Currently reading: Cold War Deceptions

I dithered about for a while thinking about what I should read after finishing Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies, but I settled on David H. Price's Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA because it went along with the general time period of the previous book and it also relates to that Kerr paper that I'm supposed to be finishing (I'm almost done with it, I promise!). 

As I indicated in the previous post about the book, I was able to identify the Committee for a Free Asia president, George H. Greene, Jr., that Kerr was talking about in a 1951 letter to Philip Horton, assistant editor of The Reporter. In that letter, Kerr was criticizing the CFA propaganda plans in Asia, which amounted to a repetition of the 'America great, Communism bad' rhetoric of the USIS, which he saw as pretty useless when he was in Taiwan (partly because the actions of the Americans in the aftermath of the 228 Incident didn't live up to that rhetoric). 

Cold War Deceptions has already helped me identify some other people, too, who were working for CFA (the precursor to the Asia Foundation). I already knew that Robert Sheeks, who I wrote about here, worked there, but I hadn't yet identified the "Mr. Stewart" Sheeks was writing to in 1955 in response to a letter Kerr had had published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sheeks criticized Kerr's letter, calling it "a wonderful gift to the communists." Based on my reading of Cold War Deceptions, "Mr. Stewart" probably refers to James L. Stewart, who Price describes as having "deep roots in Asia--having been born to Methodist missionaries in Kobe, Japan, and grown up in Hiroshima. He studied journalism at Duke University before the war. He then served as a CBS war correspondent in China and Burma from 1939 to 1944, later working in Korea for the US Army and the US embassy in Seoul. He joined CFA staff in 1951, remaining with the Asia Foundation until 1985" (p. 9). So he might be someone to look up. 

I also mentioned interest in Sheeks' comment to Stewart that he had given "items of past history" about Kerr to a reporter named Art Goul. I Googled (Goulgled?) Goul, but didn't come across much. There was one interesting item in the Foreign Relations of the United States from 1950, though, where the Chargé d'Affaires in Taipei, Robert Strong, mentioned Goul in relation to the arrest of 19 members of the Formosan League for Reemancipation (Thomas and Joshua Liao's organization--the Liaos were out of Taiwan by then, though). In the telegram, Strong notes,

UP correspondents Art Goul and Bob Miller yesterday tried get information from member of my staff reference FLR, obviously with intent make headline story of machinations of US officials here with Formosans against Chinese Government. Seems to be their intention seize any opportunity discredit this office and Department.

I'll have to see what else I can come up with re: Goul. It doesn't appear that he was the kind of journalist whose papers would be stored in a university archive, but I would like to dig around and see what kinds of stories he might have been writing about Taiwan (and possibly Kerr?).  [Update: Finding more about Goul after I realized I should search for "Arthur Goul" instead of "Art Goul." Rookie mistake.]

The book is also interesting for its discussion of projects like Radio Free Asia, which of course has been in the news recently as a results of the Trump administration's termination of funding for the organization. (It appears they're still operating, though in a reduced capacity.) It's interesting to me that RFA was often criticized as a tool of US propaganda by people on the left of the political spectrum, but it ended up having its budget taken away by a far right administration due to (if I remember correctly) its "wokeness." Haven't seen anything in The Nation about this story, though Mother Jones reported on it (though they focused more on Voice of America). I'm not connected to the X-sphere or the BlueSky-sphere, so I don't know if there are any celebrations going on on the left. 

March slowdown

This is my 901st published post. Only took me 21 years (as of March 20)! 

I've been experiencing a slowdown this month. I've had an on-and-off cold since December (been generally been feeling out of it since, oh, let's say November 5). That and all the grading I've been doing means that I haven't been reading very much. Let's admit it, I haven't read a book (or even part of a book) since finishing Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies back in February. Not sure when I'll start on another book. Right now, besides trying to catch up on grading and other things, I'm trying to get a paper done that was accepted for publication (with revisions) a year ago! (I'm terrible.) 

