Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema

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Content NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE TO COME: NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN POST-87 TAIWANESE LITERATURE AND CINEMA by Chialan Sharon Wang A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Chialan Sharon Wang ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deep gratitude goes to a group of people whose intellectual vigor is as boundless as their generous spirit in guiding me through the final stage of academic training. Professor Akira Lippit has shepherded me through since the inception of this dissertation. His support lends both vision and encouragement. Professor Viet Nguyen read the chapters and tirelessly provided suggestions that continue to steer my thoughts beyond the dissertation‟s rudimentary scope. Professor Dominic Cheung‟s expertise in Chinese literature assisted me in navigating the field and developing a paper into a doctoral dissertation. Thanks to Professor Natania Meeker, Professor Heather James, Professor Peggy Kamuf, and Professor Panivong Norindr, who provided professional advice as well as moral support. Brian Saldana‟s vitality, perseverance, and selfless dedication breathe new life into the process of this project. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents and my two brothers, who have had faith in me, loved me, and accompanied me every step of the way. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………….... ii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………….... iv INTRODUCTION I. The Orphan and the Taiwan-Japan-China Triangle………………………... 1 II. Modernity, Cultural Production, and the Taiwanese Consciousness ……… 13 III. Nationalistic Rhetoric, the Subaltern, and Alien-ation…………………….. 24 IV. Runaway National Cinema Coming Home: the Taiwan New Cinema, the New New Cinema, and the New Hope…………………………………….. 31 CHAPTER ONE: RESIDUAL HOMELAND AND REINSCRIPTION OF SELF: ZHU TIANXIN‟S “THE OLD CAPITAL” I. Nation, Culture, and Authorship…………………………………………… 47 II. The 70s and Beyond: Female Body and Globality………………………… 68 III. De-Sinocization and Its Discontents: Old Capital, New Metropolis, Uncanny Home…………………………………………………………….. 81 CHAPTER TWO: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE: REMAKING TAIWANESE-NESS IN CAPE NO. 7 AND MONGA I. Temporal Circularity in the Construction of Home………………………... 112 II. Brotherhood and the Taiwanese Essence…………………………………... 133 CHAPTER THREE: A TAIWANESE FILMMAKER‟S VIRTUAL CHINA: ANG LEE‟S CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON AND LUST, CAUTION I. Wuxia and Modernity: Ang Lee and Transnational Chinese Subjectivity…. 155 II. The Martial Arts Hero Feminized: Sexual(ized) Drive in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon…………………………………………………………….. 169 III. The Fabulation and Authentication of the Chinese: Points of Contact between Hollywood Aesthetics and Martial Arts Sensibility……………… 182 IV. The Filial Son, the Runaway Father, the Sentimentalization of the Chinese Male Subjectivity…………………………………………………………... 189 V. Homecoming: Masochistic Woman, Melancholic China………………….. 199 AFTERWORD……………………………………………………………………… 220 BIBILOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………... 233 iv ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Nostalgia for the Future to Come: National Consciousness in Post-87 Taiwanese Literature and Cinema,” discusses the trope of nationhood in Taiwanese literary and cinematic works published since the 1980s. It reflects on the way internationalism and regionalism intersect on the post-Cold war island. I contend that situated within the Asian-Pacific economic structure and the Chinese diasporic communities in the postnational era of globalization, there is a nostalgic tendency to imagine an organic community unique to the Taiwanese experience in literary and cinematic production. My corpus consists of Zhu Tianxin‟s works produced since the 1970s through the present, with a focus on her frequently discussed novella, The Old Capital, two locally-invested Taiwanese blockbusters: Wei Desheng‟s Cape No. 7 (2008), Niu Cheng-ze‟s Monga (2010), and Ang Lee‟s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999) and Lust, Caution (2008). The project builds on the scholarship both in Taiwan and abroad that has been conducted on Taiwan‟s postcoloniality and the vexed problems regarding its hybridized native culture. Informed by my research on Taiwan‟s self-definition within the flux of globalization and its economically symbiotic and politically ambivalent relationship with China and the U.S., I contextualize a selection of film and literary texts. I examine the way recent Taiwanese cinema and literature manifest an interest in re-defining “native-ness,” as a negotiation with, rather than as a resistance against, the way the island v is (mis)represented internationally. This project departs from current studies of Taiwanese literature and cinema that emphasize the way the end of the Cold-War era and the onset of late capitalism gave rise to a wave of cultural production thematized by alienation, disorientation, and the collapse of traditional values. I read in these selected works and their reception a re-invention of Taiwanese community consolidated by romanticizing colonial experience and historical trauma as well as reconstructing pre-modern national myth. Such is a community that, nonetheless, is “new” and projects a global vision in its desire to keep up with international trends. This nostalgia recasts the island‟s imaginary relationship with Republican China, turns the Japanese colonial legacy into cultural consumption, and aspires to a global visibility, which in turn shapes the island‟s self-ethnographization. The dissertation not only introduces a different aspect of postcolonial studies by foregrounding the singularity of Taiwan‟s postcoloniality after Japanese colonization and KMT rule under martial law. It also participates in the discussion of transnationality specifically attributed by scholarship on Chinese-language films to Taiwanese cinema after entries of Taiwan New Cinema garnered prizes in international film festivals since the late 80s and began attracting worldwide consumer and academic attention to the island as a separate entity from China. In this project‟s investigation into the way the island‟s cultural production interacts with the its political restructuration and economical development in the Asian Pacific context, it not only addresses the way recent Taiwanese literature and cinema reinterpret the historical trauma and ideological shifts the island vi experiences. By also taking into consideration the coevalness of postcoloniality and postmodernity that shapes the island‟s national consciousness and transnational vision, this dissertation turns its attention from Taiwan‟s much-discussed diasporic experience, entrenchment in late capitalism, and ambivalent political relationship with China toward a new localist tendency by cultural agents that rose in the past decade to reconceptualize “Taiwanese-ness” in a global context. In other words, by contributing to East Asian studies a specific example of the “peripheral” countries as opposed to the First World countries, this project makes the claim that a new form of nativism distinct from the 1970s “native-soil” movement begins to shape Taiwan‟s national consciousness, especially as seen in recent literary and cinematic production on the island,. The authors selected in my dissertation exemplify Taiwan‟s literary and artistic adaptations and responses to the current domestic and global context the island is situated in. Zhu Tianxin‟s prolific works span from pre-and post-martial law era. The underlying ideological bent in her writings demonstrates shifts between her subscription to Sino-centricism that celebrates premodern cultural China, to relevatory reflections on political propaganda and a dystopic vision of urbanized Taiwan. In 2008 and 2010, Wei Desheng and Niu Chengze each directed a locally-invested blockbuster commercial films that re-imagine Taiwanese-ness distinct from that of their Taiwan New Cinema predecessors. Considered new talents for a potential renaissance of Taiwan cinema, Wei and Niu reinvented Taiwan‟s colonial and postcolonial myths by envisioning organic native communities. Ang Lee‟s last two Chinese-language films, regarded by film critics vii and scholars alike as an epitome of transnational collaboration, indeed re-cultivate the island‟s aesthetic taste. Not only does the director‟s patriarchal status in the Chinese communities as a maestro whose successful foray into the North American box office markets lend credentials to his global visions. But the reception of these films in Taiwan reconfigures the island‟s national consciousness. In the first chapter, I examine the trajectory of Zhu Tianxin‟s literary career since the late 60s through the 90s. This chapter explores the national imageries conjured up in her works and examines the way they are inflected by her ideological transformation before and after the lifting of martial law in 1987. In studying Zhu‟s works, I take into consideration the thematic and stylistic continuities and breaks in the trajectory of her career, and the cultural habitus which her canonical works interact with. By doing so, I re-contextualize her novella published in 1997, The Old Capital, and argue that the dystopia presented in the text, which has been critically lauded as a postmodern piece, reveals the writer‟s on-going identificatory dilemmas vis-a-vis the questionable notion of “cultural China” and the post-martial-law nativist nationalism. The second chapter studies what has been considered a revival of Taiwanese cinema that rose two decades after the demise of Taiwan New Cinema. I look into two locally-produced blockbusters, Cape No.7 (2008) and Monga (2010), and discuss the way an organic Taiwanese-ness is imagined in these native films through a coevalness of modernity and postmodernity. I argue that the island‟s culture, now subsumed under the dictates of globalization, envisions a new, reconciliatory “new Taiwanese,” which comes viii into being by re-interpreting the island‟s colonial past and embracing modernity. In both films, nostalgia, instead of locating and re-presenting a historical incident in the past, projects a futuristic, utopian community by revisiting and reinventing a particular point in time in the Taiwanese history. In its investigation of two of Ang Lee‟s Chinese-language films, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) and Lust Caution (2007), the third chapter continues to delve into the notion of cultural China, now revived in cinematic language and circulated around the globe. Thinking through the “translatability,” a double-movement of signification, in Ang Lee‟s works, I argue that the Taiwanese audience, interpellated into a “Chinese” subject position in the self-conscious viewing experience of Lee‟s “international” representation of “Chinese-ness,” is seduced into identifying with the female protagonists in both films. These women depicted in his films embody and suture the aporia, an untranslatable gap between Eastern and Western cultures. I argue that the viewer‟s on-going fluctuation between the awareness of the global and re-formation of the local foregrounds the island‟s ambivalent relationships with such an internationalized “Chinese-ness” and the Euro-American cultural hegemony. 1 INTRODUCTION Taiming was by habit an introverted and reflective person. Yet rather than being the source of his will to act in the world, this introspection had restrictive actions, turning him into a brooding, withdrawn man who could barely accomplish even a tenth of what he had set out to do. Studying in Japan, and then in the mainland…at first glance such actions seemed proof of a robust strength, but they were empty, without substance. A storm of guilt raged within him. It was unbearable. He could again hear Ah-Yu‟s pitiful cries of grief. More than just sadness at Zhinan‟s death, they were a bitter accusation of all the injustices of heaven and earth. Her crazed screaming infected Taiming in turn. He suddenly felt as if he heard Zhinan‟s corpse crying out. The dead don‟t speak, he thought; it must be a hallucination. But no, it was not. Zhinan was emitting a death shriek. (243-44) Wu Zhulio, Orphan of Asia I. The orphan and the Taiwan-Japan-China Triangle The epigraph above describes the collapse of Hu Taiming, the protagonist of Wu Zuolio‟s Orphan of Asia. At the end of the novel, Zhinan, his half-brother, dies from overwork on the construction site in which he was summoned to serve in an Imperial Service Squad. A-Yu‟s wailing over the death of her son triggers Taiming‟s long-repressed protest against the entire colonial predicament, which leads him to confront his powerlessness as an intellectual trapped in his indecision and finally drives him into psychosis. The novel was first published in 1946 in Japanese in serial form, adopting the name of the protagonist “Hu Zhi-ming” as its title. Later the name of the protagonist was changed to “Hu Taiming” to avoid confusion with the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh as they share the same Chinese characters [ 胡志明]. In 1956 the book form entitled Orphan of Asia (Ajia no koji) was published in Japan. It was 2 republished 1957 under the title The Distorted Island [yugamerareta shima]. In 1962 it was translated into Chinese entitled again Orphan of Asia by Fu Enrong [ 傅恩榮]. Another Chinese edition of the novel is translated by Zhang Liang-ze [ 張良澤]. Orphan of Asia is written by Wu Zuoliu at the end of the Japanese colonial era. Written around the outbreak of the Pacific War, the long-time acclaimed realist novel reveals the abject state of the colonized intensified during the oppressive “imperialization” (kōminka) in the name of the Japanese empire‟s national mobilization. During the mobilization, while the total assimilation called for patriotic dedication to the country, the complete de-sinocization of the islanders did not promise them equal economical and political rights as Japanese citizens. The impossibility of formulating a national identity for Taiwanese results not only from the animosity and discrimination between the imperialist Japan and its exploited island. Upon his first visit to China, which Taiming has been longing for as his fatherland, not only is he shaken up by the evils of modernization and westernization in Shanghai: opium, gambling [majong], the unsanitary condition, and the youth‟s indiscriminate bashing of traditional Chinese values; the Taiwanese intellectual coming from the colonized island is charged with espionage for the Japanese Empire and thrown into prison by the Chinese government. The difficulties for Taiwan in locating a “fatherland” to compensate for the imperialist deprivation of identity stem from its historically unsettled relationship with the adjacent Mainland China. Although the first wave of modernization was administered by the Qing court in the late 19 th century, fifty years of Japanese colonization, where a large-scale and 3 systematic modernization was implemented, led to cultural, political, and economical gaps between modern China and its Taiwanese Han Chinese descendants. Wu‟s semi-autobiography attests to the ambivalent relationship between China and Taiwan and the way Taiwan‟s ethno-national consciousness emerged during the Japanese rule. Taiming constantly finds himself alienated from two political entities he seeks recognition from: while Japan‟s colonial rule will always discriminate against him as a “slave for Qing mongarch” (qingkuonu), the Republican government in China rejects Taiwanese as potential spies for the Japanese empire. Both generate in Taiming a desire for assimilation and bitter inferiority complex due to cultural and racial exclusion. As acculturization always already presupposes a split between the subject and the culture it is to assimilate to, it by default fails to inscribe an individual into a totality. In this sense, a fixed identity which Taiming, bearing the consciousness of an “orphan,” seeks in order to validate his existence eventually proves impossible. He will always be a “naturalized” Japanese instead of a “natural” one, and a Japanized Taiwanese instead of just a Chinese. Taiming‟s search for his roots only ends in disillusionment and directs him back to the irrecoverable loss. The disappointment in the racist tension between his Chinese and Japanese colleagues, the suspicion of the Chinese members in the Chinese Association in Japan, his arrest by the Chinese government, and the physical and financial exploitation of Taiwanese by the Japanese administration finally throw him into madness. Specifying that Taiwan as a location crisscrossed by different cultural and political influences possessed “no static or fully constituted identity,” Leo Ching posits the framework of 4 “triple consciousness” that shapes the Taiwanese as an ideologically troubled society, for The „emergent‟ Taiwan […] must be apprehended and articulated at the same time in relation to the “residual” Chinese culturalism and the “dominant” Japanese colonialism—a contradictory and irreducible triple consciousness that is the embodiment of a colonial Taiwanese identity formation. (176-77) It is this sense of being an outcast both from history and one‟s homeland (here the notion could be ambiguously referring to Mainland China, Japan, or Taiwan in relative terms) that places Orphan of Asia in an important position in Taiwanese literature as a significant work reflecting upon Taiwan‟s identity struggle. The “orphan” epithet has also been appropriated by Taiwanese political discourses and opens up debates on the term now saturated with diverse, sometimes contradictory significations. The notion of “orphan of Asia” (yaxiya de guer) which, since a series of diplomatic setbacks in the early 70s, translates into the notion of “international orphan” (guoji guer), gave rise to various interpretations in a new wave of postwar identity formation. The canonization and compilation of literature produced by Taiwanese writers from those by Mainland Chinese writers did not come to its peak until the past two decades. Historians and writers such as Ye Shi-tao ( 葉石濤), Peng Rui-jin ( 彭瑞金), Chen Zhao-ying( 陳昭瑛), and Shi Ming ( 史明), have produced works that rethink Taiwanese literature and history in the 80‟s. It is in recent years, with the rising contentions between the “independence consciousness” (taidu yishi) and the pro-unification, One China discourses, the history of Taiwanese literature has been recuperated from its marginalization by, if not exclusion from, sino-centric literary canonization and become a 5 battlefield for the contentious mapping of “Taiwanese-ness.” In such a political climate, the fact that the English translation of Orphan of Asia published in 2006 forms part of Taiwanese scholars‟ effort to have a selection of Taiwanese literary works translated into English under the title Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan 1 indicates this novel‟s crucial position in the establishment of a canon that will speak for both modern “Chinese” and “Taiwanese” literary history. Given the ambivalence connoted in the title of the anthology, the significance of Orphan of Asia lies not only in itself being a form of resistance against and an accusation of the colonialist brutality during the final stage of Japanese rule; the ambiguity of Taiwan‟s cultural lineage and political identity also generated different interpretations of the term by the China faction and Taiwan faction on the island. The inheritance of the “orphan mentality” by contemporary discourses has thus been a history of contesting powers for a demarcation and appropriation of “selfhood” of Taiwan. To risk overgeneralization, the pro-unification camp recognizes Taiwan‟s identity as inextricably linked to the blood and cultural lineage in China that ties together the island and the continent. For the pro-Chinese thinkers, despite its particular historical context, Taiwanese culture is undeniably a local extension of the comprehensive Chinese civilization, given that the two locations share the same language and are nourished by Confucianism. For the pro-independence faction, on the other hand, the antagonistic relationship between Han immigrants in Taiwan and the patronizing Chinese rule caused rifts between the Chinese and the Taiwanese. Furthermore, despite its malicious 1 On the editorial board of this series are Pang-yuan Chi, Göran Malmqvist, and David Der-wei wang. 6 imperialist exploitation, the fifty-year Japanese colonization had left economic and cultural legacies that brought Taiwan onto a different level of development. Different degrees of capitalism, westernization, and democratic evolution have brought about the uniqueness and autonomy of Taiwan that distinguishes it from Mainland China. In short, for the China faction, the orphan mentality should be discarded in order for Taiwan to move past the colonial victimization and rejoin the “greater China” that subsumes all Han civilizations under its universal cultural heritage; for the Taiwan faction, nonetheless, the abandoned and embittered orphan should battle against the oppressive autocratic imperialism from Japan as well as the Chiang Kai-shek‟s foreign regime [wai lai zheng quan] and fight for self-determination, and thus sever itself from the now People Republic of China. Considering that Taiwanese consciousness, despite its long-disputed definition, should not be regarded either as a political and historical identity derived from an organic China or as totally independent of its ideological imagination about China 2 , recent cultural critics have discerned that the symbiosis of Chinese and Taiwanese consciousnesses is a product of antagonism during the colonial rule (Ching 77; Hsiau 19-22). As one of the conditions of modernity, the intensified Taiwanese consciousness since the late colonial 2 In view of the instability of the Taiwanese consciousness, Leo Ching has made a crucial point that disarticulates the problematics of both Chinese and Taiwanese factions. The Chinese faction tends to position the particular Taiwanese consciousness under the universal and ontological “Chinese consciousness,” a unitary entity which is placed in an ahistorical vacuum and cannot be interrogated, while the Taiwanese camp distinguishes the “real Taiwan,” which has been left alone to deal with its own fate for four hundred years, from the “idealized China.” Thus while the Taiwan faction separates the Taiwanese historical consciousness completely from its ideological as well as material implications in the constructed notion of China, it in turn upholds an autonomous , homogeneous, and “real” Taiwanese-ness. 7 period both shapes and is shaped by the nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. This kind of imagination is central to the ideological contentions surrounding Taiwan‟s identity for decades. The imagination dominates the psychic disorientation of Hu Taiming in Wu‟s novel as well. As implied in the term “orphan,” the desire to rid itself of the colonizer‟s control hinges on the possibility of returning to one‟s cultural origin. Although Taiwan‟s retrocession to the Chinese KMT party in 1945 proved to be a disappointment and to a great extent another predicament for people on the island, the orphan mentality still holds out a tenacious desire to recover the recognition of the father (the China faction), or as a betrayed child, to kill the father, a sentiment laced with a patricidal ambition of a son to take over the father‟s place (the Taiwan faction). As such, in Orphan of Asia, the relationship between a former aristocratic colonial subject and his imaginary “homeland” is a rather troubled one. It is undeniable that, as epitomized by Taiming‟s psychic oscillation, the sense of loss experienced by an abandoned child turns into a desire to recuperate a sense of belonging by regressing into fantasies of patriarchal order. The longing for a Chinese cultural past, despite Taiming‟s envy for the modernized Japan, dominates the novel. However, for Taiming, Chinese-ness is split into the dual images of the corrupt, stagnant late Qing decrepitude and the essence of Confucian philosophical wisdom. Antithetic to Japanese culture which connotes orderliness, modernization, industrialization, and efficiency, Chinese cultural heritage signifies both backwardness and timelessness. The duality Taiming experiences is embodied by his 8 grandfather and his tutor, Licentiate Peng. While Peng appears to Taiming a representative of the defunct Chinese examination system through which scholastic officials are selected, his grandfather embodies a reticent and wise patriarch of the family who holds up the ancient Chinese culture to which Taiming can always revert to reassure his Chinese lineage. Both being his mentors, Taiming‟s distinction between the corrupted Qing customs (Licentiate Peng), and the quintessential Han legacy (his grandfather) allows him to preserve an impeccably idealized “Chinese-ness.” Licentiate Peng‟s sickly physique and inert attitude of life correspond to the corruption of the late Qing era, which is fading out of the modern world: Because he spent his life smoking opium in a dimly lighted room except when he was teaching, the master‟s almost fleshless face was a pale blue that betrayed no trace of blood even in the morning sunshine; his lips were dark blue, and his teeth, black. The nails on his left hand, in which he held his water pipe, grew uncut to well over an inch. Indifferent to all worldly matters except opium, mixing with no one, hardly ever exchanging any but pedantic remarks with his students, he still looked every morning at the flowers in the garden, his favorites being the orchids and the chrysanthemums. It was part of his daily routine. He had lived in this way for almost thirty years (7). For Taiming, Licentiate Peng is the aspect of Chinese-ness he repudiates readily. His demise in the beginning the novel for Taiming symbolizes the dawning of a new age where as a cultural heir, he aims at ushering in modernity by dint of the new education he has received through the Japanese system: Taiming was the first to leave when the funeral ended. He ran away from the ghost of a prior age; perhaps Licentiate Peng did not mind living continuously behind closed doors in a thought system in which he felt at home. That is that, thought Taiming, and now my time has come. The new age, blindingly bright, beckoned to him. (47) 9 On the other hand, stepping out of the decadence of the old Chinese bureaucratic system enables Taiming to relate to an unadulterated Chinese culture. Taiming sees in his grandfather the melancholia for an inevitable loss of the ancient Confucian and Menciusian cultural heritage gradually replaced by the Japanese imperial potency. His grandfather‟s reiteration of Confucian doctrines and story-telling bears out this sense of loss. The patriarch‟s acknowledgement of the power of modern education also reflects Taiming‟s dilemma between the ancient and the modern. The novel opens with Taiming‟s childhood experience of hiking in the mountain with his grandfather who smokes pipes, tells Taiming Chinese folktales, and insists on sending his grandson to a traditional private school where he learns classic Chinese texts. For his grandfather as well as for Taiming, the now orphaned Taiwanese have their ancestral and cultural origin in the teachings of the philosophers of the ancient Warring Period dating back to 3 rd century B.C. While the break-up of the Hu family due to the family members‟ dispute over the distribution and privatization of the family property suggests the collapse of the Chinese Confucian tradition, the grandfather‟s agonized prayers to the ancestors in the family meeting not only mourns over the loss of their cultural origin; the shaming of the unfilial family members solidifies the cultural essentialism. Worshipping the ancestors, acknowledging their efforts in establishing the family legacy, and guarding the inheritance are rituals for the Taiwanese family to reaffirm their cultural identity. The power of Taiming‟s grandfather‟s speech renders all the family members silent because 10 he invokes guilt not only over the squandering of the ancestral inheritance, but for the breaking up the communal solidarity of the Han immigrants from Mainland China. Metonymic of the Confucian canon, “ the Chronicles of Lu, the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, Han and Tang literature, song and Ming science, and the magnificent culture of ancient China” (12), Taiming‟s grandfather is the bearer of the Chinese culturalism, which, repressed by Japanese colonization, needs to be rediscovered as ancestral roots the Han orphans will eventually return to. To weed out the old and defunct customs in order for Chinese culture to catch up with the “new age,” Taiming takes it upon himself as his future goal to participate in “developing” and “establishing” the new China, which allows him to separate the pure, orthodox Ming culture from the Manchurian China of Qing dynasty who ceded Taiwan to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 3 . The image of a venerable sage who through his storytelling recalls the history of the struggles of early Chinese immigrants to Taiwan and thus passes on a unified cultural lineage sees its counterpart in Wu‟s memoir, The Figs. In this work Wu records the history he witnessed and the anti-colonialist movements he participated in since the late Japanese colonial era till the 228 incident. The autobiographical work also opens with Wu‟s reminiscence how his own grandfather tells the stories of Taiwanese anti-colonial battles. The so-called “Han ethnic soul” or “ethnic consciousness,” in Wu‟s words, is what transforms a “gentle man in his prime of life,” and a “hard-working farmer” into “a 3 Ming dynasty was the last era ruled by Han tribes overthrown by the Manchurians, a northern tribe who invaded central China in seventeenth century. 11 hero who resists the Japanese army” (36). National identity thus comes into being as Wu defines the spirit of the Taiwanese: Taiwanese have such passionate love for their soil and the same love for their fatherland. Although it is not uncommon for human beings to admire and yearn for their fatherland with patriotism, what Taiwanese people love as their fatherland is definitely not the Qing dynasty. Qing is the fatherland of Manchurians, not that of the Hans. Sino-Japanese War is the failure of the Manchurians against Japanese, not Hans‟. Even though Taiwan is temporarily occupied by Japan, one day it will be restored. The Hans will make their comeback to establish their own nation. Even in their dreams the seniors also firmly believe that the Han troops will come to deliver Taiwan. In the hearts of the Taiwanese exists the beautiful and great fatherland. (The Figs 39, my translation) 4 The collective category of “Taiwanese,” the racial purity defined by negation, and a nostalgic yearning for an ethnic cultural origin all point to Wu‟s national imaginary conjured up by a narrative of memory. In his nostalgia for a fatherland, preserving and continuing the bloodline becomes both the cause and the effect of imaginary community. Taiming‟s regression from political and cultural reality into his own national imaginary allows him to displace his desire for a protective nation onto his idealization and judgments of women. His relations with them epitomize a male intellectual‟s self-entitled power of “birthing a new community” (Chow, The Politics, 22). But this is a community where he temporarily seeks comfort and veils over his castration. In Taiming‟s visualization, the homeland is conflated with beckoning female bodies to whom he turns 4 臺灣人具有這樣熾烈的鄉土愛，同時對祖國的愛也是一樣的。思慕祖國，懷念著祖國的愛國心情，任何人都有。但是，臺灣人的祖國愛，所愛的決不是清朝。清朝是滿洲人的國，不是漢人的國，甲午戰爭是滿洲人和日本作戰遭到失敗，並不是漢人的戰敗。臺灣即使一時被日本所佔有，總有一天會收復回來。漢民族一定會復興起來建設自己的國家。老人們即使在夢中也堅信總有一天漢軍會來解救臺灣的。臺灣人的心底，存在著「漢」這個美麗而又偉大的祖國。” 12 for solace and sense of belonging. During his trips between Japan and Taiwan, Ruie‟s unexpected presence at the harbor to see him off and Tsuruko and her mother‟s unassuming presence in Japan portray an ideal female selfless compassion and attendance. For him, Ruie is “a woman, who, quietly and from afar, always favored me,” and Tsuruko is compared to “the true Japanese autumn” that embodies the delightful and receptive mother nature. Memories of these women as stand-ins for national territories recur in the novel as Taiming travels. On his trip back from Japan to Taiwan, the view of Taiwan reminds him of the three women in his life: The view of his homeland, especially the harbor, brought back to him the figure of Ruie—of Hisako, now an old memory—no less cherished. He saw Tsuruko under the scarlet leaves still on the trees in Tama, and her mother, a widow. Once, he had gone cherry-blossom viewing with the daughter alone, but the pink that enveloped the path was now as distant as that burning red. Tsuruko‟s profile lived on vividly with the leaves and the blossoms, but it was no more than the afterimage of a moment of youth, Taiming‟s youth, which seemed to be as ephemeral as the dream of flowers. (63) In this context, the borders of the nation(s) are demarcated by women. Taiming‟s love and admiration for the female characters is synonymous with a desire for pure and idealized Japanese-ness and Chinese-ness. If the grandfather‟s Chinese culturalism represents words of Confucian wisdom he recourses to transcend the gruesome reality, then these afterimages of the idealized women provides an even more potent, albeit static in nature, appeal to Taiming‟s identification. His moment of youth described as “dream of flowers” indistinguishable from the images of Tsuruko, her mother, Ruie, or even Tsuruko, conjures up a nostalgic desire for union with the maternal body. Given that the traditional 13 order embodied by Taiming‟s grandfather is on the brink of collapse 5 , the impenetrable purity and sanctity projected onto the fetishized women reveals the impotence of the father‟s law. II. Modernity, Cultural Production, and the Taiwanese Consciousness The identity crisis faced by Taiming not only persists, but, with the lifting of martial law and the rapid globalization since the 80s, has continued to inflect the discursive practices in Taiwan during the so-called “postnational” era. To delve into the complexity of Taiwanese consciousness, as early as the 1920s, “Taiwanese New Literature Movement” [taiwan xin wen xue yun dong] held “modernizing Taiwan” as a crucial objective in linguistic, literary, and cultural reforms. Journals and newspapers such as Taiwan Youth [taiwan qingnien], Taiwan, and Taiwan People’ s Times [taiwan minbao], South Voice [nan yin], and Formosa were established by Taiwanese intellectuals to serve as an important venue for anti-colonial discourses. The so-called “new literature” promoted at this juncture not only displayed resistance against Japanese colonialism in that works produced during this movement mostly dealt with themes that revealed the corruption of Taiwan‟s gentry class and the violence and discrimination inherent in the Japanese administration. But the reform of language and style, which was significantly influenced by the May Fourth Movement in Mainland China, was also meant to 5 The collapse is suggested in two moments: 1) the moment when the grandfather acknowledges the futility of Chinese tradition in comparison to Japan‟s technological and military power. 2) the moment when Taiming sees his grandfather jostled by the crowd and falling to the ground, a sign of his senility and fragility. 14 “liberalize” literature from the archaic, esoteric literary forms associated with the backwardness and stagnation of the Chinese feudal traditions and native customs that were deemed to have subjected the islanders to colonialist exploitation and manipulation. For leading writers/activists such as Zhang Wojun, Lai He, and Wu Zuoliu, modernization and cultural reform are imperative for Taiwan to combat imperialism. After 1949, such self-criticism presented itself in an ambivalent relationship between the post-war sinocentric cultural ideology propagandized by the Nationalist government and the re-presentation of China by the immigrant Mainland Chinese writers, many of whom were also involved in the Modernist Literature Movement. In the 50s, literary production was under close supervision of the Nationalist government. The so-called anti-Communist literature ascended to the position of cultural legitimacy supported by government-sponsored literary awards and magazines. Under such circumstances, Modernist Literature Movement that started in the late fifties and became a new cultural currency in the 60s continued to uphold and “innovate” the sinocentric ideology in its “aestheticization of the China trope” (Chang, 2004: 90-121). Yearnings to return to the “homeland” in early works of Modernist writers conjured up a China that was neither spoiled by the civil wars, nor changed by the administration of PRC. With the suppression of Taiwanese native culture and literature, Modernist literature reigned supreme in Taiwan‟s cultural production with its mainstream position, which, according to Sungsheng Chang, was an assemblage of “neotraditionalist genteel outlook, a conformist political disposition, conservative culturalism, and middlebrow tastes” (Chang: 15 2004: 104). But the appropriation of Euro-American modernist aesthetics and styles by Modernist writers also distinguished them from dedicated anti-Communist writers. Although criticized later by Nativist writers as “escapist literature” that consciously avoided socio-political reality and indulged in individualist angst, later modernist writers‟ pursuit of literary autonomy and critique of Confucian feudal culture turned them into pioneers who, although perhaps inadvertently, contributed to shaping an alternative national consciousness that broke away from the ideological control of the Nationalist government. Modernist writers‟ subscription to liberalism forged a bourgeois elitist culture that corresponds to the aesthetic taste and political views of the majority of the postwar generation. Modernist Literature was soon met with a counterbalancing force in the 1970s. Also led by elitist intellectuals and writers, Nativist Literature Movement [xiang tu wen xue yun dong ] intended to resume the socialist spirit of the Taiwanese New Literature which was stamped out by the Nationalist government‟s postwar sinocentric cultural campaign, which died down in the 60s. The 70s saw the struggle for cultural self-identification intensified after PRC unseated Taiwan from the United Nations, which was followed by a series of diplomatic setbacks. Along with the loss of national sovereignty, Taiwan also lost its cultural legitimacy as the sole representation of “Chinese civilization” (Chang, 2004: 17-20). Such historical contingencies played a crucial part in the rise of Nativist Literature Movement and became the key issue in the debates between Nativist writers and Modernist writers that followed. As had happened with the 1920s literary movements, 16 reforms in literature also brought on debates among Nativist literature writers on whether Taiwanese culture was an offspring of Chinese civilization or should be considered as a distinct community with its own unique colonial history and cultural development 6 . And like the New Taiwanese Literature Movement, Nativist Literature expressed mainly leftist concerns about the exploited working class whose living was threatened by capitalism. But works such as those by Hwang Chunming and Song Zelai, while portraying the predicaments presented to the agricultural traditions, also forge a nostalgic picture of such “organic” lifestyle. Nationalist consciousness with a tendency to draw a distinction between the Taiwanese historical and cultural experience and the classic Chinese cultural and literary teachings was thus more pronounced and caused much more tension during the Nativist Literature Movement. In this sense, while Taiwanese New Literature Movement was heavily influenced by the vernacularization of literature promoted by the May Fourth Movement and advocated for using everyday language, whether in Taiwanese, Mandarin, or Japanese, to express anti-colonial sentiments and to “catch up with” the world spirit of modernization, Nativist Literature Movement‟s advocacy of “realist” representation of social inequalities and capitalist exploitations was partly fueled by these writers‟ suspicions of the so-called “horizontal transportation” of the Modernist Movement. This return to the “native-soil” either as a nostalgic re-invention of country life or as a socialist 6 The most famous example was the debate on the “essence” of Taiwanese-ness between Chen Yingzhen and Ye Shitao. The definition given by Ye of the notion of “Taiwanese Literature” took a turn into competitive discourses of nationalism between the two scholars. 17 critique of capitalism in realist novels therefore presented themselves, albeit still highly aware of the KMT ideological censorship, as resistance literature that distinguished itself from the government-led cultural hegemony of anti-Communist combat literature [zhan dou wen xue], and the Modernist movement that subscribed to Western liberalism. Notably, Nativist literature‟s call for returning to the “native-soil” and its mission to recuperate life experience of the ordinary and the subaltern from the denigration by sinocentric culturalism and protest against Modernist literature‟s conformism to Western culture, became a significant inspiration for Taiwan New Cinema that rose in the 1980s, which set a milestone for a series of de-sinicization process after the lifting of martial law (Yip, 2004). When Taiwan‟s martial law was lifted in 1987, cultural production was launched into an era of polyphony. The significance of polyphony is twofold: First, historiographically, the official termination of the White Terror era allowed for the resurface of alternative historical memories. A great number of works on Taiwanese history that no longer center around the five thousand years of Confucian civilization began to be published, and led by Lee Deng-hui, the government officially admitted to and apologized for the 228 Massacre in 1947 and researches into this once-erased historical event were conducted, along with which the historical role played by the Chiang regime was re-evaluated. Secondly, it also made possible the emergence of literature and other cultural forms, such as film, about minority groups that are no longer conditioned by Nationalist government‟s liberalist, anti-Communist, and sinocentric position. The liberation from ideological 18 censorship also greatly affected scholarship in academia. Since early 90s, scholars in foreign language departments began to converse in postcolonial and postmodern theoretical terms to re-examine Taiwanese literature and history (Chiu, 2003). This new cultural currency imported mainly from the U.S. academia was also quickly appropriated by Taiwanese writers. In her observation of Taiwan‟s cultural production after the 80s, Liu Lianya believes that the post-martial-law era in Taiwan sees a coexistence of and interaction between the postcolonial and the postmodern (Liu, 2007). Such an account is predicated upon the evaluation of the KMT rule before 1987 as yet another form of administrative violence succeeding the Japanese colonization and sees the transformation from autocracy to democracy as part of the inevitable postmodern development in an age of late capitalism. For example, formal experimentation in works by writers such as Lin Yaode and Zhang Dachun captures the anxiety and chaos in Taiwan‟s rapid urbanization and globalization and allegorizes the construction of Taiwanese historiographies. Works by queer writers such as Ji Dawei and Chiu Miaojin contribute to gender and feminist studies that flourished since the 80s to challenge heteronormative gender politics. Prolific publications by indigenous writers such as Palabang (Sun Tachuan), Topas Tamapima (Tian Yage), Syman Rapongan (Wu Junjie), Liglave A-wu contest the Han-centric nationalism. Woman writers such as Pinglu, Shi Shuqing, and Li Ang, re-read and re-write historical documents in fictional forms by centering women‟s experiences in Taiwan‟s political struggles for and discursive practices on national consciousness and 19 self-determination. The abolishment of martial law also signals the irrelevancy of the China trope. One of the crucial factors that greatly demystify the potency of sinocentrism is the 1988 new policy that allowed, for the first time, the Chinese Mainlanders to visit their hometowns on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. Results of family reunions were unexpected. For these immigrants who were drafted by the Nationalist army and forced to leave their families behind, forty years of separation was long enough to develop alienation and significant cultural difference. As will be discussed in the following chapters, such disillusionment was a great impact on second-generation Mainlander cultural agents, who either turn to question the cultural memories inherited from their parents, or find themselves trapped in identity crisis. Meanwhile, localist consciousness continued to gain its momentum when in the 90s, national consciousness flared up again under Chinese government‟s military threat during the island‟s first presidential election. By this time, “Taiwanization” had taken place both in cultural production and political reform. In 1996, Taiwan had the first democratic presidential election. Significantly, the two candidates were Peng Mingmin from the first oppositional party, Democratic Progressive Party, and Lee Deng-hui from KMT. After winning the election, Lee advocated for a state-to-state relationship [liang guo lun] between Taiwan and China, a gesture that evinces strong tendency of Taiwan to claim independent sovereignty from China. Such a political move on the part of Taiwan provoked such strong protests from PRC that economical transactions between Mainland 20 and China were at one point halted. However, extremist nativist discourses that rose after 1987 soon spilled over into antagonization of the Mainlander community. The rediscovery of histories repressed during the White Terror gradually cultivates a sentiment of “victimhood” on the part of the indigenous Taiwanese who went through both Japanese Occupation and the discrimination of the Nationalist regime. A landmark in redressing the predicaments which native Taiwanese residents had undergone, including aboriginal communities, was Lee‟s acknowledgement of and official apologies for the calamities brought about by the 228 Massacre. The historical and political significance of this incident not only lies in the fact that it brought the Han Taiwanese residents who had gone through Japanese colonization to disillusionment about China, whom they have long regarded as their parent country that would soon come to deliver them from the colonization; but forty decades later, this particular incident, along with other political conflicts such as the Formosa Incident, became an excuse for the Democratic Progressive Party to antagonize the Mainlander community in its construction of Taiwanese-ness. Although nativist movements in Taiwan that sought to establish a distinct Taiwanese identity from Chinese culture had already begun before 1987, it was not until the complete liberalization of the political system by the first Taiwanese president Lee Denghui in early 90s that nativism gradually replaced the central position of sinocentric hegemony and redefined Taiwan‟s 21 nationalist discourse 7 . Since the Democratic Progressive Party came to power in 2000 as Chen Shuibien was elected president, such a nationalist political force gradually turned into another chauvinist discourse 8 . Taiwan‟s on-going process of cultural hybridization paradoxically gives rise to competitive discourses on nationalism, many of which are predicated upon ethnocentrism, sino-chauvinism, or homogenizing rhetoric on Taiwan‟s collective history. Debates on what it means to be a Taiwanese sometimes deteriorates into schism between the indigenous Han Chinese group, mainly composed of Hakka and Hoklo speakers, and the Mainland Chinese group. As a result, radical positions for the independence of Taiwan also caused anxieties in Taiwan‟s society faced with a possible downturn of economy and the threat of invasions from China. The ensuing social unrest gave rise to a series of reactionary and modified discourses with regard to Taiwan‟s self-identification. For a number of contemporary cultural agents, national identity is inevitably hinged upon their personal experiences vis-à-vis dominant historiographies. In the September issue of Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, a group of scholars and writers respond to Kuan-hsing Chen‟s seminal article entitled “Why is Great Reconciliation 7 However, the election of the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jieo as Taiwan‟s new president in 2008, after eight years of rule by Democratic Progress Party seems to presage a tendency of re-sinocization on both cultural and political planes in Taiwan. 8 Both Chen Fangming in his article “Transformative Justice and Taiwanese History” (Reflexion: Transformative Justice and Politics of Memory. Ed. Chieng Yongxiang) and Chen Kuanhsing in “Why is „Great Reconciliation‟ Im/possible? De-Coldwar/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears” (Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 43, 2001) discuss how Democratic Progressive Party indeed perpetuates the same discriminative politics practiced by KMT during the martial-law era, in that the “issues of provincial identities” (shengji wenti) were played up again in the construction of the “authentic Taiwanese-ness.” 22 Impossible?”