Some thoughts on Chi-ming Wang's "Writing across the Pacific: Chinese Student Writing, Reflexive Poetics, and Transpacific Modernity"

Wang, Chi-ming. "Writing across the Pacific: Chinese Student Writing, Reflexive Poetics, and Transpacific Modernity." Amerasia Journal 38:2 (2012): 136-154.

 I just came across this article when I was looking up Chi-ming Wang after having read his article on The Jing Affair, a 1965 suspense novel about a U.S.-backed overthrow of the KMT government on Taiwan. (That book is an interesting read, by the way, as is the article.) I was attracted by the phrase "Chinese student writing" in the title because, of course, as a writing teacher who works a lot with Chinese students, I'm very well acquainted with (some) Chinese students' English writing. I should note from the outset that Wang's definition of "Chinese student writing" is somewhat broad--he characterizes it as "the literary and cultural discourses produced by 'Chinese' diasporic intellectuals who initially came to America as students" (139).

I've also been interested in how scholars like Xiaoye You and Wen-hsin Yeh have discussed the role of Chinese students' English and Chinese writing in the formation of modern Chinese identities. Like You and Yeh, Wang takes a historical perspective, ranging from the 1880s to the present in his discussion. He begins "Writing across the Pacific" with a reproduction of an open letter to President Nixon and Congress that was published in The New York Times in 1971 and calls for the U.S. to recognize Chinese sovereignty over the Diaoyutai (written as "Tiao Yu Tai," 鯛魚台) islands. By "Chinese sovereignty," they mean the Republic of China, since the people who wrote and signed this letter are apparently primarily students and scholars from Taiwan. Wang argues that the "Baodiao" movement ("Baodiao," [保鯛] means "protect the Diaoyutai Islands") "symbolized a moment of political awakening and critical reflection" among Chinese students-cum-immigrants in the United States (144). 

Wang gets back to this movement (though he doesn't mention the "student writing" exemplified by the open letter--something I would have been interested in reading more about), but first he gives some background about the writings of Chinese students in the U.S. since the late nineteenth century. He introduces us (me, anyway) to several early English-language publications produced by and for Chinese American audiences, such as The Chinese Students' Monthly (originally The Chinese Students' Bulletin) that was published between 1905 and 1931 by the Chinese Students' Alliance of America (I'm oversimplifying this a bit--see Wang 139-140 for more details and for citations). Wang points out the emphasis on a modern sense of Chinese patriotism that was exemplified by students who wrote about their experiences and perspectives living in a racist and imperialist United States (140-142). The selections he chooses from various works such as "Shadow Shapes," an anonymously written novella published in The Chinese Students' Monthly in serial form, are fascinating, and I find myself wanting to look up this magazine. (It looks like it's available through Brill, for only $4800.)

Wang moves on to discuss the Chinese student writing of the Baodiao Movement era, arguing that for the writers in that movement, "literature was a social platform for reflection and action which must begin with the self-critique of the intellectuals" (144). He argues that although the movement failed to change the U.S. viewpoint on the status of the Diaoyutai islands, the experience led Chinese writers like Zhang Xiguo and Zhang Beihai to examine more critically the deceptive American dream that many Chinese student/immigrants were pursuing (146).

Interesting for its general absence in Wang's article is how Taiwan itself is reflected in the lives and writings of the Chinese ("Chinese" in quotation marks, as Wang sometimes writes it) students/immigrants in the U.S. Most (if not all) of the Cold War era writers that he discusses, like Zhang Beihai, Zhang Xiguo, and Bai Xianyong, were Mainlanders raised in Taiwan. (One exception is the poet Yang Mu.) Wang does gesture at this fact in his discussion of Zhang Xiguo's (張系國) Rage of Yesteryear (昨日之怒, 1978), in which the character Shi Ping "defiant[ly] return[s] to Taiwan" from the U.S. (146). Wang quotes Shi Ping as "'wanting to be a Chinese rather than an overseas Chinese'" and remarks that "[t]hough it may seem odd that a student from Taiwan should wish to be 'Chinese,' Shi’s thinking was not strange in the political context of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was believed that China would one day be reunited and when Taiwanese national consciousness was still nascent" (146-147). I would argue that here Wang ignores the fact that Shi Ping is a Mainlander (as is Zhang Xiguo), a status that colors his sense of identity and leads him to equate Taiwan with China. Shi's status as a Mainlander also brings up the interesting factor in this whole discussion of identity and the sense of displacement that Chinese (Mainlander) students/immigrants in the U.S. felt: that they cannot simply be viewed as displaced in terms of being in the U.S., but that they were displaced in the first place, when they retreated to Taiwan or were born to parents who retreated to Taiwan in 1949. Perhaps Wang doesn't address this because the writers themselves don't dwell on it; this is something I might explore in the future.

I would also question the assertion that "Taiwanese national consciousness was still nascent" in the 1960s and 1970s. Wang observes in an endnote that "in the 1960s and 1970s, [Taiwan's] national ideology was more Chinese than Taiwanese" (153, n. 43), which is true to an extent. A post by Michael Turton cites an article from 1963 that discusses "Chiang Kai-shek's Silent Enemies," which would suggest that the Taiwanese/Mainlander divide was strong then.

This divide is also neglected earlier in Wang's article when he writes of the motivations that students from Taiwan had to stay in the U.S. after graduation: "At a time when another war was a real fear in Taiwan, many students came to America not only to study, but also to stay, seeking permanent residency and U.S. citizenship at the end of their studies" (142). This explanation ignores the experiences of Taiwanese students in the U.S. who stayed as a result of their pro-Taiwan independence work in the U.S. Some, like the uncle of Wang Benhu, were blacklisted from returning to Taiwan (see the video linked to in my previous post).  

I have written briefly before about the Taiwanese students at Kansas State University who worked for the Taiwan independence movement. Will Tiao, as I mention in that post, came from Manhattan, Kansas, and has observed that KSU was known as the "military school for Taiwan independence" (台獨軍校). I have written elsewhere about the "student writing" (to use the phrase in Wang's sense of it) that went on among Taiwanese and Mainlander students at KSU regarding Taiwan's identity. This conflict is relevant to Wang's discussion because it illustrates the complexity of "Chinese" modernity and "Chinese" students. As Wang notes early on in his article, "Due to the complicated history of modern China, Chinese student writers arrived in America at different historical junctures, bearing imprints of their origins" (139). The Taiwanese students at KSU who engaged in a "battle of the pens" in the KSU newspaper with their Mainlander schoolmates in the mid-1960s could also be said to be engaged in a battle over what it meant to be (seen as) a Chinese person in the United States. (See the oral history, 一門留美學生的建國故事, for reproductions of the letters published in the KSU paper.) Both through their words and through their requests to have their names withheld out of fear of reprisals, the Taiwanese students called into question the dominant depictions of Taiwan as "Free China."

Chinese soldiers' suicides in 1950s Taiwan: a few notes

A particularly poignant part of Vern Sneider's novel A Pail of Oysters occurs when the American journalist Ralph Barton, aided by the KMT government-appointed interpreter Paul Huang, interviews Chin Poo-liang, a Chinese soldier who retreated to Taiwan in 1949 (see chapter 18). I've written a bit about the interview elsewhere (see pp. 47-48), but here I'm interested in the context of that episode and in the tragedy that Chin Poo-liang represents.

Chin is portrayed as a twenty-one-year-old private (actually an acting sergeant) who originally came from a village in Guangdong Province. He joined the Nationalist Army after his village was taken over by the Communists and his family was killed, but then had to retreat to Taiwan with the Army in 1949. His daily activities are described: they are busy every day with training and studying (Chin is studying math so that he can become an a clerk when they retake the Mainland), and Huang tells Barton that they subsist mostly on rice, tofu, and vegetables--eating pork twice a month and fish three times a month. He is paid 30 Formosan dollars a month, which Barton calculates is equivalent to less than US$2 a month. Private Chin, says Huang, wants Barton to use Chin's real name and home village in his article; as the interpreter tells Barton, "'No one there on the mainland can do anything to his family now, because you see, none are left'" (150).

Joshua Fan, in his book China's Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s - 1990s (Routledge, 2012), calls soldiers like Chin the "Homeless Generation"; not only were they dispossessed of their physical homes in China, but they were tormented by the fading hope that they would ever be able to return home--a hope that was kept alive as a result of KMT government promises to "retake the Mainland." In the novel, Huang expresses confidence that Chin will have a better life once the KMT returns to China--a return Barton considers highly unlikely.

In addition, despite Huang's description of Chin's Spartan yet livable conditions (note that attending the interview are a general and a regimental commander), according to Fan, things were not so pleasant in the Army:

In addition to the pressure to maintain readiness, the poor physical treatment made their lives unbearable. A soldier was not worth much then and officer Zhao witnessed a soldier being beaten to death as a punishment for not cleaning his rifle properly. He added that, "Because we had no family, who was going to report the wrong doing on your behalf, and who was going to seek revenge for you? No one!" (L. Sun 2001: 35). (79)

Fan argues that because of the lack of family who could be counted on for support, soldiers from the mainland were treated even more poorly than Taiwanese conscripts. Fan observes that suicide was a common act among the Chinese soldiers, especially "after the young soldiers realized they they would not be going home" (78). He quotes interviewees that reported having heard the sounds of gunshots in the barracks and others who reported having seen the bodies of soldiers who had hanged themselves.

