Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Six)

I did some writing over the weekend, which led me to think about some things that I needed to read, so today has been a note-taking day. Maybe I'll get back to doing some writing tomorrow (or I might continue note-taking--we'll see). Sometimes you write yourself to a point where you think, I need to find out more about how what I'm talking about relates to other parts of my discipline, and then you find out that someone has written something relevant that seems totally alien to your focus. That's what has happened to me!

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Five)

I might as well start calling this "Summer Reading Project." I've done a lot more reading lately than writing. So far I've read up to the end of the Dutch era in John Shepherd's book, but I've got a ways to go  yet (this is a long book, in case you haven't seen it!). It's packed with information, too. Most of it isn't relevant to my current project, but it's giving me a lot of background on what Taiwan was like in the seventeenth century. 

Guess I'll try tomorrow to do some writing, or maybe I'll do a little now (25 minutes, perhaps?). 

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Four); Lessons from an old Mandarin textbook for Taiwan

Well, at this rate I'm not going to get this paper done any time soon. Today I spent more time reading than writing. (OK, so that's an understatement. These are actually the first four sentences I've written today!) 😭

On the bright side, this evening I came across a new website (via Twitter) that contains a lot of digitized historical books from Taiwan: it's called the Taiwan eBook Database, and it's from the National Central Library in Taiwan. So far it contains over 32,000 books from 1900-1950 or so, and it's free, so that's a good thing! It doesn't seem possible to download the ebooks, but you can view them online.

Given my interests, I was digging around for some Guoyu textbooks and came across one from undated book entitled 《臺灣暫用小學國語課本甲編》 (roughly, Temporary Elementary Mandarin Textbook for Taiwan, First Edition). The first couple of lessons are interesting:

第一課  臺灣人                            

Lesson One: Taiwanese

我是臺灣人                           

I am Taiwanese

你是臺灣人                 

 You are Taiwanese

他是臺灣人 

He is Taiwanese

我們都是臺灣人 

We are all Taiwanese

第二課  中國人 

Lesson Two: Chinese

我們的祖宗  是福建人  是廣東人 

Our ancestors are Fujianese. are Cantonese

福建人  廣東人  臺灣人  都是中國人 

Fujianese. Cantonese Taiwanese all are Chinese 

They kind of threw me off with the first unit, but then they were back to my expectations with Unit 2. Later on, in Unit 16, they get to 中華民國 and tell us that everyone has a name, and schools have their names too, and so do nations. 

爸爸說  我們的國名是中華民國   我們應該記住我們的國名 

Father says  Our country's name is the Republic of China  We should remember our country's name.

Unit 17 is about the beautiful flag, Unit 18 is about Sun Yat-sen, Unit 19 is about commemorating Sun, Unit 20 is about how a young Sun Yat-sen dealt with foreigners who made fun of his queue. 

But I think my "favorite" part is in Unit 24:

第二十四課   日本侵略中國

 Lesson 24  Japan Invades China

老師站在地圖旁邊   拿著一幅圖給大家看 

Teacher stands next to the map holding a picture for everyone to see

上面畫著一片秋海棠葉   又畫著一條毛蟲 

On the picture are a begonia leaf and a caterpillar

老師說  這裡秋海棠葉的位置  正式地圖上中國的位置 

Teacher says  The location of this begonia leaf is where China is on the map

這裡毛蟲的位置   正式地圖上日本的位置 

The location of the caterpillar is where Japan is on the map

這裡畫著毛蟲爬去吃秋海棠葉  就是表明從前日本想侵略中國 

In this picture the caterpillar is climbing up to eat the begonia leaf. This shows that Japan wanted to invade China before

From there, the rest of the book is about the war between China and Japan. It's an interesting read...

[Update, 6/4/21: I found an interesting post on an "extinct" blog, "活水來冊房," about the postwar "Mandarin fever" in Taiwan: "台灣戰後國語熱"--it includes some images of this book, but it appears to be a different edition than the one in the NCL? There's also a book entitled《文白之爭──語文;教育;國族的百年戰場》that mentions this textbook. I also came across an article entitled "戰後臺灣山地教育教科書初探（1951~1958）" that explores an Indigenous perspective on some of the units in this textbook.

Here's another edition of the book. And another.]

