Two new books in the former native speaker's library; writing plans

I received my copies of Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China and Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh's (eds.) Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so that's exciting. You's book promises to take a "decolonial and transnational approach" to the study of rhetoric in ancient China, so I think I'll be bumping that book to the front of my readings in preparation for the "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics" RSA Summer Institute seminar I mentioned I'll be participating in this May. 

But first I want to finish reading Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》(蔚藍文化， 2016), after which I'll write some notes here about that. It's quite a moving (and sometimes frustrating) biography of Yang Kui (or Yang K'uei, if you prefer), and it has me thinking a lot about Yang as rhetor and rhetorician. I'll try writing up something about Yang Tsui's depiction of him in that light.

Julean H. Arnold, Education in Formosa (1908)

Arnold, Julean H. Education in Formosa. Bulletin, No. 5. Whole Number 388, United States Bureau of Education, Department of the Interior, 1908.

Came across this document while spelunking through the web for sources about Candidius, the seventeenth-century Dutch missionary to Formosa. (I did find some good sources on him, by the way.) Anyway, this relatively short bulletin (about 70 pp.) was written by Arnold, the American consul at Tamsui (淡水) at the time,* and was of interest to the US government, according to the letter of transmittal, because 

educational campaign of the Japanese Government in Formosa, which he describes with careful attention to essential details, offers a significant parallel to the educational campaign which our Government is conducting, at no great distance  from Formosa and under somewhat similar conditions, in the Philippine Islands.

The text is a bit hard to read--it's not a great copy, but a transcription of the preface might give some idea of the tone of the document:

With Japan and America entering the ranks of the colonizing powers, the question of colonial education becomes particularly important, especially so in view of the fact that education in both Japan and America occupies a commanding position. It is rather significant that the two great Pacific powers should have become colonizing nations within three years of each other.

It is the purpose of this monograph to set forth the results of Japan's efforts to establish an educational system in Formosa, her first colonial possession. In order that we may fully understand the nature of the problem with which she has to contend, I have attempted to describe somewhat fully the work of her predecessors in the island, the Dutch and the Chinese. Thus the monograph has naturally resolved itself into a history of education in Formosa. While I have touched upon the subject of education in both China and Japan, I have made no effort to describe conditions as they obtain in those countries. For such a description, the reader is referred to Mr. Robert E. Lewis's admirable book, The Educational Conquest of the Far East.

For much of my material I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Rev. William Campbell's work, entitled "Formosa Under the Dutch," and to the official publications of the Formosan government. I am especially indebted to Mr. Mochiji, director of education in Formosa, and to Mr. Ogawa, his very able assistant, for their extreme kindness in affording me every possible opportunity to study conditions at first hand.

JULEAN H. ARNOLD.

AMERICAN CONSULATE.

Tamsui (Daitotei), Formosa

I'd also note that this book is cited in E. Patricia Tsurumi's Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945.

*The author also produced a booklet entitled The Peoples Of Formosa, which was published in1909 by the Smithsonian. A footnote on the first page of the booklet describes it as part of a report originally sent by Arnold to teh State Department, translating a report to the Japanese government by "Mr. Oshima, Superintendent of Police of the Japanese Government of Formosa ... on the management of savage affairs during the fiscal year 1907." Arnold's papers are available at the Hoover Institution Archives.

Taiwan Studies Workshop at the University of Tübingen (Oct 2023): proposal deadline May 31

Copying this from the NATSA website to keep in mind:

Taiwan as Pioneer workshop

at the ERCCT, University of Tübingen, Germany

4-6 October 2023

The Taiwan as Pioneer (TAP) project at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany, will hold a workshop for Ph.D. candidates, postdocs and established scholars, from October 4-6, 2023. The workshop will be conducted in English and Chinese. The main topic for the workshop is "Innovative methodologies and new perspectives on Taiwan studies." Other paper submissions pertaining to the fields of Taiwan society and culture are also highly welcomed, but we ask participants to highlight and discuss their methodological choices in more detail than in a regular presentation.