Back to grading...

Taiwan Roundtable: Bills, Budgets, & Brawls: Understanding Taiwan's Legislative Crisis (Sigur Center)

Something else to watch when I have time (if and when that time comes):

New Books Network interview with the authors of Revolutionary Taiwan

New Books Network has a great interview with Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison about their book, Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order, which I wrote briefly about earlier.  (That's a lot links in one sentence!)

As a writing teacher, I really liked listening to their discussion early on about their writing process and how they viewed the kind of book they were trying to write. Harrison calls the style of the book that they were going for as "readable academic," where on the one hand they didn't want to write a dense academic monograph but on the other wanted to do justice to the complexity of Taiwan's histor(ies) and identit(ies). He says that that they "landed on" the idea of starting with events from contemporary Taiwan and interpret those events in terms of Taiwan's histor(ies) and culture(s). Chou compares the chapters and style of writing in terms of New Yorker essays that begin with specific stories that "bring the reader in" and then unpeel the "multiple layers" of meaning that make up those stories. She also talks about their limitations as academics that made it more challenging to them to write in this style. They also talked about how they collaborated on the book from a great distance (Chou was in Taiwan and Harrison was in Australia for most of the process, much of which took place during the Covid pandemic.) These are all interesting reflections that I'd like to point my students to when we talk about the writing process, envisioning your audience, collaborating as writers (particularly in online classes where students might not ever meet in person), and reflecting on writing, as well. 

The authors also bring up the image of Taiwan's "spectral presence," which (as I've said elsewhere, I think) is a concept that has come up a lot in my reading lately in relation to Taiwan. I mentioned the metaphor of "hauntings" that are prominent in two books I read recently, Anru Lee's Haunted Modernities and Kim Liao's Every Ghost Has a Name. Derek Sheridan also wrote an article a few years ago about "the spectre of American empire" in Taiwan. The idea that Taiwan itself has a "spectral presence," though, as a country/not-country (in terms of international recognition) that exists in almost a ghostly form outside of time and place is new and insightful to me. 

This blog also got a hat tip in the discussion (which, of course, is the real reason I'm talking about this interview!), citing a post of mine summarizing an article discussing Taiwanese cooking shows. (This reminds me--I haven't written any summaries of communications articles about Taiwan in quite a while!)

Finished Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies

Studying Taiwan before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan was a relatively easy book to read, as most oral histories are, I suppose. I read the English half of it, though I suppose it might be useful to look through the Chinese half at some point to see if there's anything different about it. I enjoyed reading about the anthropologists' experiences in Taiwan and the challenges that many of them faced when trying to do anthropological research there. 

One challenge that came up several times involved language issues. Many of the anthropologists interviewed were quite transparent about how linguistically unprepared they were to do their research; in fact, it was almost assumed that they would not be able to do the research without the help of local assistants. One reason was that they often didn't have the opportunity to learn Taiwanese (Hokkien) at the Stanford program at National Taiwan University, which sounds like it was dominated by teachers with Beijing Beiping accents. Then they'd go into the "field" and find out that no one there spoke Mandarin like that (or spoke much Mandarin at all!). Stevan Harrell expresses his admiration for Emily Ahern/Emily Martin because of how good her Taiwanese was. He contrasts her to Arthur and Margery Wolf, who were not fluent in Taiwanese and had to "hire lots of assistants." (Note that he says both Martin and Wolf "had a big influence" on him.) 

Another interesting point about their methods came up in Harrell's description of Wolf:

Arthur was also very shy. Every time he would interview someone, he would bring along [his assistant] Little Wang, the hoodlum. Every time he went out, he went with Little Wang. Wang would go to the front and speak, and Arthur would shyly stand in the back and smile. He didn't directly ask questions. 

After reading this, I felt a little better about my own stumbling efforts at interviewing people for my dissertation.

