University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Worlds incomplete: From nation to person

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Worlds incomplete: From nation to person

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WORLDS INCOMPLETE:
FROM NATION TO PERSON
by
Ju-hua Wu
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(Visual Anthropology)
May 1997
Copyright 1997 Ju-hua Wu
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UMI Number: 1384931
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UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH ER N CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY RARK
LOS AN G ELES. CALIFORNIA S0007
This thesis, •written by
Ju-hua Wu_____________________
under the direction of h-J&JLJThesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
D tm m
T)nu May 9, 1997
THESIS COMMITTEE
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue ..............................................................1
Travel, Place, Identity .................................... 5
Personal Narratives and
the Anthropology of Self .................... 9
Taiwan/China:
History and Ethnic Relations...................16
Worlds Incomplete:
from Nation to Person ............................ 26
Fieldwork at Home ......................................... 40
Conclusion ..........................................................46
Bibliography ..................................................... 50
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Prologne
Four months after my return from a visit back to Taiwan to film and conduct
research, I got a letter from my family in Taiwan with a note from my father. The
note includes my father's request to eliminate scenes about him in my video. This
is not the first time he has acted as a reluctant anthropological subject1 He had
refused to talk about his experiences when I was with him in Taiwan, contrary to
his original flattered attitude when he learned that I was going to make my thesis
project based on his life experience. At the time of my visit, he was ill and was
having difficulty moving his hands and legs at his command. He spent weeks in
the hospital and afterwards had to make frequent return visits for check-ups and
medication. He was clearly unhappy due to his physical condition, the financial
stress caused by his recent retirement, as well as the political situation on Taiwan at
the time. In the note he enclosed with the family letter, he said he must look ill and
miserable in my video. This was one of the reasons he would like me to edit out
the parts where he appears.
The camera captures the present Ethnographic films usually portray the
ethnographic present. What we record on film or video is only a momentary
glimpse of the subject's life, and therefore it is often a misleading representation.
My thesis video is about my father. It is about his predicament as an emigrant from
mainland China to Taiwan. It is about my emotional attachment to him and my
1 Ruth Behar in "Writing in My Father1 Name" expresses her father's disappointment about how
she includes the stories of her parents in her ethnography, Translated Woman. He was therefore
unwilling to respond to her inquiry. Behar then told him that he is considered a "reluctant subject"
in anthropology (1995: 70).
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cultural upbringing and identity. It is about the parallels in our experiences of being
enmeshed in two worlds while not feeling we belong to either of those worlds.
And it is about my mother's silence in offering me an alternative identity under the
dominant father figure and doctrine which echoes the discourse of the Republic of
China on Taiwan. Being so familiar with my subject/informant, I know these are
not static "things" or objects which have not changed or never will change. In my
father’ s case, it is clear that his illness and stress effected his often negative
responses to my inquiries, or even to me, as captured on video. Now that his
health is improving, he appears to be more positive.
Historical events may have proscribed our experiences, but our memories
are fluid and constantly changing. There is no end to memory. This thesis is about
memory and identity, and how they are shaped by the discourse of the nation-state.
Identity formation is a complex, ongoing process of negotiation between nation and
person. While we can theorize this process, it is nevertheless a very personal and
emotional quest. Thus I believe that incorporation of personal narrative is the most
ideal form of prose for such a project. The fact that my study is a study of Self at
the same time as it is a study of the Other challenges the paradigm of studying the
radically different Other in anthropology. The discussion in this thesis wanders
from personal memory to national history, and then from national memory to
personal history, and seeks to explore how identity is shaped through these
relations.
2
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I divide this thesis into four sections. Beginning with a discussion of
James Gifford's travel theory (Gifford 1992), I seek to explore the relations
between travel and identity, and how physical places ceased to be the primary
source of our identities. In this section, I also relate the nature of my study in terms
of travel— it is fieldwork at home (Taiwan, my place of origin, and the locus is locus
of my family) and away from home (America, where I immigrated and established a
household with my husband). Since this thesis incorporates much information
from and about my father and my memories along with personal experiences
heavily, in the second section,"Personal Narratives and the Anthropology of Self,"
I explicate the significance of using personal narratives in anthropological writing.
I follow Judith Okely's, Kamala Visweswaran's, and Lila Abu-Lughod's ideas that
writing personal narratives is a challenge to the positivist history of ethnography,
and try to push their ideas further to account for an anthropology of Self. In the
third section, I introduce the history of Taiwan as related to mainland China and the
development of ethnic relations on Taiwan at length. This is because this history is
important background information when we try to understand the situations of
Mainlanders, like my father, on Taiwan, as well as the cultural and national
identities of the next generation, such as myself. I then go into the discussion of
memory and history in the fourth section, "Worlds Incomplete: From Nation to
Person." Here I incorporate my own memories and experiences, which are
interwoven with my father’ s experiences and memories, as well as the history and
memory of Taiwan as a nation-state, in order to approach how national ideology
and discourse shape an individual's identity.
3
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The resulting video of this project with the same title should not be viewed
as a complete and ultimate statement of my father’ s and my experiences. This
written thesis provides background information as well as a theoretical framework
relevant to the video. The intention is not to provide a study guide for the video,
but to offer material necessary to understand the issues addressed, yet necessarily
not fully elaborated, in the video.
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Travel, Place, Identity
Since Edward Said's Orientalism {1978), travel theory has been regarded as
implying a play of power relations. Westerners travel to the Orient and see the
radically different Other; such tours then serve to either reassure their imperial
superiority, or lead them to reflect upon and critique their own cultural systems
(which rarely happened until recently). James Clifford went further and used the
concept of travel as a critique of anthropological practice (Clifford 1992). The
discipline of anthropology is possible because of fieldwork. In other words,
anthropological knowledge is constructed through the practice of travel and the
encounter with difference. As Clifford pointed out, however, what made this travel
possible, such things as the means of transport and the presence of capital city, was
often omitted in anthropological writing. In effect, anthropology tends to treat "the
field," which was often a village, as "the culture" (ibid: 98-100). Such a practice
inevitably assumes that culture is static, while in fact, culture is far from a spatially
and temporally bound entity.2 Clifford thus proposed to rethink culture and
anthropology in terms of travel relations-not only do anthropologists travel to "the
field," but anthropological subjects also travel, as evident in Michael Taussig's
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987) and Anna Tsing's In the
Realm o f the Diamond Queen (1993).
While James Clifford expands travel theory by pointing to how political-
economic conditions lead to different kinds of travel, and thus identity, bell hooks
suggests replacing travel with the notion of "journeying" because travel relates too
2See Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other (1983) for a critique of anthropological representation
of other cultures as timeless or only existing "there and then."
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closely to European imperialist adventures (see Hesse 1993). While journeying
carries a message of a more internal process of movement which is crucial in
identity formation, I think it lacks the connotation of encountering differences that
the concept of travel provides. Immigration, forced displacement, labor migration,
exiles, and tourism are all examples of travel. Thus, places alone, while they might
have provided the primary basis for our identity, can no longer sustain one's
identity in this highly mobile, information-rife, world. The notion of travel is not
limited to physical movement between geographical spaces. The history and
memory fashioned from traveling experiences constitute a symbolic space within
which a person forms identity, and it is perhaps more important than the actual
physical experience of being in different places. Thus, it is the reconstruction of
the experiences of travel at work here.
Clifford also calls for a shift in "locating" culture from the idea of "roots" to
that of "routes" (1992: 108). Today, many people are living in-between worlds. A
focus merely on "place" can no longer provide appropriate representations of their
life. In this light, I will look at my subject of study in terms of travel. Traditional
anthropological fieldwork involves making the field a "home away from home,"
what Clifford calls "traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling" (108). My study,
on the other hand, is a reverse of this process. I did not leave my home/culture to
study a radically different Other. On the contrary, I returned home to study the
Self after having left and been relocated among the Other several years ago.
Bom and raised in Taiwan, I left my home country for the United States
with my American husband in 1992, and established a home here in America. My
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study is about Taiwan, my father, and myself. In a sense, my fieldwork back in
Taiwan is also a work at "home away from home," with the two homes switching
places. Returning to Taiwan, and going back to my family, I also reflect upon my
own sense of identity as intertwined in these relations of family and nation.
Each level of this study can be approached in terms of travel. Taiwan's
history is itself a history of travel, as formed through waves of immigration
throughout various periods. My father’ s forced displacement from mainland China
to Taiwan in 1949 parallels my emigration from Taiwan to the United States, but
for very different reasons.
