 Okay, let's get started then. Okay, so welcome everyone to this SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies book talk. We're really delighted to welcome Sydney UN Professor of Communication at Northeastern State University. And today she's going to be talking about her award-winning book, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan, the Sa Jiao generation that was published in 2017. I'm delighted to see that we've got quite a few SOAS students have joined today's session, particularly as we also use one of her blog pieces. What is Taiwan Identity that was published in the SOAS Chinese Institute blog? So many of us are familiar with that piece but also her book. And I'm also delighted to have checked that we do actually have the e-book of Sydney's book in the SOAS library. So if you enjoy today's talk, you make sure you go into a little bit more detail. The other thing I should say about Sydney is that like many of us in the Taiwan Studies field, she's also involved in Taiwan Studies institutions. So she's a member of the Board of Directors of the North American Taiwan Studies Association, an association that's also had a huge impact on Taiwan Studies in Europe. As many of us had our first Taiwan Studies conference experience at NATSA. And I know many of us are going to be taking part in next year's conference and NATSA conference as well. And we'd also welcome Sydney and your colleagues to come and join us at the European conference in the future. And I know that one of the things that's really exciting is the way that NATSA and EATS are starting to work together a lot more. So I'm going to hand over now to you Sydney and welcome to SOAS and hopefully in the future we can really bring you to London, not just online. So over to you. All right. Thank you, Daphit, for your introduction. And good afternoon, everyone. I know it's about 5 p.m. in your time. And my name is Sydney Yue. I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern State University. And it's my honor to be here to share with you about my research. And I would like to especially thank Daphit for your invitation. So basically my book was published in 2017. It's been a few years. However, I do believe that the phenomenon I mentioned in my book is still powerless or vulnerable in the Taiwanese society. So I would like to use this opportunity to have a kind of a presentation. And I also look forward for your comments and feedbacks in the end. I am working on something extended from this book project. So any of your comments would be very helpful. So in today's presentations, I probably will cover four aspects. First, I would like to talk about the origin of the project. How did I start to study Sajiao? And secondly, I think I would like to share with you some of the dominant discourses about the Sajiao culture or the Sajiao phenomenon. And then the third thing I would like to share is the fieldwork I conducted in Taiwan and what I found. And lastly, I think I would like to connect Sajiao with the political communication or the election culture in Taiwan. And this part I touched a little bit in my book, but I did not do a very thorough analysis. So after I present what I found about the politicians use of acute elements, I would like to hear your input on that part. So let's start from my introduction of the origin of the project. Okay, so many people knew when, when they knew that I started Sajiao, they would ask me, how did you start? Why did you want to do that? And to be frankly speaking, I did not come up with that topic when I applied for my PhD degree. I was interested in gender, I was interested in popular culture in Taiwan or in East Asia, and maybe intercultural communication, but I did not have a topic. And as a graduate student, you probably will feel pressured because if you do not have a topic, you will have a hard time like a painful searching process, right? And the worst thing is that I even switched my advisors. So what I did actually was, do you still see my screen? I think I lost it, I just saw a lot of people participant. I'll re-upload it now. Okay, I can still continue my story because it doesn't matter. Okay, so when I'm working or like searching my dissertation topic, I just keep visited my professor, my new advisor. I chat with her in the office and I also ask her questions, you know, did you have any project that worked with you? And finally, she said, Sydney, I was working on the collecting terms, native terms for persuasion. And I would like to get to know some Mandarin Chinese terms in persuasion, could you give me some? And the three terms you saw on the screen would be the three terms I gave to my advisor. The first term is the general expression of persuasion in Mandarin Chinese, Qin. And then I gave her the masculine form of persuasion, that is Ji. And then I gave her the third term, that is Sa Jiao, I labeled it as a feminine form of persuasion. And that was the beginning of my dissertation in the journey of studying Sa Jiao. My advisor actually asked me a lot of questions about Sa Jiao. Why adult women in Taiwan would like to manipulate their significant order by playing cute? She could not understand as an American middle-aged woman. She thought it's weird. And so I have to answer her questions and look