Even more disturbing is the story of soldiers who went to movie theaters with hand grenades and "took others with them," as reported here on Zhongtian's "台灣大搜索":



The program recounts incidents ("attacks" might be an appropriate word) in Taipei (March 4, 1953, in Ximending), Taipei County (2 weeks after the Ximending explosion), in Kaohsiung (January 24, 1954), and in Taichung (April 1, 1958). According to the reporter, it's possible that there were more attacks, but that news of other attacks would be suppressed.

According to one interviewee, author and TV host Wang Benhu (汪笨胡), the government characterized these attacks as the work of Chinese Communist spies rather than admitting that these were the last desperate acts of Nationalist soldiers. As he puts it, the soldiers "probably felt that if they were going to go, they might as well take others with them."

Another interviewee, author Guan Renjian (管仁健), argues that one reason for these incidents was that the Chinese veterans were unable to marry due to their poor salaries. In Sneider's novel, Barton estimates that Chin will never be able to marry on his salary, which is the equivalent of US$1.90 a month. Wang Benhu suggests that Chiang Ching-kuo helped with this situation by allowing Mainland soldiers to marry after 1970. He doesn't mention how Chiang might have made it possible for the veterans to afford it, however.


Guan also notes that before 1970, gun control (and I assume hand grenade control?) for members of the military was very loose because everyone needed to be ready to fight the Communists. This loose policy probably also contributed to the "Nantou shooting" of 1959, in which an Army captain killed 10 people with two rifles before killing himself.

Sneider doesn't come back to the character of Chin Poo-liang later on in the novel, so we're left to wonder about his fate. This quick review of the soldier's situations during the 1950s  gives us some sense, though, of what is in store for Chin.

[Update, 6/3/16: Something that I wasn't able to read yesterday due to a limitation on the number of pages I could read in Google Books: Fan explains that the government issued regulations in 1952 that heavily limited the ability of military personnel to marry in Taiwan:

According to the 1952 Military Marriage Regulations, only those officers and NCOs with special skills and over the age of 28 could marry. "NCOs with special skills" referred to a small number who worked as technicians in military facilities; other NCOs and enlisted men were not allowed to marry during their terms of service (ZMNJS 1953: 181). (66)

Fan also notes, however, that the penalties for personnel who broke the rules weren't consistent. He gives some examples of enlisted men who secretly married but were not penalized (except that they didn't get any extra allowance for their families); on the other hand, he mentions a soldier who was punished for marrying without permission (67). He also mentions that the rules "were relaxed in 1959 to allow for any NCOs over the age of 25 and enlisted men who had served for at least three years to marry" (67).]

Monday half-formed thoughts and frustrations

I have been keeping a journal on my computer(s) for about 10 years; I started it in the context of trying to work on my dissertation, and I call it "Thoughts and Frustrations." It has been useful to me in working out various issues, writing-related and otherwise, so I've kept up with it fairly consistently over the years, except for a few months when I tended to journal more by hand than on the computer.

I mention this because I've been thinking some about what I would be doing in next semester's ENGW 1102 (First-Year Writing for Multilingual Students) courses. Typically at the beginning of the semester, I ask them to write a journal about their hopes, expectations, goals, and fears (!) regarding the class. Often, students will mention in those journals their frustration over how long it takes them to write as compared with their native-English-speaking classmates. This is even true for students whose writing seems pretty fluent to me. I get responses like, "It usually takes me two hours to write what my American classmates can finish in 20 minutes." Whether this is true or not, it has led me to think about how I can help students become more fluent in their writing. For the coming semester, I'm going to try requiring students to keep journals as a way of building up that fluency. I was fascinated by some things that Mike Edwards wrote about a few years ago on his blog Vitia regarding a pilot course he was teaching that in part required students to use the 750 words website to write 750 words every class day for a semester. He was teaching U.S. citizens, I presume (he was teaching at West Point at the time), but I think this kind of experience would be even more helpful for multilingual students (actually, I'm making the assumption--possibly false--that all of his students were native speakers of English). (I'm also tossing around terms like "native speaker" that are themselves problematic, but I'm just going to use this kind of shorthand here rather than complicate things. These are "half-formed thoughts," after all!)

I don't think I'll require students to use that website, but instead I'm going to ask them to set up a Google Doc to write their journals. I'm going to ask them to share that doc with me, too, because there are journal entries on particular topics that I will sometimes ask them for. I probably won't require 750 words a day, either--probably 500 instead (though they can write more if they wish). But I hope that I'm being faithful to at least one idea that Edwards mentions--that "writing has become almost like athletic performance: it’s a matter of getting it done, putting in the practice, and pretty soon, practice translates into improvement."

*****

Speaking of practice and improvement, I've been struggling with a paper that I've been working on--the "second project" that I mentioned the other day. I have written a lot in my "thoughts and frustrations" journal about some ideas that I want to try to address in the paper, but I'm finding that it's really hard to figure out how to actually incorporate those issues into the paper itself. It's not just (as I said before) about hating to write conclusions; it's more that I feel the new ideas are taking the paper in a direction that I hadn't originally intended, and I'm struggling with the feeling that I'm losing control of the paper. I have to decide whether losing control of the paper is something to be avoided at this stage or something to be desired...

*****

I had planned to write a review of Hsiao-ting Lin's Accidental State on this blog, but I see that there's already a good review of it at bookish.asia. I might still write down some thoughts after I've finished the book (which will be after I finish the abovementioned paper). There are a few things in the book so far that I have some issues with. As the reviewer, John Grant Ross, notes, Lin doesn't spend too much time on the February 28, 1947 massacre. I don't have my copy of the book with me, but I also recall that Lin refers to the massacre/incident as a "riot" (or "riots") at one point. I realize that riots were part of the whole incident, but referring to the whole series of events by using the word "riots" kind of whitewashes the acts of the KMT soldiers--both their indiscriminate and "discriminate" acts of killing.

[Update, 5/25/16: Here is the actual quote, from Accidental State:

On the whole, although it cannot be said that economic conditions improved forthwith under Wei Daoming's administration, the situation did not become appreciably worse. Around mid-1948, as one political report by the British consular staff on the island specified, with Wei's skillfulness and diplomacy, the political situation was calm and no discontent had been permitted to become vocal, thus furthering consolidation of Chinese rule on the island. The new economic measures imposed after the riot, notably the lifting of Chen Yi's state socialism, were originally intended both to pacify the native Taiwanese and to fulfill the ambition of making the island a model for the mainland Chinese provinces. It was thus historically accidental that those post-traumatic measures inadvertently laid the foundation for the subsequent formation of a Nationalist island state and unwittingly sowed the seeds of Taiwan's free market economy. Despite some positive signs coming out in the field of post-Chen Yi Taiwan's domestic affairs, in diplomatic terms, the riot, coupled with a worsening situation on the mainland, had inevitably brought about a gradual shift of American policy toward the island. Such a change of policy, in retrospect, played a crucial part in the subsequent development in China's domestic and regional politics. It was also fatefully entwined with the making of Nationalist China on Taiwan. (56, emphasis added)

I'd also note that twice, when Lin refers to a source related to 228, he calls it "one piece of contemporary scholarly work" (42) and "one scholarly work" (55). In both cases, he's talking about Lai, Myers, and Wei's A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford UP, 1991), a work that could at best be called "controversial" (it has been called worse!). Perhaps Lin is referring to this book in this way because the authors (at least Myers) also worked at the Hoover Institution, but it is at least curious, considering that I haven't yet seen him refer to any of his other sources in this way.]

[Update, 7/22/16: I wrote a more recent comment on the representation of the White Terror in Accidental State, available here.]

Writing projects and other frustrations

Since I turned in my grades on May 2, I've been trying to get started on some writing projects for the summer. I'm not teaching this summer, thanks in part to the pay raise that came with my "upgrade," so I decided to make use of my time to read and write--and more generally, to think about life directions at this stage. As my old friend ERG reminded me a few months ago, we've been teaching college students since 1990--over half our lives!

I've completed one mini-project so far, which was to write a few posts here about the writing assignments we worked on in ENGW 1102 (First Year Writing for Multilingual Students) this past semester. In case you missed those posts, they're here, here, and here. (Sorry, but I read something on a writing website that said you should link to your previous blog posts whenever possible!)