This established format of the workshop provides participants with the opportunity to:

• present their research to an international audience of peers

• engage in scholarly exchange on theory and methodology

• get to know Tübingen, the ERCCT and Tübingen University

• join the TAP network

• the possibility to contribute to TAP’s Handbook of methodologies for Taiwan Studies

Travel expenses and accommodation will be covered by TAP:

• Participants from Germany: travel fees up to 200 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

• Participants from Europe: travel fees up to 500 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

• Participants from Asia (and Taiwanese people and Taiwanese studies reserchers in North America): travel fees up to 1,400 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

Successful applicants are requested to submit a 6000 words (TNR 12, single line spacing, does not include reference list) research paper after the workshop (by 12-31-2023) for online publication on the TAP website at the University of Tübingen. The possibility that this paper could become a chapter of the Handbook can be discussed in more detail.

To apply, please send your CV and an outline of your research project (max 2500 words) until May 31, 2023 to:

Dr. Amélie Keyser-Verreault, Ph.D.

TAP project lead at the ERCCT

Mail: amelie.keyser-verreault@uni.tuebingen.de

Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 30th.

About TAP: The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has awarded a grant to four post-doc researchers to conduct the joint research program TAP (Taiwan as a Pioneer) for a duration of four years. TAP is an interdisciplinary and supra-regional postdoctoral joint project for the promotion, structural strengthening and networking of Taiwan research in Sinology. The research focuses on Taiwan's role as an innovator in the dynamics of global megatrends. The inter-institutional network between the universities of Trier, Tübingen and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, funded by the BMBF, is to create intra- and interdisciplinary structures over the next four years (02.2022 - 01.2026), by means of which Taiwan research can be sustainably anchored in the German science location. For more information, please see:

https://www.uni-trier.de/en/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/faecher/chinese-studies/translate-to-englisch-tap-taiwan-als-pionier

About the TAP network:

https://uni-tuebingen.de/einrichtungen/zentrale-einrichtungen/european-research-center-on-contemporary-taiwan/activities/taiwan-as-a-pioneer/

ChatGPT's suggestions about my list of comparative rhetoric readings

Just a footnote the previous post: after I finished it, I plugged the comparative rhetoric readings into ChatGPT to get its response to how to organize those readings. It didn't complain as much about the diversity of topics, but it just spat out the list in a different order. I asked it how it decided on the order, and it gave me the following response:

I organized the list of articles and books in a way that provides a coherent flow of ideas and themes. I began by grouping together articles that have similar themes or authors, and then arranged them in a way that makes sense chronologically or thematically.

I started with some articles that introduce the concept of comparative rhetoric and translingual approaches to meaning-making, such as Cushman's "Translingual and Decolonial Approaches to Meaning Making" and Cousins' "Self-reflexivity and the Labor of Translation." Then, I moved on to articles that focus on decolonization and pluriversal rhetorics, such as Cushman et al.'s "Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric" and Johnson and Endres' "Decolonizing Settler Public Address."

Next, I included articles that examine non-Western rhetorical traditions, such as Lipson and Binkley's "Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics," Lu's "Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" and "The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong," and Tomasi's "Rhetoric in Modern Japan." I also included articles that discuss the development of comparative rhetoric and its future, such as Mao's "Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border" and "Thinking beyond Aristotle" and Wang's "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms."

Finally, I included articles that explore other related themes such as posthumanism, hybridity, and materialist approaches to activism. The order of the articles and books is not set in stone, and it could be adjusted based on the reader's interests and needs.

This is interesting to me for two reasons: how it says it decided how to organize the sources (sounds pretty reasonable) and the fact that it basically appears to be reflecting on its process. For the fun of it, I asked it what it learned from the process, and it said,

As an AI language model, I do not learn in the same way that humans do. However, I can tell you that organizing sources in a systematic and coherent way helps to make information more accessible and easier to understand. By categorizing sources and grouping them together, it becomes easier to identify patterns, compare and contrast different viewpoints, and draw more informed conclusions. Additionally, organizing sources can help to identify gaps in knowledge or areas where further research may be needed. Overall, a well-organized set of sources can facilitate the research process and ultimately lead to more robust and accurate conclusions.

Well, that's sort of a relief... 

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky...

