The Cultural Construction of Taiwan in the Literatures of Taiwan, China, and the United States

Home , Chen (surname), Chen Gexin, Chen Lin (Ming dynasty), Chen Yingzhen, Culture of Taiwan, Gao (surname)

THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF TAIWAN IN THE LITERATURES OF TAIWAN, CHINA, AND THE UNITED STATES

A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

by Yu-Fang Lin April 2017 Dissertation written by

Yu-Fang Lin

B.A., National Chung Hsing University, 2002

M.A., Washington State University, 2004

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2017

Approved by

Dr. Babacar M’Baye , Co-Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Dr. Masood A. Raja , Co-Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Dr. Robert Trogdon , Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Dr. Mei-Chen Lin

Dr. James Tyner

Accepted by

Dr. Patricia Dunmir , Interim Chair, Department of English

Dr. James L. Blank , Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iii

PREFACE ...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v

I. INTRODUCTION: ON TAIWAN, HISTORY, AND IDENTITY ...... 1

A BRIEF POLITICAL HISTORY OF TAIWAN ...... 8

METHODOLOGY ...... 13

II. CHAPTER ONE: WANG CHEN-HO’S ROSE, ROSE, I LOVE YOU: ILLUSION,

CULTURAL EROSION, AND GLOBALIZATION ...... 25

SATIRE OF THE TAIWANESE ELITE ...... 33

HIERARCHIZATION AND CAPITAL: TAIWAN AND THE UNITED

STATES ...... 49

COMMODIFICATION OF TAIWANESE BODIES ...... 60

III. CHAPTER TWO: CHAN KOONCHUNG’S THE FAT YEARS: SCIENCE

FICTION, CHINESE NATIONALISM, AND GLOBAL CAPITAL ...... 69

LAO CHEN AND TAIWAN ...... 78

FANG CAODI, LITTLE XI, AND TWO APPROACHES TO UNCOVERING

THE TRUTH ...... 85

THE OPERATION OF CHINESE NATIONALISM

AND GLOBAL CAPITAL ...... 97

IV. CHAPTER THREE: BRENDA LIN’S WEALTH RIBBON: LOCATING

GLOBALIZED IDENTITY IN TAIWANESE-AMERICAN LITERATURE .. 113

ISSUES OF WRITING ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITIES ...... 116

iii THE IMAGE OF MAO DUN ...... 119

THE IMPORTANT FIGURE OF MEIGUO AH-MA ...... 121

CONFRONTING DIFFERENCE IN THE ANCESTRAL HOMELAND ...... 127

GLOBALIZED IDENTITIES ...... 135

TAIWAN AS HOMELAND ...... 141

V. CONCLUSION: LOOKING AHEAD: MAKING SPACE AND SHARING

STORIES OF THE HAKKA ...... 148

REFERENCES ...... 153

APPENDICES

A. ENDNOTES ...... 165

PREFACE

In this dissertation, I follow currently accepted scholarly practices in the way that I write

Romanized Chinese names, which is to follow the naming practices embedded within a given work or in respect to where a person named is from. In Taiwan and China, names are written with the surname first and the given name last. For example, my surname is Lin and my given name is Yu-Fang. In Taiwan, I am Lin Yu-Fang, but in the United States, I go by Yu-Fang Lin, because I had to adapt to Western practices. In general, I write Chinese names as surname-given name instead of given name-surname unless the name is specifically in print as given name- surname. For example, authors Wang Chen-ho and Chan Koonchung’s names are given in print as surname-given name, but Brenda Lin’s name is written in print as given name-surname. I write their names in my dissertation in the way that they write them. Also, I write some Chinese character names in full using their surname-given name to avoid confusion. To do otherwise, would be to violently alter names in a way that would run counter to accepted practices. While this might be confusing at first to Western audiences, I attempt to provide the greatest clarity to readers by using the full names of Wang Chen-ho and Chan Koonchung when referring to them, and providing contextual cues and appropriate repetition of a person’s full name or surname.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Masood Raja for inspiring me to take on this challenging yet fulfilling project; Professor Babacar M’Baye for his valuable advice and encouragement; and

Professor Robert Trogden and Professor Mei-Chen Lin for their time, questions, and suggestions on my project. I give special thanks to my mentor at Washington State University, Professor

Emeritus Alexander Hammond, who made me feel like this was all possible. Also, I would like to thank my parents for their long-term support without which my dream of completing a Ph.D. in the United States would not have come true. Finally, thanks go to my husband Jason W. Ellis and our two cats, Miao Miao and Mose, whose combined love and reassurance got me through tough times and across the finish line.

vi 1

INTRODUCTION

ON TAIWAN, HISTORY, AND IDENTITY

Most postcolonial studies focus on issues of race, inequality, and sovereignty, among others, in primarily Africa and Southeast Asia, and neglect the recent history of a country like

Taiwan, whose colonial past was not primarily dominated by Western rule, but instead by Japan and China. Many of these studies do not pay sufficient attention to Taiwan’s ongoing battle to gain autonomy from its former imperial powers. Complicating matters, Taiwan wrestles with its economic ties to the United States and China, which exert a strong influence on its political, social, and economic conditions. Taiwan, like many developing countries, negotiates the impact with its former colonizers and expanding multinational corporations. But, more importantly,

Taiwan struggles under the weight of international diplomacy and transnational neoliberal policies within the networks of global capital. For centuries, western nations have interfered in military, political, and economic issues in China. After World War II, Taiwan—the newly established Republic of China, separated from the mainland by the Taiwan Strait, continued to deal with political and military threats from the Chinese mainland and political manipulation by the United States. Taiwan has remained a crucial ally for the United States, first to fight against

Communism, and, second, to control China’s political and military influence in the region. These all place Taiwan in a figurative strait between the East and the West, which questions the very claims of this territory as an independent nation-state.

Focusing on three Asian literary texts, namely, Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You

(1998), Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009), and Brenda Lin’s Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan

Bound, America Bound (2004), this dissertation explores the complexity of the constructions of

Taiwan and Taiwanese identity in these works. Drawing on these literary texts from the late- twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, this dissertation’s purpose is to examine the cultural construction of the modern nation-state of Taiwan. It contributes to the study of the situation that

Carlos Rojas calls Taiwan’s position as a “(redoubled) colonial subject” which “defamiliarizes and challenges the ontological legitimacy of the category of the nation-state itself” (1). My dissertation follows the discursive study of the emergence of modern-day Taiwan in order to make sense of it being a “(redoubled) colonial subject.”

Caught in the middle space between the East and West/China and the United States,

Taiwan and its people struggle to be Taiwanese and to make sense of what that might mean. At the same time, the polar opposites—Communist China and the Democratic United States— likewise try to define what Taiwan is according to their own national interests. Hence, Taiwan is a unique case of cultural construction of place, because the narratives about the territory are created elsewhere and within its border. Moreover, these narratives about Taiwan are in conflict with one another at the ultimate risk of being subsumed within the greater narratives of the

Chinese and United States superpowers. Further complicating the matter are the facts that there are different opinions about Taiwan by its own people; their differing views propel the

3 imaginative work of Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. All of these stories and narratives play a role in the cultural construction of Taiwan.

The construction, manipulation, and dissemination of these multiple narratives about

Taiwan raise a number of questions regarding the nation’s place in the global network of ideas and capital. The constitutive narratives of Taiwan are embedded within the global capital network of globalization, but to what extent is Taiwan formed and aided by globalization? Does the influence of global capital reiterate colonialism in a modern situation? How do the homogenizing forces of globalization confront the multiple cultures already eroding one another’s boundaries within the island of Taiwan?

This dissertation attempts to respond to these questions and serve as a call to action for further research on Taiwan’s cultural construction within literary discourses mediated by networks of global capital. By reading three literary works that have not yet received much

Western scholarly attention, I call attention to these works that I consider important to the cultural construction of Taiwan and explore how Taiwan and Taiwaneseness are represented from the view points of three writers representing three major geopolitical stakeholders on the island: Taiwan, China, and the United States.

The concept of Taiwanese identity is of paramount importance following the beginning of the new century. According to Schubert and Damm: “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Taiwan’s quest for identity remains the most contentious issue in the domestic arena of

Taiwanese politics, spilling over from here into the cross-Strait relationship and impacting on regional and global security, where it also clashes with the very different concepts of identity formation propagated by the CCP government in Beijing” (1). They are correct that any confrontation of the Taiwan question is contentious. However, its contentiousness primarily

4 arises from the claims of ownership of the island by mainland China’s government. On the one hand, Schubert and Damm report on the pursuit of a Taiwanese identity for the people of the

Republic of China, or ROC, Taiwan (1). But, on the other hand, they acknowledge how this identity is shaped in part by “identity formation propagated” by the People’s Republic of China

(PRC) government of mainland China—a political and cultural construction consciously enacted, performed, and repeated by the propaganda engines of the ruling Communist Party (Schubert and

Damm 1). Unlike their focus on Taiwan’s strait relations and the identity formation taking place as a result of the operation of culture and propaganda, I widen the scope of Taiwan’s cultural construction to include cross-strait relations with China and Taiwan’s Western ally, the United

States, which Schubert and Damm recognize as important to any resolution to Taiwanese identity when they write: “Issues related to Taiwanese identity therefore constitute an important and influential factor in future relations across the Taiwan Strait and, as a consequence, the international relations between China and the United States” (1). Nevertheless, there are limitations to any work on the cultural construction of Taiwan, because, “In fact, the sheer quantity of research material available does not only demonstrate the complexities of identity formation in contemporary Taiwan, its contestation and ongoing evolution, but also shows the difficulties inherent in trying to gain a clear picture or even an analytical definition of the present situation” (Schubert and Damm 2). There are difficulties involved in obtaining a clear picture of the cultural construction of Taiwan. However, this construction has much to do with the wealth of cultural productions relating to Taiwan—both within and without. Therefore, any project on

Taiwan’s cultural construction is restricted by time and scope. Yet these challenges cannot negate the need for critical interventions to raise awareness, provide commentary, and provoke

5 conversation. The fact is that no one intervention can be exhaustive or definitive—all interventions are a part of an always-evolving discourse.