For both my father and myself, however, physical place or hometown does
not seem to provide the direct basis for our identities. My father's sense of being
Chinese clings to "Chinese culture" over his place of origin, Chun'an county in
Zhejiang province. Even after having spent half of his life in Taiwan, my father
still cannot allege any identification with this island. In my case, on the other hand,
while bom and raised in Taiwan, I nevertheless felt alienated from it. It is a place I
have not been able to claim as my own. Ironically, my identification is tangled with
China's culture, history, and geography. This brings up the question of cultural
belonging. Do we need to have a sense of nationhood to really feel at home?3
What does it mean to be Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Southeast Asia or America? And what constitutes our sense of cultural belonging?
What my father and I identify with is our "imagined China" in Benedict Anderson's
sense of "imagined community" (Anderson 1983).
3See Morley and Robins' "No Place Like Heimat. Images of Homeland) in European Culture" in
Space and Place, ed. by Carter, et al.
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In the following sections, I will talk about how one's identity is, at least
partly, a result of the penetration of nationalist discourses, executed in terms of
Taiwan by the Nationalist Party or Kuomingtang (KMT) since its emergence in the
beginning of the twentieth century in mainland China, that have persisted through
the KMT retreat to Taiwan during the Communist revolution in 1949, and that
persist to the present.
In the case of Taiwan, identity shaped by national ideology works in a
similar way to identity formed by travel experience. Both mark their existence
through what is "no longer." In other words, it is the memory and history, national
or personal, of a nation or of travel, which constitute a symbolic space within a
person in which one's identity is created. Our memories and fantasies may be more
important than our day-to-day existence in a place. Travel arouses memories and
fantasies on a personal level while the nation, through national discourses, instills
them collectively and turns them into history. We create our personal identity
through these memories and histories. It is not simply the physical move from
place to place that helps form identity; rather, it is the experiences, the physical
presence in different spaces, the memory and re-membering, that create and recreate
our identity. Moreover, identity formation is far from a purely individual process.
It is instead closely tied to the national discourse of a particular time. In other
words, identity is not something stable or static. Rather, it is a process of
negotiating with one's self and between Self and Other, a process that requires
working through the past and present, and working towards the future.
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Personal Narratives and
the Anthropology of Self
In Time and the Other (1983) Johannes Fabianstates that anthropological
writing is "inherently autobiographical" (87). Whether anthropologists employ
their own experiences in the writing or draw on accounts by others, ”[d]irectly or
vicariously, anthropological discourse formulates knowledge that is rooted in an
author's autobiography” (88). In "Fieldwork in Common Places", Mary Louise
Pratt'salso points out that personal narrative is a convention of anthropological
writings (1986:31). Famous ethnographies such as The Nuer (1940) by Evans-
Pritchard and Yanomamo (1968) by Napoleon Chagnon both incorporate the
ethnographers' personal fieldwork experiences to enhance the authority of their
ethnographic accounts (cf. Clifford's "On Ethnographic Authority" [ 1983] and
Geertz's Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author [ 1988]). Their personal
narratives, however, as Pratt asserts, are usually minor parts of the ethnography,
"accompanied— usually preceded— by a formal ethnography" (31). For decades, the
primary requirement for ethnography was its "scientificness." Many ethnographies
that strongly incorporate personal narratives or even fictional style have been
underrated for their lack of scientific authority. Often, the "private"
autobiographical accounts only appear in diaries, in gossip in the hall of the
academy, in novels, or in other forms of marginalized accounts (Okely 1992).
Today, whether anthropology should be considered science or art is hotly debated.4
^The book Writing Culutre (1986) include several articles that specifically talk about this issue.
See, for example, Stephen Tyler's "Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to
Occult document"
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Since the conventional style of representation in ethnography has been challenged,
the reflexive approach to ethnographic writing has gained in importance.
Reflexivity in ethnographic films emerged with the increasing self-
reflexivity and self-awareness of the anthropologist with regard to the written
ethnography. Acknowledging the filmmaker’ s presence in one way or another has
become an important practice in ethnographic filmmaking. Anthropologist and
ethnographic filmmaker Barbara Myerhoff is an example of this trend. In the films
Number Our Days (1977) and In Her Own Time (1985), she went so far as to
make herself a subject in her films. In Her Own Time is more about MyerhofFs
own struggle with cancer through the help of her informants, some of whose
Hassidic religious practices she seems ultimately to have adopted, than about the
Hassidic Jews she undertook to study, who were the intended subjects. Here, the
boundary between Self and the Other is blurred. MyerhofFs approach is a step
toward using the self as an entry point to making sense of others (Okely and
Callaway 1992; Visweswaran 1994).
On Taiwan, anthropological writing has followed the same trend as in the
United States— most ethnographies are positivist reports. Among the ethnographies
produced by anthropologists from Taiwan, Hu Tai-li's My Mother-In-Law's
Village (1984) is an exception.5 This book is perhaps among the last in a line of
works which emerged from the paradigm of studying industrialization and
subsequent cultural changes in Third World villages. But what is unique about this
5Other than this English book, Hu is prolific in writing essays (scholarly or literary) and
ethnographic fictions in Chinese. Later in her career she also produced several ethnographic films
about the indigenous people on Taiwan.
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book is Hu's attempt to use short stories to portray women's lives and marriage in
Liu Ts'o, her mother-in-law's village. In the introduction Hu expresses her
anxiety and uncertainty over adopting such a style by saying that her "efforts may
turn out to be a failure" (20). The fact that she puts the story "Daughter-in-law
Entering the Door," a tale told by the anthropologist about her brother-in-law's
marriage, in chapter six, while putting another story, "My Heart Is Flying"— a
seemingly more fictitious tale than "Entering the Door" since it is a first-person
narrative of a rural female factory worker-in the appendix, tells us that, although
the author is courageous enough to try this innovative form, she still submits to the
dominant idea of how anthropological reports ought to be written and organized.
Judith Okely asserts that "the personal is theoretical," in an academic context
(1992:9). Utilizing personal narratives is a challenge to the positivist mode of
anthropological writing. In her book Fictions o f Feminist Ethnography (1994),
Kamala Visweswaran examines the writings of women anthropologists such as
Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, and Hortense Powdermaker, who all strongly
employed the first-person narrative in their writing. She argues that, far from
producing "confessional field literature" as was claimed (and thus devalued) by
many, these women actually selected this style of personal narrative as a critique of
the dominant positivist ethnographic style (21,23). Visweswaran herself uses a
large number of her own personal experiences to talk about how subjectivity and
identity are formed or rejected in the contexts of various power relations and
through the interplay of power and knowledge in fieldwork. She writes, "the
autobiographical is not a mere reflection of self, but another entry point into history,
of community refracted through self" (137). In other words, self-narrative can
11
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serve as a counter-narrative which resists established ideology and conventional
literary forms in anthropology.
My study is largely based on my experiences with my family and the worlds
I reside in. I seek to examine my family's experiences, my father's in particular, as
interwoven in the oppositions of the "two Chinas," and hope to find a resolution to
my own identity crisis upon immigration to the United States. In both the video
and thesis resulting from this project, I use myself as the central point of inquiry to
life and experiences as influenced by the relations of mainland China and Taiwan. I
am not afraid to admit that this project is a personal and emotional quest of Self, and
that such a project is not without its political implication. The quest of identity is
never a simple act of self-discovery. Rather, it intersects with (gendered) politics
and history, and it exposes the power relations involved in identity formation. In
her article "Writing Against Culture" (1991), Lila Abu-Lughod points to the
limitations of thinking of the study of anthropology and feminism as merely based
on the opposition of self (the West, women) and other (the non-West, men) as
explicated by Marilyn Strathem (Strathem 1987). Abu-Lughod asks, "what
happens when the 'other1 that the anthropologist is studying is simultaneously
constructed as, at least partially, a self?" (140).
Since the 1980s, anthropologists have begun a "homeward" turn to direct
their study to their own cultures. The 1985 ASA conference, Anthropology at
Home (Okely 1992:11), can be seen as an example of this movement Such a
homeward turn is a result of reflection on the bounded relations of colonialism and
anthropology, and thus on problems of representation. For Euro-American
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anthropologists, anthropologists' authority in representing Third World or Fourth
World cultures has been questioned. On Taiwan, such a homeward turn means a
turn to study "Han" people rather than the indigenous, aboriginal groups, as most
anthropologists there have been Han Chinese. In both cases, it is a retreat from
claiming the authority of representing Others. Yet the unbalanced power relations
still persist.