I've quoted this poem a couple of times already. One of the many things that I have trouble with is deciding what book to read next. Sometimes I just grab something off the shelf that looks interesting. Sometimes I choose something that I've had for a very long time because I feel guilty that I've neglected it (hi, John Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800!). Sometimes I choose something written in Chinese because I feel guilty that I haven't read a book in Chinese for a long time (hi, Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》!). Sometimes I choose a biography or a work of fiction because I find them easier to read than a more scholarly or theoretical work, and sometimes I choose a more scholarly or theoretical work because I feel guilty that I'm making life too easy for myself by reading something that isn't torture to get through. (My Calvinist feelings of total depravity even motivate my reading choices, it seems.)

But I've got a long list of readings that I've given myself for that proposed semester leave that I mentioned (no word on that yet), and I'm trying to decide the order of the readings. One way might be just to jump from one book to another than seems relevant based on what I learn from the first book. Another might be to look through the books to find themes that connect them, sort of like writing a syllabus for myself. I haven't found any good answers on the internet yet (probably because I'm not using the right search terms). Maybe I should ask ChatGPT?

OK, here's what I asked the old Chatter:

I have a lot of books that I need to read for a research project. They're on a variety of topics, some more closely related to each other than others. How should I decide the order to read them in?

And they said,

When deciding the order to read your books for a research project, it's important to keep in mind your goals and priorities for the project. Here are some steps you can take to decide the order: 

1. Identify the most important books: Take a look at all the books you have and identify the ones that are most important to your research. These may be the ones that are most closely related to your topic or the ones that are most highly recommended. 

2. Create categories: Once you've identified the most important books, try to categorize them based on their topic or theme. This can help you to see how the books relate to each other and which ones should be read together.

3. Prioritize: Decide which categories of books are most important for your research and prioritize them. This can help you to focus your reading and ensure that you're getting the most important information first.

4. Balance: As you decide the order in which to read your books, try to balance the categories so that you're not reading too many on one topic before moving on to another. This can help you to stay engaged and avoid burnout.

5. Make a plan: Once you've decided on the order in which to read your books, create a reading plan. This can help you to stay on track and ensure that you're making progress towards your research goals. You can also adjust your plan as needed based on your progress and any new information you learn.

Overall, by identifying the most important books, categorizing them, prioritizing, balancing, and making a plan, you can create an effective reading order that helps you achieve your research goals. 

Hmmm... all in all, not bad advice. (Wonder where they're getting it from?) It sounds basically like what I said about writing a syllabus for myself, though. (With the possible exception of the point about "balance".)

I'm going to try something more specific, though. I'm going to feed my reading list into ChatGPT and see what it suggests about that... Wait a second...

Well, it didn't know quite how to answer that: "Wow, that's quite a list of books! Since the topics of the books are quite diverse, it's difficult to suggest a specific order for you to read them in." It did give suggestions about how to read some of the books, though. Back to the drawing board...

Watching "The #Milk Tea Alliance: Precedents and Possibilities"

Spring break has started, but I have a lot of stuff to do. But first I want to watch Jeffrey Wasserstrom's talk on the the "#Milk Tea Alliance: Precedents and Possibilities" from Feb. 15. I like his historical take on transnational activism. This is the description of the talk:

As a distinctively twenty-first century phenomenon, #MilkTeaAlliance refers to struggles from Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma to Taiwan against the increasing power of the Chinese Communist Party. The campaign is empowered by social media, but region-wide cross-border collaboration among activists and exiles is not without precedents. This talk will explore the similarities and differences between #MilkTeaAlliance and its historical predecessors, and reflects on the limits of social science analysis that fails to go beyond geographical borders. The staying power and the future influences will also be assessed.

Wasserstrom talks about Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (梁啟超), who has shown up in some of my recent reading. He compares Liang to Thai student activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, who has, like Liang, translated some works about democracy from the West (and, in Netiwit's case, from Hong Kong and China). 

A couple of more books in the former native speaker's collection

Last week I submitted a proposal for a one-semester leave to do some research to simultaneously work on an article and develop an undergraduate course on comparative rhetoric. I won't find out whether I receive the leave until April, but I decided to start (continue, actually) buying some of the books that I hope to be reading then. Some of the books are specifically about comparative rhetoric and some are about various aspects of Taiwanese society, history, and communication. The latter group are mostly for the article I'm working on. The last few days I've received two books:

• Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation. Lexington Books, 2017.
  This book looks promising as a communication studies-focused look at sajiao (撒嬌) beyond the common understanding of it as a communication practice used primarily by women to sound cute or to persuade their (usually male) partners. This book "won the Outstanding Book Award in the International and Intercultural Communication Division in the annual convention of National Communication Association in 2018."
  
