Summer vacation begins

Just turned in my final grades, so that means the get back to the Big D on a fulltime basis season begins. Big D also means "Big Deadline" looming, so there'll be at most about 2 posts coming out of here this summer (probably around the end of July, if anyone cares). I'll still check my e-mail, but only once or so a day. Wish me luck!

[Update: OK, so I lied about the "2 posts". There might be a few more than that.]

Vacation

I won't be posting here for a while. I also intend (with help) to cut back drastically on my other online activities. I have some offline priorities that I need to make priorities again.

Have a good summer if you're in the northern hemisphere or winter if you're in the south! Be good to yourself!

Land of a million Britneys

Sorry, but my reference here is to how Britney drove around with her baby in her lap instead of in a safety seat.

In Taiwan, as Michael Turton illustrates (literally), we have thousands--possibly millions?--of parents who neglect their children's safety by carrying them "unhelmeted" around town on motorcycles or scooters. Michael's next project should be to photograph parents who don't put their kids in child safety seats. I don't know how many kids I've seen bouncing around in the front seats of cars or sticking their heads out of the sun roofs of Benzes...

Update: Taiwanonymous, coincidentally, also blogs about traffic problems in Taiwan: "Road Rage Scooter Style".

Five new books in the former native speaker's library

(Warning: mixed romanization follows. Proceed with caution.)

After our interesting non-vegetarian meal, the former native Chinese speaker and I wandered up to the 18th floor of Sogo, where there was in progress a large book sale benefitting the Cheng Feng Hsi Cultural and Educational Fund (鄭豐喜文化教育基金會). The fund is named after Cheng Feng Hsi, a famous writer who was born with severely handicapped legs. Despite the hardships of being disabled and poor, he graduated from National Chung Hsing University and returned to his native village to teach. He also wrote a best-selling book, A Boat on the Boundless Ocean (汪洋中的一條船). After Cheng succumbed to liver cancer at the age of 31 in 1975, his widow Wu Chi-chao (吳繼釗) started a foundation for helping the disabled and poor. (The book sale at Sogo goes until June 11, by the way. Books were donated by area bookstores and are on sale for half the cover price.)

OK--the books I bought are:

• Photographs of Taiwan During the 1960's (六十年代台灣攝影圖像), by Ellen Johnston Laing (藝術家出版社, 2002).
  This book has a nice bilingual introduction in which Laing describes her life in Taiwan during the early 1960s. She had received a Fulbright to study Chinese language and art in Taiwan, and she lived in Taipei and Taichung. While in Taichung, she and her husband Richard lived in an old Japanese-style house on a lane off Minquan Road and she took the bus to Tunghai to study Chinese. She also went to the pre-Taipei National Palace Museum, which she describes as "a few unpretentious buildings nestled below the foothills outside Wu-feng and guarded by military police" (26-7). This book has some wonderful pictures of her house and 1960s Taichung. By the way, its "intended" English title seems to be Photographs of Bygone Taiwan: Taiwan in the 1960s, but it's also (mysteriously) titled Photography of Taiwan During the 1960s on the National Library stamp in the back of the book.
  
  
• 台灣五大家族 (Taiwan's Rich and Powerful Families: The Old Monies), by Sima Xiaoqing (司馬嘨青) (玉山社, 2000).
  This book introduces the Yans of Keelung, the Lins of Banqiao, the Lins of Wufeng, the Gus of Lugang, and the Chens of Kaohsiung.
  
  
• 阿樺:台灣建國烈士詹益樺紀念專書 (Ah-Hua: A Book Commemorating Chan Yi-hua, Martyr for the Cause of Building the Taiwanese Nation), ed. Zeng Xinyi (曾心儀) (editor, 1989)
  Chan Yi-hua committed suicide by self-immolation on May 19, 1989, during a funeral procession for Cheng Nan-jung, a pro-independence journalist who also committed self-immolation when police tried to arrest him for sedition. (More information on this is available in this issue (PDF) of the pro-independence Taiwan Communique. There's also an article available here.)
  
  
• 台灣歷史年表:終戰篇 I (1945-1965) (A Chronology of Taiwan History: 1945-1965), chief ed. Xue Huayuan (薛化元) (Institute for National Policy Research, 1993)
• 台灣歷史年表:終戰篇 II (1966-1978) chief ed. Xue Huayuan (薛化元) (Institute for National Policy Research, 1994)
  These two volumes list major political, economic, social, and international events that affected Taiwan. They also cite contemporary newspaper and magazine articles that covered those events.

All in all, the five books cost me less than the cover price of the last two books. Not a bad deal.