Another anthropologist, Burton Pasternak, tells about his first attempts to engage in fieldwork in a rural village after he had spent some time trying to find a village that he could work in. There's an amusing anecdote about him walking into a government office and asking for detailed maps of the area's villages. As he puts it, considering this was in the middle of the martial law period, "It's a miracle I wasn't tossed in the clink right off." He found out that he had to go back to Taipei to get a letter of introduction from the Academia Sinica. Then when he found his village (Datie, 打鐵, in Pingtung County), he and his wife moved in. He writes, 

Here I was, a young and inexperienced anthropologist (in waiting) with meager Mandarin skills in a Hakka village. I suddenly became acutely aware that I had no clue where to begin. I knew virtually no one in the village apart from my incredulous but generous hosts.

So when morning arrived, I took my notebook and tentatively left the compound, like a young bird finally leaping from the nests on his first flight. There I was in the street. People stared at me, and I looked back. So what's next? Fortunately, our hosts had anticipated all this and instantly took me under their wing. They brought me back into the house and suggested that perhaps they could introduce me to some villagers just to get me started, which they promptly did.  And those people introduced me to others. So gradually, I met and interviewed every family in Datie. With very few exceptions, they were to become friends. Gradually, they came to believe that I was harmless, and, in return, I was provided a constant source of amusement. 

(Hmmm... I don't know if he means he was amused or if he means he was amusing. From my own experience, I'm guessing the latter!) 

There are a lot of other interesting and entertaining anecdotes and observations in the book, but I want to end by mentioning something that Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang and Derek Sheridan write in their introduction to the book--mainly because it echoes something that I wrote about in my dissertation about the Oberlin Shansi reps in Taiwan. Yang and Sheridan contrast the experiences of the American Cold War-era anthropologists ("in waiting," as Pasternak writes) with the suggestion by some critics that as Americans, they were "lackeys of American imperialism." "In fact," they write, "it was sometimes the opposite" since they were often critical of the US role in Asia. Yang and Sheridan continue,

So much has been said about the relationship between "power" and knowledge production." Yet this sort of abstract theorization usually falls short of illustrating the complex processes that actually took place on the ground, processes that involved a web of intricate personal relations, individual choices, and delicate human emotions. 

This reminded me of something I had written in a paper about the Oberlin reps at Tunghai, that there is a danger in automatically mapping individual encounters between people onto a template of international relations; it's that danger of "situating [an individual's ]acts of cultural translation solely within a framework of American attempts at global expansion—a framework that risks considering those acts predictable in their motivations, their contents, and their effects. Unpredictability, or surprise, is an important element of encounters, as [Oberlin rep Judith Manwell] Moore describes them, as these experiences open up possible futures just as they are made possible by people and institutions with multiple, overlapping histories." While the Oberlin reps weren't anthropologists (at least most of them didn't have that kind of training), like anthropologists, they were attempting to understand others and communicate that understanding to "other others." I think they would agree with Yang and Sheridan's observation that "what individual anthropologists [or Oberlin reps] learned and experienced in their field sites is often more complicated and profound that the information published in their works." 

Back to Long Ying-tai's book now? Hmmm... I actually have an urge to read this book I've had for a while about the history of Taiwan's No. 1 Provincial Highway. 

Pioneering Taiwan Studies workshop videos

I see that the U of Washington Taiwan Studies Program has posted some videos of its "Pioneering Taiwan Studies" workshop from last November. Last night, I watched the one where Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang presented about the history of Western anthropologists in Taiwan. The conversation afterwards among the senior anthropologists (such as Hill Gates, David K. Jordan, Stevan Harrell, Robert Weller, etc.) was interesting and at time entertaining. (At one point, Jordan complained about the IUP "Stanford" Chinese language program at National Taiwan University, which he claimed was very unfriendly toward University of Chicago folks.) 

I'm looking forward to watching some of the other videos, and I've decided that I'm going to put Long Ying-tai's book aside in favor of the book Yang introduced (and co-edited), Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan. It's an oral history, and it looks really interesting. 

