Research presentations in Taiwan

I finished one presentation, and have two more presentations to do in Taiwan before my big presentation at the annual conference for Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Toronto, Canada, in mid-March 2012.

This past Tuesday, I gave a presentation (in Chinese for the first time in my life) at the seminar on "Modern Education in Taiwan (Japanese colonial period, 1895-1945)" that I am auditing in National Taiwan Normal University 師範大學. I read a memoir in Japanese by a Taiwanese woman, Wu Yue-e 吳月娥 born in 1921. The presentation topic was to discuss the educational experience of a Taiwanese person who received education during the Japanese colonial period. It was not easy to locate a woman's memoir, as more men received education than women. Because highly educated people are more likely to write memoirs or have their stories written down in the form of oral history or biography, it was even harder to find women's memoirs and oral histories because more men are highly educated than women. I chose to present on a woman's memoir because it is relevant to my research topic. Also, I saw how a woman's memoir addresses different issues from that of men's. For example, Wu Yue-e discussed her limited relationship with men, and criticized love suicide and premarital sex in contemporary society. She also had a lengthy discussion of the prominent problem of child-brides (童養媳, 養女) in "traditional" Taiwan by narrating the case of her younger sister and her future sister-in-law.

I have a do a research-in-progress report for the seminar I am auditing on January 3. The professor notified the whole class (including me) on Tuesday that she has allocated two hours of class time for me- I am assuming one hour of talk, and one hour of Q&A. I am getting nervous... I also have to do a presentation for the Fulbright office in Taiwan: 10-minute talk, and 5-minute Q&A. It will take place during a three-day conference at Xitou 溪頭 in Nantou county 南投 right after the presidential election in Taiwan (January 14) from January 16 to 18. I am getting excited to meet other Fulbrighters because I haven't met any! I know most of them are Fulbright IIE fellows (including student researchers and English teachers), and I am the only one of my kind in Taiwan this year.

I need to work on a draft of my AAS conference paper after these presentations. The AAS conference attendees do not expect a progress report, but a paper with clear argument and structure of my research for an academic audience.