For future viewing, once I get time

Steven Vertovec, “Super-diversity as concept and approach: whence it came, where it’s at, and whither it’s going”

For future reading, once I get finished grading

• "Three new essays on the Chinese script and a new twist to the old problem of censorship in Chinese studies"

Interdisciplinarity in the news!

This is a little old, but I teach an interdisciplinary writing course, and this semester there have been quite a few computer scientists who took the class. Last week, one of them brought up the breakthrough image of a black hole, so I took a moment to search for an article about it. I came across this article from The Guardian.

Skimming through it, I came across a quotation that we talked about briefly:

While still studying at MIT, the computer scientist Katie Bouman came up with a new algorithm to stitch together data collected across the EHT network. Bouman went on to lead an elaborate series of tests aimed at ensuring that the EHT’s image was not the result of some form of technical glitch or fluke. At one stage, this involved the collaboration splitting into four separate teams which analysed the data independently until they were absolutely confident of their findings. 

“We’re a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that’s what it took to achieve something once thought impossible,” said Bouman.

The quote is from the end of the article--often the place where, as I understand it, the editors put what they consider the least important stuff--but to me this was the most important part. Bouman is talking about interdisciplinary research. (And it was an added bonus that she is a computer scientist!)

It's fun to bring these news stories into class because it shows the students how people from their own disciplines might be doing research with people from other disciplines that they had never imagined. I have also shown students this video in which mathematicians are doing research about sneezing!


The one troubling thing for me, though, is, as I have admitted to some students, the process we go through to do interdisciplinary work in this class is often the opposite of what I think professional researchers do. As I understand it, outside of the kind of class I'm teaching, researchers start with a problem and then begin to work together with people from various disciplines to solve those problems. (Just as Bouman describes it above.) But in my classes, for very practical reasons we usually start with the interdisciplinary groups and then have to figure out the problems or topics that those disciplines might have in common. For instance, if I require the students to work with someone from a different discipline, but I have a lot of engineering or computer science or business majors, there are only so many ways they can combine to form a group. This semester I had some groups that had a lot of difficulty finding a topic in common to do research on.

I'm still trying to work out a way to do it the way Bouman describes it, though. I've thought about using big "umbrella" topics like "sustainability" or "globalization" in the hopes that these would be big enough themes for everyone to be able to find a connection to. Now that the semester is over, maybe I'll have time to think about this problem and do some research into it.

Blast from the past or so-phish-ticated imitation?

Got this interesting email today.

Dear Jonathan, 

You may not remember me but I am a former student of yours. I always loved your class and your perspectives as it was a tipping point for my work in short stories.

After college, in a strange mishap of life's direction, I decided to work at a beat hotel motel in the middle of nowhere Kansas. I took that time to write some incredible short stories on the very strange experiences I had there.  

If you have a few minutes to spare, I would be honored to have you read at least a story or two from my short collection. I am looking for feedback and would settle for a "This is excellent, continue writing" or "This is terrible, find a new hobby". 

In my time studying short stories, I found that they should mostly induce desire from the author. They should not satisfy like a novel but still find new ways to captivate a reader's attention and imagination. Maybe a moment from a story will return to a reader's thoughts and beg the question: "Was that fiction or did it really happen?" 

My goal is to point out the absurd and unacknowledged life of those who live in a strange, lost place yet maintain a sort of sad Americanism in their lives. I filled my stories with hidden references from concepts in literature, mathematics, philosophy, pop culture, and beyond. 

Thank you so much for your time. 

Best,
[Signature]

I don't remember the writer (considering that I have taught college-level writing for almost 30 years, I guess that's not surprising), but I'm a bit suspicious because the writer doesn't say where he took my class (and which class it was) and because I never taught any creative writing courses. (Of course, he doesn't exactly say that he took a short story writing course with me, so there's that.) I Googled the writer's name (putting it in quotation marks) and nothing came up under that exact name.

As I wrote to a friend and former colleague at one of those colleges that I taught at years ago, "Maybe [he's] a clever bit of code that spins text like "sad Americanism" via complex algorithms that I will never understand." The more I read this letter (too often already--I have work to do!), the more I think it could have been written by one of our robot overlords. (Now I'm reading it in my mind in the voice of Agent Smith.) His question, "Was that fiction or did it really happen?" is the very question that I am asking about his letter.

I haven't opened the attached pdf yet for fear it's a virus or something.

Thoughts? (If you're the writer of this mysterious email, reveal yourself!)

Deng Xiaoping billboard in Shenzhen, Feb. 1993

Deng Xiaoping overlooking Shenzen, China, 1993

I took this picture in Shenzhen back in February, 1993--my first and only trip to China (aside from a layover in Shanghai a few years ago). In the picture, he's saying, "不坚持社会主义，不改革开放，不发展经济，不改善人民生活，只能是死路一条。" (Not adhering to socialism, not reforming and opening up, not developing the economy, and not improving the people's lives can only be a dead end.)

