Wendy Wan-ting Wang (王琬葶) is a a Hou Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In our interview, she shares her Ph.D. research on how the Indigenous voice was expressed through views on infrastructure and technology, and her experience teaching the Taiwanese literature and culture in the US.
WW: Wendy Wan-ting Wang
GL: Gregory Laslo
GL: Could you please introduce yourself? What was your Ph.D. dissertation about?
WW: My name is Wendy Wan-ting Wang. I’m a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Last year, I completed my Ph.D. thesis at UC Berkeley, titled “Wired Mountains, Storied Infrastructure: Rethinking Indigeneity with Technology in Taiwan’s Literature and Media Culture, 1895-1975,” and I’m now reviewing and revising it in order to turn it into a book.
My main argument is that during the Japanese colonial period and the Cold War era in Taiwan, Indigenous peoples didn’t just passively react to new technologies. They actively engaged with them to defend their sovereignty and to tell their own history. This pushes back on a common assumption that we can only hear independent Indigenous voices after the 1980s, when Indigenous activism and identity politics took off. I came to this discovery through research on many materials that haven’t yet been discussed to their full potential in academic literature, and certainly not in English.
GL: Can you give an example of this sort of engagement?
WW: One of the earliest examples I can point to is the records about an Atayal leader, Temu Bysal, who visited Japan in 1897. The colonial government arranged these tours to impress Indigenous leaders into submission by showing off Japan’s urban development, advanced technology, and military power. During their trip, Temy Bysal and other Indigenous leaders were taken to the Tokyo Panorama Hall to see the gigantic paintings of the First Sino-Japanese War. “The Panorama” was a popular urban entertainment then, a new media technology that immersed the viewers with a sublime spectacle and evoked a sense of Japan’s imperial glory. But Temu Bysal was not shocked, instead using this technologized spectacle to tell his own stories about how his community had fought Chinese troops, seized their rifles and cannons, and mastered these technologies long before the Japanese arrived. His response suggests that even media technology meant to serve the colonial power could be turned into tools of Indigenous articulation.
Temu Bysal’s encounter with the panorama becomes a point of departure from our assumption that earlier visual media serve merely as tools of colonial control. That assumption leads us back to a canonical scene in Chinese media history: Lu Xun’s lantern-slide moment, when he watched a Chinese man executed during the Russo-Japanese War, a colonial trauma bound up with technological visuality. But what if we rethink East Asian encounters with media technology not through Lu Xun’s shock and trauma, but through Temu Bysal’s Indigenous storytelling and technological literacy?
GL: How did you organize such a broad topic?
WW: I centered each chapter on different infrastructures in Taiwan’s mountains, seeing them as sites of Indigenous engagement with various technologies. Mountaineering infrastructures, like hiking trails, mountain huts, and the guide and porter system, are one such site, where cultural and technical exchange took place between Indigenous peoples and adventurers. These infrastructures carry colonial histories. Many of the trails we hike today began as guard lines (隘勇線), which the Japanese military used to move supplies and enforce a blockade against Indigenous peoples. Later, when those guard lines were repurposed for mountaineering activities, Indigenous people took up roles as mountain guides and porters. These roles offered Indigenous peoples access to rifles under an otherwise strict restriction on firearms, and also provided chances to check on their hunting grounds. Mountaineering infrastructure thus became a space for both cultural exchange and technical cultivation, where Indigenous people continued traditional cultural practices while also picking up new skills and technologies of modern sports like climbing, belaying, and skiing.
Another site I discussed in my work is forestry infrastructure, such as logging cables and tree farms. Forestry was a major state project in Cold-War Taiwan. It engineered the landscape and reorganized Indigenous labor who had lost their land. This infrastructure also enabled a whole range of media production. A series of films took up Indigenous and forestry themes, staging spectacles such as giant trees coming down, the dizzying spans of logging cables, and crowds of Indigenous dancers, to showcase widescreen and color film technologies. Forestry Infrastructure in Taiwan also brought about an Indigenous sonic culture, the forestry labor song (林班歌). The forestry industry causes land dispossession and cultural displacement for Indigenous people, but in this alienating environment, these labor songs’ multilingual, embodied iterations carried memories of environmental change and brought stories from diverse ethnic communities into connections. This sonic culture, moved as an undercurrent at first, surfaced slowly until it became inseparable from what makes Taiwanese culture distinctive.
GL: What are some difficulties you’ve faced in performing this research?
