As I prepare to leave Taiwan after a second yearlong stint, I reflect on my stay here as it relates to research and beyond. I plan to publish my research findings in outlets such as peer-reviewed journals, so I hope to here share other aspects of my Fulbright experience in Taiwan, such as my living conditions, the research process, and a brief note on the value of intellectual enquiry in the age of AI.
When I last lived in Taiwan, from fall 2023 to summer 2024, I enrolled in Chinese language classes at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei and returned home to my own apartment every night. While this routine certainly helped me improve my Chinese, both modern and classical, I felt that this time I should consider a different approach to maintain my language abilities, especially since I would not be formally enrolled in classes. When studying French in Senegal years ago, I lived with a local family, and greatly appreciated the immersive environment and cultural exchange, so I hoped to recreate that model for my Fulbright year in Taiwan.
Through the organization of a local company, I lived with a family in New Taipei this year. The arrangement included dinners, allowing for lively linguistic and cultural exchange every day. The language of the classroom and academic settings, for obvious reasons, greatly differs from that of a three-generational Taiwanese household over the dinner table. In addition to countless new idioms, the new words I learned from my six-year old “roommate”, her parents, and her grandmother reminded me that true language fluency means the ability to shift between different registers. Although other academics may feel satisfied with limiting their language learning to scholarly topics, for me, knowing how to say words like sloth, nunchuks, buckwheat, snorkeling, hide-and-seek, dementia, or homophony—all of which remain distant from words necessary to get by as either an academic studying Chinese history or in everyday life—feels like a product of my making a sincere effort to integrate into Taiwanese society. A setting that exposes me to such new words also feels fulfilling because it helps reinforce my other language skills. The family cannot be described as “average” Taiwanese people, as the mother and father’s two years spent living in Australia on working holiday visas over a decade ago betokens. Consequently, their urbane curiosity toward other cultures and ways of life yielded rich discussions on travel, Taiwanese and American politics, and daily life. I came into their house a stranger—their daughter had never met an American before—and I leave it as someone included in family birthdays, outings, and even trips to other places in Taiwan, such as Alishan. I feel grateful to Fulbright for creating the conditions for me to facilitate this exchange.
As far as my research goes, I have felt pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s rich academic resources. When I initially applied for a Fulbright in Taiwan, I conceived of the benefits of an extended stay here as narrowly tied to the kinds of primary sources related to my research project. However, during my time here, I have benefited tremendously from other academic factors I did not foresee. For instance, I did not anticipate the importance of finding secondary sources in Chinese for my project, or the ease of doing so, a much more cumbrous task in the United States. I can provide several examples of what Taiwan’s academic resource landscape looked like in practice.
A portion of my research relates to the way scholars (both western and Chinese) have discussed “rights” in Chinese history. When a historian writing in English quoted page 728 in volume 2 of a rare 1964 book on the development of law in republican China, I first searched for the book in the libraries of Academia Sinica, the institution with which I am affiliated during my Fulbright year, in order to see how the source articulated the quoted portion in its original Chinese. Because Academia Sinica’s libraries only held an earlier 1947 edition, I managed to find a copy of the 1964 edition at the National Central Library in Taipei. The library did not keep this rare book on the shelves, so the staff had to pull it out of storage for me. Imagine my unique disappointment when the battered book delivered in a sealed plastic bag, complete with broken spine, happened to be missing pages 703 to 758 (pictured above). I dejectedly reported the news to the librarian, who helped me find another edition at NTU, where I had studied for a year before. Because NTU had already closed for the day, I added tracking down this source there to my list of research tasks.
The next day—when I stopped by Academia Sinica in the morning, the National Palace Museum in the early afternoon, the National Taiwan Library in the late afternoon, and NTU’s library at night—exemplifies the sort of unforeseen academic troubleshooting I could carry out in Taiwan. Another historian had referenced deed 025 in Volume 2 of a rare collection of facsimile legal contracts from Taiwan published in the 1970s in her discussion of “rights”, and I again hoped to understand the exact language of the original source. The editors divided each of the 10 volumes into 12 parts, yielding 120 books in total. I began the day at Academia Sinica, which holds the work in the Fu Ssu-nien Library’s rare books collection. Because the library does not allow scholars to view the original copies (lest they end up like their hapless counterpart at the National Central Library!) I viewed the digitized version of documents to the best of my abilities, which scholars can only access on site, without the ability to take pictures. Many things can go awry in the process of digitizing 120 books’ worth of historical contracts. Some documents, with their centuries old cacography, proved too difficult for me to read on a screen, and others remained altogether inaccessible through the digital system, including deed 025 in Volume 2. The librarians informed me that scholars cannot view the original text, so I took the train to the National Palace Museum Library (the institution that originally published the collection) in hopes that they would either have an accessible copy or that they could point me to a place that did. The librarians there, who had previously helped me locate documents in their own archives, took me to their storage room, but regretfully informed me that they do not have a copy. However, a quick search in their system informed me that the National Taiwan Library holds the collection, so I again took the train across town with a scintilla of hope after the challenges at Academia Sinica and the National Palace Museum. To my surprised delight, all 120 books—each of them the size of a posterboard—sat on shelves in the oversized books section of the six floor of the National Taiwan Library, allowing me to finally track down deed 025 in Volume 2 (Part 1, to be exact). Even better, the library had no restrictions on copying or taking photos, allowing me to fixate on the subtleties of rare character forms and difficult handwriting with less pressure. Fulfilled by this small success, I took the train to NTU to resolve the previous day’s abortive effort to find the missing page 728. After I communicated my inquiry, the staff sent me to the rare books room, across campus from the main library. I watched some sort of robot fetch the book from the underground storage facility, and gleefully confirmed that all pages were intact. I cannot imagine anyone feeling as energized as I did while reading page 728 of the second volume of that six-volume work on republican China’s legal system. To conclude the day, my sharing my small scholarly triumph with my host family further reinforced my Chinese speaking and listening skills, capping off a day of research that truly would not have been possible in any other corner of the world.
In a less narrative and more contemplative register, I reflect on the value of undertaking my historical research related to the meaning and development of “rights” in Chinese history in a world of rampant AI use, including among academics. Irrespective of the merits and demerits of AI—and I believe the latter grossly outweigh the former—such a debate need not detain us here. Instead, I would like to end on an optimistic note: what are the implications of AI for a research project like mine? Today’s AI, with all its much-ballyhooed capabilities, simply could not have produced the kind of research I wrote about above, which depends on scrutinizing historical documents languishing in difficult to access collections and archives in (sometimes) even more difficult to interpret sources. Even were I to feed every one of these documents into an AI database, I feel confident that it would not be able to pose the challenge to the field that human thought can, and I can confidently say the same about the work of many other scholars pursuing historical research. Fulbright now navigates its future in a world overflowing with tempting technocratic shortcuts. In this context, let us not forget the value of human thought, which remains indispensable, in humanistic fields and beyond.
