The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  61 Robert McKean Jones, “Typewriting Machine,” United States Patent no. 1646407 (filed March 12, 1924; patented October 25, 1927).

  62 Ibid.

  63 Gilbert, “Putting Ideographs on Typewriter,” 156.

  64 John Cameron Grant and Lucien Alphonse Legros, “A Method and Means for Adapting Certain Chinese Characters, Syllabaries or Alphabets for use in Type-casting or Composing Machines, Typewriters and the Like,” Great Britain Patent Application no. 2483 (filed January 30, 1913; patented October 30, 1913).

  65 Another early attempt at alphabetic Chinese typewriting (circa 1914) was made by Walter Hillier. See “Memorandum by Sir Walter Hillier upon an alphabetical system for writing Chinese, the application of this system to the typewriter and to the Linotype or other typecasting and composing machines, and its adaptation to the braille system for the blind” (London: William Clowes and Sons, Limited, n.d.). Readers are encouraged to keep an eye out for forthcoming work by Andrew Hillier, who is in the midst of writing a biography of the Hillier family and its connection to the British Empire.

  66 John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), chapter 4.

  67 J. Frank Allard, “Type-Writing Machine,” United States patent no. 1188875 (filed January 13, 1913; patented June 27, 1916).

  68 “Chinese Alphabet Has Been Reduced,” Telegraph-Herald (April 11, 1920), 23.

  69 “Chinese Phonetic on a Typewriter” (advertisement for the Hammond Multiplex), Popular Science 97, no. 2 (August 1920): 116.

  70 Special thanks to Michael Hill for alerting me to this volume.

  71 “Obituary: Robert McKean Jones. Inventor of Chinese Typewriter Was Able Linguist,” New York Times (June 21, 1933), 18.

  72 Photograph of Fong Sec, Asia: Journal of the American Asiatic Association 19, no. 11 (November 1919): front matter, photograph by Methodist Episcopal Centenary Commission. Still other examples abound. The inaugural issue of Shanghai Puck featured a short ditty of its own, “An American View of the Chinese Typewriter,” reprinted from Kenneth L. Roberts’s 1916 piece in Life magazine, entitled “A Reason Why the Chinese Business Man May Soon Be Tired.” See “An American View of the Chinese Typewriter,” Shanghai Puck 1, no. 1 (September 1, 1918): 28; and “A Reason Why the Chinese Business Man May Soon Be Tired,” Life 68 (1916): 272.

  73 A photograph of Zhang Xiangling appeared in Who’s Who in China 3rd ed. (Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1925), 31.

  74 “Doings at the Philadelphia Commercial Museum,” Commercial America 19 (April 1923): 51. For more on the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, see Steven Conn, “An Epistemology for Empire: The Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1893–1926,” Diplomatic History 22, no. 4 (1998): 533–563. The shipment from China is confirmed in Annual Report of the Philadelphia Museums, Commercial Museum (Philadelphia: Commercial Museum, 1923), 9. In 1923, Zhang explored such themes further in his preface to Julius Su Tow’s The Real Chinese in America. “As a whole,” Zhang began, “the American people have never been given an opportunity to know the Chinese truly and fully.” China was home to “trading corporations, banks and steamship lines,” he continued, news of which would surprise the average American man or woman. “Chinese are as intelligent and respectable as any other people in the world and ... are not merely laundrymen!” See Julius Su Tow, The Real Chinese in America (New York: Academy Press, 1923), editorial introduction by Ziangling Chang [Zhang Xianglin], xi–xii.

  75 Photograph 2429 in Descriptions of the Commercial Press Exhibit (Shanghai: Commercial Press, ca. 1926), in City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, record group 232 (Sesquicentennial Exhibition Records), 232-4-8.1, “Department of Foreign Participation,” box A-1474, folder 8, series 29, “China, Commercial Press Exhibit”; “China, Commercial Press Exhibit,” City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, record group 232 (Sesquicentennial Exhibition Records), 232-4-8.1 “Department of Foreign Participation,” box A-1474, folder 8, series folder 29.

