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This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa's Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa's father; and Rita Wong's forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or "e-waste"). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major purpose of this study is to critically reassess China's hierarchical view of East Asia and, specifically, its manifestation toward Korea, particularly in the context of the East Asian discourse that has been active in China and Korea since as early as the 1990s. According to this discourse, East Asians have been preoccupied with 'a dream for the strong nation-state' in the past century that specifically accounts for the secularized concept of modernization, 'the wealth and power of the nation-state'. But rising above the dream is more desirable in both bringing peace to the region and helping carry the grand project of East Asian regional integration through the 21st century. This is an integration initiated from the periphery (weaker states) to the center (strong states), and an integration that differs from the past Chinese empire and the Japanese Greater-East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. However, the East Asian discourse falls short of efforts to combine intellectual discourse to concrete political issues in the region. In this regard, the discourse is likely to remain merely a normative and abstract subject of study unless it is related to practical and pending issues among the regional countries. This study is a response to this critical viewpoint, by applying the East Asian discourse to a critique of China's view of East Asia and its manifestation toward Korea. For the full materialization of the spirit of the East Asian discourse, the essential component is continuous dialogue among intellectuals from throughout the region to gain and improve a horizontal perspective among them and to overcome the obsolete and redundant geographical concept of the nation-state. The East Asian discourse will therefore provide a communication network to support active intellectuals in their striving to provide an academic framework capable of supporting the regional positive development and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]