Recent rereadings

I've been rereading Robin Varnum's Fencing with Words recently, thinking about how she weaves together her finds in the Amherst College archives, her interviews with seven former Amherst English teachers, and her other primary and secondary sources. I'm also reading to see how she places herself in the study, and how she places the study in the discipline--two things I need to work on myself with my own study.

I'm working on getting some more interviews--at this point a lot of my interviews seem to be via mail or e-mail. I've done a few face-to-face interviews and one phone interview. I was surprised to see that Varnum only interviewed seven fourteen people--she got a lot out of them, it seems.

Another book-length work I've gone back to is Su-San Lee's 1998 dissertation, Xu Fuguan and New Confucianism in Taiwan (1949-1969): A Cultural History of the Exile Generation. Xu Fuguan was a professor in the Chinese Dept. at Tunghai from 1955-1969 and a well-known Confucian scholar. Chapter 8 of Lee's dissertation, "Mainlanders, Taiwanese and Americans in Taichung" traces some of the intercultural conflicts that occurred at Tunghai between Xu, a "New Confucianist" and defender of Chinese tradition and values, and the Americans and Christians at Tunghai. She describes the early years at Tunghai from a Chinese perspective, which helps to balance the American perspective I've been reading and writing from.

One interesting quote from Xu came in reaction to a 1964 survey report on Tunghai conducted by the United Board. The survey writers argued that there were not enough Taiwanese instructors at Tunghai to balance the number of Mainlanders. Lee quotes/translates Xu as writing,

This report is full of hostility to the people coming from the Mainland. They announce publicly that the Mainland and Taiwan are two nations and cultures; the purpose of their founding a university here is to train the Taiwanese only. And what they call the purpose of this university is virtually trying to transform it into a divinity school. Every Chinese is insulted by this report. ... Life starts from one's nation and ends with it. ... the Japanese enlightened my national consciousness in the past, and now Tunghai [U]niversity gives me that lesson again. (qtd in Lee 400; from a letter to Xu's daughter)

Xu clearly feels oppressed, which is interesting given the usual view that the Mainlanders were the ones doing the oppressing (often with American help) in postwar Taiwan. Xu, as Lee points out, not only didn't see a difference between Taiwanese and Chinese, he also associated quite a bit with Taiwanese intellectuals in Taichung. He seems to have viewed the American/Christian perspective toward Taiwan and Tunghai as oppressive as the Japanese treatment of China and Taiwan before 1945.