  76 Descriptions of the Commercial Press Exhibit, 56.

  77 Born in Shanghai, Zhang studied at St. John’s University in Shanghai, and later at Columbia University. He served as associate editor of the Peking Daily News between 1913 and 1915, and later as associate-level secretary in the Ministries of Communication, Interior, and Foreign Affairs. “Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders,” China Weekly Review (Shanghai), 1936: 6–7. See also photograph 2308 in Descriptions of the Commercial Press Exhibit. The Chairman of the Chinese Commission was Tinsin C. Chow.

  78 Descriptions of the Commercial Press Exhibit, 41.

  79 Ibid., 56.

  80 “Consul General Stationed in the United States Writes to Inform of Philadelphia Competition (Zhu Mei zonglingshi hangao Feicheng saihui qingxing) [駐美總領事函吿費城賽會情形],” Shenbao (January 14, 1927), 9; “List of Awards-General n.d.,” City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, record group 232 (Sesquicentennial Exhibition Records), 232-4-6.4 (Jury of Awards-Files), box a-1472, folder 17, series folder 1.

  81 Qian Xuantong, “China’s Script Problem from Now On (Zhongguo jinhou zhi wenzi wenti) [中國今後之文字問題],” Xin qingnian 4, no. 4 (1918): 70–77.

  82 Qian Xuantong [錢玄同], “Why Must We Advocate a ‘Romanized National Language?’ (Weishenme yao tichang ‘guoyu luoma zi’?) [為什麼要提倡國語羅馬字?],” Xin­sheng 1, no. 2 (December 24, 1926). In The Writings of Qian Xuantong (Qian Xuantong wenji) [钱玄同文集], volume 3 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1999), 387.

  83 Gilbert Levering, “Chinese Language Typewriter,” Life 2311 (February 17, 1927), 4.

  5

  Controlling the Kanjisphere

  Typists more than anyone must follow the times.

  —Chinese typewriting manual, Manchukuo, 1932

  It should … not be overlooked that these Japanese typewriters could also be used for correspondence in Chinese.

  —Memo from treasurer to secretary general, Occupied Shanghai, 1943

  “Pray for Free China.” So reads a sticker affixed to the Chinese typewriter I acquired in the summer of 2009. The machine came from a Christian church in San Francisco, where it had been used for years to compose the weekly church bulletin. “They were going to throw it away,” explained the man who had learned of my work and reached out by email. “I saved it in hopes that someone might find some way to appreciate such past technology.”1 The machine was a Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter produced on the mainland by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory. With its signature pale green color, this was the typewriter of the Maoist period (1949–1976), and manufactured well into the 1980s and early 1990s.

  The Californians who owned this machine had subverted the device’s national and party affiliations, however. On the sticker that “prayed for Free China,” the flag of the Nationalist, or Guomindang, party was featured prominently, pledging political allegiance to the Taiwanese government-in-exile (or “renegade province,” in Beijing’s parlance). The machine’s allegiance was further pledged to the United States, with a second sticker on the machine featuring the American bald eagle, grasping arrows in its talons. Poised menacingly next to the pair of unarmed pigeons, the device’s official logo, the eagle stood as testament to the late Cold War period in which the machine had been in service.

  In what ways can objects be said to have politics, however, not in the technolinguistic sense explored thus far, but in conventional terms of party politics, national identity, and the like? Does it matter who builds an inscription device, in the sense of the engineer’s or company’s place of origin or ideological leanings—or are technological devices inherently neutral, nationless, cosmopolitan citizens of the world? Did it matter in any way, in other words, that a machine manufactured in the People’s Republic of China had been employed by a pro-Taiwan, Christian Chinese church in the United States? Or are technological objects by their very nature agnostic with respect to
these all-too-human concerns? These are some of the questions we will take up in this chapter.

