The Insoluble Ambivalences in Taiwan, Which Resonate Outward from Lay

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Fractured Identities and Refracted Images: The Neither/Nor of National Imagination in Contemporary Taiwan

The insoluble ambivalences in Taiwan, which resonate outward from layered political impasses into works of literature, cinema, art, and even the very architecture that no citizen can avoid, often elicit expressions of con- sternation, even from the people of Taiwan themselves. Nonetheless, the vexed messages these works send to their audiences are part of some of the most profound, complex, and, indeed, captivating cultural artifacts being produced in the world today. The fascinating thing about the painful divisions of Taiwan politics and national identity is the way they are always already telegraphing inconsistencies and incompatibilities in such art forms right before our eyes, often without note or notice. This special issue on the cultural “state” of contemporary Taiwan is therefore devoted to introducing and exploring a diverse set of approaches to the analysis of Taiwan’s dynamic and multifaceted cultural identity. The intentional double entendre inherent

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in the use of the word state in this context is the recognition that, whatever identity constitutes Taiwan, it is one that is fiercely contested and unstable. The goal of this special issue is to investigate the variable terrain of Tai- wan from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and political persua- sions and, as best as one can in a finite space, provide the East Asian cultural studies community with a mosaic of some of the most informed perspectives on Taiwan available. One never knows quite what to expect from the solici- tation and referee process, but what we have ended up with is, I believe, a profound, if necessarily incomplete, picture of Taiwan today from the views of seven important scholars representing a broad spectrum of intellectual approaches that include sociology, anthropology, legal studies, film studies, literary studies, and cultural/psychoanalytic theory. Each essay focuses on something affecting contemporary Taiwan. These include: a study of the significance of certain Japanese manga representations of Taiwan and their repercussions (Joyce C. H. Liu), a historical perspective on the legal status of women in Taiwan in various marital situations (Chao-ju Chen), a discussion of the complex lives of Taiwanese who are temporarily settled in Shanghai for business purposes (Horng-luen Wang), an investigation of philanthropy as practiced by the massive Ciji organization in Taiwan (C. Julia Huang), a study of literary representations of the “soldiers’ villages” (juancun) that were a common enclave for retired mainland military personnel and their families (Hsiao-Yen Peng), a study of literary portrayals of the aftermath of the February 28 Massacre and resulting White Terror in Taiwan (Sylvia Li-chun Lin), and an analysis of recent films by Cai Mingliang and Chen Guofu (Hsiu-Chuang Deppman). Although the approaches and subject matter cannot be exhaustive, and focus on the contemporary always incurs the risk of trying to hit a moving target, these essays provide important perspectives for anyone interested in the fate of Taiwan or in the practice of cultural studies in East Asia.

The Aesthetics of Division in Contemporary Taiwanese Art and Literature My interest in the issue of national identity and destiny in Taiwan derives from years of visiting Taiwan, during which time I observed the effect the

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divisions have had on it inhabitants. On a very unreconstructed, intuitive level, my impression of Taiwan tends to be of a peaceful place with wonder- ful social and economic prospects, a place that has transformed superbly, in the past four decades or so, from a rather polluted and politically repres- sive state to one that enjoys democracy, a vastly cleaner environment with a more ecologically aware populace, a high standard of living, and a very safe public sphere. But all that belies the shrill tones one encounters in the daily newspapers. The existential issue for Taiwan is, of course, its future vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Political camps are drawn with sharp borders between those who advocate Taiwan’s independence and those who, for the time being, are comfortable with the status quo, who do not wish to antagonize the government in Beijing, and who affiliate culturally with the notion of “China.” All of this is complicated by the position of the United States, Taiwan’s major patron, which has fashioned a contorted policy toward the island whereby it embraces the PRC’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan while simultaneously opposing any forcible or abrupt act to make good on that claim. It would have made things easier for the United States, the most powerful world democracy and de facto, if ambivalent, protector of this budding Asian democracy, had the decision on Taiwan’s national destiny not been made in secret by four men — Richard Nixon, Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger, and Mao Zedong — and codified in the first Shanghai Communiqué of 1972. It is impossible to escape discussions in Taiwan of whether Taiwan should or should not be independent from mainland China and, if so, when. For those readers seeking a pronouncement on that question in this issue, I will have to disappoint. What is far more interesting to me, as a scholar and cultural theorist, is this: what has the complex web of issues bound up in the problem of Taiwanese national identity meant for cultural production by its subjects? This special issue of positions is designed in part to answer that. But before we get to that, I would like to say a few words about my own perspective on what I’ll call the “aesthetics of division” in contemporary Taiwanese art and culture. At its current conjuncture, Taiwan is, from a cultural and political view- point, suffering from an unsuturable wound. It is not a breakaway, rogue state with a future on its own and a unique, stand-alone culture based on a history unshared by its ponderous neighbor across the Strait. Neither is its