The social atmosphere of identity politics now prevalent here in America
often makes a Third World subject feel pressure to "choose" an identity, and that
identity is often one of American's perceived "authentic Others" (Torres 1991;
Chow 1991, 1993; Trinh 1989). Indeed, my own question of identity only
surfaced after I came to America. In the eyes of my friends and relatives in Taiwan,
I have become a Westernized subject who carries less of a Chinese "cultural
burden" (wenhua baofu) even before I cam to America. Though such perception
often comes from some superficial ideas of what is "more" Chinese or Oriental--for
instance, the fact that I can have bread for my three meals while most others would
long for rice after a couple of meals— there is nevertheless a deeper level of meaning
to "cultural burden" in terms of family, morals, and values. I prefer the freedom of
individualism to the often suffocating ties of relationships in which you are
expected to cultivate all your life in a Chinese way of behavior. Marrying an
American and living in the United States allows me to be free of many forms of
conduct which traditional Chinese culture requires, especially of women. Yet in
many social contexts in America, I inevitably become a representative of Chinese or
Taiwanese culture. I often feel the anxiety of having to speak from the stereotypical
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perspectives of "authentic" Chinese culture when, to me, they do not represent "my
Chinese culture."
Like many Chinese intellectuals since the Nineteenth Century, my "Chinese
complex" is deeply rooted in concern for China's destiny. This sentiment is
apparently a reaction to China's condition after invasion by various foreign powers
in the late Nineteenth Century. These events contributed to the nationalist
movement in China whose ideology was to build a modem China that was
competitive with the Western powers. While cultural heritage is often a strong
emphasis in such an ideology, the day-to-day practices of tradition are often
brushed aside, or even disparaged as backward or superstitious. Later I will
elaborate on the relationships between nationalism and the nationalist creation of an
"imagined China." Here, however, I want to raise the problem of representation
due to asymmetrical power relations. My anxiety is not only about speaking for all
Chinese, but also about "on what grounds do I claim my Chineseness?" In
America, a person from Taiwan is automatically referred to as Taiwanese. Is a
mainland Chinese then more legitimate in claiming Chineseness, or talking about
China's destiny, than I am?
The same imbalance of power relations is apparent in anthropology. The
fact that in most cases Third World anthropologists "choose" to study their own
culture, and only in rare cases do they study Euto-American societies or Third
World societies other than their own, expresses the imbalance in power relations
that has resulted from colonialism. An anthropologist from inner Mongolia with
whom I am acquainted came to the United States to study Eskimos but eventually
switched her field to inner Mongolia because her department "strongly
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recommended" that she do so. The funding situation in American university
departments often reveals the unbalanced power relations I am referring to. White
anthropologists enjoy the legitimate claim to represent others, while minority
anthropologists are often denied the privilege of representing minorities other than
their own.
Yet the choice of subject of study for Third World anthropologists in
America is not completely a result of postcolonial power relations. Lila Abu-
Lughod points out that "halfie" anthropologists— anthropologists "whose national or
cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage"
(Abu-Lughod 1991:137)— often study the Other who is part of the Self, rather than
a radically different Other. She asserts that feminists and "halfie" anthropologists
challenge the fixed boundary between Self and Other and thus also challenge the
concept of culture which often refers to a homogenous, timeless, and coherent
entity (154). She thus proposes "writing against culture," that is, writing
discourses and practices, history and politics, and "ethnographies of the particular"
(147-57). As a halfie anthropologist myself, I also study a subject that is at the
same time the Self and the Other. The application of the homeward turn in
anthropology, for me, means a return to the self.
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Taiwan/China:
History and Ethnic Relations
"Basically Taiwan is a place without history. Although we often say
China has a history of five thousand years, Taiwan itself has a history
of only three hundred years. This island does not have its own cultural
roots, and its culture has been influenced by the Han Chinese, the
Dutch, and the Japanese”
-Quoted in Johnson (1994)
Taiwan's history has been a contested field in current Taiwanese politics.
Since 1949, under the Kuomingtang administration, the official version of history
has favored mainland China and silenced Taiwan. Up until the late 1980s, people's
memories of Taiwan prior to 1949 were forced to remain hidden, while much
memory of mainland China was made into official history. Only after the
termination of martial law on Taiwan in 1987 were the many memories allowed to
be retrieved. I grew up on Taiwan, yet I learned about Taiwan's history only after
college. While various emphases, or even versions, of Taiwan's history came to
exist according to the different political agendas of interested parties, we can
nonetheless clear away the cobwebs and come up with the basic threads. In the
following pages, I will chronicle the history of Taiwan since the first wave of
emigration, and talk about the ethnic (and class) relations which are formed through
various historical events.6 I will focus primarily on the ethnic relations between the
so-called Mainlanders and Taiwanese. While I will touch upon the formation of
6I chose not to include any discussion of the intervention of foreign powers on affairs between
Taiwan and mainland China after the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. While the United States
played an essential role in negotiating the relations between Taiwan and China, the purpose of
telling Taiwan's history' here is to bring to light the development of ethnic relations on Taiwan.
See George Kerr (1974) for information on the international power struggle in relation to Taiwan
and mainland China.
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these two ethnic groups, one should note that by Taiwanese I only refer to those
non-aboriginal Taiwan dwellers.
Taiwan's history is one of travel, formed by waves of mass emigration
from the mainland over the last three hundred years.7 In 1624, the Dutch colonized
Taiwan. And in 1628, Spanish settled on Taiwan but soon were expelled by the
Dutch. Before the arrival of the Dutch and Spanish, mainland Chinese had started
to settle on Taiwan, but the majority of the residents were still aboriginal.8 At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, for example, Zheng Zhilong, a Chinese pirate
who was active on the seas between Japan and mainland, moved from Japan to
Taiwan. In the middle of the century, when the Manchus were in the process of
taking over the Ming Dynasty and establishing the Qing Dynasty, Zheng's son
Zheng Chenggong, or Koxinga, started a rebellion against the Manchus and sought
to resurrect the Ming. Around 1661 Zheng led a group of Fukien people to Taiwan
as he was defeated by the Qing force. They drove out the Dutch and settled in
southern Taiwan. This marks the first mass emigration from mainland China to
7I am aware that, by using the concept of travel to talk about Taiwan's history, I appear to exclude
the aboriginals from the picture. The reason for this usage is that there are no written documents
to inform us of Taiwan prior to four hundred years ago. The word history conotes inclusion as
well as exclusion, which I will touch upon in discussion of memory and history. One should
note, however, that the aboriginals on Taiwan might have come to Taiwan from the South Pacific
a couple of thousand years ago. But due to incomplete archeological evidence, this has been
neither proved or denied.
®There were originally two categories of aboriginal groups. One resided on the plain area and was
called Pingpuzn (Plain tribes). They underwent intensive interactons with the Han Chinese,
including intermarriage, and then were completely assimilated with the Han. The other group was
conventionally refeted to as Gaoshanzu (Mountain Tribes), who lived in the mountainous areas and
still maintained their distictive customs in recent years. These aboriginals are considered a division
of Austronesians. They are officially classified as nine tribes, but some scholars think that there
are over ten groups with distinctive culture and ethnic markers. In 1984, the Assoication for the
Rights of Indiginous People came up with a collective name Yuanzhumin (indiginous people or
"primordial inhabitants" [Johnson 1994:2251). Now the aboriginals are generally refered to as
Yuanzhumin.
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Taiwan. Since then, many more people have come to Taiwan from various villages
in China's southern-most provinces, Fukien and Guangdong. In 1684, the
government of the Qing Dynasty claimed Taiwan a part of Fukien province.
Taiwan was then considered part of China.
From 1683 through the 1850s, three major rebellions and numerous
uprisings were leveled against the Chinese authorities from the mainland. The
earliest uprisings were aimed at opposing the Manchu Qing Empire and resurrecting
the Han Ming Dynasty (fanQingfuMing); possibly related uprisings occurred on
mainland China. Later riots, however, aired more political or administrative
petitions and fewer anti-Manchu grievances. According to Kerr (1974), during the
1800s, the immigrants on Taiwan were in general still dependent on the mainland
government and even loyal to mainland. Yet in 1895, when the Qing government
of China ceded Taiwan to Japan in accordance with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the
Taiwanese felt they had been betrayed by the mainland.9
In 1895, Taiwan declared independence to prevent the Japanese takeover.
But the independence lasted only five months; not long after the "president" Tang
Jingsong fled to the mainland, following Japanese forced occupation of northern
Taiwan (Yao 1989:31). Taiwan was a Japanese colony for fifty years, during
which time there were many rebellions against Japanese rule. The most noteworthy
was the "Musha Rebellion" in 1930, incited by the aboriginals, which resulted in
over two hundred Japanese casualties. In 1934 a Han Chinese, Cai, instigated a
rebellion in hopes of returning Taiwan to the mainland, but this failed. Afterwards,
^ h e agreement was having Taiwan as part of the price paid to Japan in exchange for the Japanese
withdrawal from Manchuria and the continental road to Peking (Kerr, 1974: xiv).
