Empathy and Its Others: The Voice of Asia, A Pail of Oysters, and the Empathetic Writing of Formosa

Two books published in the early 1950s, James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Vern Sneider's A Pail of Oysters, focused on the role that Americans could play in Cold War Asia. Michener's 1951 book of interviews stressed the idea that Americans needed to listen to the people of Asia in order to understand the region. Sneider's 1953 novel had as its protagonist an American reporter who traveled to postwar Taiwan to learn about the populace of the island. Both books emphasized the importance of face-to-face personal contact with common people, which the authors believed was instrumental to the creation and maintenance of cross-cultural understanding and regional peace. As such, they participated in a cultural rhetoric of empathy that would educate Americans about Asia and convince Asians of Americans' honorable intentions. The books also suggested that Americans in Asia had not only the privilege, but also the moral duty to represent Asia to other Americans through their writing. This paper, by looking into depictions of empathetic listening and writing in the two books, examines how A Pail of Oysters complicates Michener's treatment of Taiwan. In both works, Americans are granted moral authority as listeners and writers. In spite of the authors' emphasis on Americans listening to Asians, an important difference between them lies in the goals they set for listening. Michener's emphasis on Taiwan's role in the future of China is challenged by Sneide's on the socio-political situations in which the Taiwanese lived in the fifties. The reception of these books suggests that the power of the empathetic American writer to shape Americans' role in Asia was limited by the material, political, and discursive contexts in which it was situated.