. The essay attempts to offer an explanation for the long-standing antagonism between two Han racial communities in Taiwan: the so-called Chinese Mainlanders and the earlier Han settlers migrated from Mainland China, the Hakka and Fukien residents. Chen points out that unless the two communities strive to understand one another‟s collective memories and sympathize with the other‟s physical and psychological predicaments of living on the island, the agenda propounded by both of the major political parties amounts to nothing but political maneuvers. While for the Mainlanders, the diasporic experiences accompanied by a wounded ego after the nationalist army lost the civil war to the Communist regime disallow them to recognize the island as their homeland, the Hakka and Fukien residents‟ colonial experiences left them with the ambivalent sentiments they harbor for the Japanese colonial regime. The idea of Taiwanese-ness in the postcolonial era always involves intervening in the present by looking back on and re-membering the past. That is, the past always comes back as a sort of translation and reinvention, since history has always been a site of contentions among different communities. Understood in this sense, this idea of turning to and remaking historical materiality as a way to understand and make sense of the present correspond to the ambiguity of “Taiwanese-ness.” And in addition to the respective historical narratives constructed by different communities, the notion of Taiwanese-ness is further complicated by the coexistence of multiple temporalities. To delve deeper into the matter, the postmodern phenomenon of Taiwan‟s political transformation and cultural production cannot be disentangled from the impact of 23 globalization. Indeed, Taiwan‟s particular experience of postmodernity is a continuation and a consequence of the century-long modernizing process, even though such process had always been regulated by the state or the colonial regime, until the unstoppable globalizing trend finally forced open Taiwan‟s market completely. In 2002, Taiwan became a member of World Trade Organization under the name of Chinese Taipei and thus joined the global expansion of neoliberalism. Meanwhile, the fact that more and more Taiwanese industrial tycoons move the manufacturing factories to Mainland China for cheaper labor and that an increasing number of Taiwanese mid-sized businesses begin to seek market in Mainland China demands the island to maintain an ambivalent national status. In 2009, Taiwan and China signed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, which reduced tariffs and commercial barriers between the two political entities and intensified economic transactions across the Taiwan Strait. In this context, the island‟s struggle for independent political sovereignty is paradoxically coupled with an attempt to dissolve national boundaries to adjust to the capital flexibility. In view of the convoluted transformations of Taiwan‟s national identity, the lifting of martial law was simply a catalyst for a full-blown manifestation of the already always adulterated Taiwanese culture and competitive Taiwanese consciousnesses. Taiwan‟s multi-layered colonial experience informs leftist, liberalist, pro-independence, pro-unification, and the so-called “middle-ground” discourses in their attempt to locate a genuine Taiwanese essence. Whether the impacts of these foreign powers were readily accepted and domesticated by Taiwanese cultural agents or antagonized by those who 24 were exasperated by Taiwan‟s precarious international status, the instability of the signifier “Taiwan” is contingent upon the internalization and therefore identification with these external forces. This is exemplified when counter-discursive practices against the imperialist, or neocolonialist powers inevitably have to contest such hegemony within the logic of the centrality of the west and the marginality of the rest. The elusiveness of the notion of Taiwanese identity is also manifest when each major literary and cultural movement requires different degrees of “cultural translation,” whether it is the “horizontal transplantation” of the Modernist Movement, or the linguistic reinvention of the Nativist Movement. III. Nationalistic Rhetoric, the Subaltern, and Alien-nation. Notably, although 1987 is a watershed that heralds an era in which cultural production began to rediscover and articulate the political violence and historical trauma repressed during the White Terror period, a short story written by Huang Fan that won the China Times Literary Award had already prefigured Taiwan‟s political, postmodern, and urban literature as early as the late 70s. While the disillusionment of Taiming about Japan and China in Orphan of Asia emasculates a Taiwanese intellectual well-versed in both the Chinese and Japanese high culture, approximately 30 years later, in 1979, Lai Suo depicts the despair of an ex-political convict whose life perishes after ten years of imprisonment in his twenties and whose last bit of hope is dashed to the ground when he finally learns about the absurdity of political activism. If the discourses generated around nationalism 25 are a product of elitist ideology engineered by intellectuals throughout Taiwan‟s colonial and postcolonial period, what Lai Suo presents is the abject state of the disenfranchised exploited by imperialist administration and manipulated by native nationalism in the postcolonial period when the island is immersed in nationalist propaganda. Huang Fan‟s political satire illustrates the life of an individual from the working class during a span of time from the end of Japanese colonialism, through the authoritarian governing of the KMT party, to the bourgeoning of oppositional movements that grew increasingly stronger towards the end of the White Terror period in the early 80s. The story starts with a confused and enraged Lai Suo sitting in front of the TV set watching his own betrayal take place in the year of 1978, when his political idol, Mr. Han, interviewed by the host of the show on his return from exile to Japan, expresses his gratitude for the KMT government he once denounced by parroting anti-communist rhetoric. Compared to Taiming‟s mental collapse, Lai Suo‟s disorientation manifests itself in flashbacks that look back on his past as he travels back and forth various points of time in his life. From the bits and pieces of memory running through Lai Suo‟s mind we come to know that his illiterate father works for the Japanese sugar plant as a laborer. After the deportation of the Japanese from Taiwan in the wake of the empire‟s defeat in the Second World War, his father loses his job, and Lai Suo starts to help out the family by becoming a fruit vendor. Too shy and flimsy for the job, he comes to work for a company run by Mr. Han, and is cajoled into joining the Democratic Progressive Party, then an underground political party, in exchange for a clerk position. The narrative implies that Lai‟s 26 membership leads to his arrest by the KMT government as a political dissident. After he is out of jail ten years later, he starts to work in his brother‟s jam factory, forms a family of his own, and leads a banal existence as a man of the middle-class that started to grow with the economic take-off in Taiwan since the 60s. After a series of flashbacks that run throughout the narrative, the last scene returns to the same day when, on his way back from the TV station which he has barged into and been brushed off by Mr. Han in their brief exchange, Lai Sui experiences a quasi-epiphany: “ At this moment, the Dutch clock on the wall strikes [midnight] a few times, and the hour hand and minute hand meet. This is an end, a beginning, a departure and a destination. Lai Suo pauses and slowly raises his head” (195) 9 . The ambivalent ending of the story implies both a possible awakening, as well as hopeless paralysis that Lai Suo has been trapped in for his whole life. Given the historical context in which this short story was published, this indeterminacy following Lai Suo‟s realization of his invisibility in the history anticipates the dissolution of national myth that is going to thematize many literary and cinematic works in the years to come, especially after 1987. Published around a time when Taiwan‟s democratization was about to reach its catalyst moment, the Formosa Incident in December 1979, Lai Suo‟s radical-ness lies in its skepticism of both nativist and nationalist rhetoric. Given that the 70s is also a time where different schools of literary movements launched a series of debates on what 9 這當兒，牆上的荷蘭鐘噹噹的敲了幾下，長針和短針重疊在一起，這是一個結束、一個開始，一個起點和一個終點。賴索停止了一切動作，慢慢地抬起頭來。 27 constitutes the essence of Taiwanese culture, Huang‟s satire foregrounds the violence of the contesting nationalistic discourses in Taiwan. Living in a false consciousness, Lai Suo is under the illusion that he has been an indispensable part in salvaging his country from both the autocratic KMT government and Communist China and that after a new nation is born, he will be promised a spot in the officialdom. Nonetheless, the irony of the narrative that portrays Lai Suo‟s participation in political activities and what he has learned about his cellmate not only states the contrary to his self-perception, it also reveals the arbitrariness and hypocrisy of nationalist rhetoric: Theoretically, he really is just a rat. He told on other cellmates, so that he could be more like a rat. When he was twenty-one, once he showed off his manliness in front of the military judge. He was impassioned and eloquent, to the point of shedding tears. But it didn‟t work out very well, because he was just a nobody. When he was giving out mimeographed flyers in front of a university, he stuttered through the sentences on the flyers. His clumsiness attracted the students‟ attention. They even broke into laughter. It was amidst this laughter that Mr. Han and his aides landed in Japan, and rented an apartment on a quiet street in Ginza a few days later. Settled in, Mr. Han then started to store his semen for his four future interracial children and gather materials for his speech on homecoming he was to deliver on TV on the day of 1978. Mr. Han is the last person he would worship. After that, he has learned to not worship any living being, because, the way he sees it, everybody dies. Great men die, morons die, I will die, too. Everybody looks awful when they die. Before Du Ziyi died, he gave out loud fart. First his face swelled up and turned livid. It grew bigger and bigger, and then out of nowhere he farted. Communism was all Du thought about. He thought Marx was a substance between god and human. So he would tell the uneducated, “take money from the rich.” To intellectuals he‟d say, “class struggle motivates social progress.” To himself, “don‟t regret.” But he never shared with anybody the food his family brought him at visiting hours. Du was a chubby guy with a round face. He looked just like the kind of bourgeois class he talked about. Before he died, he pulled his cellmate over, the witness to his sufferings, and told him, “never 28 trust anyone.” (156-57) 10 Indeed, political ideologies that promise to revolutionize society and salvage the nation are precisely the cause of Lai Suo‟s alienation. In this sense, Lai Suo not only anticipates hackneyed reiterations of the discourses on Taiwanese identity that began to flourish after the lifting of martial law; this short story exemplifies the discrepancy between Bhabha‟s notion of the pedagogical and the performative in the reification of nationhood. But contrary to the recalcitrance of communities coming together by diasporic experiences, immigrant cultures, and historical circumstances that always exceed the boundaries drawn up by the Andersonian national community imagined in homogeneous time and space, Lai Suo suffers from a sense of impotence as he always fails to be interpellated as a national subject. In his desperate yet frustrated attempts at “keeping up with” social expectations and political propaganda, Lai Suo is forever trapped in traumatic memories in his life that are beyond his comprehension. Huang‟s story responds to the liminality of Taiwan‟s political status 10 就理論上來說，他實在只是一隻老鼠而已，他打其他囚犯的小報告，為的是使自己更像一隻老鼠。廿一歲時，他在軍事審判官面前，曾經表演了一次男子氣概。他慷慨激昂、念念有辭、乃至聲淚俱下。結果並不理想，因為他只是個無關緊要的小人物。他在大學門口散發油印的傳單，結結巴巴地念著傳單上的句子，他的怪模怪樣，吸引了來往學生的注意，他們甚至笑了起來。在笑聲中韓先生和幾個重要部屬正踏上日本國土，幾天後在銀座僻靜街上租了一棟樓房。一切就緒，韓先生便開始為他日後四個混血小孩儲存大量精子，和在六十七年這一天，於電視上為他重歸祖國懷抱的演講稿蒐尋資料。韓先生是他最後一個崇拜的人，後來他就學會了不崇拜任何活著的人。因為每一個人都會死，他這樣想，偉人也會死，笨蛋也會死，我也會死。任何人死的時候，樣子都會不好看。杜子毅死前，甚至放了個響屁，他的臉孔先脹成豬肝色，慢慢越腫越大，然後就放了個莫名其妙的屁。杜滿腦子的共產主義，認為馬克斯是介於神與人之間的一種物質。所以他就對沒有受過教育的人說：「分富人的錢。」對知識份子說：「階級鬥爭是社會進步的動力。」對自己說：「不要後悔。」但是杜的家屬探監送來的食品，他從不與人分享。杜是個胖子，圓圓的臉，一副他是自己嘴裡的小資產階級模樣。杜臨終時，拉過他的室友，他受苦受難的見證人，說了這樣的話：「永遠不要相信別人。」 29 from the perspective of an individual whose experience of marginalization is incongruent with the island‟s nationalist discourses. In contrast to Taiming‟s sense of mission to restore his country‟s nationhood by recuperating or inventing a certain cultural essence or ethnic lineage, Lai Suo‟s relationship with nationhood is indeed concomitant with an experience of modern atomization and postmodern de-centeredness. While the orphanhood in Wu‟s realist novel presupposes a symbiotic relationship between the country and its national subjects, the holistic selfhood of the Enlightenment is presented as a privilege inaccessible for the subaltern whose voice is subsumed under political chauvinism which has turned into a product for consumption. It is noteworthy that silenced and manipulated by political games, Lai Suo actually experiences an unconscious class transition from proletariat to bourgeoisie. Not only does his brother, who finally rose above the working class status of the family and came to own a canning factory, offer Lai Suo a clerk position, but Lai Suo begins to accumulate wealth thanks to his wife. This, ironically, does not salvage Lai Suo from his wretchedness, for his petty existence seems all the more stifled by his fertile, overzealous wife who is not only good at finances and house management but sexually aggressive: His wife is fully awake. She has on the pink Triumph bra, her body well-perfumed. By doing so and with other small tricks, she bore her three kids and helped him purchase two foreclosed apartments. When her relatives from the countryside came up to visit them, she took them to concerts and eat in hotel restaurants in Taipei. Those country bumpkins were overwhelmed by the glamour of the city. They were stunted speechless, with their jaws dropped. Right now Mrs. Lai was all aroused. She sounded unusually sweet and tender, ogling the deflated Lai Suo. That night, Mrs. Lai was ridiculously passionate. Almost forty and with blubber around her waist, she acted like a teenage girl. 30 Giggling and screaming, she pressed her body of nearly sixty kilos upon Lai Suo and nearly choked him 11 . (174) Like Taiming, Lai Suo is emasculated. But unlike the protagonist in Wu‟s novel, whose identity formation is imbricated in a masculinist heterosexual schema, the misogynist overtone in Lai Suo lies in the protagonist‟s being overpowered by women. In this sense, this postmodern individual‟s state of abjection is articulated in terms of political manipulation and sexual intimidation. As is shown in the literature and films analyzed in this dissertation, gender relation operates as a key metaphor that troubles and unsettles the patriarchal underpinning of Taiwan‟s national consciousness. Specifically, femininity in these works symbolizes at once the harbinger of modernity, the object of consumption, the threat of the new and foreign, and the possibility and potentiality of the unknown. As Huang Fan‟s works have been categorized by critics to be postmodern, urban, and political, one cannot neglect that fact that Lai Suo‟s disorientation in the midst of propaganda, compared to Taiming‟s psychic predicament, is complicated by the virtual reality in the world dominated by disseminated images and sounds via the media. Nationhood in this story not only is a constellation of ideological jargon, but politic rhetoric is to provide entertainment like a commodity as it is broadcast on TV . The reality thus defined by representation threatens to replace personal memories and experiences. 11 他太太可沒睡著，她穿著粉紅色黛安芬內衣，渾身香噴噴的，她用這種作法，加上一些小手段，讓她替他養了三個孩子，另外還買了兩棟法院拍賣的樓房。她的鄉下親戚上來時，她帶他們上臺北聽歌，在飯店裡用餐，鄉下人被大城市的氣派嚇住了，他們張大著嘴巴，半晌說不出話來。賴太太這時可就興奮極了，她的聲音出奇地溫柔，一邊用眼角瞟著一臉無奈的賴索。當天晚上，賴索太太熱情離了譜，她都快四十了，滿滿一肚子的脂肪，還像個小女孩一樣，她一面笑一面叫，把將近六十公斤的身軀，壓在透不過氣的賴索身上。 31 As the story opens, Lai Suo personal world is doomed to be trivialized by Mr. Han‟s iconic face that is about to silence Lai Suo‟s existence and throw him into psychic struggles for meanings of his life: Mr. Han‟s tired and solemn face came on the screen. It was June, 24 th , 1978. It was an insignificant day for the chaotic situation of the world and did not add any new meaning to it. But for Lai Suo, who was sitting in front of the TV with mixed facial expressions, angry, depressed, and contemplative, it is a beginning of confusion, loss, and disorientation in time 12 . (115) Huang Fan‟s Lai Suo depicts a postcolonial experience in which time is impossible to be conceptualized in a linear narrativity, as the national trauma is caricatured in its relation to the experience of an individual whose fragmented subjectivity results precisely from unreliable historiographical discourses as ramifications of, rather than as faithful testimonials to, historical incidents. IV. Runaway National Cinema Coming Home: the Taiwan New Cinema, the New New Cinema, and the New Hope The dialectics of Taiwan‟s national identity versus individual subjectivity began to enter the discursive realm of mass culture with the rise of Taiwan New Cinema. The disenfranchised who are under-represented, confused, discriminated against, scape-goated, or even pathologized by the grand narratives of nationalist ideology now occupy a central position in the new cinema that foregrounds a social consciousness with 12 螢幕上出現韓先生疲倦、威嚴的臉孔，時間是六十七年六月廿四日，這一天對混亂如常的世局並不重要，也未曾賦予這個世界任何新的意義。但是對於端坐在電視機前，表情複雜、時而憤怒、時而沮喪、時而沉思的賴索而言，正是一連串錯亂、迷失、在時間中橫衝直撞的開始。 32 a detached narrative style. Taiming‟s agony as the colonized is re-captured in Hou Hsiao-hsien‟s City of Sadness, when the head of a household, Wenxiong, after the KMT government intercepts their smuggling business from Mainland China only to monopolize the black market, delivers the line, “We Taiwan islanders got the worst deal. After the Japanese, now the Chinese. We‟re sucked dry, pushed around, and uncared for 13 .” And Lai Suo‟s malaise is pushed to the extremes when the three sets of characters in Edward Young‟s The Terrorizer are caught up in a psychotic state of isolation and fragmentation in the crowded urban Taipei. Although, compared to previous locally-produced films, films made by Taiwan New Cinema directors that featured auteuristic aesthetics and explored serious subject matters, could, by default of the nature of the medium, be more readily accessed by the general public than literature. Taiwan New Cinema rose in the late 80s as KMT-owned Central Motion Picture Company‟s concerted effort against the grim outlook of Taiwanese cinema: the poor quality of local films (cheaply produced commercial local films thematized by violence, eroticism, or tired subject matters of melodramatic romance or jaded wuxia genre), the domination of Hong Kong films (especially the wide popularity of Hong Kong New Wave, which was quickly co-opted into the commercial system of Hong Kong‟s cultural industry), and the growing popularity of cable television and the ensuing problem of 13 咱們本島人最可憐, 一下甚麼日本人, 一下甚麼中國人。眾人吃, 眾人騎, 就沒人疼。 33 bootleg videos 14 . The birth of Taiwan New Cinema was a result of a combination of socio-political changes in the late 70s through the early 80s. First of all, the government‟s active participation in revitalizing Taiwan cinema since the beginning of the 1980s fostered new talents to dedicate to producing and promoting films as a serious art form. Such an effort was a result of the gradual loosening of ideological grip on film production. To elevate cinema‟s status from mere mass entertainment to artistic cultural production, CMPC restructured Golden Horse Awards, hired film professionals to be judges, promoted international film festivals, and began to produce films that portrayed local Taiwanese experience. Furthermore, as the 70s was also a time when Native-Soil movement and Modernist literature reached another peak, a self-conscious representation of or reflections on Taiwanese native culture and society has a slow yet profound influence on this rejuvenating wave of Taiwan cinema 15 . Films produced by a young group of talents, among them Hou Hsiao-hsien , Edward Young, Wan Ren, and Chen Kuenho, featured artistic techniques of deep focus and long-takes and serious subject matters of Taiwan‟s social reality and lives of ordinary people caught up in a modern whirlwind of urbanization and political changes. In this context, despite its quick demise, in Taiwan‟s 14 For detailed contextualization of the rise of Taiwan New Cinema, see Feii Lu‟s Taiwandianying: zhengzhi, jingji,meixue [Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics]. Hong Kong: Yuanliou, 1998; and Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After. Ed. Feii Lu and Christ Berry. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2005. 15 Regarding Taiwan New Cinema‟s relationship with the 70s‟ native-soil movement, June Yip provides in-depth and cogent analysis in her seminal work, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. 34 film history, the New Cinema occupies a significant position in nuancing Taiwan‟s native consciousness. Drawing a parallel between Taiwan New Cinema and Third Cinema movements in Africa and Latin America, June Yip notes the New Cinema‟s transcendence over anti-imperialist essentialism buttressed by binarism 16 . Indeed, presenting Taiwanese experience in a style similar to the Italian Neorealism, which centers around the working class, the poor, and the psychic disorientation experienced by the ordinary individuals or communities after a series of drastic global, social, and cultural changes, Taiwan New Cinema‟s distanced story-telling perspective articulates a reluctance to subscribe to a particular ideological line. In Hou Hsiao-hsien‟s Taiwan trilogy, A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Man, Good Woman (1995), for example, national history is not so much reconstructed as broken down and scattered throughout the narrative of personal memories or family legacy. In this sense, history, instead of a documentation of real events, is rendered as subjective, imaginative, and unreliable reenactments in an individual‟s autobiographic narrative 17 . The kind of postcoloniality 16 Yip notes, “what distinguishes Taiwanese New Cinema from its literary predecessor is a more evident shift away from the binarisms of classical nationalism toward a more postcolonial or postmodern understanding of nation that is neither essentialist nor caught up in notions of cultural authenticity. Instead, it attempts to move beyond the anticolonial strategy of defining a native self against a dominant foreign other, which merely reverses the terms of an existing binary opposition toward a more radical questioning of the dichotomy itself […] Its [New Cinema‟s] neonativism recognizes the intricacy and slipperiness of the ties between the social and the cultural and attempts to transcend the binarism of China versus Taiwan in order to more fully acknowledge the complexity of Taiwanese society” (66). 17 Nonetheless, the release of A City of Sadness two years after the lifting of martial law sparked controversies because for the first time, the 228 massacre was mentioned in the film. The film was able to be released after it won the Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival. 35 and postmodernity the New Cinema testifies to, in this sense, prefigures the polyphony in Taiwan‟s cultural production that came to its full bloom after the lifting of martial law. Most significantly, the New Cinema inhabits the paradox of nationhood in the context of globalization. As the New Cinema‟s focus on presenting petits-récits of individual experience and memories as an alternative history of the island, for the first time, Taiwan was put on the international map as entries of Taiwan New Cinema won the island worldwide recognition in major film festivals as an independent political entity, as opposed to a province of China. Ti Wei in his “From Local to Global: A Critique of the Globalzation of Taiwan Cinema” offers an insightful analysis of the way combination of the government‟s subsidy policy and the New Cinema‟s goal of competing and selling presale rights in the international festival circuits contributes to the New Cinema‟s worldwide popularity with arthouse film buffs (Europe and Japan in particular). Reading such international attention to Taiwan New Cinema as its co-optation into a globalized epistemic system, Chiachi Wu, in her observation of the New Cinema and Taiwan‟s international representation in “Festivals, Criticism, and the International Reputation of Taiwan New Cinema,” takes a step further by pointing out the way this global interest in Taiwan New Cinema turns Taiwan into an ethnographic subject of postmodernist and 36 postcolonial studies 18 . Wu succinctly summarizes the development of the New Cinema as follows: “Taiwan New Cinema started out as political and cultural rebellion in the domestic context, got re-inscribed as an anticolonial cinema against Japanese, Chinese, or American imperialism on the international stage (but distinct from the category of „Third Cinema‟), and ended up transforming itself into a supplier of international art cinema” (88). Indeed, although favored by international audience, frequently discussed as an important subject of study in academia, and very much fetishized as a token of Chinese diasporic culture, the New Cinema only occupied a very short attention span of its domestic audience. The New Cinema‟s auteristic style very much distinct from Hollywood classic narrative and Hong Kong commercial film convention soon began to alienate Taiwanese moviegoers, who grew tired of the dispassionate, realist re-presentation of social reality, historical events, and modernist angst that lacks dramatic tension and captivating quick cuts and close-ups. On the one hand, perhaps the indifference evinced by Taiwanese audience towards Taiwan arthouse cinema was symptomatic of local residents‟ aversion to the ongoing political rivalry where Taiwan‟s 18 In analyzing the way major international film festivals and film critics began to shine a spotlight on Taiwan New Cinema since the late 80s, in which Taiwan sometimes features as a significant (and presumably newly discovered) example of Third World cinema, Wu shrewdly writes: “Connected to global postcolonial identification, Taiwan cinema conjures up a site of projection for cultural critics‟ desire to discover a new postcolonial or postmodern geographical imagination. Hence, the international success of Taiwan New Cinema (along with that of Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas) not only embodies a late phase of the globalization of art cinema (a phase when Chinese language cinemas, following Euro-American and Japanese predecessors, were incorporated into the establishment of art cinema), but also underline the extent to which Marxist cultural theory has been globally and discursively used, in the name of the anticolonial and postcolonial” (83). 37 historical trauma was frequently capitalized upon and played up to antagonize opponent parties. On the other, the sliding box office revenues simply reflected the deep-rooted influence of Hollywood mainstream cinema on Taiwanese audience‟s viewing habits. Moreover, the lack of faith in the New Cinema of domestic investors, who consider the New Cinema as box office poison, also contributes to the fact that veteran New Cinema filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Young, as well as the younger generation (or the New New Cinema) of filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang have lost interest in maintaining a relationship with the Taiwanese audience and continue to work as international sub-contractors who, by continuing to seek foreign financing, in turn have in view European, Japanese, or North American markets as their target audience 19 . As some critics tend to consider the late 80s as the time when Taiwan New Cinema saw its own demise, others see the afterlife of Taiwan New Cinema in its stylistic and thematic transition since the 90s: it is a shift from using classic realism to retell history from a autobiographic perspective, to resorting to magic realism to mimic the episodic collage of sense perceptions in the apocalyptic fin-de-siècle. Such a change is manifest both in the pioneers of the New Cinema, specifically Young and Hou, and younger directors such as Chen Kuo-fu, Xu Xiao-ming, and Zhang Zuo-ji 20 . Nonetheless, it is 19 For a fully analysis of foreign investment and subcontracting of Taiwan Cinema, see Wu and Ti‟s essays, as well as Fran Martin‟s “Taiwan‟s (Trans)national Cinema: The Far-flung Adventures of a Taiwanese Tomboy.” Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. Darrel William Davis and Ru-shou Robert Chen eds. New York: Routledge, 2007. 131-145. 20 For an overview of an array of Taiwanese films produced in the 90s, see New New Wave of Taiwan Cinema. Peggy Chiao ed. Taipei: Cite, 2002. 38 important to point out here that the shift merely indicates changes in Taiwanese cinema in broad strokes. Just like the classic New Cinema, the newcomers who contributed to Taiwanese film production cover a wide and heterogeneous range in genres and camera work. Yet no longer like the New Cinema in the early 80s, the 90s‟ Taiwanese films did not emerge as a consolidated tour de force that temporarily caught nation-wide attention. Works by the so-called New New Wave filmmakers in the 90s continued to earn international festival award nods, but eclipsed by the prevalence of Hollywood A-production, they remained a minority on the domestic market. It is also noteworthy that while international co-production (including financing capitals that flow among China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) remained an important operative model, CMPC nonetheless still played a significant role in funding Taiwanese arthouse cinema in the 90s 21 . As the dark age of Taiwanese Cinema persisted well into the 2000s, new generations of filmmakers such as Lin Shuyu (Winds of September, 2007), Lin Yuxien (Exit No. 6, 2007), Chen Huaien (Island Etude, 2007), Niu Chengze (What On Earth Have I Done Wrong, 2007), Chen Xinyi (God Man Dog 2008) began to produce commercial films of mainstream popular genres (comedy, drama, fantasy, mocumentary, and so on) and abandon the high-brow, formalist cinematography to appeal to younger age groups with a more engaging narrative style and topical, adventurous, or romantic subject matters. Still shot on a shoestring and most of the time still struggling with unsatisfactory box office 21 In 2005, CMPC became privatized and renamed Central Pictures Corporation, no longer run by the government. For a short period of time until 2010, it stopped the business of film production. 39 revenues, this new generation of Taiwanese films followed a similar path of promotional strategy by entering Taipei Film Festival to start with and moving on to other international (mainly in the Asian region) festivals, or joining a collective publicity campaign called Taiwan Den Young [taipian fachun], a united platform initiated by a group of independent film professionals in 2007 that organized joint promotional activities for a selection of new films. The activities include advertisement in print media, press conferences, interviews, cross-referential websites, and so on. This new promotional system was taken over by the Government Information Office (GIO) in 2008, renamed Taipian Xingaochao [Taiwanese cinema new climax] after the box office success of Wei Desheng‟s Cape No. 7 boded well for the revival of Taiwan cinema 22 . With the boost of morale by Cape No. 7 and Monga, film critics and professional alike see the year of 2008 as a turning point for Taiwanese cinema. As the media and film institutions followed up on this promising wave by holding conferences and organizing panels discussing the future of Taiwanese cinema, film professionals, whether in academia or industry, began to push for deeper government involvement as a significant force in implementing across-the-board upgrading and expansion of Taiwan‟s film industry to compete with the influx of A-productions from Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Mainland China that dominate 90% of the Taiwanese film market. The agenda the government commits to during the past few years includes holding conferences to attract 22 陳平浩, “ 台片的發春與高潮：專訪策畫人陳俊蓉小姐” 放映週報 [Chen, Pinghao. “The Flourishing and Climax of Taiwanese Cinema: Interview with the Organizer, Chen Junrong. Funscreen. http://www.funscreen.com.tw/head.asp?H_no=224&period=187 Oct. 10, 2010. 40 domestic or foreign corporate investment in Taiwanese films, changing subsidy policy and increasing government funding and cash reward for locally produce films, and launching a series of nationwide educational programs on visual aesthetics and Taiwanese cinema 23 . In these discussions, film professionals cite countries such as Korea, France, and India as role models that view local film industry as a national enterprise and an important cultural asset to reach a maximum class and age range of domestic viewers. Underlying these discourses, nonetheless, is a desire to stake out a territory where national sovereignty coincides with local culture, so that an independent national identity could be thus formed through the power of visual self-representation to contest the force of globalization 24 . 23 For example, in 2008, an annual program entitled “National Film Visual Education Project” [guopian yingxiang zhagen jihua] was launched. The objectives of this program is to provide training to high school and college-level students and teachers of understanding visual language and appreciating locally-made films, especially films that have won awards in national or international film festivals. http://ourfilms.pixnet.net/blog Oct. 10, 2010 24 Indeed, as early as 2006, at a press conference, GIO presented modified policies regarding financing and distributing locally produced films. In the presentation, Korean cinema was cited as a successful example of national cinema development. “ 闡述電影政策，行政院新聞局局長與媒體記者相見歡 ” [“Explaining Film Policy, Secretariat Greets the Press”] http://www.taiwancinema.com/ct.asp?xItem=53015&ctNode=258&mp=1; In 李亞梅,"從印度寶萊塢看台灣商業電影的發展與困境 ,” [Li Yamei. “Analyzing the Development and Difficulties of Taiwanese Commercial Films in View of Indian Bollywood] Li Yamei discusses Bollywood as a national mass culture in India that reaches all class levels of the population in Indi a. She points out the urgency of producing domestic films that are legible for the larger part of the local viewers. http://www.taiwancinema.com/ct.asp?xItem=52448&ctNode=332; Following the success of Cape No. 7, a panel discussion held at National Taiwan University of Arts called for government intervention in the development of local film industry. Specifically, Wu Peici, chair of NTUA, points out that overseen and supported by the government, French cinema gets to develop in its own particularity and national integrity which distinguishes itself from Hollywood while preserving its domestic popularity. “讓國片春萌的現象繼續綻放-- 從海角七號到艋舺～談振興國片的政策與方向 ” [Helping the National Cinema Grow: From Cape No. 7 to Monga-- On the Direction and Policy of National Cinema]. http://www.taiwancinema.com/ct.asp?xItem=61565&ctNode=61&mp=1 41 Like First-World nation states, Taiwan‟s political sovereignty and formation of national identity have been contingent upon rapid modernization dressed up as a sign of prosperity brought about by economic development. Yet like Third-World countries, there exists a resilient native consciousness in Taiwan that emerged from its own colonial legacies and from the Chinese diaspora resulting from the post-49 split between the Communist and the Republican Parties, an ideological antagonism entrenched by the Cold-War structure. Given this historical context, the post-87cultural production in Taiwan exhibits at once a relentless quest for freedom of expression and social critique, as well as a ready subscription to consumerism mixed with concern and vision for a new Taiwanese community. In the literature and films discussed in this dissertation, I investigate Taiwan‟s national consciousness manifest in visions of homeland, community, and Chinese male and female iconographies in literature and cinema. What is common in these aspects of imagined nationhood is a sense of crisis about an incapability of defining the present. To name the relationship to the present, according to Fredric Jameson, is a modern, bourgeois desire that leads to the emergence of history. In his analysis of American science fiction and nostalgia films 25 , Jameson shrewdly sums up modern America‟s relationship to history: Historicity, in fact, is neither a representation of the past or a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a 25 Jameson, “Nostalgia for the Present.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 88:2, 1989. 517-37. 42 relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective. (231) In other words, to be able to historicize, to be able to bestow meaning upon the here and now, means a possibility to define ourselves against a graspable and reified order. In Jameson‟s observation of the American culture, a reaction to such a loss of sense of history in the postmodern phenomenon is nonetheless a preoccupation with historicity itself. Jameson views in films such as Time out of Joint and Blue Velvet an attempt to restore our capability of historicizing the present by putting together a coherent image of the past. Yet he notes that the attempt itself turns out to be a failure, since eventually these films illuminate an attempt that “seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past” (242). However, in the literature and films discussed in this dissertation, as history is invoked to reify Chinese or Taiwanese identity, the past seems to be more securely reconceptualized and serve as a frame of reference for us to define the present. In these cultural artifacts, often the underlying anxiety about the indefinite national status of Taiwan is symptomatic of the feared impossibility to name the present: unprecedentedly large scale and intensity of global economic interdependence often demands a malleability and sacrifice of national sovereignty. In addition to acting as a pawn of negotiation between the U.S. and China, the Taiwanese government often needs to equivocate its nationalist agenda to accommodate its economic dependence on the Chinese market. In this sense, the narration of history in the works I look into not only invoke historical events in the past, but the romanticized past is recalled as a future 43 anterior that offers a comforting vision. This temporal reversal is thus synonymous of homecoming, only it is a home that will be projected into the future as a new Taiwanese nationhood. The first chapter looks into Zhu Tianxin‟s works before and after 1987 to understand the anxiety and dystopic outlook presented in her 1999 novella, The Old Capital. I interpret the narrator‟s restless journey between her present vision and her memories and between Taipei and Kyoto by tracing the changing perception of the notion of “cultural China” in Zhu‟s earlier texts. Since quite a few of her works are a hybrid of fiction and autobiography, I contextualize the texts by thinking through Zhu‟s literary and cultural status in Taiwan. I take these texts as a testimony to the vicissitudes of the “China trope,” a discourse that is built around the Republican China associated with a unified and timeless Chinese culture and had been a dominant ideology until recent years. By doing so, as opposed to previous scholarship that reads the novella as a break-down of signification in the postmodern age, I take the intertextuality of The Old Capital as a manifestation of an impulse to fetishize historical documents in order to make the present legible and meaningful. Read alongside Zhu‟s previous works, the breakdown of the narrator in the end of The Old Capital is a refusal of postmodern levity and ahistoricity. In this context, the cultural China that has been disavowed returns as a sublimated vision of a pristine, idealized community. I continue the investigation of the vision of national community in the second chapter. Two locally-made films are examined that augurs what some film critics consider a 44 renaissance of Taiwanese cinema, Wei Desheng‟s Cape No. 7 and Niu Chengze‟s Monga. These two films are preoccupied with what is considered the quintessential Taiwanese culture, Tai-ke [the Taiwanese fellow]. Both populist films deal with the coming together of a community. While Cape No. 7 addresses the past as an unconsummated love story to be fulfilled in the present, Monga depicts it as preserving a mythic origin the sanctity of which is assailed by a new social order underpinned by technology and capitalism. I read both films as national allegory in which issues of ethnicity, gender, and postcoloniality are folded into motifs of friendship among underachievers, gangland brotherhood, rite of passage, and father-son conflicts. While both films deal with inevitable separation between inhibited lovers or rift among sworn brothers, the breakup of individual relationships either brings about the consolidation of a community or anticipates future reconciliation at the end of the story. Compared to the persistent urge to project an ideal homeland to replace the demystified and obsolete culture China in The Old Capital, Cape No. 7 and Monga enshrine two locations in narratives that connect the present to the past. In a way, the past represents an Ur-text of national history to unfold in the present and the future. Whether it is a lost address in Cape No. 7 or a notorious neighborhood in Monga, the location becomes a spatialization of a point of time in the past: it is an originary point that engenders a nation. Indeed, the local consciousness questioned in Zhu‟s text and celebrated in Wei‟s and Niu‟s films grew out of a genealogy of self-positioning in Taiwan‟s cultural production. Over the past decades, such a self-positioning has gradually come to be expressed, both 45 in political rhetoric and popular culture, in a language that embraces social stability, economic prosperity, and cultural vitality. Frequently, these features of good life are ascribed to a unique Taiwanese character: adventurous, hard-working, and recalcitrant. Nonetheless, this native consciousness, inherently bourgeois, is also ready to keep abreast of globally dominant cultures imported into the island with the flow of capitals. While in Zhu‟s text, the claustrophobic anxiety about radical nativism turns the narrative into a eulogy of Kyoto, in Cape No. 7 and Monga, the bona fide Taiwanese community is either in tune with foreign cultures or forced open to the new and global. This kind of flexibility that characterizes Taiwan‟s native consciousness spells out a need for worldwide recognition in general and Euro-American validation in particular. In my third chapter, I analyze two of Ang Lee‟s Chinese-language films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust Caution. I am interested in the way Lee‟s rendition of the martial art genre and the subject matter of Chinese modern history to the sensibility of global (mainly American) viewership cultivates the aesthetic taste of the Taiwanese audience. One of the contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, John Woo, who migrated to Hollywood or produce Chinese-language films tailor-made to the Western audience, Ang Lee is nonetheless recognized as an American director with his credentials of directing British and American films and a Chinese-language film maestro with his award-winning pieces such as Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman and Lust Caution. Familiar with the system of international collaboration, Ang Lee has become a culture icon in Taiwan, which he 46 frequently addresses in interviews as the audience whose response he cares about the most. As Lee‟s award-garnering arthouse films are also box office successes around the globe, his innovation of the wuxia convention and nostalgic depiction of the war-torn Republican China are exonerated from domestic criticism that sees his Chinese-language films as a form of self-orientalization. Instead, because of the universal legibility of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution, the Chinese-ness reinvented in these films has fascinated the Taiwanese audience no less than Western viewers. Thinking through the question of translatability in Ang Lee‟s works, I look into how the Taiwanese audience is invited to perceive themselves as the ethnic Chinese subjects depicted in the films. I contend that these films‟ portrayal of female characters is crucial in shaping Pan-Chinese national consciousness. Indeed, the women in his films at once embody and close an untranslatable gap between Eastern and Western cultures. While their sexualized body in both films is scrutinized and consumed by a voyeuristic gaze that transcends cultural boundaries, the female characters‟ psychic dilemma invents and transcribes a disparity between the East and the West. Such a dilemma thus operates as an ethnic and cultural marker that defines a modern Chinese subjectivity. It is a subjectivity that inhabits the putative split between the modern and the traditional, the repressed and the liberated, and the national and the transnational. 47 CHAPTER ONE: RESIDUAL HOMELAND AND REINSCRIPTION OF SELF: ZHU TIANXIN’S “THE OLD CAPITAL” You had no idea when the incessant longing for faraway places, the desire to go on a long trip, to fly far and high, first came to you. In fact, you‟d been off the island less than a month altogether, like an island savage or an ocean pirate. For many years you had actually found life bearable only by regularly imagining some part of the city, some section of a certain road, or some street scene as some other city, one you either had or had not visited. It was like so many men who, regardless of how they feel about their wives—good or bad—have to imagine them as another woman before they can perform in bed. You never tried to deal with this feeling, nor did you dare mention it to anyone, especially since there were always people who wanted to know whether or not you loved this place, even wanted you to hurry up and leave if you didn‟t. “If you want to leave, leave. Go back to where you came from”—as if you all had a place just waiting for you to return to, a ready-made place to live, but you kept hanging around, to your shame. Was there such a place? (134) Zhu Tianxin, “The Old Capital” I. Nation, Culture, and Authorship This chapter investigates the vicissitude of “China trope” in Zhu Tianxin‟s works from the seventies up to the beginning of the century. From this perspective, I unpack the intertextuality in Zhu‟s 1997 novella, Gudu, or “The Old Capital.” In view of the interactions between her works and their historical context, I argue that the peripatetic narrator in the novella expresses a desire to sublate the defunct sinocentric romanticism into interchangeable, exotic images that echo Zhu‟s self-exile, a motif that recurs throughout most of her works. To name the transformation of the emotional investment of Zhu‟s works in “cultural China” into the self-conscious defense of such subscription 48 “sublation” suggests a career trajectory that both critiques the cultural hegemony of the fifties and the sixties that informs Zhu‟s early works and apotheosizes it as the death of a personal past to be mourned permanently. In this sense, this chapter‟s reading of such sublation of the morphing “China trope,” which has been the bedrock KMT‟s ideology up until the past decade, teases out repeated revisions of subjectivity. In other words, throughout Zhu‟s literary career that can be largely characterized as a series of self-(re)inscription, what seems a developmental progress of what she calls “enlightenment” also manifests itself as a perpetual return to the notion of “home.” Zhu is frequently categorized as a juancun writer. Juancun refers to military compounds allocated to families of soldiers migrating to Taiwan following Chiang Kaishek‟s regime. Although Zhu‟s maternal grandfather was a Taiwanese doctor who received his formative education during the Japanese colonization, her identification with her father‟s literary taste 26 in her early career very often places her as a sympathizer with the Chinese Mainlander community. In view of the fact that quite a few of Zhu Tianxin‟s works address this community in which she spent her childhood, critics often identify an authorial persona that weighs in from time to time, which imbues most of Zhu‟s works with biographical elements. The fact that her essays tend to read like fictional narratives and that her fictional works sometimes read like romans-à-clef has generated literary criticisms that attribute Zhu‟s changes of literary styles and increasing focus on political 26 Zhu Xining was a main contributor to several government-run magazines in the fifties and the sixties. Most of his works were set in the time of the civil war in Mainland China. He is thus categorized as a “military literature writer,” or one among the representative figures of the fifties‟ “anti-communist” literature. 49 issues to her own identity crisis as a second-generation Chinese Mainlander. It is also because of this that Zhu has been one of the most studied writers, since the trajectory of her career epitomizes a correlation between Taiwan‟s cultural development and political transformation. David Dewei Wang, for instance, in the preface to The Old Capital, an anthology consisting of the novella, “The Old Capital,” and other short stories, briefly summarizes criticisms that notice such changes: During the decade after I Remember was published, Zhu Tianxin continued to write and participated occasionally in political activities. The changes she displayed mirrored the timeline of the lifting of the martial law and the transition from the autocracy by a single party to the cohabitation of multiple parties. Criticisms proliferate on this topic. Some stress that because of Zhu‟s identity crises regarding political beliefs and ethnicity, [her] youthful and romantic [style] becomes critical and conservative (Zhan Kailing); some point out that because she has been conforming to political correctness within the mainstream culture, she gets lost in the heteroglossia in the nineties (He Chunrei); some criticizes her conservatism in gender issues, which bleeds into her self-censorship in national identity (Chiu Kueifen). Among these studies, Kim Chew Ng‟s “From the Daguan Garden to Cafes” stands out as the most comprehensive. Combing through Zhu‟s works, Ng explores the correlations between the historical contexts and her styles, and the way she dedicates herself to, records, and criticizes the social dynamics. Ng reminds us of the comments and high hopes Hu Lancheng had for Zhu and leads us to witness the dialogic tension between her and Grandpa Hu. (11) 27 Although Wang goes on to caution against criticisms that come with their own political 27 《我記得… 》後十年間，朱天心除了創作，也淺涉政治活動。她的改變，竟與台灣從戒嚴到解嚴，從一黨到多黨的時刻表相互輝映。批評家樂得就此大作文章。或強調朱因族群、政治信仰認同的危機，由青春浪漫變得辛辣保守( 詹愷苓) ；或指出她一生追求主流以內的政治正確性，面臨九○年代的眾生喧嘩，不免無所適從起來( 何春蕤) ；或批評她的性別意識過於畫地自限，間接反映她國族認同上的故步自封( 邱貴芬) 。這許多研究中，黃錦樹的專論〈從大觀園到咖啡館〉最為可觀。仔細爬梳朱的作品後，黃寫出朱的創作時空及風格上的巧妙互動，以及她投身、記錄及批判社會動態中的特徵。黃錦樹更提醒我們胡蘭成當年對朱的評價及期許，從而見證她與胡爺爺間頗見張力的對話關係。 50 persuasions and rush to pigeonhole Zhu‟s ideological bias, it is undeniable that since the early eighties, themes of passionate, confused, or cynical protagonists attempting to understand, rationalize, and cope with political and social turmoil on the island, a phenomenon often analogized in the media to be “contractions” Taiwan underwent in order to give birth to the real democracy, have dominated Zhu‟s fictions and essays. Around 1987, the works of the famous Zhu sisters, Zhu Tianwen and Zhu Tianxin 28 , began to stray from naï ve idealization and didacticism of China trope and zeroed in more and more on realist representations of individuals whose lives are significantly affected by social and historical changes. While Zhu Tianwen, a prolific writer and also a core member of the San San group, turned to a long-term collaborative relationship with the Taiwan New Cinema director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, in his numerous films inspired by Xiangtu literature 29 , several of Zhu Tianxin‟s later works engage openly with political issues and evince strong cynicism toward the chauvinism and populism bolstering the national identities conceptualized by the KMT regime and Democratic Progressive Party respectively. Starting from I Remember [wojide], to A Novelist’ s Political Journal [xiaoshuojia de zhengzhi zhoji], to The Old Capital [gudu], not only do the themes depart from the celebration of the China imaginaries and begin to touch upon allegorical or 28 Among the three sisters, Zhu Tianyi is not as prolific as the other two, and her works do not enjoy as much prestige, either. Although she was also a co-founder of the San San group and mainly in charge of administrative duties, her career has been more focused on teaching school children writing. 29 For full in-depth discussion on the relationship between Zhu Tianwen‟s working relationship with Hou Hsiao-hsien, and the link between Xiang-tu literature and Taiwan New Cinema, see June Yip‟s Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 51 satirical portrayals of the bourgeois and consumerist lifestyle and the fickle, opportunistic political views of the urban residents in metropolitan Taipei; but the experimental style of postmodern pastiche and modernist stream of consciousness reveals Zhu‟s ambition to capture Taiwan‟s vibrant yet unsettling socio-cultural dynamics. As noted by Wang, these works are interwoven in such a way that “intertextuality” in “The Old Capital” can be understood both as a collage of fragments of historical documents and as constant reiterations of motifs that run through her other works. It should be pointed out here then, that to tap into Zhu‟s career trajectory as a perspective to navigate through the fabric of “The Old Capital” seems to gesture toward the interpretive strategy predicated upon an authorial intent, as diagnosed and dismissed by the poststructuralist Roland Barthes in his “Death of the Author.” Barthes‟ thesis contends that to accord a single “theological” reading to a text and assume that the interpretation should be subjugated to the will of the author commits an act of tyranny. He writes, “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.” In response to this claim, my reading of this particular novella of Zhu‟s by way of historicizing the text inevitably requires taking into account Zhu Tianxin‟s position in the canonization of Taiwanese literature, which is still in the process of construction since 1987. The biographical dimension teased out in my reading encapsulates not so much a unified Cartesian subject as an exemplar of a specific social and cultural status occupied by Zhu that is interacting within a larger, albeit unstable, ideological environment. To this end, this chapter 52 considers Zhu‟s other essays and fictional works not merely as artistic creations confined in their own internal textual structures. To unpack the historical and political palimpsest in this particular text, I look at her earlier works as articulations of a collective cultural unconscious that respond to the metamorphosis of the ideological construct of “China.” Looking into Zhu‟s interventions in the shaping of Taiwan‟s socio-political discursive practices, my investigation includes her participations in debates, her autobiographical essays, and her fictional works. I read these interventions rather as disunified, splitting voices channeled through an authorial persona that frequently fails to have the final say to the interpretation of her writing. Instead, the reiterations of the same motifs and themes across various texts that attempt at supplementary elaborations of them continue to produce indeterminacies in these texts. With this in mind, my reading does suppose an authorial intent; nonetheless, it is an intent that, when analyzed, is no less subject to the limitations as well as instability of language, social constructs, and historical contingencies. But it is also an effort to negotiate with such contingencies for temporary artistic autonomy and subjectivity. In this sense, this chapter reads “The Old Capital” as manifestations of a “habitus” shaped by a specific time and space in Taiwan, to use Bourdieu‟s term, in which the “disposition” of the narratives embodies the tension between social practices, cultural hegemony, and political ideologies that inform the text on the one hand, and Zhu‟s conscious reaction to the constellation of these factors as a cultural agent, on the other. Wang‟s commentary implies that this particular text of Zhu‟s draws debates in the field of 53 Taiwanese literary criticism because the anxiety of the narrator cannot be reduced to the generic angst of an individual confronted with the anomie of modernity in the European modernist tradition. The mental collapse of the narrator at the end of the story reveals its historical significance. It indicates the confused identificatory outlook of a narrator who is unable to reconcile the conflicts between the Chinese elitist tradition that constitutes her subjectivity and the post-87 decolonizing trend that behooves her to undermine it. It also suggests the narrative‟s complicity with bourgeois individualism that hinges upon a unified and stable national identity. Belonging to the baby boom generation, Zhu Tianxin‟s writing career spans across the martial law and the post-martial law periods. During the two decades between the sixties and the eighties, the China trope remained a valid cultural currency concomitant with the KMT‟s self-claimed status of “government in exile” under the name of the Republic of China. The displacement, the homesickness, and the body of work produced by a group of intellectual émigrés from China contributed to the tenacity of this cultural and literary imagery, which only gradually lost its appeal with the rise of native consciousness and the fall of ROC‟s international status. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the way China trope was never strictly the product of a monolithic literary tradition, and indeed had been a signifier that generated polyphonic representations that can be traced back to as early as the Japanese colonial period, the China trope in Zhu Tianxin‟s writings have prompted her to turn to, turn around, and turn away from her early unequivocal identification with notion of China. Paradoxically, this centrifugal and 54 centripetal relationship with imagined Chinese homeland manifest in Zhu‟s texts has always already been historically and geographically Taiwanese, in that in narrating as a self-identified second-generation Chinese Mainlander, what the authorial persona in the texts examined in this chapter (re)produces is continuous conversations and contentions with two decades of discursive practices on the island. Zhu published her first book, Days on Noah’ s Ark [fangzhou shang de rizi] in 1977, which is a collection of short stories bearing the attributes of the “boudoir literature.” It is a middle-class genre dominated by female writers‟ works that address themes such as romance and young women‟s Bildungsroman, and feature belleletristic style with sentimental portrayals of commonplace details. Between the fifties and the seventies specifically, this genre also entailed romanticized nationalistic narratives with melancholic representations of Chinese ethnic identity, traditions, and imageries of the pre-49 China. Writers whose works are often classified to belong to this tradition include Qijun, Zhang Xiuya, Yuan Qiongqiong, Jiang Xiaoyun, and Zhang Xiaofong. Influenced by Zhang Ailing‟s writing style, Zhu Tianxin‟s early works such as Songs of Plowing [jirangge] (1977), a collection of short stories, and her first novel, Open-Ended [weiliao] (1982), touch upon such nostalgia for a lost homeland. While the autobiographical essays collected in Songs of Plowing record her high school days, where the young narrator occasionally indulges in patriotic panegyrics of pre-1949 China imageries and idolization of Chiang Kaishek, Open-Ended portrays life in the juancun community with details of domestic everyday life and innocent childhood friendships among the second-generation 55 Chinese Mainlanders. The sensibility of boudoir literature, before and after the martial law period, has always occupied a niche in Taiwan ’s literary market. Writing in this convention in her earlier career, Zhu Tianxin has been a many-time literary award winner in Taiwan. In 1976, her short story, How Crisp the Autumn [tianliang haoge qiu] won the United Daily News Literary Award [ 聯合報文學獎]. She won the same award a few years later with Open-Ended. In 1978 and 1979, Zhu Tianxin won the China Times Literary Award [ 時報小說獎] two years in a row with her two short stories, Love [aiqing] and Days When I was Young [zuori dang wo nianqing shi]. Both bearing the signature of boudoir literature, Love portrays a young woman‟s two loves of her life in high school and college, while Days When I was Young is rife with sentimentalized details of a female college student‟s life. China Times Literary Awards and China Times Literary Awards were sponsored by the two mainstream newspapers during the seventies and early eighties. Before the lifting of the martial law, which also lifted newspaper censorship, both of these two print media operated as a platform of cultural production as well as an educator of the literary taste and ideologies for the general public. The art, culture, and literature section of the papers called Fukan was then an important, albeit unofficial, portal to cultural norms. Although Zhu‟s award-winning pieces are not explicitly patriotic or political, being acknowledged by the two literary awards in the seventies not only implies that their content and style complied with the mainstream culture supervised by the authoritarian KMT government; 56 but Zhu made headway in earning literary recognitions because of her family background. As Chang Sungsheng notes in her discussion of the mainstream culture during the martial law period, “[w]riting in the approved literary modes gained access to the market and greater opportunity for recognition and prestige. The result was obvious inequity between those who possessed the right kinds of cultural capital—competence in Mandarin, familiarity with particular stylistic and generic conventions, and above all, thematic resources in the right kinds of personal life experience—and those who did not.” (77-78). The formative influence of Zhu‟s father, Zhu Xining, shaped her aesthetic tastes and ideological positions throughout the seventies. Zhu Xining‟s official post in the KMT government, his contributions to government-sponsored publications, and his identity as a Mainland Chinese immigrant writer, and most important of all, his participations as judge in literary awards, not only allowed Zhu Tianxin to adapt without much difficulty to the mainstream literary environment during the martial law period; in her several post-martial-law publications, especially “The Old Capital” and Manyozhe, the prestige and privileges granted to her became the albatross with which the texts have to wrestle with. The dominant ideological sway in the years from the fifties through the seventies on Zhu sees its materialization in the establishment of the San San group. Founded in the seventies and disbanded in early eighties, the San San group embodied all the cultural and moral values inherited from Zhu Xining and a close friend of the Zhu family, Hu Lancheng. This young, idealistic circle rose as a reactionary voice against literary 57 movements that were subversive to the KMT hegemony. Reflecting on the short life-span of the San San group, Yang Zhao, himself once a young member of the circle, concludes that “the insistence on and the renunciation of the [sinocentric] values cut deep through their works and formed a historical layer in the archeology of Taiwan‟s social structure. […] In hindsight, one can say that Zhu‟s works during the past decades [up until the eighties] culminate in showcasing the charms of the “San San” literary style; but social changes exposed the vulnerability of Zhu‟s San San philosophy, which eventually led to a path of the dissolution of faith ” (150-54). The sheer force of naï ve passion and the attempted application of arcane Chinese elitist ideology to Taiwan‟s volatile and complex political and historical situations spelled out its superficiality and predicted its own demise in the near future. In Zhu‟s case, while most contributors to the San San publications either found their way to respond to the changing political climate or began to openly articulate their localist strains, in several texts, the authorial persona evinces an indecisiveness as to how to account for her involvement in any way, with or without an agenda, in the dissemination of sinocentric nationalism couched in aesthetic terms. San San defended its faith in Han-Chinese culture against Taiwan‟s Modernist movement and Xiangtu literature, the two major cultural responses that addressed, both indirectly, Taiwan‟s ambiguous national identity and cultural construction. Still wary of KMT‟s martial law administration, anti-sinocentric sentiments mostly found their outlets in cultural and literary expressions. It was at this juncture that the San San group and another young literary group, the Shenzhou Poets‟ Society, were formed as contesting 58 forces against the mixture of socialist and localist leanings of Xiangtu literature and the “parallel transplantation” of western literary traditions in the Modernist movement. While Shenzhou was founded by Malaysian-Chinese students who came to study in Taiwan, the majority of the members of San San were Mainland Chinese. And while Shenzhou attempted to resuscitate the “essence” of Chinese-ness by indulging in narratives of martial arts set in an imaginary jianghu (literally, the rivers and the lakes where the martial-art masters dwell), or producing poetry that declares a chivalric undertaking to recover shenzhou, which refers to the ancient capital of both the Six and Song dynasties and literally means “the state of god,” the San San group advocated for a feudal, patriarchal order intrinsic to Confucianism as the ideological underpinnings of the pre-49 Republican China established by Sun Yat-sen‟s Three People‟s Principles. Literature produced by both groups expressed a sense of mission undertaken by intellectuals to salvage traditional Chinese culture from communism, or to protest against “literature of working, peasant, and military class” [gongnongbing wenyi]. Mutual fans of Shenzhou members, Zhu Tianxin and her sister Zhu Tianwen were among the main contributors to the San San Journal and had produced a body of work through the publisher under the same name, San San publishing house [san san shufang]. On top of resistant undercurrents against the KMT hegemony in the seventies, the diplomatic frustrations Taiwan was faced with somehow further consolidated the image of culture China in San San‟s works, now painted in a tragic-heroic light. In Zhu 59 Tianwen‟s essay “World as Small Waves” [renshi weibo 人世微波 30 ], for example, the author‟s view of Taiwan‟s rice paddies at the sunset are sublimated into visualization of a perennial natural landscape, and the burden of reviving and authenticating these visions falls upon the intellectual class: The rice has been harvested. In the field remains only a patch of sheared stalks. I walk on the field barefoot with my cousins. The soil is soft and cold, which calms my whole being. On the vegetable field, there are only crops of seeds left, with their large and thick stalks and leaves. Along the creeks are bouquets of sword brakes. The hills are covered with silver sword grass plants. Smoke rises out of the chimneys of the households on the hills. Rays of sunset beats down. This is still the world described in The Book of Songs, serene and boundless. Looking over the mountains and the streams, I feel reassured, and suddenly am grateful, that the spirits and essence of the Chinese ethnicity never die. They are simply waiting for us to resuscitate them. The morale provoked by the diplomatic ties established between the U.S. and the Communist enemy cannot accomplish much. Nor do the vitality and creativity much needed for the restoration and building of nation come from the intellectuals or the cultural agents. They originate from the sun, the moon, the wind, and the dews of the vast world. Once we establish a bond with all those, we will soon gain confidence and power, and yet we will be burdened with even more responsibility. (37) 31 Nationalism narrated in a picturesque language of natural landscape accompanied by a transcendent cultural and ethnic spirit is not unusual in San San writers‟ works. This kind 30 Zhu, Tianwen. Journals of Tamkiang: Essays of Zhu Tianwen’ s Four Years of College. Taipei: San San Publishing House, 1979. 31 稻子已經收割過了，田間只剩一片短短的稻梗，我和表妹們赤腳走在上面，泥土柔韌軟涼，整個人都沉靜了下來。菜田也大部分只剩下做種的，長著又粗又大的莖葉，溪邊一叢叢的是鳳尾草，山上漫生著銀花花的野芒，山邊人家炊煙裊裊，斜陽寸寸。仍然還是詩經裏的人世，安穩而綿遠啊。對著這樣的山高水長，我心中落實，忽而慶幸中華民族的精魄未死，她仍然只是等待著我們，等待我們的招魂啊。美匪建交所激起的民心士氣尚不足以成事，我們復國建國所賴以滋長的生命力和創造力，也不是來自於知識界或文化界，卻是源於這廣大民間的日月山川風露，有這個與我們木石為盟，隨即就能生出心的信心和力量，而我們的責任將是更重了。 60 of timelessness and organicity translated into ethno-cultural essence is reified in a language of narcissism, in which the narrator validates her existence in her anthropological and archeological interpretation of the world. What San San upheld as the Confucian China nourished by the ritualistic and music” [liyue zhongguo], in several aspects, complemented the military-spirited “New Life Movement” [xingshenghuo yundong] started in the thirties and promoted by Chiang Kaishek‟s administration. When the KMT government immigrated to Taiwan, “New Life Movement,” which failed in Chinese Mainland as a mass movement in the 1930s, became propagandist moral indoctrination that went hand in hand with the Chiang regime‟s anti-Communist discourses and was re-branded as “Chinese Cultural Revitalization Movement [zhonghuawenhua fuxing yundong]” in 1955. In order to counteract the Communist revolution and to save the nation from what the party deemed as moral degeneracy, New Life Movement was a hygienic and behaviorial reform (Dirlik, 945). To revive the nation and to shape the new citizen that contributes to the reformation, ancient Chinese virtues are invoked as competitive parallels to the moral codes of the West. As strong, modern nation-states of the West were founded upon these virtues, China fell to corruption and infirmity because the people no longer lived by, both physically and morally, these virtuous ideals. This KMT campaign, which, according to Arif Dirlik, was equivalent to the United State‟s New Deal, Russia‟s Bolshevism, Italy‟s Fascism, Germany‟s National Socialism, and Turkey‟s Kemalism, involved much less restoration of classic Chinese culture than revitalization of the nation (As is pointed out 61 by Dirlik, the metaphor frequently invoked is the idea of fuxing, revival, as opposed to fugu, restoration) by adopting and reconfiguring both Confucian norms and Legalist state centralization. Ironically, accusing Xiangtu movement of instrumentalizing literature to serve political agendas and Modernist movement of indiscriminately importing Western aesthetic standards, San San writers‟ nearly religious nostalgia for an elitist Chinese culture, under the influence of Zhu Xining and Hu Lancheng, cohered almost seamlessly with this right-wing KMT propaganda. San San‟s allegiance to Kuomingtang‟s ideology was such that in petitioning against Communism, it took a position very much in line with the Cold-War structure, with which KMT complied in order to seek both the financial and moral support from the United States. Nonetheless, the sinocentricism elaborated by both the first generation Chinese Mainlanders, particularly Hu Lancheng and Zhu Xining, and the second generation to which Zhu Tianxin and Zhu Tianwen belong, demonstrated an anxiety to distinguish itself from the new culture and vernacularism promoted by May Fourth movement informed by the Western enlightenment. An early twentieth-century nationalism, May Fourth movement called for radical innovation in Chinese language, abolishment of traditional Chinese feudal system represented by Confucianism, and application of democracy and science. In both Zhu Xining‟s and Hu Lancheng‟s writings, Chinese culture is often re-defined against Western civilization and touted to be the more sophisticated and therefore superior. Specifically, Zhu Xining‟s unfinished novel, Memoir of Hua Taiping [hua taiping jia zhuan], delves into such motifs as the impact of Western 62 culture on China in the early twentieth century and the domestication of Christianity in Chinese traditions. The attempt to construct a homogeneous Chinese culture that is not only more sophisticated than the Western culture, but is indeed more accommodating to modernity in Zhu Xining‟s work sees its parallel in Hu Lancheng‟s autobiography This World, This Lifetime [jinsheng jinshi]. Trickling down to Zhu Tianxin‟s and Zhu Tianwen‟s early writings, this ideological rhetoric is reiterated as indisputable wisdom. The passionate subscription to the idea of a “cultural China” is best exemplified in the collection of Zhu Tianxin‟s autobiographical essays collected under the title, Songs of Plowing [jirang ge], in which a young intellectual of the Taipei First Girls‟ High records her homoerotic relationship with a classmate and passionate didacticism on Sun Yat-sen‟s nationalistic ideals. Addressing Hu Lancheng as “Grandpa,” in Zhu‟s Songs of Plowing, the young woman‟s adulation for this gentry-class patriarch well-versed in Chinese classics is displaced onto veneration for China conjured up in a rhetoric of truism very common in fifties‟ and sixties‟ boudoir literature tradition. The inheritance of the cultural China from the two patriarchs is often analogized as sublimated love between a woman and her nation. In Songs of Plowing, images of China are described by Yang Cui as “a composite of geography, culture, and politics” (169): I have read works by Grandpa, but haven‟t met him yet. That should not be a problem. Reading Grandpa‟s works, I feel like I am elevated to the same realm as the heaven and the earth, and the Yanzi River and the Yellow River are coursing and throbbing in my blood vessels. I am going to rise with the wind, flying up to the top of Mount Heaven. The formidable South 63 Mountain. The gusty wind. China oh China! […] The weather of August feels like it is already autumn. The sky is clear and blue as diamond. Weather like this always reminds me of the Han and the Tang dynasties, and Dongpo. It makes me dream about walking in the moon with a boy. But right now, I want to meet a boy I love, and tell him, “What do you say we get married only after we fight our way back to the Mainland?” After the time of war is over, I will take off my military uniform and put on a beautiful dress. China oh China! (Songs of Plowing (253) 32 The sublimation of personal love to one‟s devotion to China, a concept that connotes bounded territory (as is often analogized to the shape of Alocasia), an ancient, timeless civilization (as represented by the five Chinese classics and Han-language poetry and literature), and a modern polity founded by Sun, is also a staple in Zhu Tianwen‟s collection of essays, Journals of Tamkiang [danjiang ji]. The didactic language of sinocentric nationalism in The Journals of Tamkiang summarizes the central beliefs of the San San group. Zhu Tianwen‟s critique of the literary reformation in May Fourth Movement in 1919 reflects Zhu Xining‟s efforts in sinocizing Christianity and pitting modern science and rationalism of the West against a kind of Chinese essence expressed in a nationalist language of blood and soil: The Five Classics are the Bible for the Chinese. Every Westerner from any walk of life has to study [the Bible] at a very young age. Without Christianity, which ensures the continuation of moral traditions, it is impossible for the West to survive today by relying merely on science. Studying the classics is also like speaking to our kinsmen, as if our great 32 我看過爺爺的書，卻還沒見過爺爺的人，不過那該是不打緊的。讀爺爺的書，只覺得天地都要與你平起平坐起來，長江黃河在我的血脈中砰砰的跳，而我又要臨風一飛，飛到那高高的天山上，南山烈烈，飄風弗弗，中國啊中國！[…] 八月的天，卻像是秋天了，天空寶藍得乾乾淨淨，這種天候總要讓我想到漢唐，想到東坡，總要讓我憧憬和一個男孩走在月亮中。可是這會兒，我更想找一個我心愛的男孩，對他說，「反攻大陸以後，我再嫁給你好嗎？」亂世歲月後，我再脫去一身戎裝，穿件漂亮的女孩兒衣服，中國啊中國！( 日月光華旦復旦兮，擊壤歌) 64 great grandfathers suddenly come before our eyes. Seeing them means witnessing the absolute truth of history and the national spirits engendered by history. It makes us grateful for the origin of our identity, inspiring within me an indescribable ambition to accomplish something spectacular in order to express my gratitude for my previous life. Such ambition is also provoked by everything that occurs in this life. The classics are like the boundless yellow soil on the Plateau of the Yellow and Huai Rivers. Only by emulating our ancestors who were born and spent their whole lives here can we cultivate our roots profoundly and come into full bloom. Ever since the classics are taken out of the national curriculum, we are cut off from national memories and the cultivation of national spirits and turn into rootless annual plants. As soon as they begin to blossom, it simultaneously announces their death. 33 (143) To a significant degree, the two San San patriarchs were responsible for the canonization of boudoir literature, the staying power of which is epitomized by the iconic status of Zhang Ailing‟s works. The influences of Zhu Xining and Hu Lancheng cultivated in young San San writers an admiration for the literary caliber of Zhang. San San writers‟ imitation of Zhang‟s signature style, which involves close attention to and elaborations on mundane details and sentiments, is deployed to portray love for the imaginary nation. But while Zhang‟s meticulous detailing of triviality depicts an unsympathetic, disenchanted, and apathetic attitude about the futility of life swept up in the turbulence of a greater historical context, the same style, when adopted by San San writers, injects into their works a sentimentalism that sometimes develops into saccharine glorification of the 33 五經是中國人的「聖經」，而西洋人不管做甚麼的，從小都要讀過，西洋假如沒有基督教做為他們道統上的傳遞，光靠著發展科學，是不可能支撐到今日的。我們讀經書的心情，也是好像面對親人講話，是我們祖父的祖父忽然來到眼前，見著了他的人，就是見著了歷史的絕對信實，也是見著了生於這歷史裏的民族情操。那使我們對自己身世的來源感激，生出莫名的志氣，要做一件轟轟烈烈的大事，為報答我的前生，也為今生的種種這樣叫我意氣難平。經書像是黃淮平原上遼闊無涯的黃土，我們唯有如祖先一樣，生於斯長於斯，深深的紮根下去，燦爛的開出花果。廢讀經書以來，我們是斷了民族記憶和情操的涵養，變成無根的一年生草木，眼看才長起來變即刻又萎死了。 65 imaginary homeland. The canonization of Zhang Ailing‟s works and the promotion of her unique writing style by Zhu Xining and Hu Lancheng to become an aesthetic standard in measuring literary production not only established Zhang herself, who had only visited Taiwan once in the sixties, as a significant cultural icon in the history of Taiwanese literature, the emulation of the Zhang style by the Zhu sisters in their early works also secured both writers a highly visible position in Taiwan‟s cultural production. Under the influence of Hu Lancheng, the combination of a literary style rich in allusions to Chinese classical philosophies and the timeless imageries of homeland in the Zhu sisters‟ works is interlinked with a self-described position as shi. The sense of superiority inherent in the “shi” identity --a traditional social status that designates an elitist, gentry class, which, in pre-modern China, also refers to a class qualified for serving the State-- and the sense of mission are articulated unambiguously in one of Zhu Tianxin‟s early essays: Since then, we were busy with organizing San San. In the first year, besides launching into all kinds of administrative affairs, we held conferences. Back then my mind was occupied with Grandpa‟s words. As long as China has the three thousand shi, the feat of restoring and establishing our nation won‟t be a problem at all. We really felt like we were the industrious Mencius. The world would be conquered by either Mozi or Yangzhu. The first strike of our sword was maladroit, and the inexperienced strike itself was callous and explosive. Those who meant well would ask us with concern: What in the world do you want to achieve? What in the world do you want to achieve? Indeed, what in the world did we want to achieve? That was a dead-on question. […] As we carried on, the picture got clearer and clearer, but it was not exactly a matter of practice. That was back in the sixty-seventh year of the Republic of China. […] We wanted to do what Cai Yuan-pei did during the Beijing University era, and we‟d definitely found our university in Hangzhou. Our conversation went on and on, until I got 66 drowsy, and started to feel like I was on an ornate boat drifting on Xihu, and in the dream, everything came true 34 . (171-73) The position of vanguarding the nation is also associated with the unique identity of juancun. Having a symbiotic relationship with the KMT regime, despite its heterogeneous makeup in terms of provincial identities, military ranks, and social status prior to their retreat to Taiwan, juancun stands for a collective identity that distinguishes itself from local Taiwanese residents in that, in serving one‟s country, it stands a parallel position to the arcane notion of shi. For example, as her first novel, Open-Ended [weiliao] presents a more subtle yet sympathetic portrayal of the juancun community, the psychological barrier between those who live inside and those outside the military compound is delineated by a short interior monologue presented in free indirect speech of Mrs. Xia, a Taiwanese wife who, despite her own family‟s objections, is married to a Chinese-Mainlander government functionary. After the Xia family move out of juancun, the distinction between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese seems even more pronounced: Ever Since the Xia family moved here, there seemed to be something wrong. Mostly there was a feeling of forlornness and sadness. Actually most of the neighbors were friendly. In the morning when the peddlers came, those who did not need anything would still stand around and have a brief chat. But somehow there was something wrong, some kind of incompatibility. It was probably because they were civilians. But strangely, because they lived in the 34 日後，就是辦三三了。第一年除了一切事務性的工作在積極的展開外，就是座談會了。那時真是心中一念只想著爺爺的話，中國有三千個士，日後的復國建國大業就沒問題了。我們真覺得自己是戰國時代汲汲皇皇的孟子啊，天下不歸楊，即歸墨，咱們這一劍給劈下去，卻還是試劍的時候扎煞著不上手，生冷得很，打下去卻又火光迸裂，場面總是弄得火爆至極，誠心些的人，也是一臉焦急的問，你們到底要做什麼？你們到底要做什麼？是呀，我們到底要做什麼？這句話是問到我們心底來了。 […] 做做卻是愈來愈清楚了，可是又完全不是訓練不訓練那回事，那是民國六十七年的[…] 我們是要像當初北大時代的蔡元培那樣的找人才法的，學校一定要選在杭州，說著說著說不完，睏起來，自己好像也飄盪在西湖的畫舫上，夢裡竟都成真了。 67 military compound, and were used to referring to those who lived outside the compound, whether they were farmers or Taiwanese, as the civilians. Even Mrs. Xia herself, who was born into a Taiwanese family, was also used to referring to those outsiders as the civilians. The address was loaded with complex and special sentiments. There was some contempt, some pity, and some complacency. It was the sentiments of those veterans, who prided themselves in being the brave frontline warriors that safeguarded their country 35 . (133) In Zhu‟s works, the juancun culture‟s self-distinction from “the civilians” and its sense of mission to deliver the nation from Communist China easily translates into a similar sense of superiority that hierarchizes the military families and the local residents. This cultural niche occupied by the San San group and defined by classical Chinese literary training, mainstream political and social position, and a pristine, romantic world view could not avoid the impacts of a series of domestic and international political events occurring in the late seventies and its continuous aftershocks throughout the eighties and the nineties. Since the early eighties, the symbiosis between an individual‟s subjectivity and the political came to the fore in Zhu‟s works. Although in these works, the phasing out of “cultural China” coincides with a mistrust of the KMT ideology, intellectuals still occupy a privileged position that grants them the power of envisioning and representing the national spirits. What mainly distinguishes the concerns for the national culture in peril in Zhu‟s works since the eighties from the celebration of the national imaginaries in 35 夏家搬到此後，說不出哪裡不對勁，都有些寂寥之感，其實這裡的鄰居多也和氣，早上賣菜車來時，不買菜的也會在路上站站聊聊天，但總有哪裡不對，氣息不通，大概，都是些老百姓的緣故吧！也很奇怪，因為他們一向是住的眷村，眷村的人總習慣叫那些村外的人，不一定是農家的，也不一定是本省人的，都一律叫老百姓，連夏太太自己是本省家庭出身的也習慣叫人家為老百姓，這種叫法的感情是很複雜特別的，有些輕視的意思，有些憐惜，又有些洋洋自得，像是老兵們的心情，自己真是戍守前方保鄉衛國的英勇戰士啊。 68 her earlier works is their increasing focus on the political and cultural crises the island was caught up in and an acute awareness of identificatory dilemma experienced by the Chinese Mainlanders. II. The 70s and Beyond: Female Body and Globality In the short stories collected in an anthology originally entitled Journals of Guanlin the Taida Student [taida xuesheng guanlin de riji 台大學生關琳的日記] and later on renamed as The Bygones [shi yi shi wang 時移事往], the immaculate national imaginaries of the cultural China are undermined by the political transformations and accelerated globalization. In the two short stories, “Journals of Guanlin the Taida Student” and “The Bygones”, voices of passionate high school teenagers vowed to dedicate themselves to their country in Songs of Plowing give way to the Bildungsroman of coming-of-age college graduates who encounter and manage to cope with the “ills” of society. “Journals of Guanlin the Taida Student” centers around a young idealist attempting to intervene in the status quo of society. And “The Bygones” is narrated by a perplexed onlooker witnessing the ideological struggle of his college and childhood friends. The other two stories collected in the same anthology, “The Dagger” [wuqing dao 無情刀] and “On Christmas Day” [zhuyesu jiangsheng shi ri 主耶穌降生是日], also begin to take up issues that will recur in Zhu‟s post-87 works. While the former portrays the uprooted-ness and sense of loss of a Chinese veteran caught between nostalgia for his 69 hometown he can no longer return to and his new, disproportionally young family in which his role as the breadwinner is gradually replaced by his young son‟s TV career as a child star in Taiwan, the latter presents testimonial accounts of an array of working-class people in Taiwan about a child murder case. As if attesting to what Zhu later described as “belatedness” in apprehending Taiwan‟s experience of modernity and postmodernity, her 1984 short story, “The Bygones,” not only begins to catch up with the vertiginous experience of early globalization in Taiwan in the seventies, but exposure to new, yet confusing information of international cultural and social revolutions portends the “enlightenment” of a young, second-generation male Chinese Mainlander. Like other stories collected in the anthology, this story signals a suspicion of KMT‟s propaganda, and as an early gesture of departing from sinocentricism, an attempt to rationalize and cope with the political contentions both within and beyond the borders of the island. Originally entitled “Aibo,” the story revolves around the rites of passage of a juncuan young man, who is introduced to a social circle consisting of students of arts and humanities. As the story develops, these young bohemians‟ emulation of European and American cultural, philosophical, and artistic trends sketches out the impact of cultural and economical globalization on the island. In the story, the impact takes various forms: the neocolonial relationship between the U. S. and Taiwan articulated in terms of gendered colonial relationships (The American GIs walking down the Taipei streets with Taiwanese prostitutes, or Taiwanese women getting to finally leave the island for the 70 Promised Land of America by marrying the GIs), criticisms of Chinese culture held up against western philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural standards (the “progressive” art students‟ fervor in studying Cubism, in artistic creation and performance inspired by Greek mythology, the English majors‟ passion for Sartre‟s existentialism, the hippie culture, the anti-war rhetoric, and liberal criticisms of the KMT autocracy and American neo-imperialism), or the encroachment of global capitalism on the island (the Coca-Cola logo, the jeans, and the chewing gum that strikes the protagonist as western novelties). With the rise of Modernist movement in the fifties and sixties, the influx of Euro-American high culture, pop culture, and liberalism began to shape both Taiwan‟s academia and cultural production. Roughly a decade later, Zhu‟s works displayed a similar awareness of the unstoppable and unsettling force of globalization. In discussing Taiwanese literature of the sixties and the seventies, Shi-shu [ 施淑] paints a picture of the way explosive information about global cultural movements and political conflicts infiltrated into the island under the martial law and fostered Taiwan‟s Modernist movement. The sixties of Taiwan was a hysterical era. […] Some college youth of liberal arts could only get to be voyeurs in academia: They peeked into the history of literature by reading snippets and fragments of works by writers such as Lu Xun that fell through the loopholes of book bans. They scrutinized world events such as Taiwan‟s political situation, Communist Russia, Cultural Revolution in China, movements led by students in Tokyo, Paris, and the U.S., genocide, and the Prague spring by means of word of mouth, whispers, Times Magazine and Newsweek that had pages censored, torn, or even gone altogether. Also, these young men got their updates on Vietnam wars by seeing the U.S. GIs hanging out in the bars in Keelung, Taipei, and Kaohsiung. They listened in cafes to the music of Beetles and Bob Dylon that could not provide any answers, soaking in 71 the atmospheres of hippie culture, Zen, and even the meditations of nirvana. The voyeuristic culture of White Terror, the prolonged state of war under the martial law, the voyeuristic psychology of nervousness, convulsion, and fragmentation became the exterior and interior circumstances that gave rise to the Modernist movement 36 . (qtd. in Chiu, 203) Compared to “Journals of Guanlin the Taida Student,” where the politically-active college student, Guanlin, has “learned from Andy [his American roommate, who poses as an educator of democracy and civilization and an orientalist from the First World to enlighten his Taiwanese fellow students] to evaluate objectively the democratization of the country, as opposed to blindly swearing allegiance to the KMT government like my father, an old, loyal member of the party” (50), “The Bygones” demonstrates an even more engaged fascination with the global dynamics that gradually eroded the national myth upheld in Zhu‟s earlier works. Set in the seventies, the narrative is informed by a kind of, if not hysteria as described by Shi, uncertainty and restlessness of the time. The characters‟ keenness on criticizing the U.S. political maneuvers as imperialist capitalism and keeping up with the cultural development in this first-world country as the role model for civilization demonstrates what Shi Shumei refers to as the ambivalent sentiments of shame about Chinese culture and hostility against a generalized, collective term, the West. As the nationalist mission of reclaiming of Mainland China in the name of ROC was 36 六○年代的台灣是個歇斯底里的年代 ‧ ‧ ‧ 以學院為中心的部分文學青年，只有在這些歇斯底里的思想圍城裏，成了窺視者：從被禁絕不了的魯迅等少數作家的斷簡殘篇，窺測文學史。從耳語、小道消息、被塗去、被撕裂、以致於整頁消失的時代週刊、新聞週刊，窺測臺灣現況、鐵幕後的蘇聯、中國文化大革命、東京巴黎美國的學生運動、種族屠殺、布拉格之春等世界大事。在這之外，以最奇怪的方式，從進出基隆臺北高雄酒吧的美軍，看越戰正在進行。在咖啡屋聽披頭四、鮑伯 ‧狄倫等找不到答案的音樂，感受著嬉皮、迷幻藥、禪、以至於四大皆空的超感覺靜坐。這白色恐怖的窺視文化，戒嚴令延長的戰爭狀態，窺視者緊張，痙攣、破裂的心理，提供六○ 年代臺灣現代主義發生發展的內外在條件… … 72 proven time and again to be more and more of an impossibility in the seventies, underlying the cultural and political enthusiasm of the characters in the story is a desperate need for self-definition and an impatient urge to abandon any sort of native traditions that seem no longer viable. Seventies in Taiwan indeed marked the beginning of political, social, and cultural sea changes on the island, whose impact reverberated throughout Zhu‟s works produced in the following decades. During the seventies, a series of international events involving Taiwan‟s political sovereignty had set the tone for the confusing yet competitive nationalisms after the restrictions on the usage of Taiwanese vernaculars other than Mandarins in the media and the freedom to form political parties were lifted in 1987. The clamoring for sovereignty over Diaoyu Island not only sparked international tension among Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Japan, but throughout the following decades, the economical interests in the reserves of oil evolved into an issue of whether Taiwan was capable of establishing itself as an independent national sovereignty. This incident had generated split reactions: While university students in Taiwan held several demonstrations and protested in front of both the U.S. and Japanese embassies, overseas Taiwanese activists called for nationalistic solidarity with PRC, who was gaining international recognition. Coinciding with this territorial dispute was a no less profound impact on Taiwan‟s self-positioning on the international stage. In 1971, the same year when Japan broke off its diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the Republic of China represented by Chiang Kai-shek‟s nationalist government was banished from the United 73 Nations. Nixon‟s inclination to acknowledge PRC as the sole representation of China was put into practice by his visit to China in 1972, followed by an official establishment of diplomatic ties under Carter‟s administration in 1979. The impact of Taiwan‟s losing international allies and its seat in the UN still reverberates to this day in competitive nation-building discourses. In 2007 and 2008, holding a referendum on establishing proactive state policies to appeal for Taiwan‟s return to the United Nations was promoted in both KMT‟s and DPP‟s presidential campaigns. Although a series of diplomatic setbacks in the seventies were not the immediate reason for the ever-increasing volume of dang-wai [which literally translates as “outside the (KMT) party”] political activities and newspapers such as those mentioned in the “The Old Capital,” (Free China [ziyou zhongguo] and Grand Learning [da xue]), patriotism provoked by the grim outlook of Taiwan‟s international status and protests against KMT‟s decisions to suspend elections on all levels in the late seventies in response to the severance of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Taiwan brought about significant political conflicts and cultural movements. Whereas localist cultural production began to thrive in the seventies as KMT was loosening its grip on media censorship, what most forcefully destabilized KMT‟s sinocentric policies was the 1979 Formosa Incident. The incident ended in a large-scale crack-down since the 228 incident on dangwai magazines and demonstrations for human rights and democracy ended in arrests, trials, and imprisonment of important oppositional leaders who, after 1987, became important members of the first oppositional political camp, the Democratic 74 Progressive Party. From this moment on, the increasingly pronounced antagonist sentiments against the authoritarian KMT administration in Taiwan became an unstoppable force that led to the lifting of the martial law in 1987. References to these international and domestic events contextualize the agitations of the young men in “The Bygones.” Among these young idealists, a childhood friend, Aibo, since the death of her father at her tender age, epitomizes the confused, innocent, passionate, impressionable, and dangerously corruptible individual/nation that was susceptible to modernity. This corky young woman enamored of Euro-American art and music later on renames herself “April,” a name inspired by Paul Simon‟s 1965 song, April Come She Will. Notably, in the story, the confrontation with the postwar American and European cultural influx wavers between rational criticism and irrational consumption. Such division coincides with gender lines and is articulated in a letter addressed to the protagonist by a middle-class Taiwanese friend, Fang Bo, who leaves the island to study in the U.S.: In his letter he satirizes the disasters caused by the Chinese Communists, the autocracy of KMT, the over-expansion of the U.S. capitalism which has led to the way the academia operates as a corporation. Fang Bo also said he was starting to feel trapped, and that maybe next year he should travel in Europe, since it is the origin of Western civilization and perhaps still preserves something authentic. Fang Bo probably does not know how Nanqi is doing now. He only mentions that Nanqi should really pay a visit to the hippie area in San Francisco. If one wants to learn about counterculture, one should get it first-hand, instead of [learning] superficial knowledge from some expatriated Westerners in Southeast Asia. But he warns Nanqi that drugs, including Marijuana, are still illegal in the hippie area. Fang Bo does not let Aibo off the hook in his letter, either […] “She appears as if she was the modern-day Qiujin [a female revolutionary that participated in the overthrowing of the Qing 75 dynasty], but rumor has it that the day after she retires from activism are spent in SoHo, New York, hanging out with the so-called international artists. I don‟t understand why whenever the Chinese are involved in the politics, it gets dirty. Perhaps the residual malevolence of the five-thousand-year imperial way of thinking is so deep-rooted that the Chinese habitually turn politics into a means of power struggle or keeping abreast of ideological trends. Ever since the Nixon administration began to court the Chinese communists, orientalism now adds to the craze for Indian and certain cultish cultures the chinoiserie. I wouldn‟t be surprised at all if one day Aibo is caught walking down the street of New York wearing the Lenin outfit and a Budenovka hat, because she has always been sensitive to fashion and audacious in experimenting with trends 37 . (197-98) Fang Bo‟s criticism of the malevolence of the political tension in the Asian-Pacific region and his subscription to the “authentic” European civilization and the American anti-war culture collapse into his accusations of the baneful Chinese essence and the American orientalism, both of which are eventually epitomized by Aibo‟s fetishization of counter-cultures and social revolutions. In this sense, Aibo‟s body is loaded with signifiers of modernity to be studied and understood. This body is both perceptive and promiscuous, and at the end of the story, will be anatomized and contained in a masculine narrative. Here, Rita Felski‟s discussion 37 他信中酸冷的諷評中共的惡搞，國民黨的專制，美國資本主義過度發展到連學術學院都難逃功利主義，方柏說又漸有困獸之感，或許明年將去歐洲走走，畢竟那是西方文明的發祥地，或仍倖存一些源頭活水。方柏大概不知道南奇的現況，只說南奇實在應該去舊金山的嬉皮區看看住住，真要學反文化的嬉皮文化就該學第一手的，別再跟那些流落在東南亞的半弔子洋人學些皮毛，但要叮囑南奇一聲，包括大麻在內的一切毒品在嬉皮區仍是被禁止的。方柏信裡也沒放過愛波[…] ，「儼然一副現代秋瑾的樣子，但據說她解甲歸田的日子是紐約蘇荷區跟各種國籍的所謂藝術家一淘。我不知道為什麼政治只要經過中國人一碰就會變得那麼汙穢不堪，或許五千年殘存的做皇帝思想餘毒甚烈，習慣性的便要拿來作爭權奪利甚至意識形態上趕時髦的手段，隨著尼克森政府的日親中共，東方熱除了迷印度和一些神秘小宗教外又添了一項中國熱。若有一天，愛波身穿列寧裝頭戴紅星帽的走在紐約街頭，我一點也不會感到吃驚，因為她對於時尚潮流的趨勢一向是最敏感和勇於以身試之的……。 76 on consumption and women in the advent of modernity is helpful. According to Felski‟s studies of Zola‟s novels, women often become the symbol of “an eroticized modernity” in that they are not only seen as objects of consumption, but also consuming subjects (64). As the consumer susceptible to the lure of commodities is usually represented by women in the western narrative, she surrenders easily to insatiable appetites for spending, sexuality, and even idealist literature. Translated into the kind of modernity in the Taiwanese context, Aibo‟s pursuit of cultural trends, as is described by Fang Bo, renders her both as a consumed sexual object in, for example, posing for a portrait entitled “Dionysian Obscenity” and as a consuming subject of western popular cultures. Aibo becomes a medium that facilitates the transaction between the putative Taiwanese/Chinese traditions and the foreign cultures and a corruptible body exposed to the ills of such foreign cultures. As the protagonist is constantly bewildered and, to some extent, intimidated by his friends‟ high-brow talks, his obsession with Aibo places her in the voyeuristic gaze that desires, explores, and penetrates this female cultural avatar that represents multiple, contradictory notions: she is seductive and morally degenerate in her unconventional, free-spirited way of life, superficial in her consumption of American political and ethical trends, sophisticated in her pursuit of western high arts, and innocently helpless in her decision to abort her first child out of wedlock and her death from cancer. The protagonist, as an onlooker that listens to other characters‟ frustrations with the island‟s precarious international status, seems to live the zeitgeist of the sixties‟ and seventies‟ Taiwan 77 vicariously through his infatuation with Aibo. Performing operations on Aibo‟s body twice, delivering her second child, and carrying out an autopsy after she dies of cancer, the protagonist describes his medical invasions into her body not only in sexual terms, but also as if he is attempting to reach into her soul. Bedridden during the remaining days of her life, Aibo confides to the protagonist her fear about death and her last wishes, which are followed by the protagonist‟s elegiac and poetic hymn devoted to her: “When my body is turned over for the anatomical donation program, I would like you to be the one who uses it [as educational aids]. Perhaps in my whole life, you are the only person who has looked into the depth of my soul. […]” August dies she must. The Autumn winds blow chilly and cold…It‟s still early August. Aibo didn‟t even make it till April…April is the month for Aleurites. Haven‟t you seen the Aleurites flowers booming everywhere? It‟s whiter than reed…She was born out of the head of Zeus. The sound of her scream shook the heaven and the earth. She was the ferocious goddess of war. She was also the purest virgin 38 . (221) During the autopsy, overwhelmed with emotions, the protagonist concludes the story with a sentimental remark on Aibo‟s last words: “Aibo was wrong. I have never looked into the depth of her soul my whole life. I have never even understood her. But, yes, my hands have reached into the innermost of her body four times…As I lowered my head, a teardrop slipped out of my eye, rolled down my cheek and chin, and dropped onto Aibo‟s 38 「我死了以後，捐給醫院做教學解剖，我希望你親自做，或許這一生裡，真正觸摸過我靈魂深處的，只有你。[…] 」August die she must, The autumn winds blow chilly and cold….. 。八月尚早，愛波甚至沒撐到四月…… 四月是桐月，你們沒看到漫山遍野盛開時的桐花嗎？比蘆葦還要白！……她就是那樣從宙斯的前額跳出來，吶喊之聲，震撼天地！她是兇猛殘忍的戰爭女生，也是最純潔處女的象徵。 78 wooden-colored heart 39 ” (222-23). The protagonist‟s ambiguous distinction between reaching into the innermost of Aibo‟s body and touching her soul is dissolved at the symbolic moment when his tear falls on her heart; it is a moment when the surgeon probes into and opens up a diseased body one last time to salvage the body/Taiwan thrown into the maelstrom of modernity. The protagonist‟s multiple metaphors that associate Aibo with rebirth, purity, and spirituality conclude the Bildungsroman, in which the bankruptcy of KMT‟s nationalist ideology is consoled by a humanist and introspective rhetoric that attempts to quell the “nervous, convulsive, and ruptured psyche” that permeated Taiwan in the sixties and the seventies. As Aibo‟s story has been narrated by a male outsider, this female bohemian‟s physical vulnerability and naï ve susceptibility to foreign cultural influences is protected, redeemed, and therefore contained in his understanding of her. As is manifest in the sentimental evaluation of Aibo‟s body, the shift of thematic focus in Zhu‟s works in the eighties from love stories, religious glorification of classic Chinese imageries, to social ills, alienation, and vigilance to global issues, does not altogether erase the elitist aestheticism that informs most of the San San literature. This kind of aesthetic sensibility frames the understanding of post-49 cultural and political development within metaphors that temporarily keep the anxiety in a secure distance 39 愛波的話並不對，這一生中，我並沒有真正觸摸過她的靈魂深處，我甚至沒有真正懂過她，但是 ──是了，曾經這樣四次親手探到她身體內的最深處… … 我低回頭去，一顆眼淚，溜出眼睛，滑過臉頰，滑過下疤，凌空掉落進愛波的木頭色的心上。(222-23) 79 from the individual (in this case, a classically-trained intellectual of the Chinese literature and history). Compared to the more ambivalent attitude of the protagonist portrayed in Zhu Tianxin‟s text, where occasional confusion and self-doubt leave room for indeterminacies, the preface penned by her sister Zhu Tianwen throws into crisp relief the desire to contain the indeterminacies in an omniscient and transcendent point of view: If Aibo is a trend-follower, then Tianxin as the male narrator is the emerald sea under the sun-lit blue sky. As the tide ebbs and flows, and the flowers blossom and fall, he is tolerant, well-intentioned, and respectful for the world. He is gentle like a Bodhisattva lowering his eyes, looking down upon the birth, aging, illness, and death [in the human world]. The theme of the story is either foregrounded by the presentation of a boundless human world, or elevated by the man‟s profound love for Aibo. We can say we witness again the fortitude of Tianxin‟s character, like “the fortitude of the cosmic order,” which not only lifts herself, but also her country. Aibo is part and parcel of all this. Aibo is indeed the nursery rhyme of the Jin dynasty, which predicts the barbarian invasion of China: “Mo Qianyao the daughter of Luoyang/Embracing the barbarians three months prior” Here I quote Grandpa Hu: “[…] Now is time of another catastrophe. In the scenario of the nursery rhyme, the woman who gives herself in to the impending catastrophe neither resists it, nor escapes from it, nor does she absolve the human beings of their sins. She is entangled with the catastrophe, with the barbarians. She sinks with them, and turns with them. She is the combination of the spirit of the demon and the prevalent spirit of the war. She craves rebellions and chaos. Her emotions, words, success and failure, death and life are realistic, but unfamiliar. Perhaps they are the same, yet also truthfully different. She is well aware of the fact that she is giving in to the catastrophe. Such awareness promises the safeguarding of history. But I wonder how the painter is going to paint the eyes of this monstrous woman---“ Nonetheless, the man, who is indeed Tianxin‟s avatar, stands at the zenith; 80 his tear dropping onto Aibo‟s deceased, wooden-colored heart is real 40 . (15-17) Zhu Tianwen‟s interpretation of the text conflates the protagonist‟s voice with that of the author‟s. In Zhu Tianwen‟s ornate dictions, several analogies take place. The comparison of the protagonist/author to a transcendent, compassionate Buddha sublimates the protagonist‟s friendship with Aibo to the author‟s salvation of the country. And while the global, cultural, and political dynamics Taiwan was embroiled in is compared to the invasion of northern tribes around the fifth century, Aibo is likened to a woman in a fifth-century nursery rhyme who is said to be sexually involved with the foreign, barbarous men and thus signifies abnormality. The period of time, characterized by Hu Lancheng to be apocalyptic, is nonetheless salvaged by the woman who is almost half-human, half monstrosity, as is suggested by her name, yao, and her body intertwined with the foreign. Sacrificing herself to the unavoidable catastrophe, she embodies the very catastrophe itself. Notably, it is a catastrophe described in sinocentric terms; historically, it is defined as a time where the Han/Chinese ethnicity [hua] is brought to 40 愛波如果是時尚的弄潮兒，天心化身為敘述觀點的男子，就是晴空曠日下的湛藍大海。潮漲潮落，花開花謝，他那樣包容、好意，尊重這個世界。他的柔和，又如菩薩低眉，垂望擾擾紅塵裡生老病死。全篇的重量所托，天心不是以蕩蕩人世把它浮出，毋寧以男子對愛波的貫徹的愛把它提起。可以說這次，我們又看到了天心以她那本色的強大，「天行健」的強大，拔起她自己，亦拔起她的國。愛波最是身在其中之人。愛波本身明明就是那首晉時預言五胡亂華的童謠：洛陽女兒莫千妖，前至三月抱胡腰此處且錄胡爺的一段話 ── […] 今天也是浩劫將至。童謠畫面上那委身於浩劫將至的女子，她不抵抗，亦不逃避，亦不為世人贖罪。她是與浩劫，與胡人扭結在一起，而沉呢就一同沉沒，要翻呢就一同翻過來。她是妖氣與漫天遍地的兵氣結在一起了。她亦喜反，喜天下大亂。此時的喜怒哀樂與言語、成與敗、死與生，那樣的現實的，而都與平時所慣行熟知的不同。也許一樣，然而真是不同了的。她清清楚楚知道自己是委身於浩劫，而有這個覺，便是歷史有了一靈守護了。但不知畫家可如何畫這妖氣女子的眼睛 ── 然則那站在高絕處天心化身的男子，他的眼淚落在愛波已死去的木色的心上，是真的了。 81 disorder and adulterated by the five barbarian tribes [wuhu]. And eventually, the capturing of the spirit of the time relies on the painter, who, as the final stroke, is to paint the eyes of the demonic woman. In other words, it is the painter who wields the power of breathing life into her and telling her story, and as such, narrating the mythology of the nation. As Zhu Tianwen segues from the metaphor of the nursery rhyme into Zhu Tianxin‟s text itself, the claim that the tear dropping onto Aibo‟s heart is genuine/authentic/true [zhen] accomplishes what the painter is suspected to be capable of. Just as the protagonist/text/author, in this statement, sublates the hysteria of the seventies into a transcendent vision, however abstract it is, he/it/she at once announces the death of Aibo and the woman in the nursery rhyme, and contains the indeterminacy of both historical moments. III. De-Sinocization and Its Discontents: Old Capital, New Metropolis, Uncanny Home In Zhu‟s post-87 texts that appear to be most biographical, the seventies often recur as a time frame in which memories are re-configured. Not only is the narration of these memories explicitly dialogic with the dominant political discourses of the time; but the identity of Chinese Mainlander becomes a vexed category to which she returns as she responds to the revolutionary changes in cultural formation and political ideology in tones that reflect self-reflexivity, satirical intent, and vindications of the social stigma borne by the juancun community. Nation is no longer coterminous with the notion of 82 “home” and “roots” evoked to be defended; instead, it refers to both a reminder of an absence of origin and a term loaded with ideological contentions. The essay “Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound” [xiang wo juancun de xiongdi men 想我眷村的兄弟們] was first published in the Fukan section of China Times 41 in 1991. Invoking similar details in her early novel, Open-Ended, it recasts the fictional narrative of juancun in light of autobiographical reinterpretation of her childhood memories. In Zhu‟s reminiscing of the boys she grew up with in juancun and her tracking of the whereabouts of these dispersed “brothers,” the first generation Chinese Mainlanders‟ homesickness for China and the second generation‟s inheritance of these memories are now informed by an awareness of the trend of de-sinocization. The sense of uprootedness only suggested and couched in the agitations and confusions of the characters in “The Bygones” now comes to the fore in the essay that at times seems an apologist for this self-enclosed community. “The boys of the juancun” whom the narrator grew up with, now dispersed and integrated into the society, become disembodied Mandarin accents she sometimes encounters in a taxicab, names mentioned in reportage in the news about a notorious gang, or two-dimensional images of a certain politician on television under attack by the public, all of which displaying some kind of discrepancy with prevalent nativist trend in the nineties. The aspirations to go to the West to be educated and “enlightened” in “The Bygones” now in this memoir-like essay are recognized as an urge to leave a place they find difficult to identify as “home,” a theme 41 中國時報人間副刊 83 that eventually runs through the text of “The Old Capital,” where the island is portrayed to be a dystopia. None of the brothers and sisters she was close to, for some unknown reasons, did not consider leaving this place. Those who did well at school, their parents were willing to take out loans to finance their studies abroad. Those who did not left by working on fishing boats. Girls who did not do well at school, thanks to the Vietnam War, married the U.S. GIs and got to leave the country. Many years later, when she was annoyed by the accusations that called them the occupying powers that “never treated this island as their home to settle down on,” she searched in her memories and thought hard about why exactly they never looked upon the island as permanent home, at least not during those years… She figured the answer was very simple. There was only one reason: on the Tomb-Sweeping Day, they did not have their ancestors‟ tombstones here to pay respect to. […] It dawned on her that one was unable to consider home the soil in which no family was buried. And it dawned on her that the incomprehensible agitation and anxiety that saturated the air did not come from the irrepressible and overwhelming restlessness of adolescence. It came from the kind of the inexplicable crisis and pressure of the incapability of settling down 42 . (“Remembering” 78-79) Indeed, the quandary that this generation is trapped in is thus caused by two-fold circumstances: The fact that their identity is always lived out to be doubly-removed from everyday experiences (not only is this community an ideological construct, but such 42 她所熟悉的兄弟姊妹們，基於各種奇怪難言的原因，沒有一人沒有想過離開這個地方的念頭，書念得好的，家裏也願意借債支持的就出國深造，念不出的就用跑船的方式離開；大女孩子念不來書的，拜越戰之賜，好多嫁了美軍得以出國。