An exhibit for Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing classes?

This ad for Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Dr. Chris Jones has been blowing up Twitter (is that how the young people say it?).

I'm thinking about using it in my Interdisciplinary Advanced Writing course because of its interdisciplinary connections (how he combines faith and science in his discussion of time, for instance, and how he brings in his multiple degrees in physics, nuclear engineering, and urban planning). Also because of how his personal history is combined with the history of the United States. I don't have time to tease out all of the fascinating connections he's bringing into this ad right now, but there are a lot of them! Maybe my readers can point some out in the comments?

(h/t)

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Six)

Today I got up at 2:30 in the morning, thus entirely throwing off my sleeping schedule for the foreseeable future. I had an idea to take another look at an "exhibit" source I had quoted and discussed in my draft, and I found that there was a bit more that I could usefully say about that source. I was also able to attach that source to the book I'm currently reading (Chang and Holt). So I knocked out a couple of paragraphs on that before breakfast. 

Since then, between naps, I have been thinking about whether I should bring into this discussion a conference paper that I wrote about 20 years ago. (The only problem is that someone cited my conference paper in his book, so now I'm not sure if I should cite him citing me!) What I have in it would complicate what I'm talking about in the current paper, but it might do so in a useful way. We'll see...

I also did a bit of thinking and writing and assembling of documents for my July conference presentation. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to be talking about, but I need to get the presentation organized.

Finally, I came across a thread from Anicca Harriot on Twitter about some citation-related tools that I hadn't seen before. 

• Connected Papers, which maps out the network of a particular academic work, its academic sources, and the academic publications that cite it
• Scite, which analyzes how academic works are used in the publications that cite them (uses a slightly different set of terms than "BEAM" [see "exhibit" link above])

I tried two of them on an older article (*sigh* when does an article from 1996 get classified as "older"?) and came up with some interesting results. For the article, Yameng Liu's "To Capture the Essence of Chinese Rhetoric: An Anatomy of a Paradigm in Comparative Rhetoric," I got these results:

• From Connected Papers, I got this cool map. (Hope the link works!)
• From Scite, I got some results, but I haven't set up an account yet to see what they actually are. Looks like they could be interesting, though.

Anyway, another couple of tools to play with (and perhaps show to students in my Advanced Writing classes when we're working on literature reviews. (I've had mixed results when showing them the Web of Knowledge; these look like they might be more user-friendly.) I want to go back to Anicca's thread to look at the other tools she's introducing. Always love it when generous scholars share the tools they're using with the rest of us! Thanks, Anicca! You're a blessing!

Tomorrow is today! (Or, rather, it was today) (Day Thirty-Five)

Well, it didn't quite go as I expected. Woke up at 5:00, but ended up spending hours on other business that needed to get done. I did spend some time thinking about how I've sort of lost my way on my project and how I can find my way back. Ended up reading some more in one of the books I'm using as a source and thinking about how I could use it. And, overall, thinking about why I'm doing this. In the end, I think I'll keep working on it and see what I can do instead of giving up (again). So, onward and upward!

Summer's running out of steam project (Day Thirty-Four)

So as I mentioned yesterday, I took my son to his kindergarten graduation today. He's been doing remote learning this year. Today they had all the remote classes show up for an outdoor graduation, though the "ceremony" was held within the individual classes. But there were a lot of people there, especially for someone who saw (some of) his classmates only once before. I think we both ended up with sensory overload as a result, and took long naps after coming home. (I'm guessing this does not bode well for when I have to go back to teach on campus in the fall. By the end of the first day, you'll probably be able to find me curled up in a fetal position on the floor of my office...)

Anyway, that's all to say that I didn't work on my writing project today. But there's always tomorrow! (Until there isn't.)

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Three)

I printed out my draft today to take a look at it overall. Wendy Belcher recommends doing this in her book, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Particularly when you're trying to make sure that your argument is coming through, you should put the whole paper in front of you to figure out if what you're saying is clearly supporting your argument (and that you make it clear how your evidence supports your argument). Mine needs some work on that, I fear... 

More work on that tomorrow, after I attend my son's kindergarten graduation...

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-Two): Looking for old Guoyu textbooks

Saw a guy on Twitter say that he read a bunch of articles to write a footnote that he'll probably end up deleting, and I thought, "I need to compete with this." So today I've been on that Taiwan eBook website looking for elementary school 國語 (Mandarin) textbooks. I've found a few, but not what I'm looking for (I'm mainly interested in first-grade texts to compare with that one I found a few days ago).