I just discovered it acting as a bookmark in my copy of Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship. I wondered what that area of town looks like now. A blogpost from 2017 gives some interesting (if hagiographic) history of the sign. Here's a rough translation (with the help of Google Translate, mainly because I wanted to translate it in a few hours rather than a few days...):

Shenzhen Totem: The History of Changes to the Deng Xiaoping Portrait 

By 泉影 (Quan Ying) 

On February 19, 1997, with 131 days left before the return of Hong Kong, Deng Xiaoping passed away. That chilly morning, a large group of Shenzhen residents spontaneously came to Deng Xiaoping's portrait to pay their respect to the benefactor of this SAR. Although more and more people gathered, filling the roads on both sides of the portrait, it was orderly. Seniors, young people, and children all came, a sad atmosphere permeating the scene. Some people held white flowers in their hands, wore black veils on their arms, and some stood for a long time holding high portraits of Deng Xiaoping that read, "The people will forever miss you." Because of Deng Xiaoping, Shenzhen had become the most direct beneficiary of China's reform and opening up, so the people of Shenzhen came with grateful feelings to say goodbye to the "chief designer" of reform and opening up. 

With Hongling Road, Luohu District, and Futian District as the boundaries, the area where Shennan Middle Road meets it was the most prosperous financial district in Shenzhen in the 1980s and 1990s. The northeast side of this crossroad became a must-see place because of the long-standing giant portrait of Deng Xiaoping. After Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, this portrait became the urban scenery most frequently exposed in both domestic and foreign news media. It has become a symbol of the reform and opening up of Shenzhen and China and a famous "landmark" in Shenzhen. 

A Product of the Southern Tour

At the beginning of the new year in 1992, reform in China faced a dilemma. In the early spring in southern China, the chill had not yet subsided, but the flowers and trees were green and spring was abundant. Already nominally retired, Deng Xiaoping came to Shenzhen on his southern tour and made an important speech, encouraging local cadres to "be bolder for reform and opening up." For a time, the major media reported on the themes of "An east wind blows an eyeful of spring" and "The South China Sea surges with a tide of reform." The talk greatly liberated the people's thought, and the reform deadlock was broken. China returned to the road of reform and opening up.

Because the southern talk incited a great response around the country, the propaganda department of the Shenzhen Municipal Party Committee proposed to erect in the city center a huge poster promoting Deng Xiaoping's inspection of Shenzhen. After repeated discussions, everyone agreed that the portrait should be erected in the most conspicuous, central, and most convenient place in Shenzhen. After careful site selection, the intersection of Shennan Avenue and Hongling Road was identified as the most suitable place.

After the painting was made, it was revised several times, and in the end the Shenzhen Municipal Art Advertising Company (深圳市美术广告公司) sent their most powerful artist to work in the underground parking lot of the Shenzhen Grand Theater. The enormous painting, measuring 300 square meters, took three to four months to create. It was done completely by hand, and one finger on the painting was taller than a man. On June 28, 1992 the huge painting of Deng Xiaoping was finally erected on Shennan Road. This was quite rare in China at that time, and the portrait immediately caused a sensation.

The first version of Deng Xiaoping's portrait was based on a photograph taken at the Xianhu Botanical Garden during Deng's inspection tour of Shenzhen. Dressed in a light brown jacket, his eyes are bright and ...

Well, I started this post a while back and just decided to come back to it so I could finish it in February (the 26th anniversary of my trip to Shenzhen). To my surprise, when I clicked on the link to go back to  泉影's blog, here's what I got:

"Sorry, this post is password-protected!"

So much for my timely translation... I wonder what happened?

Here are a few other links to posts about this poster:
[Updated June 1, 2020 with the AP story]

• "The symbolism of Xi Jinping's trip South" (contextualizes Xi's trip in light of Deng's trip)
• "Memory of Deng Xiaoping strong in Shenzhen" (includes some history, as above, as well as a photo of the new poster, which is described as "a computer-generated image created in 2004")
• 《小平同志在深圳》画像著作权官司终结
• "New, Improved Billboard of Deng Xiaoping Resurrected in Shenzhen"
  I learned from this Associated Press article from August 24, 1992, that there was a different Deng Xiaoping billboard before the one in the photo above. According to the article,

The old billboard had been erected in June following Deng’s visit to the special economic zone in January. During his trip, Deng encouraged the rest of China to follow Shenzhen’s example. 

In the old billboard, a stern-looking Deng pointed with his index finger, saying: ″Shenzhen’s development and experience has proven that our policy of setting up the special economic zones was correct.″

Position: Northeastern University Assistant or Associate Teaching Professor of Multilingual Writing

You can apply through the NU HR portal: https://neu.peopleadmin.com/postings/59696

The English Department Writing Program of Northeastern University seeks to fill one benefits-eligible, full-time, non-tenure track position for Assistant or Associate Teaching Professor of Multilingual Writing, beginning in the 2019 fall semester. The Northeastern Writing Program, recipient of the CCCC Certificate of Writing Program Excellence, serves multilingual undergraduates and graduate students through coursework, the Northeastern Writing Center, writing groups, and various workshops and outreach efforts. The Teaching Professor of Multilingual Writing will teach two courses per semester aimed at speakers of other languages, work for the equivalent of one course per semester in the Northeastern University Writing Center, and lead program-wide efforts to support Northeastern’s large multilingual undergraduate and graduate student population. Reporting to the Director of the Writing Program and working closely with writing program administration, the successful candidate will work with both students and faculty to coordinate and enhance existing multilingual writing support resources, and build writing faculty capacity around multilingual writing pedagogy. The ideal candidate is an innovative, dedicated teacher who is knowledgeable of teaching and assessment strategies for supporting multilingual writers. There is an established promotion ladder from Assistant to Associate to Full Teaching Professor and opportunity for multi-year contracts. The standard appointment for teaching professors is six courses per year (80%), with service (10%) and professional development (10%) responsibilities.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

● Work individually in the Writing Center with undergraduate and graduate multilingual students across the curriculum on academic and professionally oriented writing tasks.