[books] [Taiwan] [Taiwan history]

Tunghai symposium on distance language learning

This afternoon I attended a symposium at Tunghai on the topic of "Issues in Distance Language Learning." It was run by the MOE-sponsored Distance Language Learning project at Tunghai. There two speakers: Professors Herng Yow Chen (陳恒佑) of National Chi Nan University and Michael Jacques of Tunghai University.

Professor Chen, of the Computer Science and Information Engineering department, was the first to talk. He introduced us to Chi Nan's impressive multimedia language program infrastructure. He explained how the multimedia language learning program was making use of kiosks and the wireless net to allow students to make use of language learning programs from all over campus, not only through computers, but also via cell phones and PDAs. He emphasized that the advantage of online learning is reusability, and explained how the multimedia system makes use of live and recorded versions of "English Corner" activities to provide students with Video on Demand (VoD) and Audio on Demand (AoD). He demonstrated some of the resources to which the Chi Nan students had access.

Most interesting to me was the student-produced materials located at NCNU's Mountain Media site. With Prof. Chen's assistance, students write the news items and record and edit audio and video presentations for this site. Prof. Chen mentioned that participating students are paid part-time workers. In answer to a question I asked, he said that students have to be recruited for these jobs--and they're not exactly knocking down the doors to participate--and don't get paid a great deal, but that they receive a lot of training and practical experience in producing online multimedia content in English. One of the challenges that the program has to face is the difficulty of paying teachers (and students) to stay active in these kinds of activities. Although the program is part of an MOE Teaching Excellence project, the money isn't coming in very regularly to help pay for things and people. (Also, as I understand it, full-time faculty cannot be paid out of the MOE grant money.)

Prof. Chen also introduced an online English writing program that Chi Nan is using to require students to write more in English and get feedback from their teachers (or TAs) regarding grammar, spelling, and other formal issues. Right now only first-year students are making use of this online program, but he hopes that in the future all students from the first to the third year are required to participate.

During the break, I was talking with Prof. Chen and he mentioned that the school is thinking of phasing out the Freshman English program (大一英文) in favor of requiring students to study English during their first, second, and third years of attendance. This would require some major changes in staffing, however, and the logistical issues haven't been completely worked out. The idea is intriguing, though.

The next speaker, Michael Jacques, demonstrated the FLLD Online materials that he has developed for the students and teachers at Tunghai. He also discussed three key questions related to online language learning:

1. Who should be the audience for online language learning materials?
   This is a huge issue, he said, because users can be added for "free" (in terms of the costs to the school of providing the materials online to other users). While this doesn't affect the technical details of the online project, it does affect how producers of the materials should view their pedagogical aims and approaches.
   
2. Who is going to do all the work?
   Here he mentioned the need for language teachers, computer scientists, and computational linguists to work together on the project. All these parties have expertise in certain important areas, but they do not have enough expertise in other areas--so, for instance, a language teacher might have ideas about how to teach, but not know how to write a program to do what he or she wants to do.
   
3. How and when do you compensate people?
   Prof. Jacques, who has a JD, emphasized that producing these online materials does not exactly seem to fall under the umbrella of "work for hire", which isn't really a concept often used among academics. Since creating these materials is not explicitly part of anyone's job description, he said, this work "challenges the boundaries" between academic work and work for hire. Also, it appears that the laws and university policies governing producing distance learning materials are not very well developed in Taiwan (this might be my own observation).

This was an informative and interesting symposium. Unfortunately, Michael Jacques is leaving Tunghai at the end of this semester to return to the U.S., so he won't be able to continue working on the Distance Language Learning project for Tunghai. (By the way, he has a list of items for sale in case you're looking for furniture or other equipment.)

[academia] [distance learning] [ELT] [language learning] [Taiwan]

CFP: Tamkang Review issue on "The Neighbor: Literature, Politics and Ethics in the Age of Globalization"

TAMKANG REVIEW
English Department, Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taipei Hsien, Taiwan 251
TEL: 886-2-26215656 EXT. 2329 E-MAIL: tfwx@www2.tku.edu.tw

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Neighbor:
Literature, Politics and Ethics in the Age of Globalization

Deadline for Submissions: 20 September 2006

The neighbor, as a central figure in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, is a nebulous, enigmatic category that calls for rethinking in terms of subjectivity, desire, fantasy, communication, and community. The neighbor in its various manifestations―immigrants, ideal egos, ethnic Other, enjoyment, for example―provokes ambivalent responses of love and hate, fascination and fear, and problematizes the demarcations of the private and public, proximity and distance, inside and outside, hospitability and aggressivity, law and transgression. In our age of globalization, driven by fluidity, becoming, and deterritorialization, the neighbor turns out to be an unavoidable issue in the fields of literature, politics and ethics.