很多年以後，當她不耐煩老被等同於外來政權指責的「從未把這個島視為久居之地」時，曾認真回想並思索，的確為什麼他們沒有把這塊土地視此生落腳處，起碼在那些年間 ── 她自認為尋找出的答案再簡單不過，原因無他，清明節的時候，他們無墳可上。 […] 原來，沒有親人死去的土地，是無法叫做家鄉的。原來，那時讓她大為不解的空氣中無時不在浮動的焦躁、不安，並非出於青春期無法壓抑的騷動的氾濫，而僅僅只是連他們自己都不能解釋的無法落地生根的危機迫促之感吧。(78-79) 84 ideology is founded upon narratives that are set in another place and at another time); and the fact that prolific publications after 1987 that seek to redress of historical traumas and redefine Taiwanese consciousness turns their national myth into objects of ridicule. The difficulties for the dislocated and isolated juancun immigrants to identify with the island, and the fifty years of estrangement from what these immigrants used to call home put the second-generation in a perpetual identity dilemma: Unlike their parents, who still retain, and probably live the rest of their lives in, the memories of their hometown in China, they were born and grew up on the island. Absent from the chapter of Taiwan‟s Japanese colonial history and hence excluded from the cultural bonding based on a sense of victimhood, they cannot claim their Taiwanese identity comfortably and automatically like the Fukian, Hakka, and indigenous groups. As early as 1978, an essay appearing in the San San Journal had briefly expressed doubts of the inherited historical memories by the second-generation: Surrounded by slogans like “Fighting our way back to Mainland” and “Combating Communism and restoring our nation” day and night, I find them familiar yet strange. Why? Then I begin to wonder. Is the “truth” we claim to know about the Mainland really true? Living in this day and age in Taiwan, how do I bring myself to believe what news reportage tells us about the life in the Mainland? I find myself unconvinced, thinking that none of the information fed to us is first-hand; instead, it is filtered. 43 (qtd. in Shen, 50) In light of the incipient doubt eclipsed by the zeal of most San San writings, the 43 “ 一天到晚的「反攻大陸」「反共復國」圍繞在我們身邊，很熟悉但卻不切身，為什麼？接著我就有了這樣一個念頭，我們如今所曉得的大陸「真相」，會是真的嗎？生活在台灣今日的環境如何相信大陸那種生活的報導，不敢以為真的，總以為我們所接觸的都不是原本的第一資料，而是過濾的。” 簡以維：〈起風的時候〉《北方有佳人》 ( 三三集刊第 13 輯) 台北：皇冠， 1978. 224. qtd in 沈芳序 50. 85 re-articulation of juancun patriotism in „Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound” sounded especially poignant when in 1988, the KMT government lifted the ban on travelling to China and allowed Mainland Chinese to visit families they had been estranged from since 1949. As the gradual opening of the cross-strait communication allowed Taiwanese residents to access more and more information about Mainland China, both the idealized, pre-49 China constructed in KMT‟s anti-communist propaganda soon became irrelevant. With the lifting of the embargo on China, the notion of the Mainland underwent immediate change. China in the eighties, compared to Taiwan, was still at the burgeoning stage of capitalist economic development. Aside from the five special economic zones, such as Xiamen and Shenzhen, that very quickly caught on with free market economy, living standards in large portions of the inland were generally low. For those Chinese Mainlanders who could finally return to their hometowns to visit their relatives, some were disillusioned by being put in a position as just another rich relative from Taiwan to solicit money from. More unsettling is the fact that those who returned home were very often deemed as Taiwanese that were forever different from the locals. Addressing the disillusionment and, on a palpable level, the embarrassment about having once stood by proudly and passionately the KMT national myth, “Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound” delves into an even more disturbing sentiment. Besides the sense of alienation felt by a former staunch supporter of the Chiang regime both on their return to China and in their stay in Taiwan, what she is confronted with is the impossibility of defining her relationship with the past. 86 Just like the way you cannot accept being viewed as part of the vested interests, you cannot accept the genealogical determinism that just because your father is a Chinese Mainlander, you belong to the KMT camp. Instead of being suckled by the not-so-generous KMT (as your husband often jokes about it), you actually think you and this party are more like an unhappy couple that should have gotten divorced long time ago. You loathe it way more than your husband does, because between you, there is bad blood of disappointment and betrayal. Even though you have never been a member of the party, every time when you hear other people chastise it unreservedly, you cannot help but defending it by finding faults with their arguments, but at the same time, envying them for being able to lash out at it without any bad conscience at all […] Perhaps you will never know that during those sleepless nights suffered by old people, your father has to admit that he envies you as well. How he wishes he could be like you, cursing KMT for trapping them into being away from home on this island for forty years. Only when it finally came time to go back home did they realize that they were Taiwanese in the eyes of their kin. But back on the island, they are often called “you Chinese Mainlanders.” Because of this, those who often tell bedtime stories to their children, sooner or later, will find themselves just like the homeless bat in the Aesop‟s Fables that flies back and forth between the birds and the beasts 44 . (93-94) The rootlessness so acutely experienced by the first-generation Chinese Mainlanders, for the self-identified second-generation narrator, becomes at once a burden of ethical responsibility that calls for conscious severance from the dated political ideology and deep-rooted emotional attachment to it, which is fundamental to her sense of being. Such 44 正如妳無法接受被稱做視既得利益階級一樣，妳也無法接受只因為妳父親是外省人，妳就等同於國民黨這樣的血統論，與其說妳們是喝國民黨稀薄奶水長大的( 如妳丈夫常用來嘲笑妳的話) ，妳更覺得其實妳和這個黨的關係彷彿一對早該離婚的怨偶，妳往往恨起它來遠勝過妳丈夫對它的，因為其中還多了被辜負，被背棄之感，儘管終其一生妳並未入黨，但妳一聽到別人毫無負擔、淋漓痛快的抨擊它時，妳總克制不了的認真挑出對方言詞間的一些破綻為它辯護，而同時打心底好羨慕他們可以如此沒有包袱的罵個過癮。妳大概不會知道，在那個深深的、老人們煩躁嘆息睡不著的午夜，父親們不禁老實承認其實也好羨慕妳們，他多想哪一天也能夠跟妳一樣，大聲痛罵媽啦個 B 國民黨莫名其妙把他們騙到這個島上一騙四十年，得以返鄉探親的那一刻，才發現僅存的親族眼中，原來自己是台胞、是台灣人，而回到了活到四十年的島上，又動輒被指為「你們外省人」，因此有為小孩說故事習慣的人，遲早會在伊索寓言故事裏發現，自己正如那隻徘徊於鳥類獸類之間，無可歸屬的蝙蝠。 87 ambivalence, instead of liberating, is constantly presented as an emotionally taxing aporia in “The Old Capital.” “The Old Capital” was written at a time when Taiwan had the first popularly elected president, Lee Denghui. Lee‟s promotion of the idea, “New Taiwanese,” was an attempt to centralize the so-called “Taiwanese experience” as a new way to define Taiwan‟s sovereignty and to replace the sinocentricism that had ruled the island since 1945. It was also a time when the discriminative discourses based on reductive distinctions between the so-called “bensheng ren,” or, the “Taiwanese,” and “waisheng ren,” the “Chinese Mainlanders,” were fully-blown in political propagandas, while China‟s missile tests targeted at Taiwan, instead of intimidating the islanders, aggravated the anti-China sentiments to such an extent that the public‟s support for pro-independence was boosted. Therefore, nearly a decade after the lifting of the martial law, Zhu was writing in a political and social environment recognized by scholars as the postmodern and postcolonial era of Taiwanese cultural production. Concomitant with literature that addressed a wide array of social and cultural groups were the calls for nativization of Taiwanese culture and Taiwan‟s independent sovereignty from China, which continued to evolve as a topic of controversy over what constitutes the essence of Taiwanese-ness. More often than not, Taiwan‟s “de-sinocization” project after 87 can easily tip over to indictments of Chinese Mainlanders as invaders enacting a more violent colonization upon Taiwanese residents than the Japanese colonial administration. The juancun community tends to bear the brunt of such accusations. Their loyalty to a regime which 88 regards the island as a temporary military post, from which the Republic of China will eventually return to the Mainland, is frequently construed as self-entitled ethnic superiority that not only holds contempt for the local culture, but enjoys class privileges on the island. In “The Old Capital,” the narrator reminisces her days of youth in the late sixties through the seventies as she walks in the streets of Taipei. While she passes by monuments, landmarks, and her childhood hangouts, she is constantly stunned and overwhelmed by the way globalization and new hegemony have radically transformed the cityscape and therefore threatened to erase her identity. The scene then cuts abruptly to the narrator arriving at Kyoto for a potential rendezvous with a long-lost high school friend, who has been living in the U.S. for many years, and in the end, fails to show up. The narrator goes down the memory lane again as she strolls through the streets of Kyoto, taking stock of stores and familiar local spots she visited before. On her trip home, she accidentally picks up a traveling guide written for Japanese tourists, and as she is mistaken for one at the airport in Taipei, she decides to play along and follow the colonial map and revisit the city now recognized in its colonial regional and street names. In her wanderings in both spaces, the narrator laments the disappearance of the old Taipei, now made unrecognizable to her after rapid economic innovations and political reforms, while in Kyoto, she feels at home as a foreigner revisiting places that stay the same as she remembers them. The text unfolds as if the narrator is addressing the protagonist who moves about 89 different spaces and times both physically and mnemonically. Indeed, narrated in the second person voice, Zhu‟s frequent choice of perspective, “The Old Capital” exemplifies the paradox of the postmodern, metafictional form of writing that at once is invested in an introspective narcissistic search for selfhood and disrupts such attempts by its schizophrenic self-referentiality. In Zhu‟s case, the text rehearses motifs and themes elaborated in her previous works, which only come back as endless supplementarity that defers the narrative from achieving a coherent, unified subjectivity. For instance, as noted by critics, the high school friend who never shows up for her rendezvous with the adult narrator is indeed given vivid descriptions in the narrator‟s reminiscence of her high school life. The intimate interactions between the two teenage girls calls up the homoerotic relationship that plays an important part in Zhu‟s early work Songs of Plowing. In “The Old Capital,” nonetheless, contrary to the unabashedly declared affection between the two high school best friends in Songs, the narrator‟s recollection of this relationship is re-presented in a sort of homophobic censorship. Also, the political issues and patriotic impulses that puzzle the protagonists in both “Journals of Guanlin the Taida Student” and “The Bygones” are now revisited by the narrator with both wistfulness and misgivings. The straining tension between the chaotic, violent, explosive international political atmosphere and the repressive, censoring martial-law Taiwan with its volatile anti-government undercurrents is re-staged in the narrator‟s recollections to be an inexplicable gap between an individualistic, apathetic world interspersed with occasional superficial patriotism that tended to be overridden by subjective impressions 90 and sense experiences of an adolescent, and seismic global events that impacted profoundly Taiwan‟s sovereignty and placed Taiwan in a semi-colonized position. If we look upon “The Old Capital” as another roman à clef, (for, according to an essay by Kim Chew Ng, when asked whether “The Old Capital” is fiction or autobiography, Zhu confessed she was not sure either), the act of self-revision is pronounced at the moment when the text gives a nod at “Remembering My Brothers from the Military Compound.” As the narrator laments over the possibility of the houses being confiscated by new political powers as state properties, she questions, and very likely seems to have already had the answer for it, the reasons why it is difficult for her to identify with this city/island: By then, except for Lane 52 of Wenzhou Street, any other street you‟d trod would have disappeared, and you‟d have no place to walk, no memory to recall. And it didn‟t end there. You recalled something by a writer with the same background as yours: “It turns out that you cannot call a place your hometown if none of your relatives has died there.” You weren‟t as picky as that; you just wanted to ask humbly and deferentially: wouldn‟t a city, no matter what it‟s called (usually something related to prosperity, progress, or occasionally, hope and happiness), be in essence a city of strangers if it had no intention of retaining the traces of people who had lived there? Why would anyone want to cherish, treasure, maintain, and identify with an unfamiliar city? (156-57) This short passage appearing in the middle part of the text resonates throughout the narrative in different forms of questions and statements. It indeed sums up the identity conundrums Zhu‟s protagonists have been encountering across various texts discussed in this chapter. While the question of identity has been formulated differently in various contexts, “The Old Capital” seems to reach a pessimistic conclusion, as the act of 91 self-revision performed in this text in the cross-referencing to Zhu‟s previous works and in the intertextual dialogues with other writings ends in the narrator‟s collapse into paranoia and tears. Almost persistently, in her mnemonic journey between the present and the past, the moral dilemma of whether a different historical knowledge discovered in her adulthood should make an ethical demand of her to reinterpret her personal memories is at once addressed and bracketed in a romantic vision of a time in the past. In this reframed past, political strife meant genuine passion of patriotism, as opposed to political maneuvers and divisive discourses in the present. The dichotomy sets up the text right from the start: Is it possible that none of your memories count? Back then, the sky was much bluer, so blue it made you feel as if the ocean were close by, drawing you to it, and making the cumulus clouds seem even whiter, like castles sculpted out of snow. The sun shone intensely through clean air that threw up no barriers, but strangely, you didn‟t feel its heat. You just stood there foolishly in an unshaded spot, not knowing where to spend the afternoon, yet showing no signs of heatstroke. Back then, bodily fluids and tears were as fresh and clear as the dew on flowers; people were more willing to let them fall if that was what felt natural. Back then, people were so simple, so naï ve, they were often willing to sacrifice themselves over a belief or a loved one, whatever their party affiliation. Back then, before commercial real estate had led to an unrestrained opening of new roads, a building boom, and land speculation, trees could survive and grow tall and green, like those in tropical rain forests. Back then, there were few public places, virtually no cafes, fast-food restaurants, iced tea shops, or KTV , and pubs were virtually unheard of, so young people had only the streets to roam, yet they did not surge through town like white mice. Back then, on summer nights you could see the Milky Way and shooting stars, and watching them for a long, long time spawned an awareness of the vicissitudes of life and death, of dynasties rising and falling. Especially foolish 92 spectators vowed to do something spectacular so as not to end up wasting their lives. (111-12) Indeed, throughout the text, contrasts between the seventies and the nineties, between Kyoto and Taipei, between adolescence and adulthood, operate as symbols of primeval plenitude and immanent fragmentation. And such dichotomy is manifested in both temporal and spatial representations of innocence and corruption. Calling this a strategic option, Zhu Tianxin herself claims that by recalling this period of time to open the story, she was indeed seeking a “common denominator” for different communities, whatever their “age, political affiliations, or moral values” are (“Response,” 121). The dialogic relation between the text and its circumstances is also manifested in the invocations of fragments of historical accounts recording the way the Ming, Qing, and Japanese empires estimated the potential profits or costs in annexing Taiwan as an island inhabited by savages to be conquered and civilized. Apparently Zhu was well aware of the academic trend, where researches into these archives began to constitute an important field of “Taiwan studies” in the past decades. In defending her choice of Kyoto as the epitome of everything that Taipei is not and the narrator‟s decision to disguise herself as a Japanese traveler, Zhu gives an ambiguous response to those who accuse her of openly tolerating colonialism by glossing over the imperialist violence: I concede that this is a valid criticism. In fact, this is precisely what I meant by strategic writing, because during the time of writing, I thought those who were rationalizing the status quo or proposing future policies, whatever their age was, whichever generation they belonged to, whether they were politicians or not, were people who knew and sided with Japan. That was the way I viewed things back then. Only those who knew and sided with Japan had the right to speak. In 93 order to secure that right, or to make a warranted argument and to be able to start a dialogue, I went for such strategic writing. I borrowed the “religious equipments” of “those people” and invoked Japan to begin the conversation. (“Response,” 121-22) 45 While the judgment made about the political climate during the time “The Old Capital” was produced sounded skewed and subjective, it could be inferred that the lens through which Zhu viewed the social and political situations in the nineties‟ Taiwan were tinged by her criticisms of Lee Denghui. Lee is taken to task in her essays in A Novelist’ s Political Journals and, by referring to him by his Japanese name, Iwasato Masao, in the article of “Response to „Why the Great Reconciliation is Impossible?‟” and indeed, in “The Old Capital.” Outraged by Lee‟s pro-independence leanings, tirades against this controversial KMT president tended to address him by this Japanese name to emphasize his tendency to create schism between Taiwan and China. In criticisms like this, the Japanese name, Iwasato Masao, translates Lee‟s close relationship with Japan into debasement of himself as a “royal subject” [komin]. While Zhu‟s criticism never goes to such extremes, Lee is presented in her texts as another political mogul whose political ambition is motivated by cravings for power. Under such circumstances, Zhu‟s comments on her own choice of symbols remain ambiguous. Nonetheless, whether the narrative that associates Kyoto 45 這點我完全承認。事實上，這就是我所謂的策略性書寫。因為當時我覺得好像對當下現狀的解釋，甚至對未來的主張，都只屬於親日和知日的人，不管年紀、世代，不管他是不是政治人物。在我那時的理解裡我是這麼認為，只有知日和親日的他們是最有發言權的。所以為了取得那樣的發言權，或說要使得你的這場發聲是有效的、可以跟人家對話，於是有了這樣策略性的考慮，我動用了「那些人」的「法器」，採取日本來做這樣一個開始。 94 with favorable fantasies and sentiments is intended to be caricatures of the anti-KMT discourses prevalent in the nineties‟ Taiwan, or whether the untenable association of the colonial period with notions of order, purity, and innocent patriotism in the seventies is an ironic gesture, the common ground that Zhu claims to establish with her “strategic writing” in “The Old Capital” falls short in its execution, for as the narrative develops, it gradually turns into a soliloquy wrapped up in the narrator‟s own personal world. The narrative mainly intersects with references to four other texts. Aside from the colonial map, passages of Kawabata‟s Koto [The Old Capital], Tao Qian‟s Peach Blossom Spring, and Lian Heng‟s Preface to the General History of Taiwan [taiwan tongshi] are evoked as parallels to the narrator‟s personal story and to her disoriented wanderings in the Taipei streets. Some critics read this intertextuality of “The Old Capital” as the ghostly return of the repressed collective memories summoned by a modern individual‟s moving through the rationalized and homogenized urban streets, which opens up spaces of difference and excess 46 . For instance, in reading the narrative‟s imposition of colonial histories and personal memories on the city of Taipei, which constantly fails her with its corrupt cultural and political monstrosity, as opposed to the timeless and culturally homogenous Kyoto, Lingchei Letty Chen argues that the narrative‟s idealization of Kyoto, in contrast to the narrator‟s claustrophobia and xenophobia about the city of Taipei, is indeed a personal struggle to retrieve, through nostalgia, a kind of authentic cultural identity one might locate in an uninterrupted and coherent national history. Chen argues 46 Su, Jen-yi. “Ghosts in the City: Mourning and Melancholia in Zhu Tianxin‟s The Old Capital.” Comparative Literature Studies 41.4 (2004): 546-564. 95 that the pastische of fragmentary historical accounts in “The Old Capital” is a tactic Zhu adopts not only to “[evoke] the dysfunctionality in Taiwan‟s culture, in which the individual is perceived as facing problems with identity construction, particularly at the fundamental level of articulation;” Indeed, to foreground the inherently hybridized culture of Taiwan by resorting to this postmodern style implies an intention to reach beyond what Homi Bhabha designates as the space of ambivalence. In this sense, Zhu‟s novella engages with “[h]ow to look back on history and how to go deep into the present hybridized culture to find continuity” (305). Also unpacking the anxiety about such “cultural dysfunctionality” and the atomization and meaninglessness of postmodernity, Chang Shu-li interprets the claustrophobia in “The Old Capital” as coming from the island‟s unique historical context that constitutes the text‟s “mobility” at different levels. What motivates the flaneuristic movement is what critics point out as “multiple identity crises [which] have left their indelible traces on [Zhu‟s] writing, as her narrator/author is suspended uneasily between transnational migrancy and national piety, between postmodernist celebration of freedom and a modernist fetishization of language, and finally, between postcapitalist consumerism and elitist culturalism” (53-54). Undeniably, through the narrator‟s eyes, Taipei is not only a wasteland cluttered with dilapidated apartment buildings, newly established, unfamiliar shops and landmarks; more importantly, it is an urban space marked by absences of history and erasures of memories. It is precisely due to such depletion of selfhood and cultural identity that, 96 ironically, the efforts in the recuperation of meanings and search for continuity turn out to be excessive and at times contradictory. Such an overcompensation not only reveals itself in the narrator‟s almost compulsive relating of tales, ancient customs, and historical trivia wherever she goes, but also in repeated attempts at categorizing different spaces and times into dichotomous contrasts of “good” and “bad.” To build upon Chang‟s observation, the kind of suspension the narrator is caught up in characterizes precisely the paradox lived by a self-identified second-generation writer like Zhu. Just as the disillusioned narrator who mourns for the loss of her childhood memories and at the same time indulges in the solitude, anonymity, and detachment of a metropolitan bourgeois flâneuse, this very text that laments loss, identifies cultural and historical absences and speaks fear and anxiety of the unrecognizable home turns into a literary production saturated with signifiers that re-establishes Zhu in the mainstream culture. In other words, instead of gesturing toward futility and despondence, the unfolding of psychological predicaments the narrator goes through makes strong ideological statements and reiterates a sort of aestheticism that is reminiscent of the San San style. Indeed, in addition to the fact that the sense of restlessness conveyed through the text attests to Taiwan‟s historical matrix, the metafictional narrative strategy exemplifies the author‟s sensitivity to the market of high-brow literature. The palimpsest style epitomizes what Chang characterizes as “modernist fetishization of language,” “postcapitalist consumerism,” and elitist culturalism” with snippets of quotes from Freud, Frost, Thoreau, D.H. Lawrence, and most tellingly, the intertextual references to Kawabata‟s 97 The Old Capital, in addition to the rich historical and Western pop culture allusions, which have always been a staple of Zhu‟s writing. The efforts in foregrounding Taiwan‟s postmodernity and postcoloniality manifested in the formal experimentation and thematic topicality earned Zhu scholarly recognitions by critics such as Tang Xiaobing and David Dewei Wang. But the dexterity in the postmodernist aesthetics and the invocation of Taiwan‟s postcolonial legacy, I argue, does not promise a subversive force to unsettle the authority of the cited imperialist documents that set up Taiwan as the other. Instead, accompanying the intertwining of personal memories and collective history is a narrative desire to close off the hermeneutic readings of the on-going cultural and political contentions and conversations about the notion of “Taiwanese-ness.” If the mental collapse of the narrator at the end of the novel signals the narrator‟s last-ditch attempt to turn herself out of, in the Lacanian sense, the real (the ironically unrepresentable and untotalizable reconstructions and erasures of history embodied by the uneven and disorderly cityscape that bears traces of multiple over-writings) that she is unable, or perhaps unwilling to reconcile with, what is suggested in this hysteria is a refusal to recognize and engage with the heteroglossia of postmodernity itself. In this sense, the return of the “ghost,” and “superstition,” to use de Certeau‟s term, in the multiple texts evoked as the narrator‟s revisionist memory or in her rediscoveries of the historical knowledge about the monuments, streets, and bridges is not meant to open up alternative story/history and undermine the rational, monolithic urban planning. Instead, citations of these texts are woven into the narrator‟s nostalgia for an 98 invented, coherent, and permanent origin of the self. In other words, what the citations constitute is an archaic aura, in which a utopic sense of plenitude is to be found. For example, the idyllic moment described in the beginning of the text, though only two decades apart from the dystopic nineties, is portrayed as a complete break from the disorienting postmodernity. Its timelessness is presented to be an uninterrupted continuum of the primordial era when Taiwan was first “discovered” by outsiders. In one scene, sickened by the monstrosity of the newly built metro system in Taipei, the narrator visualizes her world prior to the urbanization to be an organic unity of the cosmos: “When you were seventeen the sky wasn‟t all that different from the one seen by ancestors who had followed the Tamsui River to fish, hunt, and farm 4,000 years ago, and the same as that seen by the Spaniards who followed the river upstream one night and discovered the Ketagalan tribe 330 years ago. The station and newly completed MRT tracks destroyed every sliver of imagination” (134). As is exemplified by the quote, more often than not, throughout the narrative, the documents cited presents anything but objective factual accounts. The interjections of these historical accounts are usually appropriated by the narrator‟s personal perceptions of the sights and sounds surrounding her, even if it means to redefine the seventies that appear in her previous works to be repressive and volatile. And it is precisely the re-encounter with the seventies that the narrator‟s repeated efforts in constructing, in retrospect, an organic and innocuous perspective of her adolescent world comes to a precarious moment when the monologue takes the direction 99 of self-questioning. As she walks past her high school, which faces the Presidential Office Building, she remembers the time when she was eager to get in line in the Building for a steamed bun in celebration of Chiang Kaishek‟s birthday: How you envied those girls who had not lined up for a steamed bun (in your memory, there actually were a few in your class), who were neither moved, motivated, nor brainwashed by the patriotic education from those in power. Some were even so shocked by looking at the party flag that they trembled with fear, a reaction that differed radically from yours, for you immediately thought about Lu Haodong, the revolutionary, and Huanghua Hill, and felt hot blood rage inside you. You were all in your teens; how had they managed to do that? How had they saved themselves the trouble of taking a detour in their future enlightenment and growth, as well as in the development of their independent, autonomous personality? (191) In Zhu‟s other essays, this sense of belatedness in reaching what she calls “enlightenment” about the violent nature of the Chiang Kaishek regime is frequently brought up as a point of contention in her critique of the extreme nativism based on the discrimination against Chinese Mainlanders. Although Zhu does not deny the falsehood of the KMT political rhetoric, she is reluctant to fault, as several oppositional-leaders-turned-politicians did, her own belated disillusionment about the nationalistic ideals she had embraced in her youth. Whereas she admits that “until the Formosa Incident in 79, when everyone was awakened, I had been confused and ill-informed about Taiwan‟s history and its journey to democracy,” she also learned the hard facts about many oppositional activists, who “question and shame those who arrived late at their own enlightenment, which makes me wonder if they are fetishizing this power of opposition, lest those latecomers might want to share their trophy” (A Novelist’ s Political Journals, 186). The last chapter of A 100 Novelist’ s Political Journals [xiaoshuojia de zhengzhi zhouji 小說家的政治週記], a collection of essays printed in the Fukan section of China Times in 1994, which was then published as a book in 2001, already reads like a blueprint of the psychological struggle elaborated in “The Old Capital.” As one of the contributors to China Time‟s special topic on the seventies, Zhu discusses, analyzes, and defends her choice of ideology during that time, which she was to be “awakened from” years later. It is in this chapter that she reveals her revelation, years after the tumultuous seventies, that the Xiangtu literature writers who proudly promoted the culture of their “native-soil,” Taiwan, were indeed “„singing the ballads of truth in a disguised language.‟ Yes, they used the language of literary debate to sing the ballads of fighting for basic human rights under the martial law system” (183-84). Indeed, Zhu‟s tenacious efforts in analyzing and re-interpreting the position she took in the seventies manifest themselves as an attempt to reposition herself as a post-87 writer who not only negotiates with, but perhaps should be exempt from, the moral responsibilities demanded of the younger version of her self. In response to Kuanhsing Chen‟s essay “Why is Great Reconciliation Impossible?,” Zhu articulates what she thinks is the sense of loss felt by the Chinese Mainlanders and by herself as an author since 1987. What, then, is their sense of loss? I think it is “imaginary values and beliefs.” Before I turned twenty-two (Coincidentally, [it was a similar experience] before Iwasato Masao turned twenty), the kind of values and beliefs constituted by the national allegory, life in the juancun community, and the strong and palpable nostalgia of our parents, and so on are extremely simplistic, abstract, even 101 ridiculous (seen by different communities at a different time). They could be propaganda such as “Reclaiming the Mainland,” or “The rise of fall of a nation is everyman‟s responsibility.” They could be based on nationalistic sentiments such as “vindicating the national shame of recent history since the Opium War.” They are broad, but also incredibly realistic. For a long time (even to this day), they [the values and beliefs] are the major source of strength that encourages them to live on despite the real predicaments. Since 87, the “values and beliefs” have been questioned, stigmatized, even trampled on. I think this is where the Chinese Mainlanders‟ sense of loss comes from. […] As far as my own sense of loss is concerned (if “loss” means more or less the disintegration of the “values and beliefs”), it began in my freshman year of college during the time of the Xiangtu literature debates. In the debates, I neither stood by the arguments of the Xiangtu literature, nor their opponents‟. I was naively on the side of “literature.” Of course, from a “politically correct” point of view, I was completely on the wrong side (which took me years to understand and make my peace with it) 47 . (122-23) It remains ambiguous whether Zhu shares the loss felt by the juancun community, since towards the end of the passage, she specifies that her personal loss in terms of the dismantling of beliefs and values results from an innocent attempt at safeguarding the sanctity of literature. Later in the essay she compares her soul-searching after the 87 to the predicaments of the blinded Oedipus, who needs to be exonerated from the fatal mistake because he is also a victim of the tragedy who did not know about the truth. Her justifications for unwittingly having been “politically incorrect” in her youth are founded 47 那他們的失落感是甚麼？我以為是一種「想像的價值與信念。」我且以二十二歲以前的我為例 ( 好巧，與二十二歲以前的研里政男差不多) ，國族寓意加眷村生活加黨國教育加父母輩強大真實的鄉愁 ‧ ‧ ‧ ，這些交織而成的「價值與信念」內涵極其簡單、抽象、甚至可笑( 從不同族群不同時空來看) ，很可能是口號式的「反攻大陸」，可能是「國家興亡匹夫有責」，可能是民族情感的「洗刷鴉片戰爭以來的近代史國恥」等等，很迂闊，卻也無比真實，很長一段時間( 甚至到現在) ，是支撐他( 我) 們不計較現實真實處境而生存下去的主要力量。這個支撐他們的「價值與信念」，‟87 年來逐漸被質疑、訕笑、汙名、乃至於踐踏，我以為這是大多數外省人失落的來源。[…] 至於屬於我個人的失落( 如果失落多少意味著「價值與信念」的鬆動) ，早在我大一並正值鄉土論戰時即已開始，論戰中，我既非站在鄉土文學主張這方，也非對立面，我天真單純的僅僅站在「文學」那一方，當然，從政治正確來說，完全站錯邊了( 但這要好多年後才理解釋然的) 。 102 upon her present disappointment about and indictments of several post-87 major localist political leaders, who defended their attempt at securing and solidifying political power by calling it a demand for equal autocratic privileges of the Chiang regime. In other words, under the assumption that the political is always inherently corrupt, Zhu‟s “Oedipal mistake,” to use her own words, should not be understood as ethically at fault, but instead, it is a result of ignorance of the implied political persuasions underlying her aesthetic take on literature. Three years after “The Old Capital” was published, Zhu‟s defense against and sympathy for the diasporic juancun community that ended up estranged from their home country and alienated by the new political rhetoric translates into an intimate, elegiac essay “The Author of Memoir of Hua Taiping and Me” [huataiping jia zhuan yu wo 華太平家傳的作者與我] published in 1994. Collected as the last piece in Manyozhe, which is often characterized by critics as a book of mourning written during a time span that stretches between the time her father began to become ill and the time after he passed away, this essay, as opposed to the other three essays in the anthology narrated in the second-person voice, adopts the first person voice. Acknowledging her anger about her father‟s choice of political beliefs, she eventually reconciles with her father‟s, or rather, her own, “political incorrectness” by reiterating it as the inevitable ideological bias contingent upon an author‟s subjective and solitary conceptualization of the world: For a very long time, I had to suppress an urge several times from questioning my father. Why did you come with the Nationalist government? In my opinion, back then, most outstanding writers (especially those whom I 103 admire, such as Qian Zhongshu, Shen Congwen, Laoshe) chose to stay, if not for the Communist Party itself, at least for what it represented: the humanist concerns embraced by the passionate socialist youth in the thirties and the like. Why was my father so politically incorrect? Even if I understand that my father‟s eldest brother (who ran a newspaper as a KMT member in town before the civil war), and second brother died in the hands of the Communist Party, was this good enough a reason for him to make such a significant decision? […] I learned to not judge a generation with the wisdom of hindsight. For example, I no longer distinguish the “good people” from the “bad people” of a generation according to a certain ideology, dogma, or belief (and the political position based on them). I‟m more interested in distinguishing those who are passionate, idealistic, altruistic, self-reflexive, from those who are indifferent, opportunist, and self-involved. The former kind stand the chance of choosing “the wrong side,” while the latter will certainly not make any “mistakes” or be condemned by history, and are always safe and comfortable. Is one a wiser choice than the other? It‟s all about living up to one‟s principles, even if it means having to suffer from the consequences. Regarding [my father‟s] philosophy of “writing for God,” I also secretly made my peace with it in a saying by Walter Benjamin, who writes, “The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life.” 48 (162-66) In Zhu‟s conflicted moral debates, her father‟s choice of political persuasion and the 48 很長一段時間裏，幾次我忍住質疑父親，為什麼隨國府來台？因為在我看來，彼時絕大部分優秀的作家( 尤其我喜歡的錢鍾書、沈從文、老舍) 全都選擇留下，即使不為了共產黨，也為了它背後所代表三○年代以降社會主義熱血青年追求的社會主義人道關懷等等 ‧‧‧ ，我父親，為何如此政治不正確？儘管知道父親的大哥( 北伐前在縣城裏以國民黨員身分辦報) ，二哥都死在共懺黨手裏，但這就足以支撐他做如此重大的抉擇嗎？[…] 我漸漸看待一代之人不以事後之明的分法，例如不再惑於用意識形態、主義、信仰( 及其所衍生的陣營立場) 來分出一代的「好人」「壞人」，我比較好奇於分辨出心熱的、充滿理想主義、利他的、肯思省的‧ …，以及另一種冷漠的、現實的、只為自己盤算的兩類人，前者，在任一時代，都有「站錯邊」的可能，而後者，當然是從不會「犯錯」、絕不會被歷史清算、最安全舒適的。 ----- 此中有高下嗎？求仁得仁而已。[…] 對於「寫給上帝看的」這信念，我也稍後在班雅明的話裏悄悄釋然，班雅明說：「小說家則是封閉在孤立的境地之中[…] 寫出生命中無可比擬的事物」。 104 ramifications of both his and her ideological affiliations in their works and in Taiwan‟s literary field are eventually reduced to intimate, personal relationship with a theological order. Swearing off politics that misled and indeed jeopardized her and her father‟s literary reputation and personal integrity, Zhu exonerates both her and her father‟s literary production from the involvement in establishing aesthetic and cultural norm of a certain historical period of time. The argument of never falling back on hindsight to judge the past is complemented by an inward-turning gesture of solipsist aesthetic philosophy made available by her own interpretation of a quote by Walter Benjamin. As such, across from Zhu‟s various post-87 texts, such a sense of loss goes through a series of reframing. In justifying her early ideological leanings as an innocent coincidence between her belief in the autonomy of literature and the KMT nationalism, Zhu is indeed criticizing the transience and sinisterness of contemporary political discourses with their ulterior motives. As if to underline the short-sightedness and egotism of those early activist-turned-politicians, Japanese colonization is evoked repeatedly to throw into relief the inadequacy of the current cultural and political development in Taiwan. This is exemplified in the narrator‟s contemplation of a district in Taipei which used to be called Miyanoshita: The small station at Miyanoshita was like other small stations along the line. Most of those still standing ten years later would appear in coffee commercials or short-subject government documentaries to advertise economic accomplishments. The vacant ground in front of the platform and station office would often be carpeted in Korean grass, with its exotic fragrance, and several flowers with a Southeast Asian flair, like multicolored purslanes, lantanas, poisonous leopard lilies, and monthly roses. The occasional attempt to plan 105 Chinese peonies and tree peonies was doomed to failure. Equally difficult to grow were temperate-zone araucaria and arhat pines, which, seen against the whitewashed wall and station house built of stained fir, brought solace to many homesick soldiers. For the same reason, a 10,000-cherry tree movement was initiated during the war, hoping the islanders would, like the soldiers, fall in love with the unique, tragic, and resolute beauty of cherry blossoms. They planted an enormous number of hiken cherries, omisha cherries, double cherries on Grass Mountain, Wushe, and Nafang‟ao, which is how this particular station came to have a row of hikan cherry trees. Except for a week of hasty blooming around the Lunar New Year, their pale, bare figure were hidden under mastlike betel palms, as if inflicted with an autistic lack of confidence. Yes, there were definitely betel palms, as in a photograph of soldiers from the end of the previous century, in which an oxcart moves slowly under the shadow of trees that sway in the wind, as if cut out of paper. The corner of the photo is inscribed “Impression of the South,” making you feel like taking a bath in the afternoon and cooling off in yukata and geta. (120-21) In this long quote dominated by meticulously catalogued botanical knowledge, the protagonist continues to explore the streets of Taipei in their colonial names. A comparison is made of two political administrations: A current government‟s potential move to use this setting to create a self-serving, propagandist visual representation and the Japanese administration‟s thoughtful assimilation rhetoric. Compared to the narrator‟s criticisms of the deceptive strategy of the Taiwanese government to create a progressive image of the state and, elsewhere in the narrative, its decolonization projects that only end up destroying the landscape of the island, the Japanese colonial administration‟s efforts in building a unified national image is presented to be a sincere, long-term dedication to its colony in the south. The narrative voice is carried away in its adulation of the beauty of the nature that is, nonetheless, undeniably an artificial design— the 10,000-cherry tree movement-- in conjunction with an imperialist purpose that used 106 nationalist symbols to demand sacrifices of life for the empire. As images of “tragic, and resolute beauty of cherry blossoms” and photographs of Japanese soldiers taken in “the South” are invested with a nostalgic aura, the narrator‟s almost willful indulgence in her aesthetic appreciation of the result of an imperialistic project is indeed itself a performative act of ellipsis. In a similar vein, in “The Old Capital,” the attempt to shield her personal memories from the prevalent revisionist historiography to demystify the sinocentric discourses persists throughout the text. Recorded in fragments of historical documents invoked in the narrative are often negotiations between the Ming and Qing empires and the Taiwanese residents seeking to break away from it. Taiwan is often re-presented from the perspectives of the Ming empire or the Qing empire, who sent over delegates to seek natural resources or conduct investigations for undertakings of establishing imperial cartographies. The islanders, whether it was the Han ethnic group, or the indigenous groups, are portrayed in these passages as savage, intractable, and indeed a liable asset which the empire was reluctant to integrate into its territorial expansion except as a distant protectorate that did not deserve imperialist efforts in assimilation. Juxtaposed to the narrator‟s critical gaze at the city, these historical accounts almost sit uncomfortably with the position taken by the discontented flâneuse. The juxtaposition of the narrator‟s monologue, the orientalist and xenophobic documentation of the island by various colonial powers, and tales of imperialist invasions achieve two effects simultaneously. While the mere presence of the historical fragments 107 itself is a reminder of the colonizer‟s justification of the violence inflicted upon the island, the contiguity between the narrator‟s monologue and these texts creates a kind of romantic association between the innocence of the narrator‟s adolescence and an aura of the primitive, archaic simplicity of the old times. For example, fragments of colonialist documents are invoked to justify the narrator‟s xenophobia and claustrophobia about the island now caught up in political strife: The primitive aborigines knew nothing about farming, shooting down flying creatures and hunting those on the ground to provide for themselves and for their offspring. They worshiped totems. In the beginning, here is how the Spaniards and the Dutch described Taipei: weeds long, air foul, many residents are sick. The Kangxi Taipei Lake. Later, Yu Yonghe, who came for the sulfur, described Taipei in his A Record of Travels in Baihai as follows: no place for humans. But that was 1697, and you really couldn‟t blame the city. During the same period, one could ride an oxcart through the Jiayi-Tainan Plain and feel as if they were traveling underground (how wonderful!). Toward the end of the Kangxi reign, Lan Dingyuan, who led an army to put down the Zhu Yigui rebellion, said that the Taiwanese are habitually rebellious; you quell them but they rise up again. Even Shen Baozhen said: Taipei is a pestilential place. Li Hongzhang: the birds don‟t sing, the flowers have no fragrance, then men are ruthless, the women are faithless. … Dissatisfaction with the place did not begin with you. You really did not want to go back there. (143) Each time she comes across historical monuments, bridges, and buildings in Taipei, tales, legends, names of historical figures are invoked as the narrator establishes imaginary rapport with them. Historical and cultural encounters between the colonizer and the colonized in this kind of solipsist narrative are recast as humanized, personal 108 relationships. And a desire to transcend ethnic divisions and conflicts usually expresses itself in a narcissistic exultation. For example, the sentimentality and perceptiveness in her youth is described as a universal human sensibility that transcends provincial boundaries: There was a hint of autumn in the air. Back then, neither of you had ever left this island, where it never snows, even in the winter, so how could you have known what autumn was like? In the ninth month of the lunar calendar, the chrysanthemums bloom, the hibiscuses wither, the campions grow fuzz, leaves of the calthrops and lilies dry out on the river, the oranges appear, and the yams turn milky….No no, it‟s definitely not because there were chrysanthemum and osmanthus (if your father hand come from another province), or hibiscuses and tree orchids (if your father was local Taiwanese), or wisterias and arhat pines (if your ancestors had spoken Japanese), or eucalyptuses and breadfruit trees (if your ancestors had fought in the South Pacific, even Australia, as imperial solders). You‟d know autumn was here when you stood on the Meiji Bridge, designed by Togaro Katarō, and could feel the wind coming from somewhere far, far away; how very sad. If it was a clear day, the sky would be incredibly vast. When you were feeling low, one of you would recall a line of poetry or an adage from a wise man you‟d read a few days before. Then you‟d turn vague and illusive, which was enough to prove that autumn had indeed come to the island. (128-29) History in this sense is stripped of ethical responsibility once it is mythologized and appropriated by the narrating subject to become part of her identity. This process of expressing love for the other only to absorb it and assimilate it to become part of the self is reminiscent of Zhu‟s emotional investment in an imaginary cultural China in her early works, in which a young woman‟s love for the distant homeland is sometimes articulated as a yearning for conjugal union. Perhaps the mixed feelings of embarrassment about the naï ve belief in her youth and the indignation about the moralist accusations of those who were no less victims of the 109 KMT‟s national myth are the source of the narrator‟s claustrophobia, which, towards the end of her wandering as a pretend Japanese tourist, escalates to paranoid demonization of the modern-day Taiwan. Compared to the sophisticated, orderly, refined, and timeless Kyoto, Taiwan is depicted to be grotesque, vulgar, and degraded mutations of a utopian civilization that probably never existed. One of the texts constantly invoked in the narrator‟s monologue is The Cherry Blossom Springs, a fifth century Chinese text telling of the story of a fisherman, who loses his way in a forest of cherry blossom trees and accidentally discovers an Edenic enclosure untouched for centuries by the outside world. The invocation of this particular work is loaded with personal meanings, since this work about utopia is cited by Zhu elsewhere to characterize her fond memories of Hu Lancheng, who resided in Japan after having been banished from Taiwan due to his alleged collaboration with the Japanese during the Second World War. In an essay detailing her trip to Japan, quotations from The Cherry Spring Blossom were used to describe how she was lost in the charms of Tokyo. The memories seem to be lost with the death of Hu: Thirteen years ago, when I was a junior in college, I went to Tokyo with my sister, Tianwen. We spent a month with a Chinese master who lived in Japan for decades. It was my first time to Japan, leading an ordinary lifestyle with an ordinary family. […] The next year, we went to Tokyo again as promised. Again, we were there for only a month, but this time we were in time for the cherry blossom season. Surely the grass smells fresh, and the falling petals were in vibrant colors. Friends have invited us to their households and served wine and food. Such a paradise was no different than a year ago. A year after that, the master passed away. And his friends drifted apart. When I was there again, I felt like the Wuling fisherman, who could not find the cherry blossom 110 spring any more […]. (“Scenes in a City,” 86-93, Emphasis Mine.) 49 In this essay, Zhu reiterates the contrast between Taipei and a Japan city (this time, Tokyo), where she is much more familiar with “some households in the lanes of Tokyo” than “some ugly and chaotic Taipei districts that I have lived with for thirty years yet always avoided” (93). In “The Old Capital,” this particular utopian text goes awry in the narrator‟s paranoia. As she walks through the sluice gate to the riverbank, just like the fisherman passes through an opening in the mountain, which leads to an open plain of the primitive, exotic village, she is overcome by a phantasmagoric vision. The men and women sitting under the trees of the river bank bear an uncanny resemblance of what she imagines those villagers described in the poem would be. Nonetheless, in what she sees, the primitiveness and simplicity of the villagers of the poem translate into unfeeling barbarity and repulsive crassness of a cannibalistic crowd: As expected, you heard the men and women behind say something, but you ignored them, preferring to head toward the sunny basketball court where a few youngsters were having a pick-up game, not caring if she was invited to go to their house, where she would be served wine while they killed someone for a feast. You weren‟t surprised. The blindingly bright sun‟s rays were saturated in moisture. Wasn‟t there a movie scene where a group of people who are neither vicious nor benign join forces and kill an intruder, or a stray dog, one afternoon out of sheer boredom? Then they yawned and continued waving fans, making 49 Zhu. “Scenes in a City.” Days Before the Age of Twenty-Two. “ 十三年前，我來在念大三時，和姊姊天文結伴去東京，在一位旅居日本數十年的中國老師家住了一個多月，那是我第一次到日本，住尋常人家，過尋常生活。[…] 第二年春天，我們依約再赴東京，仍然只住一個月，卻從頭趕上了櫻花季，果然芳草鮮美，落英繽紛，友人依舊各復延至其家，皆出酒食，天上人間，只覺與一年前並無任何間隔。其後一年，老師過世，友人多少星散。再去的時候，彷彿那武陵漁人覓桃源不著 […] 。” 