● Plan and conduct training around multilingual writing pedagogy and support for NU Writing Center consultants and Writing Program instructors, whether through workshops, online modules and materials, or presentations.

● Work individually with NU Writing Center consultants and Writing Program instructors in support of individual students and multilingual pedagogies.

● Work closely with the NU Writing Program Director and Writing Program administrators (Writing Center Director, Director of First-Year Writing, Director of Advanced Writing in the Disciplines), supporting ongoing programs and helping to create new initiatives to support multilingual writers.

● Serve on the Writing Program Committee (policy body for the NU Writing Program)

● Participate in writing-related assessment initiatives.

● Perform additional duties as assigned.

Qualifications 

● Ph.D. or Ed.D degree in relevant discipline (e.g., Rhetoric and/or Composition Studies, English, Applied Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Language and Literacy) required.

● Teaching experience with emphasis on college-level writing in English required.

● Experience teaching writing and/or advanced language acquisition in English to students one-on-one and/or classroom settings recommended.

● Experience facilitating student and faculty workshops.

● Interest or experience working collaboratively with staff, such as advisors, student affairs or admissions professionals, in support of multilingual students.

● Ability to work as a member of a diverse community.

Additional Information   

The College of Social Sciences and Humanities is a leader in the Experiential Liberal Arts (www.northeastern.edu/cssh/about/deans-welcome). Founded in 1898, Northeastern University is a dynamic and highly selective urban research university in the center of Boston. Grounded in its signature co-op program, Northeastern provides unprecedented global experiential learning opportunities. The College is strongly committed to fostering excellence through diversity and enthusiastically welcomes nominations and applications from members of groups that have been, and continue to be, underrepresented in academia.

Review of applications begins immediately and will continue until the position is filled.

For information about the Writing Program, please see http://www.northeastern.edu/writing/. For information about employment at Northeastern University, see http://www.northeastern.edu/hrm/. To apply, go to the Faculty Positions site at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities website: http://www.northeastern.edu/cssh/faculty-positions/. Northeastern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Educational Institution and Employer and a Title IX University. We encourage applications from women and underrepresented groups. Northeastern University is an E-Verify Employer.

Initial applications should consist of a letter of interest; a curriculum vita; and a brief (1-2 page) statement of teaching philosophy, including a description of training and experience in teaching writing. Please note any background or training with ESL students, writing in the disciplines, online teaching, community engagement, or digital media. Applications received by March 22 can be assured the fullest review.

Mya Poe, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Director of the Writing Program

415 Holmes Hall

Northeastern University 

Boston, MA 02115

m.poe@northeastern.edu

GHK in the McCarran Committee hearings

I've been skimming around in the online volumes from the hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-second Congress, first-[second] session (a.k.a., the McCarran hearings on the Institute of Pacific Relations). George H. Kerr shows up in there, in the form of correspondence from 1942 between Kerr and William L. Holland of the IPR. They're discussing Andrew Grajdanzev's IPR-sponsored book, Formosa Today. Go to p. 393.

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Davidson, James W. The Island of Formosa, Past and Present. 1903. Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 2008.

This is a beautifully produced reprint edition of Davidson's impressive 1903 book, complete with color illustrations and maps. (Not like the print-on-demand reprints available through some online bookstores. I made the mistake of buying a print-on-demand facsimile of Japanese Rule in Formosa a couple of years ago, and it was terrible--missing all of the illustrations, for one thing.) This particular book has been on my radar for years, but I couldn't bear to part with the money for it. I finally decided, though, to get it on this trip to Taiwan, and I think it was worth it. (Of course, it's also available online for free, if you don't want to pay for it.) I'm looking forward to reading it, though I have tons of work to do for the upcoming semester. (*Sigh*)

P.S. Japanese Rule in Formosa is also available online for free! Wish I had known that before I bought it...

My Introduction to Formosa Betrayed is finally out

The 2018 edition of George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed, published by Camphor Press, is now available:

Formosa Betrayed is a detailed, impassioned account of Chinese Nationalist (KMT) misrule that remains the most important English-language book ever written about Taiwan. 

Author George H. Kerr lived in Taiwan in the late 1930s, when the island was a colony of Japan. During the war, he worked for the U.S. Navy as a Taiwan expert. From 1945 to 1947, Kerr served as vice consul of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Taipei, where he was an eyewitness to the February 28 Massacre and the subsequent mass arrests and executions. 

As well as chronicling KMT repression during the early years of the White Terror, Kerr documents widespread corruption, showing how the island was systematically looted. The “betrayed” in the title refers not only to the crushing disappointment Taiwanese felt when they realized KMT rule was worse than that of the Japanese but also to the culpability of the American government. The United States was in large part responsible for handing Taiwan over to the Nationalists and helping them maintain their grip on power. 