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society any longer a temporary surrogate or fully viable mummified vessel for traditional Chinese culture — the Republic of China (ROC) (temporarily) “on” the island of Taiwan. It is a deconstructive political entity whose continued existence is predicated on the principle that we do not, and cannot, fully articulate in language what it is. Once definitively named — forced from its neither (autochthonous)/nor (hereditary) positionality into an either Taiwanese or Taiwan Chinese identity — it will cease to exist in its current form. Taiwan is purely indeterminate, undecideable, an open-ended signifier, resistant to a fixed identification as either a cohesive Chinese nation- state or a novel and independent body politic of and on its own. While this is a deeply unfortunate predicament for Taiwan’s denizens, and while it provides theorists with fascinating and unique material and data for the study of politics, culture, and identity, make no mistake: the political future of Taiwan is a question that could intimately affect every one of us, a flash- point of unimaginable magnitude because of the potential it has to “inflame the mainland.” My own intervention into the contemplation of this thorny issue comes by way of cultural, and primarily literary and cinematic, studies. Before I proceed with a short introduction of the essays themselves, I therefore would like to frame the issue of Taiwan’s identity by giving some examples from art, literature, politics, and architecture. I begin by thinking back to an exhibit of avant-garde art from Taiwan curated by An-yi Pan at the Cornell Art Museum in 2004. I was struck by the extent to which various artists in this exhibit seemed obsessed with images of splitting, cutting, dissection, and the dissolution of the human body. It seemed as if there was a collective consciousness of the body being severed or torn apart, and done so in such a way that it could not be healed. This unsuturable wound is nowhere more evident than in the highly aestheticized exposé of punishment by linger- ing dismemberment, usually a shaving of the layers of the body, found in the disturbing yet provocative video installation of Chen Jieren. Chen gives us in his photographic assemblage of torture and execution precisely what Lu Xun in his fiction denies: direct visual access — what Joyce C. H. Liu has called “the gaze of revolt” — onto the grotesque images of prosecution and persecution so rife in Late Imperial and Republican China.1 The most stunning aspect of the series is not the brutal verisimilitude of the works,