  
• Richard Madsen, Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan. University of California Press, 2007.
  I heard about this one through Twitter and thought that I read it to get a sense of how Buddhism and Daoism might have affected rhetorical practices in Taiwan's process of democratization. I've seen reviews from sociologists that praise the book, but I've also seen more critical reviews from scholars in religious studies who argue that Madsen misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Taiwanese Buddhism and Daoism. 

Whether I get the leave or not, I'm looking forward to reading these (and other) books. But now it's back to grading...

Practice with Chat GPT

 

Books, books, books

I have been really busy this month ever since the semester started, but I have to squeeze in at least one note or I'll feel like even more of a failure than I currently feel... (!)

Just received my copy of Ian Rowen's new book, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2022). My wife keeps asking what he means by "many Taiwans," so I guess I'd better read this book sooner or later. (Fortunately, it's rather short at less than 200 pp.)

First, though I need to finish Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》(蔚藍文化， 2016), which I started reading on the commuter rail at the beginning of the semester. I find myself wishing the train ride were longer (and quieter!) so I could read more each trip. 

I'm trying to decide if I should buy the paperback or the ebook version of Chiang Kuo-yu's (蔣闊宇) 《全島總罷工》(前衛, 2020). I read an interview between Chiang and Itamar Waksman, and it seems like it's discussing another important piece of Taiwanese social movement history that I should learn more about. I'm leaning toward buying the ebook because it's cheaper (especially considering postage), but for some reason ebooks aren't as convenient for me. I've bought several of them and don't even know what's become of them...

Another new(ish) book in the former native speaker's collection

I had a chance to got to Brattle Book Shop this afternoon, and after searching through their outside book racks finally came across something that interested me enough to want to buy it. 

According to several sources, The Silent Traveller in London was published in 1938, but this copy says "First published 1939." This copy wasn't in great shape, with some tears on the dust jacket that I'll have to fix, but it was only $5. The plates inside the book look good--nothing missing. (Someone else has helpfully posted scans of the plates.)

I found an interesting article about the author, Chiang Yee (蔣彞), that was published a few years back. There's another good article about Chiang here on the Victoria and Albert Museum's website.

Winter break begins

I have a few weeks off from teaching now that I've turned my grades in, and I have to make sure that I use that time wisely. (So far I've been spending a bit too much time catching up on crime movies from the 1940s that are on my DVR.) I have a small writing project--a book review--that will require me to reread a book that I finished over a year ago. I'm hoping to get that done during the vacation.

I'm looking forward to two other books that are coming out in the spring:

• Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China by Xiaoye You (SIUP)
• Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong edited by Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh (MSUP)

If you look up You's book on Amazon, you'll get an excerpt from the introduction of the book (underneath "About the author"). I'm very interested to read what he has to say about the concept of wenti jingwei (文體經緯), which he translates as "genre networks."

There isn't much information about Cheng and Yueh's book yet. Hopefully a table of contents will show up on the Michigan State UP website soon...

Dennis Kwok talk at Northeastern University

Dennis Kwok (郭榮鏗), who is a visiting scholar at Northeastern, participated in a conversation with Professor Mai'a Cross today entitled, "The Rise of China, the Fall of Hong Kong, and the Implications for the Taiwan Strait." In case you're not familiar with him (I wasn't), he was one of the founding members of the Civic Party in Hong Kong and was in HK's Legislative Council (LegCo, which I finally learned how to pronounce--with a soft "g") from 2012 to 2020. He was forced out of LegCo in 2020, after which he left Hong Kong. He is called a scholar in exile and says he currently has no plans to return to Hong Kong. 

He gave what I thought was a fairly modest/humble narrative of his own changing perspective on the fate of Hong Kong over the years, admitting that when he started out as a moderate democrat, he hoped, like many people, that "one country, two systems" would work for Hong Kong. Like many others, he said he didn't know quite what to make of Xi Jinping when Xi took over China--Xi's father was a reformer, so people were hopeful that he would be a reformer, too. The events of 2014-present changed Kwok's mind, and he doesn't have much optimism now for Hong Kong or for China. His only point of optimism: "I believe that authoritarianism simply doesn't work. ... Humans want to be free." 