Formosa Betrayed has served as a foundational text for generations of Taiwanese democracy and independence activists. It had an explosive effect among overseas Taiwanese students; for many, the book was their first encounter in print with their country’s dark, forbidden history. A 1974 Chinese-language translation increased its impact still more. It is a powerful classic that has withstood the test of time, a must-read book that will change the way you look at Taiwan. 

In this definitive edition Kerr scholar Jonathan Benda has added a detailed, thoroughly-researched introduction as well as a biographical sketch of the author.

"Kerr scholar"... that sounds nice, though I prefer "Kerrologist," or, as Henk Vynckier once labeled my fellow Kerr enthusiasts and me, "Kerrdashian."

I mentioned back in January that my interest in Kerr started back around 2007 when I discovered the three volumes of Kerr's correspondence and other writings that Professor Su Yao-tsung and his team edited based on the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum Kerr collection. I encourage anyone with a historical interest in Kerr to take a look at those books or even arrange to see the original documents in the museum. (It's a bit of an effort to do the latter, but it's worth the effort.)

Anyway, I don't have a financial interest in whether or not you buy it, but I hope that people who haven't yet read Formosa Betrayed (or even those who have) will consider buying the book!

Meditations on the fate of a scholarly article

I started this post back in October, but haven't gotten around to publishing it until now, at the end of the semester. I should note that I don't mean to sound whiny (or whingey--still don't know what the difference is between those two words). 

In my Advanced Interdisciplinary Writing sections, we're working on literature reviews. This project often finds me up late at night or, in the case of today (10/31), up early in the morning (woke up at 2:30) thinking about what goes into literature reviews. In this case, I'm thinking about the scholarly articles that are mined for what they can contribute to the students' reviews. Students are required to use only 10-15 sources, which, considering the hundreds of sources I've seen reviewed in some of the sample literature reviews I've asked them to look at, isn't that much. Still, I have some criteria for the kinds of sources they choose: peer-reviewed articles published within the last five years, preferably found via the library's databases (rather than through Google). I introduced them to the Web of Science, as well, which I think some of them used to find their articles. (Some of them, alas, are still finding sources through Google--not even Google Scholar--which perhaps I should "outlaw" in future classes.)

As we've been writing and talking about how to use sources in our literature reviews, I've been thinking about the different ways that scholarship gets used (or not used), and I think I want to share with students a personal example:

Someone who came across my list of publications on Academia.edu recently asked me for a copy of an article I wrote that was published in 2013, "Google translate in the EFL classroom: Taboo or teaching tool?" (I hate my titles). As I was responding to the request, I read through the article again, recalling (or, rather, wondering) how I wrote it and where and how I found the sources that I cited in it. I generally like the paper, but as I lamented to my wife, it hasn't gotten much mileage in terms of citations. While I was saying that to her, I checked out the article on Google Scholar and to my surprise found that there were three sources that had cited it, most impressively (to me, anyway) in the ACTFL-sponsored journal, Foreign Language Annals. Eager to find out what people were saying about my paper, I quickly downloaded the article, entitled, "Machine translation and the L2 classroom: Pedagogical solutions for making peace with Google translate."

My paper was mentioned twice in the literature review--the first time as one-third of a multiple in-text citation ("multiple researchers have suggested...") and the second as a "see also." I don't blame the authors of the article for this; in fact, I'm grateful that my paper got any mention, considering the conditions of scholarly writing these days. But, as I plan to tell students, my paper was almost 10 years in the making if you consider the origins of it in these blogposts from 2005 and 2007. I went on to write a paper about this topic that I presented at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication. There I was invited to contribute to a special issue of Writing & Pedagogy on technology and writing, and then, in the middle of proofreading my dissertation and organizing a move from Taiwan to Boston to start a new job, I put together a small study to see students' reactions to using Google Translate as part of their writing/translation process. (The scope of the CCCC paper was a lot more limited.) Then the peer-review process (being invited to contribute a paper doesn't necessarily guarantee you'll be published) and finally the joy of seeing my work published.

I'm sure my experience is not unique--as I said above, considering how much academic writing gets published every year, I'm sure some people would be happy if their article got a "see also." (It's better than being ignored, or worse, plagiarized, both of which have happened to me.) But what I want to tell students about the experience of finding that citation and then seeing how my paper was being used is that it was probably the equivalent of the feeling you have when you get a "B" on a writing project--grateful for the attention, but not particularly excited.

(Update, 12/6/18) Well, I related this experience to my students, who listened patiently. No one really responded, though, and I don't think it comforted those who got Bs to hear me say I understood. Ah well...

My son, the philosopher

My four-year-old, looking at a black and white picture of people:

Blackberries, strawberries, blueberries. They lost their colors. Without their colors, they're not yummy anymore.

Edward Paine on the legacy of the UNRRA--words

This comes from a history of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) Taiwan Regional Office that Edward Paine, Reports Officer and Economic Analyst for UNRRA, China Mission, was drafting after 1947. It's an undated typescript found in the George H. Kerr collection in the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum (GK-002-0006-045). It can also be found in Su, Yao-tsung (蘇瑤崇), ed., Collected Documents of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Taiwan (Taipei: Taipei 228 Memorial Museum, 2006), pp. 342-344.*

UNRRA will not soon be forgotten by the world because it is erecting for itself an imperishable and gigantic monument in paper. This is no discredit to the Administration. In China, at least, words, paper words and vocal words, big words, little words, red words, pink words, honeyed words, bitter words, recriminatory words, damning words, words, words, words, constitute UNRRA almost wholly and completely. They are of the essence and there is no doubt but that a large number of them have been fragrant.