Yih-jye Hwang describes the fluidity of Taiwanese identity and Taiwaneseness in relation to this on-going discourse. Hwang observes: “It is argued: there was no such thing as

‘Taiwanese-ness’ in the first place; nor is ‘Taiwanese-ness’ a single thing; it is subject to different practices – people’s speech and actions” (26). However, Hwang explains: “The idea that there is such a thing as ‘Taiwanese-ness’ grew gradually. What this thing amounts to is subject to different kinds of practices. Each practice has an input, making it possible to talk about

‘Taiwanese-ness’ and attaching a specific substance (i.e. qualities, features) to it” (26). Hwang uses the notion of “practices” as a catchall term for the discursive work that enables conversation and opens conceptual avenues for thought. In this case, the gradual accumulation of practices led to the possibility of Taiwaneseness. Hwang adds: “And this process of construction is not simply one way, either. Particular discourses of Taiwanese-ness in turn make certain actions possible, sustaining or undermining what people say and do” (26). Thus, as some avenues are opened, others might be challenged or closed altogether. This is the start-and-stop of cultural development through discursive practices. Hwang continues: “Accordingly, Taiwanese national identity is conditional, lodged in contingency. It has determinate conditions of existence, including the material and symbolic resources required to sustain it. The concept of ‘Taiwanese- ness’ should be seen as a dynamic and fluid rather than as a static concept” (26). Because

Taiwaneseness is discursive, it changes shape as the discourse changes. Of course, discourse changes not only from practices of speech and writing, but also from historical events, political change, and other cultural contexts, which are themselves discursive, but deserving attention since it potentially is part of and marginal to the practices Hwang describes. Nevertheless, the

6 effects of discourse filter through all of culture, which in turn changes the shape of neighboring and overlapping discourses within culture. In this vein, Hwang writes: “Taiwanese-ness is not naturally given, but exists in the way people talk and act. In short, there is no such thing as

‘Taiwanese-ness’ outside of this process of constitution; Taiwanese-ness only exists in discourse.

Taiwanese national identity is itself a discursive entity” (26). According to Hwang, there is no one definitive Taiwan or Taiwaneseness, and their emergences take place over time. Taiwanese identity itself is the subject of a discourse that has changed over time in response to cultural and historical context. As is true for discourses in general, all claims are contextual, historical, and contingent. As culture changes, so do its meanings, significations, and traces. Likewise, I claim that the cultural construction of Taiwan is similarly discursive, and it is the work of the critic to engage, intervene, and contribute to the development of the discourse. Therefore, this dissertation is my intervention in the meaning making of Taiwan through the study of literary works by writers of and located in Taiwan, China, and the United States.

Additionally, the complexity of Taiwanese discourse is vast. Mark Harrison describes it as: “But at the same time, the name Taiwanese can be surrounded by a tremendously complex and powerful set of institutions in education, politics, and culture: literature, films, school subjects, political parties, religious practices, scholarship, and even the books of foreign academics” (59). This dissertation can only narrowly examine the literature channel of this aspect of Taiwaneseness and, even then, can only focus on three novels. Nevertheless, discursive production of “Taiwanese” in Harrison’s explanation, “really describes the social process by which its name has been elaborated, institutionalized and in Bourdieu’s sense, has accumulated symbolic power—the process that makes the single moment of declaration (“I am Taiwanese”) meaningful, then legitimate, and then authoritative” (59). Bourdieu’s symbolic power arises from

7 social and cultural interactions via the linguistic channel. According to Bourdieu: “Symbolic power is a power of constructing reality” (166). Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic power” applies to the internalized conception of what Taiwan is. Considering Harrison’s use of the term,

Bourdieu adds:

It is not enough to note that relations of communication are always, inseparably,

power relations which, in form and content, depend on the material or symbolic

power accumulated by the agents (or institutions) involved in these relations. . . .

It is as structured and structuring instruments of communication and knowledge

that ‘symbolic systems’ fulfill their political function, as instruments which help

to ensure that one class dominates another (symbolic violence) by bringing their

own distinctive power to bear on the relations of power which underlie them and

thus by contributing, in Weber’s terms, to the ‘domestication of the dominated.’

(167)

On the one hand, symbolic power accumulates; but through its accumulation, it fits into power relationships that institutionalize and domesticate what it means to be Taiwanese. While it is my goal to read how these novels contribute to the elaboration of Taiwanese identity in Harrison’s formulation, it is also my aim to elaborate on the discontinuities, biases, and agendas that contribute to and detract from the chain of signifiers that constitute Taiwanese identity.

Furthermore, it is important that I acknowledge my relationship to this dissertation’s focus of study. I am Taiwanese, and I possibly am on the path toward becoming an American citizen. The issues raised in the works that I discuss in the following chapters resonate with my own experiences and those of others that I know. On the one hand, the cultural constructions of

Taiwan and Taiwaneseness happen through the literary channel represented by these works I

8 discuss. On the other hand, cultural constructions take place through lived experience and the connections one makes with others. This dissertation, of course, focuses on the former, but the traces of the latter are certainly present in the works discussed in this dissertation and in the words I write in response to these significant cultural artifacts. Thus, this project is itself a testament to the cultural constructions of Taiwan through the process of reading, lived experiences, and informed critiques.

To contextualize the work that I do in this dissertation, I begin with a brief history of

Taiwan in which I focus on its multiple colonizations and its gradual shift towards a postcolonial phase. Then, I explain the theoretical methodology employed in this project. I also describe the theoretical underpinnings of my readings as well as the conceptual issues that have to be recognized, negotiated, and balanced in order to understand the complexity of Taiwan and

Taiwaneseness.

A BRIEF POLITICAL HISTORY OF TAIWAN

Taiwan is a small island located at a politically and militarily crucial spot on the Pacific

Ocean.1 Before the beginnings of colonization, there were a variety of aboriginal groups or tribes on the island. In the middle of the Sixteenth Century, specifically in 1554, before there was a unified authoritative government on the island, Taiwan was discovered by the Portuguese and given the name “Ilha Formosa” (Beautiful Island). The Spanish and Dutch were interested in using Taiwan as a trading point with China and Japan, and they respectively occupied the north and south of Taiwan. However, the Spanish were defeated by the Dutch in 1642, and as a result,

Spain retreated its military. In 1662, Zheng Cheng-gong, the son of a government official from the Ming dynasty in China, whom the new Ching Dynasty viewed as an enemy, defeated the

Dutch and took over Taiwan. Later, Zheng’s son lost the war against the Chinese military and surrendered in 1683. It was not until then that the Chinese government saw the critical role that

Taiwan played to stabilize China’s border security and made the decision to include Taiwan as a militarily strategic location. It is important to note that when the Chinese government let its citizens move to Taiwan, the policy allowed only men to immigrate, and these immigrants were not permitted to bring any women with them. This resulted in many Chinese men had interethnic marriages with the aboriginal women on the island.

In 1895, China lost the First Sino-Japanese War, and, hence, Taiwan was given to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki.2 There was resistance to the Japanese colonization among different ethnic groups; however, it was the Japanese who set the blueprint for the infrastructure development of the island. At the 1943 Cairo Conference held by China, Britain, and the United

States, General Chiang Kai-Shek, who represented China, requested Taiwan to be returned to the

Republic. After the 50-year colonization by Japan and the new rule of the Chinese Republic, the

Taiwanese experienced a dramatic change: they were happy about the retreat of Japanese colonizers and that the island was returned back to China; yet, at the same time, there was nostalgia of Japan and fear of the new authority from the mainland.3

In early 1947, an investigation of a tobacco case inflamed the long-termed conflicts between the military and the civilians, which resulted in many thousands of casualties.4 This was the infamous “February 28 Incident” which began a series of clashes between the Taiwanese and the mainlanders. After the Chinese Communist Party gained the majority control of China in

1949, General Chiang Kai-Shek evacuated all of his army to Taiwan and began the period of martial law. It was a dictatorship ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek and administered by his KMT party

(Kuomingtang Party). People who were against Chiang’s leadership and the KMT party were eliminated. 5 This period, known as the White Terror, lasted until 1987.

In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China, and in 1979, President Jimmy

Carter announced the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the official government of China and cut diplomatic ties with the Republic of China (ROC), or Taiwan. From then on, in the eyes of the United States, the Republic of China (Taiwan) is only the governing authority, not the government, of the island. However, the U.S. Congress passed the “Taiwan Relations Act” in the same year, as a necessity “to promote the foreign policy of the United States by authorizing the continuation of commercial, cultural, and other relations between the people of the United States and the people on Taiwan” (Taiwan Relations Act 93 Stat. 14). This act, which was intended to be beneficial for the U.S., also includes policies “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” and “to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan” (Taiwan Relations Act 93 Stat. 14). These declarations backed by the U.S. seem to ensure Taiwan’s safety and autonomy from China, but the act put Taiwan in a difficult position since it is stipulated that “determination of Taiwan’s defense needs shall include review by United States military authorities in connection with recommendations to the President and the Congress” (Taiwan Relations Act 93 Stat. 15). Since it is up to the U.S. to determine whether and to what extent they should protect Taiwan, it is in Taiwan’s best interest to keep the U.S. as its closest ally.

In 2000, President Chen Shui-bian became the first president from the DPP (Democratic

Progressive Party), the opposing party of the KMT and second largest political party in Taiwan.6

During his governance, President Chen promoted the independence of Taiwan and initiated an

11 educational platform focused on the history of Taiwan instead of China.7 However, in 2008 the pro-China President Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT party was elected. His moves to strengthen ties with China led to the rise of the prominent “Sunflower Movement” in Taiwan, which began on

March 18, 2014 when a group of students and civilians occupied the parliament to protest the Ma administration’s unlawful attempts to pass the CSSTA (Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement).

The protestors gained a great deal of support because they raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the CSSTA on Taiwan’s economy, homeland security, and freedom of expression. Subsequently, 350,000 people rallied in Taipei on March 30, 2014 to sustain the occupying action of the students. As a result of these movements, the CSSTA was shelved and remains suspended. In March 2016, Taiwan elected Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of the DPP, as its thirteenth president. Based on President Tsai’s platform, this election demonstrates that the majority of the Taiwanese either support the independence of Taiwan or want to maintain the current political relationship with China. Furthermore, China continues to erase Taiwan’s international presence. China’s demand that Taiwan compete in the Olympic Games as “Chinese

Taipei” since 1984, and the recent fallout from the newly-elected US President Donald Trump’s tweets both show that Taiwan is pulled between China’s continued attempts to enforce their

“One China” policy and the United States’ desire to maintain influence in the Pacific Rim.