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Three)

I made some progress on my paper today, adding material, moving things around, rephrasing stuff, tightening up arguments, and so forth. I also read an article that I had come across about censorship in the early years after "the glorious retrocession" of Taiwan. The article is "Censorship and Publication Control in Early Post-War Taiwan: Procedures and Practices," by Táňa Dluhošová, published in Journal of Current Chinese Affairs in 2018. It was part of a special issue co-edited by Dluhošová and Isabelle Cheng on "The Making and Operation of Everyday Authoritarianism in Taiwan during the Cold War." An interesting article!

I'm also working on reading the book I mentioned yesterday. Haven't gotten very far on it (because I've been busy writing!), but making progress.

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Two)

I spent some time today going over my paper, taking notes on Google Keep, and adding some ideas and quotes to my draft. My plan is to work on the body of the paper and then decide on whether I want to go back to my original introduction (if it seems to fit) or write another introduction that fits better. 

I mentioned looking for a statistic a few days ago--I found a usable one today in a book I've had for a while. A long time ago, someone asked me if I read all the books I was buying. I believe my reply was that I read some of them all the way through, but some of them I just dip into for research purposes. This time was a case of dipping into a book I've never read for a statistic. (The book was Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of Taiwan, edited by Edwin A. Winckler and Susan Greenhalgh, if you're interested.)

Speaking of actually reading books that I've had for years, I've decided that I'll (finally) read John Robert Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 next. I bought the book at Cave's Books in Taichung over 20 years ago (it's a Taiwanese Southern Materials edition rather than the Stanford UP edition), dragged it to Syracuse with me, then back to Taiwan in 2002, and then to Boston in 2011. (It should probably have its own frequent flyer card.) Some people were talking about it on Twitter last week, and I thought, "I have that book!" I'm a little embarrassed to admit I haven't read it yet, so I'm going to make up for lost time...

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-One)

I spent today reading instead of writing. I finished reading Stephen J. Hartnett's book, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War. I'll probably have some more coherent thoughts about it later, but right now it's kind of late, so I'll only say a little bit about it (that maybe I'll have to correct later!).

A World of Turmoil is a rhetorical history, which is somewhat different from a "regular" history. Hartnett is a professor of communication rather than a historian, so some of the ways he approaches his topic are different from the way traditional historians would approach the same topic. For one thing, although the book covers the "long cold war" period from the end of WW II to the present, Hartnett doesn't cover the period comprehensively, but focuses on five "case studies" of communicative challenges faced by the US, China, and Taiwan: 

1. the period from the end of the Second World War to 1952 (the end of the Truman administration), when Chiang Kai-shek lost the Civil War with the Communists and escaped to Taiwan and the US separated the Communist and Nationalist forces as part of its involvement in Korea;
2. the beginning of the Eisenhower administration and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-5;
3. Nixon's and Kissinger's visits to China and negotiations over the Shanghai Communiqué;
4. Lee Teng-hui's presidency, visit to Cornell, the third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, and the Clinton administration's "Three Noes" policy; and
5. the Tsai and Trump administrations.

For these five case studies, the author focuses on how various communicative strategies (or lack of strategies, in some cases) taken by the parties involved resulted in confusion, mutual suspicion, and other challenges to peaceful relations among the three parties. (I'll say more about this at another point.) 

Another thing that is different from most histories I've read is Hartnett's conclusion, in which he proposes what China, the US, and Taiwan should do in order to have more peaceful and productive relations among themselves. I'm not entirely convinced that all of his recommendations are possible (he seems to think, for instance, that Taiwan should simply stop calling itself the Republic of China and should change its constitution, assuming that the CPC would be OK with that?!); at any rate, I haven't read too many traditional histories that end with recommendations for future action. (Maybe there are some?)

Anyway, that was what I accomplished today. Perhaps I'll get back to writing tomorrow.

Summer writing project (Day Twenty)

Writing a bit late. Just got off the phone with my brother, who is one of my best critics. We talked a LOT about my paper and its problems, and he helped me find ways of making it more doable. It's not as ambitious as I originally was making it, but I think that with his advice, I might be able to make a coherent and significant argument. Gotta get started on that later, though, as I have to go to bed now!

Summer writing project (Day Nineteen)

Spent quite a bit of time looking for a statistic in order to finish one relatively unimportant sentence in my draft. That's something that happens so often that academics are always tweeting about how they spent hours reading articles, searching for primary sources, etc., just to write one sentence. It's true, though. In my case, I put a note there and if I stumble across a usable statistic, I'll include it. Otherwise, I'll delete the sentence as it is not vital to my overall argument. 