In assessing the value of these words one has to set up several categories. One category is for words which meant nothing to begin with. This is a large group. Then there are the words which meant something at the time but which in the long run, historically speaking, mean nothing. There are also the words which meant nothing to begin with but which have a historical, a research value and those, a very small number, which both have and will be valuable. [342||343]

Those words having to do with work accomplished by UNRRA will be, oddly enough, among the least important because an all-over view will undoubtedly show that relatively little has been accomplished. The most valuable words will be those to be gleaned from tons of documents which will indicate the reasons why UNRRA has not succeeded to a greater extent than it has. They will be those which are now being written in looking back over what has been done. They will be those words which as yet have not been written and which quite probably will not be written unless some person or organization cares to make an audit, an impersonal, unbiased audit of what has occurred and why.

Such an audit might raise an eyebrow over the fact that at least sixty percent of the correspondence between the Taiwan Region and China Office has concerned administrative details. The audit would probably discover that this Region is not unique, that at least sixty percent of the time and work of the whole China Mission has been so consumed and expended. This is understandable in the nature of UNRRA but it is probably equally true that some excellent lessons can be learned from a study of the records.

Such an audit might well take a hint from the tons of documents which have been collected in a hit or miss fashion because there was no clear-cut idea of what was desired in the way of information. Much of these data are valuable, or at least may become so to someone digging through the files for material for a MA or PhD and possibly to others. However, it would seem that it has been an awful price to pay for a few degrees; especially if, as has been irrationally true of UNRRA, other organizations ignore that material which is available and send special men into the field to re-collect the same thing.

Except for this latter fact, that UNRRA has often paid no attention to the material in its own files in HQ and has sent additional men out to duplicate the information when it was needed and, even worse, has often taken the opinions of outsiders not particularly [343||344] qualified especially if their information happened to come in the form of the printed word, in a newspaper, little criticism can justifiably be leveled at UNRRA’s methods of obtaining information.

Greater men than an organization such as UNRRA will ever attract would have had to have been given broad scope in planning in order to successfully anticipate and order collected all the many types of data which the Administration has required. Better people in general than UNRRA has found would have had to be hired to carry these orders out. Time would have had to be commanded to stand still, holding changing conditions in a state of suspended animation. This letter would have been hardly less possible than the other paramount requirement, that the basic concept under which UNRRA has been made to work in China, as an advisory rather than an operating agency, be changed.

This is not an apology for UNRRA’s word-mountain; it is not an excuse; it is an admission that more has been expended than value received and a general exposition of why this is a fact. It is an analysis in retrospect, a post-game rehash, it is, I’ll admit, a somewhat defensive question “Knowing only what was known when UNRRA was started, could you have done better?”. More important it is the posing of a vital query “Will you, in the future, profit by the example which is UNRRA, which is embodied almost entirely in words?”

-----------------------
*As Talk Taiwan notes, Kerr made use of this history in his chapter on "The UNRRA-CNRRA Story" in Formosa Betrayed. (Unfortunately, Talk Taiwan repeats the unsubstantiated story that Chiang Kai-shek bought the copyright to Formosa Betrayed after it was published.)

Kerr on his association with U.S. Military Intelligence

From the George H. Kerr Papers, Okinawa Prefectural Archives (GHK4A01006)

MEMORANDUM

13 July 1986

G.H.Kerr’s Wartime and Postwar Association with the U.S. Military
Intelligence Services

It has sometimes been suggested that I served as a “spy” in pre-war
Taiwan. because of my later wartime employment as a [unintelligible] “Formosa Specialist” at Washington during World War II.

I was never that. After living and teaching in Taiwan from 1937 to 1940,
I returned to the United States to study Japanese History under Sir George Sansom, at Columbia University in New York. and was there on December 7, 1941.

Few Americans had lived for any length of time on Formosa (as tea merchants, missionaries and consular officers) and very few had travelled about the
island as extensively as I had done. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Washington
began to search for informants. I was at once offered a position in the Military Intelligence Division, G.H.Q. and there was given the “Formosa Desk” in the
Japan-Manchuria Branch. Eventually I prepared the non-military portions of
the Strategic Survey of Taiwan (Formosa). It was my duty to assemble all
possibly useful information concerning the Island.

When Admiral Nimitze [sic] proposed to drive across the Pacific, take Taiwan and occupy the Fukien coastal region, cu[tt]ing off Japan’s lines of supply and communication to the southern front, I was commissioned in the U.S. Naval Reserve
and directed to set up a “Formosa Research Unit” in the U.S. Naval School for
Military Government and Administration (at Columbia University). There we
prepared, and the Navy published some ten Handbooks for the Island
of Taiwan (Formosa). When the “Nimitz Plan” was abandoned in October, 1944,
the Formosa Research Unit was disbanded. After a brief interval with the
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI, Washington), I was sent to the American
Embassy in Chunking, China, as an Assistant Naval Attaché, and in October, 1945,
went to Taiwan as a member of an American Military Advisory Group to witness the formal surrender of Japanese forces on Taiwan and the Nationalist Chinese
assumption of authority in the island.

