East Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Examinees’ Affective Preference For Online Speaking Assessment: Synchronous Vs Asynchronous, Yuxiao Du, Fangzheng Zhang

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology

With technological advancement and the COVID pandemic, online speaking assessment is increasingly used in language teaching. Two modes are developed: online synchronous testing (direct human-to-human interview) and online asynchronous testing (semi-direct human-to-machine interview). Ample literature has explored how each of the two online modes differs from traditional face-to-face speaking assessments. However, few studies have investigated the differences between the two modes, especially in terms of examinees’ affective preferences. This study, therefore, compares the extent to which each mode is accepted and favored by test takers and explores why such an affective preference emerges. The participants are 46 college students enrolled …

Enhancing Grammar Learning With A Multimedia Instructional Module: Design And Teaching Of “Shì…De” Construction For Cfl Learners, Shenglan Zhang

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology

This pilot study examined the effectiveness and students’ perceptions of a multimedia module on intermediate Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language (CFL) learners’ understanding and use of the “shì…de” construction. The module was designed based on the First Principles of Instruction (Morrill, 2002) and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2009; 2014). It provided a systematic and comprehensive approach to teaching the “shì…de” construction, one of the most challenging grammar points in CFL. Twenty-two CFL learners participated in this mixed-methods pilot study. Data were collected using pre- and post-tests, a survey, think-alouds, and semi-structured interviews. Findings show that after using the module, …

The Ainu, Meiji Era Politics, And Its Lasting Impacts: A Historical Analysis Of Racialization, Colonization, And The Creation Of State And Identity In Relation To Ainu-Japanese History, Bri Lambright

History Summer Fellows

On March 2nd, 1899, the Meiji government of Japan passed the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act. At its core, the act stripped the Ainu of their indigenous identity, labeling the group as ‘former aborigines’ and forcing every member into Japanese citizenship. In an instant, the Ainu became erased in an official capacity from the consciousness of the state and its people, a condition that would last well over 109 years when in 2008 the Japanese state finally acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous group. What is often not acknowledged is that the implementation and subsequent enforcement of the Protection Act …

Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry : Landscape Poetry : Xie Tiao : The Integration Of Landscape, Lucas Rambo Bender

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

This episode concludes our exploration of Six Dynasties landscape poetry by considering the verse of Xie Tiao (464–499). By Xie Tiao’s time, landscape was becoming an increasingly common topic within the world of courtly verse. Partly for this reason, Xie’s poetry begins to efface the previously definitive distinction between the human world and the natural landscape, and moreover imbues that landscape with the passions of the courtier—in Xie’s case, both his yearning for the court and capital and his well-justified fear of the dangers of court politics.

Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry : Landscape Poetry : Xie Lingyun’S “Mountains And Waters”, Lucas Rambo Bender

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

Xie Lingyun (385–433) is generally recognized as the progenitor and paradigm of poetry on “mountains and waters” (shanshui 山水). Where Tao Qian had written predominantly of the only-partly wild landscapes near his cottage, Xie made his theme the dramatic wildernesses of the southlands. Much of his poetry concerns the scenery of his massive estate, which he staffed with a small army of servants and retainers. His most powerful verse, however, was written in the rugged, unforgiving landscapes he passed through on journeys into exile.

Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry : Landscape Poetry : Tao Qian's "Fields And Gardens", Lucas Rambo Bender

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

Tao Qian (365–427) is premodern China's most famous recluse. After relinquishing his official career at around age 40, Tao returned to his rustic hometown to hide away from what he often suggested was a corrupt court and society. In the hermitage he made for himself at the foot of Mt. Lu, Tao wrote poetry that, on the one hand, extolls his enjoyment of life on the rural margin between the human world and the wilderness and, on the other, narrates the difficulties he had making a living there. For the first time in Chinese history, this is a poetry that …