very professional and endorse that. That could be a potential dissertation topic. And I did it. Right. So the lesson for many graduate students on the spot today, maybe if you do not have any topic or thesis, that's a good strategy just to bother your advisor and then work with them and then maybe you can come up with a dissertation topic. All right. And I think that's the beginning. But also I think my interactions with my advisor actually plays an important role in shaping my research. So here is the photo of my advisor and me in my graduation ceremony. I want to show this image, not just to recognize her help. But also I want to highlight the interactions between me and her. In the process of doing my dissertation, I was looking for a translation for Sa Jiao in English, and I couldn't find any proper term. I think the closest term probably will be playing cute. However, this term, in my opinion, did not capture the nuances or significance of Sa Jiao in the Taiwanese context. So finally, I decided that maybe I just use the transliteration Sa Jiao as the native term to show that is a quite unique Taiwanese culture. And also, I think when I originally I tried to do these Sa Jiao study in terms of a gender perspective, because in the previous research, Sa Jiao actually has been studied as a women's talk, women's ways of speaking, women's ways of expression. However, I do believe that the interaction between me and my advisor changed my thought to kind of elaborate this project from the gender perspective into a cultural perspective. As I submitted my chapters to the advisor and my advisor, Christine Fitch, started to get to know more about what Sa Jiao is. So, occasionally, she would ask me, Sidney, are you Sa Jiaoing to me again? And I was like, what did I do? Or what did I say? Why did you say so? And after reflecting or pondering what I have done or what I have said to her, I realized maybe I did Sa Jiao to her exactly. And that made me wonder why I would like to, I performed Sa Jiao in front of a cultural outsider, my advisor. And that aha moment made me think Sa Jiao probably is not just about gender, but also about power relations. She's my advisor, and I'm just a powerless graduate student. When I felt guilty, I didn't submit my work on time, or I felt less confident. I was just looking for a communication solution, you know, how to persuade my advisor, even though I did not reach her expectation, I still a good student. And that communication pattern I'm looking for back to my cultural knowledge. I think it's a cultural package I have. I carry with me from Taiwan to the United States. So that moment or that interactions make me think, maybe I need to explore further what Sa Jiao means to Taiwanese or to many Mandarin Chinese speakers. All right. And let's start back to the Sa Jiao. Let's see if I can, can you see the screen right now? Yeah, this is Sa Jiao. Okay, good. So basically Sa Jiao combined two Mandarin Chinese word. The first word is the verb, and the second word is the objective. And we can see that the first word actually is hand movement. And I did a little bit of a special effect I want to show you. So basically Sa is a verb, hand movement, you throw things out. And Jiao basically shows feminine prettiness. Basically, we have a phrase called Ren Bi Hua Jiao means one person is prettier than a flower. And it is used to describe female most of the time. Literally, so the phrase of Sa Jiao could be saying that one is showing off their feminine prettiness. And in most dictionary, Chinese dictionary, you would find the term Shi Ai Zuo Tai as the explanation of Sa Jiao. And to translate the Shi Ai Zuo Tai into English, you can find the phrase expression to deliberately act in front of someone because of the awareness of the other person's affection. So basically, we could have, we could elaborate two features of Sa Jiao from this description. First, Sa Jiao is related on love and like a doll have to make sure that your audience actually likes you or loves you, otherwise your Sa Jiao may not work. Second, Sa Jiao actually means perform a pretentious gesture. Okay, so in this expression or in this two features, we do not see a lot of gender implication, right? So when I, before I went back to Taiwan to conduct my field work, I actually already done some literature review and browse all of the Sa Jiao studies beforehand. And I felt it's very interesting. The dominant discourse in Taiwan about Sa Jiao actually is quite gender explanation. So you would find that Sa Jiao is a necessary skill for women, and the Sa Jiao has to be naturally performed. Moreover, a Sa Jiao character should have certain body features that they should look young. Their body should be very tiny, slender, and the Sa Jiao's female probably should have a very attractive voice. And of course, this female image should be pretty and cute. And so I found this fascinating why the Sa Jiao discourse is all about women. And it sounds like Taiwanese women are given a lot of a pressure that they have to be good at Sa Jiao and they need to know the skills so that they can be to maintaining the relationship in a heterosexual relationship. So when I go back, when I went back to Taiwan and conduct my, oh, this one is just an example to show you in the contemporary