These papers are a small small sampling of the materials used in the Naval School
for Military Government.

[signature]

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Yesterday we took a trip to Lowell, Massachusetts to visit some historical sites there (my father would have been proud...). We went to the National Streetcar Museum and took a ride on an old streetcar (mainly for my son's sake). Then we walked over to the Boott Cotton Mills museum that's part of the Lowell National Historical Park. I bought two books at the museum bookstore:

• Bruce Watson, Bread & Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (Penguin, 2005)
• Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Vintage: 2014)

I want to start with Watson because I'm particularly interested in the involvement of the immigrant workers ("from some fifty-one nations") in the 1912 strike at the textile mills in Lawrence, MA. Hopefully I'll get around to reading them sometime! 

New year's resolutions for 2018-19 academic year

I posted some new academic year's resolutions a couple of Septembers ago, imitating something I had done 10 years before that.

One thing that is different this time than from two years ago is that now I have deleted most of my social media accounts. As this person has written, it's a big change. Although it has generally been a positive experience, sometimes I feel like the guy in this video:


(I'm sure everyone has already seen this, but I don't know because I'm not on social media.)

Anyway, since I gave up Facebook and Twitter, I was able to read more. I finished reading Johanna Meskill's 1979 book, A Chinese Pioneer Family: The Lins of Wu-feng, Taiwan, 1729-1895. I enjoyed it, but I was surprised at how little has been written about the book--I could find only one review on Amazon and only seven published scholarly book reviews. (Actually, I guess that's a pretty good number. And the book has been cited 128 times, according to Google Scholar.) The reviewers generally liked the book, though some of them pointed out problems in interpretation or missing sources that would have added to or modified her conclusions. Several of the reviewers hoped for a "sequel" to the book, though it apparently never came (and I don't know that Meskill intended to write one).

I have also been reading Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. It's interesting as an interdisciplinary study of the interactions of climate and imperialistic politics in late nineteenth-century droughts. I've gotten a bit bogged down in the climate science part, though. Hopefully I'll be able to say something intelligent about it in my interdisciplinary writing course this fall, though.

As far as my new's year resolutions go, I want to do more writing. I'm currently looking at a conference paper I wrote about 13 years ago and trying to figure out how I can revise it for publication. We'll see how that goes. George Kerr is also lurking somewhere in the background.

I also want to keep up to date on my grading and responding to student work. I'm not the worst at doing this, but I'm probably not the best, either. Some changes in our domestic situation might make it more possible for me to stay on track, but we'll see.

Think I'll keep my resolutions down to these two for the time being. Maybe I'll update this closer to the beginning of the fall semester...

Work on GHK introduction, a flashback, and reflections on teaching writing

A couple days ago I finally completed a draft of my introduction to a forthcoming new edition of Formosa Betrayed and sent it to the editors for their input. I'm sure it will go through some (probably many) changes before it sees publication, but that's OK with me. I was writing an email to a friend just now and mentioned the project and one of its earlier incarnations:

You probably don’t remember your comments on this blog post from 2010 (https://jonintaiwan.blogspot.com/2010/02/some-notes-about-publication-history-of.html), but what I’m working on now grew out of what I was working on back then—8 years ago! I always like to mention these kinds of things to my writing students—my 9-year dissertation, this thing, etc.—to remind them of how long the writing process can sometimes be.

I can date the interest in Kerr back a couple of years further than that, when I wrote in this post almost 11 years ago:

I found out that Tunghai's History Dept. library had these books [a 3-volume set of facsimiles of Kerr's writings and correspondence], so I borrowed them today. Talk about fascinating stuff to curl up with on a cold winter night. There are all sorts of interesting topics that come up in the letters--discussions with (and about) Thomas Liao (a Taiwan independence activist-in-exile who eventually returned to Taiwan in a propaganda coup for the KMT), letters in response to Formosa Betrayed and concerning the trouble he was having publishing a history of Taiwan to 1945, discussions regarding the assassination attempt on Chiang Ching-kuo in 1970 and its aftermath... Just a lot to keep a curious reader busy. 

"Keep a curious reader [and writer] busy." As I said to my friend, it's always interesting to get students' reactions to the idea that a writing project (or writing projects) can take years, or even decades. Kerr's work on Taiwan is itself an example of that, from working on earlier versions of Formosa Betrayed back in the late 1940s, to getting it published finally in 1965, and working on the other "Formosa" texts (one of which never saw publication) into the 1970s and 80s.

I would like to give students a taste of how those kinds of long-term writing projects happen, and I guess I do do that, to some extent. In my business writing class, for instance, they work with one topic for most of the semester and base their final project on that topic, as well. But it's an acquired taste for some students who might not be able to develop the kind of passion for a topic that it takes to sustain interest over a longer period of time (even 14 weeks can be a long time if you're not interested in what you're working on!). And I also have to realize that neither I nor Kerr (or probably anyone else) have fully focused on that one project over all of those years. Kerr wrote about Okinawa, as well, for instance. And we all get distracted over time. (At least I hope "we all" do--I hope it's not just me!) Would it be necessary/helpful to try to build that "distraction" into the syllabus, as well? Could that be done in a 14-week course? Maybe I'll try...