I also wrote two emails today in which I described my project. This was pretty useful to me because it helped remind me of my main argument and the significance of my project. One of the emails was to someone not in academia, and the other was to someone who's in a different field in academia. I got a good response from the first person, but I haven't heard from the second one yet. We'll see...

I've been reading through my draft, and although there are holes in it, it's not as bad as I had thought. At some point, I should show it to someone to see what they think about it. First, though, I have to find someone who'd be willing to read it! Then I have to develop the courage to share it with them. ("The imposter syndrome is strong with this one...")

Summer writing project (Day Eighteen)

Sitting among my books today, looking at what all these scholars had accomplished--sometimes in languages that were their second or third language (I was looking at one book written in English by a Taiwanese scholar who got her PhD in Japan), I was feeling a bit down in the dumps. 

So I decided to spend some time freewriting to work out the "so what" of my argument. I have a decent introduction that lays out the argument, but I need to work on a conclusion that reemphasizes the significance of my "findings." So I did some work on that--more still needs to be done, of course, along with continued work trying to make sure the organization makes sense. Also some work is needed filling in gaps. 

I also am trying out Google Keep for note-taking. I haven't been satisfied with my current note-taking practices for a while, so I'm going to try this approach and see how it works. 

Summer writing project (Day Seventeen)

One of the things that has been perhaps getting in the way of my writing process (besides my allergies) is the current coronavirus surge in Taiwan. Since we have friends and family in Taiwan, we're quite concerned about what's happening, of course, and this sometimes results in paying too much attention to the minute-by-minute updates provided online and through 24-hour Taiwanese news stations that we are able to access.* I appreciate the daily updates on the situation provided by Brian Hioe at New Bloom magazine, but I realized last night that checking that first thing every morning was putting me out of the mood to write. 

So this morning I decided not to check the news (or even email) until after I had done some work. And it helped! I did some work on the paper, trying to make my argument clearer among all the details I've piled up (this is a problem I usually have--I tend to get stuck among the weeds too much in my writing). I might work on the paper some more later today, but right now am trying to keep my son's attention on his remote kindergarten class.

*I remember when the 921 earthquake happened in 1999, we were in Syracuse and there wasn't anywhere near the access to updated news that there is now. It's hard to believe, but there was no online streaming news video, the Taipei Times had just started its online version, and we could only watch about half an hour of news from Taiwan a day on cable.

Summer writing project (Day Sixteen); another new book in the former native speaker's library

I did some work on the paper today, though didn't achieve as much as I had hoped. I think I made the mistake of looking at the news first before getting into my work, which stressed out and depressed me. Note to self: Try getting into writing before reading the news!

I got a new book over the weekend, which was earlier than I expected to:

Stephen J. Hartnett, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War. Michigan State University Press, 2021.

I started skimming it right away, though. It looks like it'll be interesting and important in the field of rhetoric/communication studies as one of very few full-length books so far about Taiwan. I'll try to post more about it later as I read more of it. 

Summer writing project (Day Fifteen)

I'm writing earlier today because I get my second COVID shot later this morning, and I don't know what shape I'll be in after that. I got up early today and did some reading and writing. Before I went to bed last night, I got an idea (while I was brushing my teeth!) to use something I had presented at a conference about ... ummm... 19 years ago (!) in my paper. There's a portion that's relevant to what I'm working on. The only problem is that someone cited this portion of my paper in his book, so I don't know if I should cite my own paper or cite his citation of my paper... Maybe both. Wouldn't want to be accused of plagiarizing someone who was just paraphrasing something I wrote...

Otherwise, I spent some time going through my paper and adding in some ideas and stuff that I had deleted before. I'm reorganizing it, though, in keeping with my new outline. I hope it's making more sense now than it did before. We shall see...

I don't know if I'll be able to work on the paper over the weekend--it depends on my response to the vaccination. (See, as a writer, you have to deal with all these other things in life, too!)

Summer writing project (Day Fourteen)

Today I wrote an email to a colleague in which I briefly described my project in three sentences. I include that in here because my colleague is Taiwanese and from a different (but related) discipline, so I felt like trying to explain it to her is one way of clarifying in my mind what I'm actually trying to write about. 