  The following year, another episode brought these same questions surging back to my consciousness in unexpected ways. Summer 2010 found me in London on a congested ride from Hounslow Central Station to Covent Garden, with an unremarkable matte brown suitcase to my left. Inside its stiff acrylic walls, sheets of crumpled wallpaper samples held in place the central component of another Chinese typewriter, this one built in the 1960s. Neither this suitcase nor its contents had belonged to me just hours earlier, but instead to a Malaysian Chinese-British family living in the suburbs of London along the outermost stretch of the Piccadilly Line. This typewriter had been purchased in Singapore, employed in Malaysia, shipped to London, and was now en route to my office at Stanford University. This would become the second machine in my growing collection, and one whose national identity was even more complicated than that of the first, I had discovered.2

  When I arrived at the home of the Tai family, I was greeted warmly and guided to a room in the rear of the house. Evelyn sat down at the desk and began to demonstrate the machine I had been invited to see. “I haven’t touched it in twenty years,” she began. “I’ll try my best.” Evelyn began to type, and I asked her how she had come to learn the locations of more than two thousand characters. Her response was modest, as if to dismiss the feat of memory. “I just remember it.” She expanded somewhat on this answer, explaining how Chinese radicals, or bushou, were the key, just as we saw in chapter 4 when we examined typewriting schools and curricula in early twentieth-century China. When learning the layout of the machine, she explained, she had started by learning that all characters of such-and-such radical were located in such-and-such zone. Over time, though, this conscious act of study and memorization had clearly given way to muscle memory. “Say I want xin [新 ‘new’],” Evelyn remarked casually, beginning to move the character selector across the typewriter tray bed. “Straightaway you know xin is here.”

  Everything about Evelyn’s machine seemed deeply personal. In a small, four-by-three-inch plastic box, she kept a special set of characters she could reach and, using tweezers, place on her machine in one of the empty slots in the matrix. Like the characters on the Huntington machine discussed in chapter 4, whose character tray bed still testifies to the life and times of its owner, Evelyn’s characters testified to her Christian faith and the clerical work she performed as a member of her church: immortal/saint (仙 xian), to save (拯 zheng), the exceedingly rare third-person pronoun reserved for God (祂 ta). Others were not so easily deciphered, as in gao (糕) and qiu (丘)—most likely the surnames of church members who appeared regularly in the weekly bulletins that had been typed on this machine.

  The machine was deeply personal for Evelyn’s daughter, as well. During her mother’s demonstration, Maria stood just behind us, listening to her mother’s explanations. Unlike the rest of her immediate family, all of whom were born in Malaysia, Maria had been born in Singapore after the first of the family’s emigrations. There Maria’s father had worked as an assistant lecturer at Trinity College, while her mother worked as a kindergarten teacher at a school associated with a local Methodist church (they themselves being Presbyterian). Evelyn purchased her Chinese machine in Singapore and used it to type up lecture materials at Trinity, as well as church programs and orders of worship. While Maria was still an infant, her mother had taken a three-month intensive course in Chinese typewriting administered by the Adult Education Board of Singapore, passing the certification exam in October 1972. The family moved again, this time to London, where her father was to serve as a chaplain at the United Reform Church. They disassembled and shipped most of the machine, all except for the platen. This they had packed inside a matte brown, acrylic suitcase—the very piece of luggage that they would soon turn over to me.

  Throughout these many travels, the sound of her mother’s typewriter was a constant for Maria, providing some measure of continuity during an itinerant childhood. At home, with her daughter sometimes helping her, Evelyn typed up Chinese-language programs for her church, making copies using stencil paper. Other organizations and outfits requested her help as well, such as local community centers and nearby schools and churches. When she was not helping her mother, Maria explained, she could still hear the muffled yet distinct sound of the machine through the walls of the house, late at night. The sound would accompany her as she dozed off in her bed. Here in 2010, as she watched her mother demonstrate the machine to me, she interjected almost inaudibly: “It makes me fall asleep, that sound.”

  When first I set out on my research, little could I have known that a conversation in the suburbs of London would present the opportunity to delve into an intimate history of the Chinese typewriter. Over the span of those few hours, I was able to put aside the many questions of politics we have examined thus far—the politics of how Chinese typewriting was understood in the alphabetic world, the politics of the common usage approach to Chinese technolinguistic modernity, the politics of divisible type printing, and more—and instead catch strobing glimpses of the place this one particular apparatus had held in one woman’s life for more than two decades. It was one of the “evocative objects” of her world, to cite Sherry Turkle’s a propos formulation.3 The machine even shared her name, with an embossed label reading “Evelyn” affixed to the front of the chassis. “This is my one,” she remarked to me, “from beginning to end.”