George Kerr on why he left his Vice Consul position

In Chapter 7 of Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr writes about two reports he sent to the US Embassy in Nanking:

Late in the year I sent along to the Embassy and the Department a secret coded supplementary report upon prominent personalities about town, and certain evident conflicts within the Taipei Government. My report evoked a telegraphic request for more detail, but this was construed to be a rebuke; I had committed an unpardonable bureaucratic sin by raising an issue which called attention to ourselves. 

My second semi-annual report for 1946 on social, political and economic conditions was endorsed, coded, and forwarded through Nanking, to Washington. It carried a warning that tensions within Formosa were near the breaking point, a violent crisis might be upon us at any time. The document was given a number and entered into our secret record book.

Later on, he writes that when he was in Nanking writing a "State paper" to be translated and given to Chiang Kai-shek, he made use of the December report "which had been endorsed and forwarded to the Embassy. But in the Embassy files I found also a brief, secret, unnumbered follow-up dispatch from Taipei which said in effect that the Embassy should not take my December predictions of impending crisis too seriously."

In an October 27, 1974 letter, Kerr expands more on this note and gives also some more context for why he left his position as Vice Consul. It is well-known that Consul Ralph Blake and Kerr did not see eye to eye on how to respond to the crisis in Taiwan. It's also commonly known that the KMT didn't want Kerr to stay on in his position. Hsiao-ting Lin,for instance, writes, "Chiang Kai-shek's officials acridly blamed George Kerr ... for instigating the islanders' rebellion against the Chinese rule, leading to Kerr's disgraceful recall." Kerr suggests, however, that it was he who made the final decision to leave:

In late 1946 I prepared a long Memorandum predicting a crisis at any moment, naming names and citing incidents. It was endorsed by Blake and forwarded to Nanking and Washington. But then Blake flew off to Nanking, leaving me in charge, where he urged that I be pulled out. When the crisis did occur, and I went to Nanking to report to Stuart, I was given access to the files in order to prepare the Memorandum which appears—severely censored to remove all references to Formosan appeals to the USA—in the White Paper. In the files I found an unnumbered Memo from Blake to the Embassy, sent along immediately after the endorsed December Memo, in which he strongly denigrated my report (which he had endorsed). When Stuart and Butterworth asked me to return to Formosa, I drew their attention to it, and on resigning the Service, pointed out that no man of integrity would serve under Blake under those circumstances. Blake knew that if he needed it, he could summon up that unnumbered Memo, but since it was not entered into our register of numbered, secret despatches, it could remain lost forever. (emphasis added)

Kerr suggests that despite his conflict with Blake, Ambassador Stuart and Counselor to the Embassy Butterworth still wanted Kerr to stay on in Taiwan.

(The memo Kerr refers to here appears to be different from the memo Blake attached to a later report, cited by Richard Bush, in which he criticizes Kerr's style of writing.)

Source: Letter to Jonathan Mirsky, available in the Okinawa Prefectural Archives.

The DPP's role in relaxing restrictions on cross-strait travel in 1987

I happened to watch the following video today and was interested to hear how the Democratic Progressive Party was involved in the 1987 movement to allow Mainlanders to return to visit family there. Most accounts that I've read, like that of Murray Rubinstein, depict the opening up of opportunities to visit family simply as one of Chiang Ching-kuo's reforms. Other accounts, like that of Shelley Rigger, emphasize the effects of that policy change.* 

This video depicts in more detail the process that veterans went through to gain the right to visit relatives in China. It describes the veterans' agonizing desire to know what happened to their families. As DPP official Yu Shyi-kun, who was a Taiwan provincial assemblyman at the time, says, "In addition to not being able to see family members, they couldn't even write letters to their relatives. So no one knew if they were dead or alive. Can you think of anything crueler than this?" And as veteran Liu Minguo says, "Soldiers have to listen to orders. ... In the military, if you're ordered not to do something, you can't do it. If they say it's white, it's white; if they say it's black, it's black." But according to the video, these soldiers (who became veterans) had to internalize their pain because they knew it was illegal even to express these feelings. (I've written before about how for some soldiers, such pain led to suicide and even murder.) 

According to the video, members of the dangwai ("Outside-the-(KMT)-party," which later became the DPP) decided to help these veterans try to contact their family by allowing them to send letters via their magazine, Progress magazine (前進周刊), and through the mailbox of then-dangwai legislator Xu Guotai. The program says that they helped send 300-400 letters.

After the veterans formed a "Association for the Promotion of Mainlanders to Return Home to Visit Relatives" (外省人返鄉探親促進會) and took to the streets to ask the KMT government to let them visit their families in China, the DPP voted to support the Mainlanders' attempts to return home. DPP politicians persistently asked KMT officials to allow the veterans to go home. But the KMT, most importantly President Chiang Ching-kuo, was afraid that such a policy would play into the PRC's plot to reunify under the Communists.