One thing I wonder about (which I imagine no one brings up) is possible connection between these anthropologists and the Oberlin Shansi reps at Tunghai University. I know that William Speidel, former Shansi rep to Tunghai, ran IUP in Taipei for five years from 1975-1980. Maybe some of the later anthropologists in this book ran into him. Would love to hear from anyone who knows anything about this.

Taiwan Studies Pioneers, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang

From Nov., 2024:

Presented at the University of Washington: 

The recent publication of Studying Taiwan before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan (Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 2024), co-edited by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Derek Sheridan, and Wen-liang Tseng, offers an oral history volume of a generation of anthropologists who pioneered Taiwan Studies.  This panel will be an open, group discussion of the volume. It will begin with a background of the project from co-editor Dominic Yang, followed by an open discussion to all participants.  We will ask that participants read parts of the volume before the workshop in preparation for this discussion.

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Associate Professor, University of Missouri 

Niki Alsford, Professor of Anthropology and Human Geographys, UCLan

James Lin, Assistant Professor, University of Washington

This event was made possible by the generous support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Finished The Great Exodus from China

I just finished reading Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. I can't say I enjoyed the book--it's about trauma, after all--but I appreciated Yang's work on it and especially his generous use of Taiwan scholarship in the process. I've complained elsewhere about English-language books on Taiwan that don't cite Taiwanese scholarship as much as I think they should; I'm glad to see that Yang took that scholarship seriously. (My one complaint is that in his bibliography, the titles of Chinese-language books and articles are only written in pinyin--I'd prefer characters. But perhaps that's an editorial decision that Yang had no control over.)

The book is an interesting combination of archival work, interviews, readings of fiction and non-fiction from the time periods discussed, along with some statistical information (as when Yang argues that the numbers of mainlanders coming to Taiwan during and after the KMT defeat was less than usually assumed). I appreciated the variety of sources he brought to his study. I also appreciate his reflections on his own positionality in relation to his subject. I think it was an important (but probably controversial) move. I'll have to look at some reviews of the book later on to see how reviewers responded to this approach. (I am having trouble accessing NU's library databases right now, so I'll come back to this later.)

What's the next book on my list? I'm not sure right now. Yang's discussion of Long Ying-tai's 《大江大海1949》 makes me want to read that book just to get my own impression of it. We'll see, though... Maybe I want to read something less traumatic!

Update, 9:33 p.m. I found some reviews of the book. Here are a few:

Qian, L. Behind the History and Sociology of Memory: A Review of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2021, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Int J Polit Cult Soc 37, 291–298 (2024). https://rdcu.be/eagUR  

Yang, D.MH. A Reply to Licheng Qian’s “Behind the History and Sociology of Memory: A Review of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2021, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)”. Int J Polit Cult Soc 37, 299–307 (2024). https://rdcu.be/eagVZ

A couple of quotes from Yang's response to Qian that caught my eye--they expand on the question I had above regarding his discussion of his positionality in relation to his topic:

My family immigrated to Canada from Taiwan when I was a young teenager. Taiwan is located in the strategic contact zones between Chinese, Japanese, and American empires. I learned about my home island’s painful and multilayered history of migration and colonialism belatedly as a graduate student returning from Canada. This history included my family’s anguish and sorrow caused by the arrival of the mainlanders in the mid-twentieth century, a past that my grandparents and parents had kept largely silent. Faced with the complexity and nuances of different but interconnected traumatic experiences on the island, I was absolutely overwhelmed. My [305||306] conflicting emotions of loyalty toward my own victimized family members and the profound empathy that I gradually developed for the hundreds of thousands of waishengren families through my archival research and fieldwork had tormented me. Given my positionality, I did not know how to tell the waishengren story adequately and “objectively.” How should a descendent of the colonized and victimized write about the trauma of the former colonizers and victimizers? (305-306)

...... 