Total Prevention: A History Of Schistosomiasis In Japan, Alexander Bay

History Faculty Articles and Research

In Japan, schistosomiasis was endemic in Yamanashi Prefecture and a few other hotspot areas where the Miya’iri snail lived. The parasite’s lifecycle relied on the intermediary Miya’iri snail as well as the human host. Parasite eggs passed into the agrarian environment through untreated night soil used as fertiliser or through the culture of open defecation in rural Japan. Manmade rice fields and irrigation ditches, night soil covered paddies and highly refined growing seasons put people in flooded rice paddies to intensively work the land in the spring and summer. The disease was equally dependent on human intervention in the natural …

Traditional Chinese Poems, “The White Blossom” And “Agony Unfurls,” As Well As The Finished Parts In The Martyrdom Of Chen Zi-Ang, A Film Screenplay, And “Shadows Of Phoenixes” In Scarlet Tears On A Golden Branch, A Novel (華夏傳統詩〈素華〉與〈抽怨〉、電影劇本《陳子昂殉道記》已成之部、小說《金枝紅淚》中〈凰影〉已成之部), Xiao-Yu Chen

Student Publications

Book Description

Chen Zi-Ang (courtesy name Bo-Yu, 659–700 CE) was a medieval Chinese author, poet, scholar, twice-prisoner, and a martyr. It has been a devotion of the Daoist and the Chinese folk religions to venerate him as the Holy Land Patron of the Shu Area (Sichuan) and his hometown, Shehong. During his brief life, Chen reverently practiced the cultural-spiritual lineage of Confucianism and was a devout follower of the Daoist religion. He was also a long-term manifester of the Chinese cultural-spiritual archetype of the warrior. Earning his doctorate in 684 CE, he served in a number of minor official roles, …

Nami-Ko: A Realistic Novel, Kenjiro Tokutomi

Zea E-Books Collection

Nami-Ko, also called The Cuckoo (不如帰, Hototogisu), is a tragic story of love and devotion, through sickness, war, oppression, and vengeance. Eighteen-year-old Nami Kataoka hoped her marriage to Baron Takeo Kawashima would bring freedom from her overbearing stepmother. But the couple’s happiness is spoiled by her illness, her mother-in-law’s jealousy, and the schemes of Chijiwa, her husband’s cousin and her own disappointed suitor. Takeo’s naval career takes him away for long periods, and when war breaks out between Japan and China (in 1894), his mother takes advantage of his absence to break up the marriage, sending Nami back …

Pentasyllabic Shi Poetry : Landscape Poetry : Landscapes Of The Mind, Lucas Rambo Bender

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

This episode discusses the prehistory of Chinese landscape poetry. In the centuries before poets began to write consistently of their concrete, personal experiences out in nature, landscape appeared in poetry primarily as a foil for the city and the court, where most poets were writing. In this role, the natural landscape could be terrifyingly inhospitable or wondrous and pure. Either way, it was for the most part imagined rather than experienced, a site more often for mental roaming than for extended in-person exploration.

Han Ancient-Style Poetry : The “Nineteen Old Poems” : Reflection Through A Female Persona : A Mosaic Of Emotions, Zong-Qi Cai

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

The first of the “Nineteen Old Poems”, the best known poem of an abandoned woman in the collection, features a mosaic combination of time, space, and emotion fragments and thereby captures the otherwise inexpressible melancholy of an abandoned woman. Such a mosaic combination is to become a preferred structure for the most intense of lyrical expressions in later poetry.

Han Ancient-Style Poetry : The “Nineteen Old Poems” : Interplay Of Images And Emotions : Binary Structure And Multilateral Texture, Zong-Qi Cai

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

Two distinct formal features, binary structure and multilateral texture, are developed in the “Nineteen Old Poems,” the definitive collection of Han pentasyllabic poetry. The rise of these two formal features attests to the profound impact of transitions from oral performance to poetic writing, from the dramatic/narrative to the lyrical mode of self-presentation.

