Writing and Literacy in China, Korea and Japan.

• Author: Miller, Roy Andrew
• Position: Review

By INSUP TAYLOR and M. MARTIN TAYLOR. Studies in Written Language and Literacy, vol. 3. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY, 1995. Pp. xii + 412.

Gibbon relates how Zenobia "had drawn up for her own use an epitome of oriental history,"(1) of which unfortunately nothing more is known; but whatever the celebrated Queen of Palmyra got for her pains can hardly have been more ambitious than this book by Ms. Insup Taylor, of the University of Toronto, "educated in S. Korea and the USA," and further identified by the publisher as "a multilingual" (p. vi).(2) Its overt theme, the problem of how to achieve and define literacy in three modern Asian societies, turns out to be no more than a point d'appui for interminable digressions on history, geopolitics, economics, literature, population problems - indeed, everything a man from Mars who had never heard of Asia might need to know, with the possible exception of recipes for characteristic local dishes. All this is recounted in an eager, naive, and doggedly enthusiastic first-person narrative style that at first amuses, but soon thereafter wearies, the reader.

But despite the book's diversity of topics, it is in a manner of speaking held together by two covert themes that, though unannounced and at best only tangently impinging upon literacy questions, are clearly Ms. Taylor's real concern. One is an apologia for the continued use of the Chinese script in China, Korea, and Japan on the grounds that its advantages outweigh its problems; the other, which begins with the astonishing allegation that "the three East Asian peoples - Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese - . . . are related . . . racially" (p. 1), eventually culminates in a coda of startling brash Pan-Asian chauvinism: "The four 'little dragons' - S. Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore - as well as the economic superpower Japan put a premium on equipping their citizens with functional literacy. . . . What about China? . . . its illiteracy rate has been decreasing over the past few decades, if slowly. Watch out, the big dragon is breathing fire!" (p. 380).

Buttressing the former theme is Ms. Taylor's conviction that her knowledge of the Chinese script, plus the fact that she is a native speaker of Korean, has rendered it unnecessary for her to bother with learning Japanese or Chinese. Especially in the case of Japanese, she avers that "by paying attention mostly to Kanji [Chinese characters], . . . I seem to read a Japanese book faster than an English book, even though I am far, far more practised in reading English than Japanese" (p. 340; similarly, pp. 325-26).

Lurking behind the latter is also Ms. Taylor's low opinion of education in the West ("In East Asia, the business of school is to teach students core subjects; in N. America...