Many are going to be skeptical about the modality, as well as the sincerity of my transformation. The skepticism is understandable. Building empathetic understand-ing and rapprochement among communities, people, and nations holding serious grudges against one another is easier said than done. It is a long and difficult “working through” process where all parties have to be wholeheartedly committed. I have been told in private by a number of colleagues in Taiwan that intellectuals in certain local circles on both ends of the mnemonic divide do not really appreciate what I am doing. A second-generation mainlander professor told his German colleague who was attending one of my talks in Taiwan: “Who does this guy think he is? We don’t need his sympathy!” (306) 

Harrison, H. (2021). [Review of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang]. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52(2), 306-307. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/803869. 

Yung, K. K. (2023). Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 6(1), 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1163/24688800-20221258

Gustafsson, K. (2023). [Review of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang]. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 83(1), 231-235. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jas.2023.a922635.

Podcast from the past--on YouTube

I just noticed that an interview I did with Keith Menconi for an ICRT podcast almost 10 years ago about Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters is up now on YouTube. 

It's not exactly visually stimulating, but Keith did a good job editing the interview to make me sound reasonably intelligent.

February slowdown

As I sort of predicted in my last post, my book-reading has hit the wall. Part of it is that my workload has gone up now that we're into the semester. But I also caught a cold last week that knocked me out for a while, and now I'm feverishly working to catch up on my work (not literally feverish, fortunately). 

I haven't been closely following it, but the story of 大S's (徐熙媛) death from flu-related pneumonia was quite a shock to a lot of people. It appears that her death has a lot of Taiwanese inquiring about getting flu vaccines, which I guess is a good outcome from a tragic event. You can't be too careful. 

Anyway, back to work now...

One odd and one end

• I'm happy that I've managed to finish reading four books so far this year, but I think my reading pace is going to slow down now that we're into the semester. For number five, I'm working on Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's book, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, but so far it's a little slower going, probably because when I get around to reading it on the commute home, I'm too tired to focus.  
• I deactivated my BlueSky account the other day--I did wonder when I set up my account how long it would last. I guess I know now. I haven't deleted it, but I needed to take a break from it, and this seemed the best way. It was getting too distracting and negative for me at the moment. I suppose my posts and replies have disappeared--my apologies for messing up the internet!

Thoughts on Taiwan Travelogue

I finished reading Lin King's translation of Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's Taiwan Travelogue this morning. I enjoyed the novel a lot, including its postmodern framing, where the English translation I read is supposed to be a translation of Yáng's Mandarin translation of Aoyama Chizuko's original novel, a novel that went through several Japanese, English, and Mandarin editions. (If memory serves me correctly!) 

I also enjoyed getting a picture of Taiwan--and particularly Taichung--during the period of Japanese colonialism. The descriptions of the Taichū Train Station and its environs, the markets, the streets and countryside were fascinating to me. King's translation also cleverly creates the point of view of the Japanese travel writer/novelist by using Japanese names for most of the cities and sites in Taiwan (which she often calls "the Southern Country" or "the Island" in contrast to "the Mainland," which refers to Japan). For example, Taichung's Lü Chuan River (or Lyu-Chuan Canal) is called the "Midori River." 

Lü Chuan River (Midori River) during the Japanese Period, from Wikimedia Commons

Much of the book is focused on discussions of food, particularly Taiwanese cuisine (Aoyama-san describes herself as having an always-hungry "monster" in her belly as the result of unfortunate events during her childhood). While there were a lot of dishes, snacks, beverages, etc., that I was familiar with, there were also quite a few that I don't recall ever trying or even hearing of, particularly because their names are written in romanized Taiwanese (though the Mandarin names are often added in footnotes). Reading this book made me hunger for Taiwanese food, both familiar and strange. 

Perhaps my unfamiliarity with the food mentioned in the book and with some of the places they visited should be a warning to me. Without giving away the plot of the novel, the ending made me question my own relationship to Taiwan and Taiwanese people, and what my role should be (if any) in representing Taiwan (and Taiwan's rhetoric) to others. Maybe it's not my place to speak but rather to continue to learn. 