111 tea, picking teeth, digging between toes, and listening to plays whose characters you didn‟t know, while caterpillars slithered down along tiny threads overhead. (216) If (post)modernity means to her apocalyptic defacement of urban space, violent erasure of individual traces, vicious political strife, and capitalist Darwinist competitions, then colonialist projects undertaken by both Ming, Qing, and Japanese empires ironically stand for monumentalization, history-building, and stabilization of national identity. The narrator‟s proclivity for a cultural and national coherence and permanence, which seems to offer stable and monolithic personal identity, gradually manifests itself as xenophobia that interprets difference and heterogeneity as cannibalism and monstrosity. The sense of alienation that permeates the text indeed is the narrator‟s self-alienation. Betrayed by the imaginary homeland which she religiously glorified and which constituted her identity, the narrator finds herself caught in, to invoke Kristeva‟s term again, a state of abjection, of non-being, where one is cast out of the Symbolic order and loses its subjectivity. In the case of “The Old Capital,” it is a moment when the notion of cultural China becomes absurd and meaningless, and the new national myth under construction appears to be no less appalling. Taipei, a city she used to believe to be a place from which she would eventually return to a home she never knew, now becomes un-representable unless it continues to be othered, exoticized, and sublated into a utopia, a nowhere. 112 CHAPTER TWO: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE: REMAKING TAIWANESE-NESS IN CAPE NO. 7 AND MONGA I. Temporal Circularity in the Construction of Home I am the president of the Township Representatives. I‟m 170 centimeters tall, I weigh 75 kilos, and I‟m 65 years old. My interests are quarreling, fighting, killing, and arson. My biggest wish is to burn down the whole town of Hengchun, then call back all the young people, rebuild it, be our own bosses, and never again be someone else‟s subordinates. Now are we properly introduced? -- Cape No. 7 In 2008, the release of Cape No. 7 directed by Wei De-sheng was a national sensation. Lauded as a miracle in the history of Taiwanese cinema, the film reached the box office revenue of more than 320 million New Taiwan Dollars (approx. 10 million U.S. dollars) in two months after its release, topping the most expensive Asian-financed film, John Wu‟s Chinese epic The Battle of Red Cliff released in 2008, and Ang Lee‟s adaptation of a short story by the iconic author, Zhang Ailing, Lust Caution, in 2007. Without the extravagant promotion campaigns of Wu‟s and Lee‟s films, the movie with a cast of mostly amateur actors started slow but became a blockbuster by word of mouth and through the internet. Cape No. 7 was released at a time when the Taiwanese were demoralized by news about former president Chen Shuibien‟s embezzlement scandals, the economic downturn under the administration of the newly-elected president Ma Yingjeou, and a dwarfed national status in Beijing Olympics, where the Taiwanese team 113 was left with the options of entering the games either as Chinese Taipei, or as China Taipei, and ended up winning the number of medals far lower than the island‟s expectations. At this juncture, the film‟s lighthearted portrayal of a group of nobodies, each attaining self-fulfillment and coming to a communitarian solidarity in a township at the southern tip of the island, Hengchuen, comes in time to comfort the island‟s wounded national ego. The romance comedy is framed by the voice-over of a Japanese teacher working in the colonial Taiwan, who has to be repatriated to Japan after the empire was defeated in the Second World War. The narrating voice reading his love letters to a Taiwanese woman is woven into the romance between a male Taiwanese struggling musician, A-ga, and a female Japanese PR coordinator, Tomoko, who is involved in a BOT project in Hengchuen. The love letters the Japanese teacher was too timid to send out are finally collected by his daughter after he dies, and sent to the old address used during the colonial period, Cape No. 7. The two story lines converge as A-ga, who has to take up a temporary job as postal carrier, notices the package with an obsolete mailing address and manages to track down the address of the now-aged Taiwanese woman, Kojima Tomoko. Framed by the twin love stories half a century apart, the film gravitates around a group of Taiwanese at the lower stratum of the capitalist society, each dealing with their personal frustrations. They meet and are rounded together, somewhat fortuitously, to compose and perform an opening-act for a beach concert starring a Japanese pop singer. This group of underdogs, epitomizing the township faced with a bleak outlook of younger population 114 emigrating to bigger cities, and with the threat of its land being hijacked by international BOT projects, rise above the situation when the eccentric team pulls off a successful performance. Although Cape No. 7 is not the first film that touches on the Taiwan-Japan relationship, the unambiguous rapport between the departing Japanese in 1945 and the arriving ones fifty years later is taken to task by Xu Jielin and Chen Yizhong. In sync with the voice-over, the movie opens and closes with a historical scene where a ship pulls away from the port with deported Japanese on board, parting from the Taiwanese friends they have come to bond with during their stay. The motif shots of this farewell scene that begin and end the film create an epic effect as well as a nostalgic affect. What is evoked in this moment is reciprocal affection between the Taiwanese and the Japanese civilians rather than animosity between the oppressor and the oppressed. While Xu contends that the theme of an interrupted Japan-Taiwan love affair vicariously resuscitated and consummated half a century later symbolizes Taiwan‟s lingering servility towards its ex-colonizer and that the popular culture which informs the film is a slavish imitation of Japanese and North American subculture, Chen points out the negative portrayal of the “Chinese Mainlanders” [waishengren] in the film: not only does their brief appearance in the opening and closing shots as the KMT military force taking over Taiwan positions them as intruders that “break up” this Taiwan-Japan romance, but waishengren‟s absence throughout the rest of the film indicates a refusal to recognize them as Taiwanese. Although “Taiwanese consciousness” does play a central role in the movie, criticisms 115 such as these that interpret this relationship to be Taiwan‟s self-deprecating adulation for its former colonizer fail to take into account several facts that make the issue a much more complex one. First of all, forty years of KMT rule under the martial law have long alienated the postwar generation from historical traumas of the Japanese colonization. Although for the past two decades, a great number of researches, including the government‟s efforts, have been devoted to recovering the erased collective memories and to disputing and revising the hegemonic historiography controlled by the Chiang regime, KMT‟s successful sinocentric educational system and media control during the forty years and the accelerated globalization on the island since the 80s have cultivated a new generation of bourgeois citizens with conservative aesthetic tastes and liberalist political beliefs (Chang 2004). This newly-established, affluent class hardly relate to the residual sentiments for Japanese colonization felt by the generation that had experienced the drastic difference between Japanese and KMT administrations. Secondly, as I will discuss in further detail later, this film set primarily in southern Taiwan does hold out the promise of an organic community that is solidified by a sense of tolerance and compassions among the characters. This sense of community has also been established by a gesture of reaching across national borders, language barriers, and even ethnic lines. The coming together of people of different backgrounds is achieved by the introduction of idiosyncratic characters, some of whose cultural or ethnic identities are more pronounced than the rest: Malasun, the identified young, hard-working Hakka salesperson with his the over-the-top zest for his career, the bona fide “Tai-ke” (literally, 116 the “Taiwanese fellow”), A-Ga‟s stepfather, Hong Guorong, whose first appearance in the film declares himself unambiguously to the Taiwanese viewer that he is an embodiment of the “southern style,” the Rukai father and son, Olalan and Rauma, whose gift for music often serves as an emotional outlet, and needless to say, Tomoko, the Japanese manager, a model-wanna-be, who has to settle for a job she can barely put up with. While several comic moments do depend upon stereotypes and are undeniably capitalizing on multiculturalism, as the story progresses, the characters soon develop beyond these cultural and ethnic classifications. With this in mind, then, the reading of an implied exclusionist ideology presumably manifest in the absence of Chinese Mainlanders inadvertently perpetuates the fixed distinctions along the provincial lines the film attempts to transcend. In other words, such interpretation is predicated upon a certain visibility of the provincial categories, either based on the characters‟ use of language, or more tenuously, certain intrinsic characteristics that define provincial identity. Moreover, to hold on to the cultural hierarchy of Japan the superior and Taiwan the inferior also neglects the transformative and autonomous power implicit in cultural appropriation that occurs both in everyday life and aesthetic production. Not only does such logic presume two homogenous cultures that coincide with national boundaries; it is also predicated upon the assumption that cultural exchanges between the equally unstable Taiwanese- ness and Japanese-ness are forever locked in a colonizer/colonized dichotomy. In contemporary Taiwan, Japanese-ness has become more of a fluid commodity than a master signifier of the Other that demands assimilation and sustains discrimination in the 117 colonialist discursive practices. To complicate the matter, the underpinning of the two antagonized cultural-political entities is an essentialized Chinese-ness up against “foreign” influences. This kind of sinocentrism is intrinsic to the construction of Taiwan‟s national imaginaries, whether as the parental country from which Taiwan was severed, or a symbol of ideological re-colonization by the Chiang Kai-shek regime, a notion frequently rehearsed in nativist discourses. Pointing out the assumptions behind these criticisms, however, I do not argue for a total discount of Taiwanese colonial past that in fact still has strong residual influences on the island; nor do I completely agree with the insouciant celebration of cultural pluralism that risks glossing over the inequality between the neoimperialist center (the capitalist conglomerates cemented by cross-national alliance) and the margin (the main providers of low-skilled labor, materials, and the market which consumes the cultural hegemony from the center). But the two interpretations of the film run the risk of neglecting the sociopolitical as well as economic changes taking place on the island for the past twenty years since the lifting of martial law. What Cape No. 7 is symptomatic of, indeed, is the co-evalness of postmodernity and modernity of today‟s Taiwan. What I mean by postmodernity here not only refers to the fragmenting and decentering forces that rose during the era of globalization where, according to François Lyotard in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, grand narratives are delegitimized under the dictates of free market and computerized technology, which contribute to the (re)production, circulation, and 118 contestation of knowledges now beyond the control of the nation-state. But in the history of Taiwan, it also refers to the disorienting violence of modernity as a foreign order forced into Taiwan‟s society, demanding submission and quick adjustment to renovations on all levels, economical, social, and political. Furthermore, it suggests Taiwan‟s domestication of these foreign influences that no longer resembles the original. It also needs to be pointed out that, the postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation for the past decade is, as Jameson notes, inevitably overshadowed by a global economy where “what begins to infuse our thinking of globalization is a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale; of forced integration as well, into a world-system from which „delinking‟ (to use Samir Amin‟s term) is henceforth impossible and even unthinkable and inconceivable” (Jameson 1998: 57). Under such circumstances, globalization also intensifies the transport of culture as commodities, and in this new world-system, North American mass culture, along with the enormous financial interests involved, reigns supreme as a homogenizing transnational cultural industry (59). Paradoxically, what underlies Taiwan‟s undertakings for international recognition, particularly the recognition of the United States, and its willingness to be “infused” into the global standardization, is also a desire to for self-determination. Although the question of how to define “Taiwanese-ness” continues to be the subject of heated debates and the attempt to affiliate with PRC remains the state‟s on-going agenda, the reluctance to compromise Taiwan‟s national sovereignty still persists. While with the lessening of the state‟s intervention in the economy for the past decade, global capitalism quickly 119 sucks the island into a new order of postmodernity, this decentering power coexists with the post-martial-law reconstruction of history. At this juncture, Taiwanese government is still caught up in a postcolonial struggle seeking to establish its national identity. In other words, the dilemma Taiwan is caught in is manifest in the identity crisis caused by its ambiguous political status with reference to PRC and the U.S. and in its national exigency in playing a part in world economy. This agenda becomes increasingly tricky, as the concept of nation associated with native soil has constantly been challenged by the so-called trans-nationals who, unlike the diasporic sinophone immigrants forced to leave their homelands mostly for political reasons half a century ago, travel between the island, where their business is located, and another country, where they purchase their properties. In the midst of the competing discourses on “Taiwanese-ness,” therefore, the call for a united national front (whether it implies unification with Mainland China, or Taiwan‟s declaration of independence) at times hampers the expansion of global capitalism, while in some cases, the economic development serves as a rationale for the consolidation of national identity (Jiang, 1998). Ming-yan Lai in his work Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestations in China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism, succinctly describes the coeval-ness of modernity and postmodernity in Taiwan and China, both playing significant economic roles in what Euro-American capitalist countries refer to as the Asian Pacific Rim: [A]s suggested in the idea of modernity in the margins, modernity is constitutionally different in Taiwan and China from the Euro-American center. Indeed, modernity in the margins is arguably always already postmodern in the 120 sense (per Ernesto Laclau) that the values of (Western) modernity cannot maintain any absolutist hold there, and that it entails an acute sense of the loss of mastery, a recognition of ineradicable differences, and the necessity to take others, especially powerful Euro-America, into consideration. Put differently, the supposedly postmodern experience and condition of fragmentation, decenteredness, and what Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang call “spatial fracturing and temporal desynchronization” are very much a part of modernity in the margins. (25) Lai‟s explication of postmodernity in the margin suggests at once the totalizing economic force dominated by the Euro-American center, and the potentially resistant power in re-appropriating Euro-American cultures travelling to the other end of the world. Cultural translations and “transplantations,” to borrow the key term in the 60s‟ Modernist Literature Movement in Taiwan, thus in many ways overdetermine that contradictory definitions of Taiwanese national consciousness. Indeed, Taiwan‟s self-consciousness emerged from its encounter with modernity represented by all the cultural hegemonies it eventually came to internalize. Along with Japanese empire‟s industrialization of the island, the import of modern values such as linear temporality, democracy, reason, and science have given rise to Taiwanese intellectuals‟ demands for home-rule. Notably, the fact that these values inherited from European Enlightenment were transported to Taiwan by way of communications between Taiwanese and Chinese intellectuals in the twenties and thirties, and through political organizations of Taiwanese overseas students in Japan during the colonial period continues to complicate the construction of Taiwan‟s national identity up to the present moment. Even during the seventies, the upsurge of anti-American sentiments was 121 concomitant with the continual influx of American popular culture as well as elitist culture. The heated debates between the activists of Nativist movements and writers of the Modernist Movements embody the way different receptions of modernity intervene in sociopolitical values and Taiwan‟s self-perception. On the flip side of the coin, the notion of modernity in Taiwan, like in many other third-world countries, is associated with a wounded national ego, and as is already suggested in the term, national consciousness emerged precisely because of such traumatization. In Europe and North America, the experience of modernity (especially from the nineteenth century on) involves confronting a new sense of reality, such as compression of space and time, social relations redefined by exchange values, and belief in rationality and the linear progress of human civilization. For Taiwan, again, like many other postcolonial countries, in addition to the violent rupture with the past, the postmodern sense of “spatial fracturing and temporal desychronization” as a result of Taiwan‟s multi-layered colonial experience produced an alternative modernity. Although the alterity inherent in Taiwan‟s experience of modernity suggests that culturally, Euro-American hegemony is inevitably de-centered, re-interpreted, and domesticated on the island, this notion of (post)modernity is also compounded by an inferiority complex constituted by the collective memories of multiple imperialist invasions into China since the 19 th century, the discriminative administrations both under the Japanese empire and the martial-law KMT regime, and the centuries-long subjection to Euro-American imperialist culture and economic system. Even though materially, the modern history of 122 Taiwan attests to a thoroughly hybridized culture on the island, a century‟s semi-colonial and colonial experiences in both China and Taiwan have ingrained in the national psyche of both regions a cultural hierarchy. That is, Taiwan, like other East or South Asian ex-colonized countries, has unconsciously internalized a historicist way of thinking. The notion of “time-lag” is not only central to colonialist empire‟s stagist or evolutionary theories as justifications for their invasion and occupation of other civilizations; this notion is so entrenched in ROC‟s (here it refers both to the Republican China founded in 1911 and the Nationalist government based in Taiwan after 1949) national consciousness that the strong will power of the nation state to come abreast of the so-called developed countries brought about the rapid modernization and economic take-off after the Second World War (Chu, 2007). The record-setting reception of the film thus has to do with the fact that this movie, praised by Hou Hsiao Hsien as the new hope of Taiwan New Cinema, which has seen its own decline for the past few years, throws into relief the aspiration of the island to be included in the global cultural industry by distinguishing itself from other sinophone geopolitic entities. This double-bind can be seen in the fact that the acclaims dedicated to the film by Taiwanese viewers are usually accompanied by concerns about possible nomination for the category of foreign films of the Academy Awards. The endorsement of Ang Lee, who has always straddled the dual positions of Asian American director in the United States and the national pride of Taiwan, is constantly purported by the news to be the affirmed continuation of the lineage of national cinema directors, whose works 123 promise to put Taiwan on the international map. However, alongside the attempt to put behind the colonial past, a tendency very much in keeping with the spirit of globalization, this “national film” [kuopian] that turned out to be a box-office hit on the film market dominated by mainstream Hollywood movies creates a sense of Taiwanese community. This is achieved by a double gesture of remembering and forgetting that reflects a global multiculturalist trend: by celebrating post-colonial hybridity, it somehow empties the notion of the “postcolonial” of its own historical context (Dirlik, 2000). This historical amnesia involves a co-optation with the logic of the late capitalist world system, characterized by a reluctance, or incapability, of interrogating the nature of such logic. In the case of Taiwan, this sense of levity is part and parcel of the postmodern phenomenon as a by-product of globalization. Taiwanese culture is thus very much characteristic of what Frederic Jameson terms as “the becoming cultural of the economic and the becoming economic of the culture” (Jameson, 1998: 60). Cape No. 7‟s re-presentation of history makes both the past and the present more palatable and identifiable, especially for an audience that has been jaded with the repercussions of postcolonial nation-building: the mud-slinging political culture, social unrest caused by the schism between the pro-independence and pro-unification camps, military tension between Taiwan and China, and rehashes and manipulations of stories of victimization under Chiang‟s dictatorship in nativist discourse. Despite the saccharine tone of the romance comedy and despite the director‟s emphasis in several interviews on the non-political aspect of his work, one cannot fail to notice an 124 attempt to create a distinctive Taiwanese-ness in the contrast between a tropical island “in the south” and its northern counterpart, Japan. The association between Taiwan and images of tropical beach and waters is brought to the fore right at the beginning of the film in the Japanese teacher‟s narrative, in which a sense of nostalgia for “southern country” is constantly invoked. The theme of returning home to the south is reiterated by A-ga‟s motorcycle trip from Taipei, a city of no identity presented in shots of strips of stores and neon lights, concrete overpasses, and landmarks, where there is barely human contact. Quite different from Taipei, Hengchun, according to Wei De-sheng, is a township of cultural contrasts: centuries-old historic monuments and five-star resort hotels, the Taiwanese moon guitar (yueqin) and the American bass guitar, the traditional wedding banquet with tacky striptease performances and the beach concert starring an international pop musician. It is also a small town suffering an ever-increasing gap between the city and the country. And it is precisely this uneven-ness that allows for an “organic” Taiwanese-ness to emerge, and soon after the release of the film, to be fetishized and consumed as a commodity. Against this southern backdrop, the colonizing force of international conglomerates meets with local resistance. This southern regionalism is embodied by A-ga‟s stepfather, the president of the township representatives. Throughout the film, A-ga‟s stepfather, “Mr. Representative,” manifests a determination to re-energize the town and combat the encroachment of international corporations on local autonomy. The desire for self-reinvention, as quoted in the epigraph, is pronounced in his sarcastic yet explosive 125 response to Frog, whose benign yet inane invitation for self-introduction offends him. As the film unfolds, such recalcitrance gives rise to a communitarian solidarity constituted by a group of misfits who, for the Taiwanese viewers, are nonetheless easy to identify with for their rustic vitality, scrappy personalities, and crude, unpretentious demeanor. The convivial occasions such as the wedding banquet and the climactic beach concert at the end glue the disgruntled characters together and cultivate in them a sense of compassion for one another, functioning as a sort of carnivalesque ritual through which an adamant local culture takes shape and prevails. The optimistic tone of the film is hinged upon a future-oriented outlook with a voluntary compromise with the colonial legacies and the consequences of globalization. Although the film is framed with a love story that takes place during the Japanese occupation, quite contrary to the criticisms discussed above, it barely dwells on the colonial period. A-ga‟s obsession with getting to the bottom of the interrupted love indeed projects toward a utopia that seems to be a quick way out of confronting the present identity crisis the island is caught in. History in this film is staved off and represented merely as a point in time that serves as a break with the past in anticipation of an idyllic picture of hope and prosperity. Towards the end of the film, after the band finishes their opening act and is about to walk down the stage, Old Mao continues to play his moon guitar. A move at first taking the rest of the band by surprise, Mao‟s reluctance to turn the floor to the Japanese pop singer Kousuke Atari inspires the rest of the members to come back on the stage and perform Schubert‟s “Heidenröselein.” This unexpected encore 126 number attracts Kousuke Atari to join them, who is as moved by the opening performance as the crowd. The impromptu brings the whole film into another climax as the song is then performed simultaneously in both Mandarin and Japanese. This cathartic moment at once signifies an oppositional local popular culture against marginalization by international corporations and celebrates cross-cultural, cross-racial unification. And retroactively, it reifies the past when the score spills over to the next scene, when the emotional beach concert cuts to the shot of an aged Kojima Tomoko, the Taiwanese woman, to whom the letters are addressed, sitting at the back door of her house, sorting through tea leaves. As she discovers and opens the letters that were quietly laid next to her by A-ga, the shot of this aged woman is then quickly transitioned to recap the scene that opens the movie. This time we see the young Tomoko standing at the dock, her eyes anxiously searching for the Japanese teacher, also played by Kousuke Atari. As Tomoko finally spots the Japanese teacher on the ship, the shot-reverse-shot between the couple locks the Japanese teacher and the Taiwanese young woman in each other‟s gaze, and as the suturing effect already suggests, in the viewer‟s gaze. As the camera lingers on and “caresses” the yearning look on Tomoko‟s face, history, with the German tune now sung in Japanese in children‟s choral voice, is contained in this innocent, timeless space. Time does not extend further back from this point on, but holds out a deferred promise to be fulfilled in the future. In this sense, the movie gestures toward moving beyond the victimhood associated with Taiwan‟s colonial history. This heartwarming piece that shines a spotlight on a group 127 of ordinary yet somewhat quirky people comes on the film market like a breath of fresh air for the Taiwanese viewers precisely because it no longer bears the burden of excavating the truth of history. Recognized by Hou Hsiao-Hsien as a film signaling the potential revival of Taiwanese New Cinema, Cape No. 7 is a far cry from Hou‟s City of Sadness in their ways of dealing with colonial legacies. Compared to the way City of Sadness addresses the trauma taking place at the juncture of the turnover from Japanese colonization to KMT autocracy, the historical moment is translated in Cape No. 7 from the perspective of a whole different generation that stands on the other side of the historical gap. Indeed, the constant transitions of power that ruled the island over the past century deter the island from developing a coherent post/anti-colonial discourse. The binarism of self and other where most ex-colonized countries resort to to establish a national identity is constantly unsettled in the Taiwanese context, since all of the colonizers (here the term is used loosely to include the martial-law Nationalist government and the postwar U.S intervention in Taiwan‟s political and economic affairs.) play multiple roles as invaders, perpetrators of epistemological violence and ideological control, contributors of Taiwan‟s infrastructure and economic development, and sponsors of its cultural industry. First of all, the organized modernizing process in Taiwan undertaken by Japanese empire created ambivalent sentiments among the residents on the island. The love/hate sentiments about the former colonizer turned especially acute in native Taiwanese residents‟ disappointment about a poorly-disciplined and comparatively backward KMT military 128 government and its discriminative administrative policies. Secondly, despite the disillusionment about the new administration from Mainland China, the residual nostalgia for Chinese cultural roots of the Han native habitants still has a strong hold on Taiwanese intellectuals. For veteran leftist scholars such as Chen Yingzhen, the bonding between Taiwanese and Chinese socialist intellectuals towards the end of Japanese colonization and at the beginning of the White Terror era still holds out an idealistic prospect of reunifying with Communist China to build a Marxist utopia, despite the fact that, now committed to capitalism, PRC is no longer the same socialist regime envisioned in Cultural Revolution. Thirdly, as discussed earlier, the domination of western theories in Taiwanese academia during the past decades becomes a double-bind in Taiwan‟s decolonization process. The trend to adopt western theoretical frameworks to interpret Taiwanese cultural production in both English and Chinese departments of universities at times lead to anachronistic readings, in which Eurocentric rhetoric is unconsciously rehearsed in academia. On the other hand, however, postcolonial theories emerging from other third-world historical contexts lend themselves as global perspectives to re-evaluate the development of Taiwan‟s decolonization. Lastly, since the American and Japanese cultural industries have long been absorbed into Taiwanese popular culture and language, the enterprise to re-member the past and to reinvent national imaginaries risks being cancelled by a historical amnesia caused by Taiwan‟s consumerist culture. The “postmodernization” of the island, brought forth by Taiwan‟s century-long capitalism, thus results in the disappearance of history. 129 Viewed in this light, the film is not crafted toward revisioning history and producing an alternative narrative to the official historiography, as is Hou‟s trilogy produced in the 80s; nor is it designed to examine colonial legacies lived by those who became the generation of silence, such as the father who cannot communicate with his children because they speak different languages in Wu Nianzhen‟s A Borrowed Life. How, then, do we read the love affair between Japan and Taiwan remembered and reenacted in two different generations, which is frequently singled out, just like the two readings mentioned above, as an issue subjected to interpretations based on certain identity politics? How do the love stories between Tomoko and the Japanese teacher and between a Taiwanese aspiring musician and a frustrated Japanese model-turned-band-manager fit into the communitarian, or even regionalist, theme, which is the nodal point at which the characters‟ lives intersect? Undeniably, the romanticized view of this little beach town is wrapped up in a sentiment of nostalgia. At different points of the film, the clashes among characters are resolved at by each of them revealing a back story of their own. This sense of looking to one‟s remote or near past in confessional dialogues as a ritual of initiation to be accepted into the community corresponds to the rediscovery of the love affair between Tomoko and the Japanese teacher. The redemption of the memories erased under the change of political powers not only strings these characters‟ lives together; the love that crosses national boundaries epitomizes a primeval, allegorical wound. Reliving and surviving the wound becomes a socializing act that in turn heals the wound of alienation and 130 fragmentation of modernity. Parallel to the forming of the local band, the tracking of the old address and revelation of the identity of the Taiwanese Tomoko culminate in A-ga‟s confession to the Japanese Tomoko, which, with the success of the concert, symbolizes the self-invention of the whole town. Read in this light, the so-called Taiwan-Japan relationship is indeed a self-propagating myth that gives birth to the southern community. The nostalgic affect which permeates the coming together of the community thus invokes the Lacanian originary separation, a moment when one is launched into subjectivity. However, while in the Lacanian identificatory process, the constitution of subjectivity is an on-going splitting, this film reverses this alienation process and makes possible the return to a state of plenitude. In other words, turning back to this particular moment in 1945 is an act of locating an origin in the present. The notion of nostalgia, coming from the Latin root “nostos,” to “return home,” is already implied at the very beginning of the film by A-ga‟s motorcycle ride all the way from the heart-breaking Taipei to his hometown, Hengchun. The sentimental narrative of the Japanese teacher is a voice that not only calls out for the prodigal son, but it comes from the position of the other that holds this new-born community in a gaze that construes the southern town of the island as home. Well into the wedding banquet, when the guests are in a state of inebriation, the scene cuts to the Japanese teacher on board the ship, accompanied by his voice-over, “The ocean in December is wrathful as usual. I‟m assaulted by the stench of shame and regrets, jolted by the uproars. I can‟t tell whether I am returning to my country, or leaving it.” Not only is Hengchun recognized as home in the teacher‟s narrative, but an 131 organic community comes into being in the convergence of this narrative with the night of the banquet, in which the drunken Tomoko and A-ga confess one‟s affection for one another by sleeping together, and an also drunken, sobbing Rauma divulging his personal story is comforted by a kiss from the precocious girl Dada, followed by a tender moment between Mr. Representative and A-ga‟s mother. The power of this very much needed nostalgia manifests itself in the fact that Hengchun has soon attracted a new wave of tourists, a phenomenon reminiscent of the way Jinguashi was quickly transformed into a tourist spot after the release of The City of Sadness decades ago. The nostalgic affect has also turned into a consumable commodity, as the fad of sending postcards to the fictional address in the movie quickly swept the island. Notably, the “cultural particular” created in a film that addresses both the geographical and historical specificities of Taiwan is highly translatable, as can be witnessed by its popularity in other sinophone regions such as Singapore and China. Because of the ahistoricization in the film‟s treatment of the Japan-Taiwan colonial legacies, the nostalgic sentiments thus migrate across national boundaries easily. A product of East Asian popular culture, Cape No. 7 epitomizes the constant appropriating of the (neo)colonialist forces such as Europe, Japan, and North America, and allows for a postmodernist reading of this text against essentialist assumptions of any sort of unadulterated, authentic culture. Moreover, shaped by the postmodernity intertwined with Taiwan‟s postcolonial condition, the translatability of the communal organicity in turns allows the film to be 132 both national and local. As is discussed above, the communal solidarity is created mainly through two narrative strategies. Formally, it is engendered from a mythically circular (as opposed to the linear, modern, and “national” temporality), retrospective movement in the search of the origin for such a community. Thematically, the solidarity is reinforced in the township‟s ambition for self-determination in its protest against international conglomerates. During the time of the island‟s identity crisis, the parallel between Mr. Representative‟s appeal to trump the BOT project by forming the township‟s own local band and the island‟s demand for self-determination and international recognition is poignantly palpable. As Taiwan‟s relationship with its ex-colonizer is reconfigured in postmodern terms, where the political and territorial domination is replaced by cultural transaction and reinvention, Cape No. 7 performs a quasi-national allegory. The ambiguity of the term itself is understood in the sense that as Taiwan‟s wounded national ego is compensated for by the kind of nativist pride and sublimated in the township‟s receptiveness and hospitality for foreign cultures, the film, which boasts of a genuine “Taiwanese-ness,” nonetheless sits comfortably with Taiwan‟s undecided (non)national status. Because the story is set in the small town at the southern tip of the island, the trope of local-ness overdetermined by motifs of “the south” preempts the possible alienation of the Chinese or pro-unification viewers who tend to view Taiwan as a region that eventually will be returned to People‟s Republic of China. For this demographic, Cape No. 7 is undeniably provincial. Its ahistoricity and, arguably, apoliticalness, allows the film to be easily understood as a low-budget production about an uplifting, small-town 133 story with a group of benevolent and optimistic townspeople. A crucial quality that attracts different sinophone viewership, the notion of hybridization that characterizes the cultural experiences of the geopolitical space of the Pacific Rim can be best exemplified by the scores of Cape No. 7. Both diegetically and extra-diegetically, the music that plays a vital role both in the plot development and the dissemination of the film is indeed itself a semiology that attests to the transmigration of popular culture across the globe. For instance, the score, “South of the Border” is a title that invokes the title of Haruki Murakami‟s novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, which in turn is derived from a thirties North American pop song entitled “South of the Border 50 .” The transport of the sign, in this sense, always occurs with simultaneous transformation of meaning in a different context, just like the way the theme song “Heidenröselein,” replayed throughout the film in Japanese and Mandarin with different instruments, always calls for different interpretations in each of its singular happening. The fluidity of cultural signifiers manifest in the film and in its reception thus foregrounds the indeterminacy of nationhood in the era of globalization. While the film itself visualizes a communal unity, the heterogeneity of popular culture inherent in the film scores constantly exceeds national and geopolitical boundaries. II. Brotherhood and the Taiwanese Essence Do you have any ideas that Monga is falling apart? Before the fall of the Qing 50 The songwriter himself, Yen Yunnong, in his blog, addresses the issues of artistic originality and authenticity of the score in his response to Xu Jielin‟s article. http://anoyen.pixnet.net/blog/post/22224449 134 Dynasty, foreign artillery, guns, and fleets awaited on the border, ready to attack, while Cixi was still deluded about her invincibility. Now Monga is looking at the same crisis. Our leader, Masa, dresses up and visits whorehouses every day. Your Geta‟s mind is stuffed with concrete. The future is coming, but the Monga folks are still asleep! 51 Monga I do not intend to reproduce the 80‟s. This is very significant in aesthetic terms. In different aspects such as art direction, costume, or even performance and emotions, we hope it is retro but modern; in other words, we want to create our 80‟s, a Monga that belongs to us 52 . [emphasis mine] Niu Cheng-ze, director of Monga 53 Having successfully raised funds by seeking domestic financing, Monga brought forth another wave of the public interest in Taiwan‟s historic site in 2010. Acclaimed as the first Taiwanese guwaakzai [ 古惑仔] movie, a genre specific to Hong Kong cinema adapted from a comic book series about young gangsters (The Young and Dangerous series being the earliest adaptation with a number of spin-offs), this 2010 film portrays the brotherhood of a group of teenage gangsters that is eventually broken up by feuds among the members of two generations. Almost by default, the genre, the subject-matter, and the characterization of the movie brand Monga as “Taiwanese,” or “Tai,” a colloquial and to a degree derogative terminology that is interchangeable with “native,” 51 現在整個艋舺都要保不住了，你知道嗎？在滿清末年，外國人砲、槍、軍艦都等在外。那個慈禧還以為自己很行。現在我們艋舺的情形一模一樣。我們大仔 Masa 每天穿得光鮮亮麗上茶室，你們的 Geta 腦袋裝水泥。未來就要來了耶！艋舺人還在睡！ 52 我並不是要複製 80 年代，這在美學上是非常重要的，不管是美術、造型、甚至情感與表演，我們都希望它是復古，但現代的；換句話說，我們要創造一個屬於我們的 80 年代，屬於我們的艋舺。 53 Lin 2010: 181. 135 “grass-roots,” and “local.” With the wild success of Cape No. 7, the audience are disposed well toward another somewhat comical and romantic presentation of “Taiwanese fellow” [taike], best exemplified by Ma Rulong, the veteran actor of Hoklo language TV dramas and martial arts films since the 70s, whose career was revived after he was cast as the Town Council Representative, an uncompromising guardian of Kaohsiung‟s local culture, in Cape No. 7 and a legendary and traditional patriarch of a Monga gang in Monga. While the histrionic characterization, the screw-ball comedic elements in human relationships, and the urban, ephemeral love affairs in Cape No.7 evince its influences by the Japanese trendy drama, Monga manifests its strains of the so-called Taiwanese idol drama, a television production that, also inspired by its Japanese counterpart, rose in the past decade and features young, iconic actors targeted at teenage fan base, urban romance, intricate plot design, air-brushed make-up, and trendy costume. Prior to Monga, the director Niu Cheng-ze has been actor who starred in numerous movies and TV productions since the 70s. His works include early and later films made by Taiwan New Cinema directors such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Chen Kuen-Ho. Niu‟s directorial debut took place in 2000. Having being an integral part of Taiwan New Cinema and expressing the desire to produce films of the caliber between Hou Hsiao-hsien and Zhu Yenping 54 , Niu‟s contribution to producing Taiwan‟s idol drama also informs the way the adolescent 54 A Taiwanese director who flourished in the 80s and 90s and whose profile consists mainly of commercial films, especially those dealing with screw-ball comedies thematized by the obligatory military service in Taiwan. 136 friendship is portrayed among the five main characters in Monga. Monga unfolds its narrative of gangster brotherhood that initiates a fatherless high school teenager‟s Bildungsroman as he is recruited by one of the gangs based in a town with a long history of Fukian traders that migrated over from China since the 18th century and settled down in this port town by the river. The story follows Mosquito, who, lonely and dispirited for constantly moving with his single mother and transferring from school to school, is befriended by a young gang of four members, Dragon [Dragon], Monk [huesiunn], Monkey [pehgao], and A-Po [apeh] after they witness him fight his way out of a group of bullies. With the addition of this last new blood, the five adolescents form a young gang called the Prince gang [taizu bang], exchange vows, and are sworn in as brothers, a social ritual, especially in the underworld, that demands die-hard loyalty and full dedication to brotherhood. The gang that recruits Mosquito is headed by Dragon, only son of Geta, who is the leader of the Temple Front [miokao] gang in the Monga area. Whereas Mosquito, the waisheng (Mainland Chinese) kid, finds himself emotionally involved in the solidarity among his Prince gang peers, identified with the communal life of the Temple Front gang, and looking up to Geta as a surrogate father, Temple Front and its affiliate, the Back Alley [aobiatsu] gang, see its own disintegration as Geta and the head of Temple Front, Masa, are murdered by Monk and Win-kiam, a rebellious ex-con and nephew of Masa. The in-fight that occurs across generations and ends in patricide breaks up the Prince gang as well, as Mosquito finds out and exposes Monk‟s betrayal to other members of the Prince gang. The revelation leaves 137 Monkey in bed with life support in hospital after his solo revenge against Win-kiam causes him to be shot by the latter, and Monk stabbed to death by Dragon, one he has loved since childhood, during a cut-throat fight between Monk and Mosquito. Following Cape No.7, Monga is considered as another Taiwanese film produced since 2008 that saw what Niu himself calls the renaissance of Taiwan cinema. While Wei‟s film folds the time of a significant historical event (the end of Japanese colonial period) into a cyclical communal temporal loop, Monga recalls the time around a historical watershed as the narrative begins in flashback from Mosquito‟s [wenzi] point of view. This piece of “heroic bloodshed” insinuates the emerging political and social changes around the time of the lifting of martial law in 1987 when earlier in the film, a close shot shows the headline of the newspaper on the Twelfth Plenary Session of Central Executive Committee chaired by the then president Chiang Jingkuo in 1986, a significant KMT meeting which foretold the liberation of Taiwan‟s political system, before the single mother of Mosquito uses the newspaper to wrap in her son‟s lunch box. An hour into the film, an intertitle runs across the screen that announces the transformative moment of the five young characters: “1987. We entered the world of adulthood together and never returned 55 .” It is this moment when this underworld band of brothers are sent by the patriarch of their gang, Geta, up to the mountain area to receive combat trainings. It is also a moment when one of the characters, Monk, starts to contemplate revolts against the patriarch after he is beaten unconscious by Geta when taking the blame for accidentally 55 1987. 我們一起走進大人的世界，並且一去不回。(1:04:36) 138 killing another gangster held under torture and learns about the bad blood between his own father and Geta. Set in the 80s, Monga seems to sidestep the political and social transformations of the time. In the epigraph, Niu‟s conceptualization of the film itself not only makes a self-reflexive statement of the ontology of film; the implications of constructing a “Taiwanese memory” by creating something at once “retro” and “modern/contemporary” also indicate co-optation with the global trend of commodifying nostalgia, which in turn contributes to imagining a Taiwanese identity when the first person plural possessive pronoun calls into being an “our Monga.” Indeed, this “retro-chic-ness” not uncommon in the postmodern urban cultural realm is re-capitulated at the end of the film. The name “Monga,” now replaced by its modern official name, “Wanhua,” and exists in the Taiwanese vernacular, is ethnographized at the closure of the narrative: an intertitle gives a premodern, aboriginal, and mythic origin of the term: “Monga, in the Pepo aboriginal language, means a small boat.” Much like Cape No. 7, the construction of a national identity is inevitably interlinked with the logic of cultural consumption expedited by media images. Conveying intense emotions, volatile relationships among characters, and darkness of the gangster world, the film quite often tells the story in perspective shots, with a cinematography that deploys vibrant, saturated colors, low-key lighting, and sharp focus. Contained in a timeless-frame of innocent yet turbulent adolescence, most of the scenes were also shot in close-formed settings: tight shots of high school classrooms and 139 stairways, Mosquito‟s mother‟s small hair salon, the confining space cut up by columns and beams in the temple run by the Temple Front gang, the Japanese style karaoke room where gang members sit around a long table, dark, packed discotheques, the inside of a dingy brothel, the narrow lanes of the night market, crowded red light districts lined up with shops with neon lights, cluttered warehouses, or closed space of the gangsters‟ dens. With the contrast between the warm and cold hues, the tight shots charged with emotions readily demand identification in the way the idol drama does of the audience familiar with the genre. Without dealing upfront with a series of social and political changes and upheavals in the 80s, Monga depicts an Edenic rite of passage of five young men until at the very end, where they are caught up in troubled youth and the explosive underground world. While the comico-serious nature of the film allows the narrative to be told from subjective points of views (mostly Mosquito‟s) in exaggerated performances and fantasies, the lyricism of street fights (for example, the poetic one-take shot of the five youngsters in a scuffle with other gangsters as an introduction of the main characters in the beginning of the film, which then cuts to a nearly slapstick presentation of chaotic fracas among all clans in Monga) frequently hold an ironic yet poetic gaze at the world of violence and betrayal. Charged with emotional excess and poetic violence, what kind of political unconscious is narrated into a film that appeals to the audience with its melodramatic elements (the oedipal structure, the moral opposition between good and evil, and the maturation of a character towards the end of the story) and its showcasing of the clandestine and 140 vernacular culture notoriously attributed to Monga? Declaring that he has no intention of glorifying the gangster culture and endorsing violence, Niu Cheng-ze points out that he means to tell a story of his own youth and caution the young audience not to choose the wrong path of life. Yet, in addition to the cathartic ending, where the deaths of the main characters invoke elegiac and reconciliatory tones that cast a redeeming light on both the villains and the heroes, the narrative centering on the self-reflective protagonist, Mosquito, who commits to defending the honor of Geta and constantly questions the moral codes of the underworld [hey dao] undeniably portrays an ideal community of brotherhood grounded on justice and loyalty. In this sense, if, as Niu himself admitted, inspired by a murder case that shook up the underground world in the 80s, where a gang member gunned down the leader of his gang, this movie is at once a revisit to his own coming-of-age years in the 80s and a re-creation of the atmosphere of the time in a way that is relatable to the audience nowadays, then this nostalgic turn indeed exemplifies what Rey Chow calls the nostalgia “in tendency.” That is, rather than locating a specific object in the past, this tendency to look back is indeed an intensification of “a sensitivity to the movements of temporality.” As Rey Chow notes, “[t]heir affect is tenacious precisely because we cannot know the object of such affect for sure. Only the sense of loss it projects is definite. 56 ” (Chow 1988, 147) The nostalgia Monga invokes in the spectator, therefore, more than a retrospect for the 80s, is an attempt to imagine an ideal 56 This definition of nostalgia comes from Chow‟s analysis of Stanley Kwan‟s film Rouge. In this essay, Chow explores the relationship between nostalgia and the identity crisis of Hong Kong faced with the approach of 1997 and the sense of fragmentation in postmodernity. 