Based on this brief history, it is perhaps no surprise that Shu-Mei Shih described

Taiwan’s historical condition as a “serial and layered colonial condition—both settler colonial and subjected or beholden to another power” (13). Throughout Taiwan’s history, which is strongly characterized by a series of colonizations and sedimentary layers added on top of preexisting cultures and ethic groups, Yun-han Chu observes how Taiwan’s political development is linked to its geopolitical relationships: “In the last century, the political fate of Taiwan, like that

12 of Korea, was ultimately linked with the outcomes of the competition among the great powers for dominance over East Asia. At each juncture of a major shift in the region’s overarching order, Taiwan was always at the epicenter of strategic conflict on the scale of titanic clashes”

(133). These conflicts present an opportunity for political and economic elites to influence the development and definition of Taiwan identity. As Chu argues: “National identity is not inborn, but a socially and politically constructed sentiment that is subject to change, especially under the intensive mobilization of political elites at times of regime transition and/or global restructuring”

(136). However, the escalation of the Taiwanese independence movement, following democratization on the island, depends on the cultural pluralism that democratization affords and encourages. Chu links the “Taiwanese identity surge” to “Taiwan’s democratization:”

[T]he quest of Taiwanese consciousness and a Taiwanese society with a separate

international identity were long suppressed under the old Nationalist regime,

which justified its ruling legitimacy and the political dominance of the

Mainlander elites on the basis of the ‘One China’ principle. Thus the surge was

simply unleashed by the process of democratic opening-up (136).

According to Chu, the historical and political reality initially limited the discursive possibilities that Yih-jye Hwang described as emergent over time. Chu continues: “Furthermore, it could be argued that some historical and global factors were at work. First of all, the seed of Taiwanese identity was buried deeply during the years of Japanese colonial rule and post-war political reconstruction” (136). In this case, the Japanese assimilationist practices galvanized the

Taiwanese people as other, who were made to assimilate into Japanese culture—not as equals, but as ruled subject. In addition, as Chu explains, “attention must be paid to the epic changes in the international system since the late 1970s that first precipitated the state legitimacy crisis and

13 later awakened aspirations for independent statehood” (136). The ascendancy of the PRC in economic and political networks set Taiwan against a potential imperial colonizer. The PRC can be seen as such, since its claims on the island, its resources, and its people would be due to Party

Rule which is top-down and violently implemented. This latter point is intensified by Chu’s observation that: “it is important not to overlook the negative effects of Beijing’s intensive efforts to isolate Taiwan from the international community and its hostile reunification campaign” (136). He concludes this passage by noting: “However, as most of the recent literature suggests, neither historical and global forces on the people’s political consciousness must be actualized through state actions, the competing strategies of the elites, and their mutual influences and compromises” (Chu 136). Certainly, the PRC, ROC elites, and other political actors in the region, including Taiwan’s military and economic ally, the United States, play their respective roles in the development of Taiwan’s cultural construction and the emergence of

Taiwanese identities. However, these top-down influences are only part of the cultural construction of Taiwan. Through democratization and the circulation of culture through artistic literature, Taiwan’s cultural construction is, like Yih-jye Hwang suggests, discursive and arising from many voices, experiences, and stakeholders (both elites and non-elites alike).

METHODOLOGY

Since Taiwan is a previously colonized space and its current (albeit contentious) condition is seen as postcolonial, this dissertation’s orientation as such is an example of postcolonial theorization and reading. However, before endeavoring to explain the theories that inform this project, it is important to clarify the terminology that I use throughout the following chapters. Anne McClintock’s concise explanation of the relevant terms is a good starting point.

Oriented around “a variety of forms of global domination,” McClintock defines colonization as:

“[involving] direct territorial appropriation of another geopolitical entity, combined with forthright exploitation of its resources and labor, and systematic interference in the capacity of the appropriated culture (itself not necessarily a homogenous entity) to organize its dispensations of power” (88). In general, colonialism means: “Imperial colonization, by extension, involves large-scale, territorial domination of the kind that gave late Victorian Britain and the European

‘lords of humankind’ control over 85% of the earth, and the USSR totalitarian rule over

Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century” (McClintock 88). But, another specter of colonialism applies to Taiwan: “Internal colonization occurs where the dominant part of a country treats a group or region as it might a foreign colony” (88). Taiwan’s history is primarily one of imperial colonization by the Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese. However, it is important to note the various forms of internal colonization that have taken place against

Taiwan’s indigenous and native peoples following the escape of the ROC from mainland China to the island of Taiwan. The island was already in the hands of China after the end of World War

II; but, in the aftermath of the establishment of the ROC on the island, its indigenous and native peoples were further marginalized and effectively colonized internally by the ROC.

However, before defining the term “postcolonial,” it is important to temper it according to the rightful concerns that McClintock expresses:

I wish to question the orientation of the emerging discipline and its concomitant

theories and curricula changes, around a singular, monolithic term, organized

around a binary axis of time rather than power, and which, in its premature

celebration of the pastness of colonialism, runs the risk of obscuring the

continuities and discontinuities of colonial and imperial power. (88)

The root of her misgivings has to do with the idea that postcolonial is oriented around an axis of time (pre-colonial, colonial, and then, postcolonial eras for a nation) rather than power. Even after a nation is unshackled from the direct rule of a colonial power, the lasting effects of influence via culture, trade, and politics can cast a long shadow over a nation and its people.

Ella Shohat earnestly asks: “When exactly, then, does the ‘postcolonial’ begin?” (103).

Shohat’s point is that the postcolonial condition varies from place to place, because each colonized culture that escapes colonization follows different historical and cultural trajectories.

Due to Taiwan’s serial and layered colonial conditions, it is difficult to say if it has ever definitively transitioned to a postcolonial condition. However, its peoples’ current debates over

Taiwaneseness and Taiwan as a country seem to signal a break with the past, at least as much as is politically and economically viable in its continuing conflict with mainland China and the

United States’ support for Taiwan (a dual-edged sword—a pawn on the one hand, and a city upon a hill to be defended on the other).

Robert Young responds to these concerns regarding timing and terminology and suggests: “Many of the problems raised can be resolved if the postcolonial is defined as coming after colonialism and imperialism, in their original meaning of direct-rule domination, but still positioned within imperialism in its later sense of the global system of hegemonic economic power” (57). He gives us a distinction between postcolonialism and postcoloniality, which he clarifies along axes of time and power respectively. First, Young defines the postcolonial as: “a dialectical concept that marks the broad historical facts of decolonization and the determined achievement of sovereignty—but also the realities of nations and peoples emerging into a new imperialistic context of economic and sometimes political domination” (57). According to

Young, the postcolonial is a dialectical concept crossing historical facts and lived realities, which

16 goes beyond the historical register that McClintock warns us about when postcolonialism is used as a defining term alone. Young continues: “The experience of that new sovereignty typically encouraged the development of a postcolonial culture which radically revised the ethos and ideologies of the colonial state and, at the same time, reoriented the goals of the independence movement towards the very different conditions of national autonomy” (57). Taiwan is postcolonial due to the historical changes that have happened to it as a result of colonization and the removal of colonial rule several times over. The effect of these colonial experiences have weighed the culture of Taiwan with European, Japanese, and mainland Chinese culture, language, and political systems. Young theorizes colonization in a similar way when he states:

“The postcolonial also specifies a transformed historical situation, and the cultural formations that have arisen in response to changed political circumstances, in the former colonial power”

(57). Similarly, Taiwan transformed many times over as the political circumstances changed in each of its external and internal colonizers.

Moreover, Young defines postcoloniality as: “[putting] the emphasis on the economic, material and cultural conditions that determine the global system in which the postcolonial nation is required to operate—one heavily weighted towards the interests of international capital and the G7 powers” (57). Likewise, Taiwan’s postcoloniality is embedded in the networks of power and capital on both sides of its political oppositions—China and the United States. It is held in a state of tension between these two influential polar opposites that depend on it while, in turn, making the colonized depend on them. Explaining a similar dynamic, Young argues:

“Postcoloniality can still register, however, the resistant pressure and agency of the postcolonial world within such conditions, demonstrating that there is no ‘postcolonial condition’ outside specific instances of complex interminglings of structural forces with local, personal experience”

(57). The cultural construction of Taiwan via voices within and without registers Young’s concept of “resistant pressure and agency” within the specific conditions of a postcolonial experience that differs from those of other postcolonial nations in history and on-going cultural, political, and economic conditions.

Unlike most of the scholarship on Taiwanese identity, which favors the political and sociological, this dissertation is aligned with the significant trend in Taiwan Studies, such as that of Ann Heylen and Scott Sommers, which have “linked with the critical analysis of literature . . . that discuss the emergence of Taiwanese nationalism and resistance in literature” (10). However,

I am interested more broadly in literature about Taiwan or Taiwanese identity by writers in

Taiwan or of Taiwanese heritage as well as those from other countries. In this case, my dissertation includes writers from Taiwan, China, and the United States, because I assert that

Taiwanese identity is comprised of an endless chain of signifiers both from within and without its borders. Taiwan is an idea and signifier. Taiwanese is an identity for the people of the island of Taiwan created within the discourse of globalization. The easy circulation and translation of ideas through traditional means (e.g., books) and new media (e.g., the Internet) means, for this project, that Taiwan’s signification is created, debated, and formalized by many stakeholders, including those among others Taiwanese, Chinese, and Americans. However, this project’s focus is on the literature of Taiwan, China, and the United States in particular, because these nations share an intertwined and contentious recent history during which time Taiwan began to emerge as a new country that struggles to free itself from its colonial past.