I found these books, though (among others):

• 初級小學適用國語第八冊 (for fourth grade, published Nov. 1946)
• Lesson One is "我們是中國的少年" (We are Chinese youth)
• Lesson Two is "怎樣做新台灣的少年" (How to be a new Taiwanese youth)
• After some chapters on Koxinga and Taiwan, there's this amazing lesson called "巷戰" (which I'd translate as "urban warfare"). I was reading it to my wife, and she couldn't believe how violent it was, especially for a fourth-grade textbook. Here are some samples: "Everyone is both nervous and excited; they see their dear commanders and brothers [comrades] one by one injured or killed, but they are not sad; they are full of passion [hot blood] to take revenge for their dead." Then there's stuff about a soldier blowing up the enemy but accidentally killing one of his comrades, which makes him both excited to have killed the enemy and sad to lose his friend. 
• 高級小學國語課本第二冊 (for fifth grade, published 1949)
• This has some interesting lessons about Chongqing and Wuhan (even though this is a book for students in Taiwan, it appears they're trying to make students care about the mainland). Also there's a lesson about 伊資 (who turns out to be James Eads), a self-taught engineer who built the first bridge across the Mississippi. The textbook's introduction mentions that they want to interest students in engineering among other things. (In keeping with the Three People's Principles, of course.)
• 初小國語教科書第二冊 (for second grade, 1938)--this text was actually for students in China, so I won't spend as much time on it right now)
• 初小國語教科書. v.1 (I'll look at this later, too)

I've also Googled around looking for some, but evidently I haven't found the right combination of keywords to get what I want. Did find this interesting blogpost: "那些年我們讀的教科書──紀台灣二次政黨輪替." Gotta keep an eye on this blog--unlike the last one I found, this one seems alive still. 

If anyone knows where I can find some books from a bit later--like the 1950s, I'd be grateful!

Summer writing project (Day Thirty-One)

Did make a small amount of progress on my paper today, but I do need to pick up speed if I'm going to finish a draft of this by the end of the month (or the end of the summer?!). Also sent an email explaining my topic for the conference presentation that I'll be doing next month, so I consider that part of my writing. (See Concurrent Session 5 on July 7 for the summary of our panel's topic.) Also had a small family medical issue today that took us away from home for a while. That's taken care of now, more or less.

Back to work tomorrow? I hope!

Next on my reading list

I'm sure my dear reader is dying to know which book I'm going to read now that I've finished A Son of Taiwan. I'm still working on John Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, but that's sort of leisure reading. (Sorry, Professor Shepherd!) I've decided to read Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China, by Hui-Ching Chang and Richard Holt (Routledge, 2014). I've read some of it before but never the whole book. 

And as I mentioned in a previous post, the book is notable (to me, anyway) for being a rhetorical study that is published in a Routledge series on Taiwan rather than rhetoric or communication. I was looking to see if Stephen Hartnett had cited it, and it appears he doesn't, which is odd since his book is also about the rhetoric of China-Taiwan(-US) relations. I would think that Chang and Holt's book would be quite relevant. One possible reason that it slipped through his radar is that, from what I can tell, the book has never been reviewed in any communications-related (or any other) journals. (I'm judging this from a search of my library database. If anyone can find any reviews of this book in a scholarly journal, please correct me.) I wonder why this book doesn't seem to have been reviewed. It also has been cited only 25 times, according to Google Scholar. Could it have fallen through the disciplinary cracks? 

(By the way, I really wish A World of Turmoil had a bibliography--it was very hard to check through its endnotes to see if Chang and Holt had been cited. Maybe in a future printing/edition?)

Summer reading and reflecting (Day Thirty)

For various reasons, I felt kind of down today--I'm getting frustrated with my writing project, and I was also sad to find out that a colleague was resigning. So I mostly did some reading today (except for when I was having a meeting with another colleague about how we are going to revise a course--that went well). I read four stories in A Son of Taiwan, one of the books I mentioned yesterday. Some of them deal with men who have come back after getting out of prison for political "crimes," and others appear to be more metaphorical takes on the White Terror period. One thing that I got from reading these stories (like Li Ang's "Auntie Tiger") was the feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time. As Li Ang writes in one place,

"It was an era of mad people and beggars. We did not witness the massacre, we did not see piled bodies or bloodstains, and even Third Uncle seldom passed on his tales. Our fear came from having been taught that one could not believe even what one witnessed, for there had to be a conspiracy by enemy spies." (130)

Li uses this idea to describe various rumors that spread about the Taiwanese Communist Xie Xuehong, who tried to lead a rebellion against the KMT in the wake of the 228 Massacres. The rumors (and Li's story) tie her strength and leadership--and mysteriousness--to her sexuality, which is also depicted as strong yet mysterious. As this is a work of fiction, however, I feel I have to read a biography to find out what is true about Xie. I have a biography written by Chen Fangming, but I haven't had time to read it yet. In the meantime, I can read the article by Ya-chen Chen about her that was listed in the Wikipedia references. It's about Li Ang's portrayal of Xie. 