141 world for the present by retelling the moment of rupture in the past. What indeed is this sense of loss symptomatic of in a film that portrays a “misled” path of no return, as is declared in the intertitle of the film? And what is implicated in the temporal shift, this sense of movements, changes, and possibly disorientation? I argue that, manifest in a romantic visualization of boyhood, the nostalgic sentiments invested in this psychic, temporal shift entail a search for an absent father figure and the lost values of the “good old days” that stand for putatively holistic Taiwanese tradition and identity that remains indeterminate in the postnational and postmodern present. If Cape No 7 repeatedly plays out the moment of returning to the plenitude of the communal circle, Monga demonstrates the double anxieties of patricide and castration, and a desire to sublate both into a new subjectivity. Thus, this kind of temporal movements, instead of tracking backwards linearly towards a specific point of time in the past, indeed demonstrates a jerk, a split, a rupture, a loss of sense of direction to recover from as the narrative offers a sublimating closure. I argue that it is thus this reified social order which gives birth to a masculinist Taiwanese essence. This “imagined” Taiwanese-ness is reiterated and invented as the narrative plays out its destruction and vindication in the end. And in this process of mourning the disintegration of this order, the film envisions a “new Taiwanese.” By announcing with Geta‟s death the death of the patriarchal feudalism that preserves the integrity of Taiwanese-ness, a new Taiwanese identity is forged that displaces the provincial conflicts long troubling the island‟s nationhood onto an othering dichotomy of the traditional vs. the modern, and the immediate human contact vs. the 142 alienating technology. Apparently, the self-enclosed underworld defined by brotherly love and blood spill belies everything the 80s‟ Taiwan represents: the quick expansion of capitalism, the explosion of information and new, competitive, and radical historical discourses, and the vertiginous political and social upheavals that sucked the island into a vortex of postmodernity. The emotional turmoil in the gangster film also jars with what Niu describes as “the good old days” the 80s stands for him: an optimistic time of liberation and on-going economic development. Compared to Cape No. 7, which deploys the imagery of home-coming by rehearsing the motif of return in a romantic and circular relation to the end of Japanese colonization, Monga calls into being and anthropologizes the social practices of the Monga gangs when the characters oftentimes tie the fate of the gangs in the historicity of the town itself. For example, to introduce Mosquito to the Temple Front gang, Monk gives a brief description of the rules of conduct in the gangsters‟ world in Monga that starts with the early development of Monga since the end of the Qing Dynasty. The historical reference here recalls the conflicts among early Chinese immigrants to Taiwan, where different clans, mainly Zhangzhou and Quanzhou, had to compete for trading businesses. Monk‟s narrative thus establishes a temporal continuity and cultural homogeneity that characterize the modern Monga gangs in the 80s. The narrative of the myth about the flourishing of the town segues into that of the myth of Geta, the leader of the Temple Front gang, whose exceptional combat skills won him his title. In other words, through the act of narration, the Monga gangster community 143 comes to represent, although an illicit way of living, a prototypical social structure that defines Taiwanese-ness. As Mosquito was born into a single-parent family that caused him much misery and desolation, the fact that he finds a home in the Prince gang, which introduces him into Geta‟s Temple Front gang, turns the gangster community into a new familial setting in which Oedipal identification is initiated belatedly. In an allegorical sense, from Mosquito‟s point of view, this “imagined” native Taiwanese culture is to be discovered and preserved. Appearing to be uncovered as a pre-existing entity, this native culture indeed emerges as an invention the moment Mosquito begins his search for a surrogate family. As a veneer of the cinematic version of idol TV drama, the historicity, the brochure-like historical information, similar to Cape No. 7, is drawn upon to create a legibility of the Taiwanese native consciousness. The discursivity that constitutes an ethnic essence is best exemplified in a lecture given by Geta when he visits the five lads during their training and catches A-Po complaining about the outdatedness of physical combat, which makes a ridiculous self-defense in comparison to handguns that, now used more and more widely in the gangsters‟ world, kill all. Slapping on A-Po‟s head from behind, Geta declares, “The gun is the evil stuff coming from the Westerners. It is used by gutless people. It is the weapon of the lowly people. To survive in the black society [heishehuei] and to fight, [you] need fists and knives. I forbid you to touch the gun. Do you hear me 57 ?” 57 槍是西方人所傳來的邪惡東西，是沒種的人在用的，是下等人的武器。在這個黑社會中打滾，跟人冤家打架，就要靠拳頭，靠刀。我不准你們五個碰槍，聽到沒？ 144 Not only does Geta‟s speech set up the dichotomous distinction between martial arts weaponry and firing arms that, in the film, has been linked to ethnic pride and national trauma. Throughout the film, the supremacy of guns over knives operates as a metaphor that sums up the angst about the dehumanization and alienation brought about by capitalism, the corruption of moral values that uphold traditional hierarchical social and familial structure, and the invasion of modern technology presumably imported from the west into the local community founded upon fraternity and reciprocity. What the gun stands for, therefore, is a product of modern technology that compresses time and displaces human relationships from physical closeness and bonding to a short-changed capitalist social network. As the firing arms force open the self-enclosed community of Monga (metonymical of the pre-modern China), it also represents the inevitable future, as is indicated Win-kiam‟s speech to Monk in the epigraph above, that Monga (now metonymical of Taiwan) needs to catch up on. Compared to the long drawn-out physical combats which, like the kung fu genre, are carefully choreographed and synched to melodious or exciting, drummed up soundtrack, gunshots that occur in the film always announce disruptive moments of cold-blooded betrayal and imminent moral degeneracy, particularly when Masa and Geta are both gunned down by members of their own gangs. Notably, in contrast to Masa‟s sudden, vulnerable death by an unknown gunman—he is shot facing the camera, drunk and unsuspecting, while the audience only sees and actually expects a gun reaching out from behind the camera— Geta displays his physical prowess one last time by single-handedly knocking down four hit men. The patriarch of 145 the Monga underworld is killed, with a betrayed last look, by Monk with a bullet. The tragic-heroic death of Geta not only immortalizes the patriarch; it becomes a counterpoint at which several narrative lines quickly culminate and develop to their resolutions. It is the beginning of Mosquito‟s legitimate take-over of Dragon‟s place as “the prince” [taizu], when he is the first one to discover Geta‟s dead body and vows to revenge and volunteers to wear the mourning dress designated to be worn by the first son of the patriarch. Since it is the bereaved son that plays the major role in the burial ceremony, Mosquito is symbolically the heir and preserver of the Monga culture at this point. It is also the beginning of the internal conflicts among the Prince gang members, who, informed by Mosquito‟s discovery of Monk‟s betrayal, are quickly involved in a series of fatal fights. In these fights, the traditional values represented by Geta are supplemented by his chio-ri [ 尺二], a Japanese short knife carried by him. Swearing to find out the culprit who kills Geta, Mosquito removes the short knife from the altar that enshrines Geta to use it as a sacred weapon for revenge. Such a gesture adds a cultish value to the knife and sets into motion retrospectively a chain of signifiers of that defer the definition of Taiwanese-ness: the short knife not only becomes Mosquito‟s weapon of revenge; this phallic symbol that guards and represents, retrospectively, Geta, the Temple Front gang, and the order of this primeval Taiwanese community with a premodern history, indeed recalls an absence or a lack. This lack is the lack of the referent of whatever Monga represents, the name of a locus that signifies a continuity which supposedly constitutes the ethnic essence of the Taiwanese. 146 As is mentioned above, the death of Geta is the result of the disintegration of the Prince gang. It thus announces the end of the adolescent brotherhood that promises an eternal love. Nonetheless, what comes out of the deathly fight between Mosquito and Monk is normalization of male friendship defined in heteronormative terms. Despite the blood spill towards the end, the narrative is overall a poetic portrayal of the homosocial relationship among the five members. The reiterated tagline of the movie, “The hell with meaning [yiyi]! Brotherhood [yiqi] is all I know 58 ” makes a heroically romantic statement, promising an ideal communal bonding that recalls an imaginary and idyllic past before the alienation and atomization brought about by technology and modernization. The term, yiqi, composed of two characters that signify “chivalry” and “energy,” connotes in this film predominantly male-male relationship. Because of the five young men‟s innocent belief that they join the gang to seek genuine friendship [huen yoqing], instead of pursuing the underground business [huen heidao], the chivalric codes of conduct they observe mainly bind them to an unconditional fraternal love. It is in conjunction of the demand for such a nearly religious devotion that, although maintained in heteronormative and patriarchal hierarchy, yiqi allows for homosexual love to slip in as a stronger emotional investment to fortify this kind of brotherhood, as is demonstrated by Monk‟s long-time affection for Dragon. This almost exclusive homosocal/homosexual space in the so-called “buddy” films is preceded by John Woo‟s action films, to which the term heroic bloodshed is first 58 意義是啥小？你爸只聽過義氣，沒聽過意義啦! 147 attributed to. Discussing the representation of masculinity in Woo‟s films before and after his entrance into Hollywood, Jillian Sandell revises Laura Mulvey‟s groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and Steve Neale‟s article, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema” by arguing that, in Woo‟s films produced in Hong Kong, as opposed to his later works in the States, men become the object of the spectacle while still operating as agents that further the narrative. Sandell takes to task the reified gender paradigm implied in both essays in which a) women are the only objects of spectacles, b) spectacle of female body always interrupts and halts the narrative, and c) “any objectification automatically means feminization, and feminization automatically means disempowerment” (27). Sandell points out the way Woo‟s “pre-Hollywood” films demonstrate the combination of men‟s “emotional intensity” and “physical strength and expertise of a deadly killer” (26). In this combination of “buddy” and “romance” genres, while male bonding is shown in elaborated and melodramatic shootouts, “the moments of action in [Woo‟s] The Killer facilitate the moment of friendship, and both are necessary for the resolution of the narrative” (27). However, compared to the mainstream Hollywood action films, the male characters‟ relationships are indeed to reinforce their individual heterosexual love life, the deep affection among male heroes, which borders on misogyny in Woo‟s Hong Kong films, does not go entirely unchecked. Using The Killer and Hard Boiled as examples, Sandells teases out the anxiety accompanying the male intimacy in Woo‟s early works. Describing these two films as acting out an underlying homophobia, Sandells notes that, “the violence 148 simultaneously authorizes the intimacy and punishes the men for their feelings. The violence operates in the same way at the level of the audience—providing a pretext for enjoying the spectacle of male bodies and intimacy between men while punishing us with explosions and sympathetic pain” (30). In Monga, the strong attachment Monk has for Dragon has also come too close for comfort. Compared to the male intimacy in Woo‟s films, the homosocialism in Monga unabashedly crosses over to homoeroticism. Monk‟s loyalty for Dragon is described as “incomprehensible” in the very beginning of the film when Mosquito tells of each member‟s back story through voice-over. A titillating description of Monk‟s deep affection for Dragon is illustrated in a voyeuristic scene in a public bathroom, where they are shown to sit on two stools with their naked backs towards the camera, Monk is gently scrubbing Dragon‟s back with a sponge. Repeatedly, the narrative insinuates Monk‟s homosexuality by showing his jealousy at Dragon‟s girlfriend and his disinterest in going to the brothel. However, it is precisely because Monk‟s love for Dragon is accepted in the heteronormative term of brotherhood that the un-named excess of fraternal dedication also becomes a potential anomaly that disrupts the patriarchal structure as the narrative develops. In other words, repressed by its namelessness, Monk‟s queer attachment to the son of the patriarch of the Temple Front gang inescapably returns as that which is foreign and new. Instigated by a grievance generated by his new-found knowledge about the ruthless competition between his father and Geta who was crowned as the leader of the gang after chopping off his father‟s arm, Monk‟s patricidal conspiracy with Win-kiam is 149 also the result a ruminative act supported by the intention to participate in revolutionizing the business modality of the Taiwanese gang in Monga for a greater profit. Although Monk‟s deep affection for Dragon invites the audience‟s sympathy, such sympathy is toned down, or rather punished, with Monk‟s betrayal, as if his love for Dragon is too much to bear. Homologous to the shootouts in Woo‟s films which oftentimes bring to climax the emotional drama of male-male relationships with homoerotic spectacles in his films, Monga blares out the sentimental theme of love in the mortal combat between Mosquito and Monk. After they are both wounded in an ambush that has gone out of control, a chase scene taking place in the narrow lanes of Monga brings Mosquito and Monk to confront each other. Different from the shower of gunfire in Woo‟s films, this one-on-one combat is once again a moral war between the gun and the knife. When Mosquito is shot by Monk and collapses onto the ground, he reaches out his arms, a gesture that pleads for a merciful embrace. Monk acquiesces, but is unexpectedly stabbed by Mosquito with the dagger that he has pierced into Mosquito during the ambush. This deathly embrace turns into a tearful, heart-to-heart exchange of last words between the two heavily-wounded men locked into each other‟s arms. While Monk bitterly asserts to Mosquito the ruthless power struggle in the underworld, Mosquito emotionally protests with his belief in friendship and yiqi. This drawn-out deadlock between the renegade and the loyalist of the Temple Front gang is broken by Dragon‟s surprise attack on Monk. A cut to Geta‟s short knife picked up by Dragon‟s hand from the ground reintroduces the patriarchal law that 150 slashes across Monk, the undying brotherhood gone awry. This scene consists of a series of aesthetically elaborated shots thematically connected by the motif of cherry blossoms. As the dead father‟s knife spills Monk‟s blood into the air, the slow-motioned frame becomes a surrealist spectacle with a mid-shot of Monk, who turns around with an unbelieving look, his right arm holding out firing a surprised gunshot into the air, his blood spraying all over the left side of the frame. Here, physical combat connotes double meanings: it is at once a violence for the gangsters to stake out territories and observing of the law of retaliation, and a form of human contact that fortifies brotherhood and friendship and carries the affect of such bonding to eroticism. Mosquito is recruited by the gang led by Dragon when the opponent gang that bullied Mosquito is forced by Dragon to line up in front of their new member to take his beatings. It is thus at once a moment that demarcates the line between friends and enemies, and a cultish performance where Mosquito, empowered by the advice which Monk whispers into his ears, “If you don‟t kill them today, they‟ll kill you tomorrow,” is initiated into the world of violence and male intimacy. In this deathly fight between Mosquito and Monk, Monk‟s reiteration of the mantra into Mosquito‟s ears now is nonetheless a plea for salvation: killing him would be the ultimate expression of brotherhood in that Mosquito would not only once again be mentored by a senior brother, but finishing Monk would send him to martyrdom as a sinner whose sin is nothing else but stopping believing in brotherhood. Dying in a brother‟s hand, therefore, would be a return to his faith in the highest form. Specifically, as it is Dragon who finishes Monk, dying in the hand of someone he vows eternal love 151 for in the name of brotherhood would be the only access to the real physical intimacy. During this scene of redemption, the spattered blood transforms into cherry blossoms in Mosquito‟s eyes, the patterns on the postcard he received from his birth father from Japan, whom he has believed to have died of an unknown disease. The exotic flowers from Japan continue to thematically connect this shot to a shot of the cherry blossoms Mosquito drew on the ceiling of room in a brothel, a shot from the point of view of Xiaoning, a girl he met and has fallen in love with. Xiaoning is in the middle of having sex with a client, her face nonetheless glowing with happiness when she asks the client to recommend a good movie she plans to watch with Mosquito. As the motif of cherry blossoms travels back to the shot of Mosquito lying on the ground, he cracks a smile exactly like that of Xiaoning‟s as Monk‟s blood spills onto his face. The movie ends with plaintive yet euphoric shots of each peripheral character in the movie, a sentimental last look at each of the five brothers‟ bereaved parents, lover, and rueful ring leaders. The montage of melodramatic shots demands the audience‟s sympathetic identification and redeems the bloodshed between Mosquito and Monk. As the scene finally cuts back to Monk, who is stabbed to death by a tearful Dragon and collapses like a rapturous lover, he is left in the dark alley with a relieved smile on his face, while Dragon and A-Po drag the unconscious Mosquito away into the dark of the night. In this euphoric last scene, the spectacular wounding of Monk‟s body completes Mosquito‟s rites of passage. The imaginary cherry blossoms falling onto his smile not only secure him in the heterosexual relationship, in which, as if through a proxy, he 152 consummates his Platonic love with Xiaoning. But Mosquito‟s voice-over adopts a wiser tone that, in hindsight of his youthful days, reconciles with the inevitable choice of joining the gangster society as a young man. As cherry blossoms represent the last and only trace of his father‟s love for him, this lack that he seeks to fill up in the Monga underworld sublimates into an Oedipal resolution: after this rite of passage, Mosquito grows up to be a man. His revenge for Geta, the surrogate father, and his hostility against Grey Wolf [huilang], his birth father unbeknownst to him, now reconciled in his renewal of the vows of brotherhood, only this time it is a pact in which Monk is sacrificed. If Monk‟s rebellion represents an upsurge of unleashed energy that seeks democratic freedom and demolition of the old order, then Mosquito‟s embrace of the familial ties which he has been lacking and rediscovered in the Temple Front gang counters as a backlash against the heretic rebellion to disrupt the chivalric patriarchal world. In this context, Monk‟s extraordinary intelligence and virility becomes detrimental to the old society of Monga, since if the invention of the new Taiwanese identity requires the destruction of the patriarchal world led by Geta, then the need for provincial reconciliation overrides the social and cultural recognition of homosexuality. In other words, as an irrational destructive force driven by love carried to the extremes, Monk is instrumentalized to shatter the old order for the new one to arise. And the choice of Mosquito as the voice of the cinematic indirect speech, through whose point of view the audience indulges in fantasizing about and inventing a time of “good old days,” becomes the only possible way to re-enter the present under the auspices of nostalgia. In his essay, 153 “Pornography, Nostalgia, and Montage,” Žižek uses the American film noir of the 1940s as a case in point in his discussion of the suturing effect of gaze qua object in nostalgia. If in cinema, the spectator‟s fascination with the images is indeed her fascination with the point of view, instead of the image/object itself, then, as Žižek notes, What we really see, when we watch a film noir, is this gaze of the other: we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic “naïve” spectator, the one who was „still able to take it seriously,‟ in other words, the one who „believes in it‟ for us, in place of us.” For that reason, our relation to a film noir is always divided, split between fascination and ironic distance: ironic distance toward its diegetic reality, fascination with the gaze. (112) In other words, the self-reference concomitant with the particular genre of film noir in the contemporary viewing experience creates an identification not only with what happens to the protagonist, but in the hopes of re-understanding the world in a simpler and innocent point of view. In this way, according to Zĭzĕk, nostalgia no longer implies extracting fragments of the past and inserting it into a “timeless present.” Instead, the viewer‟s aligning with this child-like gaze connotes “look[ing] at the present with the eyes of the mythical past” (112). In the case of Monga, this moving back in time in order to retrieve back in the present an innocent belief in the integrity of older values is achieved when the story follows Mosquito‟s transformation. In other words, this nostalgic sentiment is invoked by the film with an impulse to recast the present, instead of revisiting the past. As Mosquito is invited to become one of the integral members of the Prince gang and thus welcomed into the Temple Front community, his identity is ironically revealed towards the end of the film as the son of Grey Wolf, the leader of the 154 Waisheng gang that attempts to annex the Taiwanese gangs in Monga by provoking schism between the Temple Front gang and the Back Alley gang. With Monk‟s betrayal and patricide and Mosquito‟s filial vindication, it is thus the double movement of inclusion and exclusion embodied by Mosquito and Monk respectively that displaces the deep-seated provincial/ethnic animosity between the descendents of Fukian settlers (benshengren) and the Mainlander immigrants (waishengren) onto an abstract incompatibility between genuine Taiwanese “spirit” and an intrusive force of the future. Such antinomy is nonetheless resolved in the identity transformation Mosquito goes through in this coming-of-age story, in which an outsider is integrated into the native community and, by paying tribute to the deceased and apotheosized patriarch, a certain Taiwanese essence is preserved. Moreover, as the violence of modernity is deflected with Monk‟s death, the ending of the narrative nonetheless announces an imminent new era that begins with the end of the old-time Monga. 155 CHAPTER THREE: A TAIWANESE FILMMAKER’S VIRTUAL CHINA: ANG LEE’S CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON AND LUST, CAUTION I‟ve always had a kind of love-hate complex about the wuxia as a genre of film and popular culture. I love it because it is a fantasy about China as a repressed community, an unleashing of the unconscious, an emotional escape. Although [it is about] an illusory China, it is a China of genuine emotions. But I hate its crudeness, its being too unsophisticated to be considered classic. In truth, it really is nothing of good. It is wonderful because it is wild; it is bad because it is vulgar. I‟ve always been conflicted about it. With this opportunity to shoot a wuxia film, I wish to make it a classic, so that people can take comfort and savor the affection in it; I also wish to preserve its wild audacity. But making it a classic and whittling off its coarseness is like caging a beast, where I am faced with quite a few dilemmas. How do I decide between the exquisite and the mediocre, the Chinese and the Western, the ancient and the modern? How do I fuse them into something that can be accepted by everyone? Ang Lee, A Decade of Dreams in Cinema 59 And yet, does light not have another kind of transparency, the transparency of our media and consumer society? Such transparency moves us, it seems to me, not back to the „original,‟ but rather to the fabulous constructedness of the world as spoken of by Nietzsche and Vattimo. Rather than some original text, it is the brilliance of this „fabling of the world‟ to which Benjamin‟s „arcade‟ leads us. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions I. Wuxia and Modernity: Ang Lee and Transnational Chinese Subjectivity 59 對武俠片這個片型以及武俠小說之類的通俗文學，我始終有著一種愛恨糾纏。我愛它，因為它是我們中國壓抑社會的一種幻想、一種潛意識的抒發、一種情緒的逃避。雖然是個虛幻的中國，卻是個真實情感的中國。但我恨它的粗糙、不登大雅之堂。老實講，真的不算甚麼好東西。它好，好在它的野；壞，壞在它的俗。對它我本身就有著掙扎。這次有機會拍武俠片，我既希望它能一登大雅之堂，人們得以享受對它的寄託與情感，又希望保有它野性的狂肆。但在走向大雅、在去它的俗味時，就像把野獸關到籠子裡，我得面對許多兩難的衝突，如雅與俗、武打與意境、中與西、古與今，要怎麼取捨？如何融合？又為大家接受！( 十年一覺電影夢, 293) 156 Weighing in as Taiwan‟s national treasure with much accorded authority, Ang Lee is quoted by the media to have compared Wei Desheng‟s Cape No. 7 to “stinky tofou,” a local delicacy that is embraced and adored by the Taiwanese, but is incomprehensible, if not a complete turn-off, to foreigners. This benign comment is well-taken, presumably, by both the rising-star filmmaker and the Taiwanese viewers, for it not only encapsulates Lee‟s avid acknowledgement of Wei‟s record-setting film, but this metaphor, apt or not, is also a promise for future advice coming from the world-renown director on how to break into the international film market, the North American region especially. To make this entry, according to Lee, requires a translation and re-presentation of Taiwan‟s native history and culture for the benefit of audiences unfamiliar with Taiwan‟s local sense of humor, social conventions, and historical contexts. The internationalization of Sinophone films directed by Taiwanese filmmakers saw its watershed precisely around the time Ang Lee debuted his first movie. Lee‟s rise to fame in the nineties resuscitated the Taiwanese national film market after the short-lived Taiwan New Cinema was upstaged by mainstream Hollywood and Hong Kong blockbusters. He debuted on the market in 1991 with Pushing Hands, a production financed by Central Motion Pictures Corporation, which was run by KMT until 2005. The Golden-Horse Awards nominee for eight categories later became the first film of his Father Knows Best trilogy that began to establish his credentials in the U.S., including The Wedding Banquet (1993), which won the Golden Bear in the Berlin International Festival, and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), which was nominated for both the Golden 157 Globes and the Oscars. In Taiwan, Lee‟s works are generally considered as departure from works of Taiwan New Cinema veterans such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tseng Chuang-hsiang. While films of these directors address Taiwan‟s postwar history and society, deal with semi-autobiographical recollections or mundane lives of individuals, and experiment with artistic styles such as observational realism and modernist expressionism (Berry and Lu, 2005: 5), Lee‟s works, regarded as the second-wave of Taiwan New Cinema or the “New New Wave” (Berry and Lu, 109), began to explore themes of globalization, Chinese diaspora, and cultural hybridization. In Berry and Lu‟s words, “Ang Lee has turned out to be the most successfully surfer on the wave of globalization, offering Western audiences a taste of a kind of Confucian ethics mediated through Hollywood technique” (8). Placed side by side with Tsai Ming-liang as “ post-1980 „second wave‟” directors (Dilley, 36) whose films enjoyed higher visibility on international markets than their contemporaries, Lee produces works that appeal to a different audience from Tsai‟s; while the latter‟s uncompromising artistic auteurism attracts a certain niche community, mostly connoisseurs of high-brow arts, Lee more than once in his biography acknowledges that his films are targeted mainly at mainstream middle-class and fall between Hollywood low-brow and arthouse sensibilities. Set apart from other Taiwan New Cinema directors by his training in American institutes, Lee has a filmography that reflects a careful balance and compromise between independent and mainstream productions. The nearly uninterrupted streak of commercial success and artistic 158 recognitions of both his American and Chinese films (aside from a couple of box office and critical disappointments such as The Hulk (2003) in the U.S and jaded reception of Eat Drink Man Woman in Taiwan) established Lee as an outstanding American director since Brokeback Mountain (2005) and a bona fide Sinophone film maestro since Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000). Lee‟s flair for selling the cinematic presentation of pan-Chinese imageries to the western audiences has gained worldwide recognition in Crouching Tiger, which, surpassing his achievements with the Father Knows Best trilogy in the American film market, was a lucrative model of foreign film distributive strategy and a successful cultural translation of martial arts and swordplay, a genre unique to the Sinophone film and literature for decades. Determined to break into the mainstream American film market rather than settle for the arthouse niche, which is customarily what most foreign films are ghettoized into, Sony Classics Pictures planned out a series of publicity campaigns. The fact that these campaigns were tailored to different segments of audiences that ranged from arthouse community (which includes female and middle-class viewers), wuxia fans (both kungfu and martial art B-movie viewers and martial arts aficionados), and adolescents that can be easily reached through blogsphere demonstrates an effort to advertise selectively different dimensions of the movie: drama, myth, martial arts, Daoist philosophy and Confucian ethics, exotic landscapes of China, and anti-gravity stunts and special effects. In addition, promotion activities such as test screenings, interviews in both print and electronic media, strategically-timed releases in 159 arthouse and mainstream theaters were also in order to match the sensations of the film‟s nominations in each award event. The entire production efforts of the Crouching Tiger, as the prolific reviews generated by the ground-breaking foreign film in both Britain and the U.S. unequivocally agreed, epitomizes the so-called postnational, boundary-crossing global cooperation that attests to the heterogeneity of Chinese diasporic communities and the on-going hybridization of Eastern and Western cultural production. Not only were talents recruited for both the crew and the cast an assemblage of American and ethnic Chinese professionals with different nationalities, speaking (or not speaking at all) different Chinese vernaculars, using various Chinese spelling systems (or simply reading in English), but the script of the film itself, like most of Lee‟s previous movies, is a product of the collaboration between his long-time partner, James Schamus (U.S.), Wang Hui-Ling (Taiwan), and Tsai Guo-Jung (Taiwan) in their reinterpretation of the work by Wang Dulu (China) 60 . As Felicia Chan notes, the stellar commercial success of Crouching Tiger worldwide not only rekindled the interest of the Sinophone viewers and brought about another around of box office popularity, but resuscitated the reception in Lee‟s home country, Taiwan. Fascinated or upset by the choreography and aesthetics of martial arts distinctive from Hong Kong maestros of the 80‟s and 90s‟ wuxia genre such as Tsui Hark and Ching Siutung, audiences in East Asian Sinophone regions, especially in Taiwan, were 60 Fran Martin in her essay “The China Simulacrum: Genre, Feminism, and Pan-Chinese Cultural Politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” cogently summarizes criticisms that recognize in Lee‟s movie “the tension between the national and the transnational in the era of intensified global cultural flows.” (Berry and Lu, 2005:150-151) 160 exhilarated by this low-budget picture‟s double victories in both box offices and award nods in the Western world. Lee‟s was such a long-awaited international success since his impressive track record with The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), and Sense and Sensibility (1995) that both China and Taiwan were eager to claim him as their national pride. Nonetheless, although Crouching Tiger epitomizes an era of globalization where images of China are reproduced and circulated across national boundaries, critics have noted the discrepant receptions of the audiences in the West, particularly the U.S. and Britain, and Sinophone regions such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. While this Mandarin-language movie with subtitles turned out to be the highest grossing foreign production in the U.S. film history and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, a portion of the Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese moviegoers showed disappointment or misgivings-- at least when it was first released in the summer of 2000 in regions where the viewers are familiar with wuxia pian, prior to its nominations of the various awards-- about Lee‟s rendition of a genre they considered indigenously and specifically “Chinese.” Several factors contributed to the skepticism of the Sinophone audiences: the Westernized script with dialogues that sound like Chinese translation of the English language, the various accents of the actors that disrupt the illusion of a monolithic fantasy world of this particular genre, the “unrealistic,” and the adaptation of the work by an obscure wuxia novel writer, who is much less known than Louis Cha [Jin Yong], the martial arts novelist whose works have been frequently adapted into movies and TV dramas in Hong Kong 161 and Taiwan. Despite the unprecedented number of nominations in the Golden Horse Awards (the equivalent of the Oscars in Taiwan) and a fan base consolidated by this history-making film, Lee was also accused by a community of viewers of selling a wuxia flick full with “flaws” to the Westerners because they couldn‟t tell the difference among various accents or distinguish excellent from mediocre martial art stunts, or were simply gullible enough to lavish rave reviews on the oriental mystique displayed by a generic, dumbed-down version of Chinese drama. The skepticism that determines this film to be a sell-out in Lee‟s pandering to the Western taste, as is noted by scholars, demonstrate chauvinist culturalism which prioritizes a unitary Chinese culture and takes cinematic art as a literal representation of Chinese culture. The issue of self-orientalism Lee‟s Chinese-language films are frequently associated with is explored in Rey Chow‟s in-depth discussion of contemporary Chinese film. According to Chow, the hostility against the “misrepresentation” of China expressed by critics that call for nativist resistance against the Euro-American hegemony by means of cultural representation, though seeking to deconstruct the superiority of the Western semiology and reclaim the right of the Third World to self-representation, risks perpetuating the binary opposition between the East and the West: The Euro-American homogenization of the world is then steadily polarized against an equally overwhelming attempt on the part of some “natives” and nativists to hold on to “tradition” even as tradition is disintegrating. Instead of enabling alternatives to the deadlock, nativist demands of cultural “fidelity” have great potential of becoming prohibitive deterrents cultural translation altogether. 162 (Chow: 1995, 179) Invoking Benjamin‟s essay “The Task of the Translator,” Chow‟s analysis of the cinema produced by the fifth-generation Chinese filmmakers teases out the hierarchy intrinsic to cultural essentialism: the fetishization of the “original,” be it of language or culture, and the presumed inadequacy of translation. She proposes a re-reading of these Chinese films often accused of self-orientalism as a translation understood to be what Benjamin calls a sense of Wörtlichkeit: “a real translation is not only that which translates word by word but also that which translates literally, depthlessly, naively” (186). This sense of “word-for-word-ness,” in Chow‟s rendering of Benjamin‟s term, implies a turn away from the assumption of a certain profound truth of the original to free, inclusive, and constantly transformative movements across reified cultural systems, a movement achieved precisely by the innovated and hybridized works of the Chinese filmmakers after 1989. Read in this light, contemporary Chinese film, no longer understood as a “blockage” to the representation of a genuine Chinese-ness, embodies a liberated notion of translation that enables transmissibility of and encounters between cultures and, as pointed out by Chow, understands the world as the Nietzschean idea of “fable:” it is both a recognition of the violence perpetuated by “truth” or “tradition” in an absolute, tyrannical sense, and an “active force of life” that allows for cultural fluidity and open-endedness (197-98). Chow‟s elaboration on the notion of “translation” helps us examine Lee‟s two Sinophone films under discussion in this chapter. To what extent does Lee‟s fabling of the 163 Chinese culture, so to speak, mobilized by the flows of the capital and motivated, according to Lee himself, by an intention to retell the story of an imaginary China, “soften” the world and negotiate the stringent distinctions of the East and the West that govern nationalist or nativist discourses? In its confrontation and re-encounter with, and reconfiguration of Chinese-ness, what cultural or epistemic violence inherent in the notion of “tradition” is “reassembled” as the “original” to be translated, and in this process of translation between the traditional and the modern and between the putative West and non-West, what kind of new “Chinese subjectivity” is envisioned in the filmic texts? In other words, if, as Chow points out, the transformative force of translation undoes the binary of the translator and the translated, and thus brings the development of the First-World and the Third-World languages and cultures into a co-evalness where national identity becomes an interface of cultural “contamination” and economic alliance and competition, how much does Lee‟s ambition to align the local with the global, as indicated in his advice to Wei, suture cultural contradictions and differences, and more importantly, what is at stake once ethnic particularity and national imagery, rendered by a so-called native Chinese in a medium that projects fantasies, are recast to be more universal and consumable? Indeed, in addition to Crouching Tiger‟s own heterogeneous makeup of production crew, cast, and the collaborative process of script-writing, discourses of militant cultural essentialism could be easily dismantled by a genealogical analysis of the wuxia genre. As Stephen Teo points out, since the inception of the cinematic rendition of wuxia, the 164 evolution of this narrative composed of fantasies, knights-errant, superhuman skills, and moral codes of chivalry has always been transnational (Teo, 2005). Wuxia being a populist-based genre, its hybridized nature is evidenced by its continuous incorporation of various kinds of indigenous low-brow literature and performance arts: oral narrative tradition, opera, indigenous literature, popular accounts of history, period costume movies, fantasy narratives, etc. (191). The composite nature of wuxia thus lends itself perfectly well to its conventional production and distribution strategies that take advantage of the genre‟s inherent adaptability and fluidity. Whether it was produced in Shanghai, the earliest site that churned out the first wuxia pictures, or later on in Hong Kong and Taiwan, or distributed in Singapore to other Southeast Asian regions, the martial art film has been made to be consumed both by its local audiences and to be exported to its overseas target audience, the diasporic Chinese communities. Marketing strategies that have aimed at disseminating this cinematic genre globally also necessitate its absorption of non-Chinese filmic cultures on its transnational path. As Teo notes, “[i]ndeed, in the 1920s wuxia imbibed influences from the medieval European romance, the Hollywood swashbuckler, the Western, the European detective story à la the Méliès serials; in the 1960s, there were obvious influences from the sword-and-sandal epic, James Bond spy thriller, Italian spaghetti westerns, and Japanese chambara” (192). Notably, what the mobility and hybridity of wuxia pian give rise to is an “abstract China” interlinked with a so-called “deterritorialized Chinese subjectivity.” And it is in this ironic sense that, before Lee, wuxia remained uniquely “Chinese.” Teo‟s essay, 165 however, manages to distinguish early wuxia films produced in Shanghai and those produced by “New School” filmmakers in Hong Kong from the 1960s on to penetrate the Hollywood market from Ang Lee‟s millennium Oscar-winning blockbuster. Teo stresses the fact that Lee‟s film breaks with several principles of wuxia that maintain the integrity of this “Chinese” genre. The most salient aspect of such a departure is the fact that, while the Hong Kong wuxia film, such as the brand of Tsui Hark, albeit a mixture of both traditional Chinese and foreign cultural strains, still “underlines the inter-connectedness of genre traditions within Hong Kong cinema rather than a conscious attempt to sell these movies to a foreign audience” (199), Lee‟s Crouching Tiger attempts to surmount any possible cultural barriers by trying to “appease proprietary feelings that a Chinese audience would have toward the wuxia genre, but at the same time his objective was to make a crossover movie that would appeal to a global audience unfamiliar with wuxia conventions,” and, according to Teo, therein lies the “fundamental contradiction” in Crouching Tiger‟s narrative structure (200). In other words, if wuxia has been a product of postmodernity, what the “pre-Lee” martial arts films, so to speak, responded to and helped shape was an “indigenous” postmodernity that took shape under particular East Asian cultural and political circumstances, whereas Crouching Tiger launched into a hybridizing process that involved a promotional trajectory of traveling abroad and returning home again, a trip that turns the picture from being cliché to becoming “foreign” to the Sinophone audience. In this sense, producing images that circulate among the Sinophone communities and are 166 disseminated through the apparatus of the North-American cultural industry, not only has Ang Lee become a cultural agent who, possessing the cultural capital of the media technology, participates in what Aihwa Ong terms “the production and dissemination of cultural attitudes and norms about „Chineseness‟” (Ong, 1999: 161) 61 . His auteuristic efforts in the circuited translations back and forth the Western and the Eastern world set in motion a continual reconfiguration of the ethnic imagination of the “Chinese.” To take Teo‟s points further, what Lee achieves is beyond film adaptation that involves translating the literary into the visual and reorganizing the narrative to tailor it to a screen time frame. The production of Crouching Tiger indeed takes on a project of cultural knowledge production, where the collective fantasy of “quintessential” Chinese-ness is, despite the fact that the nature of wuxia film itself defies the concept of the term, to be transposed to the North-American film culture through a series of a certain type of “pedagogical” customization: 1) relatable cultural analogy (For example, strong female characters in this film have been noted by critics and the director himself alike to be identifiable for Western feminist viewers. Drawing on his previous directorial success of Sense and Sensibility, Ang Lee once explained to one of his female leads, Michelle Yoeh, that Shui Lien and Jen are the Asian version of the Dashwood sisters; and the last scene where Jen jumps off the cliff has frequently been compared to the last scene of Thelma 61 In Ong‟s discussion of such mediatized discursive space, her main subject of study is films and TV programs produced in the diasporic Chinese-language communities in Southeast Asia and America. 167 and Louise 62 ), 2) genre reformulation (the film begins with a series of establishing motif shots, the exposition of the relationships among characters, and the background story of the Green Destiny for the benefit of the Western audience, as is admitted by Lee in his commentary on the film, instead of opening with an action scene, as conventional wuxia film usually does), and 3) self-referentiality as a wuxia genre (consider the casting of Zheng Pei Pei, renowned for her female martial artist (xianu) characterization in the 1960s through the 1970s, the homage to King Hu in the bamboo grove and tavern fight scenes, and narratologically, and a scene where Shu Lien points out to Jen the fictional world of jianghu described in books). If the so-called “fundamental contradiction” pointed out by Teo presupposes the film‟s dilemma in addressing two different groups of audiences-- one coming to the theater with a certain expectation of this genre and the other with little foreknowledge about it-- then the film‟s successful publicity strategy and its reinvention of wuxia turn this contradiction into a situation where a new Chinese subject is formed by the seduction of the narrative; that is, the interpellation occurs the moment the self-identified Chinese viewer re-experiences an identificatory process in the imaginary order. Although this new Chinese subject anticipated to emerge in this visual identification does not necessarily 62 For example, Fran Martin in her essay, “The China Simulacrum: Genre, Feminism, and Pan-Chinese Cultural Politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” presents a compelling argument on the way Lee‟s film reinvents the Pan-Chinese tradition through the characterization of Jen. Martin argues that Crouching Tiger stages the pleasure of what she calls “allo-identification: identification with an image of an „other‟ or a subject significantly different in some way from the viewer‟s own self-identification” (Berry and Lu, 2005: 154). Addressing the 1990s pop-feminism and the nüxia [female knight-errant] subgenre, Crouching Tiger, according to Martin, achieves a “magical convergence of „China‟ and „the West,‟ tradition and (post)modernity, and Chinese folk legend and global pop-feminism” (159). 168 correspond to the experiences of a historical individual born with Chinese cultural heritage or lineage, through the fantastical representation of cinema, this subjectivity called into being, or “reassembled,” by a viewer, or “witness,” whose familiarity with the wuxia genre and the Daoist moral codes as well as living experiences under the global sway of Euro-American cultural ideology nonetheless at once reifies an ethnic image that imposes itself upon a racial body and situates this body in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone.” In this sense, as if granted the authorization to re-present “Chinese-ness,” Lee‟s film serves as a medium that channels, bilaterally, oriental fantasies and North-American aesthetic and cultural standards and seduces the viewer into reimaging herself as a subject coming to terms with the new order of postmodernity. Nonetheless, even if, as Fran Martin points out, the picture enables cross-identifications among audiences of different cultural backgrounds (here the notion of culture, instead of being circumscribed by national boundaries, is defined by knowledges or practices one is engaged in), one still cannot ignore the inequity of cultural representations between the East and West. This legacy of such inequity continues to affect the “self-ethnographization,” to invoke Chow again, of those cultures that were once objectified. Expanding Laura Mulvey‟s notion of to-be-looked-at-ness from gender inequality to postcolonial situations, Chow stresses the agency inherent in the spectacular re-presentation of the once inferior, non-Western other. In Chow‟s words, What this means is that in the vision of the formerly ethnographized, the 169 subjective origins of ethnography are displayed in amplified form but at the same time significantly redefined: what are “subjective” origins now include a memory of past objecthood—the experience of being looked at—which lives on in the subjective act of ethnographizing like an other, an optical unconscious. If ethnography is indeed autoethnography—ethnography of the self and the subject—then the perspective of the formerly ethnographized supplements it irrevocably with the understanding that being-looked-at-ness, rather than the act of looking, constitutes the primary event in cross-cultural representation. (180) It is this cultural memory of and the ethnic imprint on the Third-World body that lures the viewer, conscious of her imposed identity, into interacting with the Pan-Chinese images constituted in Lee‟s Sinophone films. This new order of postmodernity, characterized by the rapidly disseminated, or the so-called viral, mediatized imageries of “Chinese-ness,” is a condition in which this “Chinese” subject is demanded to see herself desired by the Western audience as images, and as she is invited to internalize the contradictions of the narrative and imagery, she is to embody, and therefore fill in, the gap of knowledges between the East and the West. And it is this second order of identification that the Chinese-identified viewer is also caught up in Lee‟s next Sinophone film, Lust, Caution, which I will discuss later in the chapter. II. The Martial Arts Hero Feminized: Sexual(ized) Drive in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon The original novel, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon [wohu canglong], is the title of the fourth part of Wang Dulu‟s pentalogy. Ang Lee‟s adaptation simplifies to a great 170 extent the lengthy development of the original plot and the intricate relationships among a large number of characters. The film is structured around two pairs of love relationships—Li Mu-Bai and Yu Shu-Lien on the one hand, and Yu Jiao-Long (“Jen” in the movie subtitle) and Lo Xiaohu (“Lo” in the subtitle) on the other — and punctuated with themes of revenge, transgression of laws, and restoration of order. The dynamics of the narrative is hinged upon the theft and the pursuit of the legendary Green Destiny Sword [qingming jien], which, in the beginning of the film, is presented by Li Mu-Bai to an aristocratic patriarch (played by Lee‟s long-time working partner, Lang Xiong) not only as a gift, but more importantly, as a gesture on the part of a master swordsman who seeks retirement from jianghu. The Green Destiny, a symbol of such an intersection between the jianghu underworld and the aristocratic social life, is stolen by an up-and-coming martial art talent, Yu Jiao-Long, a coming-of-age lady of nobility now betrothed to another bureaucratic family she resents. By secretly studying not only the illustrations but also the texts of martial art manual stolen from Li Mu-Bai‟s master by Jade Fox (Jiao-Long‟s illiterate martial arts tutor disguised as her handmaid), the young woman‟s skills have surpassed her teacher‟s at an early age. Jen‟s theft of the Green Destiny incurs interventions of Yu Shu-Lien and finally, Li Mu-Bai, and much like an initiation process of Jen into the chivalric world of jianghu, the encounters of Jen and the savvy martial art veterans not only coincide with an illicit reunion between Jen and Lo, a young man she encountered in a robbery initiated by Lo‟s gang and fell in love with, but they also reveal the feud between Jade Fox and Li Mu-Bai and accidentally bring to light 171 Jen‟s betrayal against Jade Fox. Starting slow in the beginning to set up the drama, the film then accelerates into a series of fight and chase scenes, until the action closes at Li‟s death brought upon him by Jade Fox, who also dies during the fight. Despite Shu-Lien‟s resigned, albeit bitter, forgiveness, after seeking out Lo on the Mt. Wudang and spending one night with him, Jen decides to leap over the cliff, a poetic yet ambiguous image that leaves the story open-ended. Observing the enthusiastic reception of the film in both the West and the East, Felicia Chan points out that cultural migrancy such as the one enabled by Crouching Tiger necessitates translation, during which, as suggested by Chen, the historicity that contextualizes a text is quite often suppressed. For instance, while for the Western audiences, feminist readings tend to call attention to the way strong female characters such as Jade Fox and Shu Lien are either vilified or unfavorably challenged as opposed to their male characters; In other words, the fact that the analysis of gender issues under scrutiny here is premised upon bourgeois-class individualism elides a crucially different sign system of jianghu that structures the social relationships in this film. To elaborate on Chan‟s point, for the Asian audiences who are familiar with the vocabularies of the martial arts narrative set in the feudal society, the kind of subjectivity assigned to each individual only makes sense when a social being is understood in relation to one another. Founded upon qing [emotional attachment] and yi [moral and chivalric commitment], jianghu thrives as a community of emotional debts and moral reciprocity and responsibility, whether it‟s brotherhood under oath or vengeful symbiosis between 172 nemeses. In other words, what Chan‟s essay brings to attention is the cultural gap generated by interpretations that tend to take out of context the elements defining the wuxia genre (in this case, imposing universalized Western bourgeois values upon specific non-Western conventions by suppressing specific cultural and historical circumstances). Indeed, in the imaginary community of jianghu, on top of the five relationships (emperor and ministers, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brothers, and friends) that are the cornerstone of Confucian cultural ideology, the agency of female martial art adepts such as Jade Fox and Yu Shiu-Lien needs to be understood beyond the dichotomy of woman/the oppressed and man/the oppressor. Like their male counterparts, they are also bound by moral obligations of master/disciple hierarchy and fraternal ethics in the name of xia that defines chivalric codes in general, and, at times, protocols of jianghu. Relationships founded on these criteria in turn correspond to Daoist philosophy that structures classic Chinese cultural ideology, circumscribes the transmissions of martial arts between generations, and sometimes overrides the gender rules dictated by the patriarchal order. In this sense, despite the hybrid nature of the wuxia genre, the analysis of the dynamics of social relationship in the film needs to go beyond Ang Lee‟s own facile comparison between the two sisters‟ struggles in filling in the position of the missing father in the Victorian, patriarchal world in Sense and Sensibility and Shu Lien and Jen‟s conflicts in the Qing dynasty in Crouching Tiger; or for that matter, the leap over the cliff at the end of the movie does not comfortably fit into the feminist readings that parallel the leap with the counterintuitive yet liberating jump of Thelma and Louise, 173 who seek to escape from the domestic role of housewife. This does not say, however, that gender is irrelevant here. On the contrary, it is precisely the deployment of modern gender codes that inflects the traditional code of honor governing the relationship between Mu Bai and Shu Lien on the one hand, and the feudal and filial order (lun and xiao) binding Jen‟s relations with other characters on the other, and turns Crouching Tiger into a site of translation not only from the pan-Chinese to the Euro-Amercan cultural habitus, but from the archaic to the modern. More significantly, such a transition that crosses over the temporal and geographical gap between the modern and the premodern, and between the East and the West, is embodied by Jen. Almost as an anti-hero, Jen is portrayed by Lee as the central character that at different times of the story is the object of desire for other characters. In both Wang‟s original novel and Lee‟s cinematic adaptation, Jen drives the story characterized by Li Mu-Bai, Yu Shu-Lien, Lo Xiao-Hu, and herself. Certainly, in Wang‟s novel, the fringe characters implicated in Yu Jiao-Long‟s ever-escalating trials and tribulations she mostly brings upon herself are in a much greater number and more fully developed. And the social network in which Jiao-Long 63 is inadvertently implicated in re-inscribes the identity constituted by one‟s relation to another in a community. But it is in Lee‟s movie that the sense of in-between-ness is focalized and intensified with not only Jen‟s double-identity and her secret mobility between the underworld and the aristocratic society, but more 63 In order to distinguish between Ang Lee‟s adaptation and Wang Dulu‟s original novel, I use Jiao Long to refer to the novelist counterpart of Jen in the movie. 