This book showed up out of the middle of nowhere. I saw that there was an interview with the editors on the New Books Network, but before listening to the interview, I ordered the book. (To be honest, I still haven't listened to the interview. But I'll get around to it sooner or later!)
In my somewhat foggy state of mind, I think I was attracted to the word "persuasion" in the title and the term "pan-Asian rhetoric" in the book's summary. Paging through the book, I was surprised to see a chapter on Li Xianglan (李香蘭), who is also known as Yamaguchi Yoshiko (山口 淑子) or Shirley Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi was someone I had forgotten that I had heard of before--the other day I stumbled onto her movie, China Nights (「支那の夜」), also known as Shanghai Nights (「上海之夜」) on YouTube. I ended up watching the whole movie even though it was 98% Japanese with no subtitles. (Needless to say, I didn't get a lot out of the dialogue.) The Wikipedia article about Li Xianglan (zh) reminded me that she had also played an Indigenous girl in a movie made in Taiwan called Sayon's Bell (「サヨンの鐘」). A 2011 post by Darryl Sterk from the anthropological blog Savage Minds introduces a recent "anti-aboriginal romance film" named Finding Sayun (【不一樣的月光：尋找沙韻】) that critiques the representation of Indigenous people in the original film.*
Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading that chapter to find out more about Yamaguchi and Sayon's Bell, which I've also found a copy of on YouTube:
I also found this 10-minute preview of Finding Sayun:
* I think my title punctuation is a mess in this paragraph--apologies!
I've been hearing a lot lately from friends and relatives about various age-related or partially age-related health problems they're encountering. And then I share my own health problems back! I guess I'm at that stage of life when this is par for the course. Combined with that are the deaths of famous people from my childhood or youth, like Richard Simmons, Bob Newhart, Dr. Ruth, etc. And then President Biden steps away from the presidential campaign after lots of loud questions about his ability to govern at his age. (I'm not going to go into political commentary here.)
Not sure what point I'm trying to make here, if any. Just that this is on my mind these days.
Got back from a short trip to find these two books that I ordered from 博客來 books:
移工築起的地下社會：跨國勞動在臺灣 (Underground Lives: Stories Untold for Migrant Workers in Taiwan), by 簡永達 (2023)
冷戰下的「臺灣研究」：北美人類學家訪問紀錄 (Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan), edited by Derek Sheridan, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, and Tseng Wen-liang (2024)
The latter is in both English and Chinese, so I'll probably be reading that first. But before that, I have a lot of work to catch up on...
This was produced in 2020, but I didn't see it back then. It's pretty interesting. I learned a bit more about higher education during the Japanese colonial period and the martial law period.
I don't agree with some of the information in the video, though. They said that Soochow University was the first private university in Taiwan, but according to Wikipedia, it wasn't actually fully certified as a university until 1971. Classes started at Tunghai University in 1955, though for some reason, Tunghai isn't mentioned in this video.
This week I was supposed to be attending (and presenting at!) the 2024 North American Taiwan Studies Association conference in NYC, but I bowed out in May due to too many other commitments. Turned out that it's lucky I did because last week I had a nasty encounter with some poison ivy that is currently making my life miserable. But I felt a bit bad when I read through the conference handbook and saw how interesting it was going to be. It looks like one of those very rare conferences (in my experience) where I would like to attend almost every session! Ah well...
I have some money left over from my professional development fund for this fiscal year, so I bought a few more books that I thought might be helpful to my research.* Here they are:
Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare, edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (2019) After Hart-Davidson's recent death, I read an obituary that mentioned this book. It looked interesting.
Buying all these books has me wondering, though, what I'll do with them down the line. I've been following Kurt Bell on Twitter recently; he and his wife are retiring and moving to Japan. They decided that they could only take a total of 6 boxes of belongings with them, and this has me thinking about what I'll do with all my books if I get to that point in life. Maybe I can eventually donate these books to a library or organization (or person?) interested in Taiwan. Anyway, I think I have a few years before I get to that point.
The first speaker, GTI Deputy Director John Dotson, traced the theory back to 1979 when the US changed recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the People's Republic of China. While he doesn't say this is the origin of the theory, he does suggest that the theory has its origins partly in Taiwan's own feelings of being betrayed by the U.S. His main focus, though, is on how the CCP is using and amplifying this theory to drive a wedge between Taiwan and the United States. IORG Co-Director Chihhao Yu also spends a lot of time on PRC propaganda in relation to US skepticism, but he also suggests that the Taiwanese abandonment narrative has its roots in Taiwan's history as a colony, going as far back as 400 years ago.