One thing I wish the editors would have done with the book (besides proofreading it a bit better) was expand the introduction. I noticed that that they didn't include any publication dates for the stories, for instance. I'd like more information about the stories, particularly Ye Shitao's, which appears to be extracts from a longer work and is a little hard to follow. 

Two more stories to finish. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on my paper, too.

[Update, 6/12/21: I finished the book last night. A correction: The publication year for one of the stories, Lee Yu's "Nocturnal Strings," was given (1986).] 

Summer writing reading book-buying project (Day Twenty-Nine): New books in the former native speaker's library

A few more books have been added to my collection, which may come in handy as I do my writing. Two of them are from the "Literature from Taiwan Series," that is published by Cambria Press in collaboration with the National Human Rights Museum, National Taiwan Normal University, and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. (I want to visit those two museums once I get a chance to go back to Taiwan.) 

• A Son of Taiwan: Stories of Government Atrocity, ed. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin (2021)
• Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror, ed. Ian Rowen (2021)

These are obviously collections of short stories written during or reflecting on the White Terror period. 

The third book, published by Rowman & Littlefield, is a collection of essays by some major figures in and scholars of contemporary Taiwan:

• Taiwan's Struggle: Voices of the Taiwanese, ed. Shyu-tu Lee and Jack F. Williams (2014)

Hopefully I'll be able to dip into some of these books as I work on a couple of projects during the next few weeks before I have to start teaching again in July.

Summer writing reading project (Days Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight): Elegy of Sweet Potatoes

Let's just admit it. My mind is more on reading than it is on writing. Especially when I keep getting good books in the mail. Tuesday (Day Twenty-Seven) I got a copy of Tehpen Tsai's Elegy of Sweet Potatoes in the mail. I finished reading it today (Day Twenty-Eight). I think the last time I read a book this quickly was when I read A Pail of Oysters about 15 years ago. I think this book is about twice as long as Oysters, but like the former, it's highly readable and engaging. 

Shortly into the book I realized that "sweet potatoes" (plural) must refer to all of the young Taiwanese men who were caught up in the Chinese Nationalist Party's sweep of Communists, rebels, people with "wrong" thoughts, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and people who associated with the wrong people (who, in some cases, implicated them in illegal activities or thought crimes in order to extend their own lives). I realized that while Tehpen Tsai (lightly fictionalized as Youde Tsai) is the main character through whose eyes we see part of the White Terror period in 1950s Taiwan, the book is really about the "sweet potatoes" (again, plural), whose lives were for the most part destroyed by the KMT. It's also about their families who, while mostly staying in the background, show through in some scenes (such as at the beginning and end of the book when we see Tsai's family's reaction to his arrest and return), in the letters that the prisoners share with each other, and in the conversations the prisoners have about their families. One prisoner suggests that if he is ever sentenced, he will divorce his wife if the sentence is longer than 10 years so that she and their child can have a better life. Tsai's family shows up in some photographs, as well--the look of joy on the face of his wife, Panto, in the last photograph is particularly moving. 

The book is packed with details and people (I need a list of characters to help keep me straight, especially since some characters are called by more than one name). Although it's not an academic history, you get what feels like a first-hand experience of what it was like to be be imprisoned during the White Terror. (The pecking order for where the prisoners in the overcrowded cells--the newest prisoner usually had to stand next to the toilet--reminded me of Wang Wenqing's (王文清) story, 「獄中獄外的人生」published in 《秋蟬的悲鳴:白色恐怖受難文集》.) I was surprised by how much the prisoners were able to talk to each other in some of the prisons and by the fact that they were able to sing Japanese and even Communist songs while their fellow prisoners were being taken away to be executed.

An informative essay by Michael Cannings about the life of Tehpen Tsai also needs to be read to get a more complete understanding of Tsai and his story. It gives background to the historical period and more details about Tsai's life that are only touched upon in the book--particularly his life post-imprisonment. 

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Six)

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

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Five)

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

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

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

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

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

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

第一課  臺灣人                            

Lesson One: Taiwanese

我是臺灣人                           

I am Taiwanese

你是臺灣人                 

 You are Taiwanese

他是臺灣人 

He is Taiwanese

我們都是臺灣人 

We are all Taiwanese

第二課  中國人 

Lesson Two: Chinese

我們的祖宗  是福建人  是廣東人 

Our ancestors are Fujianese. are Cantonese

福建人  廣東人  臺灣人  都是中國人 

Fujianese. Cantonese Taiwanese all are Chinese 

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

爸爸說  我們的國名是中華民國   我們應該記住我們的國名 

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

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

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

第二十四課   日本侵略中國

 Lesson 24  Japan Invades China

老師站在地圖旁邊   拿著一幅圖給大家看 

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

上面畫著一片秋海棠葉   又畫著一條毛蟲 

On the picture are a begonia leaf and a caterpillar

老師說  這裡秋海棠葉的位置  正式地圖上中國的位置 

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

這裡毛蟲的位置   正式地圖上日本的位置 

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

這裡畫著毛蟲爬去吃秋海棠葉  就是表明從前日本想侵略中國 

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

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Three)

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-Two)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Twenty-One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Twenty)

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

Summer writing project (Day Nineteen)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Eighteen)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Seventeen)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Fifteen)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Fourteen)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Thirteen)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Days Eleven and Twelve)

Knew I forgot something yesterday...