Speaking of which, what should be my fifth book for 2025?

P.S. This interview with Lin King gives more information about the novel. And here is a more complete review of the book (spoilers!).

P.P.S. Next book on my reading list: Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. 

P.P.P.S Here's another nice review of the book. I find myself hoping a movie version of this comes out one of these days...

Finished Revolutionary Taiwan; on to Taiwan Travelogue

Just finished my third book of the year--Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison's Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order. I think it provides a good introduction to Taiwan's complicated place in the world today, including some historical background for that place--or its "out of place"-ness, as they describe it. 

They begin with a description of what vote-counting is like in Taiwan--a description that was depressing to me when I think about how impossible such an open and peaceful vote-counting would be in the USA. (Although I was there in 2004 when the response to Chen Shui-bian's victory was not particularly peaceful. Who can forget Chiu Yi's attack on the Kaohsiung District Prosecutor's Office?) The vote-counting is symbol of Taiwan's maturing (mature?) democratic process, but as the authors demonstrate, this democratic process is happening in the context of a precarious state of existence. (I'm surprised there's not yet a book about Taiwan entitled Precarious State--get to work, people!)

One part of the book that I especially liked was their "close reading" of Taipei City's martial-law-era road-naming practices. Not that familiar with Taipei, I didn't realize that someone had actually laid a map of China over a map of the city to figure out what to rename Taipei's streets. (This part of the book reminded me of the article about TV cooking shows in Taiwan that I read a few years ago--particularly the part about Fu Pei Mei. I see there's a new book about her, too.) 

The book ends, interestingly, with an epilogue that introduces a critique of dominant--and parochial--Taiwanese attitudes toward Indigenous Taiwanese and "new Taiwanese" immigrants and foreign laborers, arguing that this parochialism needs to be overcome in order for Taiwan to really move beyond being seen as a "Chinese democracy." As they conclude, "the choice to cultivate a more diverse and eclectic national community today--one that will extend Taiwan's connections to communities and countries around the globe--lies with the people of Taiwan" (p. 159).

Around the same time that I finished Revolutionary Taiwan, I got my copy of Taiwan Travelogue in the mail. I decided to read this award-winning novel next. I have already finished the first chapter, and I'm loving it! (It makes me hungry, though--so much about Taiwanese food!)

Classes starting this week; interview assignment

I have two on-ground classes tomorrow--two sections of "Advanced Writing in the Business Administration Professions." I have been teaching this course on and off for over ten years now, but I'm trying a new/old thing this semester. New in that I haven't done it in this course--at least not in this way or for these reasons--before, but old in that I have done it before, both in this course (for different reasons) and in other previous courses. 

The assignment is an informational interview assignment with someone whose job aligns with the student's expected/hoped for/dreamed of career path. This being a writing course, I ask students to focus a good part of the interview on the writing expectations and practices of the job. I've done this assignment in some previous advanced writing courses (and it occurs to me that I did this assignment at least once in a composition class I taught at Tunghai, where I asked students to focus on how people in the job used English--or didn't!). 

The new thing this time is that we're going to throw GenAI into the mix--(how) are the interviewees using GenAI as part of their work? What are the implications, if any, for what students should be learning in an "Advanced Writing in the Business Administration Professions" course? This assignment occurred to me last semester after running into a previous student from ten years ago who was telling me about how the company she works for has its own proprietary ChatGPT-like system that employees are expected to use to write letters to clients. She hates it--it writes sentences that are too long. I want to get a sense of how widespread this is, and I want students to learn about it, too.