Taiwanese society what kind of a female image would look like a Sa Jiao feature. So these are the book covers from the romance novel in Taiwan. This is a very popular genre. Can tell that these women are portraying very innocent, cute, and pretty features. And I argued in my book, this kind of a female ideal image was actually heavily influenced by the Japanese Kawaii culture after the 1980s, 1990s. Because of this popular cultural flow, the gender role or gender expectations in Taiwan actually have certain salient change. Okay, now let's talk about some of my findings in Taiwan. According to Catherine Ferris, she, I think she's the first figure studying Sa Jiao in Taiwan. She defined Sa Jiao as a set of actions that involve the imitation of a child's gesture body movements and ways of speaking. And as you can see, these are some examples how people define or identify Sa Jiao behavior. If you do this kind of a cute performance, you are conducting Sa Jiao. And also, I do not think Sa Jiao should be just study as a women's speaking act or facial expression or body movement. Because all these figures, they are celebrities in Taiwan and all of them could perform certain Sa Jiao feature that is pouting. Right, so Sa Jiao actually is the action of with informal feminine childish and irrational performance. However, the feminine expression does not always attach to a female body. That's, I think that's important contribution of my book because I do not deny that Sa Jiao actually is a gendered performance. However, we should apply Sa Jiao to an even broader social phenomenon. Alright, so basically what I did in Taiwan in two summers was just, you know, walking around in Taipei in a specific area. There were a lot of department stores, restaurants, banks, parks or on the bus. All of these public settings are the place I collect Sa Jiao cases. Okay, so it was not very difficult for me to locate or identify Sa Jiao scenes in everyday communication, everyday life in Taiwan. And after I collect sufficient numbers of Sa Jiao case, I decided I kind of a categorize their functions. So I believe that Sa Jiao has some practical everyday communication functions and the top three are greeting, apologizing and negotiating. So you may ask me, how did I determine this thing is a Sa Jiao thing, right? In previous studies from Catherine Ferris or Dr. Chow, they already gave me a lot of Sa Jiao features. So basically I used their observations, their principles to identify those Sa Jiao behaviors I found in Taipei. And these features included the following. Okay, they are not at the whole list, but these are some very salient Sa Jiao features. For example, high pitched baby voice, or maybe you can say some nasal sound, excessive usage of sentence vinyl particles, tag questions, deliberate acute performance. So for example, I think the common phrase for apology in Mandarin Chinese would be 對不起. And if you want to add a little bit of Sa Jiao flavor, you could use the sentence vinyl particles in the 對不起 phrase. So I'm going to demonstrate a little bit. I will try my best because I don't think I'm a Sa Jiao person. But anyway, 對不起. If you want to add a Sa Jiao flavor, that would sound like 對不起啦. 對不起哦. 對不起嘛. Something like that. I don't know how you feel because I cannot see any audience's face if you smile or can you give me a thumbs up to show that I did a good job. Anyway, so thank you, thank you. So basically that expression, I will identify as a Sa Jiao feature. And for the native Taiwanese Mandarin speakers, they will feel a sense of acute. Okay. And another example I found very fascinating is that I observe a lot of female clerks in Taiwan would greet their customer by saying, how are you? 你好. With a very cute expression. So they instead of saying 你好, they will say 你好. It's just like a kitten meowing and that kind of expression is amazing to me because I always feel like wow, it's so cute. It's so cute to the Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese listeners. And I do think that expression could shorten the distance between listeners and speakers. And that is important elements for Taiwanese. They want to express their friendliness. They want to show people that we could establish intimate relationships. And these features are important for Taiwanese. Taiwanese are proud of being friendly. And so that's the reason I think Sa Jiao culture is very prevalent in Taiwan nowadays. And so after my literature review and my fieldwork in Taiwan, I actually claim that Taiwan is the island of Sa Jiao. I say this based on the three evidence. First, I think the gender role actually shows Sa Jiao culture is encouraged in. Taiwan. Women are expected to be good at Sa Jiao. And if women feel that they want to be marketable in a marriage market, they probably will actively to learn how to perform those deliberate cute actions. And secondly, in my fieldwork, I think Sa Jiao performance is prevalent in everyday communication in Taiwan. Men and women perform Sa Jiao all the time. And they try to use those Sa Jiao tactics to achieve certain communication challenges or communication problems. And I do think I mentioned, you know, the cultural codes of friendliness, friendliness and intimacy plays a significant role in Taiwanese people's worldview and their