It is within this framework that my project explores the cultural construction of Taiwan as a postcolonial nation whose postcoloniality is an on-going reality within the global networks of capital. How, then, is Taiwan culturally constructed? Homi Bhabha argues persuasively that:

“Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation—or narration—might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west” (1). Bhabha intertwines the concept of nations and narrative. They are both stories—the story of the nation and the narrative of stories. Each narrative is an idea held in the mind of each subject, and such narratives are shared between subjects in a variety of ways, including literature. Of course, individual experience, agency, and rationality may shape a story that is different for one subject as opposed to another. Yet, the idea of shared narratives—stories that must be by definition detailed, informative, and rhetorically persuasive, such that they are accepted, believed, and shared—to culturally construct the nation seems more powerful than those aspects of the nation that are largely unseen (such as the total population, borders, abstractions like norms, etc.).

Bhabha continues his arguments by asserting: “To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the conceptual object itself” (3). This is an important maneuver on his part—the cultural construction of the nation via narrative informs as well as changes the object, the nation itself.

And, as Bhabha concludes: “If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the ‘totalization’ of national culture, then its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life” (3). This is what I am attempting to accomplish with this dissertation. Namely, I wish to draw attention to the dissemination of narratives that form a chain of signifiers leading to a variety of conceptions of Taiwan. These significations are produced by different stakeholders for different reasons, but each nevertheless plays an important role in the construction and integration of narratives that

19 form an idea that is Taiwan. On the one hand, there are dangers associated with these narratives and who tells them. On the other hand, there are hopes associated with them as well. It is my purpose to explore what these might be and to lead the way for others to continue this type of work in the cultural construction of Taiwan.

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities provides perhaps the most significant theoretical framework for my readings. Anderson defines an imagined community as: “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). He begins to unpack his definition in the following way: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). Each subject conceptualizes the whole within the mind, because it is impossible to grasp the political community’s entirety in any meaningful way. Individuals receive bits and pieces via culture and discourse. As Bhabha points out, the nation is narrated discursively. Culture and discourse inform what and how the community, in this case Taiwan, can be and is imagined. Moreover, as

Anderson writes: “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (7). Likewise, Taiwan has physical borders—it is an island surrounded by water, and across the Taiwan Strait is the continent of Asia with its own nations, including the

PRC. United to a nation’s physicality, there is its right of self-determination, which Anderson describes when he explains: “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (7). Taiwan’s sovereignty is, of course, challenged from within

(KMT wants reunification with China, DPP wants independence) and without (the PRC insists

20 on One China). Discussing a similar dynamic, Anderson asserts: “Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). This is perhaps

Taiwan’s act of saving grace following democratization. Despite the tension surrounding the political sovereignty of the island-nation, the imagined community of Taiwan remains an increasingly accepted, circulated, and promoted idea.

The cultural construction of Taiwan is informed in part by Yih-jye Hwang’s notion of discursive practices leading to the emergence of Taiwaneseness, Bhabha’s concept of narrating the nation, and Anderson’s concept of imagined community. Yet, there is one additional framework that addresses the very issue of cultural construction that needs to be elaborated.

Allen Chun’s provocative article highlights many of the issues while taking a contemporary stance to what has been traditionally believed about how one should construct and perform identity, which contributes to the characterological analysis that I perform in the subsequent chapter readings. While Chun focuses on the constructedness of Chineseness in China and

Taiwan, I apply his framework specifically to the cultural construction of Taiwan and

Taiwaneseness. He argues: “Since the very idea of (a national) identity is new, any notions of culture invoked in this regard, no matter how faithfully they are grounded in the past, have to be constructions by nature” (Chun 114). Noting the late emergence of national identity as a subject concept, the formation of this construction in the present in response to the historical past and the present moment must also be understood. In this sense, Chun asserts: “In the end, they conform to a new kind of boundedness in order to create bonds of horizontal solidarity between equal, autonomous individuals constitutive of the empty homogeneous social space of the nation in ways that could not have existed in a hierarchical, cosmological past” (114). The possibilities of

21 national identity, like the imagined community described by Anderson, are, therefore, boundless.

The construction of a level field of subject identities within a national context of the modern nation state means that they are constructed rather than bestowed and are therefore contingent upon those that have emerged from the heterogeneous social space of both the present and the past.

Adding to Anderson’s theorizing of nation, Chun states: “Because it is constructed, culture is not just imagined but authorized and institutionalized as well” (114). The constructed nature of a national culture depends, at least in part, on its authorization by political elites and increasingly so by the circulation of capital and globalized interests. The authorized elements become institutionalized over time. In a sense, these elements could be said to calcify or harden.

They are layered over the previously authorized and institutionalized elements of the imagined national community and national identity. The process of the imagined community proposed by

Anderson takes on a more complicated structure in Chun’s configuration, because the institutionalized aspects of the cultural construction of Taiwan involve institutions beyond the scope of this dissertation. In addition to discussing the ways in which culture is institutionalized and authorized via law, policy, and education, Chun points out:

Cultural discourse in this regard includes not only symbols of national identity,

icons of patriotic fervor and other things; more importantly, it involves the

authority of statements about shared values embodied in language, ethnicity, and

custom, as well as shared myths encoded as genres of knowledge, such as history,

ideology, and beliefs. (115)

This statement reflects the influence of Anderson’s notion of imagined communities in Chun’s study of the cultural construction of Taiwan. Anderson’s influence is also apparent in the ways in

22 which Chun posits these issues in terms of identity, which is also paramount to my analyses in the following chapters. Chun writes: “Instead of simply asking how identity is constituted, one should also ask when and why identity is invoked. That is to say, perhaps more interesting than knowing that people have identities is the problem of why people have crises of perception that give rise to new identities” (132). The issue of identity crisis arises in all of these texts that I discuss in this project, and it is important to recognize how these crises represent a point of emergence, discovery, or illumination to identity for the characters discussed within the narratives, which in turn leads to an understanding of how Taiwan is constructed via the characters’ relationship to the nation and its imagined community. According to Chun, this work of deciphering identity and its constituents is important because: “Only by demystifying (not just decolonizing) the authority of interests that have deemed it necessary to define culture in a particular way and to make people identify with prevailing communities would one then be free to choose, making the idea of multiple identities a meaningful reality” (134).8 Chun’s theory frames how to study the complexity of the characters examined in this dissertation. Also, these issues of complexity are important to all of us grappling with an identity shaped by our changing relationship to place and nation. Finally, as Chun argues: “if ethnic identities and culture are all constructions anyway, why bother to ask how true they really are? A historical view of things easily shows that national identity coded in terms of ‘Chineseness’ was created in the span of a few decades and can be shown, in the long run, to be ephemeral” (129). I agree that identity is ephemeral and fleeting. It changes with discourse and the individual’s lived experience. It is not dependent upon truth. Instead, it is dependent upon understanding, exploring, making, and becoming. It is the purpose of this dissertation to shine the light on the texts discussed in the following chapters not to discern truth but to illuminate the stories which are told, witnessed, and

23 expressed by the three respective writers. I do not mean to imply that their stories alone are what is of total value—they are only part of a bigger picture that readers can use to attain some sense of understanding about the cultural constructions of their own identities as well as importantly the cultural construction of what Taiwan is and means.

I explore these issues of imagined communities, narrating the nation, discursive practices, and cultural construction in close readings of three representative texts. In Chapter One, I examine the novel Rose, Rose, I Love You, written by the renowned Taiwanese author Wang

Chen-ho. The book is set around the time of the Vietnam War. A group of Taiwanese elites, including a councilman, a teacher, and a lawyer, try to prepare R&R (rest and relaxation) for

U.S. troops visiting from the battlefields of Vietnam. The story focuses on the development and process to train working girls from local brothels to entertain the incoming soldiers. Through this satirical work, the author laments how Taiwanese cling to the United States and its culture, and how it has influenced Taiwanese elites and the proletariat at the same time. I critique how

American influence seems to erase Taiwanese culture and national pride.

In Chapter Two, I discuss The Fat Years written by the Chinese writer Chan Koonchung.

This science fictional work describes how, in the near future, China replaces the United States as the most powerful country in the world. However, even when the whole month of February 2008 seems to mysteriously disappear in the leadup to this sea change, the majority of the Chinese are unaware of it. The protagonist, who is Taiwanese, attempts to solve the mystery of the missing month and eventually uncover the alarming tactics deployed by the Chinese government to achieve its goal of world domination. I explore how Taiwan is culturally constructed through the grand narrative of Chinese nationalism in this work.

In Chapter Three, I explore Brenda Lin’s memoir, Wealth Ribbon. This book focuses on how a Taiwanese American woman suffers from the anxiety of identity crisis brought on her through her attempts to rediscover her ancestral heritage in mainland China and reestablish a connection to her parents who are from and live in Taiwan. An American by birth, she discovers unexpectedly that she is disconnected from both China and Taiwan. Through the exploration of her family’s roots, I investigate how Taiwan is culturally constructed for her as she develops a new globalized identity in response to her dilemma.

And finally, in the Conclusion, I discuss how I would like to do further work on important Taiwanese writers who are famous in Taiwan but are less known to the international scholarly world. One of these authors is Huang Chun-min, who dedicates his works on depicting

Taiwan’s cultural experience and evoking Taiwanese identity. In addition, because of my Hakka origin, I describe my interest in exploring novelists who focus their works on Hakkan experience, such as Chung Li-ho, Chung Chao-cheng, and Li Chao.

CHAPTER ONE

WANG CHEN-HO’S ROSE, ROSE, I LOVE YOU: ILLUSION, CULTURAL EROSION, AND

GLOBALIZATION

Rose, Rose, I Love You is a satirical Taiwanese novel by Wang Chen-ho9 and translated by Howard Goldblatt from traditional Chinese into English.10 Originally published in Taipei in

1984 as Mei Kuei Mei Kuei Wo Ai Ni by Yuan Ching Publishing Company, it was reprinted in

1994 by Hung Fan Bookstore. Columbia University Press published its English translation in

1998 as the first of its Modern Literature from Taiwan series. According to Shuang Shen, its themes established its enduring legacy: “Among the many issues that the author raises in this book, the evaluation of the confusing process of modernization and Westernization in Taiwan remains to be an urgent and unsettling question even for contemporary readers more than two decades after the story is supposed to take place” (180). The novel’s continuing popularity and importance, which is connected to the book’s themes of national identity, practices of geopolitical destabilization, capitalism, and globalization, led to its translation into English for a

Western audience. However, it is one of only a few Taiwanese novels originally written in

Chinese and translated into English. Carlos Rojas notes: “It is ironic that, in the English-speaking world, so much has been written about the hegemonic disasters of mainland cultural history, yet so little about the multifarious sociopolitical, cultural, and literary dynamics of Taiwan” (ix).

