Make Love and War: Chinese Popular Romance in Greater East Asia, 1937-1945

My dissertation examines Chinese popular romances produced and consumed in the Japanese colonized and occupied regions, including Taiwan, Manchukuo, and Shanghai, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. I investigate the complex relationships between emotion, representation, and consumption vis--vis wartime discourses and sociopolitical turmoil. Through extensive archival research in Taiwan, China and Japan, I (re)discovered and reevaluated five important wartime popular romance writers and their works. In addition to fiction, sequels, film and stage play adaptations, Japanese translation and readers/viewers responses all together create the cultural phenomena of the popular romance genre. In this dissertation I ask the following questions: How are emotion and love articulated vis--vis wartime politics? How does the popular romance genre engage with its environment? How could this genre demarcate, blur, cross or reinforce the boundaries between eroticism and patriotism, the individual and the state, and the private and the public? I argue that even though the wartime politics dictate that private emotions be devoted to the public needs (i.e., the War) and hence individual interests should be subjugated to the collective, Chinese writers and readers pursued individuality through the discourses of romantic love and the devotion to the opposite sex rather than to the nation or to the colonizer. Thus, paradoxically, popular romance, even though a mass production, is a collective channel for reaffirming individual existence under political pressure. Chapter 1 examines Xu Kunquan (1907-1954) and Japanese translation of his novel in colonial Taiwan. This chapter discusses how romantic love story is used to channel the emotions during negotiating between morality and decadence and to seek spiritual transcendence under political pressure. Chapter 2 discusses Wu Mansha (1912-2005), a Chinese alien in colonial Taiwan and how an entertainment genre written in Sinitic languages promoted Japanese Imperialism, as well as how the author used this genre as a tactic to survive wartime politics. Chapter 3 analyzes Mu Rugai (1884-1961) from Manchukuo and how he used the popular romance to vent his political resentment and to deconstruct the Japanese ideology of Manchukuo as utopia. Chapter 4 analyzes the melodramatic imagination of victimhood in wartime Shanghai. The victimization and feminization of the male protagonist in Qin Shouous (1908-1993) novel Begonia and its film and stage play adaptations is on the one hand an allegory of Chinas wartime status. On the other hand, the excessive, sensational depiction of victimhood in a tragic love story releases the repressed energy of the audience in Occupied Shanghai. Chapter 5 discusses Eileen Chang (1920-1995) and the consumption of femininity in wartime Shanghai. The literary persona of Eileen Chang is constructed as the combination of movie star, a new cultural phenomenon in twentieth century China, and courtesan culture from late imperial China. Through imagining their love/hate relationship with this literary star, the audience pursued femininity as opposed the masculine wartime politics

Interferometric Porosimetry of Porous Silicon with Radius Distribution Functions

In this study a set of porous silicon (pSi) interferometric vapor sensor were made from p+ (~1 ohm-cm) and p++ (~0.005 ohm-cm) B-doped Si. The pSi layers were prepared electrochemically, stabilized either by ozone oxidation or 1-octene derivatization, and then characterized. FTIR reflection spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and x-ray spectroscopy of pSi layer cross sections confirmed the completeness of the ozone oxidation and 1-octene hydrosilation. The performance of the pSi layers as interferometric ethanol vapor sensors was assessed by constructing calibration curves of optical thickness change versus ethanol partial pressure and using these to assess the detection limits for ethanol vapor sensing. The interferometric calibration curves were analyzed by fitting them to a BET adsorption and capillary condensation model. The model fits the calibration curves using four parameters: two thermodynamic parameters describing physisorption, plus a mean radius and standard deviation describing the pore size distribution. Acceptable fits were obtained for the p+ Si only, and these fits yielded reasonable mean radii that clearly contracted in response to the octene hydrosilation

Could Zc(4025)Z_{c}(4025) be a JP=1+J^{P}=1^{+} D∗D∗ˉD^{*}\bar{D^{*}} molecular state?

We investigate whether the newly observed narrow resonance $Z_{c}(4025)$ can be described as a $D^{*}\bar{D^{*}}$ molecular state with quantum numbers $J^{P}=1^{+}$. Using QCD sum rules, we consider contributions up to dimension six in the operator product expansion and work at leading order of $\alpha_{s}$. The mass obtained for this state is (4.05\pm 0.28) \mbox{GeV}. It is concluded that $D^{*}\bar{D^{*}}$ molecular state is a possible candidate for $Z_{c}(4025)$.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures.Published in Eur.Phys.J. C73 (2013) 2661. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1304.185

Higher order light-cone distribution amplitudes of the Lambda baryon

The improved light-cone distribution amplitudes (LCDAs) of the $\Lambda$ baryon are examined on the basis of the QCD conformal partial wave expansion approach. The calculations are carried out to the next-to-leading order of conformal spin accuracy with consideration of twist 6. The next leading order conformal expansion coefficients are related to the nonperturbative parameters defined by the local three quark operator matrix elements with different Lorentz structures with a covariant derivative. The nonperturbative parameters are determined with the QCD sum rule method. The explicit expressions of the LCDAs are provided as the main results.Comment: 17pages,10figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1311.596