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Ten)

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

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

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

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

See you Monday!

Summer writing project (Days Eight and Nine)

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

Summer writing project (Day Seven)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Six)

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

Summer writing project (Day Five)

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

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

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

Summer writing project (Day Four)

A little late on writing this. Apologies to all my reader.

I did get up earlier today, but I only got a paragraph written. Not much, huh? Maybe I'll pick up speed on it soon. 

Meanwhile, I read more of Becoming Taiwanese for inspiration. Back to work tomorrow!

"Now what enemies do we have?"

In the third chapter of Becoming Taiwanese, Evan N. Dawley goes into some depth discussing a Lunar New Year banner hung in the Jilong Customs Assimilation Association (基隆同風會) meeting hall in 1935. The purpose of the Customs Assimilation Association (CAA) was to promote the assimilation of Japan's Taiwanese subjects to Japanese culture, though there was less a sense, at least at the time the CAA was established, of a need to eradicate all non-Japanese practices than there was a kind of negotiation between local practices and the norms of the Japanese metropole. For instance, Dawley notes that a "mild critique" of local religious festivals is "couched in a Confucian morality that must have been familiar to Jilong's islanders" (151). 

The banner at the CAA building is another such negotiation, according to the author. After translating the couplets on the banner, one of which reads, "With the same sentiments and origins, we enforce military preparations and encourage culture and learning, why should we fear that our enemies will run wild?" (154), Dawley argues that the couplets represent a negotiation between "their Chinese heritage and their accommodations to Japanese rule" (155). Going into more depth about the reference to "enemies," he writes, 

The reference to "enemies" (hu'er [胡兒]), a term with an ancient application to supposedly uncivilized groups beyond the state's borders, was [155||156] perhaps the most telling statement of their independent consciousness. On one level was the question of just who these enemies were. Just across the Taiwan Strait lay Republican China, where the central government did not have firm control over all of the provinces, but the centralizing regime at times threatened Japanese interests; to the north of the area under Nationalist Chinese rule lay Manchuria, an ancient homeland for China's enemies, including some historical hu'er, where the Japanese Army ran a puppet state through the last Manchu emperor and challenged Chinese sovereignty. Which group corresponded to the enemies who might run wild? At no time had [local Jiling elites] Yan and Xu overtly displayed the sort of anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism that flourished across the strait and motivated the "half-mountain people" (banshanren) who left Taiwan to fight Japan in China. They would certainly not have risked referring to Manchukuo as an enemy in the presence of Government-General representatives. It is more likely that both the ongoing fragmentation in China and the potential danger of a more unified nation under Nationalist control sparked the metaphor, but even so the message did not favor expansion, since these enemies gave no real cause for concern. Yan and Xu subtly challenged those who saw Taiwan as a bastion for further imperial conquest, and they did so by relying on an old Chinese worldview of external threats, and on the language of literary Chinese, which connected them to their cultural background rather than to contemporary Japanese nationalism. (155-6)

I like Dawley's interpretation of the rhetoric of "enemies" in the couplet. I hadn't heard of the term hu'er before; when I looked it up, another thought occurred to me. I saw that one of the definitions of the term notes, "清 末 民 初泛用為對外國人的蔑稱" (meaning that hu'er was used at the end of the Qing and the beginning of the Republican period to refer more generally to foreigners). I wonder if Japanese were ever called hu'er...

This couplet reminded me, too, of another place where I saw "enemies" referred to: in a sixth-grade Guoyu textbook lesson from 1956. In this lesson about a Chinese war hero named Yan Haiwen, "the enemy" is never referred to by name, just by the appellation, "the enemy" (in this case, using the term diren [敵人]). At the end of the lesson, students are asked, "Who was China's enemy at that time? Now what enemies do we have?" In the textbook, the writers are vague about the identity of the enemy in order to force students to emphasize that the Japanese were the enemy of China at that time, and then through the second question, to identify with China by answering the question about the enemies "we" have now. For Taiwanese sixth-graders in 1956, whose older relatives (including siblings or parents) might have served the Japanese military in some way, to be associated with "China's enemy" in their Guoyu class must have been traumatic. 