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as atrocious as it appears, but the unremitting consistency of the equation of penalty and punishment with dismemberment. Chen himself lives the sort of ambivalent life of a diaspora at home, as one whose own father was a waishengren (mainlander) refugee from China. Splitting off, the breaking of the body politic into parts, is not seen, and has never historically been seen in Chinese discourse, as anything but a form of punishment, less an infliction than an excision. Chen Jieren illustrates this in his own comments on his work: “Penalty is a ritual of embodiment supplemented with the structure of exclusion.” The gaze onto the very act of execution as it is being carried out completes the act, gives the act its public reason for being. We are not laterally gazing onto the crowd who in turn gaze on the execution, as in Lu Xun; rather, in Chen Jieren’s work, we are situated within and become part of the crowd as we gaze directly onto the execution itself.2 Lin Shu- min’s hologram series, also exhibited in this show, offers a similarly unset- tling spectacle to the viewer, albeit in a much different form. His portraits of contorted faces and disintegrating human images, confined in the frames of Plexiglas holograms and then strewn together in jagged and random com- binations on the floor, bespeak a combined image of society out of whack, a collective cacophony of humans together but incapable of interaction or connection (see fig. 1 in Gallery of Taiwan Artists). As a nation-state, Taiwan is in the unenviable position of being alienated from itself. Those who view themselves as native Taiwanese or benshengren are prevented by political exigency from reconfiguring the state to reflect this view while those who are considered to be not native, the waishengren, are deprived of and dislocated from the homeland with which they are ideo- logically affiliated. This creates a “diasporic aesthetic,” as Stuart Hall terms it, an “urge to return to an origin that never existed in the first place and in fact changes depending on what the contemporary set of desires and dic- tates might be” (emphasis in original). The question of Taiwan’s identity and destiny is always one of enunciation, dependent on “who speaks for it.”3 Hall allows for an inclusive identity that recognizes “the whole body of efforts” that together constitute this malleable sense of national identity. Hall’s diasporic aesthetic offers a possibility for how Taiwan can resolve the predicament of multiple national imaginaries and synthesize the dialectic between these competing claims. The issue of diaspora has been brewing in

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Taiwan for several decades. If we examine two short stories — one by Chen Yingzhen, a prominent Taiwanese nativist writer, and one by Bai Xianyong, a “mainlander” author known for his advocacy of modernism — we can easily see the enigma that each subethnicity in Taiwan has become for the other. Chen Yingzhen’s story “Di Yijian Chaishi” (“My First Case”), published in 1967, features a rookie Taiwanese police officer investigating the suicide of a mainlander. Bai Xianyong’s story “Huaqiao Rongji” (“Glory’s by Blossom Bridge”), published in 1970, involves a mainlander woman from Guangxi Province living in exile in Taipei.4 One of the characters whom she describes in rather unflattering terms is Taiwanese. Each first-person text represents the subethnic other of its narrator: a Taiwanese focusing on a mainlander and a mainlander focusing on a Taiwanese. An examination of the two narratives highlights the tensions, conflicts, and misunderstandings that lay just below the surface of political consciousness and expression in Taiwan. The stories articulate how irremediable this tension is. There also is a general difference in aesthetic tendency that can be charted along subethnic lines, with modernist fiction more disposed to lofty sensibilities and an attention to delicate linguistic craft and nativist literature more prone to earthy expression (hence the term xiangtu wenxue for “nativist literature”), the working class, and rural settings. This aesthetic divergence has also made its way into the fine arts in Taiwan. Certain artists, such as the late Chen Tingshi, Zhuang Zhe, and Chu Ge, who pioneered abstract move- ments in Taiwan, are closely associated with the modernist coterie. The work of others, such as Zhou Mengde, are more characteristic of realistic techniques and often depict the working class. The cover image for this issue features Zhou Mengde’s “Worker in front of the Window,” a pen-and-ink rendition of a man working a machine in tight confines, electrical cords hanging near his head, a propane tank hooked up to the apparatus where he is working, and the floor littered with papers and an empty soda bottle. The monochrome drawing heightens the gritty tone of the depiction and the working-class subject matter, and the depiction relentlessly maintains a fidelity to realism. By contrast, in the Gallery of Taiwan Artists, Chen Tingshi’s wildly imaginative block prints “Hibernation” (fig. 2) and “Sea Rhyme #3” (fig. 3) epitomize an aesthetic diametrically opposed to that of Zhou. Chen’s images hint at a representa-

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tion of reality through the titles of the two works, but one would be hard- pressed to describe how they adhere to any real image of hibernation or the sea. Instead, “Sea Rhyme #3” exerts power over the viewer through the bold contrast of blue and gold, the dialogue of circular forms, and the crackle effect of wrinkles on the images. The all-black “Hibernation” illustrates the fact that Chen is as comfortable creating monochrome images as he is colorful ones. The stylistic consistency derives from his high level of abstraction and the evocation of natural imagery through the abstract circles and sharp lines in his work as well as the texture created by the crackling in places. Zhou Mengde is much more interested in realism, if not verisimilitude. His “A Record of Life” (fig. 4), an oil painting of his wife busy at the sewing machine, and “Pool Table” (fig. 5), one of several oil paintings done in a pool hall, attest to his ability to come up with colorful, almost iridescent, representations of quotidian figures encountered in everyday life. They may be at work, as in fig. 4 and the cover image, or they may be at leisure, as in fig. 5, but in any case the refractions that do emerge in his work are far closer to a representational realism than that of Chen Tingshi. And there is almost always a working-class aspect to his subject matter. None of this discussion is meant to privilege one artist over the other, nor can the comparison of two of Taiwan’s artists promise to encapsulate all of what is going on in the vibrant Taiwan art scene today. My hope is merely to illustrate through this schematic comparison the vast differences that do exist. It would be presumptuous to assert that realistic aesthetics is the sole domain of native Taiwanese artists and that abstract expressionism is the exclusive province of waisheng artists; however, it is true that Zhou is a born-and-bred Tai- wanese of Southern Min descent. Chen, by contrast, was a member of the mainlander group that filtered into Taiwan after the end of World War II. Generally speaking, the more realistic, earthy qualities of artistic representation have tended to be associated with the nativists and the more abstract, modernist qualities have tended to be associated with the mainlanders. The conflict of Chinese ethnicity versus a nativist Taiwanese ethnicity can beget some very interesting ironies. For example, a few years ago, there was a nettlesome espionage case in the United States involving a scientist at the highly secure Los Alamos National Laboratory: Wen Ho Lee (born in Taiwan) was arrested on spy charges, suspected of selling to the Chinese

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government the plans for the W88, the United States’ most advanced nuclear warhead.5 Lee was subsequently released after pleading guilty to one greatly reduced charge of improper handling of classified materials (computer files) but with no admission and no conviction on the espionage charges. He eventually won an out-of-court settlement against the U.S. government and five prominent media outlets for their public treatment of him. Part of the case against Wen Ho Lee involved speculation about his motivations. A crucial aspect of the allegations regarding his motivations was centered on his Chi- nese ethnicity even though Lee is a U.S. citizen who came from Taiwan, where he was born and raised. The ironic elisions in the Wen Ho Lee affair extend far beyond the concrete facts of the case, which none of us without national security clearance can ultimately determine. The chief elision is that of his complex, layered ethnicity — Chinese? Taiwanese? American? All these seem to slide together at points and the unasked question in the affair is the implicitly assumed ethnic origin of the principle actor in it.6 This problem harks back to the central antinomy in Taiwan’s ethnic composition itself: is it Taiwanese, is it Chinese — or is this all a ruse? Perhaps the word ruse is a little strong, but I would nevertheless argue that the notion of an ethnicity may seem to be essential and immutable, but in fact is manipulated and subject to the politics of positionality every day. One final example regarding classical art will help illustrate my point. In 1996, an exhibition of some of the finest and rarest artistic treasures (includ- ing twenty-seven items on a “restricted” list) from China’s past, all in the possession of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, was set for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While the planning for this exhibit was never a secret, and formal arrangements had been underway for at least five years, it was not until there was a preview show at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan that people became alarmed over the inclusion of these twenty-seven items in the show. Protests eventually broke out, object- ing to their inclusion, often referred to as guobao, or “national treasures,” in the exhibit. As a result of these protests, seven of the restricted objects were withdrawn from the exhibit along with several others that, while not restricted, were withdrawn “for reasons of rarity and condition.”7 The significance of this incident resides in the fact that the protestors in Taiwan (it is not clear how many were of the native Taiwanese group and how many

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from the mainlander group) predicated their opposition on the fact that these artifacts originally from China were national treasures. In order for there to be such treasures in the first place, there must first be a nation. The notion of a unique Taiwanese national essence breaks down over the question of the basis of making a claim one way or another with regard to these national treasures. The way that cultural production inscribes the tautly contested issues of national identity is engraved in all sorts of places, from the erudite confines of well-wrought literary works to the most imposing examples of public art. The architecture and urban layout of Taipei, for instance, read like a layered Rorschach test of how political regimes have viewed themselves. As a city, Taipei was planned by the Japanese. The Presidential Palace, built under the Japanese Administrative Period, to wit, is placed at the center of the city and faces east, the most important geomantic direction in the Japanese cosmol- ogy. In addition, having the building face east allowed for the added benefit of having its back to mainland China, as if to choreograph in architectural space the repudiation of any national design that the mainland might have on Taiwan. Incidentally, from the air, the building appears as a large graph in the shape of the Chinese character (Japanese kanji) ri, or “sun,” the sym- bol of Japan, as if the construction of this building was like placing a chop mark on Taiwan, signifying ownership. By contrast, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, constructed in the late 1970s by the Guomindang (GMD) government, stands in spatial dialogue to the Presidential Palace, facing it and looking over its shoulder toward mainland China as if to say, “we’ll be back some day.” The National Palace Museum is more traditionally Chinese than either of these structures, for it is situated facing south as are the imperial buildings in the Forbidden City, the museum’s namesake. The completion of this structure in the early 1970s was a mark of extreme national pride in Taiwan. In addition to its traditional structure, it is famous for its vast stor- age vault built into the mountain. Not far down the street, and standing in dialogue with the museum, is an emblem of the one ethnic component that stands in near opposition to the National Palace Museum: the Museum of Formosan Aborigines, facing north, conceived in the mold of a traditional Aborigine structure, and privately funded. Finally, we have the recently built commercial tower known simply as Taipei 101, to signify the number

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of stories, which looms over the freshly planned eastern part of the city of Taipei. The building is not intended to stand in dialogue to anything in Taiwan but rather, as a reflection of Taiwan’s feelings of its own economic prowess (perhaps a little too self-consciously asserted), to other such buildings in East and Southeast Asia that aspire to be the tallest skyscraper in the region and indeed the world. The design of the building itself, with its traditionally ornamented façade, creates another sort of rupture — between the classical Chinese culture of Taiwan’s invented past and its ultrasavvy, transnational present and future. What the dialogue of these buildings suggests is that large public structures, where art and popular culture intersect, are not detached from the whole contested question of national imagination in Taiwan. This contestation obviously has not reached conclusion in the sphere of the nascent demo- cratic maturation of Taiwan, for each election is simply a further deferral of the question of who has the upper hand in Taiwan’s national destiny. With the indecisive and universally dissatisfying outcome of elections that often split the presidency and the legislature between the two major political par- ties, we are left to conclude that Taiwan’s national identity is still intractably caught up in a vexing stalemate of neither/nor: neither is it part of the mainland nor is it independent, neither is it essentially Chinese nor is it essentially Taiwanese. Rather, it is a set of fractured identities and refracted images of the national imaginary. From this inherently tentative perspective, we can nonetheless perceive ways that this troubling status of Taiwan identity might be productive, even enabling, from a cultural or artistic point of view. The essays in this issue all, in some way, address the difficulties and open up spaces for conceiving new possibilities in the conflicted and complex inter actions and intersections of culture and identity in contemporary Taiwan.

The Historical and National Status of Taiwan’s Identity The seven essays selected for this special issue represent a broad array of subjects and approaches to the issue of identity in Taiwan today. They have been divided into three groups, although there is a great deal of mix- ture among them and no discrete demarcation can truly contain the multiple implications that each essay holds. The first of these sections logically

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includes two essays that address how history has informed the contemporary cultural milieu in Taiwan. Joyce Liu’s essay draws interesting connections between the experience of the Japanese colonial period and the status of Tai- wan today, and it is equally concerned with notions of the Taiwan “psyche” and the political manifestations of whatever this cultural construction may be. She analyzes an explosive comic-book depiction of Taiwan by the right- wing Japanese cultural icon Yoshinari Kobayashi that caused a sensation in Taiwan during the 1990s. Yoshinari’s depiction of the Taiwanese, and the implications for any connection China wishes to maintain with Taiwan, is highly controversial, for he puts forth an idealistic image of the Taiwanese as embodying a “Taiwanese spirit” that makes them superior to their distant kin on the mainland, a spirit that is a direct result of the acculturation that Japanese bestowed on Taiwan in colonial times. Liu makes a connection between the social and psychological by relying largely on the work of post- structural psychoanalytic theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy. By investigating the ways the intricate process of induction has interpolated Taiwanese subjects into what could be characterized as a psyche mimetic of Japanese sub- jectivity, Liu convincingly illustrates how powerful the cultural hegemony of Japan on Taiwan once was and, at least in some people’s minds, still is. Chao-ju Chen’s essay on the legal status of women in Taiwan provides a very interesting and complementary contrast to the approach and subject matter of Joyce Liu’s more theoretical treatment. Chen’s scholarship focuses on the legal history of Taiwan, particularly on the treatment of women. There is much discussion in Taiwan these days about the status of immigrants, spouses of Taiwan’s citizens, and the rights of permanent residents. All of these issues are equally tied up with the overall status and identity of Taiwan itself. Is Taiwan an independent nation with its own legal status? For all intents and purposes, it functions that way, sort of as a quasi nation, even while not for- mally declaring itself so, lest it incur the wrath of the Beijing government and the possibility of military reprisal. But what of women within this grand scheme? We often speak of the identity and rights of Taiwan as a whole, but we far less often look at women or minorities within that whole. Chen asks: “What does the ‘nation’ mean to women?” She provides a historical exposé of the legal mechanisms that affiliate and disaffiliate women with the nation. She looks at the status of women during both the Japanese colonial era and

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the immediate historical period running up to the present, most of which has been under the GMD. Nationality, she explains, in its simplest form is the right to have rights. But how is nationality gained and to whom and by whom may it be transferred? Chen reveals how “becoming Japanese,” the process by which one achieved status as an imperial subject in the official sense of the word, was a “male choice,” and that in interethnic marriages women could find themselves “stateless.” Her essay raises deep questions regarding the historical issue of citizenship in Taiwan and the ramifications that this issue holds, both for permanent residents in Taiwan today and for the future of Taiwan’s relationship with mainland China.

Social and Cultural Reconfigurations of Contemporary Taiwan In Horng-luen Wang’s article, the obsession with China as an emergent world power is the central issue. Wang investigates the phenomenon that in the late 1990s came to be known in Taiwan as Shanghai re, or “Shanghai fever.” Wang’s treatment of this well-known trend is one of the most authoritative, teasing out the complexities, ambivalences, and contradictions atten- dant in the decision of Taiwanese citizens to move to and work in Shanghai, the most bustling metropolis in East Asia today. On the one hand, Shanghai has the appeal of being a postmodern “land of opportunity,” a place where one can make one’s fortune nearly overnight. On the other, though, living there, and especially raising children there, creates serious and complicated problems in terms of social and cultural development and national identity. Even though the Taiwanese, according to Wang’s findings, often prefer to be invisible, to maintain a low profile, the data from his fieldwork unveiled many examples of broken dreams and stories of failure and anguish. Indeed, whether the move from Taiwan to Shanghai is actually a choice for many of these people is a question that Wang asks us to ponder, for beyond the romance of the Shanghai fever lies a dilemma of Taiwanese caught between the twin and inexorable forces of nationalism and global capitalism. Shang- hai itself is a bit of a sliding signifier: it is at once a place of great nostalgia for the roaring days of the Republican Period and a global urban metropolis of unfathomable future promise, with both referents eliding or disavowing Shanghai’s Maoist-era history.

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C. Julia Huang’s essay on Ciji, the global Buddhist nongovernmental organization (NGO), contemplates that organization’s transformation from a homespun and rather innocuous charity into a powerhouse that can rival political entities as large as states, given its permeation not only of Taiwanese society but also of China, Southeast Asia, and even the West. The signs of Ciji’s good works, but also of its wealth and influence, are seen everywhere — in hospitals, emergency relief centers, clinics, and at any disaster that occurs. It is known for being more responsive and resourceful than the government. But what is Ciji and is it all good? Zhengyan, the elusive political identity at the center of Ciji, began as a nondescript Buddhist nun. She has built Ciji into a philanthropic organization of massive wealth, even as she has maintained a simple life in the quiet coastal city of Hualian. Huang argues that, insofar as this philanthropic organization mimics the government in its size and structure, it has become a “regime of civil morality.” But it also is different from a normal political entity. Its transnational web of intercon- nections and hierarchies demonstrate that Ciji, in some ways, has more real power than the government of Taiwan, itself marginalized by virtue of the Chinese government’s largely successful effort to sideline Taiwan diplomati- cally. Its huge growth, however, belies to some extent the inner nature of the organization. The intensity of change that Ciji has undergone, in tandem with Taiwan’s broader sociopolitical change, is in marked contrast to the temperance and quietism of Zhengyan herself. At the center of this vast network, she is still portrayed as a gentle model for ethical behavior in contemporary Chinese-speaking communities.

Literary and Cinematic Representations It is a misconception to view Taiwan society as uniform. In spite of the small size of the island and population, its ethnic composition is complex, sometimes contradictory, and fraught with problems when one attempts to define it. A case in point is the subethnic group of soldiers’ villages that were established at the time of the Retrocession to accommodate military personnel and their families in Taiwan. Socialization within these tightly knit communities was experienced very differently than from other Taiwanese communities, and these differences

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have had profound implications, especially for the children of those communities. Several prominent literary figures in Taiwan today hail from these compounds, and their experiences have become the material for a number of their works. Peng Hsiao-yen’s analysis of this body of literary works sheds light on the uniqueness of their experiences, complicates the notion of Taiwanese ethnicity, and reveals interesting instances of, for example, how memory is manipulated as a tool for the reinforcement of certain ethnic boundaries and in the construction of certain forms of historical imagination. But many of the writers employ postmodern techniques of metafiction to cast doubt on the veracity of their own experience and the usefulness for considering it as a site of privilege in Taiwan. The result is, in many cases, such as Zhu Tianwen’s “Ancient City,” a complex network of intertextual relationships that does as much to subvert a clear picture of the past as it does to legitimate the cultural capital this coterie of authors enjoys in Tai- wan today. Sylvia Li-chun Lin raises the criticism a notch on the political powers that be, or have been, in Taiwan, by labeling the fiction she deals with “literature of atrocity.” She also approaches this literature with the specific intent to illustrate how it represents the relationship between women and national crisis, situating her approach with respect to Lydia Liu’s feminist analysis of Xiao Hong and to postcolonial writings such as Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled.” What she discovers in a survey of literary exposés of Taiwan’s infamous February 28 Incident and subsequent massacre, as well as the follow-up White Terror, is that women, while often not implicated directly in left underground activities in Taiwan, were often detained or “disap- peared” through a process of guilt by association, whereby being married to a political dissident was reason enough to prosecute. Lin also provides nuance to this literature, which is often viewed as a collective whole, by charting the “evolution of the representation of women” in it, showing, for example, that male writers tended to write about women one way, while female writers, such as Li Ang, would choose different approaches to their subject matter. In some cases, in fact, the arrest of a husband became a “politically enabling” act, creating a different kind of victimhood. Some women, although not themselves the focus of persecution, were able to rise

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to the level of martyrdom precisely because they were living remnants of their departed loved ones. The final essay in this volume, by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, is completely rooted in the contemporary, for it delves into the methods employed by Sec- ond New Wave Taiwanese directors to probe the intimate recesses of private behavior and thinking. Ostensibly, the films under question, such as Chen Guofu’s The Personals and Cai Mingliang’s What Time Is It There?, are postmodern representations of Taipei’s consumer society and urban alienation and of the crisis in forming sexual and emotional relationships that this type of society has engendered. Deppman finds that these filmmakers are pro- ducing works that defy the normal categorization of things as “postmodern” or “third-world” by opting for a more amorphous overriding quality that she terms “transworldliness.” The transworldly phenomenon, she argues, is one in which Taiwan is allegorically represented by the individuals on the screen as being always already out of place in its/their environment, alienated both from home and public space. Simultaneously, Chen and Cai subvert cinematic convention, such as the genre of romance, to alienate the spectator from what might ordinarily appear as erotic scenes on the screen. Deppman supports her overarching thesis with painstakingly detailed shot and frame analysis from the two films. As a result, her essay is at once very provocative and visionary and at the same time rigorously devoted to close reading. She is persuasive in demonstrating how New Wave filmmakers such as Chen Guofu and Cai Mingliang can, through cinematic images, recreate in visual detail the anxiety that a “cinema of disillusionment” means for the subjects represented therein. This set of essays neither pretends to be exhaustive in fleshing out all the various ways in which cultural production in Taiwan has flourished in spite of the arduous conditions of political isolation, nor does it attempt to close the door on further debate about Taiwan’s status or how that status is artic- ulated in culture and society. Rather, this collection of essays can be viewed, however we may endeavor to describe Taiwan, as an important intervention in the dynamic landscape of a social and political conundrum. Indeed, the selection of essays for this volume, as well as this introduction, are likely to form a point of departure for further debate and contestation over the frac-

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tious and dynamic nature of Taiwan’s identity. If they do precipitate further debate and reflection, then the project will have realized its goal. For one of the most intriguing and liberating qualities about the study of Taiwan and the island itself is its resistance to fixed definition, simple explanation, and authoritative pronouncements about its future. That its inhabitants militate against such definitions on a daily basis is something that has earned the island and its people great respect in my eyes. This volume would not have been possible without the support of Dr. Wu Jing-jyi, executive director of the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange (Fulbright) in Taiwan. I approached Dr. Wu about the idea of helping to support this endeavor through a research grant in Taiwan. He brought the proposal to the National Science Foundation in Taiwan Guokehui and they generously awarded us a major grant toward the publication of this issue. I am grateful for their much-needed support and their recognition of the importance of the study of Taiwan in international and academic circles. Julie Hu and the staff of the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange provided indispensable help in completing this special issue. I also would like to thank the contributors for their perseverance, dedication, and insight. The selection process for this issue was made difficult by the extraordinary number of submissions. There was not room in the issue for the large number of outstanding submissions on this theme. I hope that the scholars whose work did not ultimately appear here will remain steadfast to their commitment to Taiwan studies. Finally, a word of thanks to the anonymous reviewers for providing highly detailed and constructive comments for revision. Christopher Lupke, Guest Editor

Notes

1. Joyce Liu, “The Gaze of Revolt: Chen Chieh-Jen’s Historical Images and His Aesthetic of Horror,” www.srcs.nctu.edu.tw/joyceliu/mworks/mw-interart/GazeOfRevolt/GazeOfRevolt .htm (accessed April 7, 2009). 2. www.asa.de/magazine/iss2/3chen.htm (accessed March 31, 2004). 3. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222 – 37.

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4. See Chen Yingzhen, “Di Yijian Chaishi” (“My First Case”), in Diyi Jian Chaishi (My First Case) (Taipei: Yuanjing, 1975), 117 – 65; and Bai Xianyong, “Huaqiao Rongji” (“Glory’s by Blossom Bridge”), in Taibeiren (Taipei People) (Taipei: Wenxue Chubanshe, 1971), 133 – 49. 5. For a searing and detailed exposé on the Wen Ho Lee affair, see Robert Sheer, “No Defense: How the New York Times Convicted Wen Ho Lee,” Nation, October 23, 2003, 1 – 9. 6. It is interesting to note that Lee later coauthored a book depicting his ordeal titled My Coun- try Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy (New York: Hyperion, 2003). 7. Alfreda Murck, “Art and Politics,” Orientations, March, 1996, 94.

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