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the Japanese executed a series of strict assimilation policies in order to destroy
Taiwan's identification with the mainland and to promote identification with Japan
and Japanese culture (Kerr 1974). The results of these movements were most
evident among the younger generation of Taiwanese. For instance, Japanese had
become the primary language of communication among Taiwanese as well as
aboriginals. Even now, Japanese is often the only way aboriginals and non
aboriginals can communicate.
Taiwan was "returned to its motherland" in 1945, when Japan handed it to
Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist (KMT) administration as part of the Treaty of Cairo
decision, in which the allied powers ordered Japan to return its "stolen territories"
(Kerr, 1974: xi-xiv).
The KMT government took over Taiwan in 1945 when Japan surrendered.
The Taiwanese, however, found that the Mainlanders who took over the island's
administration were no better than the Japanese. For Taiwanese, the island's return
to the motherland did not bring them the freedom to participate in the politics of
Taiwan, nor did it give them the same rights as the Mainlanders. On February
28th, 1947, a rebellion against the Mainlanders arose, sparked by the small incident
involving the arrest of an unlicensed cigarette vendor. Many Mainlanders were
killed during the rebellion. The governor, Chen Yi, later gave the order to shoot the
rebels and brought in reinforcements from the mainland to settle the rebellion. The
result was disastrous for both sides. It was estimated that between 10,000 and
28,000 people were killed during this incident, both Mainlanders and Taiwanese
(Mendel 1970; Chang 1993). Many Taiwanese were arrested and executed during
the suppression, while Mainlanders were mostly killed on the streets during the
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riot. The details of this "2-28" incident were then suppressed by orders of the
KMT government Only within the last ten years has it been allowed to be
discussed.10 Hou Hsiao-hsien's film The City o f Sadness [BeiqingChengshi]
(1989) is based on the time period of this incident
As this review of history shows, the current population on Taiwan is
generally a result of centuries of immigration from the mainland. Aside from the
Aboriginals, or Yuanzhumin, there are three major ethnic groups on Taiwan; each
was formed through various waves of mass migration from the mainland. The
largest ethnic group is the Hoklo or Min-nan (southern Fukien) people, whose
ancestors emigrated from southern Fukien province during the 17th and 18th
centuries (Kerr 1974). They speak Hoklo or Min-nan dialect, which is a
linguistically different language than Mandarin. Another group is the Hakka, who
speak the Hakka language and whose ancestors were originally from northern
China, but who migrated to Guangdong province in the south of China centuries
ago. During the 18th and 19th centuries, some of them then moved to Taiwan and
now compose about 7% of Taiwan's population (Kerr 1974; Chang 1993). These
two groups are referred to as "Taiwanese,"11 in opposition to another ethnic group,
Mainlanders, who migrated to Taiwan around 1949 when the KMT government
retreated from the mainland following the Communist victory. Including their
offspring, they constitute about 15% of Taiwan's population (Chang 1993).
Although categorization according to ethnic markers divides people on Taiwan into
1 °In the winter of 1996, the Taipei city administration announced a change in the name of "Taipei
New Park" (xin gongyuan) to the officai "2-28 Incident Memorial Park." And in Feburary, 1997,
the government announced that Feburary 28 as a national hoiiday.
1 will use "Taiwanese" to refer to Hakka and Hoklo people hereafter.
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four major groups, with Aboriginals further divided into nine ethnic groups, the
modem political scene on Taiwan is a constant power struggle between Taiwanese
and Mainlanders; Aboriginals are generally excluded from the political picture.
According to Wang Fuchang( 1993), the year 1945, when the KMT took over
Taiwan, marked the formation of two ethnic groups which are based on Barth's
idea of "ethnic boundary" and consciousness (Barth 1969). The 2-28 incident
triggered the tension between these two groups. Later policy and ideology executed
and disseminated by the KMT government reinforced the polarization of the two
groups. Thus, the tension between these ethnic groups is based on provincial
origins (shengji) or native places (i.e., Mainlanders or Taiwanese). Even to this
day, provincial origin remains the primary site of struggle in Taiwan's politics.
Since 1949, state ideology under the KMT’ s rule has been that of
mainland recovery. Under this policy, martial law was enforced and Taiwan has
considered itself one of the thirty-five provinces of the Republic of China (ROC).
Congressional elections have been postponed until the time of the reunification of
China, when all citizens throughout China will vote for their representatives. Thus,
this ideology legitimized the Taiwanese limited access to politics, while promoting
Mainlanders1 privileges. This situation was reinforced by the KMT's language
policy that made Mandarin the official language of Taiwan. The various dialects
spoken by the Taiwanese were officially curtailed; speaking the local dialect became
a sign of lower class. Mainlanders, who all speak the official language of Mandarin
better than Taiwanese do, gained advantages in political and educational venues.
During the first decade of the KMT's administration, the social stratification
in Taiwan was such that Mainlanders comprised the upper class and Taiwanese
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comprised the lower class, with Aboriginals nearly out of the picture, in terms of
economics as well as social prestige. Because of land reform and the loss of
Japanese investment in business, many Taiwanese landlords and elites lost wealth
as well as social status (Gates 1981; Li 1993). For Taiwanese, comparing post-
1945 rule to the Japanese colonial period, the standard of living was reduced
tremendously. Many Mainlanders, on the other hand, having witnessed Japanese
brutalize their families and destroy their homes in the war on the mainland,
considered the Taiwanese "traitors" because of their degree of "Japanization."
Taiwanese had been forced to learn Japanese and had adopted a Japanese lifestyle to
some degree; many even fully identified with Japanese culture. This difference,
plus the memories of the 2-28 incident in 1947, meant that opposition between
Taiwanese and Mainlanders was intense.
The economic boom of the 1960s changed some of the social and ethnic
landscape on Taiwan. As Mainlanders did not own land on Taiwan, the majority of
them worked in government-owned institutions or operations. Economic growth
therefore did not have a significant effect on their wealth (Li 1993). Moreover,
many Mainland soldiers retired with extremely low pensions. Most Taiwanese, on
the other hand, either owned land or owned private businesses or worked in the
private sector; this factor greatly influenced their financial success. Thus, poor
Mainlanders and rich Taiwanese made up the social landscape of the 1960s and
1970s (Gates 1981:269). But even as the economic wealth of Taiwanese outrated
that of the Mainlanders, Mainlanders still enjoyed more political power and
educational prestige in general.
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In the 1980s, President Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek,
initiated the indigenization policy in order to increase the political power of
Taiwanese in hopes of somewhat lessening the political imbalance between the
ethnic groups. The higher ranks of official positions would no longer belong only
to Mainlanders. Current president Lee Teng-hui, a Taiwanese, was promoted
under this policy. In fact, since the 1980s, there have been continuous elections for
the National Assembly and the Legislative Yuan, even though there was not a
complete re-election until 1991. Through this "open" policy, Taiwanese have been
able to participate more actively in politics.
Family, clan and lineage are the dominant networks in politics on Taiwan,
especially outside the metropolitan areas. Mainlanders, being more recent
immigrants, have limited kinship connections on Taiwan. Thus in elections
throughout recent years, elected Taiwanese politicians have gradually outnumbered
Mainlanders. In addition, the first oppositional party, the Democracy Progressive
Party or DDP, which advocates Taiwan's independence, despite having been
banned, was established in 1986. Martial law was repealed the following year.
Since then, Taiwan's independence has become public discourse. In the first
presidential election, in the spring of 1996, the most hotly debated issue was
whether Taiwan should seek independence or(re)unite with mainland China. The
election aroused the PRC government's ire and a military threat in the form of
missile tests in the sea near Taiwan's coast. The central issue in Taiwan's politics
during the 1990s shifted from ethnic identity to national identity.
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Partly due to the DDPs promotion of "Taiwan for Taiwanese," terms such
as "new Taiwanese" and "new Taiwanese consciousness" have emerged in the
1990s. They refer to an identification with Taiwan and its fate regardless of the
provincial origins of its citizens. Many second generation Mainlanders, having
been bom in Taiwan or having immigrated to Taiwan at a young age, find
themselves with no concrete way to identify with the mainland; Taiwan is the only
"nation" they can identify with. For their parents, on the other hand, it is a different
situation. As Li suggests (1993), the first generation Mainlanders are "caught in a
very awkward political situation.... If Taiwan becomes a separate political entity
from China, that would be a betrayal to their ancestors, and the tradition of the great
Chinese civilization. To them, it is a political puzzle: who is their number one
enemy, the communists or the Taiwanese separatists?" (62).