Summer writing project (Day Three)

Overslept this morning, so I didn't make much headway on my project so far. One thing I did decide to do, though, was to save my work as a new file and then delete everything after the (somewhat long) introduction I mentioned yesterday. I did that because I felt that the current draft, a lot of which came from a 2005 conference paper and a chapter from my dissertation, was no longer reflecting what (I think) I'm trying to do. So I decided instead to start from scratch. I can always go back to previous drafts to copy relevant parts into the new version when necessary. 

Right now I'm reading Evan N. Dawley's book, Becoming Taiwanese. I just finished the third chapter, in which Dawley explores how social organizations in Jilong mediated between the residents of Jilong (both islanders and Japanese settlers) and the shifting approaches the Japanese colonial government was taking toward Taiwan. He ends the chapter with the suggestion that it's in the context of the 1930s-era push for assimilation in the expanding (and increasingly intolerant) Japanese empire that we can begin to see "Taiwanese" "as an ethnic group that obtained cohesion and sought survival within the confines of the Japanese Empire" (160). 

Anyway, back to work...

Summer writing project (Day Two)

I was up a bit late last night, so I woke up a little later than I had planned. Last night, there was a panel discussion online about the Diaoyutai movement of 1971, and I wanted to tune into that. It turns out they recorded it, so it might end up on their website at some point in the future. There were some "old veterans" of the movement who talked: Liu Ta-jen (劉大任), Chang Hsi-kuo (張系國),  and Shaw Yu-ming (邵玉銘). There were also some scholars who discussed their research on the movement. Chang couldn't stay for long because he had a heart operation today(!). I wish him the best!

So to my writing--yesterday I was complaining about my introduction, which was not taking me in the direction I was hoping to go. This morning I found a way to cut to the chase and get the introduction to where I wanted it to be. The problem, though, is that my introduction is about 1165 words, which is almost 1/6 of the maximum length of the paper (the journal I hope to send this to requires articles to be at most 7500 words). So I will probably have to cut that introduction down at some point. But first I need to get the paper written; then I can decide how it needs to be cut down. Wish me luck!

Summer writing project (Day One)

During the past year, I joined a group at my school that was working on writing research articles. We were using the book, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks by Wendy Belcher to help us through the process. One thing we liked about the book is that it's actually more realistic than its title suggests--for me, the 12 weeks has stretched out into something closer to 36 weeks and counting. 

I also found that I wasn't able to keep up with the writing, so I'm now coming back to my paper after a two-month hiatus. (Sorry, Dr. Belcher!) I have a couple of months to work on it before I have to start teaching again (I have a class to teach starting in early July), so I'm going to try to see if I can finish a solid draft by then. First step is to remind myself of what I was writing about!

I reread my introduction draft this morning and was excited at what I was working on, though at the same time I feel as though the introduction is taking me in a different direction than I was originally thinking. That is, it seems to be introducing a different paper from the one I thought I was working on. I'm now considering what I should do about that. One part of me wants to continue on this introduction and see where it takes me, but another part of me wants to go back to the draft of the body of the paper (which is a bit of a mess) and see how I can work my way from there back to a more suitable introduction. Probably I'd have to rewrite the body as part of that process, but I'll have to do that anyway. 

If I did the latter, I suppose I could keep the first introduction for another paper. I like it, though, and at least part of it seems relevant to what I plan to write about for this paper, but I'm not sure how to tame it to get it to move me to where I want to be. 

Well, this is the first day of the summer writing project, so I guess it's OK if I am working through these kinds of questions at this "early" stage.

I'll try to continue with these vague blog posts on my writing process throughout the summer. At least it might force me to keep getting up early and doing some writing.

New books in the former native speaker's library

Well, April is almost over and I see I haven't written anything here. Apologies to my reader(s). Classes are over now, and grades are due May 3 (I keep writing March 3 for some reason). After that, I have a bit of a break because I won't be teaching the first summer session. I have a research project I want to make some progress on and a few other things, so hopefully I won't spend the entire month of May lying on the couch watching old movies. 

I also want to read some books that I've acquired in the last few weeks (with the help of professional development money). These will figure at least indirectly into that project I mentioned. 

• Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, by Evan N. Dawley (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019). I'm going to start with this one. Dawley discusses the book here. I always love to hear authors talk about their writing process--how they came up with their topics, etc.
• The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (Cambridge, 2021). I heard Yang talk about this book at a Wilson Center virtual event--his talk is available here. I was already going to buy the book, but Yang's talk excited me even more about the subject.

I ordered several Routledge books on Taiwan, something I wouldn't normally do without professional development money. (Also they're having a 20% off sale on everything!) There were some that I felt I needed for this project, though, and I didn't just want to order ebooks for the library. (Sometimes they take a while to become available. Anyway...)

• Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan, by Bi-yu Chang (Routledge, 2015). No link to any book talk here, though she did talk at the the SOAS Taiwan Studies Summer School I attended last year (!). (Anyone know if they're doing one this year?)
• Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China, by Hui-Ching Chang and Richard Holt (Routledge, 2015). I mentioned this book in a previous post, but I didn't have a copy yet.
• Comparatizing Taiwan, ed. Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao (Routledge, 2015). I'm not sure how much of this book I'll be reading--some of the chapters appear to be out of my area (whatever that is), but the introduction and first chapter could be useful.
• The Colonisation and Settlement of Taiwan, 1684-1945: Land Tenure, Law and Qing and Japanese Policies, by Ruiping Ye (Routledge, 2019). This is probably even further out of my area, but the title interested me.
• Taiwan: Manipulation of Ideology and Struggle for Identity, ed. Chris Shei (Routledge, 2021). This new book is part of the Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis series. This would appear to be more closer to my area, and there are some interesting chapters (judging from the titles) that I'll want to dip into, like Hsin-Yi Yeh's on "Remembered Chinese-ness and its Dynamics: Analysing the National-Remembering in Taiwan after 1949." 

This is probably my longest list of new books ever! Hope I actually get around to reading some of them, or I will truly live up to that poem I quoted long ago,

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books are a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
--Arnold Lobel [But I'm still annoyed by the grammatical error in the third line...]

Update on water harvesting question about Taiwan

A quick post to mention that I received a reply from the Water Resources Agency, Ministry of Economic Affairs, that indicated that they have been doing cloud seeding for the past 10 years. They referred me to this explanation of cloud seeding. They didn't say much about atmospheric water harvesting, which suggests that they are not doing anything presently in that direction.

I also came across a recent article in Nano Energy on "Solar-powered nanostructured biopolymer hygroscopic aerogels for atmospheric water harvesting." One of the authors is a professor at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, so I wrote to him to ask if he knew of anyone in Taiwan working on practical applications of atmospheric water harvesting. I'll update when I hear back.

Considering the recent reports of heavy fog in western Taiwan, atmospheric water harvesting sounds like an ideal approach to Taiwan's drought conditions.

Another source on atmospheric water harvesting:

• "Fog‐to‐Water for Water Scarcity in Climate‐Change Hazards Hotspots: Pilot Study in Southeast Asia" by Zaitizila Ismail and Yun Ii Go, Global Challenges (2021). 
  Abstract: "Water is indispensable for human survival. Freshwater scarcity and unsustainable water are the main growing concerns in the world. It is estimated that about 800 million people worldwide do not have basic access to drinking water and about 2.2 billion people do not have access to safe water supply. Southeast Asia is most likely to experience water scarcity and water demand as a result of climate change. Climate change and the increasing water demand that eventually contribute to water scarcity are focused upon here. For Southeast Asia to adapt to the adverse consequences of global climate change and the growing concern of environmental water demand, fog water harvesting is considered as the most promising method to overcome water scarcity or drought. Fog water collection technique is a passive, low maintenance, and sustainable option that can supply fresh drinking water to communities where fog is a common phenomenon. Fog water harvesting system involves the use of mesh nets to collect water as fog passes through them. Only minimal cost is required for the operation and maintenance. In conclusion, fog water harvesting seems to be a promising method that can be implemented to overcome water scarcity and water demand in Southeast Asia."

Is anyone in Taiwan doing work on atmospheric water harvesting?

OK, I'm going way out of my own comfort zone when it comes to this topic, but I'm going to toss out an idea anyway. I heard about this idea of harvesting water from the atmosphere on NPR a long time ago (was it this many years ago?). Lately, the news from Taiwan has been about the lack of rainfall (fewer typhoons, which is resulting in less water for industrial, agricultural, and residential purposes). It has come up most recently in worries about how Taiwan's production of semiconductors will be affected by the drought.

What I haven't seen yet is any reporting on the possibility of using the idea of atmospheric water harvesting to provide more water to Taiwan. I wrote a couple of friends about it--one a Taiwanese industrial engineer at my school, and the other, a faculty member in a university in Taiwan that has a sustainability science program. Neither of them knew much about what might be going on in Taiwan in relation to this idea. 

I also wrote an email to President Tsai's office (through their website--I don't have her personal email or anything). I mentioned a couple of articles about this idea (they don't let you forward links, unfortunately): this more general-audience article on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for water harvesting, and this academic article on "autonomous atmospheric water seeping MOF matrix." 

I don't know if anyone in Taiwan is working on this already. I don't know if it would even work--maybe it's too humid in Taiwan (a lot of the places where they use these things seem to be pretty arid). But it might be worth a try. 