Tamkang Review will launch a special issue on the neighbor in spring 2007. Papers addressing the following topics are particularly welcome:

• ethnic differences and conflicts
• Neo-Nazism and xenophobia
• fundamentalist and terrorist violence
• urbanization, immigration, and diaspora
• global consumerism and tourism
• cultural translation
• monsters in Gothic fiction or horror films
  

Please note:

1. Tamkang Review only publishes papers in English not being simultaneously submitted elsewhere.
2. Please send your MLA-styled manuscript, an abstract of (no more than 250 words), a list of no more than 10 keywords, and a curriculum vita as Word-attachments to tfwx@www2.tku.edu.tw.
3. The manuscript should be anonymous. Your name and affiliation should only appear in the curriculum vita.

A book the former Bianchi-rider hopes someone will buy for him...

• The Tour de France: A Cultural History, by Christopher S. Thompson (U of California P, 2006)

Get my copy now! ;-)

Taiwan fails to get into the World Health Assembly again...

...and neither the BBC's nor CNN's websites even mention it.

For those who are counting, this was the tenth attempt by Taiwan to get observer status (not even full status as a member!) in the World Health Assembly. For those who are not counting, you should be.

As the Taipei Times reports, the assembly refused (again) even to include Taiwan's application on its meeting agenda (pdf). This was after the assembly listened to protests from Pakistan and the PRC (those role models of humanitarianism). (If you're interested in the discussion of the adoption of the agenda, you can find it in this document [pdf], page 10, Item 1.4)

The Taipei Times quotes "Ambassador and permanent representative to the UN Sha Zukang (沙祖康)" as lying saying, "'We have been very concerned about the [Taiwanese people's] health. This is absolutely for sure'." As the Times editorialized during the SARS crisis of 2003, "the biggest contribution China has made to the health of the people of Taiwan and the world lately is the transmission of the SARS virus." Those of us with memories that go back to the 921 earthquake also recall how China's Red Cross demanded international Red Cross organizations work with it if they wanted to help Taiwan. Typically, what the PRC says and what it does regarding its "concern" for the people of Taiwan are diametrically opposed.

Maybe the reason that CNN and the BBC haven't reported on this is that, after 10 years, it isn't news anymore.

[health] [Taiwan] [WHA] [WHO]

On the bright side, it's impossible to be denied tenure here...

[Update: I've made some changes to this, based on some informative comments from Clyde Warden.]

Got this in our mailboxes on Friday. It confirms something I heard about earlier, but didn't want to mention here because I didn't have all the details.

The university is following an MOE mandate to evaluate teachers every three years. Teachers are evaluated by four categories: Teaching (40-50%), Research (20-40%), Service (10-30%) and Student counseling (10-30%). Teachers need to have 70 points in total to pass the evaluation. There is no minimal point requirement for each category, but there has to be at least some points for each category. Teachers will be evaluated every three years and the evaluation is done at the college level, not the department level. If a teacher does not pass the first time, then s/he will be evaluated once a year (maximum of 6 years) also, the teacher will not be allowed to teach part-time outside of Tunghai, will not be paid overtime, annual-promotion-pay will be frozen, and cannot be "lent to other institution". If a teacher does not pass after 6 years of yearly review, s/he will be referred to the university FAC, which reserves the right to terminate his/her contract. Each college needs to come up with guidelines to calculate points for evaluation. These guidelines have to be approved by the college FAC and university FAC, but they also have to meet the MOE mandate. Each college has flexibility in assigning points. We need to create guidelines to submit to the college that will meet the needs of the teachers in our department.

The main conclusion that I draw from this is that there is no tenure system in Taiwan the tenure system in Taiwan is quite different from what many applicants might expect. (Some say there was never any tenure system--this is probably true. [But see Clyde's comments below.]) If any department or university in Taiwan is advertising for a "tenure-track position", the writers of the ad have either been misinformed and/or are misinforming the audience need to make sure applicants understand what exactly is meant by "tenure" in the Taiwan system.

My questions:

1. Are other schools doing this? Is this only new for private universities or is it new for public and private schools?
2. Can someone point me to the relevant MOE guidelines/mandate? I'd just like to take a gander at it myself.

Feel free to discuss.

[academia] [higher education] [Ministry of Education] [Taiwan] [tenure]

Comparative driving

Had to link to this description of driving practices in Burlington, NC. Sounds so much like home (here), only without the motorcyles and scooters:

See, over the last three years, I've lived in a town where there are no rules, exactly, for driving. They're more like suggestions. You know: "if it's not too much trouble, you might want to consider keeping your car right of the center line--but no biggie. We know sometimes you just need the whole road." Since moving here, Lee and I have (in most cases, many times) seen drivers:
turn left from the right lane
turn right from the left lane
wait in the right
lane until traffic clears so they can get into the left lane to turn left
back up on the interstate to take an exit
back up on a busy four-lane
road to turn into a business (and then still just drive onto the curb and into the grass between the street and the parking lot)
stop in the middle of the road to hand a package from one DHL van to another
park in the entry drive of the TJ Maxx lot because it's easier than finding a spot
pull up to an intersection, wait until we were upon said intersection, then pull out in front of us (and proceed to go 15 mph below the posted limit)
come to a complete stop to turn right from a busy street

There are more, too, but my neural net can only process so much at once.