About Taiwan, he warned, "You'd better take it seriously" when Xi indicates he won't leave the Taiwan issue to the next generation of Chinese rulers. Citing Kevin Rudd, Kwok called Taiwan "the holy grail" of CCP politics. It's Xi's political legacy. Kwok said that he has gone to many conferences and meetings where Taiwan is discussed, and the key question that no one asks is, "What do the Taiwanese people want?" They're the ones who are going to be doing the fighting. (I've seen this written a lot, like by writers like New Bloom founder Brian Hioe, but somehow hearing it said out loud 讓我紅了眼眶...) He said that the most painful lesson Hongkongers learned was through the events leading up to and including the National Security law. People should have protested 30 years ago, he said, when the British signed Hong Kong over to the PRC. You can't rely on outsiders to defend you. You have to defend yourself. This reminded me of the preface to Chen Rong-cheng's 1973 translation of Formosa Betrayed, where Chen wrote, ｢人不先自救，誰會救我？｣. The more things change, ...

Application for next summer's Rhetoric Society Institute accepted

I found out this week that I was fortunate to be accepted to participate remotely in a seminar for the Rhetoric Society of America's Rhetoric Society Summer Institute next May. I applied to a seminar entitled, "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics," run by Romeo García, LuMing Mao, and Hua Zhu, all from the University of Utah. In case the Summer Institute's website isn't archived, I'm going to copy the seminar description here:

The turn to non-Western rhetorics has been an exercise in confronting and unsettling a Western epistemology, perspective, and project that has long dominated rhetorical studies. Yet, such a turn risks reinforcing the dualism of the West and the rest and what all this entails. Today, a decolonial agenda and comparative rhetoric offers an-other option. Against the backdrop of the unavoidable modern/colonial world system, decolonial and comparative rhetoric can bring together the analytic of coloniality, the prospective task of epistemic delinking and epistemological decolonization, the rhetoric of in/commensurability, the fluidity of interdependence, and pluriversality, mobilizing a critique and possible transformation of rhetorical studies.

For decades, scholars such as Bagele Chilisa, Linda Smith, Shawn Wilson, and Walter Mignolo have advocated that our research and our scholarly ethos need to be decolonized in order to reimagine and practice the dissemination of knowledge and relational exchanges otherwise. Meanwhile, comparative rhetoric advances by extricating itself from ethnocentrism, essentialism, and dualism and by moving towards re/contextualization, plural local terms, and discursive third (or forth, etc.) (Lloyd; Lyon; Mao; You; Wang). Comparative thinking is resonant with decolonial epistemology, and particularly, the understanding of culture (as contact zone), local (as sociohistorical and networked), subjectivity (as living and co-growing), and hybridity (as unstable and happening). Together, decolonial studies and comparative rhetoric appeal to us to change the terms and contents of conversation. 

The seminar will: (1) Provide an interdisciplinary overview of comparative and decolonial studies; (2) Facilitate discussions on how we may form allyship among comparative and decolonial studies; and (3) Examine what makes comparative thinking and decolonial epistemology play their distinct roles in studying global rhetorics. Prospective participants will be asked to describe their current research and how it may relate to global rhetorics as well as identify two goals for the seminar. 

This was my proposal for participation in the seminar (thanks to Beth Britt for her help and feedback on this!):

I am applying to the seminar in “Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics” to help further my current research on the rhetorical history of Taiwan. This project sees Taiwan as a contact zone among its Indigenous people, Han settlers, other migrant populations, and at least five historical colonial/semi-colonial forces (Dutch, Manchu/Han, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, and American) that have created an unstable hybridity in Taiwanese subjectivity. Because Taiwan is typically viewed from the outside as a Chinese society, how historical experiences of migration, colonization, incomplete decolonization, and political marginalization have affected the rhetorical practices of this maritime country have been largely ignored in favor of an image of Taiwan as part of Greater China. I am seeking to learn more about comparative and decolonial rhetorical studies in order to challenge essentialist views of Taiwan and its rhetorical practices. As a white USAmerican male who lived and taught in Taiwan for 16 years, I also want to understand how to confront my own positionality ethically as I work on this project. My research and writing has mainly focused on American intercultural relations with and representations of Taiwan in the contexts of the Cold War (globally) and Martial Law (locally). Moving into work that engages Taiwan more directly, I seek to address the effects of multiple, layered, and conflicting colonialisms experienced in Taiwan, while avoiding adding another layer of colonialism through my own research.