The second project that I'm currently working on is a revision of a paper I presented at the Boston MLA conference about 3 years ago; I hope to get that done soon so I can send it to a journal for review by the end of this month. The revision work has been a bit slow going, though, partly due to some confusion about how to end it (I hate writing conclusions!) and partly due to the general lethargy I'm feeling as a result of hay fever. This month has been terrible so far for pollen. So far I'm celebrating little victories like finding my copies of Cold War Orientalism and The Rhetoric of Empire, which I thought were lost after our move last year. Now that I've given myself a deadline, however (the end of the month), I hope that I will work harder on my revisions.

Finally, I hope to develop and work on some sort of writing project in response to the recent death of my father. He passed away in April after a short stay in a hospice, and I've been experiencing quite a mix of feelings since then. After we came back from the burial, I located a CD of interviews that my brother had done with my parents starting in the mid-1990s. I had never listened to them before, and I started listening to one of the interviews from 1995. I was surprised at how my father sounded back then--very different from my more recent memories of talking with him. I want to listen to the interviews more and think about what I might write about him--possibly using the interviews in the process. Maybe it will just be some blog posts about him, but maybe it will be something more developed or "formal." We'll see.

FYW Assignment: Responding to the university's academic plan

I've been writing about the assignments that I tried out this past semester in ENGW 1102, our writing program's first year writing course for multilingual students. In my first post, I briefly described the "English and Me" (English and I?) assignment, in which students wrote about their relationships to the English language(s). In my second post, I discussed an assignment for which students defined the concept "international students." In this post, I'll describe the third assignment, which was a collaborative response to our school's academic plan for 2025.

As I was preparing this semester's syllabus, I saw that the university was in the planning stages for an academic plan that included emphases on "the global university" and "diversity and inclusion," among other "strategic themes." I was interested in how I could give students the opportunity to be involved in that conversation, given their positions as multilingual and/or international students who were also mostly first-year students. After thinking about various options, I decided that the best choice would be to ask them to join the discussions on the "strategic theme" page of their choice. I assumed (correctly) that most students would choose to participate in the "global university" or the "diversity and inclusion" discussions. So that those discussion boards wouldn't be overwhelmed by the comments of 30 students, I decided to have them work in groups on their responses. I also left open the possibility that groups' responses would be combined if they were very similar in content or emphasis.

My assignment consisted of two parts, which I'll quote from here:

1) You will write a response that you will post on the appropriate section of the Academic Plan website, and 2) You will write a longer discussion of your post and the Academic Plan that you will post on Digication (along with a copy of the response that you posted to the website).

The posted response could vary in length depending on what you decide to do, but it should be an original contribution to the discussion (in other words, it shouldn’t be a repetition of others’ posts or an “I agree” statement). ...

The longer discussion could be written as a memo to the class that explains the context of your response (what aspects of the Academic Plan or what comments others had posted that you felt called for your input) and describes how you developed your response.

By requiring the longer discussion, I asked students to make sure that they had read the previous comments carefully to determine how their own ideas might fit into that discussion. For the first draft of the assignment, I asked them focus primarily on the "longer discussion" and to "summarize and quote from--and respond to--what [their] sources say." By "sources" I primarily meant the other comments on the Academic Plan website, but I also encouraged them to bring in other relevant sources. Once they had laid out the context for their responses, for the second draft I asked them to write out those shorter responses along with the longer discussions.

Students seemed enthusiastic about the opportunity to have a say in the direction that the university would be taking during the next ten years, though there was the expected amount of skepticism regarding how much effect their responses would actually have. One thing that came out of the process was that we all learned more about what services and programs the university had in a number of areas, such as study abroad programs, international internships and co-ops, services for diverse students, etc. We also debated how well these programs and services were publicized and what could be done to publicize them better. (Some students, for instance, felt that sending out more emails about particular study abroad opportunities would be good, while others felt that the school sends out too many emails already.) Some students felt that the university was doing a good job already with the programs and services it provides, and that the problem was that students weren't taking advantage of those opportunities.

One problem with this kind of assignment, of course, is that it's not really that repeatable. Since the Academic Plan is supposed to be finalized in the fall of this year, it's not likely that students in my future classes will have the opportunity to take part in this kind of university-wide discussion about the school's future. Perhaps, however, other similar opportunities will come up for future students.

A Pail of Oysters in paperback

Just a note to mention that A Pail of Oysters is now available for pre-ordering in paperback. You can pre-order it at the Camphor Press website, or you can get it at Amazon.com. While you're at Amazon, consider writing a customer review--there are only four up there now...

FYW assignment: Asking international students to define "international students"

A while back, I started writing about my approach this (past) semester to a first-year writing class for multilingual (mostly international) students. I described my rationale for asking students to write about their experiences as English learners and users and then mentioned that in a second class project, students would be writing about the concept of "international students." Now that the semester is over, I'm going to discuss and reflect on that assignment in more detail.

To prepare for the second assignment, we read a 2009 World Education News and Reviews article by Nick Clark entitled "What Defines an International Student? A Look Behind the Numbers." Clark discusses how different countries and organizations define "international students" and "foreign students" and how those different definitions affect how they count their student populations. This has implications for how the mobility of students around the world is tracked by national and non-governmental educational organizations.

After we read and briefly discussed this article, we got into a conversation about other ways in which international students are defined or characterized, including the kinds of words that we (or, rather, the students in my classes) often experience as being used in relation to international students. Words such as "diversity," "tolerance" (vs. "acceptance"--one student said, "I don't want to be tolerated!") came up, as well as concepts like respect for different cultures' ways of doing and being, universal vs. local knowledge and values, and stereotypes about international students (one big stereotype at my school is that international students are all rich). Then we talked about the assignment, which asks students to develop and convey their own understanding of "international students." As I wrote in the assignment sheet,

The first thing I’d recommend that you do is develop a plan for gathering sources that define, describe, or otherwise discuss international students. You might, for instance, survey or interview classmates (both “international” and domestic) to see what they think the term means or what images come to mind. You might consider why the term “international” is used and “foreign” isn’t. You could look for what comes up when you Google the term “international students.” You might look at the images used on university websites when you Google “international students” (vs. “foreigners,” perhaps). You might look at how the university’s website discusses international students or how it introduces services for international students. These aren’t the only types of sources you might go to, and you might not want to use all of them, but they’re a start. Think about where else you might find discussions of international students.

The next step, after gathering various perspectives, is to consider what meaning you want to convey about international students. Your task in writing this essay is not simply to echo others’ perspectives; you need to provide and support your own understanding of the term. You should include what others say, but you’ll need to respond to those arguments (see They Say / I Say for templates that will help you do that). Develop your argument, weaving in and responding to the other perspectives that your sources have provided.

I was trying to avoid two extremes with this assignment: one is the essay that defines something in a vacuum, ignoring both how the term is defined by others and (perhaps more important) the whole purpose or purposes for definitions; the other was the essay that simply repeats others' definitions without developing the writer's own perspective on the topic. We made some use of Graff & Birkenstein's They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, particularly the sections that discuss how the writer can respond to other texts and how the writer can emphasize the importance, the "so what?," of his or her argument. I wanted students to see definitions as arguments, and I think this assignment did do a good job, mostly, in getting them to think in this way (if they hadn't already thought in this way).

There were a couple of challenges with the assignment as I envisioned it and/or with how students interpreted it. One was that I asked students

to go beyond a traditional essay; you should use, where appropriate, visual elements (charts, graphs, images) to enhance your written discussion; you might also make use of some of the affordances of Digication and compose a multimodal text in which you include visual and perhaps even audiovisual (video) elements and even more interactive elements.

This suggestion/recommendation was an attempt to get students to write multimodally using our school's Digication e-portfolio platform. It wasn't entirely successful, partly because we were having enough trouble working out what we thought we could say about the concept of "international students" and the importance of defining the term anew. Most students who tried to do something with multimodal composing basically inserted images as examples of how universities "pictured" international students. Some inserted statistical tables or graphs. I think only one student tried including videos from YouTube, though that wasn't entirely successful, either, because he didn't really do anything with those videos. I'll have to rethink how much emphasis I want to put on the multimodal element if I use this assignment again.

The other challenge, as I've alluded to above, was working out what we (they) wanted to say about the concept of "international students" and how they wanted to answer the "so what?" question about defining "international students." One challenge related to this was getting them to see (and express in writing) the idea that different definitions might be more or less applicable or appropriate to different situations. While, for instance, the definitions in Clark's article might be applicable for people who want to compile statistics about student mobility, they might not be appropriate for other situations. That doesn't make them "wrong," necessarily (this was something that came up in early drafts when some students characterized the definitions as incorrect), just not useful for all situations.  I think most students seemed to be able to see and express this distinction by the end. The other part to this challenge was helping students to express their own purpose for (re)defining the term. Meeting this challenge required getting them to envision a different audience--going beyond seeing this as an assignment where I was the only audience (or at least the only one that counted). I think They Say / I Say helped with this, though I probably need to emphasize it more in class next time around.

