Wendy Wan-ting Wang (王琬葶) is 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 Indigenous history of Taiwan 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 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 to turn it into a book.
My central argument is that throughout this period, Indigenous peoples did not react passively to new technology, but actively engaged with it as part of their infrastructure to defend their sovereignty and articulate ideas about their history in a sustained way; in other words, that an Indigenous voice can be found here prior to the 1980s, although it has not yet been seriously discussed in academic literature—certainly not in English.
GL: Can you give an example of this sort of engagement?
WW: Some of the earliest I can point to are reflections by Atayal leaders Temu Misel and Bawtu Nomin on their visit to Japan in 1897. Tours like these were meant to intimidate Indigenous leaders by showing off Japan’s urban development, advanced technology, and military power. When they were shown a “panorama hall” containing a panoramic photo of combat during the Sino-Japanese War, they were not impressed in the slightest, saying things like “We used to fight the Han on an almost daily basis, and captured many rifles and cannons from them whenever we won. None of us is unfamiliar with their use.” This reaction shows that modern technology was already a part of Indigenous peoples’ storytelling and world-making. It’s also interesting to compare this to Lu Xun’s famous turn from medicine to literature, which happened several years later after he saw a lantern slide showing Japanese soldiers beheading a Chinese man.
GL: How did you organize such a broad topic?
WW: I centered each chapter on a site of negotiation between nature, technology, and Indigenous epistemology. The second chapter focuses on adventure literature and mountaineering photography. Modern mountaineering culture and technology was introduced to Taiwan by the guard lines (隘勇線), used by the Japanese military to enforce a blockade on highland Indigenous peoples. Soon after, Indigenous people began participating in that culture and using its technology, even before Taiwanese Han, doing things like skiing and belaying climbing. By serving as mountain guides for the military or for private citizens, they were also able to borrow rifles to hunt with, thus circumventing firearms restrictions and preserving an element of their culture.
Another chapter deals with the media ecosystem supported by the timber industry in the postwar and Cold War eras. Top-down and grassroots forms of media both thrived in this environment: Aerial photography was used to track forestry resources, state-sponsored films were produced, and international movie companies came to take advantage of cheap labor and shooting locations, while Indigenous people were hired as migrant laborers or entertainers on timber plantations, bringing their traditional songs and stories from their traditional homelands all over Taiwan, which led to a mixing of Indigenous cultures and the growth of a pan-Indigenous consciousness. The 1960s also saw the introduction of the guitar to Taiwan, for which Indigenous workers adapted their traditional music and produced new songs.
GL: What are some difficulties you’ve faced in performing this research?
WW: There are no official or centralized archives of this material. It usually belongs to local cultural agencies at the county level or below, or is in private collections focused on just a single village or family. Research into them relies largely on personal connections and visits. Fortunately, I think Taiwanese are starting to see the value of these archives.
Nevertheless, areas such as the White Terror as it relates to Indigenous peoples remain extremely understudied. Political persecution of Indigenous elites and destruction of personal records means we must now rely on literature and declassified political records to piece together attitudes. In this chapter, I focus on inter-ethnic connections in mountain communities in the wake of the 228 Incident. I found that during this period, the mountain infrastructure around Alishan provided a network connecting political dissidents and organizers. At the same time, Indigenous leaders looking to achieve autonomy (particularly in food distribution) used dissident labor to maintain this infrastructure, which led to a brief alliance between the two groups. During its short life, this alliance did begin to bear fruit: Records of one grocery store in Alishan state that it had begun producing soy sauce, and villagers saw electric lights and motor transport in use there for the first time.
Historians usually consider this time to be one of gloomy silence in terms of the Indigenous voice. But the sense of hope and ambition in these records leads me to believe we should instead see it as a period of unfulfilled aspirations for greater Indigenous sovereignty and direct control over agricultural production. Although this movement was quickly suppressed, that vision of autonomy through infrastructure should be remembered and commemorated.
GL: What are some highlights from your experience researching and teaching Taiwanese literature and culture?
WW: During my time at Berkeley, I was the only one teaching the Indigenous history of Taiwan. I have come to believe the richness of Indigenous culture underpins Taiwan culture as a whole; we need to not just respect it, but also explore that richness, if we want to sustain Taiwan as an independent culture and state. Obviously, I oppose the co-opting of Indigenous history by the state to deny its own settler-colonialist origins, but we cannot rely on the small minority of Indigenous scholars and students to maintain this culture on their own.
At the same time, Asian-American students want to know more about Asia, so it’s critical to expose them to concepts which they, as Americans, can relate to. The idea of “wilderness” is one such comparative touchstone. In US national parks like Yosemite, most traces of Indigenous Americans have been completely wiped out, which is why the land can be called “wild,” and thus ripe for exploitation. But Yushan and Dasyueshan can’t be called “wilderness,” because writers there still describe these mountain spaces as their home. To them, these spaces and trails still represent family history and colonial experience. Yes, the Batongguan Trail in Hualien was used by the Qing and Japanese militaries, but its origin was as a network connecting Bunun communities.
Other commonalities include urban Indigeneity and the stigma of alcoholism, as well as Indigenous migrant workers in the logging industry. One particularly touching connection I saw made came when I was teaching Death is a Tiger Butterfly by Wu Ming-yi, right when the tiger butterflies were migrating through San Francisco. A student mentioned to me that she was the descendant of Chinese immigrants who came to the US in the early 1900s. The fishing village in China from which they came has since been relocated to make way for a butterfly refuge. These human-nonhuman connections are one way we can activate transpacific connections.
GL: What future directions do you see your research moving in?
WW: Once I finish my book, I plan to move towards feminist and queer ecology, with a focus on human-nonhuman relationships. My main point of departure will be human-nonhuman kinship and networks of care. One example would be Syaman Rapongan’s writing of human-fish relationships and how he regained his sense of agency and identity through spearfishing. A similar avenue would be Indigenous female shamanism, with customs like tattooing plants on hands, creating very close human-plant intimacy, or family connections to symbolic animals like eagles.
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, and similar lenses. The important thing is to see Taiwan in conversation–and not just with China, Japan, and the US.