This speaks to the significance that Wang Chen-ho’s novel acquires for being one of the few literary texts about Taiwan to be translated for a Western, English-speaking audience.11

Two important issues of translation deserve discussion before analyzing the novel’s content. First, “Rose, Rose, I Love You,” the song that is the namesake for the novel, has the distinction of probably being the only crossover hit song of a Chinese composer. Chen Gexin composed the song and Wu Cun wrote the original Mandarin lyrics. Wilfrid Thomas is credited as the writer of the English-language version of “Mei Kuei Mei Kuei Wo Ai Ni” or “Rose, Rose,

I Love You.” Interestingly, the song was a hit in China where it was performed by the female

Shanghai recording artist, Yao Lee, and in the West, where it was chanted by the male American vocalist, Frankie Laine.12

Second, Howard Goldblatt, the translator of Wang Chen-ho’s novel from Chinese into

English, comments on his translation: “It’s all my words. . . . If they’re reading a translated novel, they’re reading the translation and hope that the translator got the story, style, and characters right.”13 Of course, the translator’s job is multifaceted. The translator must respect the original author’s literal content while accommodating the expectations, experiences, and knowledge of the translated work’s new audience. There are historical and cultural contexts to be considered, too. Therefore, the words of a translation are those of a translator who writes them down through the creatively cognitive act of expressing the true meaning of terms, concepts, style, and tone. Adding to Goldblatt’s translation of Rose, Rose, I Love You, his experience of

Taiwan as an American Navy sailor informs his rendition of this novel, too. According to Levitt,

Goldblatt graduated college and joined the Navy to avoid the draft, and “the Navy sent Goldblatt to Taipei instead of to sea” (par. 11). While stationed “in Taiwan, Goldblatt became a serious student of Chinese. He found he had a good ear for the language, and he enjoyed the humor.

After his discharge from the Navy, he stayed on to study at the Mandarin Training Center, a language school in Taipei” (Levitt par. 13). Goldblatt adds: “My life in Chinese started there” in

Taiwan (Levitt par. 12). His path to becoming a translator was not a deliberate one. Dylan Suher comments on Goldblatt’s work: “Goldblatt, because of his background, is unique. . . . Before the

70s, if you studied China, you were a missionary or an Orientalist. Goldblatt came to Chinese literature in a different way. It keyed him into modern and urban Chinese fiction. It’s a novel approach. Others who do it have one dominant language and period. He translates everything.”14

The translator’s different way of coming to Chinese and his interest in translating all things in this language represents an immersion rather than a distanced interest. Furthermore, his immersive tendencies are influenced by his experience as an American, a Vietnam War veteran, and an academic. It is important to bear this evidence in mind in relationship to the novel’s

English translation, because while we can follow the trace of the words of Rose, Rose, I Love

You back to Wang Chen-ho’s original novel, we cannot ignore the new meanings and messages acquired through the work of a multilingual, American translator.

While Goldblatt’s translation is largely accurate in terms of Wang Chen-ho’s language and style, it should be noted that Wang Chen-ho’s way of writing served as much for critique as what he was writing. In describing Wang Chen-ho’s oeuvre, Kuei-Fen Chiu points out: “Wang

[Chen-ho]’s defamiliarization of Mardarin Chinese through the resuscitation of the spoken word of the common people unwittingly activated a reconnection with the (Taiwanese) cultural heritage on the brink of erasure” (603). She goes on to argue that Wang Chen-ho’s emphasis on

28 the rootedness of culture in the orality of language reaches its apex in this novel: “The artistry of this peculiar form of adulterated language reached its height in Wang [Chen-ho’s] masterpiece

Rose, Rose, I Love You” (Chiu 603). Even in Goldblatt’s translation, the language used by the different stratifications of the Taiwanese people is illustrated for the reader’s benefit. The original text and translated text reveal the operation of language as culture and the effect of language on culture by stripping away the layers between the classes, revealing how intertwined the elites and non-elites actually are in the production of Taiwanese culture.15

Set in the 1960s, the novel is about a group of Taiwanese from the elite tiers of society preparing an extended R&R (rest and relaxation) for an expected group of United States soldiers arriving from battlefield operations in Vietnam to an eastern province of Taiwan called

Hualien.16 This point is rooted in historical fact to which David Der-wei Wang alludes: “Due to the Cold War, the US military established an army base in Taiwan in 1951. The culture of

‘American army consultants’ and the financial aid from the US were culturally significant phenomena in Taiwan. . . . After the escalation of the Vietnam War, Taiwan became one of the

US troop’s support bases” (289, my translation). In addition, Michael Berry reminds us:

[We] should not forget the historical background against which these events play

out—after all, the “white terror” of the 1960s marks one of the darkest and most

repressive pages in modern Taiwanese history. At the same time, we should also

not forget the remnants of Taiwan’s colonial history under the Spanish, Dutch,

and Japanese or the cultural hegemony of the KMT and the United States—all of

which can be found in Rose, Rose, I Love You. (571)

Wang and Berry separately locate Rose, Rose, I Love You within the world-wide conflicts following the Korean War as well as within the historical events that took place in Taiwan.17 It is

29 in this historical backdrop that local Councilman Qian invites Dong Siwen, a local schoolteacher who earned his English degree from Taiwan University, to train a group of prostitutes—selected as recruits from the four local brothels—to serve the needs of the American soldiers and entertain them.18 The novel ends with a vision experienced by Dong Siwen. In the vision, Dong

Siwen teaches the girls to sing, “Rose, Rose, I Love You” in its original Chinese and popular

English translation. The girls are to wear red roses on their chests while they line up to welcome the arrival of the soldiers. The image of the rose has a dual meaning in the novel: it is associated with the name of a particularly virulent and dangerous venereal or sexually transmitted disease called, “Saigon Rose.”19 The reader is left not knowing whether the soldiers arrive or not, and whether the elaborate schemes of the Taiwanese local elites succeed or not. Nevertheless, the novel, according to Angela C. Yee, is “a less subtle indictment of Taiwan society’s subservience to American hegemony” (95), than “a scathing commentary on the moral degradation of Taiwan under imperialist and capitalist invasion” (96). I explore these issues and their effects on the cultural construction of Taiwan in this chapter.

In the following, I argue that Rose, Rose, I Love You questions what it means to divest one’s cultural and national identity in favor of one imported from a hegemonic country. In this case, the novel reveals through the political force of sarcastic satire how grotesque and misguided the main characters are to attempt a scheme for entertaining American troops on leave. Ya-Chen Chen explains that:

The sarcasm of the Meigui meigui wo ai ni [Rose, Rose, I Love You] is an

extremely sophisticated cultural critique. . . . Completely different from the

simple-minded (over-)emphasis on superficial romantic sexual encounters in

American movies, [the novel] seeks to explore the highbrowed issues of self-

identity and corporeal subjectivity through sexual gratification between

Taiwanese bar girls and American GIs. (196)20

Chen is referring to the central narrative thread of preparing the Taiwanese bar girls to meet the

American soldiers. In the novel, a group of Taiwanese male elites tell a group of Taiwanese prostitutes that their participation in this program to entertain the American soldiers will elevate their social status and material wealth.21 Of course, as Chen argues in her feminist critique of the novel, there is a bodily cost to the prostitutes: “American soldiers’ physical pleasure from the services of Taiwanese prostitutes strongly indicates a sacrifice of women’s corporeal subjectivity” (196). Everyone sees their involvement in this enterprise as contributing to collective well-being and individual prosperity in their society if it becomes successful. Dong

Siwen initially plans to teach the prostitutes some simple English phrases; but he later decides to expand the training content to include politics, law, dancing, and global perspectives.

Councilman Qian and Dong Siwen are assisted by Doctor Yun Songzhu, whose mother owns

Mercy Chapel, a church located near the city’s red light district, which is repurposed for the prostitutes’ educational center prior to the impending arrival of the American soldiers.22 There is also an important appearance of Attorney Zhang Sherlock, who instructs the prostitutes on the rules and regulations regarding their material relations to the foreign soldiers.23 For example, they are told that it is illegal to unionize, or to keep US dollars, and that they should give the soldiers a fair price. As they attempt to understand the intentions of Councilman Qian, Teacher

Dong Siwen, Doctor Yun Songzhu, and Attorney Zhang Sherlock, the readers never see the soldiers arrive or the Taiwanese elites’ plan executed. Yet readers remain captivated by a narrative that reveals much about the disconnection between these players, the reality of their machinations, and the impact of their work on individuals and their culture.

An early sign of such disconnections is apparent during the instruction phase, which reveals how difficult it is for the girls-in-training to actually acquire what they are taught. For example, these girls never learn more than the first of Dong Siwen’s proposed and unnamed thirteen essential English sentences.24 There are also themes of cleanliness with bodies and places—both of which are seen as important to saving face or maintaining respectability with the

American soldiers. Additionally, Dong Siwen attempts to give the Taiwanese girls traditional

English names to make it easier for the American soldiers to pronounce them. In all of these maneuvers, Councilman Qian, Dong Siwen, Yun Songzhu, and Zhang Sherlock try to remake the

Taiwanese women into sexualized properties for the assumed use and benefit of the American soldiers. As a result, the Taiwanese elites corrupt their nation’s women, because they wish to gain favoritism from the US in exchange for the women’s bodies and subjectivity.

Furthermore, the Taiwanese elites represented in the narrative ape Americanism in demeaning ways, since they explicitly impose the emblem of American product brands on

Taiwanese people and culture. To this effect, critic Gao Quan-Zhi points out that Wang Chen-ho achieves dramatic effect by placing his characters in: “Restricted circumstances . . . meaning being stuck in a condition and unable to achieve a breakthrough. It is the most fundamental and important concern and anxiety of Wang Chen-ho’s novel” (3, my translation). The characters

(the elites and non-elites) cannot see outside of their received cultural ideas about American capital and culture, which leads in Gao’s argument that such a problem causes: “collective blindness to malicious ideology or social behavior without any self-awareness” (4, my translation). And, he goes as far as writing that Rose, Rose, I Love You is “the most extreme case among all the collective blindness in [Wang Chen-ho’s] fictions” (Gao 20, my translation).