[See update here.]

Transcript of an interview with Kam Louie at National Taiwan University

I came across this transcript of an interview with Kam Louie. It's 99 pages long (!), so I haven't finished it yet, but it's quite interesting. 

Everything I know about academic writing I learned from my six-year-old

My six-year-old likes to talk about dinosaurs. Any conversation you try to have with him always ends up turning to dinosaurs. The other night, he was talking to his grandmother, who asked him how he liked the book she had sent him. "I like it! I like it a lot! Small Inventions that Changed the World!" (He said the title very dramatically.) But then, "The Paraceratherium was a giant rhino that walked the earth over 30 million years ago…” As you can imagine, it’s not easy to have a conversation with him, unless you want to listen to him lecture you on the prehistoric world (Paraceratherium was technically not a dinosaur, he reminds me).

I am supposed to talk to a class of first-year English majors in a couple of days about my research and teaching, but I've got this on my mind instead. I'm thinking about how how much watching my kindergartner has taught me about scholarly writing. Here are a couple of points that come to mind:

• The importance of taking part in a conversation. Kenneth Burke's metaphor of entering the parlor is popular among writing teachers (I have it in my syllabus, in fact). The example above demonstrates the risks of not listening for a while until "you have caught the tenor of the argument." Typically, upon waking up, his first words to me will be something like "Baba, 65 million years ago, a giant asteroid collided with the earth near Mexico, and the dinosaurs all died." (Before you write to correct that, be aware that I am simplifying what he says to me--he's more complex and nuanced.) My point is that like my son, I need to learn good academic writing "manners"--instead of jumping right in with my own contribution, I need to think about how what I want to say relates to what people are currently talking about. 
• The importance of good titles. I hate my titles, but my son doesn't seem to have any trouble with putting out short, provocative titles. Here are a couple (he also has a cool pen name: Mr P.):

• The importance of branching out into other areas of inquiry. While he's currently thinking a lot about dinosaurs, you can see from the two titles that my son doesn't only write about prehistoric life. He has also found out, too, that learning about geology is important to understanding dinosaurs.
• The importance of not being too much of a perfectionist. My son just plows on through mistakes, as you can see from the title of "Human Destroys the World!" I try to remind myself that nothing I write is going to be the "final word" on the topic, so I shouldn't put so much stress on it being "perfect" or on responding to all of the critical voices in my head in that one paper. Save something for future work or responses to criticism. Just put it out into the world! And don't let spelling get in the way.
• The importance of writing every day. Right now he's asking me for paper, so I'd better stop this and get him some.

"Hey, guys! Wait up for me!"

 

Recorded from my kitchen window Sunday, Feb. 7

Another book in the former native speaker's library

I don't have time these days to read or write anything not related to teaching, but I can still buy books! My latest purchase is an English translation Ye Shitao's A History of Taiwan Literature by Christopher Lupke. It has a great cover, a 1927 street scene by Ran In-ting (藍蔭鼎), an important Taiwanese watercolor artist. (Here's a short video in Mandarin about Ran.)

I first heard about this translation from an interview with Lupke on the New Books Network. I liked the interview, especially for the chance to hear about Lupke's experiences in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and about his process of doing the translation. (It took him about 10 years!) 

I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to read it, but I think I'll have to dip into it as I work on a writing project on a somewhat related topic. The book's a bit expensive, so hopefully I'll get reimbursed for it!

Rebecca Wragg Sykes on Neanderthals

This is a topic that I know absolutely nothing about, so I'm not sure why this article, "Sheanderthal," was pushed to me. (Maybe it's because my six-year-old is constantly asking me how to spell the names of dinosaurs and other words about the prehistoric world, and I have to look the words up on Google!) But this was a pretty fascinating read about what scientists know, and what they speculate, about the lives of female Neanderthals. I was particularly struck by the interdisciplinarity of the work, combining archaeology, genetics, anthropology, biology, and probably a couple of more disciplines I've not noticed. 

I'm now watching a conversation between Michael Shermer and her about her book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Shermer talks a little too much, in my view (sorry, dude!), but it's pretty interesting to listen to.

Wenchang Jun Figurine (文昌君公仔)

In last semester's Travel Writing class, I asked students to write about a "souvenir" that they had acquired (or hoped to acquire) in their travels. I asked them to describe the item, to explain where they had acquired it, to discuss its meaning to them, and to consider how the souvenir might be metonymic (based on the article by Morgan and Pritchard that I cite below). I thought I'd share what I wrote in response to that assignment for anyone who might be interested. (It's not likely to be published anywhere else!) We wrote our assignments as letters to each other, which as I explained to them at the beginning of the semester has long been one of the main forms of travel writing.

