Tainan Trashes Its Garbage Truck Classroom

Well, a short-lived English-teaching phenomenon is over, at least for the moment. It was in the news today that Tainan City garbage trucks had, six months ago, suspended indefinitely their broadcasts of English lessons. "The city government decided to temporarily suspend the service because it has so many other policies it needs to deliver to residents," said Environmental Bureau Chief Chang Huang-chen, as quoted in the Taiwan News (September 6, 2008). Well, considering that nobody could ever really evaluate the effectiveness of the service, it seems appropriate that the mobile loudspeakers now carry warnings of health problems in Vietnamese and Thai "for the benefit of foreign spouses who do not understand Chinese." Tainan City has, according to the news article, recently been struggling with a spreading crsis of dengue fever and enterovirus. In these circumstances, I think we can forgive the bureau's decision to "trash" the city's "English Time."

Comments

China Arrests Anti-Poverty Activists

At times it feels hopeless to imagine that the Chinese government will ever develop a sense of universal rights or even common decency. More proof of this from the following Associated Press article printed in the local Taipei Times newspaper on Sunday, February 08, 2009, Page 1. Days before China's human rights record comes under scrutiny before a UN panel, the government's grip on dissent seems as firm as ever. Government critics have been rounded up and some imprisoned on vaguely defined state security charges. Corruption whistleblowers have been bundled away, while discussion of sensitive political and social topics on the Internet remains tightly policed. On Friday, officers stationed outside a government building in Beijing took away at least eight people — members of a loosely organized group of 30 who had traveled to the capital from around the country seeking redress for various problems, almost all of them involving local corruption. One member of the group, Li Fengx...

"Invisible Nation" and the Indivisibility Difference

Invisible Nation will probably disappoint Taiwan audiences, largely because the documentary was produced for is intended for international audiences, though the film is pragmatically “for Taiwan.” Completed in 2023 and made available to the global documentary film circuit last year, Invisible Nation finally found its way to movie screens throughout Taiwan on June 13, 2025 — a Friday the 13 th release, to be precise. Produced and directed by Vanessa Hope , Invisible Nation was filmed with the cooperation and encouragement of Taiwan’s first democratically elected female president, Tsai Ying-wen (whose Administration of the Republic of China spanned two terms, 2016-2024). Hope could easily be understood as something of a “China hand,” though she would probably not be comfortable with the label. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Hope had been a scholar of international studies for the Council on Foreign Relations in her hometown of New York City. She also earned a doctorate from C...

Trauma, Silence, and "Woman Islands"

Here’s a selection of excerpts from the 2011 English translation (by C.J. Anderson-Wu) of Chung Wenyin’s 1998 novel, Woman Islands ( 女島紀行 ). I provide it here in the hope that it might entice students and scholars, especially those with an interest in Women’s Studies and Feminist Literature, to consider taking up this book as a subject for literary criticism. I have straightened up the grammatical style of the original translation that had attempted to portray the “untranslatable” style of the Chinese text and the author’s insistence upon “maintaining the awkwardness of her writing instead of smoothing it out for English readers.” Although I can appreciate that desire, I chose instead to alter some of the sentence constructions that might come across as more a result of poor proofreading than of conscious choice by the translator. I’m going to hope this won’t be a problem, and I apologize in advance if anyone is offended by my editing choices. But then again, if you want to see...

My Life as Adoga

Search This Blog