At that time of Taiwan’s history in which Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You is set, most people believed that everything about the United States and its people were great for

Taiwan. The main characters promote and practice this idea, since they are the elites of this

Taiwanese society. The elites’ embrace of everything American is problematic because it leads one to ask: What do they think about their own country and their own culture? It seems like they see Taiwan’s culture and people as insignificant in comparison to those of the United States. In this chapter, I argue that through satire, Wang Chen-ho’s novel portrays a society in danger of losing both itself and national identity by embracing the culture and identity of another society.25

Therefore, the novel forces Taiwanese people to begin to grapple with what it means to be from

Taiwan, which is a quandary that Carlos Rojas rightly describes as not preexisting but emerging:

“‘Taiwan’ itself, as a social/cultural/political entity, is not a self-evident, preexisting category but a discursive and political construct that is continually being constituted and contested through a multifaceted process of ‘writing,’ literary or otherwise” (4). By adopting American culture and placating American hegemony—represented by its military and corporate brands—the

Taiwanese characters in Wang Chen-ho’s novel attempt to elevate themselves higher on the international social ladder while erasing their own cultural heritage and national identity in the process. These Taiwanese elites look to the West and the United States for what I call their false cultural-capitalist salvation. Using the setting of the church, the Taiwanese elites seek a kind of salvation for Taiwan by serving the imagined needs of the US soldiers and adopting the trappings of American culture in exchange for money, while Dong Siwen emblematizes the elites who pursue this false cultural-capitalist salvation.

SATIRE OF THE TAIWANESE ELITE

Most critics, like Gao Quan-Zhi, Yao I-Wei, and Xiao Mien-Mien regard Wang Chen- ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You as a comedy.26 I agree that the portrayal of the characters in the story is comical. Philip F. C. Williams calls it: “a rollicking burlesque novel” (816). Jeffrey C. Kinkley writes: “[it] is typically, and rightly, called comic, satiric, absurd, farcical, parody, burlesque, or by the disapproving, such as Lung Ying-t’ai, vulgar” (92). On the level of language and culture,

Kinkley asserts: “but interplay between literary and kitsch effects may be just what makes Rose,

Rose [I Love You] so fun” (85). Wang Chen-ho uses humor, the burlesque, and kitsch to write a satire that reflects on the social and cultural situation of Taiwan in the late 1960s. The effect of the novel is beyond simply laughing by making readers aware of the contemporary social situation through its humor. In an interview, Wang Chen-ho says: “the role that the intellectuals play in a society is not what I discussed in my novels. I’m only interested in paying attention to them being the middleman” (qtd. in Chu 258, my translation). Put another way, intellectuals are middlemen between knowledge and the citizenry (or audience). However, the writer’s depiction of intellectuals in the novel has an unintentional impact on readers beyond mere middlemen. The intellectuals are not just middlemen, since they have the power to be a strong influence on readers, and in turn, society. They also have the ability to deceive or manipulate others for their own self-interest. While they might stand between knowledge and individuals (and thus are in a sense middlemen), intellectuals have the power to pervert the dissemination of knowledge and thus impart disinformation, half-truths, and a whole host of other distortions that actually limit ordinary people’s access to information. In this way, they act more like self-interested gatekeepers than middlemen.

In order to understand the role of intellectuals in Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love

You, it is important to observe the novel’s representation of how the entertaining-American- soldiers project is brought about by the people behind it. They are the politicians, the teacher, the doctor, and the lawyer, who are in the growing middle class and are the elites of the society. It is crucial to note that in traditional Chinese culture, teachers are usually well-respected members of the society and possess authoritative influence especially over uneducated people. Before becoming the advisor to Councilman Qian, Dong Siwen graduates from the top university in

Taiwan with a bachelor degree from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,27 which makes him almost like a god-like figure in most people’s eyes. Nevertheless, it is also his educational opportunities that enable him to arrogantly show off his privilege through his use of language. Readers learn that Dong Siwen’s “Mardarin [has] a decided Western twang,” “owning, perhaps, to his industry in studying a foreign language” (Wang 4). And, when Dong Siwen speaks with persons of an equal or higher educational background: “the more inclined he was to pepper his speech with words from translated novels . . . making it difficult to listen to him and awkward to have to. Sometimes . . . no one could understand a word he said!” (Wang 4). Dong

Siwen enjoys flaunting his English-speaking ability whenever he has the opportunity to do so, but sometimes to the point of unintelligibility to other Taiwanese!

When he advises Councilman Qian about how to talk with the brothel owners, Dong

Siwen reveals his attitude toward his position as an intellectual in this society. He first hesitates when he is invited to teach the prostitutes English. Councilman Qian asks: “It’s because they’re lowly prostitutes, isn’t it? Not good enough to be your students!” (Wang 37). Dong Siwen replies:

“Oh please! . . . Teachers aren’t the snobs you think we are. Anyone who wants to learn can be our students. Didn’t Confucius himself say we should provide education without discrimination?

Education without discrimination!” (37). Dong Siwen seems to ground his pedagogical approach and beliefs on the philosophical teachings of Confucius.28 However, it is implied in the text that his hesitation before responding does not have anything to do with teaching, but instead, everything with how much remuneration he will receive in exchange for his teaching. If he is to teach, he wants to be financially rewarded for his efforts. Furthermore, Dong Siwen reveals his true feeling about those persons he views as beneath his supposedly high social status, which are enabled by his intellectual background and network of other social elites, including Councilman

Qian. To put not too fine a point on it, Dong Siwen contradicts what he said earlier when he states only a page later:

Why make it sound like my patriotic duty? This isn’t about going out to kill off

commie bandits, after all. Besides, with people like that, you have to make them

think you’re stooping to their level because you have to, not because you want to.

Not only that—not only that, it’s important to let that bunch of whoremasters and

madams know they can’t get intellectuals to do their bidding just by throwing a

little money around! (Wang 38)

First, Dong Siwen refers to the brothel masters as “people like that,” which implies they are beneath his social status, because he says that one must “[stoop] to their level” or lower one’s self to a lower social status level. Then, his elevated sense of social status as a member of an intellectual elite class is even clearer in the last sentence when he refuses to do as the brothel managers want despite the possibility of payment. In a sense, their money cannot buy the will and actions of the intellectual elites who supposedly are above them. Additionally, the way that

Councilman Qian speaks about the prostitutes to Dong Siwen is insulting: “They’re afraid of goddamned earthquakes. Whores who’ve been laid a thousand times think their asses are worth

36 their weight in gold” (Wang 33). Councilman Qian implies in this statement that the prostitutes, who he sees beneath himself and other elites, should not believe their attitudes, opinions, and self-worth are greater than they are. He inverts the intellectual elites’ perception of greater self- worth by devaluing how the prostitutes see themselves—especially in this case regarding the fear of earthquakes in the geologically active region of eastern Taiwan.

In a later episode, Dong Siwen reveals what can best be described as a self-delusional inversion of knowledge as a justification for his actions. After getting his hotel room for the duration of the training sessions, the reader sees his savior-like sense of self: “Within hours of moving into the hotel, Siwen was suddenly, and rather astonishingly, reminded of the biblical story of how Jesus miraculously cured the lepers, one that his professor had introduced in a

Survey of Western Literature course” (Wang 42). Dong Siwen imagines a biblical scene involving Jesus visiting the lepers: “And they lifted their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go show yourselves unto the priests.

And it came to pass that, as they went, they were cleansed” (Wang 42). Dong Siwen’s vision does not end there. Next, his imaginings about himself mirror those of Jesus. In his mind, he sees an incredible sight of “forty or fifty girls,” who tell him, “Teacher, have mercy on us!” (Wang

42). In spite of this being a dream or delusion of grandeur, Dong Siwen says aloud to the empty room, “Ah ah! I really truly have mercy on you all! Which is why I’m going to do everything possible to save you, ah! Cleanse you. Do everything within my power to train you to be the best bar girls you can be, ah! You must work hard and study hard to reap the greatest rewards from your training. . . . Your standing in society will soar! Your lives will soon improved!” (Wang 42).

We see that Dong Siwen’s experience of Jesus is not religious but instead secular. He read some part of the Christian Gospels in an English class. This implies that his understanding of the

Gospels is from a fictional or critical frame instead of one based on faith or belief. Furthermore,

Dong Siwen’s epiphany, which mirrors his readings about Jesus, begins when he imagines the girls in his mind’s eye. However, this sight and what they say to him, “Teacher, have mercy on us!” is all an illusion. The humorous aspect of this paragraph begins when he opens his mouth in response to his waking dream or hallucination, and he assumes his self-imposed role as savior of the girls. He says aloud that he will save and cleanse them while training them to be high-class prostitutes. Yet, this implies a dirtiness that cannot be cleansed due to the fact that these bar girls will be prostitutes. Nevertheless, he seems to believe that he can be their savior who will help them gain rewards, greater social standing, and improved lives.

Furthermore, Dong Siwen implies that the intellectual elites have a higher social status than others in Taiwanese society. For example, during a campaign-planning meeting, he advises

Councilman Qian:

First, you’ll be seen by the people as an ‘honest and upright civil servant.’ Second,

you will create the illusion in the eyes of most people that even though you’re a

councilman, you’re no better off than they are. They’ll be able to identify with

you that way. Chief, please don’t forget one important thing, that allowing the

people to identify with you will consolidate your grassroots support for the future.

(Wang 23)

Dong Siwen advises Councilman Qian to offer his constituents an “illusion” instead of reality.

His proposed “illusion” is that Councilman Qian is equal to his constituents in their perception of a duty-bound civil servant and someone of normal means. According to Dong Siwen, the illusion makes people believe something that is not true, because in fact, Councilman Qian is financially well off and from a wealthy family. This is reinforced in descriptions of Councilman Qian’s

38 home, which is three-stories tall while the working-class housing is only one story tall. His house emblematizes the social stratification that Dong Siwen attempts to hide behind this illusion. For example, the first floor of Councilman Qian’s home contains old furniture of normal means. As one moves to the second and third floors, nicer things are evidenced. Those of supposedly higher social standing may join Councilman Qian on the second floor and his closest associates may go to the third floor. Councilman Qian furthers the illusion of duty-bound service for the people in other ways, too: “if his perspiration output fell off a bit, he ran into the bathroom to add a little tap water to the mix . . . giving the impression that he was serving his constituents every minute of the day” (Wang 24). Thus, his furnishings and apparent perspiration are surface features that support the illusion, and as we know, illusions are all about the appearances on the surface, which hide the operations and manipulations beneath.