There were a few interesting points that came out of the students' writing, and I'm just going to list some of them to end this (already too long) post:

• A number of students (probably more than I've had in previous multilingual sections of FYW) were either U.S. citizens or long-term residents. A couple were U.S. citizens, but because they had lived abroad for most of their lives, they were classed by my school as "international students" (something that might not have happened at other schools, as they discovered). I had mixed feelings about asking them to define "international students" because I was afraid that they would think I saw them all as international students (or worse, "foreigners"). But I think, on the other hand, that there's a value to asking them to do this because whether they think about themselves in this way or not, there are probably other people (such as domestic students, faculty, administration, etc.) who would view them as "international" in some way or another.
• The students took some interesting approaches to defining the term. Quite a few focused at least in part on the distinction between "international" and "foreign," mostly because Clark's article does that. I didn't require them to focus on that distinction, though I think some students mistakenly assumed that it was part of the assignment. There were varying degrees of success in their attempts to make original distinctions between these terms, but a few did a very good job on this. One, in particular, looked at other collocations of the term "international" vs. "foreign" and pointed out the differences between characterizing a language as a "foreign" language and characterizing it as an "international" language, then extending that distinction to how students might be characterized as "foreign" or "international." 
• We discovered that not everyone uses the terms "international students" and "foreign students" in the same way. (Surprise!) We found an article in the Boston Globe, for instance, in which the author uses the terms interchangeably, even referring, at one point, to "foreign international students." One of my students actually wrote to the article's author about this, getting her response that she wasn't distinguishing between "foreign" and "international."

I'll write later about the final assignment for this class, in which I asked students to contribute to public online discussion of our university's long-term academic plan.

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

The University of Hawai'i Press had an online book sale (in fact, it ends at midnight tonight, so get over there!), so I bought three books:

• Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa, ed. Davinder L. Bhowmik and Steve Rabson, 2016.
• Remembering the Kana:  A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each, by James W. Heisig, with Helmut Morsbach and Kazue Kurebayashi, 2007.
• Learning Japanese for Real: A Guide to Grammar, Use, and Genres of the Nihongo World, by Senko L. Maynard, 2011.

You can probably tell from the last two books that I'm planning to work on learning Japanese. I'm more interested in learning to read it than in learning to speak it, but I suppose I'll try to pick up on some spoken Japanese as well, if it helps me with my primary purpose. I'll start with the Remembering the Kana book and see where it takes me.

The first book, Islands of Protest, caught my attention because there's a story in there called "Taiwan Women," by Medoruma Shun, from 1983. But I think the other stories, poems, and drama in the book will also be interesting. Most of it is postwar literature, though there are a few earlier pieces.

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Lin, Hsiao-ting. Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016.

I asked my brother about this because he was going to AAS in Seattle. He ended up sending me a copy as a gift! What a great brother! Guess I'll be digging into it after the semester is over.

New book in the former native speaker's library

Ong, Iok-tek. Taiwan: A History of Agonies. Trans. Shimamura Yasuharu. Ed. Ong Meiri. Taipei: Avanguard, 2015.

I probably won't get around to reading this until summer vacation, but it's high on my list. I found out about its English publication through a book review by Jerome Keating published in the Taipei Times, Feb. 25, 2016. Keating writes,

"Ong’s book is for those researching Taiwanese consciousness post-WWII. What makes it unusual is not just the historical content, much of which can now be found in other contemporary works, but the realization that awareness of Taiwan’s history and identity had reached a state of maturity in Japan by 1964."

Upgrade

Just found out today that as of the next academic year (2016-2017), I'll be a Senior Lecturer. As I told a colleague, this mainly means I'll have to order a whole new set of business cards....

Well, and the fact that I have a new title. One that sounds kind of cool (if I were in the UK). A couple of years ago I was chatting on Facebook with folks about the term "non-tenure track" and how it defined us in terms of what we aren't. We tossed back and forth some possible alternative titles. I suggested "reader" would be most apropos, considering that reading is most of what I do as a writing instructor...

[Update, 6/2/16: Now they've decided to change our titles from "lecturer" to "teaching professor." So I'll be an Associate Teaching Professor. (Good thing I hadn't already ordered new business cards...)]

Reminders for myself and for my students

Not sure any of my students read this blog, but anyway...

I am catching up on reading the reflective journals that my 1102 (First-Year Writing for Multilingual Students) students wrote after they finished the "English and Me" assignment. I asked them to think about the process of writing the essay--the challenges they faced, how they dealt with those challenges, and any other points that came up. Many of them mentioned the peer work as being helpful to their writing; they felt that getting responses from their classmates helped them think about how others were reading and interpreting (or misinterpreting) what they wrote. Nothing really earth-shattering here, but those comments and the comments about the value of drafting and revising are always something that I like to see. 

I mention this because I think this process worked well as I was working on the introduction to the new edition of A Pail of Oysters. I sent a rough draft to John Ross and got his feedback on it. Since I had never written an introduction to someone else's book before (and particularly the kinds of introductions you see to older novels), I wasn't sure how to write it. I got good feedback from John on how to revise it, and we went back and forth on it, also bringing in Mark Swofford (another of the co-founders of Camphor Press) later on in the process. In all, I have about 15 different drafts of the introduction from between last September and the end of January 2016. (I should probably tell my students about that!) Not all of the drafts are drastically different from previous ones, but they all reflect reworkings of ideas, sentences, etc. based on the feedback from the readers.

This process (as well as my students' reflections) has reminded me of the need to draft and revise and to get others' eyes on my writing as I'm working on it, rather than thinking that I need to give someone a "perfect" "final" product. It reminds me that while I might take pride in my work, I don't have to be so proud (or perhaps insecure!) that I won't show unfinished work to others.

Upcoming ICRT interview about Vern Sneider

I was interviewed last week for a program on ICRT (International Community Radio Taipei) called "Taiwan Talk." The subject was Vern Sneider and the new edition of A Pail of Oysters. That interview is going to be broadcast tonight at around 7:05 p.m. Eastern Time (about 8:05 a.m. Monday morning Taiwan time) and again at 5:05 a.m. Monday morning Eastern Time (about 6:05 p.m. Monday evening Taiwan time). You can listen to it live by going to ICRT's website and clicking on the link to the live stream. There'll be a longer podcast that will be available later at this link [Update: it's now available at that link.]

I'm not a great interviewee (haven't been interviewed that much, so I don't have a lot of practice), but Keith Menconi, the interviewer, did a good job trying to make me feel at ease, and I hope he'll do just as good a job at editing out my hedging, hesitations, and hemming and hawing! We'll know in a couple of hours...

Another old conference paper posted online

This paper, entitled "The Location of Chinese Culture: The Rhetoric of Chineseness in Post-World War Two Taiwan" (I really hate my titles--I should just drop them and use the subtitles), was presented in July of 2005 at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. I didn't try to publish it, but I did use most of it in a background chapter of my dissertation (which is really why I wrote it in the first place). Here's the abstract:

The vast majority of English-language resources on contemporary Chinese rhetoric locate their object of study in the geopolitical space of the People’s Republic of China. Such a perspective risks ignoring an important aspect of Chinese rhetoric--what I call “the rhetoric of Chineseness.” This term refers to the rhetorical nature of identifying as Chinese in a variety of historical, social, political, and other circumstances. It suggests that fundamental to the notion of a Chinese rhetoric is the need to understand the shifting nature of the signifier “Chinese.” Without a more complex understanding of “Chinese,” we lose the ability to see contemporary Chinese rhetorics as multifaceted discourses that are embedded in various political and social contexts.

Particular to my purposes here are the ways in which Chineseness was called upon by political and intellectual figures in Taiwan in the formation of a cultural and national identity that was used for a variety of purposes related to the making of Republic of China citizens on Taiwan after World War II. I will describe how, after the Japanese surrender, the incoming Nationalist (KMT) government positioned itself as the representative of Chinese culture and nationhood. Political discourse in martial law Taiwan (1947-1987) involved the invention of particular cultural and political understandings of “Chinese” in order to encourage the people of Taiwan to think of themselves as part of a once-and-future Republic of China, a nation which saw itself as the rightful government of China although it had lost control over the physical space of China. Through civic and language education, the government of the ROC on Taiwan attempted to indoctrinate its people into a view of themselves as Chinese citizens and “compatriots” to their suffering brethren on the mainland.

This study will, it is hoped, complicate the notions of “Chinese” that are often unexamined when scholars analyze “Chinese rhetoric.”

As with the other conference paper I posted a few days ago, there are things that I like about this paper--particularly some of the writings that I dug up in the Tunghai University library by former Minister of Education (and founder of Chinese Culture University) Zhang Qiyun (張其昀) and Liang Rongruo (梁容若), professor of Chinese and co-editor of the Guoyu Ribao (國語日報). But one thing I always found myself worrying about when working with such primary sources in Chinese was the question of how influential these writings were, or even how influential their writers were. It's not always easy to tell this when you're working with older sources in your own language, to say nothing of working with historical documents in another language. I wonder how people deal with this. I think the writers I cite here were somewhat influential at the time, but I sort of found that after the fact. (I also have to admit that I don't remember how I managed to come across these texts. I have a feeling it was serendipitous, though.)