The veterans began to take to the streets, carrying signs, handing out leaflets, and organizing speeches to let Taiwanese know about their pain and to pressure the KMT to change its mind. On June 28, 1986, a meeting of the Association held in Taipei attracted over 20,000 supporters and officials from the KMT's intelligence bureau. The veterans' tearful songs about going home to find their mothers moved the audience to tears. At this point, according to the video, the veterans' tears and song were finally heard by Chiang Ching-kuo. In October of 1987, the Executive Yuan declared that Mainlanders with family in China could return to visit their relatives.

In the video, Yu Shyi-kun speculates that because the DPP was promoting this policy, Chiang Ching-kuo became concerned that if the KMT didn't pay attention to the veterans' request, it would lose the support of some of its most loyal followers. Tamkang University professor Chang Wu-Ueh (張五岳) agrees that the support of the DPP was vital to publicizing this issue and pressuring the KMT to change its policy.

------------

* I did find a footnote in this 1999 article by Yu-Shan Wu that cites a 1998 book by Kuo Cheng-liang (郭正亮), 民進黨轉型之痛 (The DPP's Ordeal of Transformation, or as Wu translates it, The DPP's Agony of Transition). According to Wu, Kuo argues that "there was a period in the late 1980s of far-sighted pragmatism in the DPP's attitude toward the Chinese mainland. At this time, the DPP exposed the rigidities of the KMT's mainland policy, championed open communications with the mainland, and hoped that by unilaterally recognizing the PRC they would encourage Beijing to respect Taiwan's sovereignty" (568 n. 6).

[Update, 5/2/24: Lost that video, but here's another video that discusses this topic in part]

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

Haven't written anything here for a few months. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write much now, either. But I got three books in the mail today that I had ordered during the University of Hawai'i Press's big sale last month, and I wanted to share the joy:

• The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan, ed. David K. Jordan, Andrew D. Morris, and Marc L. Moskowitz (U of Hawai'i P, 2004)
• Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, ed. Yuko Kikuchi (U or Hawai'i P, 2007)
• The Peasant Movement and Land Reform in Taiwan, 1924-1951, by Shih-shan Henry Tsai (MerwinAsia, 2015)

The first two books cost only $5 each (and the second is a richly illustrated glossy-papered hardback). The third cost $45, but a total of $55 for three academic books is not too bad in my ... ummm... book.

I've got some other books to work on first (after I finish grading, some writing projects, and any other things that come up...), but I hope to dip into them soon!

A story from One Family, Three Eras: Wu Bai and his Children

I have more to say about this book, but I'm going to start with a rough translation/paraphrase of the second chapter:

Early on in 《一個家族·三個時代：吳拜和他的子女們》 (One Family, Three Eras: Wu Bai and his Children) by 吳宏仁 (Wu Hongren, or Hong Jen Wu), Wu Bai is asked to stay after class by his fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Kimura. Two years older than his classmates, Wu Bai entered the second grade of the Japanese school in rural Tainan at the age of eleven. Although he started late, Wu is strong in math, and after two years of study, his Japanese is also very good. But the problem that Mr. Kimura faces with Wu and some of his classmates is their refusal to cut their queues. The principal at Kimura's school has been pressuring the teacher to force his students cut their queues, but Kimura wants to try reasoning with Wu in hopes that if Wu cuts his queue, his classmates will follow suit.

Mr. Kimura starts out with the standard argument that the queue is symbolic of the Manchu Qing dynasty's power over the Han people. Now, he tells Wu, there are those in China who want to overthrow the Qing (it's 1911) and Taiwan is already Japanese territory, so there is no connection between the Han of Taiwan and the Manchu Qing.
Wu's reply throws Kimura for a loop--he tells his teacher that his father says that even though the Manchus want the Han to grow queues, at least they don't force them to learn the Manchu language; in fact, they have learned and use Chinese. In addition, many Han people have become officials in the Qing state. "The Japanese..." he says, but stops. Kimura suddenly realizes that he is not only facing a teenage boy, but he's also confronting the boy's father. "How could this rural farmer understand these ideas?" he wonders.

Mr. Kimura tries another approach, reminding Wu about how the Japanese men of the Edo period wore their hair in topknots, which Wu agrees looked silly. Kimura goes on to describe how the Japanese men started cutting off their topknots in the Meiji period, connecting that change to Japan's modernization and suggesting that wasting time on one's hair, as the queue-wearing Han were doing, was comparable to opium smoking and foot binding. Though Wu is suspicious of this comparison, he finally decides to cut off his queue, an act which does in fact influence his classmates to cut off theirs.

What Mr. Kimura doesn't know, writes Wu Hongren, is that Wu Bai keeps his queue in his bookbag, taking it out on the way home and fixing it to his head with one of his mother's hair clips. He knows his father doesn't like the Japanese, and Wu Bai doesn't want him to find out. But as luck would have it, within a week his secret is revealed when his younger brother knocks Wu's queue off his head. Surprisingly, Wu's father doesn't get angry; rather, he says, "If you're going to their school, you can't ignore their rules--I understand." After a pause, he continues: "I just want you to remember two things: don't forget who you are, and don't try to deceive me."

Wu Bai reaches to pick up his queue. A thing that was so important earlier now doesn't seem to have any meaning at all.

(From pp. 34-37 of 《一個家族·三個時代：吳拜和他的子女們》 (One Family, Three Eras: Wu Bai and his Children) by 吳宏仁.)