The illusion created by Dong Siwen and Councilman Qian is not limited to themselves, since it is not confined to the way they view others. The illusion is externalized as well when they persuade others of things that are false. They use rhetorical techniques to persuade individuals who they see beneath them of these falsehoods. For example, the prostitutes protest when they learn that they are forbidden from working during their training period. However,

Dong Siwen tells them that the training will provide them with great opportunities:

You ought to be thrilled to have such a fine opportunity to study something new,

an opportunity other, less fortunate people would jump at. This is a gift straight

from heaven! You should grab it while you have the chance. Instead of letting

another second pass, you should work and study hard to become the best trainees

possible. You have to take the long view, look to the future. One week of sacrifice

is what I’m asking. Once you get through these five days of training classes, you

will not only elevate your status, but you’ll also increase your earning power. . . .

You’ll greatly greatly greatly greatly increase your earning power, which will

greatly greatly greatly greatly improve your standard of living, until you are

among the richest people in our society. You will greatly greatly greatly greatly

elevate your social standing, until you become respected members of the

community. (Wang 133)

In Taiwanese society, characterized by conservatism during the middle of the twentieth century, the promises of opportunity described by Dong Siwen, including those to help the Taiwanese prostitutes “elevate” their “status,” “increase” their “earning power,” “improve” their “standard of living,” and become “among the richest people in our society” with an “[elevated] social standing,” are simply untrue. Dong Siwen offers the prostitutes these gifts “from heaven” as words without real substance. His objective is simply to persuade the prostitutes to train for the work ahead, which will result in financial rewards for himself and the other elites, which will far exceed the small rewards for each individual prostitute.

In another example, Councilman Qian and Dong Siwen mirror one another’s flattery for the other during the opening ceremony for the training school. Their flattery is another form of illusion that they use to prop up their higher social standing. First, Councilman Qian performs his role to impress his audience:

‘First I want to thank Teacher Dong—’ He nodded twice in the direction of Dong

Si-wen, a show of respect to which Si-wen quickly responded by clasping his

hands in front of him and demurring: ‘You flatter me. It was nothing, really.’ ‘—

if not for Teacher Dong’s dedication and hard work, we would not be witnessing

this historic event in Hualien today. And you trainees sitting out there would not

have this wonderful opportunity to practice your American, learn how to entertain

foreigners, earn some extra cash, and raise your social status! So you should give

Teacher Dong the respect he deserves.’ (Wang 150)

In a related passage, Councilman Qian thanks Dong Siwen, who equally plays his part with false modesty saying: “it was nothing, really.” Councilman Qian calls the day “historic” and the work ahead for the prostitutes as “a wonderful opportunity.” Certainly, if the scheme works, the prostitutes might earn more money from the American GIs than from their local customers, but at what cost to themselves and their community? Is the cost for learning “American,” learning entertainment techniques, and earning extra cash, worth it? Are the prostitutes really meant to believe that selling sex to foreigners in a conservative culture will “raise [their] social status?”

For their efforts, what kind of “respect” should they give Dong Siwen? In response to

Councilman Qian’s flatteries, Dong Siwen gives his own flatteries to the councilman:

My thanks to Councilman Qian for taking time from his busy schedule to honor

us with his presence at this opening ceremony. Thanks too for his passionate and

encouraging remarks, and for his earnest good wishes. What could be better than

encouragement and good wishes? We are grateful to Councilman Qian for

supplying them just when we need them most. Thank you from the bottoms of our

hearts! . . . Come on, everybody, a warm round of applause for Councilman Qian.

Come on, everybody, join me! No need for modesty, not when you show gratitude.

Come on, everybody, join me! (Wang 151)

While the councilman appears to look busy to his constituents, he is not taking time away from

“his busy schedule.” In fact, his presence is more as economic overseer of a capitalist scheme instead of some grand “opening ceremony” for a public works project. Dong Siwen’s rhetorical

41 question, “what could be better than encouragement and good wishes?” was answered earlier for the benefit of the reader: money. Then, when Dong Siwen asks and then begs his audience to join him in applause for their local, elected leader and instigator of this project, the illusion comes crashing down. The audience hesitates. They do not wish to clap for him. Dong Siwen tries to hold the illusion together by entreating them by saying, “No need for modesty, not when you show gratitude.” While the audience is certainly not being modest, they are revealing their displeasure or at a minimum their understanding of the farcical nature of Councilman Qian and

Dong Siwen’s self-perpetuated illusion.

The two co-schemers with Councilman Qian and Dong Siwen are Doctor Yun Songzhu and Attorney Zhang Sherlock. These two characters have their own problematic relationship with things as they are and the illusion that they create for the benefit of their plan. Their plan and the stereotypes it promotes erode Taiwanese identities and culture by hiding behind exaggerations and prejudices. One important example is the character Doctor Yun Songzhu, who is a closeted gay man in an extremely biased, conservative society that forced homosexual persons to hide their lives from society-at-large. Set long before what Hans Tao-Ming Huang describes as, “the tongzhi (literally, ‘comrade’, denoting approximately lesbian and gay or queer) movement in 1990s Taiwan” (2), which marked activism and visibility of queer person for recognition within Taiwanese society, the context in the novel for Doctor Yun Songzhu’s sexuality is problematic. Using Huang’s terminology, Doctor Yun Songzhu’s character would exist in a colonized state by the Confucian, heteronormative-focused norms and legal structures that only began to change with “the onset of the 1990s tongzhi movement in Taiwan [which] can be seen as a decolonising project that centered on the question of sexuality. Institutional homophobia in Taiwan has since begun to be challenged by lesbian and gay activism” (15). In

42 the context of the novel, most Taiwanese people simply did not talk about homosexuality at that time. Yet, Dong Siwen knows that Doctor Yun Songzhu is gay, because Dong Siwen puts up with his strange greeting ritual: “two hands were suddenly stroking and kneading his soft, giggly breasts. Songzhu did this every time they met, a goofy way to say hello” (Wang 77).

In addition, Dong Siwen says nonchalantly to Doctor Yun Songzhu: “I always knew you had this problem. One helluva of a great cover for something so seamy” (Wang 91). However,

Doctor Yun Songzhu understandably worries about this revelation, slaps Dong Siwen’s face, and shouts: “Horseshit! . . . . Where’d you get that idea? I’m a doctor, I got a wife and kids! . . . That kind of joking has no place here! What the hell did you mean by ‘a great cover for something so seamy’? Up your old lady, up your old granny!” (Wang 91). Doctor Yun Songzhu cannot have his secret exposed, because it would do far more than having him lose face in his society. The impermissibility of homosexuality could have dire consequences for him. However, he is depicted using the worst stereotypes about homosexual men as lecherous towards young, straight men.29 For example, his mother is the pastor of the church where they are conducting the training for the prostitutes, and Christian posters on the wall of his clinic waiting room state: “He suffered for our sins, and by His wounds we are healed,” “He who forgives your sins, heals your diseases,” and “For I am the Lord, who heals you” (Wang 75). More importantly, these three posters with these three quotes are also hung on the wall of Doctor Yun Songzhu’s examining room inside his clinic (Wang 83). As a doctor, he serves as a savior to those who are injured or sick, but he uses his god-like station in society to take advantage of young men to satisfy his own bodily desires. He uses his office as doctor as a way to prey on those young men who do not share his attraction for other men. For example, Doctor Yun Songzhu molests a patient, a man who is in his 20s, when this young man visits his office for a checkup over a stomachache:

Songzhu glanced tenderly at the young man. . . . and laid his hand on his bare

back. . . . never taking his eyes off the young man’s glossy skin. . . . you could

detect a slight quake in [Doctor Yun’s] voice, as if he could scarcely believe that

such joy had dropped from the heavens. . . . “You’re quite well developed. . . .

very well developed. Especially here—” [Doctor Yun] reached out and touched,

rather forcefully, Li Fayu’s robost penis. . . . [He] bent down to examine the

young man’s testicles . . . . jammed his face into one of Li Fayu’s hairy armpits,

sniffing around for the longest time. . . . [Doctor Yun’s] hand moved down to his

patient’s abdomen and began fondling him. . . . “Try switching positions. . . . roll

over and lie face down. . . . flatten out! With your rump sticking up like that,

you’re just asking for a good humping.” (Wang 84-90)

This scene deserves quoting at length to illustrate how Doctor Yun Songzhu has his way with the young man—his patient—regarding a stomachache! The young man, Li Fayu, is uncomfortable throughout this sexual assault, but he is depicted in the story as being someone who gives himself over to the doctor’s authority and social status. For Li Fayu, the doctor is a savior who deserves the benefit of the doubt regarding what the reader sees as a sexual assault and what the young man believes to be uncomfortable and unusual. Eventually, however, Li Fayu speaks back when Doctor Yun asks him to go into a separate room, masturbate, and collect a sample of semen for the doctor’s inspection. The young man begins to panic: “‘You want me to do zat?’ In his panic, the young man’s th’s turned into z’s” (Wang 89). Doctor Yun assures him that it is

“the latest diagnostic technique” (Wang 89). Winning the young man’s delicate confidence, Li

Fayu admits in all earnestness: “I—I—don’t know how to do it by hand” (Wang 89). Doctor Yun is all too happy to assist. He takes advantage of his patient throughout the diagnostic inspection.

Therefore, within the privacy and protection of his clinic, he acts on his impulses with impunity to abuse those men below his elite status as a materially successful doctor, but in the public sphere, he excoriates Dong Siwen for implying anything about his closeted homosexuality, which he hides behind the veil of heteronormativity evidenced by his wife and children.