  As quickly as politics had receded from view, however, they burst forth once again, this time in a remarkably different light. As I looked over the apparatus, a small plaque affixed to the rear of the chassis caught my attention, and instantly complicated the romantic portrait I had been painting in my mind. Upon this plaque was embossed:

  “Chinese Typewriter Company Limited Stock Corporation. Japanese Business Machines Limited.”

  This Chinese typewriter was Japanese.

  An entirely new conversation ensued, returning us to the day, many decades earlier, when Evelyn and her husband had first purchased the machine at a shop in Singapore. The store had on offer a selection of Chinese typewriters, she recalled, including the same Double Pigeon model that was waiting for me back at home. Double Pigeon was by far the most widely used Chinese typewriter at that time, both in China and internationally, in large part because it was one of the only models of Chinese typewriter being produced on the mainland.

  The other model on offer was the Superwriter, built by Japanese Business Machines, Ltd. Structurally and linguistically, the principles of the machines were identical, both featuring common usage tray beds upon which were arrayed a collection of approximately 2,500 Chinese characters. The typing mechanisms operated identically, as well. Using his or her right hand, the operator guided the character selector device over the top of the desired character, depressing the type bar at the appropriate time. The main question for Evelyn was the reputation of Japanese and Chinese manufacturing more broadly. Should she purchase a Chinese typewriter built in China, or one built in Japan?

  As every historian knows, brief and passing moments like this have the capacity to reroute us, hurtling us down unexpected paths that can require years to traverse, but leave us richer for the journey. Working through my archives again, and expanding into new collections in Tokyo, questions came into focus I had not contemplated before: Over the course of modern history, who controlled the means of Chinese textual production and transmission—when, how, and to what ends?

  By this point in my research, I knew full well that global giants like Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and Mergenthaler Linotype had all tried and failed to enter the Chinese-language market, let alone capture it. Standing in Evelyn’s living room, the question reemerged: What about Japan? If Western manufacturers had proven unable to bring the Chinese language into their ever-expanding repertoire of world scripts—and increasingly unable to imagine what a typewriter might look like for a nonalphabetic script—what about companies and engineers
in Japan, where nonalphabetic Chinese characters—or kanji—formed a core part of the Japanese language? And how might this history relate to the contemporary concept of “CJK,” a catch-all term within contemporary computing that refers to “Chinese, Japanese, and Korean” information processing, font production, and more?4 As I looked upon this Japanese-made Chinese typewriter, was I in fact looking at the “prehistory” of CJK?

  In this chapter, we examine the braided histories of Japanese typewriting and Japan’s takeover of the Chinese typewriting industry. Although the apotheosis of the Western-style keyboard typewriter had placed China and Chinese irretrievably beyond the pale of technolinguistic modernity as understood by multinational companies like Remington, the history of Japanese multinationals was an altogether different one. Japan was home to two distinct approaches to typewriting, one oriented exclusively toward the typing of Japanese kana—the twin syllabaries, hiragana or katakana—and the other oriented toward character-based writing (kanji). In look and feel, the first family of machines was indistinguishable from those built by Remington, Underwood, or Olivetti. The second family, meanwhile, was indistinguishable from those built in China. Occupying this liminal position, Japanese engineers were in many ways less imaginatively confined than their Western counterparts, never restricting themselves to a keyboard-based system incapable of handling characters. Instead, Japan succeeded where Remington failed by developing the very same tray bed–based common usage machines with which Chinese typists had become familiar.

  Japanese companies made inroads into the Chinese market as early as the 1920s, a process that accelerated quickly with the expansion of Japanese empire-building in northeast China in 1931, and then with the outbreak of full-scale war in 1937. By the late 1930s and 1940s, Japan dominated the Chinese typewriter market, and would continue to exert influence well into the early postwar period (as exemplified in Evelyn Tai’s choice of Superwriter). CJK, it turns out, has a violent past, inseparable from the rise and fall of the Japanese empire and the horrors of the Second World War.