Wang Xitian And The Chinese Experience In Imperial Tokyo, 1899-1923: Class, Violence, And The Formation Of A New National Consciousness, Isabella Yihan Yang

Student Work

A 2021-2022 Williams Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Isabella Yang (Saybrook ‘22) for her essay submitted to the Department of History, "Wang Xitian and the Chinese Experience in Imperial Tokyo, 1899-1923: Class, Violence, and the Formation of a New National Consciousness” (Daniel Botsman, Professor of History, advisor).

Drawing upon a remarkable array of sources in Japanese, Chinese and English, Isabella Yang, in her thesis “Wang Xitian and the Chinese Experience in Imperial Tokyo, 1899-1923: Class, Violence, and the Formation of a New National Consciousness,” has crafted a genuinely path-breaking account of an aspect of …

Female Bonding And Marginality In Shang Wanyun’S Novella “Xialihe” (1978), Antonio Paoliello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article explores the representation of homosociality between two marginalized female characters in “Xialihe” (夏麗赫) (1978), a novella by Sinophone Malaysian writer Shang Wanyun (商晚) (1952-1995). Although some scholars have suggested that the writer’s preoccupation with the intimate world of women started only in the 1980s, I argue that “Xialihe” already highlights issues such as female intimacy and women’s social marginalization. The text represents, therefore, a link between her earlier nativist production and her later more feminist approach. Additionally, I contend that, writing from a marginal position at the periphery of Malaysia’s national literary system and from a doubly-conservative environment …

Han Ancient-Style Poetry : The "Nineteen Old Poems" : The Magic Of One Additional Character And The Rise Of Reflective Poetry, Zong-Qi Cai

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

After nearly one millennium since its birth, Chinese poetry achieved an optimal convergence of sound and sense in its pentasyllabic poems developed during the Eastern Han (25-220 CE). Taking full advantage of an explosive rise of two-character compounds, the anonymous Han pentasyllabic poets created a poetic rhythm far more flexible and expressive than all existing rhythms and adapted it for philosophical reflection and emotional brooding on human transience.

Yuefu Poetry : Political Satire Or Coquetry? An Ambiguous Song, Jui-Lung Su

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

This episode discusses the two opposing interpretations of the poem entitled, “Mulberry Along the Lane,” one of the best-known yuefu songs in classical Chinese literature. Traditionally this poem has been interpreted as a representation of social injustice, depicting the situation of an official harassing a peasant girl. The other perspective is the poem is simply a verbal flirtation between a man and a woman and a popular song about a clever lady who employs an engaging and inoffensive way to turn down her suitor.

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Beside Yingzao: An Index Of Chinese Building Traditions, Tianyi Hang

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Yingzao referred to the Chinese architectural practice prior to the nineteenth-century introduction of the term jianzhu, the translation of “architecture.” The earliest preserved illustrated government-issued building standard was titled Yingzao fashi. Published by the Southern Song government in 1103, Yingzao fashi defined and regulated technical terms used to describe imperial construction as well as specified the labor costs of certain building techniques. These terms inform our understanding of the traditional Chinese way of categorization and knowledge system of architecture and architectural elements.

Titled “Beside Yingzao,” this study takes the technical terms from Yingzao fashi to guide the reader in investigating …

Yuefu Poetry : A Bad Breakup In The Han Yuefu, Jui-Lung Su

How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast

This episode analyzes this yuefu piece from different perspectives. As many of the popular songs of the Han, this poem contains dialogue and monologue at the same time. The poem follows a daring woman’s emotional changes from her initial rage against her lover from the south who jilted her to an unsettling feeling of anxiety.

The Costs Of Lolicon: Japan’S Pedophilia Trade, Megan Sluzhevsky

Senior Theses

This thesis investigates Japan’s normalization of pedophilia via the proliferation of popular culture and media. This analysis will begin by looking at historical examples of pedophilia, specifically focusing on chigo in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, wakashu in Edo Period pleasure quarters, and the spread of soft power diplomacy after World War II. This phenomenon will also be viewed in the modern context by discussing lolicon in Japanese media and advertising, idol culture in the Japanese music industry, the JK business, and “real” child pornography. The ways that Japan benefits from this culture economically and politically will also be investigated. Finally, this …