Sound familiar?

[driving] [North Carolina] [Taiwan]

Two more books that the former native speaker ordered, and one that he didn't...

Today I received my last shipment of books from the University of California Press sale that I mentioned earlier. One of the books that I ordered didn't arrive, though, and was replaced with a book on a completely unrelated subject. I wrote to UCP to find out what happened, as no explanation was given on the invoice.

Here are the two books I ordered:

• Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II, by Gerd Horten (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002)
• Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program, by David L. McConnell (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000)

And the book I didn't order:

• The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen, by Jeffrey L. Broughton (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999) (One of my colleagues has already laid claim to it if I am unable to return it!)

[Update, 5/20/06: The representative I e-mailed apologized for the error and sent out the book I had actually ordered. She asked me to tear off the cover of The Bodhidharma Anthology and send it back so that they can count it for inventory purposes. So I cut off the cover (if you're reading, Mr. Broughton, my apologies!) with one of those razor-knives that all Taiwanese elementary students seem to carry around, and I'll send it back on Monday.]

[books]

A Pail of Oysters III

Published version of this post available here (pdf).

"Perspectives on the Language Centers in Taiwan's Universities" Symposium

I know I'm supposed to be finishing up that third post on A Pail of Oysters, but I wanted to mention a couple of other things in the mean time. One is the symposium that Tunghai's FLLD held this past Saturday (May 6). Our department hosted nine invited speakers who run language centers at different universities around Taiwan. The directors were asked to address the following questions about their programs:

1. What is the mission of your language center?
2. What is the history/development/reasons for creation?
3. Introduce your language center (staff, faculty, students, structure within the universities, etc.).
4. What are the facilities (space, allotment/office space)?
5. What is the number of faculty and staff?
6. What is the status of teachers/kind of contracts?
7. What are the requirements in terms of teaching load and responsibilities for teachers?
8. What programs/classes do you offer?
9. What are some of the pros and cons of having a language center?
10. How are teachers in the language center evaluated?

The basic motivation behind this workshop was that Tunghai is in the process of developing its own language center and wanted to learn about the pros and cons of having one. I am not on any of the committees that are in the process of developing this center, but from what I understand as of the last time the school's president came to the FLLD to talk with us, the language center would be primarily a teaching unit, separate from the FLLD. It would be under the College of Arts, if I remember correctly. It would have its own director, who would be of the same rank as a department chair. So the purpose of the symposium was to find out what other universities' language centers have dealt with in their development, so we can learn from both their successes and their difficulties.

I'm not going to summarize each person's presentation, but I want to mention a few of the major themes that came out of the presentations. In no particular order, here they are:

• There's an increasing attempt to reach out to honors or otherwise advanced students through special semester-long or short-term courses. The program at one school (and possibly more) is also feeling pressure from the rest of the school to offer courses and other kinds of help to graduate students and faculty who now are feeling more pressure to publish in English-language international academic journals.
  
  
• Most of the language centers would probably be better labelled "language programs" because they are responsible for the required first-year English courses and elective language courses. There was one (if I remember correctly) language center that did not have the responsibility for the FY-English program. It operates more as a center that offers short-term courses, lectures, study groups, and other activities for extracurricular English learning. (And the staff there consists of one director, 2 staff members, and no faculty.)
  
  
• There are more and more attempts to make use of computer-aided self-study systems so that students can learn on their own. Some programs require the computer-aided learning to be graded as part of required courses; some just provide the learning stations and hope that students will come. (One director mentioned that they had increased the number of computers in one lab from 7 to 41, but only the same 7 students were showing up...)
  
  
• Most of the directors complained of being understaffed, particularly in terms of full-time faculty. As one director put it, the problem is not a sense that part-time teachers are not as hard-working; the problem is that because it is difficult to give part-time teachers the same level of pay and facilities as full-timers (office space, etc.), part-timers usually have to teach at more than one school and therefore cannot be around for program activities, office hours, or important program meetings. This makes it harder both for students to have more interaction with their teachers outside of the classroom and for programs to be as unified as directors would like. [This is my recollection of what was said--if it doesn't quite accurate to others who were there, please let me know!]
  
  
• I felt a sense that teachers and administrators in the language center are not as highly respected as teachers or administrators in regular departments. The term "second-class citizens" was used more than once in characterizing the language centers' status.
  
