COLD WAR IN THE HEARTLAND: TRANSPACIFIC EXCHANGE AND THE IOWA LITERARY PROGRAMS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES JULY 2019 By Yi-hung Liu Dissertation Committee: Mari Yoshihara, Chairperson Jonna K. Eagle Robert Perkinson Subramanian Shankar, Andy Chih-ming Wang Keywords: Cold War, cultural exchange, transpacific studies, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, International Writing Program Acknowledgements As this dissertation is about to be submitted, I am indebted to many who have supported me along the way. I sincerely hope I can pay off my debts to them one day. Without Mari Yoshihara, this dissertation would have been a collection of archival materials and some random writings. Mari guided me to organize my research, sharpen my arguments, and establish meaningful conversations between this project and current scholarships. As I wrote this dissertation in Taiwan, I especially thank her for her prompt reply to my every email. I am grateful for her astute comments from beginning to end, and her belief in me that I could accomplish this within the time frame. And she was right (Mari is always right). I look forward to working and hanging out with her as a colleague. My deepest gratitude to my committee members: Jonna Eagle, Andy Chih-ming Wang, Subramanian Shankar, and Robert Perkinson. I am extremely thankful for Jonna’s careful reading of and shrewd comments on my drafts. Her feedbacks greatly refined this dissertation. I am lucky to have worked with her for several semesters, and I have learned a lot from her style of working and writing. Andy has been my mentor for years; his advice were always valuable and to the point. His belief in my potential to study in a strange country and finally obtain a PhD degree guided me through some difficult moments. I hope I have made him proud. It was in Shankar’s class that I learned how to investigate the Iowa literary programs not just from a historical perspective. His command of literary theory and translation studies provided me an important anchor point to analyze the IWP. Robert supervised one of my special fields for the Qualifying Exam; a number of books that he suggested came in handy as secondary sources for this dissertation. His expertise in U.S. history helped me substantiate my project with accurate details. I would like to express my appreciation to those who accompanied me through my undertaking of this Iowa project. My sincere thanks to Lori Mina and Rumi Yoshida, who i helped me deal with a variety of paperwork at UH. In seminars and over drinks, many shared with me their ideas about my research. I regret that I cannot name them all. I thank Josh, Ava, Tyler, Somjeed, Pao, Jayson, Keiko, Eriko, Marimas, Lesley, for being a part of my transpacific journey. My senpai, Sanae and Yohei, reassured me that there’s nothing to be afraid of when I was unsure if I could cross the finish line. Their encouragement meant a lot to me. Po-hsi is my comrade. We supported each other with discussions about our projects and trash talks about our lives. My special thanks to Tomoaki, who read nearly every draft of this dissertation and shouldered my anxiety throughout my study. I still owe him a meal. It is my great pleasure to become good friends with Guoqian. Her acid remarks in Chinese with a beifang (lit. Northern) accent never failed to make me laugh. Her positivity and generosity taught me a lot. She enabled me to gain a perspective less confined by the island of Taiwan. As moving to Iowa City changed Nieh Hualing’s life, studying in Honolulu changed mine. I am on a route that I did not intend to take five years ago. Regardless of all the changes, I am grateful for my parents and the engineer: their support, their tolerance, and their time that they have allocated to me. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother. I would also like to dedicate this dissertation to my cat, who couldn’t care less about it. ii Abstract Titled “Cold War in the Heartland,” this dissertation investigates the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW) and the International Writing Program (IWP) against the backdrop of the Cold War and the ongoing Chinese Civil War. By tracking the enterprise of the IWW and the IWP through a transpacific framework, this dissertation implies that “Cold War freedom” has conditioned our ways of doing literature and imagining political futures. Through the two Iowa literary programs, this dissertation presents a history of U.S. cultural Cold War with a focus on the exchange between the United States, the Republic of China in Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China. Having become a renowned writing program under the directorship of Paul Engle, the IWW welcomed in 1964 a female Chinese writer from the ROC, Nieh Hualing, with whom Engle co-founded the IWP in 1967. As this dissertation suggests, Engle’s close relationship with the U.S. government evidences that the achievement of the two Iowa programs was associated with U.S. cultural diplomacy, while Nieh’s transpacific movement attests to how U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis “China” from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was instrumental to the making of the IWW and the IWP. Mining English and Chinese archives that are related to the Engles and the U.S. diplomacy, this dissertation uncovers that the U.S. fought the Cold War under the banner of cultural exchange on both sides of the Pacific. The IWW and the IWP were embedded in the Sino- U.S. relationships and Cold War bipolarity. “Cold War in the Heartland” also attends to writers to reveal that the cultural exchange conducted at and through the two Iowa literary programs involved a number of stakeholders and yielded unpredictable results. American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver responded to the social circumstances of the 1960s U.S. in their works during their time at the IWW. Vonnegut engaged himself with the antiwar movement and opposed U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, while Carver exposed the division between classes in iii a supposedly equal, affluent society. Chen Yingzhen and Wang Anyi, coming respectively from the ROC and the PRC, encountered each other at the IWP. In Iowa City, they dealt with political and personal divisions as a result of the Chinese Civil War. By analyzing the actions and writings of the IWW and the IWP participants, this dissertation argues that the two Iowa literary programs were undergirded by the entanglements of the intimate and the geopolitics. Iowa City as a community of writers and a City of Literature was not only an outcome of the cultural Cold War, but also a series of wars between the nation-states, literary ideals, cultural identities, and individuals. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements… i Abstract iii Introduction 1 Iowa City: a Transpacific History Chapter One 23 Cold War Divide and Connection: War and Peace in Iowa City Chapter Two 43 Roundtrips between Iowa City and Taipei: Cold War Internationalism, Paul Engle, and Yu Kwang-chung Chapter Three 78 Layovers in Iowa City: Cold War Modernism, Raymond Carver, and Wang Wen-Hsing Chapter Four 112 Freedom Translated in Iowa City: Nieh Hualing and the International Writing Program Chapter Five 155 “Two Chinas” Come to Iowa City in 1979: Reunion and Division of Chinese Literature Conclusion 188 A City of Many Tales Bibliography 196 ……………………………………………………………………..… ……………………………….……………………………………..… ………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………… v Introduction Iowa City: a Transpacific History Writing is always communication but it cannot always be reduced to simple communication: the passing of messages between known persons. Writing is always in some sense self- composition and social composition, but it cannot always be reduced to its precipitate in personality or ideology, and even where it is so reduced it has still to be seen as active.1 —Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 1977 In November 2008, Iowa City was designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a City of Literature. Iowa City became a part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN), joining Edinburgh and Melbourne as the world’s third City of Literature.2 In the application to UNESCO, the Literary Community of Iowa endorsed the city as “the most literary city on earth,” the “Athens of the Midwest,” and “a place for writers.”3 Describing Iowa City as “home to several national and internationally famous writing programs,” it particularly highlights the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW) and the International Writing Program (IWP).4 Officially instituted in 1936, the IWW grew from a regional writing program in the Midwest into an internationally renowned creative writing workshop under the helm of its second director Paul Engle. In 1964, the IWW welcomed a female Chinese writer from the Republic of China in Taiwan (hereafter ROC), Nieh Hualing, whom Engle married in 1971. Engle and Nieh co-founded the IWP in 1967. Until 1988, the couple invited more than a thousand writers from all over the world, transforming the literary scene of Iowa City into one with a distinct international tone. 1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1977]), 211. 2 See the website of Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature <http://www.iowacityofliterature.org> for more information. Up to 2017, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) is consisted of 180 cities. 3 See the Literary Community of Iowa City, “Application for Iowa City, Iowa, USA to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network” <http://www.iowacityofliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Iowa-City-Application-to- Unesco-CCN_App.pdf> (accessed April 1, 2019), 5.