I have some other writing projects to work on, but I want to do some reading about decolonial rhetorical studies. I noticed that Xiaoye You has a new book coming out next year called Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China. According to the description, the book "integrates a decolonial and transnational approach to construct a rhetorical history of early imperial China." Hopefully I'll be able to read that before the seminar.  

Homework for ... some point in the near future

I mentioned earlier that I had applied for a summer seminar on decolonizing comparative rhetoric. I want to read some articles that might be relevant to this topic before then, but I have also come across some talks on YouTube that might help fill me in on the conversation. This video, for instance, is a lecture by LuMing Mao, a famous scholar in comparative rhetoric:

I might not be able to watch it until Thanksgiving (!) or winter break (!!), but I'll try to fit it in. By the way, the Delhi Comparatists seem to have a lot of interesting lectures and discussions.

Interview with Jonathan Lerner, author of Lily Narcissus, published

bookish.asia has published an interview I did with Jonathan Lerner about his new novel Lily Narcissus. I had fun talking with him about his writing process and how he does research for his writing. As someone who isn't a fiction writer, I'm fascinated by the differences in how their novels come together. Lerner used the word "unconscious" a few times, telling me, “I only found out what was going to happen to these characters as I unfurled the story.”

The interview is accompanied by some nice color slides of Taipei that Lerner's father took between 1957 and 1959, so check it out--and then buy his book!

Jhumpa Lahiri video about writing in Italian

This video about Jhumpa Lahiri gets into her experience of writing in Italian; I think I'll suggest it to my first-year writing students. One thing she says that I found interesting and might inspire some conversation is this:

I like being at the beginning again as a reader and as a writer. I like that I'm limited. I like that I only have a certain vocabulary and certain tools, and I can only go so far. That appeals to me.

I wonder what my students might think about that perspective... 

Reading for pleasure or reading "for pressure" in other languages?

In my first-year writing for multilingual students class today, we were talking about Jhumpa Lahiri's 2015 article, "Teach Yourself Italian," and about how her passion for Italian led her to decide to move to Italy and, in preparation, to "pledge to read only in Italian." The section of her article about that decision is called "The Renunciation." Lahiri writes, 

I consider it an official renunciation. I’m about to become a linguistic pilgrim to Rome. I believe I have to leave behind something familiar, essential.

We talked about the idea of renouncing our native language (in the students' case, to speak only in English). The students weren't very keen to renounce their native languages in order to speak only English. One mentioned that there is pressure from friends and classmates from their home country to speak their common language. Another suggested that because it's more difficult to speak English, to speak only English would result in a great loss of confidence. Also, their native languages are tied to their sense of who they are.

Lahiri's description of what it's like to read in Italian reminds me of what it's sometimes like when I read in Chinese:

I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel, every unknown word a jewel.

There's both pleasure and pressure in this depiction of reading in another language. You run into obstacles in the form of unfamiliar vocabulary or syntax, but getting past those obstacles seems to launch you forward (toward new obstacles!). If you take the time to work through those obstacles instead of bypassing them (as I admit I sometimes do), you have a feeling of accomplishment, and maybe you learn something new. As Lahiri puts it,

After I finish a book, I’m thrilled. It seems like a feat. I find the process demanding yet satisfying, almost miraculous. I can’t take for granted my ability to accomplish it. I read as I did when I was a girl. Thus, as an adult, as a writer, I rediscover the pleasure of reading.

As we were discussing Lahiri's experience, I asked the students if any of them read in English for pleasure. Some of them shook their heads, others laughed. My guess is that their reading in English is mostly (as a former Tunghai colleague put it) "for pressure" rather than for pleasure. I can understand this feeling. Most of the time when I read in Chinese, it's in order to write something (like that blog post on bookstores in colonial Taiwan), so there's some degree of pressure. 

But I wonder if we should (re)define the notion of "reading for pleasure"; after all, Lahiri's depiction of her experience reading in Italian shows that it's a lot of work to read in a language that you're not as strong in. Despite that, she treats the work of reading as pleasurable even if it is demanding (or perhaps because it is demanding).