This transformation in politics comes with changes in social context With
President Lee Teng-hui's indigenization movement, Hoklo language (increasingly
referred to as "Taiwanese") has become as important as Mandarin in nearly every
context, sometimes with a strong sense of reversing the unfair suppression of it in
the past. One thing worth noting, however, is that the indigenization process is
Hoklo-biased. The message embedded in "Taiwan for Taiwanese" with Hoklo as
the unifying Taiwanese language, while necessarily excluding Mainlanders, also
marginalizes Hakka and their language, who are part of the Taiwanese social
category as opposed to Mainlanders, not to mention continuing the already lengthy
marginalization of aboriginal groups.
In the mid 1980s, the government of Taiwan finally allowed its citizens to
visit Mainland China. Many first generation Mainlanders returned to their native
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place after over forty years of separation. In the People's Republic of China,
however, they were treated no differently from Taiwanese— both were classified as
"Taiwanese compatriots." Many found their hometowns had disappeared or
changed; there was no way to completely refresh their memories which had been
frozen for forty years. Some chose to stay in mainland China anyway because they
felt lonely and alienated in Taiwan, if not for other personal reasons. Yet in many
cases, they were only well-received until they used up the money they had brought
with them. Eventually they had to return to Taiwan. On Taiwan, however, they
were alienated by the increasing indigenization in political, social and cultural
contexts. They found that they lived in two worlds, in both memory and reality,
yet did not belong to either one.
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W orlds Incomplete: from Nation to Person
At the time of my fieldwork, my father was not only physically ill, but also
somewhat depressed. This was due to both household financial stress and his
dissatisfaction with the political situation at the time. It was during the first direct
presidential election on Taiwan. It was speculated that president Lee Teng-hui
would capture the widest margin of votes among the four candidates. He had been
active in promoting indigenization on Taiwan, which includes excluding
Mainlanders (most of whom have opinions opposed Lee's) from important high
rank government positions, and had expressed in various contexts that Taiwan
should not be considered part of China and that Taiwanese are not Chinese. Many
Mainlanders on Taiwan thus considered Lee a traitor, and a closet separatist, as
opposed to open separatists such as the DDP's candidate Peng Mingmin, whose
platform was to foster Taiwan's independence. To Mainlanders like my father, if
Lee were elected, Taiwan would move toward independence and they would then
lose their only means of connection to "their China."
In this section, I intend to discuss the relationship between personal identity
and discourses of the nation-state. I analyze the relations by investigating the case
of veteran Mainlanders,12 my father as a veteran mainlander, and my own
experiences. Each of us lives in worlds that are incomplete— we are not able to feel
we belong to either of the worlds we reside in. How do we constitute our identities
in such a situation? Or, perhaps, the question can be asked from another angle: is
12I follow Hu in the use of "veteran Mainlander" to translate Laobing and Rongmin. Both terms
refer to Mainlanders who have retired from the military. Laobing, literally means "old veteran
soldiers," and Rongmin literally means "honorable citizens." The former is a usage of the general
public, while the latter is an offical category.
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this situation responsible for our identities, or are our chosen identities what put us
in situations of such ambiguity? I also look at the issue from the perspectives of
memory and history. To a certain extent, the nation-state defines individual
memories. Maurice Halbwachs believes that all individual memory is directed,
formed and re-formed by collective memory, which is closely tied to history (see
Sturken 1997:4). I contend that individual memory, while unable to escape from
being socially constructed, remains a highly personal realm that has more to do with
personal experiences, emotions, dreams, and fantasies, than with recollection of
social events. In other words, personal memory forms a symbolic space within a
person. One can fill that space with the national and social discourses; or it can be a
space from which to subvert those discourses.
Although I am married to an American and I have lived in the United States
for several years, I am not a U.S. citizen. I do not have the right to vote in the
presidential election here in the States. However, while I have not been in Taiwan
for the past few years except for occasional short visits, I was able to participate in
the first direct presidential election on Taiwan by registering to vote as a member of
the Chinese Diaspora. As I mentioned earlier, the presidential election in 1996 was
a campaign more about national identity than domestic politics. Because of this, the
election invited an armed-forced threat from the People's Republic of China, which
could not accept Taiwan moving toward separation from China. I remember the
situation was intense. The whole island was concerned about nothing but the
presidential election and the Chinese Communist Party's reaction to the ongoing
electoral campaign.
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My father was extremely dissatisfied and annoyed by President Lee's
behavior and bold talk. He not only took pleasure in scorning Lee whenever he
could, but even welcomed the missile exercise/threatening maneuvers of the PRC
army. "Come bomb this island! Kill the separatists! Overthrow Lee Teng-hui!
Kill them all!” he said, after watching the news about the missile exercises. I asked
him, "What about you? If they really attack here, you won't survive either." He
replied, ”1 will suffer either way anyhow." Sometimes he would answer to a
similar question by declaring, "Me? I will just go to mainland!"
On the election day, my parents, my younger sister, and I walked to the
polls to vote. My elder sister was at school in Paris at the time. I voted for Chen
Lu'an, a candidate not of my father’ s choice. Both my mother and sister followed
my father's wish and voted for Lin Yanggang, although they had expressed that
they did not really like him. Neither Lin nor Chen advocated Taiwan's
independence. Lin, despite being a Taiwanese, even spoke of reunification with the
mainland and was supported by many Mainlanders.13 I went out to meet my
college friends after casting my vote and did not come home until late evening.
When I got back, the atmosphere in the house was awkward. I found that during
my absence my father and sister had had a huge fight. The cause of the fight,
however, was me. By early that evening, the result of the election, though not
completely settled, was obviously in favor of Lee. Moreover, second place
1 % should be noted that many of Lin's Mainlander supporters voted for him becuase the New
Party, a party established by second generation Mainlanders who were originally members of the
KMT but left because they believed the current KMT had moved away from its original focus—
while it did not have a candidate of its own, backed him. For many first generation Mainlanders,
the New Party was their only hope to exercise their political will in the growing indigenization
movement Yet since the majority of the members of the New Party had fairly high education
levels, they also attracted many metropolitan people of younger age (fifty and under), regardless of
their ethnic identities.
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apparently would go to Peng, the pioneer of the "Taiwan forTaiwanese"
movement. The candidates my family and I had voted for were among those
receiving the least support My father thus was extremely upset and angry. He
probably had had a little drink, since drinking has always been his way of relieving
pain, as he himself has claimed. When he found out from my sister that I did not
vote for the candidate of his choice, his rage was intensified, as if the election result
would have favored Lin if only I had voted property. According to my sister's
recounting of the fight, my father yelled out, "If I'd known she would not vote for
Lin, I wouldn't have wanted her to come back! She should go back to America!"
The fact that my father had such a strong reaction to the outcome of the
presidential election illustrates how national discourse is intertwined with personal
emotions and identity. My father's memory or fantasy of a reunited China
disillusioned him, and blinded him to the actual political situation between Taiwan
and mainland China to some degree. This is how he could imagine himself having
the freedom to return to the mainland if China were to attack Taiwan. Furthermore,
that memory or imagined freedom furthered his sense of alienation on Taiwan. Yet
it is not only his memory, but also the nation's memory and history (in this case,
nation refers to the Republic of China) that induced such a condition. Like many
veteran Mainlanders, my father absorbed the version of history disseminated by the
military, a version that transformed their love for a lost homeland to patriotism for
the nation (the Republic of China), the party (KMT), and their spiritual leader
(former president Chiang Kai-shek). Governing each Mainlander is an imagined
China of his/her own, comprised of elements of both the national discourse,
memory and personal history.
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When I was young, children had to practice numerous military drills. We
were taught to be alert to the political invasion of the communists anytime. We
were also taught to be alert to communist spies around us. In our childish
imagination, communist spies always wore sun-glasses, white suits and hats, like
those gangsters in the movies. Nationalist ideology disseminated through education
was not limited to this alone. In my youth, I was also taught that our country, the
Republic of China, was shaped like a begonia leaf (inclusive of Mongolia). From
elementary textbooks to high-school honor-guard performances on national
holidays, the phrase "I love China" always accompanied me. I learned much about
Chinese history and geography with little mention of Taiwan's history and
geography. Indeed, since Taiwan was considered only one of the thirty-five
provinces of China, the proportion of material we learned about Taiwan was not so
small after all, compared to the other provinces.