174 importantly, her reluctance to come to terms with the laws of the two realms she is entangled in. Both empowered and burdened by her superior lineage and prodigious talent in mastering martial arts, Jen‟s/Jiao Long‟s movement driven by sheer will is not only predestined by her father‟s appointment in Xingjiang and relocation to Beijing, but by the consequences of her theft of and obsession with the Green Destiny. In Lee‟s cinematic reinterpretation particularly, Jen‟s traverse between the her father‟s premise that heavily guards her virginity and the wilderness of the Gobi desert where she develops a love affair with Lo, between her mundane domestic life as a noblewoman and her close combats as a knight-errant with other swordsmen, and between her ambivalent love-hate relationships with Jade Fox and Li Mu-Bai renders her the sole, most fully-developed allegorical character. In other words, Lee‟s characterization of Jen, rather than Mu Bai, presents itself as the point of tension between communal responsibility and individual freedom, a theme, as has been noticed by critics, that often informs both Ang Lee‟s English-language and Chinese-language films. However, whereas in movies such as Pushing Hands, Wedding Banquet, Ice Storm, or even later on, Brokeback Mountain, social mores and familial obligations seem to eventually prevail over individualistic desires and needs, in Crouching Tiger, an unhinged force represented by Jen repeatedly breaks through traditional proprieties. What needs to be pointed out, nonetheless, is the inherent Foucauldian repressive hypothesis at work in Lee‟s presentation of Jen‟s destructive 175 impulses and waywardness. Jen‟s character is an embodiment of a series of obsessive rule-breaking. Such an impetus that sets in motion the plot of the movie implicates the rest of the cast in different manifestations of sexual desires. And it is precisely the sexualization of the break-away of traditions that not only sets Lee‟s film apart from its original novel, but it produces a transnational Chinese subjectivity inextricably linked to a nostalgia for an irretrievable past that is reinvented time and again. And much like the Freudian fort-da game, it is the reiterated theme of crossing the threshold from the putatively repressed China to the modern values that prioritizes individual desires which in turn sustain such nostalgia. Antithetical to Shu-Lien, whose respectable social status and unconventional singlehood in jianghu gives her agency but who, in the movie, is nonetheless immobilized emotionally by her single-minded infatuation with Li Mu-Bai, Jen‟s compulsive movement and wandering is frequently spurred on by her obsession with a certain object (the Green Destiny and the jade comb, for example) or by her whimsical, alternating alliance and antagonism with other characters. In other words, almost untamable, Jen is much less a securely interpellated subject than a force of the Lacanian real that persistently provokes other social subjects‟ desires without fully satisfying them. In this sense, Jen is at once a destructive death drive that attracts the other characters to their demise and a life force that motivates every move of their action. What the repeated transgression of boundaries achieves, in effect, is a proliferation of sexual expressions transported by her movement. If, as has been pointed out by critics, the Green Destiny is 176 indeed a Lacanian objet a, whose superb craftsmanship establishes itself a reputation of the supreme piece of weaponry, Jen‟s unhinged obsession with the unrivaled power invested in this sword, compounded by the fact that she has neither aspiration in the noble circle, nor the desire to be fully integrated into jianghu, puts her in a contiguous relationship with the object that generates significations in the Symbolic order of both the nobility and the underworld. Hence, as Jen and the sword become metonymic of one another, and both turn into signs that set in motion the chain of signifier, she becomes a force of jouissance that at once re-activates desires in the Symbolic order and unsettles such an order for being an undefinable force coming from the Real. And it is this force of the Real that revises the terms of the oriental China locked in an ahistorical past into an order that demonstrates mutual influences, appropriation, and antagonism between the East and the West. This is mainly achieved by the film‟s killing off of two main characters that represent the past. Li Mu-Bai‟s intention to domesticate Jen so that she won‟t “turn into a poisonous dragon” not only disrupts his conjugal engagement with Yu Shu-Lien, a union that will eventually place him in a proper social relationship, but the transgression on the part of a father-figure like him leads to his unheroic death towards the end. While in both the movie and the novel, Li represents the enforcer of the law that sees to it that Jen be corrected as a delinquent who steals the phallic symbol, a token of mutual recognition between society and the underworld, it is predominantly the film‟s emphasis on the fact that this “genuine man” [zhenren] of the Wudang clan, who strives to achieve the state of mental perfection and is well-versed in 177 the wisdom of Zen, chases the young woman in the name of rehabilitating her by making an exception of taking a female disciple with a similar tenacity as Jen‟s that sets itself apart from the novel 64 . Such persistence unfolds into a series of seductive scenes, including the poetically choreographed fight scene at the bamboo grove and Jen and Li‟s no less sexually-charged interactions in a cave scene. While the former ends in Li‟s symbolic attempted penetration of Jen‟s when he gently presses her forehead with his fingers to “enlighten” her, followed by Jen‟s desperate leap into the water to retrieve the Green Destiny thrown into the lake by Li, in the latter, Jen, drugged by Jade Fox, makes sexual advances at Li, who, in turn, comes in close physical contact with her when bringing her to through qi transmission. Aside from the other cave scene in which a dehydrated and famished Jen is nursed by Lo in Xinjiang, an encounter that quickly turns into their love-making and development of a nearly conjugal relationship, the second one, symbolic of the twin effects of sexual and death drives, also stages Jade Fox‟s death in her fight with Li. Almost as a duel over a love triangle, the fight ends in Jade Fox‟s elegiac last words on her longing for Jen, an infatuation intertwined with love, betrayal, and a desire to kill. For Jade Fox, Jen represents everything she can never attain: the privilege of literacy, the prodigious talents for martial arts, and an alliance with Jen as two swordswomen braving the world of jianghu. As is observed by Chan, the death of this inadequate mentor/master played by 64 Lee himself also calls attention to this reversal of master-disciple relationship in his film, which, conventionally is a pursuit of the disciples for the master in order to acquire from him (on rare occasions, her) the secretive martial arts skills. 178 Zheng Pei Pei, who in the 60s and 70s reigned as the most renown female actor in Shaw Brothers‟ early wuxia films based in Hong Kong, signals the end of an era now replaced by the new face of Zhang Ziyi. Indeed, the elaboration of pathos in Lee‟s rendition surrounding Jade Fox not only plays down the conventional thematic opposition between “good” and “evil,” but invokes sympathy from the viewer for a woman stunted in her aspiration for self-fulfillment. The emotional debts that define human relationship in jianghu thus translate, on the part of the cinematic Jade Fox, into her frustrations in her attempt to fulfill her desires along the axiom of inter-personal liasons: her sexual relationship with Li‟s master in hope of getting the access to the secrets of the Wudang martial arts, and her Sapphic affection for Jen in her desire for companionship. In Wang‟s novel, the theme of betrayal is much attenuated in that Jiao Long‟s master is indeed a man who discovers by chance the Wudang manual. Jade Fox comes in the picture as a cunning, though illiterate, shady character who seduces the brother of Li‟s master, Gao Langqiu, in order to steal the manual. After he dies and the manual accidentally falls in the hands of Gao, who later becomes Jiao Long‟s master, Jade Fox and Gao strike a deal to keep as secret Gao‟s illegitimate possession of the manual and pose as a married couple. Endowed with much less of emotional depth than her cinematic counterpart, though quickly killed off by Yu Shu-Lien in her attempt to steal the Green Destiny, Jade Fox is more successful in negotiating her terms in her pursuit of the manual and has little emotional investment in her relationship with Jiao Long other than in matters that serve her self-interest. Compared to the novel, the bitterness and devastation 179 of Zheng Pei Pei‟s character not only turns her into a victim of gender inequality (that women are not allowed to become disciples of the Wudang school of martial arts), but also of circumstances (that her notorious reputation as a thief and her illiteracy relegate her to the lower rung of the jianghu hierarchy). Accorded the emotional complexity, Zheng Pei Pei‟s Jade Fox suffers the angst of aspiration, unrequited love, and vengeful fury as a relatable modern female individual. As opposed to the novelistic Jade Fox, whose disregard for the economy of qing and yi at once marks her as a villain and liberates her from reciprocal obligations in the community of jianghu, Lee‟s revision of the character portrays a woman trapped in precisely those terms. The affect thus generated around this character, for the Asian audience familiar with Zheng‟s filmography, readily spills over to the nostalgic send-off of Zheng Pei Pei as the ultimate xianu/swordswoman of King Hu‟s movies. Similarly, Li Mu Bai‟s unheroic death— as he is poisoned by one of Jade Fox‟s flying needles during the fight— produces an elegiac sentiment that sets the tone for the rest of the film. As the rest of the storyline focuses on Jen alone, the sentimentalism is carried over in her reunion with Lo, which turns out to be their last rendezvous. The pathos of loss finally becomes the tenor of Jen‟s leap over the cliff. Despite the ambivalence of this leap, for which the reason is never given and the result of which is never made known to the audience, Jen‟s overpowering sorrow nonetheless wraps up the death of the traditional patriarch, which in turn completes what is usually considered the saga of the emasculated father throughout Lee‟s Father trilogy. The compromise of the father figure in the 180 Chinese feudal tradition, in Crouching Tiger, culminates in the sexualization of a new female icon. Compared to the cinematic Jen/Jiao Long, the novelistic Jiao Long‟s recalcitrance to both the code of chivalry and the customs of the aristocratic world are accounted for as arrogance. Such personality flaw leads to near irreparable consequences that end in the fall of her family (the death of her mother and her father‟s forced retirement from the officialdom after her family is shamed by her illicit affairs with Lo and her broken betrothal to Lu Junpei). In the novel, Jiao Long suffers from an emaciating sense of guilt and has more than once been subjected to her in-laws‟ blackmail and manipulations in exchange for the good name of her family. Her ritualistic leap over the cliff is performed in the name of filial piety as a way to atone for the downfall she has brought upon her family. However, the atonement turns out to be Jia Long‟s complete break from her family ties altogether. Without any explanation in the narrative, she survives the leap, is presumably the anonymous visitor to Lo‟s lodging, and after spending a night with him, disappears only to re-emerge as the protagonist in Wang‟s next book, having given birth to a male child. In Wang‟s works, Jiao Long‟s impetuousness leads to a series of consequences that eventually sever her from her noble heritage and push her into the underworld of jianghu. In the next book following Crouching Tiger, she is fully embroiled in the affairs of the world of martial arts as she becomes a vengeful mother attempting to recover her son that was secretly swapped for a female child, whom she nonetheless raises as her own. The agency granted to Jiao Long in Wang‟s novel, 181 compared to Jen in Lee‟s rendition, is not unusual in the wuxia genre. It is in this sense that the fantasy world of jianghu, as the underside of the premodern feudal society, becomes a space in which, much like Bakhtin‟s notion of the “carnivalesque” force of the novel, with the rigid social and gender hierarchy subverted and authority de-privileged, the feudal hegemony is “softened,” if not turned upside down. In this sense, Jiao Long‟s increasing involvement in jianghu empowers her as a female martial arts adept who engages in continual negotiations and contestations with the law of the Other. Contrary to the communitarian web in relation to which personhood is defined in the novel, in the film, the familial relationship recedes into the background as the filmic narrative engineers an economy of individual desires. If the metonymic relationship between Jen and the Green Destiny sets up the axioms of the erotic dynamics of the movie, through which premodern feudal structure is recalibrated into modern individual relationships, the constitution of this new Chinese subject manifests itself as departure from what has been considered “essentially Chinese”: Daoism, Confucianism, and the hierarchy of jianghu. If Li or Yu rehearse Daoist or Confucian mantras throughout the film, the reiteration of abstract or abstruse philosophies more often than not generates an seemingly sophisticated aura soon to be dissipated by bourgeois social values embodied in Li and Yu‟s or Jen and Lo‟s individualist romance, or transgressive obsessions articulated in the love triangle. As I have mentioned above, such a movement connotes a self-reflexive turn of this wuxia picture against itself as a genre. The rolling of the film itself, in reiterating the wuxia tradition, dissolves the pre-modern imagery of 182 Chinese-ness that defines this very tradition. And while, along with the death drive embodied by Jen as a pure destructive force, characters such as Li Mu Bai and Jade Fox come to their demise, the much debilitated patriarchal authority represented by Li and the classical icon of swordswoman reincarnated in Jade Fox played by the now aged Zheng Pei Pei point to atomized, superficialized, individualistic desires and pathos. In other words, in the “re-enactment” of the wuxia genre, as the characterization constitutes and rehearses the very moment of being “released” from the social structure of jianghu and feudal China, qing and yi is replaced by libidinous cathexis that nonetheless lingers nostalgically on the moment of loss (read: the deaths of Li as the patriarch and of Jade Fox as the old xianu). In this sense, although Jen‟s rebelliousness dismantles the law of jianghu and society, the sexualization of such a force also turns this putative feudal past into a fetishized cultural memory to be inherited by the ethnic Chinese. III. The Fabulation and Authentication of the Chinese: Points of Contact between Hollywood Aesthetics and Martial Arts Sensibility Not limited to characterization, in Crouching Tiger, the self-referentiality of the wuxia genre tradition facilitates the splitting of the ethnic self into objectified cultural images and subjectivity thus formed in the process of what Chow refers to as self-ethnographization. Several fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, for a wuxia genre aficionado, are emblematic in their tributes paid to an older generation of wuxia filmmakers and actors, specifically King Hu‟s martial arts films. As Chia-chi Wu points 183 out, In a fight episode set in a tavern, the confrontations between a horde of jianghu martial arts adepts and the cross-dressed Jen, who, after escaping from her disrupted wedding procession, decides to explore the world disguised as a man, calls attention to the genre itself with a caricature portrayal of stock characters who come forward to introduce themselves with generic appellations and mannerism. Offended by Jen‟s arrogance and disregard to jianghu protocols, the adepts‟ ensuing fight with Jen is presented in a choreographed theatricality, in which Jen‟s every winning move is synched to each line of her improvised poem. Such a design is not uncommon in a conventional wuxia film. Highlighting wuxia‟s lineage of regional performance arts, Crouching Tiger grants the audience the director‟s vantage point, which disengages the audience momentarily from identifying with the central characters. And it is this very moment where the viewer is reminded of her position as a viewer sitting in the theater and enjoying the traditional Chinese art that reinforces a second order of identification, as the well-choreographed scenes call attention to the form itself and momentarily disrupts the viewer‟s internalization of the diegesis. This caricature of idiosyncratic jianghu characters indeed serves as a signal between the viewer and the director, who, vis-à-vis another intended audience, the non-Chinese, by sharing certain “ethnic knowledge,” are implicated in a collusive relationship. Nonetheless, instead of cultural reification, the conscious objectification of the wuxia genre indeed (re)turns it into a trope that, in recognizing its fictionality, the self-reflexive viewing experience enables the translation of the concept of the genre in the sense of word-for-wordness; namely, the two-fold 184 detachment instituted both formally and phenomologically allows the term wuxia to become a floating signifier that is associated with Chinese-ness in the mere sense that in the era of globalization, they both point to a sense of constructedness and as such, the impossibility of essentialization. To return to and nuance Teo‟s notion of “fundamental contradiction” manifested in Crouching Tiger, the paradox therefore lies in the constitution of the new Chinese subjectivity in the film, which is at once predicated upon parasitical references to archaic cultural images and understood as a drive of escape embodied by Jen from the feudal world. And although it is a Chinese-language film, by speaking the filmic language of the majority (read: the West), Crouching Tiger unfolds itself as a morphogenetic process of mingling, contamination, and interpenetration that transforms and revises notions wuxia/Chineseness that are “re-assembled” in the film. Nonetheless, if the dynamics of the characters and the parody of the form itself in the movie constitute an ever-transformative force, Lee‟s decision not to dub over the actors‟ various Chinese accents is one that gestures toward a Cartesian subjecthood, which assumes an intrinsic, indivisible individual identity. In view of the majority of criticisms that see the film as an embodiment of the untotalizable notion of “Chinese-ness,” I argue, however, the self-ethnographization of Lee‟s film has its limits in its “fable-ness.” The film expresses an intention to re-present authentic materiality, which, in this case, is achieved by underscoring the coherence between voice and image. Insofar as Lee‟s nostalgic fabulation of cultural China frees the signifier of “China” from orientalist knowledge construction that keeps the putative Chinese culture in an eternal time-lag, 185 very much in line with the global trend of iconographic stardom in popular culture, Crouching Tiger subscribes to “realist” representation in the sense that the actors‟ diverse Sinophone identities, conflated with the characters they play, are to be “faithfully” translated onto the silver screen. As cinema itself has conventionally been considered a medium of representation that tends to erase its inherent heterogeneity by minimizing differences and thus producing and reproducing socio-cultural ideologies through mise-en-scene, movements created by sequences of frames, sound effects (especially through dubbing and soundtrack), and so on, the director‟s decision to break the traditions by imbuing the characters with the actors‟ actual voice not only achieves the suturing effects of authentication (in the most primary sense, the disembodied voice invading the screen from the off-the-scene dubbing is spatialized, synchronized with, and thus “re-embodied” by the actors themselves), as realist film narratives do. But as such, it highlights and reinforces the integrity of the international, iconographic status of the celebrity actors (both Chow Yen-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, in particular, who had become household names at this point in both East Asia and the U.S.). In this sense, their physical presence and stature re-presented and completed by their “real voice” on screen competes with, if not overpowering, the narrative of the film itself. It is precisely these iconic images that in turn become specimens of the so-called diverse Chinese ethnicities defined by accents. Hence, for Ang Lee, to abandon the traditional dubbing in Sinophone films, especially the wuxia genre, signifies an approximation to ethnographical reality and, more 186 importantly, as mentioned above, access to an organic quality that is considered the very core of a modern subject: I like using provincial accents in movies. This has to do with my upbringing and the needs of the films. I grew up with the mainland Chinese. My life was surrounded by the polyphony of dialects and accents, which, of course, included Taiwanese. Dialects are the accumulated essence of languages; sometimes they are more colorful and vivid and a lot of fun, like the Chinese communities. The hybridization of languages is a reflection of the reality. It‟s second nature to me to add in dialects. […] One of the many important functions of language is expressing emotions. When actors get rid of exaggerated performance, the delivery of stories relies on dialogues, voice, and accents. In addition to expressive dialogues, voice and accents carry the qualities and character of the actors and serve as a major medium to express multi-layers of meanings and psychology. Therefore, to abandon the authentic voice and dubbing it with someone else‟s voice speaking the standard Mandarin is fake-ness on top of fake-ness. The dubbed standard Mandarin deviates from voice and accents. To me, that is more insufferable than listening to Chinese language spoken with an accent and inflected tones. One can at least feel the essential qualities of someone‟s voice and tone in his or her accented Mandarin. That‟s why I found it difficult to give up Michelle Yoeh. I know she has difficulties with pronunciation. But I still wanted to cast her. Even the senior dubbing expert from Beijing asked me not to change the cast, for it is so much more moving to let her voice speak. (147-48) 65 Here the constitutive paradox of cinema is epitomized by Lee‟s own defense of his choice of dubbing. On top of his desire to bring forth an ethnological representation of what constitutes “Chinese-ness,” as is explained by Lee himself, the decision to capture the 65 我喜歡在電影裡使用鄉音，這跟我的成長環境有關，也和片子的需要有關。從小我就住在外省人的圈子裡，生活裡就是各地方言、各省口音組成的混聲大合唱，當然包括台語。方言是日積月累的語言精華，有時候比國語還精彩傳神，充滿趣味性，華人世界本如此，語言混雜是我們生活現實的反應，加入各地語言，對我來說是件很自然的事。 (147) 語言的重要功能之一，即傳達情意。當演員捨棄誇張性的演出時，戲很多依附在對白、聲音及腔調上，除了對白達意外，聲音即腔調則載負了演員很多的本質及個性，成了傳達多層意義及心態的主要媒介。所以要我捨棄原音，換上旁人的聲音，講標準國語，那是「假上加假」。配了音的標準國語，是聲音、腔調都走味，對我來說，比聽有口音的、變腔調的華語還要難過。腔調、口音不標準，至少還能感覺到人的聲音及腔調的本質，為此我難以割捨楊紫瓊，我知道她發音及腔調都有問題，但我還是要，連北京的配音老師傅都說，拜託你不要換，聽她本人說真的比較感動。 187 “essence” of the characters channeled by the actors‟ real voice, accordingly, is key to providing insights into the humanity, an modern(ized) autonomous and unique soul, so to speak, and a genuine-ness of the enunciating subject, which, at this point, is both the performer and the character. It is this modernist nostalgia for an organic and coherent individuality that underlies the narrative and the thematics of the film itself; and such realism, in conjunction with Lee‟s mastery in the classic Hollywood formulaic narrative through which knowledge is constructed and received, implies a pedagogical aesthetic flow in the reverse direction from the West to back the East. Indeed, conscious of the way his American film and theater training informs his making of Sinophone films, Lee declares his intention of “elevating” the quality of Sinophone film conventions in his defense of dubbing decision: Frankly, in the film, Chow speaks better Mandarin then Chen Shuibien, Tung Chee-hwa [the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China], and Jiang Zeming. I think his Mandarin is 90% perfect. Yoeh has more difficulties in both pronunciation and accent though. But I think the essence of one‟s voice expresses emotions in a way that is more moving than the dubbed standard Mandarin. That‟s why I could not help preserving the actors‟ proper voices. There is nothing I can do if a group of Taiwanese viewers take that part of the film to task. But I was saddened to hear the criticisms from Taiwan that I didn‟t do anything about the accents because this film was made for the Western audience. That was not what I thought. To be fair, my films need to be examined by the Western standards, especially since I was trained in Western theater. This is what I do. So when I was making the film, I knew what didn‟t meet the Western standards, especially the Western arthouse standards. I am vain. I wanted to elevate the quality of the mainstream national film, bragging about it [literally: sticking gold onto the face of the national film] and being vainglorious [punching my 188 own my face so that it‟s swollen enough for me to claim I‟m fat]. (305-06) 66 What is implied in Lee‟s manifesto-like statement to improve the quality of the conventional Sinophone genre of wuxia and to sell it on the international market is indeed an intention to sublate the contradictions into a globalized and therefore homogenized cultural particular that circulates back to Sinophone regions and redefines the film aesthetics. Lee‟s modernist nostalgia for the organicity of individual identity obligates us to rethink the question of the audience‟s disappointment with the aggressivity of the various accents that disrupt what wuxia is supposed to be. Clearly the Sinophone audience is well aware of the fact that Mandarin Chinese is never a pure language with a unified accent. If one of the premises of becoming what Chritian Metz calls an “all-perceiving subject” is the viewer‟s recognition of the unattainability of the real and the complete surrender to the replacement of the irredeemable real by the virtual reality that is film, what is unsettling for a viewer long-immersed in the tradition of wuxia in novels, comic books, and films, however ironic it might sound, could precisely be Crouching Tiger‟s attempt to “re-authenticate” the purely fantastic dimension specific to this genre. In other words, compared to other fantasy genres such as science fiction, mythic romance, or adventure 66 憑良心講，周潤發在片中的國語講得比陳水扁、比董建華、比江澤民都好，我覺得他的國語百分之九十是沒問題的。楊紫瓊的發音及腔調是有問題。但我覺得聲音本質能夠傳達的情緒比聽配音的標準國語要感動人，所以我還是割捨不下，保留原音。但台灣某些觀眾要批評，我也沒辦法。不過聽到有些來自台灣的批評說，這部片子是拍給西方觀眾看所以不在乎口音時，我很難過。當初我的想法並非如此。也許公平一點的講法是，我的片子需要西方眼光檢驗，尤其我受了很多西方戲劇教育，這是我的本行。所以拍片時，我知道哪些東西是通不過西方標準，尤其是西方的藝術院線。我愛面子，想提升主流國片的品質，為國片臉上貼金，打腫臉充胖子。 189 films, the problematic moment triggered by the actors‟ “original” voices in the movie may not arise from the infringement upon a homogeneous Chinese ethnographic imagination, but indeed from Lee‟s innovation of the wuxia convention, a design that suggests an intention of eroding the boundaries between fantasies achieved by the “unnatural” dubbing of an accent-less Chinese and the putative reality endorsed by the original voice of the celebrities. In this sense, Lee‟s declared restoration of what is supposed to be a truer, more accurate representation of spoken Chinese language through a medium that is fundamentally “a representation of representation” might indeed conjure up a reductive picture of “Chinese-ness” despite the film‟s viability in intervening in the cultural discourses worldwide. After all, jianghu, the fantasy world inhabited by martial arts adepts and knights-errant that operates according to a different set of laws yet still interacts closely with society, with its superhuman kung fu fighting, qi-transmission, and flying techniques, is meant to be a space where abundant imagery of racial hybridization in characterization frequently subverts the notion of a “natural” Han race. IV. The Filial Son, the Runaway Father, the Sentimentalization of the Chinese Male Subjectivity The sense of inadequacy suggested in Lee‟s comments on guopian [national film] in terms of “meeting the Western standards” not only endorses the hegemony of the Hollywood filmmaking conventions and the exigency of translating Chinese culture into the lingua franca of Hollywood production. More importantly, within this wholesale 190 subscription to the dominant Hollywood cultural industry and out of the tension between the deconstruction of the wuxia genre and the invention of new ethnographic fetish (which, in the Marxist sense, connotes the commodification of “authenticity” of a more pristine aesthetic quality à la Hollywood style) to be consumed no less by the Western audience than by Sinophone viewers, is the continual mystification of an auteuristic persona obsessing film critics around the world: an outsider of both the American and his native Taiwanese cultures who somehow is capable of delivering powerful and incisive cinematic interpretations of both cultures, a prodigal son seeking to break out of Chinese traditional patriarchal expectations, a reticent director sculpted by the repressive Confucian upbringing, a former struggling Taiwanese filmmaker/stay-home father in New York for six years before he garnered his first film award with Pushing Hands. In short, the double, or even triple, national subject position (American and Chinese/Taiwanese) Lee inhabits in turns has brought about another round of fethisization of the filmmaker himself. In film reviews and criticisms, Ang Lee has been construed as synonymous with “transnational” and “global.” Considered a maestro in the United States, especially after his second award-winning American film, Brokeback Mountain, and a national treasure in Taiwan who accumulated credentials from his feats of staking out his territory in the North American film market, Lee looms large in most of his films, including most of his Anglophone pieces, that are frequently considered to be informed of the conflicts between Western individualism and Chinese family ethics (Berry: 2007). It is therefore not unusual that critics juxtapose the director‟s biographical materials to 191 the portrayals of the patriarchs in Lee‟s Father Knows Best Trilogy and link Lee‟s relationship with his own father to the frictions between two generations in his Chinese-language films. As a young adult, Lee disappointed his father, a disaporic Chinese and principal of a prestigious boys‟ high school in Taiwan, when he failed twice in his college entrance examination. His decision to go to National School of Arts not supported as a promising path that reflects his intellectual, gentry-class family background, Ang Lee won an unexpected recognition and encouragement by his father when Hulk turned out to be a box office flop and the despondent filmmaker about to retire was pep talked by his father back into his next project, Brokeback Mountain. In this sense, Lee‟s hybridized cultural background reiterated and disseminated by the media and consumed by the fascinated public as an inspirational success story not only projects him as a role model of a Taiwanese achieving American dreams, but despite his public image of a demure Asian director and a filial son who constantly declares his love for Taiwan, in his Chinese-language films, the emotional attachment to the Chinese cultural roots and imaginaries and the collision and reconciliation between the Western and the traditional values played out in family melodramas are at times understood to be an elaborated cinematic attempt to castrate the patriarch by mourning his sapping authority. In other words, it is the confrontation with and reinvention of this father figure constantly invoked in Lee‟s biographical accounts, who expected prestigious academic achievements and superior socials status from his son like most feudal gentry-class Chinese patriarchs do, that informs the diasporic Chinese culture treated in the Father trilogy. 192 In view of the father figure whose patriarchal authority is challenged and recuperated in Lee‟s movie, Shi Shu-mei discusses the way Lee embodies the flexible national identity Taiwan assumes vis-a-vis its ambivalent relation with China and the U.S. Analyzing Lee‟s Father Knows Best trilogy and his working relations with the British cast and crew while making Sense and Sensibility, Shi points out how, under the sway of Americanism that steers Taiwan‟s politics and dominates its cultural practices, Lee poses as a filial son of Taiwan who resuscitates the Confucian patriarchal law about to be edged out by the westernization of the Sinophone communities and vows to win an Oscar award on the one hand, and as a citizen of model minority who strives to assimilate to the culture of American filmmaking on the other. Similarly, in the trilogy, the father figure‟s adaptation to western culture not only perpetuates the dichotomy of the modern and the premodern between the First and the Third World countries. But the gender politics implicated in the cultural minoritization manifests itself in the fetishization of the female characters in the three Sinophone movies and the weakening of the patriarch who thus poses no threat to the Western culture: In all three films, the patriarchs are situated outside the U.S. economy of gender. They are old, they are objects of love by other Asian women, and they pose no threat whatsoever to the dominant economy of masculinity and femininity. The only attractive Asian male figure, Wai Tung in The Wedding Banquet, is also appropriately emasculated as a gay man, hence nonnormative. Curiously, therefore, what brings tears and sighs of relief to the Taiwan audience—the pathos of the patriarch—poses no threat to the voyeuristic enjoyment of the American audience. The national subject and the minority subject are successfully fused. More than that, there is ample proof that the minoritization of Chinese culture through exoticism and eroticism has itself become the desirable means of consumption in Taiwan, confirming Edward 193 Said‟s fear of the “dangers and temptations” of employing Orientalist structures of cultural domination by the dominated upon themselves. (54) As is mentioned above in my discussion of Crouching Tiger, Lee‟s ambition in recaliberating Taiwan‟s national cinema by introducing the Hollywood model to Sinophone filmmaking certainly suggests an internalized assumption of the uneven degree of sophistication of cinematic production and aesthetic standards between the U.S. and the Sinophone cinemas. His take on the theatrical language of modern Chinese films which, according to his biography, he deems “immature” and “awkward” makes manifest this cultural prejudice. The subtext of Lee‟s comments on theatrical dialogues in Chinese cinema and theater indeed corresponds to Shih‟s point on the minoritization of Chinese culture, where an exigency of “catching up” with the aesthetic development in the Western culture is called for. Read in this light, the surrender of Li Mu Bai, the father figure, to the seduction of the anarchic drive represented by Jen, seems to reiterate the trope of an emasculated father in the trilogy. As has been pointed out by critics, the theme of a traditional Chinese father feeling powerless in the face of the disintegration of Confucian and heteronormative family values as well as the prevailing influence of westernization and globalization runs through Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman. In Pushing Hands, Mr. Chu epitomizes a castrated Chinese patriarch, who, struggling through Cultural Revolution and sacrificing for his offspring as a responsible and filial father preserving the family line, comes to the States to live with his son only to be trapped in 194 the apartment with an American daughter-in-law, whom he is unable to communicate with, speaking no English at all. In The Wedding Banquet, Mr. Gao, a father so anxious to see his son, Wai Tung, who works in the States, get married to a Chinese woman and bear him a grandchild, decides to see through his gay son‟s staged marriage to a Chinese aspiring artist, Wei Wei, who agrees to play along as a deal with Wai Tung, her landlord. Seeing that Wei Wei is pregnant with Wai Tung‟s child after an accidental sex that happens at the wedding night where both the bride and groom were drunk, Gao leaves the States with his mission accomplished, albeit with a deviant happy ending. The movie ends with Mr. Gao raising his arms at the airport security check, a poignant symbolic gesture of surrender by a former military general during the Chinese civil war, now an aged father compromised to the new world order of globalization. In Eat Drink Man Woman, a semi-retired widowed master chef, Chu, who has lost his sense of taste, is troubled with yet remains silent about his three daughters‟ love affairs. The film ends with an unexpected turn of events, where the father, to everybody‟s surprise, marries the daughter of a woman who, similar to him in age and background, has been enamored of him and considers herself his perfect match. The story closes with a frozen shot with the father and the second daughter holding a bowl of soup made by the latter after Chu critiques her cooking and is soon astounded to realize he has regained his sense of taste. Nonetheless, while critics tease out the multi-layered interplay of gender and ethnic relations that configure the transnational Chinese subjectivity, it also behooves us to delve further into the precarious heterosexual paradigm that is putatively overseen yet 195 barely maintained by a debilitated patriarch: even if in the Father trilogy the patriarch is portrayed in a sympathetic light, and undeniably the atmosphere of loss and nostalgia surrounds the disappearance of Confucian values, which, according to Cynthia Liu, indeed re-strengthens the heteronormative structure with these ill and senile fathers‟ passive-aggressivity, given the ambiguous characterization of Li Mu Bai in Crouching Tiger, how else could we rethink, or in Deleuze‟s terms, “deterritorialize” the ordeals suffered by these father figures that, instead of being replaced or “killed off” by the new world order represented by the next generation (for even in Crouching Tiger, the death of Chow Yen-fat‟s character resembles a post-coital collapse rather than a power usurpation after his sexually charged qi transmission to Jen‟s body), indeed transform? How could we think outside the gridlock of the unilateral cultural, economical, and political domination of the West over the East in our readings of Lee‟s works? Specifically, how, to build upon and perhaps to revise Shi‟s observation, does the pathos of these non-threatening avatars of Chinese patriarch unfold itself to be part of the “voyeuristic enjoyment” not only of the American audience, but very possibly, for the Sinophone audience as well? In other words, the adaptability of the father figure in these three movies, instead of being understood as passé or asexualized Asian males who either portray self-orientalization in this Sinophone trilogy or embody tragic caricatures of obsolete Chinese traditions, might indeed indicate these fathers‟ refusal to inhabit the position of the Confucian patriarch, or their attempt at becoming viable participants in, if not accomplices of, the postmodern conditions encapsulated in globalization? 196 In this sense, doesn‟t Mr. Chou at the end of Pushing Hands choose to break away from his family line that he risked his life to preserve when he decides to move out of his son‟s house and rent an apartment on his own? Isn‟t the white lie concocted by Wei-Wei, Wei Tung, and his partner Simon, unbeknownst to the trio, a re-enactment and parody of the patriarchal values understood and acknowledged by Mr. Gao himself as defunct rituals and practices in The Wedding Banquet? And could we not read the retired chef in Eat Drink Man Woman who shocks the rest of the cast in the end with his announcement of his engagement to the daughter of his neighbor as no less a (post)modern subject like his three daughters of the post-war generation that, lost and struggling to make sense of the atomization and alienation within the human communities, transgresses Confucian social proprieties to seek comfort in the mere tenderness of human relationship? In other words, could we not understand these patriarchs, played by Langhsiung, with the development of the plot, to be engaging in a process of traversing the reified imagery of the feudal China and being integrated into the global economy of cultural production, where the traditional hierarchy that structures social and familial relationships is flattened out to conform to the kind of individuation that is now a global order of social form? On this note, I would like to return to the last shot of Eat Drink Man Woman, where Mr. Zhu and his second daughter, Jiaqien, hold the bowl of soup made by the daughter, who followed the recipe of her deceased mother. After a brief argument with Jiaqien over the flavor of the soup, Mr. Gao realizes he regains his sense of taste and, as if overjoyed by this discovery, asks for another helping. In the much-discussed ending shot, Jiaqien 197 stands up to fill her father‟s bowl, which is then grasped by the overwhelmed father looking up to her and uttering his last line, “Daughter…” I argue that this particular shot connotes a reversal of social and familial order, for the father is indeed the grown-up child that has “left the nest” (Jiaqien ends up buying her father‟s house after he decides to move to a smaller apartment with his new bride to form another nuclear family) and is symbolically brought back to life, or rejuvenated, by having a new wife who now bears his child and by tasting his daughter‟s soup that is not made according to his recipe. The shot of father-daughter relationship, then, does not so much signify the passing down of family tradition from the patriarch to the unmarried daughter, as a single, financially independent woman, having decided to resume her career ambition, looking down with an almost maternal gaze at a man who, by selling the house his children grew up in and by marrying a divorcee his daughter‟s age, one-ups the other women in the household in their aspirations to break away from the traditional family and seek love and new values for themselves. But, to say that the portrayal of male characters in Lee‟s Sinophone films indicates a break away from the feudal tradition, therefore, might sound more optimistic than the underlying logic of cross-national culture export indicates. For undeniably, as in both Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, such a close, even identificatory, relationship with women‟s experience on the part of a man of patriarchal stature is presented in conjunction with the eroticization of such an experience. As is noted by critics, the export of Lee‟s portrayals of a contemporary Mainland Chinese 198 family in Taiwan such as the one in Eat and a chivalric fantasy world of jianghu in Crouching Tiger is packaged with an emphasis on the sexualization of Asian women. Shi Shu-mei has pointed out that the poster of Eat Drink Man Woman circulated for promotion on the North American market features the three daughters and the trailer peppers these young women‟s romantic encounters with exotic Chinese cuisine, the appetite for food and sex that comprises the two primitive desires of human beings, according to a saying in the Chinese classic Liji [The Records of Rituals], from which the title of the movie originates, thus turns into the worldwide appetite for the two exotic objects, Chinese cuisine and Asian women, of the so-called Chinese culture in the global promotion of the film. In a similar vein, the trailer of Crouching Tiger showcases a capricious Jen breaking through the patriarchal structure and hence produces a new sexual icon of Zhang Ziyi, “China‟s gift go Hollywood 67 ,” who was later on cast in films directed by other globally famed filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Wong Karwai, and in notably, Rob Marshall‟s the Memoir of Geisha (2005) and whose image soon began to be disseminated around the world in product endorsements and cross-cultural events. This “New Chinese-ness,” the sexualized Asian female imagery that represents a fusion of the classic and the postmodern, the chaste and the erotic, the docile and the transgressive, or, the East and the West, becomes a new paradigm of culture commodification labeled as “Chinese-ness” reproduced in Lee‟s Lust Caution. It is in the interpenetration, co-optation, and contestations among American and Chinese-language 67 Entitled “Ziyi Zhang: China‟s Gift to Hollywood,” Richard Corliss‟s article appeared in the April 10, 2005 issue of Times and introduced Zhang as an up-and-coming Chinese actress “going west.” 199 cultural productions that an identification with female sentimentalism or hysteria begins to revise the representation of Chinese subjectivity. V. Homecoming: Masochistic Woman, Melancholic China Lust Caution provoked controversy in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan because of its explicit sex scenes and its sympathetic portrayal of the collaborator for the Manchuria established by Japan. The movie also had to be released as NC-17 rated because of its full-frontal nudity scenes of both Tony Lieung Chiu-Wai and Tang Wei. Nonetheless, released in the theaters in Taiwan in its uncut version and garnering for Lee another Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival, the film attracted media attention mainly due to Lee‟s uninhibited display of emotions in front of the press. Choking and tearing up while being surrounded by the press with his leading actress, Tang Wei, Lee won over the viewers in Taiwan by expressing his gratitude for his folks‟ unconditional moral support and appreciation of his works. It is in the promotion of Lust Caution in Taiwan during the Mid-Autumn Festival in 2008, a tradition of family union, that Lee‟s image of the filial son of Taiwan 68 is repeatedly invoked and consumed; and along with his excessive sentimentalism, the cinematic adaptation of Zhang Ailing‟s [Eileen Chang‟s] cynical short story on the futility and tedium of human relationships was commended by the newly-elected president Ma Yingjeou to be a significant piece that gives us a glimpse of 68 The ambivalent position Ang Lee situates himself vis-à-vis his national identity is manifest in his constant declaration of his love for his homeland Taiwan at international film awards , his deep-rooted fantasies about cultural China, a discursive heritage in his second-generation Mainland Chinese background, and his self-proclaimed role of the translator between the Asian and the American cultures in his films. 