appreciate the quick responses
In case this helps diagnose the problem, I will clarify that by "Table of Contents" I mean the Table of Contents inside the feed, not the booklist generated by the Sony reader.
I'm not sure Sony UI is responsible for handling the inner feedbook's Table of Contents inside the file.
In any case, an interesting note is that the same phenomenon where only the book's Table of Contents appears properly happens on Digital Editions in Windows XP with East Asian fonts enabled (inside Regional and Languages Options) and in Adobe Reader LE in Windows Mobile 6.1 with Chinese NLS with Ming Liu font.
And to clarify for example, the Windows XP with Digital Editions scenario, the Left Panel of DE displays the Table of Contents of the file properly (which suggests my computer has the necessary fonts), but each page containing the articles contain "????" characters.
The case directly above would appear to rule out the uncertainty of what program's handling the file. In this case, Digital Editions should be reading both the TOC and the articles.
I can't think of what else to install besides a Chinese Version of Windows XP if that even matters.