I remember that in my second-grade textbook there was one chapter entitled
"My Father Is a Soldier." It was a rhyme which praised the army, navy, and the
air-force. Through education, the importance of national defense was propagated,
and the elevated social status of soldiers was instilled in all of us. My father was an
officer in the army. I adored him. I felt proud to see him in his uniform. Also, he
wrote speeches for me so I could participate in speech contests. I was selected to
compete in these contests because, being one of the few Mainland offspring in our
school, I spoke standard Mandarin without any local accent. Almost every one of
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those speeches ended with slogans such as "Three Principles of the People unite
China!"14 or "Long Live the Republic of China!"
Once, my father wrote a script for my Xiangsheng performance, a
traditional stand-up comic routine. It was 1979, less than a year after the United
States recognized the PRC as the legitimate China and severed its diplomatic ties
with the Republic of China. I remember reciting that then-American President
Carter was "just a peanut planter, what did he know?" I was ten at the time. My
father was my idol. I always tried to memorize and obey everything he told me.
Through my family education, I accepted the national discourse through the
nationalist pedagogy.
When I was little my father would shout Mao Tse-tung's name and
condemn the Communists at dinner-time. He would say, "Don't mention Mao! I
get angry hearing his name! If it weren't for him, the mainland would not have
fallen into the Communists' hands." There was a chapter in my fourth-grade
textbook which left a deep impression on me. It was entitled "Heaven and Hell,"
and was the story of two boys with the same name; one lived in Taiwan (Heaven),
and the other lived in mainland China (Hell). It taught us how dramatically
different life was on Taiwan and the mainland. The boy on Taiwan enjoyed a good
material environment and had much love from his family while the boy on the
mainland was miserable in virtually every aspect of his life, and had to eat tree baric
when he was hungry.
14The Three Prinicples of the People refer to "nationalism, democracy, and the people's
livelihood" which were proposed by the founding father of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yct-
sen, as the means of saving China.
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After I came to the United States, I had opportunities to meet people from
the PRC. Only then did I learn that while we were told that they ate tree bark, they
were told on the mainland that we ate banana peels in Taiwan. We were all subject
to the nation-state's discretion about what we could know and what we could not
know. These memories, which sound somewhat comic today, contribute much to
how I perceive myself. I even joined the KMT youth league in high school simply
because my father was a member and it seemed a perfect way to express my
patriotism. My cultural upbringing and my emotional attachment to my father
inflected my identity as a Chinese on Taiwan who clung to her imagined idea of a
homeland in mainland China though she had never seen it nor stepped upon its
land.
In his article "Making Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of
Nationality" (1994), Marshall Johnson asserts that the ideology and policies of the
Taiwanese nation-state constitute the majority of people on the island as Chinese.
"China," in this case, has become the national memory on Taiwan (178). Not only
do Mainlanders identify with mainland China, through the permeation of ideology
in education, mass media, national holidays, and virtually every context of social
life, the younger generation of Taiwanese also adopt a Chinese identity. Ironically,
as Johnson points out, China has always been a "present absence and absent
presence" in Taiwan's national discourses. The Republic of China on Taiwan is
thus "a nation-state existing in the absence of the national territory" (185).
However, the KMT government has worked to invent China in people's memory.
For instance, the city map of Taipei, the capital of the Republic of China on
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Taiwan, was made to resemble a miniature China. The roads were renamed with
the names of major cities or provinces in China. You can find Nanking, Beiping
(the name for Beijing in the Republican era), Chungking, or even Tibet Major
universities established after the KMT rule were also named after famous
universities in mainland China, such as Qinghua and Soochow Universities.
Such a phenomenon is not limited to geographical naming. Often, personal
names also reflect national history. The last character of my first name, hua ,
among other meanings, refers to China, as in "huaren" (Chinese [diaspora]) or
” huaxian (a term referring to the early denizens of the Yellow River Valley in
northern China). On Taiwan, the so-called Mainlanders of my generation often
bear names expressive of nationalist sentiments, such as Aiguo (Love the Nation),
Jianzhong, Jianhua or Jianguo (Build China, or Build the Nation), and Guoqiang
(Strong Nation). Our parents make their memory and history ours. As their
children, although we did not directly experience the history that affected them, we
embody their memories and their hopes in our names.
Pierre Nora, in "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,"
(1989) differentiates memory from history and proposes an oppositional relation
between them. "Memory is life, ...open to the dialectic of remembering and
forgetting...[it] is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal
present," while history "is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete,
of what is no longer...[it] is a representation of the past" (8). Furthermore,
memory is at once multiple and specific, collective and individual, but history
"belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority" (9).
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To Nora, memory is often seized by history. This is why one needs constantly to
search for one's origin and identity. Because memory no longer exists everywhere,
one has to actively search for it to remember. In other words, identity and memory
are bound in a relation of seeking what we are through what we are no longer (13-
18). Marita Sturken, on the other hand, sees the relationship between memory and
history as "entangled" rather than oppositional (1997:5). Although Nora's
discussion of memory and history goes beyond the oppositional relation, I follow
Sturken in seeing memory and history as intertwined. There is no clear boundary
between memory and history; memories are constantly made into history, and
history too, continuously constructs memories.
While Nora's ideas concerning history and memory appear to be obscure,
his theory of "the sites of memory" is helpful in understanding their relationship.
To Nora, the sites of memory range from physical objects, such as national flags
and memorials, to symbolic non-objects like rituals or calendar dates. This is
similar to what Fujitani calls "mnemonic sites" (1993:89) and what Marita Sturken
terms "technologies of memory" (1997:9). In this sense, physical landscape and
the body itself are both considered sites of memory, which serve not only as point
of entry into history, but also reflections of the present and projections into the
future. The map of Taipei and the names of some second generation mainlanders
are such examples. The tattoos of anti-Communist slogans worn by certain veteran
Mainlanders are another example of the body as a site of memory.
In the case of veteran Mainlanders on Taiwan, their memories of mainland
China are mixed with the history of the Sino-Japanese war, the Communist
revolution, and most importantly, their migration from mainland China to Taiwan.
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Some had joined the army only to make a living; others held different reasons. But
most joined the military to fight against the Japanese. In some cases, since both the
KMT and the Communists recruited soldiers through the appeal of resisting the
Japanese, whether neighbors from the same village ended up joining KMT troops
or CCP (Chinese Communist Party) troops was often a matter of chance. If you
happened to come across the KMT's recruiting team, you joined the KMT troops,
and vice versa. The post-1949 situations for these people who grew up in the same
town but joined different armies, however, was completely different, even
oppositional. The identities of those who remained on the mainland after 1949 may
have been more localized and community-based, often remaining in terms of clans
and lineage. Those who were forced to retreat to Taiwan, on the other hand,
formed new identities which were more symbolic and general (Chinese,
Mainlander) (Hu 1993).
Johnson (1994) uses the scene of the veteran hospital in Taipei as an
analogy for the veteran Mainlanders' situation of being wedged between Taiwan
and China:
The first generation mainlanders, the Chinese of autobiographical
memory, the soldiers who whispered [and they had not been interrogated
about Koxinga] about the old man's dark powers, the ones who held
fast to the deeds to China— they are coming in the hospital doors and
leaving the world. Many have taken a detour through an unexpected
China. The barrier to the extension of ROC state space remains, but
the absence ofChina is remade if not gone (210-211).
The veteran Mainlanders have become an index for the tragedy of this time. Public
representations of veteran Mainlanders' lives often dwell upon the tragic side.
Indeed, many veterans retired from low-rank military positions and so have
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relatively low pensions. Furthermore, many veteran Mainlanders remain single or
married late— often to handicapped or aboriginal women. According to Hu (1993),
there are several reasons for this. At first, the KMT military prohibited young,
single soldiers to marry. In the late 1950s and early 1960s when the prohibition
was loosened, soldiers beyond a certain age were allowed to marry; but at the time
most of these soldiers from the mainland had reached their thirties and forties, far
above normal marital age. Their relatively low income also worked against their
marriage chances. In addition, many first generation Mainlanders believed that they
would soon fight their way back to mainland (Hu 1993:302). There are also a
large number of veteran Mainlanders, who, like my father, married late but still
lead a comparatively "normal" life— that is, maintaining a middle class family.
However, their sense of victimization and alienation on Taiwan in the 1980s and the
1990s seems no less than that of stereotypical veteran Mainlanders. They are all
subjects of this tragic history in which they were forcibly separated from home and
family in mainland China for nearly half a century only to ultimately find that they
had lost the means to claim either Taiwan or mainland China as their home.
Since he was a young teenager, having witnessed the Japanese plane
bombing and destroying of his home, my father had wanted to join the military .