One thing that I haven't heard so far is the possible connection between skepticism about America's actions/stance toward Taiwan and what George H. Kerr argued was the US "betrayal" of Taiwanese during the early postwar years. Kerr's argument in Formosa Betrayed is not just that the Kuomintang takeover of Taiwan was a betrayal of the hopes of the Taiwanese people for a just and equitable post-war society as they became part of the Chinese nation; it was also that the United States betrayed Taiwan by allowing the KMT to continue to rule Taiwan despite its corruption, incompetence, and authoritarian rule during the White Terror period. Kerr argues that the US took a hands-off position toward what was happening in Taiwan; as he relates, after he met with the director of Office of Far Eastern Affairs in March, 1947, the latter showed him the door "with remarks to the effect that no one in the United Nations and certainly no one in Washington would ever be interested in Formosa."
Kerr watched as the US government continued to support Taiwan's KMT rulers ... until it didn't. When Nixon and Kissinger visited China, Kerr told Richard Koo that he thought Chiang Ching-kuo would use the opportunity to sell out Taiwan and that "Nixon will welcome any arrangement Chiang Ching-kuo will make -- or probably has made -- to hand Formosa over to Peking without a public international intervention or conflict of any sort. ... The interests of the Formosans are of no importance to him [Nixon] if they stand in the way of his ambition" (3 Aug. 1971). Later he described US/China interactions to Mark Mancall as the US presidents "go[ing] hat in hand to 'pay tribute'" (9 Feb. 1975).
And I have quoted many times Chen Rongcheng's afterword (1973)/preface (1991) to the Chinese translation of Formosa Betrayed, where he wrote, ｢人不先自救，誰會救我？｣(“If we do not first help ourselves, who will save us?”) To Chen, it seemed that one of the messages of Formosa Betrayed was not to trust the US too much.
This is not to deny anything that the panelists had to say. It's interesting, though, to speculate on whether the "America Skepticism Theory" might have some of its roots among people who themselves were advocating for Taiwan independence, and who feared being betrayed once again if they depended too much on the US. And that included Kerr himself, who increasingly despaired of the chances that his country would do the "right" thing for Taiwan.
This is another episode of 台灣演義 that has English subtitles. It goes through the history of Taiwan and its changing status under different colonial regimes, up through postwar Taiwan. A nice summary of the reasons Taiwan is in such a conflicted state. (Hmmm... that would make a nice title: Conflicted State...)
I wasn't sure I would be getting these because when I ordered them during the Cornell University Press sale, I never got an email confirmation. But they came today!
This episode of 台灣演義 introduces Lin Hsien-t'ang, Chiang Wei-shui, and other Taiwanese of the Japanese colonial era who founded the Taiwan Cultural Association (台灣文化協會). It uses old photographs as well as animation to depict the work of these early advocates of equal treatment of Taiwanese under the Japanese colonial government. It also introduces the founding of the Taiwan Minpao (臺灣民報), a newspaper published for Taiwanese. It also discusses the Erlin Incident (二林事件), a conflict between sugarcane farmers and sugar refineries, and the eventual demise of the Taiwan Cultural Association.
I got back last Saturday from Yokohama, where I had a great experience talking to a small but very interested audience about George H. Kerr, his process(es) of writing what eventually became Formosa Betrayed, how Taiwanese students at Kansas State University used Kerr's book in their "battle of the pens" with pro-KMT students, and the translations of the book into Chinese. (Some of this is discussed in my 2014 conference paper, "Formosa Translated.")
While I was there, I also got a chance to talk with my friends Su Yao-tsung, Hidekazu Sensui, and Yukari Yoshihara about a project we're working on related to Kerr. (More details forthcoming.) I also had a lot of conversations with Su about Kerr, the writing of Formosa Betrayed and his other works, the February 28 Incident, the Taiwan independence movement in Japan and the United States, and the Cold War context of Kerr's teaching and writing about Taiwan.
He also suggested a topic that I might work on researching related to that last point, so I decided to look up some books written about Taiwan during the 1950s. I just got one of them in the mail, Geraldine Fitch's (infamous) Formosa Beachhead (which is also available online).