Otherwise, I've been reading through Allen Chun's Forget Chineseness to see how he's approaching the idea of Chineseness. I think his approach might be more useful for my project than some others that I've seen. As Chun puts it, "To problematize Chineseness as constitutive of an ongoing historical framework, from a comparative perspective and within a transnational or glocal context, serves to problematize the nature of contexts that invoke Chineseness as an ethnic or cultural problem, among other things" (x). I've already read several of the articles that have been revised into chapters for this book, so I know that his approach and perspective are amenable to my own.

I also read a few reviews of his book from different scholarly journals. Sometimes I find that reading different reviews of a book before I get into the book itself helps me do several things: determine if the book is actually worth reading (either out of quality or relevance to my work or interests); get a sense of the structure and arguments of the book (I tend to get bogged down in detail both as a reader and as a writer); get an idea of some possible shortcomings of the book that I might not notice on my own. Since I don't plan on reading the whole book at this point, the reviews can also help me pinpoint areas of use to me that I might not have noticed from looking at the index or reading the contents page or introduction.

Some people might feel that this is "cheating" or that it will bias my perspective toward the book, but I think this kind of "lateral reading" is worthwhile, not just for websites or memes, but also for published work. Particularly because Chun's book is not in my discipline, I find it helpful to get "insiders'" perspectives on it before I consider reading and citing it in more depth. And while I can keep their points of view in mind as I read from the book, I don't have to accept their conclusions if I find they're different from my own views.

If you're curious, here are the reviews of Chun's book that I read (sorry for the different citation formats and the Northeastern proxies):

• Justin Wu (2019) Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 49:2, 335-337, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2018.1562561
• Gillette, Maris B. 2018. "Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification." Pacific Affairs 91(4):783-786 (https://link.ezproxy.neu.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/scholarly-journals/on-geopolitics-cultural-identification/docview/2166930477/se-2?accountid=12826). 
• Li, Yao-Tai. “Book Review: Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification.” Cultural Sociology 11, no. 4 (December 2017): 540–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975517731079c.
• Carrico, K. (2017). Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification Allen Chun New York: SUNY Press, 2017 xii 284 pp. $95.00 ISBN 978-1-4384-6471-8. The China Quarterly, 232, 1116–1117. http://doi.org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1017/S0305741017001436

Summer writing project (Day Thirteen)

Today wasn't a very productive day, I must admit, despite having a new direction with my introduction. I worked a bit on that, but the problem with introductory anecdotes or "opening vignettes" (besides the fact that Jonathan Dresner seems to hate them) is that there's this battle between making the anecdote complete, making it concise, and and making it relevant. Sometimes some of these are easier to achieve than the other, but right now, the anecdote I thought would be good is turning out to require a lot of work to make it all three. For instance, here's my opening paragraph so far.

In late 2015, Chou Tzu-yu, a 16-year-old Taiwanese member of the K-pop group Twice, was accused of being an advocate for Taiwan independence for holding a flag of the Republic of China (Taiwan) during a television program. After expressions of outrage from Chinese netizens, her management company released a video of a contrite Chou apologizing for her “improper behavior” (Denyer and Xu). One of the ironies of this incident is that the flag she was shown with was for years associated with the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Republic of China, and has only recently been embraced as a symbol of Taiwan. That is, for most of its history, the flag has represented the Republic of China, even when the actual territory controlled by the Republic of China shrank to eventually include only Taiwan and its outlying islands. In that sense, the flag Chou held was a Chinese flag rather than a Taiwanese flag, and the real controversy was over which version of Chinese identification (PRC vs. ROC) was legitimate.

Ignoring the fact that I'm not sure I even believe that last sentence, my problem is how well this will introduce my real topic. Can you guess what my paper is going to be about from that introductory anecdote? Maybe I should go back to my original introduction, which, while a bit duller, is at least more relevant.

Summer writing project (Days Eleven and Twelve)

Knew I forgot something yesterday...

These past two days have been somewhat uncomfortable (high pollen counts) but also helpful. I worked out an outline (again) to help keep me on track, and I came up with another idea for the introduction, though I have to work out the details.

Tonight I attended a webinar run by the University of California at Santa Barbara's Center for Taiwan Studies. It was a discussion of historiography of Taiwan; the speakers were Chang Lung-chih, Leo Ching, and Seiji Shirane. It was very educational to learn how historians of Taiwan are approaching the study of Taiwan's history in dialogue with the histories of the region and other parts of the world (such as the Caribbean). I missed the other "Taiwan Talks" sessions this year, but I hope they continue them next year now that they're on my map!