Anyway, enjoy! (Or don't...)

Hmm...

Judging from the picture, though, I seem happy about it...

There's a certain irony to the fact that at the end of the week that I decide writing for academic audiences is no longer my main interest, Academia.edu tells me that I'm now in the top 5% of researchers on their site.

[Update, 6/3/16: Well, it was fun while it lasted...]

New edition of A Pail of Oysters out

I mentioned in a recent comment to a previous post on A Pail of Oysters that a new edition would be coming out soon. It's out now in e-book format, published by Camphor Press. I had the honor of writing the introduction, based on archival research and an interview with Vern Sneider's widow.

The Taipei Times has also published an article on the new edition. I was interviewed for that (through email), as was Mark Swofford, one of the co-founders of Camphor Press. I liked the following quote from Swofford:

“It’s a very complex novel, [written] when many people thought it was just the communists versus the KMT,” he says. “It was more of a middle way sort of thing; from the standpoint of the Taiwanese people.”

 If you don't like e-books, it'll be coming out later on in print. I'll update this at that time.

An old conference paper, "The French Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?" posted online

I uploaded to Academia.edu a copy of a paper that I presented back in February of 2004 (wow--that actually predates this blog!). The title is "The French Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?" but it probably should be "The Jesuit Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?" (But "French" sounded better because of the contrasting nationalities thing...) Here's the abstract:

In the thirty years since the publication of Robert T. Oliver’s Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, Chinese rhetoric has slowly gained recognition as a legitimate area of research in communication studies. This study has begun, however, with characterizations of Chinese discourse in terms of what it is said to lack in comparison to the West. Oliver’s book, for instance, begins by stressing India and China’s lack of political, legal, religious, or educational platforms for oratory. It famously continues that for these countries “rhetoric has been considered so important that it could not be separated from the remainder of human knowledge” (10). George Kennedy, in his 1998 book Comparative Rhetoric, even implies that Chinese rhetoric as a scholarly discipline was invented by French Jesuits.

This paper argues that if Chinese rhetoric was, as Oliver and Kennedy suggest, first theorized by the West, then it was also theorized for the West. Furthermore, European theories of rhetoric were changing even as Jesuit descriptions of Chinese rhetoric were circulating around Europe. Whether Chinese rhetoric as a discipline was invented by the Jesuits or not, contemporary Western studies of Chinese rhetoric have failed to examine the complex relations between “our” notions of Chinese rhetoric and the particular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European contexts in which those notions were rooted. Absent this examination, Chinese rhetorical theory is inevitably cast as being in some sense outside of time and “behind” that of the West.

Works Cited

Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Oliver, Robert T. Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1971.

I think the paper makes an interesting argument about cross-cultural studies of rhetoric, though similar arguments have probably been made elsewhere since then by others who are more active in comparative rhetoric than I am anymore.

Anyway, I thought I'd post the paper online after I noticed that it was cited in Li Yuxue's (李奭學) book, 中國晚明與歐洲文學. I guess Li must have come across the CD-ROM on which the papers from the conference were saved. (Everyone attending that 2004 Conference on East-West Identities at Hong Kong Baptist University got a CD-ROM with the papers on it.) I don't think I'm going to be doing any revising with it at this point; that phase of my life has pretty much passed. But I enjoyed rereading my paper (am I allowed to say that?) and I hope others will get something out of it, too.

Back to teaching first-year writing after a long break

Before this semester, the last time I taught a section of first-year writing was in the summer of 2014 (hmmm... not that long ago...). I'm doing some things this semester that are similar to the projects we did back then, but I've made some changes due to some interesting developments at Northeastern (more on that, perhaps, in another post).

I should mention that I primarily teach multilingual students (mostly international students), so the activities that we do in class are primarily focused on their experiences as multilingual (and possibly international) students. I take some of my rationale for this focus from Ilona Leki's 2007 book, Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development (I've written a brief review about this book). Leki argues that L2 writing classes "can be used to make space and time for students to explore the world into which they have stepped by, for example, examining and making a start at responding to the literacy demands across the curriculum" (284). She also recommends that L2 writing teachers give students an opportunity to address the challenges they face as L2 students, such as when their cultures are "essentialized by professors" or when they are "not selected for group work." Leki suggests that

[u]sing their developing L2 literacy skills as tools to work toward analyzing such situations, including their hidden ideological dimensions, and developing possible solutions communally not only honors their intellect and experience but also might make L2 writing classes be remembered for more than only the use of the comma. (285)

So we start off introducing ourselves to each other by writing my old standby, "English and Me," in which they describe experiences that exemplify important aspects of their relationship to English. I should mention that "English and Me" often grows into something more than just "English and Me"--for one thing, students' English learning doesn't take place in a vacuum, so often their discussions of their learning experiences encompass such things as educational cultures; family relationships; politics; first (and second and sometimes third) languages in addition to English; culture shock; and emotions like frustration, loneliness, feelings of accomplishment, and pride. I see this essay as not only a way for me to get to know them, but also as a way for them to reflect on what has ultimately brought them here as part of the flow of "transnational citizens" back and forth across borders.

In the second project, we'll be working on defining the concept "international students," which should be interesting... More on that later.

New publication (sort of...)

It's just a preface, and it's basically the same text that I posted here, but I recommend the book because it has a lot of great material in it about the George H. Kerr collection at the Taipei 228 museum.

代序：葛超智資料介紹 [Preface: Introduction to George H. Kerr materials], 一個自1947年寄來的包裹：臺北二二八紀念館 典藏文物特展專輯 [A package from from 1947: Taipei 228 Memorial Museum Special Exhibition Collection]。編者：蘇瑤崇，杜正宇。臺北市政府文化局；臺北二二八紀念館, 2015。

There's no picture of the cover on the website, but this is what the cover looks like.

Well, hello there...

It has been a while since I last checked in here. Last semester was a busy time, balancing work and parenting. Once again, I'm going to try to resurrect this blog. (Huh. Only three posts in which I proclaimed that I was resurrecting the blog. I thought there'd be more.)

What will I write about? I don't know. I'll have to see what I'm moved to write about. Send me some ideas in the comments, if you wish.

It's interesting, by the way, that 3 of the 4 posts I've written about resurrecting the blog (including this one) were written in January...

Summer activities

I spent some time in June at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum going through the records of the George H. Kerr collection there. Here's the text of a short talk I gave at the opening of a special exhibit at the Museum on June 24th. Thanks to Su Yao-tsung for inviting me to the opening, to the administrators of the Chiu Scholarly Exchange grant program that funded my trip, and to the museum staff for helping me out while I was at the museum!

大家好，我叫Jonathan Benda。首先，我要謝謝臺北文化局和二二八紀念館讓我有機會來這裡做相關的研究。我目前在美國波士頓東北大學英文系任教。去東北大學之前，我在臺灣教了16年。

像很多對臺灣產生興趣的美國人一樣，我透過了葛超智寫的 “被出賣的臺灣”（也就是Formosa Betrayed） 開始認識臺灣當代歷史。也像很多讀者一樣，我被書中有感染力的故事所感動。看完了這本書以後，我便進一步想瞭解Kerr是在什麼樣的背景之下寫了這本書。在許多美國人和臺灣人之間，對於Kerr是如何寫成這本書，一直有一些誤解，而這些誤解產生了更多的誤解，以至於後來對這本書的可靠性產生了疑慮。譬如說，有一個美國學者認為Kerr 在1958年寫 Formosa Betrayed 時，只用了一些隨手的資料。可是，在臺北二二八紀念館還有沖繩的縣立文書館的資料顯示，Kerr其實早在1947年就開始著手記錄臺灣的近代史，後來出版的 “被出賣的臺灣” 就是那本歷史的一部分。臺北二二八紀念館搜集的資料也顯示，Kerr所使用的資料其實又廣泛、又豐富。雖然Kerr自己承認Formosa Betrayed的語氣有點情緒化，可是我們也不能否認這本書的內容是根據許多客觀的官方資料所寫成的。有興趣的人，可以自己透過這些文獻資料來瞭解。

研究Kerr的資料讓我們瞭解到Formosa Betrayed其實是很多人的著作。Kerr因為搜集了許多聯合國善後救濟總署的報告、書信跟其他的檔案，所以他用了這些很多人寫的資料來撰寫這本書。因為聯合國善後救濟總署的歷史還沒有被許多人涉略，所以我覺得相關的學者可能還沒有機會發現這些豐富的史料。Kerr的檔案也包括了第二次世界大戰時，美國海軍為了預備侵略、佔領臺灣所準備的研究報告跟計畫書。

