Wednesday, March 20, 2024

This blog is 20 years old!

A lot has happened since I typed out these words.  

A Pennsylvania Dutch proverb that I often heard as a child goes, "Ve git too soon oldt und too late schmart." I think that about sums things up. I don't have any words of wisdom to share after 20 years of off-and-on blogging. I sort of do this for my own entertainment, I guess, so I don't have high expectations for it. (Though I have at times referred to it in my annual self-criticisms merit reviews as an example of the writing that I do.)

If anyone is curious, though, here's a list of what are currently the top three posts on this thing, according to Blogger stats:

Odd that the top 3 are all from the summer of 2016. I have my own favorites from before that. Like this 2005 review of 走出白色恐怖 (Farewell to the White Terror) by 孫康宜 (Sun Kang-i). 

And this 2006 post on the Freshman Chinese curriculum reform at Tunghai and its 2013 follow-up on how the course was going. (Yikes! I can't believe the follow-up itself is over 10 years old!!) 

And, of course, this 2005 posting of a FICTIONAL love story that I wrote with the help of the former native Chinese speaker back in 1996. Always liked this story. I can still recite some of it, which always impresses my wife! 

Any other posts I should add to this list?

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Need to watch: Fareed Zakaria's CNN special about "Taiwan: Unfinished Business"

I saw an ad for this Fareed Zakaria special on Taiwan, but I wasn't able to see it when it was on CNN, so I'm recording it and will watch it later.


I saw that some people on Twitter criticized the title, wondering whose "unfinished business" it was--the CCP's? One poster (Isla Island) wrote, "'Unfinished business' parrots Beijing's propaganda that its planned invasion & annexation of Taiwan is part of a 'unfinished Chinese civil war'."

I thought the title was interesting in light of the fact that one of the early titles for George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed was The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business on the Pacific Frontier--and then just The Formosan Affair: Unfinished Business. Evidently that title was considered by Houghton Mifflin to be a bit too dry, which is why we ended up with Formosa Betrayed (I really think an exclamation point would go well at the end of that: Formosa Betrayed!). 

Anyway, I'm curious to see what Zakaria has to say. Will it be better than John Oliver's masterful piece on Taiwan, in which he compares it to the "Stanley Cup": "different people keep passing it around and and carving their names on it"? We'll see...


[Update, 3/14: I liked John Oliver's version better.]

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

University of Hawai'i Press has a clearance sale going, so I bought two books--I think they were a dollar each:

I have to admit, though, that I haven't had time to read anything except for student writing since the beginning of the semester, so I don't know when I'll get around to reading these. Ah, for those long lost days of my "sabbatical"...

Saturday, February 03, 2024

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

Not much to say about these yet because I'm still buried in reading student work, last semester's "sabbatical" a distant bittersweet memory...

This last book is outdated, and the reviews I've seen (here and here) have been mixed at best, but I wanted it to see how the author deals with Taiwan's postwar history in the context of communication studies (though he is a political scientist). 

Saturday, January 20, 2024

A video about the history of trains in Taiwan

Think I'll watch this when I get a chance. I tried to get my son the train fanatic to watch this with me, but he lost interest because I couldn't translate it fast enough...

Friday, January 05, 2024

Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website

Despite everything, this is why I stay on Twitter (or whatever they're calling it these days). I saw a link to this 1936 short film: 台中州高砂族內地觀光.

It looks like the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute website is a great resource. But I'm not sure whether I would have come across it if someone hadn't tweeted about it. 

"Sabbatical" review

Books read since the end of last spring semester (links are to my posts on the books--I didn't post on everything I read):

I also read a bunch of articles for the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute session that I attended. And also articles, book chapters, etc., for the papers I worked on during my leave and for the course I'm planning to teach on "rhetorics in contact." 

I didn't manage to read everything on my overly ambitious preliminary reading list, but I did make some headway into it. I suppose I'll go back to that list and read more of it as I find the time to do so. I need to finish up the two papers that I have been working on, too. But first, I need to finish getting my courses prepared before Monday (*gulp!*)...

Monday, January 01, 2024

First "new book in the former native speaker's library" post of 2024!

This afternoon, I went to the neighborhood 7-Eleven and picked up a book I ordered yesterday from the 博客來 website: it's called 《島國知音:台灣問題專家葛超智其人其事》(An Island Nation's Close Friend: Taiwan Expert George H. Kerr's Life and Experiences). It's a translation of 《沖縄と台湾を愛した ジョージ・H・カー先生の思い出》, which was published in 2018. I have a copy of the Japanese book, but I can't read it, so I was excited when I found out a Chinese translation had been published. 

The book is a collection of essays about George H. Kerr by people who knew him (like Kabira Tomokiyo 川平朝清 and Higa Mikio 比嘉幹郎) and people who have studied his life and work (like Su Yao-tsung 蘇瑤崇 and Yoshihara Yukari 吉原ゆかり). It looks like it'll be a good book to read on the flight home!