value. And the third one actually is my argument based on my funding. I think Sa Jiao culture is growing and the growth of Sa Jiao culture actually is concurrent with if you observe movement or localization movement and democratization in Taiwan. I guess it's kind of a collective mental state when most of Taiwanese realize that they are not Chinese anymore. They are just Taiwanese. And they also witnessed all these powerless or vulnerable status Taiwan faced nowadays. They are struggling in between the superpowers that the United States and the PRC. And that kind of mentality actually influence people's everyday communication. So that is my argument. And I use the political communication as my evidence to say, you know, it's not just about interpersonal relationship building. But in general, Taiwanese people maybe unconsciously perform a certain cute actions, try to persuade each other to accomplish their communication tasks. So then in my book, I mentioned the election in Taiwan. I think if you know, in 1998, Chen Shui-bian, during that time he was the Taipei mayor, he was running for his second term. And he created this Appian-wa-wa, the Appian doll for his campaign. I think it's the beginning of cute elements that has been used in Taiwan's election. And he failed for his rerun for the mayor. However, he was elected as the first DPP president in Taiwan from 2000 to 2008. And I'm not saying that those cute elements determine his victory. However, I do think starting from him, I think the Sajiao performance used those cute elements in their campaigning. So it says something. It works. It is an effective method. So we see a lot of politicians use those elements. And here is an example, like Tsai Ing-wen, the current president in her first run, like the second presidential election in 2016. She has those piggy banks and the personal five dolls. These are very cute. And these worked when she tried to encourage her supporters to donate money or support her. However, I want to also mention one point. She, a Tsai Ing-wen, is the first female president in Taiwan. And her public image actually is not very feminine, or we would say she seldom played cute in any public settings. We do not see her wearing a skirt. She always looked very professional and in dark suits, right? However, her personal image, she probably choose to be gender neutral as a female leader for Taiwan. However, it does not mean that she could avoid use of the cute elements in her campaigning. Her team actually had to use those cute elements to help her shorten the distance between her and the voters. And the cute trend still continued. We see in 2020, in social media, a lot of visual artists actually create a lot of cute figures for Tsai Ing-wen. And this one is an example. The Taiwanese visual artists' array created a lot of cute, cutified Tsai Ing-wen icon here. All of these figures are Tsai Ing-wen. And Tsai Ing-wen tries to promote her policy and to show her achievements in her first four years. And this is a promotion for her tax reduction policy. Okay, so we still see a lot of cute elements used in Taiwan's election. And we would like to ask why, right? I'm not just favoring Tsai Ing-wen. I'm going to show you some male politicians' cute elements or cute figures. Here they are, right? So basically the first one is incumbent Taipei mayor, Ko Wen-je, and his cute cartoon figure. And the second in the middle, that is the presidential candidate for 2016 for the DPP party. He has also a cute figure of him. And the third one, everybody probably know him. This is Ma Ying-je, our former president. And I did not know how to call the cute icon in his head. But you can tell it's a cute performance. And the last one actually is a presidential candidate for 2020. And he has also those cute icon to represent him. So finally, this is the last slide I want to show you. This is Tsai Ing-wen in her first 2016 campaign. And this image was created by one of her young supporters who is also a visual artist. And I don't believe it's paid by Tsai's campaign. It's a voluntary work, you know? And in this young artist's eyes, Tsai Ing-wen becomes a teenage superwoman, right? With cat ears. And Tsai Ing-wen has two cats, Ah Tsai and Xiang Xiang. You can see these two cats around her in other very cute elements in that image, right? So when I showed this picture to an American audience, they were shocked that it was created by her supporter. And they reasoned it could be interpreted as an attack by the opponent to belittle the female candidate if it happened in the United States, okay? One female professor, if I saw myself portrayed this way, I would be so mad. I was so harmless and like a doll. How could people feel flattered when they are cutified this way? So this is a professor's comment on Tsai Ing-wen's cutified image. Hearing her response, I was also pondering, yeah, why don't Taiwanese get mad? Why do Taiwanese people view the cute image as compliment instead of insult? And what is the danger of the Sajiao culture? What is the danger of using the cute elements in everyday communication? And that would be some directions for my future project. So I probably would just stop here and I am looking towards send the feedbacks and questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.