But due to the age limitation, he could not join the youth army until he was sixteen,
in 1946. At that time, the Sino-Japanese war had ended. Yet be still wished to
devote himself to the nation. In addition, his mother had decided to send him to
normal school so that he could be a school teacher. That was against his desire to
travel around and experience the greatness of China. Joining the army was, for
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him, the only way that he could leave a small town and explore the vast and
beautiful landscape of China. Yet history made him travel to Taiwan eventually.
Only over forty years later was he able to go back to the mainland again.
The Taiwanese government policy prohibited public officials from visiting
the mainland even once the door to the mainland was opened to the general public.
Many Taiwanese flocked to mainland China as tourists before Mainlanders could
ever return for visits with relatives. My father was eager to return to the mainland
to visit his hometown and see relatives there. He asked my eldest uncle to procure
an urgent sickness excuse and thus was finally able to go back with my mother
under the rubric of visiting the seriously ill. That was in 1991. My father's
hometown had literally disappeared since the Chinese Communist government built
a dam in the 1950s around the area— the whole county now lies at the bottom of a
man-made lake, now a tourist attraction called "the Lake of a Thousand Islands."
Yet this did not seem to bother my father. My mother and he came back to Taiwan
rich with stories that they kept referring back to, even months after the original trip.
The excitement of seeing close relatives in mainland seem to preclude any sorrow
over the lost hometown. Indeed, the landscape of the mainland has been a symbol
of Chinese culture and history to my father, even before he left the mainland.
When I was at home doing fieldwork, I saw him closely examining tourist sites on
the mainland in a set of hard-covered, beautifully printed cultural tour books--Tour
the Great China. Travel back to the mainland has become, for my father, a dream
which he must make a reality while he is still able.
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Nearly five years later in December 1995, my husband and I followed my
father’ s route to visit my mainland relatives whom I had never seen before. I
wanted to take a look at my father's home area and the China which has dominated
our identities. Ironically, when my father visited mainland China, he was treated as
a "Taiwanese sibling" and was issued a special visa for Taiwanese. I, however,
coming from the United States in the role of an overseas Chinese, was considered a
Chinese citizen and therefore was issued a PRC citizen's travel permit
Around the table at my eldest uncle's house, we drank home made rice wine
and recalled our memories of my parents' first trip back to the mainland. My uncle
said,
"They flew in to the Hangzhou Airport [ was the one who went to
pick them up. I didn't let your aunt [my uncle's wife] go because I
knew she would cry. [ am better at these things. ...It was crowded at
the aiport Lots of people were holding name cards at the gate. I was
holding a name card with your dad's name on it too. We've been apart
for so many years, who knows if we could recognize each other or not.
I saw many people hugging and weeping when they saw each other.
When your mom and dad came out from the gate, I saw them. I asked
your dad, 'Are you Shu-pei?' He said yes. Then we walked to the
car... It was late night already, I asked them if they'd like to stay the
night in Hangzhou or go straight home. Your dad said, 'go home.' So
we came back. When we arrived, it was only mid-night. Your dad said,
1 have not come home in forty years, but when I do, it only took me a
day-departing in the morning, and arriving at night."'
Different from my father's experience, despite the warmth I felt from my
mainland relatives, my perception of my first encounter with China was very
different from my father's experience. What I saw was not the China that I
imagined. The landscape, the civilization, and those famous sites from the all-too-
familiar literary classics evoked for me the China of history and culture that I
identified with, but not the corrupted People's Republic of China that I now beheld.
Citizens silently accepted the authority of the public police. Historical sites
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appeared to be nothing but tourist attractions. Slogans were displayed everywhere.
I felt that I had returned to my childhood days under martial law.
Following my relatives, we traced the remains of the old town Chun'an— my
father’ s hometown. There were not many things to be found. I inevitably felt
nostalgic. But for what? For my imagined China? Or for my father’ s lost
hometown and a lost China? The China that the nation-state of Taiwan instilled in
its people is a nostalgic idea of China. As Johnson pointed out, it is an imagined
China constructed with the absence of China (1994: 185). It has long disappeared
if, indeed, it ever existed. My father's identification with China, although it is
largely formed by the nationalist ideology' of the Republic of China, at least has its
physical root While the movement away from this physical place, the
travel/migration, seems more important than the actual place in forming my father's
identity on Taiwan, his memory of life in Chun'an remains a salient source of his
sense of cultural belonging. The China which I identify with, on the other hand, is
almost completely a fiction. Under the KMT's national ideology and my family
upbringing, I was not given a chance to identify with Taiwan. Yet my travel from
Taiwan to America exposed my crisis of identity. While I have not been able to
claim Taiwan as my motherland, America is even farther from "home." My being
Americanized does not mean that I feel I belong to the United States. Why can I not
feel at home in either "home"? Travel forces me to confront this question, and
allows me to rework my identity through memory and history: the nation's, my
father's, and my own.
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Fieldwork at Home
The video with the same title as this thesis opens with a third person
narrative that describes my recurring dreams about my father
She got married in 1992 when she was twenty-three. She married an
American, then she came to the United States from Taiwan. After she
came to America, she started to have some recurring dreams about her
father. She would dream about him walking out of the house at night,
often with his bike, swaying and staggering a bit as if he was drunk.
She would follow him at a distance in case he fell down. And then he
would fall down, and she'd run over to help him up and walk him home.
Recently, my dreams about my father became scenes of him walking alone without
his bike, since he had stopped riding the bike a few years ago due to his leg
problem. In those dreams, he would also fall, and it was always I who ran to help
him get up when he fell. My mother or sisters, when they appeared in my dreams,
rarely made any effort to help him. If dreams reflect reality at least to a certain
degree, these dreams tell of my father's alienation even at home within the family.
The scenes of my father drinking alone by the dining table while the four of us
women sit in the living room chatting, watching TV, and laughing occupied my
memory. Perhaps my feeling for my father is comprised betrayal and guilt— I had to
betray him because, unlike in my youth, I can no longer follow his wish to achieve
what I consider important. Yet at the same time, my betrayal is accompanied by a
tremendous sense of guilt and a sense of loss. My fieldwork at home with my
father as my subject was conducted in the midst of such ambiguity.
When I carried a video camera following my father around filming him
doing his daily routine— preparing food, going to the market, gardening, etc.-he
had only a few months earlier retired from his job as a public official a few months
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ago. Contrary to my mother's active appearance on the video, when the camera
was pointing at my father, he often kept silent, even when I was asking him
questions. His most frequent comments were "OK, that's enough," or "Stop
filming now, you've shot enough," and "Turn off your camera; this is not worth
recording."
I had expressed my wish of making my thesis project based on his life
experience as a veteran Mainlander on Taiwan to my family a couple of years ago.
Every one in the family was excited about this thought and considered it an
important task. I sometimes wonder if my choice of this topic is partly an act on
my part in hope of pleasing my father. When I returned home to do fieldwork,
however, my father remained silent to nearly all of my interrogations. He would
say a sentence or two to block my further questions. "Those are personal things.
It's inappropriate to make them public," he said. "But those are stories you told us
so many times in the past," I protested. "No, it's inappropriate. What if your
uncles and aunts in the mainland learned about those stories? It's not good." He
even said, "All biography is fake," as if my attempt of recording his life is
meaningless.
Ruth Behar, in "Writing in My Father's Name" (1995), speaks about the
tension between the anthropologist and her subject when the subject is her father,
and points to the problem of representation in writing ethnography. She asked,
"should we, as writers, be worried about hurting those about whom we write?"
"Look...people...can take it better than you think" was the answer from the person
to whom her question was addressed, an author of a highly acclaimed memoir (69).
Behai's father had been upset about her revealing certain family matters in the last
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chapter of her ethnography Translated Women (1992). He even accused her of
revealing those accounts to bother him and thus refused to engage in further talks
with his daughter (72).
Snarling, he replies, " I don't want to talk. Don't put me in your
memoirs anymore, Okay?"
"But I really want to know," I say.
" I don't want to tell you anything. I am the tirano with the whip,
remember? ...I don't want you to write about me again. I prohibit
you from writing about me, now or ever..." (70).
Doing anthropological fieldwork at home and having your own father as
your primary subject force the anthropologist to confront issues such as power
relations between the anthropologist and the subject/informant, problems of
representation, and ethical questions, in the most direct way. Behar asserts that she
had to confront "the most profound predicaments" she has had as an anthropologist
when she tried to write her experiences at home with her parents into her
ethnography (1995:23). While the colonial nature of anthropology makes
anthropologists the ones who assert power on their subjects/informants, fieldwork
at home points to the fact that the subjects also impose power on the
anthropologists. The dual roles of an anthropologist and a daughter in this situation
become ambivalent It is a body that exercises power as well as submits to power.