館內的文獻資料也包括Kerr跟很多人的往來書信。從這些書信我們發現，有許多看完Formosa Betrayed的讀者都深深受到感動。這些信函也顯示了這本書出版前，Kerr在美國透過他的投書及演講，四處在學術團體之間宣傳他對臺灣人權跟台美關係的看法。大部分研究者會感到興趣的是Kerr與海外支持臺灣獨立的臺灣人士，他們之間的往來。譬如說，對蔣經國刺殺案有興趣的人，可以查閱Kerr跟台獨運動人士以及黃文雄的律師團的文書往來。這些信函可以看出Kerr對臺灣人權跟獨立的熱心和關注。不同的人對Kerr的動機有不同的見解；有人說他是要以臺灣獨立的藉口讓美國控制台灣，還有人說他是因為要讓臺灣人擺脫一個當時腐敗的政府才鼓動美國支持不同的對台政策。學者可以透過紀念館裡的文獻來瞭解Kerr的動機。

前美國在台協會的處長卜睿哲曾經稱Kerr是一位二二八事件的參與者和觀察者，也是一位對二二八事件記憶的重要人物。館內收集的George H. Kerr檔案也顯示了Kerr在冷戰時代是台美關係跟台獨運動的重要角色。臺北二二八紀念館一直保存了可能會面臨消失的重要臺灣近代歷史，它可以提供重要的歷史知識給參觀者，不論他們是臺灣人或是外國人。在紀念館裡面的George H. Kerr檔案是個重要的知識寶藏，我鼓勵更多研究臺灣的學者來這裡做詳細的研究。

Conference presentation done; back to work on GHK

I finished my conference presentation on Saturday. There weren't a lot of people in the audience, but what they lacked in numbers they made up in enthusiasm. (Possibly because over half the audience was from Northeastern!) My presentation was titled "'Brain Circulation' and Writing in the Disciplines: Giving Students Opportunities for Multilingual Writing in a Business Writing Course." I already talked a bit about the topic here. In my presentation, I cited a couple of blog posts by Julie Meloni that originally got me thinking about this idea:

• "Student Use of L1 in an ESL Classroom"
• "Google Translate, and Translation Projects in the Classroom"

I think these two posts are worth a read if you're thinking about how you might work writing in other languages into a writing class for multilingual students (as "we" translingual types sometimes like to do)--in an assignment that is different from the personal essay. (Not that I have anything against personal essays.)

Anyway, now that that presentation is over, I have to get back to work on GHK. I left him hanging for a long while. He's probably wondering what happened to me. I need to put together a list, too, of the sources I want to see at the archives because evidently they're stored off-site. So I need to get going on that. (In between grading, of course...)

What I have and haven't been doing lately

Today marked the first day back to classes after spring break. Over the break I graded a couple (or three? I forget) sets of assignments, did our taxes, realized that I was mixed up about the location of the May conference and bowed out of doing a presentation there (with some regret--I would have liked to present there), played with the little guy (my son, that is), and produced a reflective teaching portfolio. I also drank way too much coffee and probably gained a few pounds (though I wouldn't know for sure because I won't go near a scale). I didn't do much anything related to my research project or end-of-March conference, but I'm hoping that with classes back in session, I might be able to get back in work mode.

I do think that I did some important things over break, though, even if I didn't get to do everything. Spring break seems to be an occasion for instructors to do two main things: catch up on grading and get sick. I'm lucky that I didn't do the latter, even if I didn't completely succeed on the former. Well, at least the weather is getting warmer now.

Recent research/writing activities

Well, besides commenting on and grading student papers, I've tried to fit in some time for working on some projects. The urgent keeps getting in the way of the important, though (sounds like something Stephen Covey would say). I've got a conference presentation at the end of the month to work on and another conference paper due in early May. I've also got to continue reading through and annotating the archival documents for this summer's trip. But right now I'm working on revising an assignment that students will be working on starting next week, and after that I have to work on the merit eportfolio that lecturers in my program have to put together every year. I guess I shouldn't complain, though; most professors seem to need to do an annual 自我批评 self-evaluation.

I did get some work done on the conference presentation for the end of the month. I'm going to be talking about an opportunity I extended to some students in my business writing class last semester to write one of their projects in their native languages rather than in English. Of course they had to supply me with a translation and a "context memo" that explained the particulars of their document, but I wanted to give them the chance to write in another language since their intended audience were government officials in their home country. I've been thinking about this kind of opportunity lately because I have been getting quite a few students recently who don't intend to stay in the US after graduation (at least not for long) and who will need to write professional or scholarly documents in their native languages--a task that is not easy to do even if they're practiced in writing those kinds of documents in English. I know I can't teach them how to write all those kinds of documents in their native languages (it's arguably not even my job), but I can give them an opportunity to try if they want to... for one project... if it makes sense in terms of their intended audience... if they provide a translation... (I have a feeling I'm going to hedge a lot in this presentation...)

Research update

I finished reading Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement last night. I took a few notes on it as well in the process. He mentions a March 10, 1931 letter sent to Washington from the American Consul at Taihoku (Charles Reed). I'll have to see if that letter is in his collection, or where he came across it.


He also mentions Bailey Willis, an 81-year-old (in 1937) Stanford geologist who visited Formosa and the Philippines and noticed some of the Japanese military preparations going on.

I need to continue reading and note-taking. No time to slow down now...

Getting into work

I've gotten started on the work to prepare for my trip to the archives this summer. I'm currently reading through GHK's Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895-1945 (a book I bought quite a few years ago that evidently had been given by Kerr to his nephew "Bill Kerr the 2nd"--wonder how that ended up for sale on Alibris...).

I've been taking notes on it and reading "around" it as well, going back to some of Kerr's earlier writings about the Japanese colonial project in Taiwan (a couple of articles he wrote during WWII for the Far Eastern Survey, published by the Institute of Pacific Relations). It has been interesting so far, and it's helping me to develop some questions that I want to pursue.

First writing group meeting a success!

Although not everyone from our writing group was able to make it to our first meeting, we had three people there (plus one interested non-member who might end up becoming a member!). We talked about our projects, goals, challenges, writing habits, families, etc. We came up with some goals for the rest of the semester and made some plans. My main goal is to go through my GHK materials here (books, photocopied archival docs, etc.) and figure out specifically I have and what I need to look for when I go to Taiwan in the summer. I know that this will be a good use of my time. As will our writing group!

Snow.. snow...

It may look pretty to some people, but I'm really tired of seeing this stuff.

Writing group to meet, just in time

I've been going through some continued confusion and ennui related to my research and writing, my *cough* "scholarly" life, these this past few days weeks months years half a decade. It's not like I don't have any short-term goals. I've got plenty of 'em. But, as I was saying earlier, I've been having trouble figuring out the point of trying to write specialized scholarly articles in my discipline (well, the discipline in which I got a Ph.D.) when I don't know when or if I'll ever go on the tenure track. On the other hand, the kinds of things that I'm interested in writing about (GHK, for instance) aren't likely to put me on the best-seller list. And I'm not even sure I have a book in me. (It's much more fun to watch my baby talking to himself and learning how to blow bubbles in his mouth.)

So it was good to hear that one of the members of my semi-virtual writing group wanted to meet in person. We arranged a time when most of us could make it, and on Wednesday at lunchtime we'll get together. Maybe they'll have some suggestions for me re: my future plans. In the meantime, I'm going to try to force myself to work on that paper for the conference in May.

Writing group resurrected? and other musings

We're trying to get the writing group going again, though it will be with fewer people. We'll see how the meetings go. We're supposed to have a meeting on Feb. 11 if the weather permits. We're still emailing each other each Friday with some information about how we're doing on our projects. So far I've succeeded in writing a conference proposal and sending it in. My next (current) project is to work on a paper for a conference in May where I've been invited to present. My paper is on George Kerr (GHK).

One of the nice things about being off the tenure track is that I can choose my projects and work on what I'm really interested in. But the disadvantages include having less time to work on projects and less external (instrumental?) motivation for working on research because my work isn't valued by the university in the same way that the work of a TT person would be. So I have to motivate myself to write. I also have to decide if I want to write for a scholarly audience, a general audience, or something in between. That decision partly depends on my future goals as well, though (if I intend to stay off the tenure track forever or not). I sort of bounce back and forth between extremes when it comes to these issues. I wonder what other non-TT people in situations similar to mine are doing...?

My Chiu grant proposal

Thought I'd post my grant proposal for the summer trip to Taiwan. Here's a link to it (on my Academia.edu page).

Writing group falls apart before it begins

Well, that's depressing. A couple of members of our writing group are bowing out because we weren't able to line up our schedules enough for everyone to meet at the same time (even for a once-a-month meeting). Well, it's partly my fault, I'm sure. I have a pretty tight schedule, so I didn't help matters. Maybe we can still email each other and report on our weekly progress. Maybe I can report on my progress here to whomever happens to stumble onto this blog.

Joining a writing group

So I'm sort of signed up with a faculty writing group. I wasn't able to attend the meeting at which the group's plans were discussed (a bad omen, indeed), but they decided that we would email each other each Friday to report on

• time spent writing
• progress made and accomplishments
• challenges faced, and
• plans and goals.

My biggest problem figuring out what to write about the first one is deciding on what counts as writing. Maybe they talked about that at the meeting.

[Update, 1/26/15: Looks like they did.]

Another blog post about writing blog posts

Back in July I wrote something about trying to start up this blog again, but since then it doesn't seem like I've written very much. I guess a lot has happened since then (mainly our son's arrival) that I comment on in other places, like Facebook. I think I will try again to get back to writing here, though. Here are some thoughts on what I might (or might not) write about:

• Maybe I'll write about things that I'm reading (assuming that I get to read anything besides student writing and baby books). I'm currently reading Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, and I might have some thoughts about that once I get finished.
• My New Year's Resolution is not to go overboard in thinking (and ranting) about Taiwanese politics--that's going to be challenging since we got a TVPad and now I see a lot more Taiwanese news than before--but I might do some writing about Taiwan if I have any thoughts to write about.
• I probably will have some thoughts about Taiwan in relation to George H. Kerr, since I managed to get awarded the grant that I applied for last summer. That grant, from the Chiu Scholarly Exchange Program for Taiwan Research, is going to help fund my trip to Taiwan this coming summer to do some research on Kerr's papers at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum.
• I probably won't write much about baby-related stuff. There are lots of baby blogs out there and I don't think I will add anything interesting to that discourse. Plus I'm not comfortable posting too much personal stuff here. (I do have a running collection of pictures on my school website in case you want to see pictures of the cutest baby in the world...)
• I probably won't write anything about local academic politics (lack of job security prevents me from doing this...).

OK. So that's a start. I guess I'll have to keep up on this blog now...

No typhoons on the way to Boston...

I just noticed that my first blog posts for October of 2005, 2007, and 2009 are all about typhoons. Don't take my word for it--check out the links...

New book in the former native speaker's library

Gonna be needing this soon...

• What to Expect the First Year, 3rd. ed. (2014), by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel
  There are some mixed reviews of this book, but I figure it's a start. The fomer-current-and-future native Chinese speaker has her own books, too. And then there's all the information (and "information") on the web... plenty enough to confuse me...

Article on a new/old approach to teaching junior-high-level Chinese composition in Taiwan

Chen, Fangyu (陳芳毓). "Without Memorizing Model Essays or Sentences, Students are Taught to Write their own Stories" (不背範文佳句，教孩子寫出自己的故事). Global Views Monthly (遠見雜誌), September 2014. http://www.gvm.com.tw/Boardcontent_26063_1.html (also available as "68位學生教出57位作文滿級分 不背範文佳句，教孩子寫出自己的故事")

This article by Chen Fangyu (陳芳毓)  introduces a junior high school Chinese (國文) teacher who took an approach to the teaching of writing that evidently differed from what most junior high teachers do--and that evidently worked.

The Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students (國中教育會考) is an examination given to third-year junior high school students (ninth graders) in Taiwan. It was first given in 2014 to replace the senior high school entrance examination now that Taiwan has gone from a mandatory 9-year education system to a mandatory 12-year system, doing away with the need for a high school entrance exam. The new examination has been controversial, to say the least, but the purpose of this article isn't to criticize the test, but to describe the approach of one junior high school teacher, Zhou Tianyu (周恬宇), to helping students improve their writing--an approach that resulted in 84% of her students getting perfect marks on the Chinese writing portion of the exam, when nationwide, only 1.6% got perfect scores.

Zhou, a teacher at Taichung's Daya Junior High School, worked with her two classes of students for three years. Zhou emphasized being able to write from experience, and she tried to teach students to use their experiences in their responses to the exam prompts, which often were focused on personal experiences like "the time I made my own decision" (「那一次，我自己做決定」). Her approach to getting students more used to thinking and writing about their own experiences was to require them to keep a diary.

In addition to having students keep a diary every day, she had them watch videos like Malala's UN speech (in English, I assume, probably with Chinese subtitles) and read the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (in translation, I assume). Then she would ask students to write about questions that connected these international issues and events to their own lives.The point seems to have been to give them practice seeing connections between their lives and the kinds of topics asked about in the exam questions.

She seems to have adopted some of her approach from Erin Gruwell's depiction in The Freedom Writers Diary of her own work with underprivileged students. The article mentions in several places Gruwell's book and the movie based on it. Interestingly, what Zhou is doing is being evaluated--in both the educational system and in this news article--for its effectiveness in regards to a very traditional writing task for Taiwanese students: passing a high-stakes timed essay exam. To that end, Zhou's approach to writing instruction also needs to take into consideration her students' need to be able to write quickly at the same time that they are able to write from their experiences. The article directly addresses this challenge in the following paragraph:

68個學生程度不一，怎麼教？就像企業以標準作業流程訓練新進同仁，周恬宇也設下寫作4段標準作業流程（SOP）：第1段解題；第2段寫生活經驗；第3 段引申論述；第4段再呼應首段做結論。上手後，程度好的學生自然會打破框架，程度一般的學生也能安全上壘。

 Roughly translated:

[Zhou's] sixty-eight students write at different levels--how to teach them? Just like businesses that train their new employees in standard operating procedures, Zhou established a four-paragraph SOP: first paragraph, the opening; second paragraph, writing about personal experience; the third paragraph, extending the discussion; fourth paragraph, concluding by echoing the introductory paragraph. After practice, stronger students could break [go beyond] the framework, while regular students could safely "get on base."

Interestingly, the framework that she provides is similar (if not identical) to the traditional qi-cheng-zhuan-he (起承轉合) four-part structure for Chinese essays. Zhou's perspective on providing a template seems similar to that of American teachers who use the five-paragraph essay framework when teaching primary or secondary students to write.*

As we can see then, although Zhou eschews the "traditional" approaches of requiring students to memorize model essays or "beautiful sentences," she still provides them with a fairly fixed structure to plug their ideas into. This is distinguished, though, from the memorization/imitation techniques that are often practiced in test-preparation cram schools because Zhou insists on students using their own ideas to fill in the the essays and not on memorization and imitation that she says would destroy students' interest in writing (她說，模仿固然能培養文學性，但一定要寫自己的故事，才不會扼殺學習興趣。).

There are other things I could mention about her technique, such as how she marks the students' writing (the article says she spends three hours a day correcting their lexical and grammatical mistakes). The one thing that I want to focus on in the end, though, goes back to the point I found most fascinating about Zhou's approach--her use of non-Chinese works as springboards for students' writing. In the past, I hadn't heard of other secondary school Chinese teachers in Taiwan who used materials from other countries, like Malala's speech or A Thousand Splendid Suns, as sources. Usually, students have been required to read (and memorize?) texts from China--classical texts in particular, though not exclusively. (I don't have time right now to find sources to support this; I'll try to add something here later--if anyone has any thoughts, please comment.)

I'm tempted to call this aspect of her teaching a translingual or transcultural approach to teaching Chinese writing in the sense that she brings in experiences and texts that cross linguistic and cultural barriers, indirectly showing students that to write in Chinese doesn't require one to operate only within the linguistic and cultural borders of Chinese.

*See David Cahill's 2003 article in Written Communication for more on the qi-cheng-zhuan-he structure; he focuses in particular on how the zhuan, or "turn," as it has often been translated, has been overemphasized and misinterpreted in Western contrastive rhetoric studies, effectively making Chinese writing seem more discursively alien to Western readers than it really is.

Second week of class

Thursday marked the end for students to be able to add classes. As I thought would happen, the populations of my three classes changed a few times before then. As late as yesterday, three students were added to my "small" class, almost filling it. That class also has a move diverse population, too, in terms of majors, so we'll be able to do more interdisciplinary work.

Speaking of Tunghai...

I see that ten years ago around this time (the beginning of the semester), I was planning a Research Methods course for sophomore English majors in which I was going to have them "examine critically the history and politics of plagiarism while at the same time trying to teach them not to plagiarize." Hmmm... wonder how that worked out...

First week of classes over

We had a short week this week because classes started on Wednesday, but at least I got a chance to meet (most of) my students. During this week it's a little hard to get into the serious work of the semester because class populations can change a lot. I have two classes that are full, but one is still filling up. (Well, it's about half full right now--or half empty?)

That smaller class is going to be interesting, too, because its focus is on interdisciplinarity, but most of the students are engineering majors. (Probably because of scheduling issues.) I suppose that I can consider civil engineering and electrical engineering as different disciplines, though, even though they're in the same college.

I've given the classes some small assignments for over the weekend; we'll see how they do on those. The two sections of interdisciplinary writing are reading John Swales' chapter on discourse communities (from his 1990 book, Genre Analysis).



I plan for us to talk Monday about discourse communities and disciplinarity. We'll see how it goes! Later on we'll be reading a more recent chapter about discourse communities by Anne Johns. In the business writing course, they'll be brainstorming possible topics for their first project, a research report on a "hot" topic in their discipline/profession.

It was really hot in Boston this week, and one of the classrooms that I have two classes in was particularly sauna-like. I think the air conditioning didn't work. It reminded me of the good old days when I taught at Tunghai's College of Arts building--I remember that during the first couple of weeks of classes, there would be sweat dripping from my forehead when I was teaching. Hopefully they'll fix the air con before Monday!