Summer writing project (Day Ten)

I didn't write much of anything today, but I finished reading Evan Dawley's book, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s to 1950s. I learned quite a bit from it, and I like how his focus on the development of one city through the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist periods is tied to the formation of a Taiwanese ethnic identity and also to other trends and related histories, such as the disparate histories of social work in Japan, China, and Taiwan and the various stances toward and uses of religion in these three places. Social work and religion have been two areas of Taiwanese culture that I've never given enough attention to, but this book helped me to see that I need to explore them more. 

My main reason for reading the book was to see if it could help me in my current writing project, and I think it will. I'm not going to go into detail about it at this point, but I think I can draw from this book some examples that pertain to rhetoric, so I think I will work them into my paper. We'll see how it goes. 

I'm trying to decide now which book I should read next. I think I'll read Bi-yu Chang's Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan next, though I will have to see if I should read through the whole book or just focus on some of the chapters. I might also dip more into Faye Yuan Kleeman's Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. And maybe also Allen Chun's Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification, which also might be relevant. I've read some of the articles from which Chun's book developed, but I want to see what might have changed from the previously published versions of his chapters. 

Oh, and I suppose I should do some writing, too, in the midst of all this reading and skimming. I wouldn't want that the only written product that grows out of all this work is a bunch of blog posts about my writing/reading process...

See you Monday!

Summer writing project (Days Eight and Nine)

Neglected to post anything here yesterday. Not much to say, though, for yesterday or today except that my hay fever is keeping me from being able to think clearly. I'm almost finished reading Becoming Taiwanese, and I've been picking up some good ideas from the book that I can cite in my paper. Will try to work tomorrow...

Summer writing project (Day Seven)

Today wasn't a good day for writing for me--my hay fever (and the medicine I take for it!) had me lethargic and foggy-brained all day. I did some reading in Becoming Taiwanese as well as a bit of Faye Yuan Kleeman's Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. Chapter 6 of her book covers language policy in Japan and colonial Taiwan. Some of this is also covered in Eika Tai's 1999 article, "Kokugo and Colonial Education in Taiwan." Gareth Price also discusses some similar points in his book, Language, Society, and the State: From Colonization to Globalization in Taiwan. I'm curious about what they have to say about how proficient Taiwanese were in the Japanese language by the end of the Japanese colonial period.

Price, citing A-chin Hsiau, says that by 1944, 80% of Taiwanese were proficient in Japanese. As he notes, though, "this must be taken with some caution; the Japanese would have had political motives for inflating the extent of assimilation to convince both themselves and their Taiwanese subjects of its success and, as we shall see, colonial authorities constructed political and socio-economic incentives for residents to claim Japanese proficiency" (p. 126). Kleeman says that by 1941, 57% of Taiwanese "could comprehend Japanese" (p. 142). Tai also cites the 57% number and notes, as Kleeman does, that this number doesn't mean that these people were fluent or proficient in Japanese. As Tai notes, for instance, "in the streets of Taiwanese cities, where Japanese needed to communicate with local Taiwanese who spoke little Japanese, these two groups of people together invented a pidgin Japanese in which Japanese words were put together in a Taiwanese order" (p. 129). Kleeman also gives examples of how the reality of Japanese usage differed from the image provided by that 57% number.

Anyway, back to work on my paper tomorrow, assuming my allergies don't knock me out again.

Summer writing project (Day Six)

I did actually end up doing a little writing over the weekend--mostly on Saturday, and it mostly consisted of putting back some material that I had taken out on Day Three. But I think I've put it in in a way that's more connected to my overall argument. I added some more today (though not as much as I'd like to). I'm skimming through some books and looking for another to look up some citations. More of that tomorrow...

Summer writing project (Day Five)

So today I didn't wake up early enough, but I did have a productive meeting with my colleagues in my faculty mentoring circle, "How to Get Published." We were talking about our goals for the summer and the hurdles we have to overcome, and without getting into too much detail, I'll just say they gave me some good advice and reminders about how I should be thinking about this whole process of academic writing and publishing. 

I was also reminded that I have another summer writing project--a presentation for a conference in July! I need to get some work done on that, too! It's on a completely different topic, but I've presented on something related to it before, so maybe it won't be too hard to do.

I'm not going to write these updates on the weekends--I'll give you a break! See you Monday!