Triangulated Manhood in Wartime Taiwan: The Case of Goo Sin-Ing's Writings (1938-1945)

Huei-Ying Kuo, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University

This study challenges historiography that frames the Taiwanese identity-making during World War II through the lens of a China-Japan binary. It examines how pan-Asianism reshaped Taiwanese identity through the writings of the biliterate (Chinese and Japanese) physician Goo Sin-ing (Wu Hsin-jung; 1907-1967). My primary sources are Goo's diaries and published works from 1938 to 1945, including his two-part essay "Memoir of My Late Wife" and his commentary on the customs of simpua (adopted daughter-in-law). I show how his attempt to reconcile the demands of being an enlightened, Japanese-educated Asian man and a dutiful Han Taiwanese son generated a form of manhood triangulated among Japanese imperialism, Chinese nationalism, and Western racial hierarchy. I trace this tension by analyzing the contrasts between his romantic life in Tokyo and his family responsibilities in Taiwan; between a newly imagined Asian identity and his primordial Hoklo Han heritage; and between being a proud father and struggling to survive as an ordinary man during wartime air raids. Gender is crucial to understanding the gap between his public presentation of patriarchal order in family life and his internal struggle over political belonging, specifically the question of which state or empire his Han lineage would belong to, given the broad ethnic claims of pan-Asianism. His postwar recollections of wartime experiences, however, curtailed the earlier possibilities for conceptualizing Han identity beyond the framework of Chinese nationalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 208. Contested Belonging in the Shadow of World War II: Gender, Nation, and Empire in East and Southeast Asia, 1937-1952