  
• Related to this, I noticed a concern that language center faculty will end up being evaluated in the same way as faculty in other departments (in other words, a heavy emphasis on research), despite the heavier teaching responsibilities that come with teaching English to the entire freshman class, teaching English electives to upperclass students, and running various programs to encourage students to use English outside of class and to ensure that the English proficiency of the students meets some sort of externally defined standard (the GEPT or TOEFL, for example).

Part of the problem, from my perspective, seems to be that the schools are stuck in a situation where the MOE's requirements put them at cross-purposes vis-a-vis the language centers. On the one hand they want the language centers to ensure that everybody's English meets a certain vaguely defined standard (and I do mean "everybody's"--not just undergrads, but graduate students and faculty and staff make use of the language centers in at least some schools). On the other hand, it sounded like several program directors felt hamstrung in terms of hiring because of the emphasis on hiring assistant professors and people who are going to publish. National universities don't allow the hiring of full-time lecturers, and there is quite a bit of pressure on private universities to follow suit. (I have more to say about this, but I'm going to hold off on that for a while. In the mean time, see this post on Michael Turton's blog that raises the question, how are all the universities in Taiwan going to hire PhDs to teach in their English departments/language centers?) At this point, I'm not sure to what extent language centers will be able to offer their faculty alternatives to the research/teaching/service (where "research" means publications in big-name journals) promotion/"tenure" model. This is going to become a much more pressing issue, too, as the MOE gives private universities more pressure to require lecturers to apply for promotion (more on that later, too!).

Again, this summary of the symposium is based on my impressions/memories of the meeting. I'd appreciate the corrections of anyone else who was there. (Like Kris Vicca, who in a careless moment admitted that he's read this blog before!) I have thought about whether or not I should mention who said what, but have opted not to at this point, though if the directors want their names attached to particular comments or opinions, I'll be happy to comply with their requests. And the paragraph above is based almost entirely on my own slightly muddled view of things. I'll try to develop these ideas in more depth at some point in the future.

[academia] [ELT] [language centers] [Taiwan]

Two brief comments on Silent Hill, which we just got back from seeing

1. I pretty much agree with Roger Ebert's review of it. 'Specially the part where he says that "everybody wanders through the town for two hours while the art direction looks great." That's basically the whole story.


2. There's a scene where the main character's husband (who's looking for her and their child) breaks into a small-town archives, finds the burnt boxes of the Silent Hill police records in plain sight, and discovers in seconds exactly the record that he seems to be looking for. (I say "seems" because I'm not even sure why he wanted to check out the police records in the first place.) As someone who has done research in several archives, I just have 5 words in response to the situation I've just described: Not. In. A. Million. Years.

A Pail of Oysters II

[Note: I took this down for a while, but have re-posted it. Some of what is below is developed in more detail in my 2007 article, "Empathy and its Others: The Voice of Asia, A Pail of Oysters, and the Empathetic Writing of Formosa" (Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 33(2), 35 - 60).]

In my earlier post I mentioned what little criticism or analysis I could find about A Pail of Oysters. Here I'm not going to summarize the entire novel, but I want to point out a few things that were interesting to me about the book.

There are four main characters in A Pail of Oysters:

• Li Liu, a part-Hakka, part-Pepohuan (Plains Aborigine--or literally, "plains savage") who has been sent by his ailing father to bring back their god (a framed picture, possibly like this, which was stolen by some KMT soldiers);
• Precious Jade, a young prostitute who escapes the House of the Laughing Gods;
• her younger brother, a middle school graduate who is about Li Liu's age; and
• Ralph Barton, an American reporter who is being dragged around Taiwan by KMT people so that he can write glowing accounts of how the Nationalists are running Taiwan.

After escaping the House of the Laughing Gods, Precious Jade finds her brother in the house of their adoptive father (the same man who sold her to the house of prostitution) and they both escape. In the process, Precious Jade's brother puts the identity cards of some of the other prostitutes in a place where they can find them and then escape. This, of course, makes his rich adoptive father very angry at the both of them, since the prostitutes are one of his main sources of income. He's also upset that Precious Jade's brother has escaped, since he had invested a lot of money in the boy in hopes that in the future he would have a son to honor him after his death.

The two run into Li Liu, who has accidentally ended up in Taipei after he hitched a ride on the jeep carrying Ralph Barton. Precious Jade's brother buys some food for Li Liu and invites Li to live with Precious Jade and him, despite Precious Jade's objections.

I want to dwell, at this point, on an interesting part in the story where Precious Jade's brother and Li Liu are talking and Li Liu asks the brother what to call him:

"...I was thinking. You call me by my name. You call me Li Liu, and I do not know what to call you."

"I see."

"You said you thought your name was Yamamuro at one time, and more recently Wang, but that you did not want these names any more. Truly, though, you must have a first name by which I can address you."