WW: There is no centralized archive for the literary or media materials I have been studying. Beyond state and university collections, I visited many local cultural agencies to gather sources, and I received a great deal of help from private collectors. Fortunately, Taiwanese society has come to recognize the value of these materials, and more effort is now going into preserving them. Without the collective work of people across Taiwan who care about history, I could not have completed this project.
Yet the absence of a centralized archive does not prevent us from conducting fruitful research. It can even open up unexpected paths. While researching Indigenous literature about the White Terror, I was intrigued by a story by Faisu Mukunana. The story describes a grocery store in Alishan in the early 1950s, centering around the smell of soy sauce and the arrival of electric light brightening the life in a Tsou village. Behind that vision of infrastructural futurity lies an understudied history: a short-lived collaboration between fugitive Communist members and a Tsou leader. To understand how such an unlikely alliance came about, I turned to the archives of White Terror political cases. It was a detour for me as a literary and media scholar, since I do not usually work with those files. But the case files led me to a handwritten testimony by Yapasuyongʉ Yulunana, written in prison. He is remembered mainly as a military figure, yet in these records I found him a leader who cared deeply about building the infrastructure that would improve the lives of Tsou villagers. This research allowed me to rethink Taiwan’s early 1950s. It was indeed a dark period, but it was also a time when Indigenous leaders collectively developed and expressed their visions of the future, aspirations they left for those who came after them to fulfill.
GL: What are some highlights from your experience researching and teaching Taiwanese literature and culture?
WW: While teaching at UC Berkeley, I developed courses on Taiwan’s Indigenous literature, cultures, and history. Along the way, I came to believe that we can’t really imagine Taiwan’s future as a self-governing country without understanding its many layers of Indigenous history and the richness of Indigenous cultures. That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with the state co-opting Indigenous cultures to look progressive while glossing over its own settler colonial roots. Understanding how Taiwan came to be what it is today, through an Indigenous lens, should be a project for everyone in this society. It shouldn’t be left to Indigenous scholars and activists alone to do the work of educating the rest of us.
I also teach courses in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities that place Taiwan within its broader archipelagic and oceanic worlds, reading it alongside Japan, Hawai‘i, and other trans-Pacific connections. One question I’m especially interested in is how the idea of the national park traveled from the United States to Japan and then to Taiwan, and whether “wilderness” became a way of understanding Taiwan’s mountain landscapes. In American national parks like Yosemite, the land was framed as “wilderness,” as if Native Americans had never left live traces there. When the Japanese began establishing national parks in Taiwan, many people sought to preserve Indigenous presence as a distinctive feature, but only on the condition that Indigenous peoples remain “primitive” as a kind of ornament to Taiwan’s mountain scenery. For Indigenous communities, though, the lands were never “wilderness,” nor were they “savage land.” Mountains are home, the places where family histories took root and unfolded.
A unique part of teaching Taiwanese literature at Berkeley is talking with Asian American students and hearing about their own transpacific backgrounds. When I taught Wu Ming-yi’s “Death Is a Tiger Butterfly,” our class happened to meet at a time when tiger butterflies were migrating through Northern California. One student told me that his family first arrived here and lived in a fishing village on the California coast. That area later became a refuge for many marine animals and a site of tiger butterfly migration. Human–nonhuman connections like these are one way we can activate transpacific connections.
GL: What future directions do you see your research moving in?
WW: While working on this book, I am also developing a new research project on feminist and queer ecology in Taiwanese literature and media culture, with a focus on human–nonhuman relationships. So far, my main observation is that works by Indigenous and land-based communities portray human–nonhuman kinship as an indispensable network of care. One example is Syaman Rapongan’s writing on human–fish relationships, which shows how Tao men regain their sense of agency and their homosocial support networks through spearfishing, opening their bodies to the material substances of the ocean. Other examples include women’s and queer collectives formed around Indigenous shamanistic rituals, plant foraging, and plant tending. These collectives rethink the human life cycle through human–plant intimacy and a distinctly vegetal sense of time, rather than following the normative time of progressive development.
GL: What advice would you give to new researchers entering the field of Taiwan Studies?
WW: Taiwan Studies is always a comparative project, so don’t confine yourself to just Taiwan. Taiwan Studies means the study of Taiwan in the world, not just Taiwan itself, and interesting conversations happen when you look at Taiwan through transpacific, Indigenous, eco-critical, archipelagal, and environmental lenses. The important thing is to see Taiwan in conversation with the broader cultures in the world–and not just with China, Japan, and the US.