I attended an online discussion today on "Scaffolding GenAI Conversation in Your Courses," and one of the things that came out of it is that, perhaps not surprisingly, faculty are taking very different approaches to how or whether to allow students to use GenAI in their work. I got the sense from the discussion, for example, that while in my writing classes, learning how to synthesize sources is an important practice that I want students to work on without help from AI, in courses in some other disciplines/professions, it would be acceptable to have AI do the work of synthesis because the pedagogical focus of the assignment is not necessarily on synthesis. (In those cases, though, I'm sure the instructors would still want the students to tell them how they used AI to help them.) This reminds me again to make clear what I'm hoping students get out of assignments--what they should learn how to do, presumably unaided by AI. And maybe from this, what things might be OK to get help with from AI (for instance, APA citation, at least to a certain extent). 

Well, now to go back to my materials and see if I need to do any tweaks on the syllabus before tomorrow morning.

Finished reading Rebel Island

I enjoyed reading Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan, by Jonathan Clements. I realize it's a general history for people who don't know a lot about Taiwan, but I found myself learning from it even though I've read other histories of Taiwan. It's a good supplement and updating of books like Wan-yao Chou's A New Illustrated History of Taiwan and the Murray Rubinstein-edited Taiwan: A New History. 

It covers a lot of territory in its 250-odd pages, so there are some stories or aspects from Taiwan's history don't get much or any coverage (the 921 earthquake of 1999 is only mentioned in relation to Morris Chang's insistence on getting the power back on to his TSMC plants). But I think Clements makes a good point early on in the preface about the history (and prehistory) of Taiwan. I'm going to quote this paragraph in full. I don't know if it's completely technically accurate, but it sounds plausible:

If we imagine the whole history of the human habitation of Taiwan, up to the present day, as a single calendar year, then humans first arrive on 1 January--although those ancient people have left behind none of their DNA, only fire sticks and stone axes. The Neolithic period, which saw settlement of the island by the ancestors of today's Formosan indigenous communities, begins around 1 November. The rise on the mainland of the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, his Terracotta Army, and the very concept of there being a China that Taiwan could become a part of, happens sometime on 3 December. Prolonged and enduring ties with the Chinese on the mainland are initiated around Christmas. The Ming-dynasty loyalist Koxinga and his men arrive in the small hours of 28 December, and their regime is toppled with a Qing-dynasty retaliation by lunchtime. The Japanese annex Taiwan as a colony around midday on 30 December, and are themselves ousted shortly before dawn on New Year's Eve, making way for the mass arrival of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party, in retreat from Mao's Communists on the mainland. Martial law stays in force until just after breakfast, and the entire modern history of a democratic Republic of China on Taiwan occupies the next 18 hours until midnight, when I am telling you this. (xiii)

In other words, there's a lot of Taiwan's history to cover, even if your focus is mainly on "November" to "New Year's Eve." I think that despite any faults (including a few mistakes here and there), Clements very ably covers that history. 

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Just received my copy of Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order, by Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison. It's a relatively short book (about 161 pages + bibliography), so I think I can read it soon, after I finish Rebel Island, perhaps. (All these "revolutionary" and "rebel" books about Taiwan!) 

Finished reading John Brown, Abolitionist

I wanted to read a biography of John Brown for some reason, so I asked my brother and sister-in-law for one for Christmas. I finished reading it today. I thought John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds was a good study of Brown, the historical context in which he grew up and became an anti-slavery and anti-racist advocate, his effect on the Civil War, and how he was remembered in both the North and the South. Reynolds clearly admires John Brown, and he suggests that had Brown not attacked Harpers Ferry, the Civil War might have taken place much later and been much bloodier. 

Here's a good interview with Reynolds about the book from 2005.

Review of Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms published

My review of Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, edited by Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh is out. It was a pleasure to read this book, particularly realizing the risks some of the authors took in writing it.

"Midterm" reflections on August's "new year's resolutions"

Back in August, I wrote up a few new year's resolutions for the 2024-2025 academic year. In the past, I've usually written them up and then ignored them, but this time I'm going to take a look back at them and figure out what I did, what I didn't do, and what course corrections I might make.