"The one who was supposed to be my real father used to call me Modiharu," the youth said slowly. "And the one who bought me named me Ching-Meng." He considered. "But I don't want those names either."

"Then what am I to call you?"

"I do not know. Would you want to call me nameless one?"

Li Liu shook his head. "No."

"I see." (120-1)

Eventually, they agree that Li Liu should call him "Didi" (younger brother), just as Precious Jade does. Later on, Precious Jade's brother gets a job at the Friends of China Club and meets Barton. The two of them get to talk a lot (Precious Jade's brother is trying to improve his English), and Barton gives the boy the English name Billy.

I don't know if Sneider intended it, but Didi's (or "Billy's") issues with his name and parentage (distinguishing clearly between "the one who was supposed to be my real father" and "the one who bought me") sound like a metaphor for Taiwan's situation at the time. The boy's confusion about his name involves the same confusion over national identity that people in Taiwan might have been experiencing at the time. The use of Japanese and Chinese names mirrors the problems of identification for the Taiwanese. Each "father" gives a different name that requires the child to reject the previous identity.

In the end, Precious Jade's brother rejects both his Japanese names and his Chinese names, settling first for the label "Didi", then also for an English name that is given to him by an American. Did Sneider mean this to be symbolic of the ideal American relationship with Taiwan--one in which the Americans would help the Taiwanese people establish an identity for themselves that would not only reject the oppressive identities forced upon them by the Chinese but also be friendly to the American people?

Another narrative thread in the book suggests that this conclusion might not be too far off. Barton also becomes involved with a Mr. Chou, the head of an architectural firm who arranges secret meetings with the American to tell him about the plans some Formosans have to try to reform the Nationalist government by getting rid of the "Communistic-technique" faction of the KMT. (Here Sneider alludes to Chiang Ching-kuo, not by name, but as a member of the "Communistic-technique" faction who "has lived almost half his life" in Russia [177]). Chou wants Barton to write articles about Formosa in order to let Americans know about the problems there so that the "Democratic-technique" faction can overcome the Communistic-technique faction. He also describes the Formosans' plans to build Formosa's democracy through economic development, specifically via "free enterprise," and their hopes that the Americans will help with this. Chou assures Barton that their plan to "build Formosa" will also "be helping to build all of Asia" (180). He argues that building a strong capitalist economy on Taiwan that breaks up government monopolies and allows for the participation of Formosans will help build a better society and more appealing alternative than that of Red China. Chou implies, then, that a democratic and capitalistic Taiwan would help further the U.S.'s fight against Communism in Asia.

Chou (or Sneider?) is at pains to emphasize that the opponents of the government are not Communists, even labelling CCK's faction of the KMT as the "Communistic-technique" faction. (I'm not going to argue with that characterization, though.) The future of Asia, it is implied, lies in developing a strong free-market economy in Taiwan, which will lead to a more democratic Taiwan that would be more friendly to U.S. interests.

This is, by the way, in sharp contrast to the impressions James Michener gives of the situation in The Voice of Asia, which was published only 2 years prior to Sneider's book. After interviewing a few Mainlanders on Taiwan (see my list of his interviewees here), Michener gives the following answer to the question, "Is the present Formosa Government responsible?"

It is probably the most efficient government in Asia today, not even excepting Japan's. It has solved the food problem. It has rationed goods so that everyone gets a fair break. It polices the island so that even white men can move about at night without risk of murder. It has launched an education program, prints liberal newspapers and insures just trials. Furthermore, in order to erase evil memories of initial Chinese occupation, the Government has specifically worked to protect the indigenous Taiwanese population. (106)

Michener's "Observations" section consists almost entirely of issues related to how and when the Mainland should be retaken militarily. He doesn't suggest any changes are needed on Formosa, and in the above paragraph gives unstinting praise to the KMT regime for reforms that the characters in Sneider's novel would say hadn't even happened. To Michener, the KMT government is taking care of the Taiwanese people and Americans don't need to worry about it. Sneider's book argues that American ignorance of the real conditions on Taiwan--ignorance exacerbated by reportage like Michener's--would be disasterous for Asia.

Toward the end of the novel, Barton finds out that Billy and Precious Jade have been caught by the "Peace Preservation Corps" and taken to a racetrack in Tamshui and shot. (Their adoptive "father" found out where they were and turned them in, accusing them of being Communists.) At first Barton is sick of Taiwan and wants to leave. Then, after he runs into Li Liu, he "borrows" a jeep and helps him escape back to the South before Li Liu can be arrested. As Barton drives, the car, he changes his mind about staying in Taiwan:

No, he told himself, he wasn't finished with this part of the world. His glance slid to the boy who held his god. He would stay here. He would learn all that he could. And then he would reveal--in articles and fiction--in any way he could, the utter stupidity, the ignorance of a small group who not only enslaved eight million people, but who endangered all of Asia. (304)

This is the last we see of him. And perhaps the alleged fate of A Pail of Oysters--pulled out of libraries then and virtually ignored now--might tell us what the fate of Barton's words would have been.