200 the modern tragic history of China. The president, seeking to establish affiliation with the PRC, was also shown to choke back his tears in front of the cameras after the premiere. In lieu of a tragic hero and a femme fatale, the period movie of quasi-film noir style features a suffering college-girl-turned-undercover-mistress who dies almost willingly and a seductive collaborator who displays his emotions and vulnerability. The affect that saturates that film does not so much shape it into a detective thriller as a nostalgic melodrama that portrays a doomed love affair wronged by history. Targeted, as his previous films, at global as well as local audiences, the release of Lust Caution brings to the fore sentimental responses from the audience: an obsession of fans of Zhang Ailing and their jealous defense of more incisive, although more cruel, depiction of human nature in the original story. The imagination of nostalgic aficionados of the oriental city who are fascinated with the down-trodden, war-torn, yet exotic Shanghai in the 1940‟s and their search for bits and pieces of authentic representation in the movie. Political rhetoric of a KMT president whose election signifies a restoration of political power wrenched off the oppositional Party‟s hand after their eight years of administration. It is a rhetoric coupled with his reassertion of Taiwan‟s legitimate inheritance of modern Chinese history. And most notably, the aspirations of a second-generation Chinese Mainlander filmmaker and his sense of mission to re-present a suffering modern China plagued by imperialists and Nationalist armies. This is a part of Chinese history, as he has indicated in an interview with Long Ying-Tai, that needs to be rescued from oblivion. In other words, this picture soaked in a melancholy aura about a woman torn between an 201 illicit love affair and sworn patriotism in the time of war, a reading that is perhaps more in affinity with Zhang‟s original story, is romanticized in this film and appropriated by the viewer as the reminder of her or his own imaginary object-relation with the other. The pathos that is the tenor of the film comes from the sadomasochistic sex scenes transformed into mutual comforting of two agents suffering from the dictates of political ideologies. In Zhang‟s story, the misstep of a female undercover, Wong Chia-chi, is narrated in a satirical tone that mocks not only the sinisterness of patriotism but the absurdity of romance. In the original story, the execution of the female protagonist is concluded by her lover‟s words of triumph and vengeance, “he wants her to live as his woman, and die as his ghost” (Lovell 46). In other words, the narrative ends sardonically with a male reassertion of his virility with the objectification of a woman. At the end of the movie, however, Yi Mocheng mourns the tenderness of their short-lived affair by running his fingers through the bed she once slept in. And it is precisely the sense of suffering that invites identification from the viewer. In other words, if it is the unruly drive embodied by Zhang Ziyi‟s character in Crouching Tiger that speaks that double-tongue of the traditional and the modern, in Lust, Caution, this translatability of the Chinese-ness is articulated by a female body that suffers the pains of national wounds. The presentation of Wong Chia-chi‟s/Tang Wei‟s emotional predicament is inextricably linked to her contorted body that is seductive both in the pathetic and erotic sense. The sadomasochistic sex scenes are the culmination of the camera‟s voyeuristic caress of Tang Wei‟s naked body. This voyeurism coincides with audience‟s sadistic gaze at her 202 transformation from an innocent college student into an alluring mistress. In the film, Chia-chi‟s tenuous relationship with her father, who emigrated to England, remarried, and left her behind in China, is severed as Old Wu, a KMT special agent, burns her correspondences with her father. The practically orphaned and naï ve young female spy that dedicates her body to the patriotic cause can only enter martyrdom as an agent of the Party that breaches traditional female proprieties and thus forfeits her rights to be a socially integrated subject. The prostitution of her body is insinuated at the moment when she is shown to exchange a lingering look with a prostitute when she and her fellow students begin to execute their amateur assassination of Yi by framing one of Yi‟s subordinates in a brothel. That her interpellation into the Symbolic order is predicated upon becoming the unwanted and punishable woman is manifest in the way she is portrayed as a woman always thwarted in her romantic affections either for Yi or for Kwong Yu-min, the leading student in the drama club, who later becomes her associate working for the Republican Party. While Kwong seems inhibited by their work relations from pursuing their burgeoning mutual affection, Yi‟s love for her announces her death. This isolated heroine that plunges into self-abandonment in her choice of following through a naï ve patriotism nonetheless embodies an aura of decadence that appeals to the Western audience the way the cinematic representation of the Republican Shanghai does. Lee‟s detailed cinematic restoration of Shanghai in the 40s is intertwined with a narrative of a woman‟s emotional suffering that nonetheless spells out both torment and exhilaration. It was a time when the cosmopolitan city reached its peak in the 203 assemblage of both internationals (the Shanghai-landers) and job-seekers from other provinces of China and the city‟s development of vernacular culture that hybridized the local and the foreign (Zhen, 2005). Midway into the film, Wong Chia-chi, in reporting as an undercover agent to her superior of the Republican party against the imperialist Japanese government that takes over Shanghai in the 1940s, gradually loses her professional demeanor and displays increasingly stronger emotions as she explains to the two men in the room how the sexual relationship between her and her target, Yi Mocheng, has derailed in such a way that the roles of predator and prey have reversed. In the close-up shot, Wong forces her emotions upon the audience when she speaks almost directly into the camera: He knows better than you how to act the part. He not only gets inside me, but he worms his way into my heart. I take him in like a slave. I play my part loyally, so I too can get inside him. And every time he hurts me until I bleed and scream before he comes, before he feels alive. In the dark only he knows it‟s all true 69 . (195) The outburst persists as bouts of accusations of the inaction with which the Party has left her stranded and in danger. Language becomes the only element in this shot synchronized with Wong‟s contorted facial expressions of intense emotions: one cannot tell whether she is humiliated by Yi‟s violation of both her body and her mind or indeed is enraptured in re-experiencing her sexual intercourse with him in her hysterical language. Her ironic 69 你以為你指的陷阱是甚麼我的身子嗎你當他是誰他比你還要懂戲假情真這一套他不但要往我身體裡鑽還要像條蛇一樣的往我的心裡越鑽越深我得像奴隸一樣的讓他進來只有忠誠的待在這個角色裡面我才能夠鑽到他的心裡每次他都要讓我痛苦的流血哭喊他才能夠滿意他才能夠感覺到他自己是活著的在黑暗裡只有他知道這一切是真的 204 remark on the idea of playing her part loyally in order to penetrate the façade of the special agent is the retort against her superior‟s dramatic harangue on the dogma of patriotism: “loyalty to the party, to our leader, and to our country!” The ambiguous sentiments in Wong‟s trance-like protest insinuate multiple connotations in the trope of “loyalty.” A call for a solemn oath to conform and to obey, the two Chinese words zhong cheng that stand respectively for “whole-hearted-ness” and “genuine-ness,” imply a submission to a tyrannical demand that forbids betrayal and threatens with punishment. Therefore, for Wong to play her role loyally in her seduction of the collaborator, she must surrender her body and soul to the Republic of China, to subject herself to the law of the Party. That is, to answer the absolute call of the Other introjected as superego, in order to become a subject of a nation-state. A nation state that legitimizes itself through its declaration of the state of exigency and its irrational demand for obedience. But what troubles the notion of this total submission is the double-bind of playing an undercover role of seductress. Such loyalty in assuming the role of Mrs. Mai simultaneously translates into a call for betrayal. Only by willingly giving herself up to the seduction of Yi, only by living whole-heartedly and genuinely the bitter jealousy of a mistress and enduring, mastering, and enjoying the pains of the sadomasochist love-making with him, can she successfully break through his impermeable vigilance and gather inside information of the puppet regime. The surrender to the tyrannical power of nation state thus tips over into a total identification with the enemy as her object of love. Yi is no less enslaved by the dictatorship of nationalism. He demands in turn her empathy 205 with his psychological pains that can only be temporarily alleviated by voracious sexual desires. In this sense, Wong Chia-chi's melodramatic outbursts are more than a rebellion or even a protest: they are a scream that sucks in the insuppressible pain and issues the excessive libidinous cathexis through her mouth. If, as Zhang‟s original story intersects with the film adaptation at this one point in its characterization of Chia-chi, for her, “every time with Yi feels like taking a hot shower that washes off every bit of her depression, because now everything has a purpose,” then feeling pain is the only thing that keeps her alive. According to Juan-David Nasio, a painful scream is always an appeal to the Other. Calling it the expression of “the primordial powerlessness of being human,” Nasio interprets Freud‟s definition of this motor discharge as superego that is the “primal source of all moral motives” (107). Because as the earliest statement of an infant, albeit inarticulate, the scream is responded to by the mother‟s care and, in this first communication initiated by the mother, is transformed into speech, this voice whose meaning is given by the responder will from now on be uttered as a trace of the internalization of the Other. In this sense, aren‟t Wong Chia-chi‟s outbursts a kind of utterance, a plea for her pain to be interpreted by the viewer to whom she addresses at this juncture? If the violent utterance of pain an invocation of one‟s relationship to the overpowering yet incomprehensible Other, isn‟t Wong Chia-chi‟s emotional yet eloquent speech, which makes no sense to her superior precisely because it comes too close to uncovering the irrational and violent underside of patriotic rhetoric, indeed reminiscent of 206 the scream responded to and named by the Other? When the close-up of Chia-chi‟s contorted face demands our identification, doesn‟t the affect reminds us of our primeval relationship to the Other, our awareness of and desire for a holistic identity, which we can only access by looking at, or looking toward an imaginary Other? However, are they not, more than an expression of her helplessness and powerlessness, at once the most powerful form of self-reproach a subject inflicts upon herself? This reproach, like the moral voice of the law of the Other, is an indictment of Chia-chi herself for precisely the betrayal perpetrated by the most loyal subject. These outbursts are symptomatic of a subject‟s erotic relationship with the Other through the masochistic pain, for they express the most intimate proximity to the tyranny of the Other. By inflicting upon oneself such a sense of guilt and shame, one is at once the agent and the victim of such abusive power, and therefore in this self-splitting fantasy, one assumes the position of the Other, identifies with it, and feels its love for her. Nationalism, the source of pain, is therefore at once the anchor of Chia-chi‟s identity and the very force that undoes her. Her subscription to the patriotic cause begins with her participation in the students‟ drama club, where the college students‟ histrionic performances in propagandist plays that successfully stir up public emotions evolve into a naï ve and premature plan to assassinate collaborators. Their failed attempt nonetheless catches the attention of the Nationalist Party, who then enlists them into their espionage system. Performativity, then, for Chia-chi, becomes the only means that rescues her from the state of abjection as one of the wretched colonized in Shanghai during the time of war. 207 Only by faithfully playing the role of a seductress under the dictates of the Republican government can she assume a personhood. And like every other undercover agent, only by permanently staying in character can she avoid being captured and executed by the collaborationist government or committing suicide upon arrest as demanded by the Party. However, if her vows of patriotism are the only justification of her mere existence, and if as a result, the lines she delivers as Mrs. Mai gradually become her only language, then there remains nothing outside her performance. In other words, the performance constitutes her identity. Her breakdown caused by her confusion of her duty as an undercover agent with her psychic investment in being the love object of Yi brings her to a state of psychosis. For her, absolute loyalty to the Party is only possible in the form of betrayal, and her subjection to the demand of the nation-state only effects a detachment, if not expulsion, from the law of the Symbolic order. Here the threat of death manifests itself in two senses in Chia-chi‟s relation to the Other: 1) Falling in love poses death threats to both characters for the consequences of coming in too close contact with the enemy. 2) But it is at the psychic level of abandoning oneself into the liminal space between the Symbolic and the Real, between language and body, between articulations of words and the ineffable scream that both Chia-chi and Yi approximate to annihilation in experiencing the insufferable jouissance of the Other in their sadomasochistic indulgence in pain. Chia-chi and Yi‟s shared quandary thus epitomizes the paradox of the Other. As Nasio points out, one‟s relation with the Other is always experienced as the Freudian notion of 208 “perceptual complex of the other person” (108). That is, the Other that represents the Symbolic law always addresses the subject from the dual positions of the Imaginary and the Real. In Nasio‟s words, this Other who changes appears as another whose characteristics mirror my own characteristics, whose gestures mirror my own gestures, and so forth, in an interminable coming and going. In these permanent reflections, there is a work of rememoration, for these gestures recall my own, and when he or she is upset, his or her screams remind me of my own screams that cause me to relive my first painful experiences. (108) If her dedication to her role is motivated by her sympathy for the pain experienced by her war-torn country that is sung, dramatized, sublimated in the radical and absurdly exaggerated theatrical performance, at the same time, this Other also “appears, no longer as a similar human being, but as an inaccessible Thing (das Ding ), […] the inassimilable part of the Other, an uncanny and unchanging presence” (108). In other words, if Chia-chi‟s outbursts to which her superior desperately attempts to dismiss are not only an unleashed masochistic reprimand of the superego that accuses her of her moral depravity (for she loses her virginity for nothing since her first attempt at assassination fails, and the complete submission of her body in their violent sexual intercourse also lets down her psychological guard and compromises her professional performance); it is also an address to the void, a cry that turns one‟s gaze to the part of one‟s self that points to something foreign and inexplicable, something that cannot be contained either by the Symbolic power of language or the Imaginary identification with an imago. In this sense, if pain is a physical sensation that expresses a subject‟s plea for love to 209 the Other coupled with her total identification with it and the masochistic sexual desire to be completely consumed by the demand of the Other, then this moment of Chia-chi‟s outbursts accidentally allows her to traverse the boundary of pain to the state of jouissance and occupy the very place of the Other. On the one hand, patriotism represents one register of the law of the Other that is internalized and causes the permanent split of ego and superego in one‟s psyche (as demonstrated in Chia-chi‟s self reprimand). On the other hand, the second order of the Other that seduces rather than punishes the subject is the unrepresentable realm of the Real that is outside the Symbolic order, the pure force of ultimate enjoyment. In the three scenes of sexual intercourse, Chia-chi is at first surprised by Yi‟s physical abuse and then struggles to reverse the position of domination. The mise-en-scene of these scenes finally captures the two lovers from a high-angle, which pins down the two interlocked bodies in a shot that resembles a tableau vivant. In Ang Lee‟s own interpretation of this unusual shot, this is an image inspired by a Buddhist scroll of hell. Although his own interpretation concludes with the notion of the eternal suffering that aims at invoking pity and empathy, it is nonetheless at this moment that the intercourse is asexualized. In these three scenes, the rubbing of the two bodies with wounded egos stops arousing in the viewer the excess of need that is the sexual desire, but turns into mere bodies that resemble the stillness of death. And it is at this moment that the affairs between Chia-chi and Yi turns these two characters into döppelgangers that are both in the throes of the abusive Other (which, for both of them, are the omnipresent surveillance of the two political regimes) and momentarily attain the state of 210 lawlessness (the voracious yet impossible demand to merge completely with the alien Other). This total submission gone awry, the tortured body driven by amorphous aggressivity that aims at extinguishing both pleasure and pain and achieve the state of stasis, the outbursts that (dis)articulate the language of the law, however, are to be reinscribed into the semiotics of maternal love. In a scene where Chia-chi is invited to meet Yi in a geisha house, she proposes to sing a local tune for him, considering herself a better singer than the professional singers in the house. In this episode that does not appear Zhang‟s original text, Yi is moved to tears. Before his emotional response to the song, he scoffs dotingly at Chia-chi‟s playful taunt that the reason he wants to meet her here is because he wants her as a geisha. For the first time, Yi reveals his vulnerability and confesses to her that he knows better than her about prostituting oneself. This moment of tenderness where the Yi bares his soul and lays his head on her lap turns Chia-chi into a comforting mother, whose desires are momentarily curbed and tailored to answering the need of a weeping child. The undoing of Chia-chi at the end of the film is thus sublimated into the affective image of a sympathizing and sacrificing mother. In Zhang‟s original short story, Chia-chi‟s interior monologue is presented in an ironic tone, where her naïve assumption leads her to mistake her sexual liaisons with Yi for love and reveals nothing but her delusion which brings on her destruction: “He really loves me, she thought. Inside, she felt a raw tremor of shock—then a vague sense of loss” (Lovell 39). In Zhang‟s text, Chia-chi‟s idealization of Yi‟s intention to purchase an expensive and rare diamond ring 211 for her is soon undercut by Yi‟s complacent realization of the young woman‟s dedicated love for him after reassuring himself that his order on the quick execution serves to redress his indiscretion: He was not optimistic about the way the war was going, and he had no idea how it would turn out for him. But now that he had enjoyed the love of a beautiful woman, he could die happy—without regret. He could feel her shadow forever near him, comforting him. Even though she had hated him at the end, she had at least felt something. And now he possessed her utterly, primitively—as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost. (46). While the execution of Chia-chi is mentioned offhand in Yi‟s stream of consciousness and thus trivialized in Zhang‟s text, Lee‟s version of Yi Mocheng mourns his lost love, and while the film closes by re-capping the motif of his wife‟s routine ma-jong games with the other officers‟ wives, as the novel does, it is Yi now that is cast in a remorseful light, the final victim of China‟s tragic modern history. The naming of Chia-chi‟s cry as compassion and sacrifice of a woman in pain and Yi‟s forlorn gaze at the bed that Chia-chi once slept in as he touches it as the look of a bereaved lover sexualize retroactively and retrospectively the representation of modern China‟s recent colonial history and aestheticizes for the Taiwanese audience, including Lee himself, the economic exploitation and military invasion of China by imperialist powers in the 1940s. Dubbed in the universal language of love by a diasporic filmmaker whose work seeks to represent the temporally and spatially displaced imagery of China, the cinematic adaptation of Lust, Caution performs a melancholia in which the object introjected and 212 fetishized, instead of the lost history of China, is a sense of loss itself. This sense of loss, nonetheless, presents itself as a powerful unifying force that calls for national identification. In her essay “Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears, and Lust, Caution,” Hsiao-hung Chang, bringing together the Deleuzian notion of affect as intensities that manifest themselves as “becoming” and the general definition of affect as feelings and emotions, reads the 40s‟ Shanghai in Lust, Caution as an assemblage of emotional forces that fold different temporalities of the modern Chinese history together and become a representation of cultural China, an imaginary homeland that seems even more unified and real than actual geopolitical entities. Shanghai in the 40s is not the nostalgic roots to pay homage to, but the affective routes with which to link the family, the political party and the nation and through which the filial son might regain the cultural legitimacy lost and reclaimed not in a place (Shanghai, Taipei or New York) but in a kind of affect. It is through this “anachronic” affect, formed by the trans-historical crush-together of the patriotic feeling of World War II and the diasporic sentiment of the (post-)Cold War, the father‟s city of Shanghai, the father‟s political party (the Nationalist Party, KMT) and the father‟s nation (Republic of China) are re-united and redeemed by colliding once again jia guo ( 家國 family-nation) and dang guo( 黨國 party-nation) together. It is the affective homecoming-as-becoming that creates Shanghai of the 40s before the split of the civil war, before the separation of Taiwan and Mainland China, as the ultimate prelapsarian “One China” that is at once territorially and authoritatively fractured by the war and united nominally and affectionately under one single nation state. […]What Lust, Caution provides is no longer a representation of Shanghai that once existed, a single urban point of reference that is both geographically elsewhere and temporally in the past, but a singular becoming-Shanghai that breaks away from Shanghai as the historically and geographically discernable locale to become increasingly more an atmosphere, a milieu and even an unhistorical vapor. (44-47) Indeed, a “prelapsarian” China has operated as an important trope in the national 213 narrative underlying Lee‟s Chinese-language films. Very much in the same vein of the way the fantastic wuxia China mashes up canonical jianghu protocols and Confucian sensibilities, (for both are inflected in a popular and hybridized cultural language and temporally homogenizes diasporic Sinophone communities in the Asian Pacific), the pre-1949 Republican China, a modern nation that was just birthed in 1912, plagued by civil wars and imperialist invasions, and flourishing in its cosmopolitan capacity to accommodate and vernacularize world cultures brought in by foreign refugees and colonizers, is conjured up as a ur-nation whose suffering and glory are intertwined with and reflected in personal tragedies and memories. If, as is noted by Chang, for second-generation Chinese Mainlanders like the president Ma Ying-jou and Ang Lee himself, this ur-nation is equivalent of father‟s nation and father‟s party, then what gathers the forces of national identification is its being a roman-a-clef. In this sense, the authenticity of this anachronistic, imaginary China is validated not only by the aura of the 40s‟ Shanghai remembered by diasporic Chinese and re-assembled by the next generation in image and text, but also by the public consumption of real-life stories that, along with the release of the film, are brought to light by publishers and critics. In Taiwan, the despondency and morbidity of Chia-chi‟s dilemma inherited by a grieving Yi Mocheng invites both sympathy and a voyeuristic indulgence in delving into scandals or personal stories that are rumored to be the material for Zhang‟s original story. Lee‟s maudlin treatment of the material provokes interest of Taiwanese critics and viewers in Zhang Ailing‟s brief marriage with Hu Lancheng, and a failed espionage 214 mission of the former female Kuomingtang spy Zheng Pingru, who was assigned to seduce a collaborator for the Japanese government, Ding Mocun. The film brought the “Zhang fever” [zhangre], a deluge of publications and conferences on Zhang‟s works in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, to a new height with the opportunely-timed publication and ensuing discussions among literary critics of an unfinished semi-autobiography of Zhang Ailing, Xiao Tuanyuan [small reunions]. It also prmpted a rediscovery of the story of a young female patriot who sacrificed her life for her country. Notably, it is in the consumption of what is generated from Lee‟s re-presentation of China in Taiwan that the indeterminate nationhood is brought to the fore. Approving Lee‟s rendition or not, both the web discussions and the high-brow criticisms in Taiwan, in their interest in the ambivalent pathos of the film, their fascination with the prosperous cosmopolitanism of Shanghai, and their patriotic compassion for the calamities brought forth by the atrocious civil wars and colonial invasions of the early twentieth-century China, manifest Chia-chi‟s psychic paradox: inasmuch as Taiwan‟s national/nationalist identity is constructed upon affectionate or traumatic memories of the Republican government (read: for the Chinese Mainlander‟s, the allegiance to the KMT government-in-exile, and for the Han immigrants that arrived at the island before 1949 and had undergone Japanese colonization, nativist consciousness that rose in response to dictatorship), this love for one‟s country invoked in Lust, Caution connotes an indulgence in re-inventing the historic trauma embodied by Wong Chia-chi and Shanghai. If Wong Chia-chi invites identification as a sadomasochistic orphan and a consoling mother at 215 once, then the 40s‟ Shanghai seduces with the phantasmagoria of its traumatic history and its alienating “thingness,” an urban, international, and semi-colonial space that constantly escapes nationalist totalization because of its endless heterogeneity. Compared to what Chang observes as the stringent Cold-War/Post-War dichotomy inherent in the most radical web diatribes against Lee‟s sympathetic portrayal of a hanjien [Han Chinese traitor] in China, this fascination with Chia-chi‟s psychic drama and her seductive, docile body exhibiting both the trendiest metropolitan fashion style and the downtrodden life of the slum of the 40s Shanghai foregrounds Taiwan‟s “fabled” liaison with modern Chinese history. Proudly applauding Lee‟s efforts in claiming Lust, Caution as a Taiwanese movie in film festivals and award ceremonies, news reports and web discussions tend to engage in a privileged exoticization of the cinematic adaptation of Zhang‟s cynical yet decadent portrayal of a love story that is constantly overshadowed by the narrator‟s dismissal of the psychic pains undergone by the protagonist. Zhang‟s distrust of true romance, her pitying, silent accusation, and sneering of the violence committed by the human race is transformed into a fetish for the majority of Taiwanese viewers and critics whose linguistic and cultural affiliations with and historical and geopolitical distance from China grant them a self-entitled privilege of understanding and nuancing the psychological and physical torments experienced by the protagonists. It is in this sense that the indifference evinced in Taiwan‟s reception of the film to what the extremist viewers in China take as offenses--invasion to the national boundaries represented by Tang Wei‟s naked body and alliance with the enemy manifest in the 216 benevolent portrayal of a hanjien-- is symptomatic of a national consciousness that can hardly be temporally and spatially anchored. If, as Chang points out, the Taiwanese viewers‟ identification with the time and space where the story of Lust, Caution is set comes from the island‟s sentimental tie to the Republican era (a crucial time that will soon generates a composite of meanings in Taiwan‟s identity: the fall of the “unified” China, the re-establishment of the nation stationed in Taiwan, and a violent cultural, linguistic, and identificatory rupture in the official historiography stretching from the annexed dependency of the Empire of Japan to KMT‟s martial law), then this part of history brought along and penned by the authoritarian government that represented only the minority of the island is also inevitably foreign and exotic. This foreignness and exoticism of the film that seduces with the female spy‟s and the male collaborator‟s weeping is translated by Lee‟s emotional declaration of his love for Taiwan into a sense of long for a disappearing past. No less affective than his own tearful moment in front of the press, Ang Lee‟s speech after he received the Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker Award for Lust, Caution at the Golden Horse Awards emphasized how he was proud of being a Taiwanese filmmaker and representing Taiwan, a recognition which, according to him, was frequently unavailable outside the island. The speech won another round of applause as he pointed out the indignation [weiqu: literally, suppressed and stooping] Taiwan has suffered around the world. Though it was not the first time that Lee made such claims, the term weiqu written all over Lee‟s face overwhelmed with emotions that disseminated through the news media nationwide turned 217 into a powerfully affective metaphor that not only characterizes Wong Chia-chi and the cinematic representation of the 40s‟ Shanghai, but most significantly, Taiwan. As if in congruence with the excessive melancholia expressed by the filmmaker and instilled in the period film, sympathetic critics and viewers commend Lee‟s insight into the repressed sexuality and turbulent emotions underlying Zhang‟s text and his self-designated responsibility to recover this particular period of the Chinese history. The psychic predicament Lee bestows upon the two protagonists in Lust Caution thus motivated critics to cull through historical documents and thus revise and resituate Taiwan. For example, Fu Jigang, while critiquing Lee‟s immature skills in incorporating natural landscape into the narrative, appreciates the filmmaker‟s retelling of the history in the 40s‟ China and attributes his flaws in using natural settings to the dictatorship during the Martial Law era. Fu reads the emotional depth of Yi Mocheng in the film as Lee‟s intention to reveal other dimensions of patriotism than the autocracy of the Chiang regime. Writer, cultural critic, and former Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Taipei City Government, Long Ying-Tai, redefines the real-life collaborator, Ding Mocun‟s identity and vindicates his loyalty to the Republican government as a double agent that was mercilessly executed by Chiang Kai-shek on a whim. Notably, Long‟s other article based on her interview with Ang Lee manifests the constructed-ness of history that is predicated upon loss: This is Lee‟s “rescuing history” operation. Whether he is attracted by the dilemma of human nature in Zhang Ailing‟s story, or moved by her unconventional values, or inspired by the cinematic style of the story, the real 218 motive for turning it into a film is something very personal. This motive pushes him to “realize” Zhang Ailing‟s story with an anthropologist‟s research rigor and a historian‟s precision and to faithfully record, as if he is shooting a documentary, the history of the Republican era in the 40s, down to its spirits and material life. He is highly aware that this part of history is being edged out in Hong Kong, submerged in Mainland China, and erased, forgotten, and forsaken in Taiwan. Had he not made the film, it would have forever been consigned to oblivion. He is rescuing a diminishing history he is part of 70 . Taking Lust, Caution as a realistic representation of history and weaving Lee‟s persona of a filial son into collective memories that comprehend, supposedly, both the grand narrative (a “national” history that is about to be erased in the three Chinese-speaking regions) and private lives (in the sense that, in addition to Ding Mocun and Zheng Ruping, Ang Lee‟s identity as a second-generation Chinese Mainlander is the ramification of the split between the Communist Party and the KMT Party and that Zhang Ailing‟s own life story looms large in this short story), this poetic passage reiterates and reifies this prelapsarian myth where the personal becomes the national. With broad strokes, Long paints the aura of nation by conflating it with the effusive emotions in the cinematic reinterpretation of the story. Like the majority of the reviews that “understands” and sympathizes with this female spy‟s weiqu, the languish tone in which Long recognizes Lee‟s efforts in restoring the history mourns for Chia-chi‟s sadomasochism and closes it off. In readings like Long‟s, Chia-chi‟s outbursts that allow her to momentarily cross over 70 它是李安個人的「搶救歷史」行動。也許是張愛玲小說裡人性的矛盾吸引了他，也許是張愛玲離經叛道的價值觀觸動了他，也許是小說的電影筆法啟發了他，但是，真正拍起來，卻是一個非常個人的理由，使得他以「人類學家」的求證精神和「歷史學家」的精準態度去「落實」張愛玲的小說，把四○ 年代的民國史── 包括它的精神面貌和物質生活，像拍紀錄片一樣寫實地紀錄下來。他非常自覺，這段民國史，在香港只是看不見的邊緣，在大陸早已湮沒沉埋，在台灣，逐漸被去除、被遺忘，被拋棄，如果他不做，這一段就可能永遠地沉沒。他在搶救一段他自己是其中一部分的式微的歷史。 219 to the limitless side of the Other and re-experiences the ecstatic moment of the dissolution of the line of loyalty and betrayal are circumscribed in the language of nostalgia. Her pain is now Ang Lee‟s pain, an assemblage of psychic intensities that Lee embodies for his native homeland. 220 AFTERWORD In 2010, China hosted a world expo from May 1 until October 31st. The theme of this expensive undertaking is “Better City, Better Life.” Prompted by the intensive promotion of the Chinese government, about 70 million Chinese poured into Shanghai from different provinces to come to appreciate the “world cultures” represented by 242 countries and world organizations. The World Expo, nonetheless, was mainly attended by Chinese nationals. Foreign visitors were indeed far and few between in this extravagant exhibition for which China won the bid in 2002. For the construction of the site along the Huangpu river, the Chinese government spent ten years cleaning up the city and relocating about 18,0000 families and 270 factories. Following up on the Beijing Olympics, this is another occasion for the Chinese government to display national prowess to its people and once again re-strengthen nationalism of the Chinese population. Taiwan participated in this feat by establishing a Taiwan Pavilion and two Taipei case pavilions in the Urban Best Practices Area zone. The Taiwan Pavilion showcased the island‟s eco-sphere by presenting a 4-D theater with a soundtrack starting with the voice of an indigenous vocalist, and by introducing two local features, tea and lantern-flying ceremonies. Distinguishing itself from other national pavilions, the pavilion limited the number of visitors by handing out reservation tickets to the first four thousand people lined up at the entrance of the pavilion each morning and afternoon. And unlike other pavilions which allowed in as many visitors as the capacity limit, only forty people were 221 tour-guided each time through the presentations in the pavilion. The tour guides, or “ambassadors,” had been carefully selected and trained. Its theme being “Mountain, Water, Heart, Lantern,” this exhibition cite shaped as a lantern containing a globe inside presented the specificity of Taiwan as a geographical locus of natural flora and fauna, an island surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and carved out by rivers and mountains, and a local culture characterized by universal humanity and cosmic spirituality. Like Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan entered this world fair as a province of China. Despite the fact that Mainland Affairs Council in Taiwan managed to have China revise the statement on the World Expo website that claimed Taiwan as part of China like Hong Kong and Macau, it did not have a national pavilion day 71 . The two Taipei pavilions were designed in conjunction with the central theme of the Shanghai World Expo. Boasting of the city‟s environment-friendly policies on its resource recycling and future vision of wireless broadband, the two pavilions manifested the city government‟s ambition to be put on the global map. In one of the pavilions, a clip entitled “Taipei, Life, Smile” [taipei, shenghuo, weixiao] about the sights and sounds of Taipei was directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose objective narrative style was now employed to present “the real life of Taipei” with more levity and exuberance 72 . No longer a city of sadness, Taipei was now vying to be one of the most advanced 71 Ko, Shu-ling. “Taiwan Prevails in Expo Spat.” Taipei Times. Taipei Times, 10 December, 2009. 01 November 2010. <http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2009/12/10/2003460593/1> 72 “ 世博台北館 360 度立體影院侯孝賢講真實台北生活.” 你好台灣. 19 April 2010. 01 November 2010. <http://big5.am765.com/zt1/zdzt/2010shsbh/shsbtw/sssbtwgdt/201004/t20100419_558756.htm> 222 metropolises in the world. Notably, this showcasing of Taipei in the Shanghai World Expo had another more specific goal: to promote the Taipei International Flora Exposition that was scheduled to be launched right after the closing of the Shanghai World Expo. This reciprocal promotional package began in 2009 when a month-long “Shanghai Culture Celebration” took place in Taipei. During the World Expo in 2010, Shanghai hosted a “Taipei Culture Celebration.” The cultural exchange between two cities from Taiwan and China can be traced back to 2006, when Taipei and Beijing started a young tradition under the name “Cross-Strait Cities Art Festival” [liangan chengshi yishu jie]. Between 2009 and 2010, however, this event took on a global ambition since the promotion of Shanghai city had been done in several cities around the world as a warm-up for the Shanghai Expo. While culture celebrations of twin cities in Taipei and China were held under the aegis of shared Chinese culture 73 , the World Expo served as a venue for both Taipei and Shanghai to entitle themselves to the epithet “cosmopolitan.” Entering the world expo again since the “Expo ‟70 Osaka” in 1970, Taiwan stood out and outshone other national pavilions by its quality presentation and strategic visitation policy and by highlighting its hospitable tour-guiding service. However, such a visibility was tempered with a self-erasure while the three pavilions played down Taiwan‟s national identity. Both the Taiwan Pavilion and the two Taipei Case Pavilions touted Taiwan as a locale of energy, technology, and most important of all, tourism. With the island‟s 73 “ 兩岸城市藝術節- 臺北縣文化藝術週率先登場.” 台北縣資訊服務站. 台北縣政府 .14 November 2008. 01 November 2010. <http://www.tpc.gov.tw/web/News?command=showDetail&postId=173284&groupId=8846> 223 spectacular landscape and exotic ecological system, the Taiwan Pavilion beckoned worldwide visitors (especially the Chinese kinsmen) to enjoy and appreciate its local features. If the two Taipei pavilions called attention to the city‟s urbanity pulsing with advanced infrastructure, vigorous businesses and industries, vibrant pop culture, sophisticated bourgeois lifestyle, and a harmonious balance of tradition and modernity, it certainly extended invitation and promised hospitality to internationals as well. In other words, maneuvering its way through its ambiguous identity vis-à-vis China, Taiwan‟s authenticity lies in its primitive natural environment untainted by politics and history. Even though it is also a land of civilizational advancement, the kind of development is in keeping with, if not leading among First-World countries, the living standards of the modern global community. Taiwan‟s strategic yet precarious cooperative relationship with China in economic development and international self-presentation allows, or demands, Taiwan to toe the fine line between a staunch nationalism and an eager global agenda that silences the nationalism. The adaptability and self-effacement resonate with Ang Lee‟s multi-lingual directorial caliber. Despite the frequent pledge of his deep affection for Taiwan and his complaints about being constantly forced to retract the name “Taiwan” by Chinese representative at international film festivals, Lee is nimble in integrating into the global market system. His filmography of mainstream Hollywood productions has long earned him the recognition as a bona-fide American director. With Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Riding with the Devil, and Brokeback Mountain, Lee‟s American theater and 224 cinema education and his experience in transnational production tone down his Taiwanese identity. Yet with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution, Lee reinvents China as an upcoming cultural currency that migrates across national boundaries. Indeed, one being the fantasy world of martial arts, the other nostalgic romanticization of the pre-49 Shanghai, Ang Lee‟s high-grossing Chinese-language pictures cast a cultural China that is both modern and traditional. And ironically, this China, made for global consumption, positions Lee as a native informant who, for both the Western and Chinese-speaking audiences, captures and imparts to the world the essence of Chinese culture through the art of film. As a successor of Taiwan New Cinema, Lee breaks the curse of the New Cinema by turning Chinese-ness into a high-profile arthouse commodity both at home and abroad. As is proven by the fact that young talents of Taiwanese cinema eagerly seek advice from him, Lee‟s international success becomes a yardstick for both Taiwanese film production and the island‟s global viability and self-validation: to develop Taiwan‟s film industry means not only to tap into the unique source of Chinese culture with freedom of expression. It also means that only by promoting and selling Taiwan as part of China global can this island‟s cultural production be legible and viable around the world. The notion of cultural China was first brought forth by Tu Wei-ming in the preface to his work The Chinese Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. It is a term conjured up to encompass the newer, more modernized Chinese discursive practices as voices from the periphery to contest the political authority of PRC, who occupies the 225 geopolitical center of an essentialist Chinese culture. Questioning the subversive power of Tu‟s cultural China, Ien Ang notes that setting up such an opposition only serves to perpetuate the center/periphery dichotomy and entrench Sinocentrism. In Ang‟s explication of the identification of the diasporic Chinese with a Chineseness that is indeed “stripped of substantial cultural content” (238), race operates as a cultural and ethnic marker that imposes the Chinese identity on an ethnic body. As Ang invokes Rey Chow‟s observation, this Chinese identity, coterminous with racial demarcation, is imbricated in a “myth of consanguinity,” the myth of “the unity of the Chinese people as children of the Yellow Emperor” (239). Pointing out that the fiction of racial belonging suppresses an individual‟s heterogeneous and complex social experiences, Ang notes that “the liberating productivity of the diasporic perspective lies in, according to Rey Chow, in the means it provides „to unlearn that submission to one‟s ethnicity such as “Chineseness” as the ultimate signified” (241). Certainly, Taiwan‟s relationship with Chineseness is anything but tenuous. Despite the co-presence of the descendents of Chinese immigrants and indigenous communities, as well as fifty years of Japanese colonization, a Han-centric self-identification remained the dominant ideology for nearly two centuries. Under the banner of “Free China” during the Cold-War era, diasporic Chinese literature produced by the immigrants from Mainland and Malaysian Chinese is entitled to a legitimacy of orthodox Confucianism that distinguishes them from “overseas” Chinese immigrants. Compared to the uprooted cultural experiences of self-identified ethnic Chinese dispersed outside Mainland China, 226 particularly in Southeast Asia and the West, Taiwan‟s cultural production in Chinese, whether it is Mandarin, Hoklo, or Hakka, is relatively place-based. Nonetheless, because of political, economical, and cultural changes during the past two decades, Chineseness has been revealed to be no less unstable and insubstantial. While terms such as “New Taiwanese” and “Taiwan Experience” have been deployed to replace the racial myth with a sentimental attachment to shared historical and cultural experiences, Chineseness comes to signify ideological imposition associated first with the Chiang Kai-shek regime and later with PRC. Because of its ambiguous relationship with PRC, this new Taiwaneseness, the construction of which inevitably suppresses heterogeneity in its own multiculturalism 74 , is caught up in a struggle with defining itself whether as a local Chinese culture or an independent national culture. Moreover, in the so-called post-New Era in China (or the post-Tiananmen China), this deterritorialized Chineseness has been reabsorbed into the operation of transnational market with the rise of China as a global economic superpower. Instead of being re-territorialized, nonetheless, the cultural imagery, particularly that shaped by Chinese-language films tailored to the Hollywood market, now gives a new twist to Chow‟s proposition of “unlearning that submission to one‟s ethnicity such as „Chineseness.‟” What does it mean that now this putative, essentialized Chineseness has turned from an un-selfconscious identity, to a deliberated, strategized cultural construct in the operation of the global market? How does one account for the surrender and 74 Here I refer to the institutionalized and reductive racial categorization of the Taiwanese population into “four ethnic groups:” Hakka, Hoklo, Mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese aborigines. 227 recuperation of agency in the subscription to China global? But more importantly, if the increasing westernization and the growing receptiveness toward economical and cultural communications with PRC coexist with a more and more adamant self-identification as a Taiwanese, how does one articulate the irony inherent in the fabulation of an organic Taiwaneseness across the literary and cinematic texts discussed in this dissertation? 228 I turn to another literary text to sum up this problematic. Liu Zijie‟s “Seven Days in Heaven” [fuhouqiri] won the first prize of the Lin Rongsan Literary Award in the category of nonfiction in 2006. In 2010, a film adaptation came out as yet another gripping Taiwanese film. The short autobiographical story details the seven days of secular funereal rituals for the narrator‟s deceased father. Coming back from the city to her hometown to assume the oldest daughter‟s ritualistic responsibilities at the funeral, the narrator describes the family and herself to be performing the tedious ceremony clumsily, and quite often, with a nearly sacrilegious sense of humor. The second things in order: string instrument, carrying the casket, cleansing. The Taoist priest instructed that we not cry when transporting the casket [to the burial ground], but do on our way back. These scripted stage directions would come up repeatedly in the next few days. I knew that a lot of things were no longer for me to decide, including crying. There would always be someone besides me saying, “don‟t cry now,” or “now cry.” A lot of times my sister and I just looked at each other perplexed. “So now do we cry or not?” (“A couple of fits of wailing will do,” someone next to us said again.) Sometimes this happened when I barely brushed my teeth and washed my face, or put down my meal. I would hear the drum cue the music to start, and a shriek from the priest, like a director that ordered, “action!”, issue through the microphone, “Now, come, daughter, cry!” I would flail around like an extra, throwing on my funereal white linen headdress, dashing forward, kneeling and crawling. Amazingly, tears came out without fail each time 75 . 75 第二件工作，指板。迎棺。乞水。土公仔交代，迎棺去時不能哭，回來要哭。這些照劇本上演的片場指令，未來幾日不斷出現，我知道好多事不是我能決定的了，就連，哭與不哭。總有人在旁邊說，今嘛毋駛哭，或者，今嘛卡緊哭。我和我妹常面面相覷，滿臉疑惑，今嘛，是欲哭還是不哭？（唉個兩聲哭個意思就好啦，旁邊又有人這麼說。）有時候我才刷牙洗臉完，或者放下飯碗，聽到擊鼓奏樂，道士的麥克風發出尖銳的咿呀一聲，查某囝來哭！如導演喊 acti o n ！我這臨時演員便手忙腳亂披上白麻布甘頭，直奔向前，連爬帶跪。神奇的是，果然每一次我都哭得出來。 229 Throughout the narrative, the ironic reiteration of the religious vocabulary and the description of the local rituals as a foreign and absurd experience are layered with the narrator‟s morose expression of bereavement. In a way, the affect of the narrative does not so much come from the burlesque portrayal of the funereal ceremony as the poetic articulation of the narrator‟s melancholic sentiments. However, inasmuch as the itemization of the burial rituals is rendered superfluous, ridiculous, and comical, the grieving process becomes even more poignant precisely because the narrator‟s obedient though skeptical observation of the empty rituals betrays an emotional attachment to these rituals, as is manifested in the sons‟ and daughters‟ patient verbatim repetition of the lines fed to them by the priest. The alternation between levity and gravity foregrounds an emotional quandary for an urban Taiwanese coming to terms with rural customs that are themselves full of contradictions and arbitrary interpretations. If, for an educated and urbanized young woman, the richly-orchestrated funereal customs that are religiously practiced in her hometown look nonsensical and folly, they are also the only frame of reference that mediates between her and the unknown. Given the priest and other attendees who take every step of the ceremony as a serious business that needs to be conducted to show respect for the departed and deal with the gravest taboo in the Chinese culture, the daughter, whose narrative shifts between Taiwanese and Mandarin and between first person and second person (when addressing her father) voices, cannot decide whether to mourn and bury the dead by carrying out the elaborate rituals, or to keep the dead alive 230 by prolonging the melancholic identification with her father and dismissing the rituals as a meaningless farce. In the narrator‟s reminiscence, the father is portrayed as an unconventional character who jeered at death and sickness, and bantered around with sons and daughters as peers. Throughout the narrative, while the daughter takes on the father‟s nonchalance in her description of the funeral, she nonetheless succumbs to the denial of her father‟s death in the end. Sometimes I wish it were even lighter, not just lighter, but more frivolous. So frivolous that when I met up with my best friends in college at a bar with booming rock music, I rested my head on the shoulder of one of them, half drunk and blowing out rings of smoke, and casually brought it up as if it were something that just crossed my mind. “Hey, I forgot to tell you guys. My dad died.” Some of them probably have visited our house before and have tasted the local delicacies you bought. Somebody jumped and asked me half-surprisedly and half-sympathetically, “Why didn‟t you tell us?” I would tell them, “It‟s fine. I often forgot about it.” Yes, I often forgot about it. So, without my noticing it, it often turned into something really heavy, so heavy that some day after my father‟s death, I was on an airplane flying from Hong Kong to Tokyo, as I saw the flight attendant pushing the duty-free cart down the aisle, I instinctively reminded myself to buy you a carton of Yellow Long Life cigarettes. This half-second thought brought me to tears for one and a half hours until the seatbelt sign went on and the captain made his announcement. The voice sounded like yours. You said, “Please collect yourself. We are about to land.” 76 76 有時候我希望它更輕更輕。不只輕盈最好是輕浮。輕浮到我和幾個好久不見的大學死黨終於在搖滾樂震天價響的酒吧相遇我就著半昏茫的酒意把頭靠在他們其中一人的肩膀上往外吐出菸圈順便好像只是想到什麼的告訴他們。欸，忘了跟你們說，我爸掛了。他們之中可能有幾個人來過家裡玩，吃過你買回來的小吃名產。所以會有人彈起來又驚訝又心疼地跟我說你怎麼都不說我們都不知道？我會告訴他們，沒關係，我也經常忘記。是的。我經常忘記。 231 The gravity of the emotion disallows a total identification, either with her father who fell unconscious in the hospital after bantering with the nurse and died without any last words, or with the chaotic funeral itself that is meant to not only appease the departed but to console the living. On the other hand, performing these rituals becomes a way for her to access her emotions when she is demanded to physically dramatize agony and pain. While the ceremony itself is an alienating experience for the narrator, it is the only means that bridges the insurmountable gap between the deceased father and the bereaved daughter. To read this short story allegorically, perhaps we can draw an analogy between the narrator‟s conflicted sentiments about Taiwan‟s local customs and the Taiwanese residents‟ perception of “Taiwaneseness.” In this analogy, the departed father represents an unreachable origin that beckons a Taiwanese‟s love and identification, and the absurd and mantra-like funereal ceremony can be compared to a set of cultural signifiers that transcribe the inaccessible cultural essence. In this sense, in the construction of a native and organic Taiwaneseness, which is sometimes humorously termed as “the authentic Taiwanese flavor” [ 正港台灣味], the process of self-identification in Taiwan, whose culture has always already been hybridized and in the making and whose 於是它又經常不知不覺地變得很重。重到父後某月某日，我坐在香港飛往東京的班機上，看著空服員推著免稅菸酒走過，下意識提醒自己，回到台灣入境前記得給你買一條黃長壽。這個半秒鐘的念頭，讓我足足哭了一個半小時。直到繫緊安全帶的燈亮起，直到機長室廣播響起，傳出的聲音，彷彿是你。你說：請收拾好您的情緒，我們即將降落。 232 self-consciousness emerged with industrialization, colonization, and modernization, always incurs an awkward acclimation, an ironic self-scrutiny, an involuntary investment of irrational and patriotic sentiments, and an anxiety for the validation of the other. 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY “2010 Guopian yingxian jiaoyu zhagen jihua.” “2010 Educational Project on National Cinema.” Pixnet. 10 Oct 2010. <http://ourfilms.pixnet.net/blog> A City of Sadness. Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien. Prod. Era Information and Entertainment Ltd. Screenplay by Zhu Tianwen and Wu Nianzhen, 1989. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation, “Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema,” discusses the trope of nationhood in Taiwanese literary and cinematic works published since the 1980s. It reflects on the way internationalism and regionalism intersect on the post-Cold war island. I contend that situated within the Asian-Pacific economic structure and the Chinese diasporic communities in the postnational era of globalization, there is a nostalgic tendency to imagine an organic community unique to the Taiwanese experience in literary and cinematic production. My corpus consists of Zhu Tianxin’s works produced since the 1970s through the present, with a focus on her frequently discussed novella, The Old Capital, two locally-invested Taiwanese blockbusters: Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7 (2008), Niu Cheng-ze’s Monga (2010), and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999) and Lust, Caution (2008).

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Creator Wang, Chialan Sharon (author)

Core Title Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 03/22/2011

Defense Date 12/09/2010

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

Tag Ang Lee,Cape No. 7,Croughing tiger hidden dragon,Lust caution,Monga,national identity,Niu Chengze,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcolonial studies,Taiwanese Cinema,Taiwanese literature,The old capital,Wei Desheng,Zhu Tianxin

Place Name Taiwan (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Cheng, Dominic (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

Creator Email chialanw@usc.edu,sharonclwang@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3691

Unique identifier UC1466007

Identifier etd-Wang-4359 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-448789 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3691 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Wang-4359.pdf

Dmrecord 448789

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Wang, Chialan Sharon

Type texts

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

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu