When I tried to buy a bottle of white flower oil (baihuayou) recently at a Taipei pharmacy, I was given a box of Viagra instead. Noticing my grimace, the old man behind the counter thrust a pencil and a paper at me, and I dutifully wrote down the Chinese characters. I got the white flower oil. Such a small incident may illustrate only my inadequate command of Mandarin, or my apparent diminution of vigor, but what interests me more is the resolution of miscommunication. This interaction surely has been replayed endlessly in East Asia over the past millennia. Yet, it is symptomatic of the times that a Taipei pharmacist should hear an Anglophone word when a Chinese one is spoken. Why not? Just as billboards carrying English-language brands and catchphrases dot the Taipei skylines, so are East Asian scholarly journals published in English. Perhaps more noteworthy for the present context is that the quintessentially “western” phenomena of science and technology should require concentrated scholarly attention by East Asian scholars largely located in East Asia and that their primary intellectual tools should be the “western” theories of Science and Technology Studies (STS). 1