Unlike Richard Rodriguez, who confesses in his memoir Hunger o f
Memory that he was writing "about those very things [his] mother has asked [him]
not to reveal" (see Behar 1995:72), I feel that I cannot afford to do the same even if
I could reach a greater level of meaning by revealing what my father does not want
to make public. This is partly due to the fact that I am making a video as part of this
thesis project Fieldwork with a camera intensifies the tension between the
anthropologist and the subject because the issue of representation is more acute in
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filmmaking than in writing. My father does not read English. There is a small
chance that he will read this thesis. As for the video, however, even though he
does not understand the English narration, he can certainly see how he appears
from the images in the video or from his own voice.
Fieldwork at home also points to the problem of anthropological fieldwork
in general. Anthropologists spend a year or two in the field intensively and then
depart and return to academia to write up their "findings." Many do not return to
their fields until more than ten years later. There are also many who never return to
the field after their first fieldwork, especially when they later swtiched the subject of
study to another "field." Kristen Hastrup, in her article "Writing Ethnography:
State of the Art," contends that there are forms of violence inherent in fieldwork
(1992: 122). First of all, the anthropologist's "probing into cultural silences" is a
symbolic act of violence (123). My father's refusal to talk about himself may be a
counteract on the violence I did to him through probing, with a camera, into his
memory and emotion, some of which he might prefer to bury in his mind. The
anthropologist's departure from the field after s/he was done with the fieldwork is
also a form of violence to the informants (123-124). The relationships between the
anthropologist and informants that were formed during fieldwork end when the
anthropologists leave the field. If the anthropologist was in the field documenting
life of his or her informants, then for whom is the documentation meant? When
your father is your informant, you are forced to cultivate the relationships between
the two, not only during the fieldwork, but for the rest of your life.
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When I was in Taiwan doing fieldwork at home, I found that my father has
had much resentment about my leaving Taiwan for America after my marriage.
Chinese tradition requires grown-up, especially married, sons and daughters to take
care of their parents financially and in their daily routines. Being far away from
home, I am far from being a dutiful daughter who takes care of her parents. And
being a student, I am not able to support my parents financially. My father
expressed his disappointment with me by saying, "You could've stayed in Taiwan
for graduate school. And you shouldn't have switched your study to anthropology.
If you continued on doing entomology and stayed in Taiwan, you'd have had a
Ph.D. and a job already. When I was twenty-seven, I already was a platoon leader
and had hundreds of soldiers under my command." So perhaps to my father, his
twenty-seven year old daughter was an unsuccessful, un-filial daughter. Perhaps
my "betrayal" during the presidential election even disappointed him more. I seem
to stand on no grounds asking him for his cooperation in my fieldwork when he did
not feel like doing it But he eventually agreed to have an on-camera interview to
talk about his life experiences. Was this out of his mixed feeling for me like I have
for him, or was this because he tried to keep his promise of being my
anthropological subject? In either case, it is not a conventional anthropologist-
informant relationship. When a conventional anthropological informant decides to
stop being an anthropological subject, s/he may simply refuse the role. But when
your father is your subject, it is not so simple. My father's life is in part my life,
and his experiences part of my experiences, and vice versa. Fieldwork at home
questions the take-for-granted relationship between the anthropologist and her or
his subject in an anthropological convention. It exposes the often unbalanced
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power-relations in anthropological practices, and how representations are produced
in these relations.
My father’ s agreement to an on-camera interview came with a request that
whenever he told me to stop the camera I had to stop. Looking at him through the
camera lens, I could feel his anxiety of being recorded recounting memories in such
a serious manner. I could also feel his uneasiness of talking to the camera, to an
imagined audience of whom he did not know if they cared about his stories or not
He told me to stop the camera several times during the interview, and lit up a
cigarette between takes. I would stop the camera and wait for him to feel ready
again. When he was talking about his returning to mainland China in 1991,1
thought I saw some tears running in his eyes. Yet he never allowed them to drip
down to his face.
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Conclusion: Identity A gainst Culture
When I tell people that my thesis is about my father and myself, many
appear to be skeptical about the quality and validity of my work. That "the
personal" means non-theoretical has been a common belief in the academy in
general, not simply the discipline of anthropology alone. A friend of mine, a
doctoral student, regardless of my explanations, questioned me several times, "So
your thesis is not really a thesis. It is like an introduction and supplement to your
video, not anything theoretical, right?" As I have reasoned in the section "Personal
Narratives and the Anthropology of Self," that perspective is the very paradigm I,
as well as many feminist anthropologists, wish to challenge.
In this thesis, I started with travel theory to formulate a discussion of
identity formation as influenced by national ideology and discourses of the nation
state. I also used travel theory to locate my study in anthropology. Identity is a
personal question, no matter how it is constituted through power relations and
politics. As I stated in previous sections, my immigration from Taiwan to the
United States brought me to the question of identity, and my "root-seeking" trip
from the U.S. to mainland China further exposed the crisis in my sense of cultural
belonging. My father’ s travel experience from mainland China to Taiwan, and,
over forty years later, his travel back from Taiwan to the mainland, had greatly
influenced his sense of his Chineseness. In today's world, identity is no longer
constituted solely through the physical place where one resides, it is also formed
through the experience of travel. In other words, identity is always contextual and
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multiple. If one clings to the idea of a sole source of identity, the discomfort of
residing but drifting in multiple worlds will perhaps always be there.
In "Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as
Identity" (1996), Allen Chun states that, aside from looking at how identity is
constructed, the question one should ask is, not what people's identities are, but
why we have crises of identity (132). Pierre Nora (1989) and Marita Sturken
(1997) contend that history shapes people's memories, or even seizes memory
(Nora 1989: 13). When the nation-state imposes its ideology on us and teaches us
a version of history that detaches us from our experiential memory that connects us
to our past, indeed we feel a sense of bewilderment— uncertain of who we are.
Thus, why we have "identity crises" is largely due to how the nation or some other
dominant force in our lives defines us. In the case of Taiwan, the KMT
government's "China-centered" ideology imposed a Chinese identity upon its every
citizen. Yet that Chinese identity was shattered in the face of the "real" China. So,
as I identified with the Chinese "nation" and culture, and tried to make sense of my
identity as Chinese, the term "Chinese" itself became problematic.
This study is an effort at making sense of how I became who I am in terms
of family, cultural upbringing, and national and international politics. I examine the
history of Taiwan in relation to mainland China, and how the KMT government has
disseminated its ideology through mass media and education throughout its political
domination. I also examine how these discourses intertwined with my father’ s life
history and memory, and how all these shape my sense of identity. The project
investigates the nature of how the nation-state of the Republic of China on Taiwan
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utilizes the collective category "Chinese" to define not only the nation but its people.
It also works as a process of my exploration and realization of the relationship
between national ideology and personal identities.
Identity is not a fixed entity but "contextually constructed1 (Kondo 1990:
26). We should consider identity with more freedom rather than merely limiting
ourselves to attachment to race, ethnicity, or nationality, that is, culture. Lila Abu-
Lughod proposes "writing against culture" (1991) in objection to the idea of
culture— a timeless, static, and homogenous existence— in anthropological writing.
Following her, I would like to conclude my thesis with the idea of "identities
against culture." Collective cultural or national categories such as "Chinese" are to
be subverted rather than identified with. These categories induce one's discomfort
in living in-between worlds but not feeling a sense of belonging to either one of
them. I do not mean, however, that I will then give up my Chinese identity. What
I suggest is to embrace identities that are in-between or beyond these categories. In
this regard, Chinese is only part of my identity. I can at once be a Chinese,
Taiwanese, American, a woman, an anthropologist or a filmmaker.
As Nora points out, we all have the desire to seek our origins and identity
(1989: 15-16). We need to search for our past and its relation to the present in
order to know where we stand now. Yet this does not mean merely remembering
the past; instead, it requires a more active effort of re-examining what has been
remembered and forgotten at the personal as well as the national levels, and how
that has influenced the present self. It is an effort to reconstruct one's
experiences. As Michael Fischer suggests, it is an effort of "(re-)invention and
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discovery of a vision [emphasis mine]" (1986: 196) towards the future. Through
constant negotiation with history and memory, we are able to map ourselves in the
world.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Wu, Ju-hua (author)

Core Title Worlds incomplete: From nation to person

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Visual Anthropology

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anthropology, cultural,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychology, personality,psychology, social,sociology, ethnic and racial studies

Language English

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-14365

Unique identifier UC11337140

Identifier 1384931.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-14365 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1384931.pdf

Dmrecord 14365

Document Type Thesis

Rights Wu, Ju-hua

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA