Cold War Intimacy Beyond the Taiwan Strait : Sexual Labour and Chinese Modernities in the Teahouse

Lingnan University Digital Commons @ Lingnan University Lingnan Theses and Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 10-15-2020 Cold War intimacy beyond the Taiwan strait : sexual labour and Chinese modernities in the teahouse I-Ting CHEN Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, and the Gender and Sexuality Commons Recommended Citation Chen, I.-T. (2020). Cold War intimacy beyond the Taiwan strait: Sexual labour and Chinese modernities in the teahouse (Doctor's thesis, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd/79/ This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Lingnan Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. Terms of Use The copyright of this thesis is owned by its author. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution or dissemination of this thesis without express authorization is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved. COLD WAR INTIMACY BEYOND THE TAIWAN STRAIT: SEXUAL LABOUR AND CHINESE MODERNITIES IN THE TEAHOUSE CHEN I-TING PHD LINGNAN UNIVERSITY 2020 COLD WAR INTIMACY BEYOND THE TAIWAN STRAIT: SEXUAL LABOUR AND CHINESE MODERNITIES IN THE TEAHOUSE by CHEN I-Ting 陳逸婷 A thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies Lingnan University 2020 ABSTRACT Cold War Intimacy Beyond the Taiwan Strait: Sexual Labour and Chinese Modernities in the Teahouse by CHEN I-Ting Doctor of Philosophy This research asks who the mainland Chinese hostesses are with regard to not only their sexual labour but also the ways the ambiguity of language, nationality, and history is manifested in their daily life, such as in using Japanese loanword “annada” (sweetheart) to call their clients and being seen as dalumei (the mainland little girl) despite their age and Taiwanese citizenship. What emotions and affects are at work when they sing a duet in both Mandarin and Minnanese with each other to express their feelings? How do we understand the sexual labour and women’s encounters in relation to not only their current experiences but also the ways in which the entanglement between the discourses of modernity, desire and subjectivity, and the history of colonialism, the civil war, and the cold war in East Asia shapes those experiences? The United States-led internationalisation of feminism after World War II and the United Nation’s protocol on “gender mainstreaming” from the 1990s onward have inflected government policies in different countries in East Asia, including Taiwan. After the lifting of Martial Law in 1987, the government in Taiwan adopted “gender mainstreaming” as a major instrument for policy-making, pursuing the promulgation of a series of laws protecting women and children and criminalising sexual offenders. Simultaneous with the campaign for legislative reform in post-martial law Taiwan is the emergence of cross-strait migration after the enactment of laws permitting cross-strait exchange. Women migrating from mainland China to Taiwan, were represented in cold war feminist discourse as either the victims of human trafficking or wanton women who sell themselves in exchange for Taiwanese men’s money. Their life in Taiwan, therefore, was deployed by feminist and nationalist narratives in prolonging the cold-war sentiment and the “us-Other division” between běnshěng rén and wàishěng rén after the Civil War. Feminist scholar Naifei Ding coined the term “cold sex war” to depict how the US and UN-led international feminist campaign against human trafficking was deployed to fight against “enemy patriarchal-cum-socialist influences” (Ding 2015, 58) in East Asia in general and Taiwan in particular. Although Taiwan branded itself as “a nation of gender equality and democracy,” the social anxiety about national and sexual bodies/boundaries obscured the agential practices that mainland Chinese hostesses have engaged in through doing business in the teahouses and small drinking parlours. This dissertation investigates questions of desire, gendered subjectivity, and modernity in the context of cross-strait relations between Taiwan and mainland China. I conduct the investigation of sexual labour, Chinese modernities, and “cold-war and cross-strait intimacy” through (1) analysing the debates about women’s body and labour in Taiwan and mainland China in existing scholarship; (2) reading the representation of the courtesan figure in the late Qing novel Haishanghua liezhuan; and (3) the ethnographic work that I conducted in the erotic teahouses in Taipei. Through this dissertation, I hope to highlight the complexity of mainland Chinese hostesses’ erotic business, intimacy, work and life with the clients. I argue that a greater understanding of this complexity sheds new light on contemporary Taiwan-China relations. DECLARATION I declare that this is an original work based primarily on my own research, and I warrant that all citations of previous research, published or unpublished, have been duly acknowledged. _________________________ (CHEN I-Ting ) Date CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………iii Chapter INTRODUCTION………………………………………………............……………1 Post-Cold War Taiwan? Research Methods Layout of the Chapters CHAPTER 1 WOMEN, CHINA, AND MODERNISATION..…………….………27 Body as the Battlefield: Footbinding and Foot Liberation Pleasure or Patriarchy? Prostitution and Polygamy The New Woman in China Rise of the New Woman Dilemma of the New Woman The Goddess, the Prostitute, and the New Woman The Cold War and the Sex War: Cross-Strait Relations CHAPTER 2 DESIRE AND SUBJECTIVITY……………………………………..72 Yù Subjectivity: A Different Approach to Desire Reading Desire in Chinese Literature The Ethos of Ji The “Fate” of Being a Prostitute I. Zhu Shiquan: A Story About Her Bad Fate II. Li Shufang: The Goddess and a Prostitute III. Huang Cuifeng: A Succesful Businesswoman Shame and the Resistance I. Shame and the Rural-Urban Division II. A Courtesan and a Businessman: Who is the Shameful One? The Prostitute and the First Wife I. Three First Wives II. The Shame of the First Wife Conclusion CHAPTER 3 INTIMACY AND BUSINESS IN THE TEAHOUSE…………...…125 i Teahouse: The Erotic and Leisure Site The Culture of Yìdàn in Taiwan The Geography of the Leisure Site The Teahouse District and Its Borderless Nature Pěngcháng: The Business of Face and Favour Return the Table Intimacy of the Business Quánpěng: To Patronise All The Quarrels Dàodǐngei: The Client-Boyfriend Dàodǐngei: The Business Facilitator Friendship: Hostess-Client Relationship Conclusion CHAPTER 4 REIMAGINE CROSS-STRAIT INTIMACY………………..……177 The Formation of “Taiwan-ness” and Masculinity The Clown in Banana Paradise Songs and the Frustrated Lovers I. The Clown II. A Drop of Sweat The “Little Taiwanese Women Who Cross the Borders Rural-Urban Migration: “If I have to beg, I beg in the city” The Dilemma of Nation-State Singing and Resistance A Way to Listen: Mandarin and Minnanese Duet Dreams of Love and Home Cold War Intimacy and Homelessness CONCLUSION………………………………….……………………..…………236 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………….………………..……………245 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I completed this thesis with the help of many people. Two women, especially, supported me throughout the dissertation. One is my supervisor, Tejaswini Niranjana (Teju), and the other is my mother, Ms Ho. Teju is a supervisor who is always honest with her supervisee. Whether my writing was good or poor, she pointed it out to me, so that I always knew how to proceed with the writing under her supervision. Her ethics of supervision, I think, combined sincere evaluation, specific suggestions for revisions, and inspiration during discussions. Overall, being Teju’s supervisee has been challenging for me, since I know that her expectation for her students went beyond fulfilling academic requirements. In other words, through our discussions, I gradually realised that my goal in the dissertation was not only to finish a long piece of writing; instead, it was to propose new perspectives that can explain my initial research problem about contemporary society through my observations of its history of culture, gender, and subjectivity in the context of the third world. As an educator, Teju encouraged me to pursue my research inquiries through thinking and writing in creative ways. For example, she encouraged me to read literature, watch films, and attend various kinds of performance, through which my understanding of how to conduct a research project evolved. I am grateful to Teju, who read my thesis drafts countless times, gave me useful, practical, and inspiring advice, and trained, accompanied, and believed in me throughout the dissertation. I completed the majority of the writing for the dissertation during the pandemic in 2020. The experience was not joyful. When I returned to Taipei in February, where I spent six months to finish chapters 3 and 4, due to the virus paranoia and the pressure iii to meet deadlines my mental status was unstable. I could not sleep without having nightmares about either the virus or the thesis submission. Every time I panicked I called my mother. Without my mother’s unconditional support, including caring for me, answering my calls, and cooking and delivering food for me during my longest period of self-quarantine in the last six months, I would not have been able to finish the dissertation. 我要謝謝我母親何姵蓁女士對我寫論文時期的支持，沒有她的

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