More here... [Not yet...]

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Vern Sneider] [Taiwan] [白色恐怖] [White Terror]

A Pail of Oysters I

I finished reading A Pail of Oysters the day after the book arrived. I should mention that the copy I finally bought is a little water-stained and lacks a jacket, but it didn't cost me nearly as much as a lot of the copies that I've seen for sale (a quick check of one on-line book dealer shows copies selling from US$45 to US$290). One of the reasons for this is probably the relative scarcity of the book. As I mentioned previously, the story is that the KMT had some student spies steal copies of the book from libraries in the U.S. (I'm curious if anyone has any hard evidence for this story, though. I'm not doubting that this kind of thing happened; I'm just wondering if anyone has heard of any evidence that people from the KMT identified this particular book as one to systematically steal from U.S. libraries.)

Before I make my own comments about A Pail of Oysters in another post, I'll quote a few sources that summarize it or comment on it. I checked around the web and in some academic databases and didn't find much about this book. It doesn't get mentioned in any Asian Studies journals or Asia-related magazines that I have access to, and the only comments I could find in English-studies journals were two brief mentions in 1950s issues of the English Journal (one was an article about using literature to teach American schoolchildren about other cultures, and the other was a one-paragraph review of the book).

Gale's Contemporary Authors Online has some contemporary reviews of the book that praised it:

In A Pail of Oysters Sneider again drew upon his first-hand experience in the Far East to write a novel about the political problems of that area. A more serious book than Teahouse, A Pail of Oysters was described by Margaret Parton in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review as "a serious and sometimes tragic story of a sad and troubled country." Set on the island of Formosa, where the defeated Nationalist Chinese government fled after the takeover of mainland China by the communists, the novel examines the corruption and injustices of the Nationalist government. "For anyone who has served as a correspondent with the Nationalists," wrote Gordon Walker in the Christian Science Monitor, "it sounds realistic and generally accurate." Pat Frank in Saturday Review thought the novel "combines beauty of expression, originality of thought, and contemporary historical importance; it is a bright light thrust into the infected peritonium of Formosa, into a region murky with propaganda."

I should note that Christina Klein described Saturday Review as a more left-leaning publication for middlebrow Americans, as compared with a magazine like Reader's Digest. My guess is that if Reader's Digest had a review of the book (did they do book reviews?), it wouldn't have been as complimentary.

On the web, the speech by Keelung Hong that I mentioned in a previous post has this short summary of the book, including some background on its writing:

It describes not just the foibles of confused Americans out of their depths across the Pacific, but accounts of KMT terror, including the shooting of the character based on the interpreter Ed Paine recommended to Vern Sneider. The book opens with a KMT patrol seizing oysters gathered by Taiwanese coast dwellers. Sneider makes very vivid the terror in which Taiwanese lived in the late 1940s, the oppression of KMT bandit-troops, the massacre of 2-28, and also makes clear the common Taiwanese views that what land reform was really about was breaking up any Taiwanese power bases.

And a summary of the book that I found on a booklist at Forumosa has this to say:

This is a fictional story, but the tale might as well be real to a Taiwanese. The story starts in near Lukang when KMT soldiers steal the god from a family and he is sent to bring it back. Much of the story focuses around an American newsman stationed in Taipei and how he learns Nationalist Taiwan is not what it seems. The true story behind the fiction is that Sneider met Ed Paine, an eye witness to the 228 massacre and Paine hooked Sneider up with his interpreter. The history is fuzzy, the places are not where they should be, but the story is more an allegory of 50's Taipei with the dreaded race track and deaths. This book is now considered rare following years of KMT student spies stealing it from libraries.

I don't know enough about 1950s Taipei to judge the accuracy of book's descriptions, but it does give a good feeling of what the city might have been like back then, with its descriptions of both main roads like South Chungking Road, where you would find places like "Cave's Book Store and the Bank of Formosa", and some of the small alleyways and fetid apartments where many poorer people lived. It's possible, though, that Sneider spent more time in Taipei and thus his descriptions of the countryside are a bit more sketchy and superficial.

I have more to say about the book in another post.

[Update, 3/2/2007: According to the March 11, 1954 issue (pdf) of The Grosse Pointe News of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, A Pail of Oysters was selected by the Notable Books Committee of the American Library Association as one of the 50 books "of the previous year which it considers meritorious in terms of literary excellence, factual correctness and sincerity and honesty of presentation" (10). Interesting...]

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Vern Sneider] [Taiwan] [白色恐怖] [White Terror]

More new books in the former native speaker's library

...in increasing order of how excited I am to have gotten them:

• Communication and Global Society, ed. Guo-Ming Chen and William J. Starosta (NY: Peter Lang, 2000)
  Several chapters in this collection look interesting, including Hui-Ching Chang's "Reconfiguring the Global Society: 'Greater China' as Emerging Community" and Starosta and Chen's "Listening Across Diversity in Global Society".
  


• The Voice of Asia, by James A. Michener (NY: Random House, 1951)
  As I mentioned earlier, this book was discussed in Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism. I don't think she mentioned, though, that Michener has a section on Formosa that includes five short chapters: "Indian Summer in Formosa" (a chat with Y.P. Tom, a Chinese C-47 pilot), "The Governor's Mansion" (a chat with Edith Wu, the wife of K. C. Wu, Governor of Formosa), "The Hard Way" (a chat with Liu Ping, a political science student at Taiwan University), "The Tank Commanders" (a chat with "four young fellows, tough, straight and aching for a fight"), and a chapter called "Observations". I'll talk more about this later, but right now I'll just make the observation that Michener's interviewees were all Mainlanders with a burning desire to reconquer the mainland. He evidently didn't talk with any Taiwanese or anyone who had a doubt that the KMT could reconquer the mainland (with the help of the U.S., that is). (A note of thanks, by the way, to my brother and sister-in-law, who sent the book to me, and to Ainsworth Books, who did a great job of packing the book when they sent it to my brother and s-i-l!)
  
  [Update: The K. C. Wu mentioned above also figured in Fires of the Dragon. Henry Liu interviewed Wu as part of his biography of Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK). Kaplan describes him as someone who "attempted to nurture a genuine democracy on the island" and notes that, "after watching CCK's agents spread a reign of terror across the island, [Wu] finally broke with the Chiang regime and fled to America" in 1954 (192). Ironically, Michener's chapter about Edith Wu ends with her apologizing for some unfinished work on the governor's house. She says, "'We've omitted some of the little finishings. After all, we do not think of this as our permanent home'" (97). But if she expected they would be moving to Savannah, Georgia Evanston, Illinois within four years, she didn't let Michener know.]
  


• A Pail of Oysters, by Vern Sneider (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953)
  Sneider is more well-known for his book Teahouse of the August Moon, which was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando (as an Okinawan!). As Keelung Hong commented at a talk at Berkeley in 2003,

  Hollywood did not evidence the same interest in A Pail of Oysters as in his other books. Although well-reviewed, it was not a popular success. Even more than Formosa Betrayed, copies of A Pail of Oysters have disappeared from most libraries, probably on instructions issued to the student spies paid by the KMT to monitor Taiwanese on US college campuses.

  (Note: Hong's speech is worth reading in its entirety.) I noticed (without surprise) that the libraries in Taiwan don't have any copies of the English original, only of the Chinese translation that was published in 2003. This book was mentioned by a couple of people I interviewed; they said they had read it before they came to Taiwan. (A website related to Taipei American School's 50th anniversary recalls the book being "passed around the foreign community in a Catcher in the Rye book jacket".) I'm really eager to start reading this one.
  

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Communication and Global Society] [Taiwan] [The Voice of Asia]

Looking for a book...

I'm looking for a copy of Robert B. Kaplan's The Anatomy of Rhetoric: Prolegomena to a Functional Theory of Rhetoric. Language and the Teacher: A Series in Applied Linguistics 8. (Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development, 1972).

According to NBI (Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information database), there are no copies of this book in any library on the island. I've also checked several online bookstores and have come up with nothing. Anyone have a spare copy lying around?

[Anatomy of Rhetoric] [books] [contrastive rhetoric] [Robert B. Kaplan]

Scott will probably enjoy this one...

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Not just prestigious, these universities are also non-accredited! What more could you ask for?

(via a colleague)

Bold Plum: with the Guerillas in China's War against Japan

I was looking up the name of Michael Lindsay after finishing Philip West's Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916-1952 this morning. West mentions Lindsay, who taught at Yenching, and Lindsay's sympathy for the Communists. The reason I was interested in Linsday was that he was mentioned by name when R.O.C. (Taiwan) Minister of Education Cheng Tianfang (程天放) expressed to the founders of Tunghai his concern that they make sure they didn't hire any Communists or "fellow travelers" as faculty.

Anyway, I came across this website advertising a new book by Hsiao Li Lindsay, Michael Linsday's widow. The website has a 2006 copyright and says the book is coming soon. I checked Amazon, but the book isn't listed yet. Looks interesting, though!

[books] [Bold Plum] [Hsiao Li Lindsay] [Michael Lindsay] [Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations]