been spending more time (too much time) on Facebook (I'm trying to cut down on that--haven't checked FB in about 3 days now). And I've been working on some other projects and also trying to figure out what I should be doing in terms of writing.
So I've sort of felt that if I wrote in this blog, I'd be taking time away from writing other stuff--as though I have a limited number of words and shouldn't waste them. But the problem is that if I'm not writing here, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily doing any productive writing elsewhere. (Half my journal lately has been full of self-loathing over the fact that I'm not getting any productive writing done.) My other concern was that I didn't know what to write about in this blog. But I'm not entirely sure I should be worried about that, considering I'm probably the only person reading it.
So perhaps I should just try to write a little in this blog and see what happens. Maybe I'll come up with some ideas and put them down here, and maybe it'll lead to something. I'm not 100% sure what I'll be writing about here yet--I don't necessarily want to go into a lot of detail about research I'm doing (I'm working on an international collaborative project and probably shouldn't give away too much about that without my colleagues' permission), and I don't necessarily want to go into a lot of detail about life either (there's an international collaborative project going on there, too, but I don't want to go into too much about that, either). But I'll try to write something in here more frequently, and maybe it'll be something worth reading--and perhaps even worth responding to...
In other events, I've had two uncles pass away since January. One died in January at the age of 93, and another passed away this morning at the age of 94. I know I wrote a poem a long time ago about the uncle who died today. I don't have a copy on me, but I'll see if my mother has a copy and if so, I'll post it later.
So I've sort of felt that if I wrote in this blog, I'd be taking time away from writing other stuff--as though I have a limited number of words and shouldn't waste them. But the problem is that if I'm not writing here, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily doing any productive writing elsewhere. (Half my journal lately has been full of self-loathing over the fact that I'm not getting any productive writing done.) My other concern was that I didn't know what to write about in this blog. But I'm not entirely sure I should be worried about that, considering I'm probably the only person reading it.
So perhaps I should just try to write a little in this blog and see what happens. Maybe I'll come up with some ideas and put them down here, and maybe it'll lead to something. I'm not 100% sure what I'll be writing about here yet--I don't necessarily want to go into a lot of detail about research I'm doing (I'm working on an international collaborative project and probably shouldn't give away too much about that without my colleagues' permission), and I don't necessarily want to go into a lot of detail about life either (there's an international collaborative project going on there, too, but I don't want to go into too much about that, either). But I'll try to write something in here more frequently, and maybe it'll be something worth reading--and perhaps even worth responding to...
In other events, I've had two uncles pass away since January. One died in January at the age of 93, and another passed away this morning at the age of 94. I know I wrote a poem a long time ago about the uncle who died today. I don't have a copy on me, but I'll see if my mother has a copy and if so, I'll post it later.
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