Fitch, who died in 1976 at the age of 84, was described in the New York Times obituary as "a consultant editor to The Free China Review and other English‐language publications in Taipei, Taiwan."
Judging from a quick skim of the book, Formosa Beachhead is less about Taiwan than it is about China and the United States' policies towards China (and Nationalist China in particular). It'll be interesting to read in more detail.
There are a couple of contemporaneous reviews of the book, including the following:
W. Macmahon Ball, in Pacific Affairs (concludes that "[t]he book should win enthusiastic readers in some sections of the Middle West and in Formosa")
I came across this video in my search for more information about WUFI, the World United Formosans for Independence organization. Unlike some other 台灣演義 videos that I've posted, this one has English subtitles! Enjoy!
I've been invited to talk at the Center for Asian Studies at Kanagawa University in Yokohama about my research on George H. Kerr. My lecture is entitled, "Formosa's "Borrowed Voice": George H. Kerr's Struggle to Chronicle Taiwan's Postwar Trauma," playing on the title of Linda Arrigo and Lynn Miles' book, A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through International Networks, 1960-1980(a book you should get if you haven't yet!). Like the "foreigners" Arrigo and Miles describe who lent their voices to speak for Taiwanese who, at the time, would be in danger if they spoke out themselves, Kerr tried to use his voice to tell Americans about what was happening in Taiwan as soon as he left the island after the February 28 Incident. But he struggled to write and publish a complete account of what happened, for reasons I'll describe in my talk.
I'm also working on an article manuscript about this topic, which has been accepted with revisions required. (That might take a little while because I'm also speaking at the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference in June. Yikes!)
A Pennsylvania Dutch proverb that I often heard as a child goes, "Ve git too soon oldt und too late schmart." I think that about sums things up. I don't have any words of wisdom to share after 20 years of off-and-on blogging. I sort of do this for my own entertainment, I guess, so I don't have high expectations for it. (Though I have at times referred to it in my annual self-criticisms merit reviews as an example of the writing that I do.)
If anyone is curious, though, here's a list of what are currently the top three posts on this thing, according to Blogger stats:
And, of course, this 2005 posting of a FICTIONAL love story that I wrote with the help of the former native Chinese speaker back in 1996. Always liked this story. I can still recite some of it, which always impresses my wife!
I saw an ad for this Fareed Zakaria special on Taiwan, but I wasn't able to see it when it was on CNN, so I'm recording it and will watch it later.
I saw that some people on Twitter criticized the title, wondering whose "unfinished business" it was--the CCP's? One poster (Isla Island) wrote, "'Unfinished business' parrots Beijing's propaganda that its planned invasion & annexation of Taiwan is part of a 'unfinished Chinese civil war'."
I thought the title was interesting in light of the fact that one of the early titles for George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed was The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business on the Pacific Frontier--and then just The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business. Evidently that title was considered by Houghton Mifflin to be a bit too dry, which is why we ended up with Formosa Betrayed (I really think an exclamation point would go well at the end of that: Formosa Betrayed!).
Anyway, I'm curious to see what Zakaria has to say. Will it be better than John Oliver's masterful piece on Taiwan, in which he compares it to the "Stanley Cup": "different people keep passing it around and and carving their names on it"? We'll see...
[Update, 3/14: I liked John Oliver's version better.]
I have to admit, though, that I haven't had time to read anything except for student writing since the beginning of the semester, so I don't know when I'll get around to reading these. Ah, for those long lost days of my "sabbatical"...
This last book is outdated, and the reviews I've seen (here and here) have been mixed at best, but I wanted it to see how the author deals with Taiwan's postwar history in the context of communication studies (though he is a political scientist).
Think I'll watch this when I get a chance. I tried to get my son the train fanatic to watch this with me, but he lost interest because I couldn't translate it fast enough...
Despite everything, this is why I stay on Twitter (or whatever they're calling it these days). I saw a link to this 1936 short film: 台中州高砂族內地觀光.
It looks like the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website is a great resource. But I'm not sure whether I would have come across it if someone hadn't tweeted about it.
I didn't manage to read everything on my overly ambitious preliminary reading list, but I did make some headway into it. I suppose I'll go back to that list and read more of it as I find the time to do so. I need to finish up the two papers that I have been working on, too. But first, I need to finish getting my courses prepared before Monday (*gulp!*)...