• "Try to get up earlier in the morning"--the idea here was go get up early enough to do my Duolingo and a little writing. This didn't work at all as planned. I did manage to get up early some mornings and do a little journaling, but I didn't have enough time to do my Duolingo before I had to get the day started. And many days, I woke up just in time to jump in the shower before starting to get my son ready for school.
• "Use my commute time to read"--since I didn't have time to do my Duolingo in the morning, I usually did it on the trip into school. Sometimes I read on the way home from school, but a lot of times, I was using that time to catch up on work. 
• "Make time for writing"--I pretty much failed at this during the semester, unless you count my teaching-related writing and service-related writing. I had the usual amount of the former and, it seems, more than the usual amount for the latter. I did a few little revisions on a couple of book reviews that will be coming out soon, but besides that, I didn't work on any of the papers I have to revise.

So things didn't go quite as well as planned. I think one thing that cut down on my writing time was that I was teaching a new course, so that involved a lot of work to keep ahead of the students. This semester, I'll be teaching "old" courses (though of course I can't seem to stop myself from fiddling with the assignments), which might help. 

Another thing that might help in terms of the writing is that next semester, I'm rejoining a writing accountability group that has always forced me to spend at least an hour and a half a week on writing. I've always found that helpful. I need to finish that George Kerr paper first, then get started on the chapters I need to write for the collaborative biography. 

I think I need to add "going to bed earlier" to the list of resolutions because if I don't get to bed earlier, I can't wake up earlier. I'll try to work on that. I've been napping a lot recently because of some muscle relaxants I have had to take for a sciatica problem, but hopefully I'll get over that before vacation is over. Napping always throws off my evening sleep schedule. 

As for using commuting time for reading, I think I'll still end up doing Duolingo during the trip in. I'll try to do some reading on the way home. I'll have to decide what I want to read, though! Right now, I'm about a third of the way through David S. Reynolds' John Brown: Abolitionist, but I'm going to try to finish it before the semester starts. I have to think about what to read after that. Any ideas?

A few reflections on the "Rhetorics in Contact" course

Back in August, I wrote about my plans for the new course I was going to be teaching, "Rhetorics in Contact." Now that the course is over, I want to reflect on the course and think about what I might do better next time. In no particular order:

• I think the readings worked well. As we read and responded to them, we actually started finding connections that I hadn't noticed before. Shimabukuro's book was particularly good for bringing together a lot of points that we had discussed earlier, though often she would use different language for talking about similar kinds of concepts. I personally gained a lot from reading through her book again for the course.
• Here's something I posted on BlueSky about Shimabukuro's book and current events. (Hope you can read it!)
• We used Perusall for "socially annotating" the readings. It made things nice generally, but in the case of Shimabukuro, I was a little annoyed that the Perusall edition of the book didn't have any page numbers. It made it harder to cite the book when we were working on final papers. Haven't yet figured out a workaround for the next time, so any suggestions are welcome!
• Maybe because we were using Perusall and doing social annotation (and maybe for some other reasons, as well), class discussions weren't as active as I had hoped. I think I have to work harder next time on making sure class time is better used, and I'm not just doing most of the talking.
• We did a few informal writing assignments that I liked. I think I want to keep most of them and perhaps do a few more. After we read Garrett and Xiao's "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited," for instance, I asked students to write about any discourse traditions in their families or cultures. Their responses were interesting. (And I had fun writing my own response, too!) We also did some practice analysis of materials in NU's Digital Collections. I also had them write some reflections on their class trips to the archives. 
• I think I need to do a bit more with helping them on the archival projects. (One student suggested starting earlier, but I have to think about that. Maybe we could go to the archives earlier.) More class time devoted to them bringing in archival materials and challenges they were facing would be useful, perhaps. And more work with citing archival documents. 
• I also should do a bit more with helping them think about connections between the readings and the archival collections they were working on. One student in their final reflection pointed out how working on the archives helped them better understand the concepts from the readings, but I think I could do a bit more to help in that direction. 

Anyway, overall the course went well (aside from problems with class discussions or lack thereof), so I'm encouraged to try teaching this again if I get the chance!