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Hi everyone,

I acquired this little figurine of the 文昌君 (Wenchang Jun), or “God of Literature and Culture," in a bookstore in Taichung back when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. This god, who is also called by other names like 文昌王 (Wenchang Wang) and 文昌帝君 (Wenchang Dijun), has historically been associated with learning and literacy; he was traditionally called upon by people who were preparing for the Civil Service examinations in Imperial China. Even today, students who are preparing for the university entrance exams or other important tests will go to Wenchang temples (Wenchang Ci, 文昌祠) to ask for the god’s blessing. 

Photos of my 文昌君 figurine (公仔) taken by myself (August 22, 2020).

Obviously, the figurine above is the "cute” version of the god. A more “serious” version can be found in temples like the Wenchang Temple in Xinzhuang, New Taipei City (see image below). 

Wenchang Dijun (文昌帝君), taken at the Xinzhuang Wenchang Temple (新莊文昌祠), Taiwan. (Photo taken by Pbdragonwang, CC BY-SA 4.0)

One place in Taiwan where the Wenchang Dijun can be found is in academies established to teach children (typically boys) and train scholars to pass the Civil Service examinations during the Qing Dynasty. Back in 2006, my wife and I visited the Huangxi (or Huangsi) Academy (磺溪書院) in Dadu, Central Taiwan, which, according to a sign in front of the school, had been established on the site of a Wenchang temple around 1887. (If you want to know more about the temple and academy, check out this post on Alexander Synaptic's blog.) 

Photo of the Huangsi Academy taken by myself (Dec. 29, 2006).

Although I do not worship Wenchang Dijun and never (consciously) asked for his blessing on my dissertation work, I couldn’t resist picking up the figurine when I saw it in the Nobel Bookstore. The name of the bookstore itself calls up several associations--besides sounding a little like Barnes and Noble, it also suggests a promise that customers can become successful scholars like Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲), a Taiwanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986. Even more than Barnes and Noble, Nobel, like many bookstores in Taiwan, devotes much of its space to stationery and test-preparation materials in addition to selling popular and scholarly books, gifts, and manga. 

This souvenir isn’t an expensive, hand-crafted art object. It cost me NT$85 (less than US$3) with my Nobel membership card. To me, though, it signifies something important about the place I was in at that time, both literally and figuratively. Sitting in the stationery section of that multi-storey bookstore, it reminds me of the important role examinations play in the lives of Taiwanese and the various methods they might use to do well on those exams (from attending exam prep classes at night to visiting a Wenchang temple to ask the god for help getting into their “first-choice” school). I imagine the meaning of the “100 分" on the paper Wenchang Jun is holding is clear to anyone in this context--you can imagine how having this on your desk as you study might encourage you in the middle of those late night study sessions. That was also a reason that I bought this--to motivate me as I worked on my dissertation, a long drawn-out process that didn’t seem to want to end. Seeing him sitting there, brush in one hand, the promise of a perfect score in the other, gave me a feeling that this was a marathon I would finish. 

The figurine also speaks to Morgan and Pritchard’s assertion that “souvenirs are rhetorical, socially incarnated signs, registering a complexity of acquisition and signalling complex social messages” (41). At one point, I had the figurine in my office, and it acted as a “cute” conversation piece that simultaneously indexed my own “authenticity” as someone who understood the meaning and significance of Wenchang Jun. I also probably hoped that it would remind people of my (self-perceived) status as a scholar through its association with the long tradition of Wenchang temples and academies in Chinese culture. 

Now the souvenir acts as a touchstone for memories of a previous place in my life--the waning years of my formal studenthood and the culture in which I was trying to immerse myself. 

Works Cited

"新莊文昌祠" (Xinzhuang Wenchang Temple). Wikipedia, zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E8%8E%8A%E6%96%87%E6%98%8C%E7%A5%A0. Accessed 22 August 2020.

Morgan, Nigel, and Annette Pritchard. "On Souvenirs and Metonymy: Narratives of Memory, Metaphor, and Materiality." Tourist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 29-53. doi:10.1177/1468797605062714.

"Interesting times" redux

A Twitter posting from Ketagalan Media (why oh why am I still looking at Twitter postings?) reminded me that I started this blog almost 17 years ago in the context of Chen Shui-bian's win over Lien Chan, who called the election a fraud. As the Twitter post says, "Rioters set fire on the streets and rammed down the gates to Kaohsiung's courthouse." I recall that former KMT legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) was one of the instigators of that. Ugh. Anyway, the US seems to have outdone Taiwan by having a sitting president instigate a violent riot/coup attempt. Maybe this is what is meant by "American exceptionalism."

[Edit: Struck those words because I don't want anyone to feel like they have to give me a history lesson.]

 Nope.