Beginning of fall semester

Next Wednesday (9/3) will be the first day of classes, and marks the beginning of my fourth year teaching at Northeastern University. Time flies! This semester I'll be teaching two courses that are somewhat new to me: an advanced writing course for students in the business school and a new advanced writing course focusing on interdisciplinarity.

The first course isn't completely unfamiliar to me because most of the previous advanced writing courses I've taught have been largely (though not exclusively) populated by business majors. I'll be a bit more focused on some business-related genres, though, than on the kinds of academic genres I used to teach.

In the second course, we'll be focusing more on academic writing. This course will ideally be populated by students from a lot of different majors (though it looks like in one section of the two sections I'm teaching, most of the students are from the business school--more on the reasons for that later). Students will start out by investigating their disciplinarity discourse communities and sharing with their classmates the discourse conventions of those disciplines. Then we'll move from there into working with classmates from a different major on an interdisciplinary research project. We'll be trying to figure out how to go beyond the conventions/discourses/blinders of our individual disciplines in order to investigate topics or problems that themselves aren't limited to one discipline. This course is new--in the past, there was a general course in writing in the disciplines, but the focus wasn't so much on interdisciplinarity.

For both of these courses, I'm teaching the multilingual sections (traditionally called the SOL [Speakers of Other Languages] sections, for people whose native languages aren't English). In the past, there wasn't a multilingual section of the business writing course, but we found that most of the students in the multilingual sections of the general course were business majors, so we decided to open a special course for multilingual business majors. There's only one section for that course, though, which is why, I think, the interdisciplinary course is populated primarily by business majors (who might be surprised by the focus of the course--we'll see...).

We'll see how these courses go. Perhaps I'll post more about them later...

I'll get back to this after I get my grant proposal done...

王乾任: "尊修辭而輕思辨的美文寫作教育，害死台灣"

I do agree with this comment from him: "寫作是專門技能，國文老師一定會教寫作的假設，其實很奇怪，卻少有人會質疑--something I'm glad to see written in Taiwan... something that some people haven't realized in the US, either...

[Update, 8/31: No time to write about the article... sorry...]

Bad writing habits

I'm still working on the grant proposal. And questioning myself every step along the way. And skimming library search results and Google Scholar search results for sources that I won't have time to read before the proposal is due on the 8th. (And writing blog entries!) All the bad habits that come up when I (and I imagine a lot of other people) have to write something. I have to remember this moment when I'm teaching in the fall.

August first

I've got a grant application due soon that I've been half-(w)racking my brain over and half-avoiding, and I came across this post that I linked to back in August of 2007:

I love this description of the writing process by Tom Shroder, Editor of the Washington Post Magazine:

I'm sure there are writers who don't find writing to be a bone-crushing, nausea-inducing festival of self-loathing. I just don't happen to be one of them. Faced with a blank screen and a deadline for even the shortest, simplest piece, I am seized with the overwhelming desire to clean out my garage. Or do anything other than writing (up to and including root canal).

The problem seems to be standards. I have some. And I'm terrified I can't live up to them. I've found that to make myself write anything at all, I have to begin by lowering my sights, and simply try to write something bad. Don't even write, I tell myself, just type.

That's about how I'm feeling right now...

Another old Chiang Kai-shek joke

Liked this one when the former native Chinese speaker (why do I still call her that?) told it to me long ago. This version is updated to 2000:

蔣介石去世後，不可避免的在天堂遇見了國父孫中山先生，壯志未酬身先死的國父孫中山，非常關心中華民國的狀況，於是問老蔣：『我死後中華民國有沒有行憲啊？』
　　
蔣介石馬上回答：『有啊！有行憲，有行憲啦！』
　　
孫中山又問：『那第一任總統是誰？』
　　
蔣介石回答：『是我。』
　　
孫中山心想，老蔣一統江湖，確實當得，又問：『那第二任呢？』
　　
這時老蔣不太好意思說還是自己，可是又不太想說謊對不起老孫，於是回答道：『于右任，﹝余又任﹞。』
　　
孫中山高興的說：『不錯，不錯，書法家當總統，文學治國，那第三任又是誰呢？』
　　
蔣中正腦筋一轉，機智地答：『吳三連，﹝吾三連﹞。』
　　
孫：『嗯，輿論界有人出任總統，也好，那下一任又是誰？』
　　
蔣：『趙元任﹝照原任﹞』
　　
孫想了一想說道：『很好，語言學家當總統，那第五任呢？』
　　
蔣：『是，是趙麗蓮﹝照例連﹞。』
　　
孫中山開心的說：『太好了，連教育家也做總統了，那國家可真是越來越進步了，那第六任呢？』
　　
到第六任，蔣介石已經有點詞窮了，於是隨便嗚拉的說：『伍子胥﹝吾子續﹞。』　　

這時孫中山有點不解了，問道：『怎麼春秋時代的古人也能跑來當總統了呢？』
　　
老蔣只好不慌不忙的回答：『同名同姓啦！』
　　
聽了國父若有所悟，慍中含笑的說：『該不會是林憶蓮﹝您亦連﹞吧』
　　
老蔣尷尬假裝耳背的說：『....是啊，俺也喜歡吳復連﹝吾復連﹞.....』
　　
國父聽了火氣更高了，怒聲說道：『你乾脆改名叫﹝連......佔﹞！』
　　
接下來應該是.. 老蔣也發火了,大聲說:"隨便(水扁)啦..........."
　　
註：吳復連是台灣著名棒球選手。
　　
其實原來只到伍子胥，後來又有狗尾續貂，笑果差了點。笑話太長有 時就會疲乏了。

The fifth "John" who lost China

This is an old joke that people more educated about US-China relations than I am probably all know, but I got a kick out of it. In a review of John Paton Davies' autobiography, Roderick MacFarquhar writes,

In the 1950s, the late John King Fairbank, the dean of modern China studies at Harvard, used to tell us graduate students a joke about the allegation that a group of red-leaning foreign service officers and academics—the four Johns—had “lost” China: John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John King Fairbank himself. What the McCarthyites had forgotten, Fairbank said, was to finger the fifth “John”: John Kai-shek.

Another addition to the former native speaker's library

(I'm not sure why I'm still calling myself "the former native speaker...")

The National Geographic Magazine, January 1945. (Vol. 87, no. 1)

The reason I bought this old copy of National Geographic is that it includes an article by Joseph W. Ballantine entitled "I Lived on Formosa." Ballantine later wrote Formosa: A Problem for United States Foreign Policy as well as a book on speaking Japanese.

I looked around on the web to find out what I could about Ballantine. According to the dust jacket of his book, he was in charge of the American Consulate in Taiwan in 1912. Other sources mention that he was born in 1888 in India, so that would mean he went to Taiwan when he was 24. According to this source, though, Ballantine was a Vice and Deputy Consul in Taiwan from 1912-1914.

I came across this paper written by Richard Bush last year; part of it discusses Ballantine and, interestingly, also starts out with Bush's discovery of the National Geographic article.

 "I Lived on Formosa" introduces Taiwan in the context of the island's role in World War II, mixing descriptions of the island, its products, and its population (including its "fierce head-hunters") with depictions of US bomber attacks on airbases, a list of some of the POWs held on the island, and speculation about the potential for using Taiwan as a steppingstone to Japan. (If you haven't heard of the POW camps the Japanese had in Taiwan, here's a link to a memorial website with details.)

Besides that, two themes stand out in Ballantine's article. One is how badly the Japanese treat the Taiwanese, and how much the Taiwanese are looking forward to getting out from under "the heavy yoke" of Japanese rule and "reunit[ing] with their fellow Chinese of the mainland." Because he spoke Japanese, Ballantine writes, "I soon saw with what harshness and contemptuous arrogance the Japanese regarded and treated the subject Chinese." Later on, he writes that "Jap policemen have long arms, regiment the populace, pry into everybody's private affairs, interfere with religious services, teach school, and even try to control the thoughts of the people. Prevention and detection of crime with them are merely incidental functions."

Another theme concerns the lack of Westerners in Taiwan. He describes a "secluded" life with other Westerners, noting that in the winter, "often we were unable to get together even a quorum for bridge." A subheading in the article announces, "Few Europeans Ever Lived Long on Formosa." In Ballantine's defense, it's likely he didn't write those subheadings, but he does write that "no white man's venture here ever lasted long" without mentioning Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay, who lived there for almost 30 years.

Finally, there's a certain quality of timelessness to Ballantine's article--the sense that he is describing in present tense scenes he witnessed and  people he met decades earlier. Indeed, I haven't found any evidence that he spent any time in Taiwan after 1914. Yet none of his stories of meetings with Aborigines or discussions with Japanese officials, etc., indicate when they happened. It is as if nothing (except for the war) has changed Taiwan in the three decades since Ballantine lived there.

(I see there's an interesting book entitled Presenting America's World: Strategies of Innocence in National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945, that might discuss this kind of thing.)