Yet, as Gao Quan-Zhi comments on this disturbing episode in which Doctor Yun takes advantage of his patient Li Fayu:

[Wang Chen-ho] uses sexual harassment from a gay character as the vicious

behavior in this [restricted] group. . . . However, the notable point is the reaction

of the victims . . . the male patient tolerated Dr. Yun’s assault. Dong Siwen is

aware of the homosexual tendency of Dr. Yun, but among multiple incidents of

the physical harassment, only once does Dong Siwen push away the hand that is

pinching his nipple, without expressing any strong discontent. This arrangement

may suit the background of the society which tolerates sexual harassment. (22, my

translation)

Wang Chen-ho inverts the heteronormative form of sexual harassment as a way of highlighting other societal issues within the scope of the story. Gao continues: “However, this arrangement brings significant meaning to the story: if the male patient or Dong Siwen resists the assaults to protect themselves, it actually brings a positive meaning to their roles. It is Wang [Chen-ho]’s intention to create a world without law, moral, and positive sense in this work” (22-23, my translation). The novel’s elite characters exhibit blindness to social behavior out of sync with culturally acceptable social norms. The non-elite characters draw attention to this blindness, and readers likely respond in kind. This is the effect of the satirical elements in the story—the humor,

45 the irony, and the exaggeration encourage readers to recognize the story as a commentary on its historical context.

Like Doctor Yun Songzhu’s patient, Li Fayu, other non-elite characters recognize the dissonance of Doctor Yun’s private and public personas hidden by the disguise of his social standing as a doctor and intellectual. For example, Doctor Yun is called upon to give a lecture to the prostitutes on the day of the opening ceremony of the training school housed within his mother’s church. Immediately on his entrance, the reader learns how he reacts to the women gathered to hear him speak: “Dr. Yun was not in a jovial mood. When he walked in the door and saw a room filled with gabby women, much of his enthusiasm melted away on the spot” (Wang

172). Had the room been filled with male prostitutes, his attitude might have been different.

Nevertheless, Doctor Yun Songzhu rises to the occasion when he begins to talk about the male reproductive organs:

How could someone like [Dong Siwen], a virgin, sit there and listen, actually sit

there and listen, to Songzhu’s feverish disquisition on the shape and

characteristics of the male [sex] organ, its components and their functions, the

stimulants that cause it to swell and grow rigid? You may not be prepared to

believe this, but it’s absolutely true. And when Songzhu got caught up in the

subject of his own lecture, he was transformed; his look of displeasure was

replaced by one of utter bliss. He embellished his lecture with illustrations at the

blackboard, larger than life and accurate to the smallest detail. Councilman Qian

chuckled to himself the whole time as he watched and listened. . . Sherlock Zhang

was mesmerized, adjusting his shades from time to time so as not to miss a thing.

Big-Nose Lion and Black-Face Li30 sat in stunned disbelief—or maybe they were

in awe of Songzhu’s talents as an illustrator. . . . Some of the girls . . . muttering to

themselves and to their neighbors, ‘Haven’t I seen enough men’s nasty equipment

in my life? Why bring me to church to take this tour?’ (Wang 172)

In this scene, Doctor Yun loses himself in a topic of male anatomy that reveals one of his inner most drives that he cannot otherwise reveal publicly. The safety of the lecture hall, housed within his mother’s church provides him a cover to speak freely to a captive audience. Furthermore, it seems to bring out some of his best talents—including that of illustrator as noted by Big-Nose

Lion and Black-Face Li. However, the commentary at the end of the passage by the women seems to be the most telling. The church as the location of the training center raises the tension between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular. Likewise, Doctor Yun

Songzhu’s character represents a tension between the powerful heteronormative social structure and the powerless homosexual individuals bound within that social structure. He is the abuser and the abused. Thus, Doctor Yun’s characterological tensions layer with the other tensions embedded in this work of fiction: reality and illusion, elites and non-elites, occident and oriental, and cultural erosion and cultural growth.

The fourth main member of the scheme to train the prostitutes for the imminent arrival of the American soldiers is Attorney Zhang Sherlock. While he is not as visible in the narrative as

Councilman Qian, Dong Siwen, or Doctor Yun Songzhu, he represents a very significant aspect of the cultural erosion of non-elite Taiwanese peoples enforced by the structures of power controlled by the elites. Consider the fact that while the novel focuses on a few characters who scheme and orchestrate the training, there are many more characters—most of whom do not speak or are unnamed in the novel—who are controlled, manipulated, or directed by the machinations of the few elites. Would it not make sense that if the masses disagreed with their

47 governmental leaders or business owners, they could wrestle the reins of power through mass action, protests, or strikes? Unfortunately, the ability of the non-elites to act has been curtailed by those in power. Attorney Zhang Sherlock’s purpose in the narrative, I assert, is to reinforce the power structure of the elites over the proletariat. How he accomplishes this is through his work as a lawyer—one who is literate in the complex language of law and one who can use the law artfully for his and others’ purposes. For example, Attorney Zhang Sherlock, who is visibly nervous and swallows repeatedly before launching into this significant speech to the assembled prostitute women, says:

I only have one thing to say, only one thing . . . . I ask you all to keep in mind that

it is against the law in our country to go out on strike. What this means, in simple

terms, is if you’re dissatisfied in any way with your boss—maybe he gives you

wages you feel are too low because it would be a hardship for him to give higher

wages—you then join together in a work stoppage, which results in financial

losses that force him to give into your demands. That is a simple explanation of a

strike. (Wang 153)

In the beginning of this scene, Attorney Zhang is using his sophistry as a lawyer to define a strike in a particular way. He discounts the importance of grievances by the workers. As an alternative, all of the hardships are visited on the boss rather than the workers. While a strike might have been illegal, Attorney Zhang frames the discussion in terms of the many hurting the one instead of the one hurting the many. He continues:

“I ask you all to keep in mind that strikes are not permitted in our country. They

are illegal, punishable by death (several of the girls oohed and ahhed at that).

Please keep that in mind, don’t ever forget it. Thank you.” Having said his piece,

the gaunt, puny, unmanly Attorney Zhang, who would one day make a killing in

illegal emigration to America, quickly sat back down. (Wang 153)

He repeats the legal prohibition against strikes in Taiwan at that time, and then he strengthens the prohibition in the minds of the prostitutes by saying that its violation is “punishable by death.”

Death is the ultimate act of force by the state and the powerful elites to maintain control over those non-elites without political power or capital. As the narrator points out, the physically- weak Attorney Zhang uses the power seized by the elites through their control of the state to play his role of enforcer—reminding the women what restrictions they may not transgress.

Furthermore, the narrator tells the reader about Zhang’s future successes as an enabler of “illegal emigration to America” (Wang 153). The purpose of this aside reminds the reader of the hypocrisy exhibited by the elites, which is another kind of tension. Attorney Zhang Sherlock is a representative of the court, and by extension, a representative of the laws of the state. He above all others should obey the law. Yet, the reader learns that even this person who should be an exemplary follower of the law—one who would remind others to follow the law—is not a follower of the law. This is another way that the elites rationalize their actions. In a sense, they are above the law when it comes to their own enrichment at the cost of Taiwanese culture and the burden placed on non-elites Taiwanese citizens. They are essentially saying, ‘do as I say, and not as I do.’ Of course, this hypocrisy is fundamentally wrong despite any rationalizations that they might harbor. The cost of their hypocrisy—the layering of these tensions—is the dissolution of what Taiwan is as a state, a culture, and a people by the dishonest actions of the few—the few, who should be the “best” representatives and protectors of Taiwanese culture, but instead, are the worst.

HIERARCHIZATION AND CAPITAL: TAIWAN AND THE UNITED STATES

The Taiwanese elites in Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You use their social status, access to capital, and control of the law to maintain their hegemony over their non-elite fellow countrymen. In this section, I discuss another important dimension that motivates the Taiwanese elites and problematizes their status in a hierarchy that stretches across the ocean from Taiwan to the United States. Namely, there are additional tensions embedded in the novel, including the hierarchical relationship between Taiwan and the United States, and the financial opportunity pursued by the Taiwanese elites in the name of the nation when in fact the opportunity enriches only themselves.

The character Dong Siwen provides a significant example of the nature of national hierarchies as represented in the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Dong Siwen makes this observation about how mobilized everyone from the top of the social order to the bottom becomes when news arrives about the impending arrival of the US soldiers at the port on a

Saturday afternoon: “Everyone, from the mayor and the county boss to the municipal representatives and county councilmen, plus a contingent of students and another of local citizens, will be there to greet them. Do you folks realize how much work all those people . . . . have put into getting things ready for these GIs” (Wang 10). Elected officials, students, and local citizens go to work and prepare for the visit. They make preparations for how to facilitate the

American soldiers’ arrival, how to greet them when they arrive, and how to assist them during their visit. They are putting forth a great effort by a number of different people from many different stations of the social order from the highest to the most humble level. However, why do all of these Taiwanese people care to serve the needs of these American soldiers? What motivates the highest of the high and the lowest of the low to prepare for what seems to be a

50 significant visit of American GIs on leave from the battlefront and seeking rest and relaxation?

On the one hand, it could be simply a matter of financial gain—the soldiers bring US dollars to spend in Taiwan. On the other hand, the Taiwanese elites may see this is as an opportunity for personal financial gain, but they pursue this gain in the name of Taiwan and in so doing, they seem to position Taiwan in a subservient position to the United States. This lower position for

Taiwan carries with it a number of cultural imperialistic issues, but most significantly, these things are done by the Taiwanese elites to “improve” Taiwan by borrowing culture, history, language, and brands from the West to remake Taiwan in a Western mode. Additionally, the non-elites might not have the critical perspective or information to determine what benefits if any come from the importing of goods and culture from the United States. Fang-Ming Chen argues that:

The subalterns who live in the countryside may not understand how capitalism

invades Taiwan, and they may not be able to explain how the Taiwanese society

develops to idolize American culture, either. The culture and psychology of a

society are formed not only through political propaganda and the educational

system, but also through an accumulation bit-by-bit of daily life. (541-542, my

translation)

According to Chen, there is insidiousness to the encroachment of global capitalism heralded by the United States. Perhaps the elites should know better, but the import of American goods and culture reinforces their position due to the uncritical acceptance on the part of non-elites. Chen continues: “When an aggressive culture marches into Taiwan, it uses not armed forces but a variety of forms, such as film, literature, art, and merchandise. It permeates into one’s hearing, sight, and taste to make one accept a certain cultural atmosphere and edification” (542, my

51 translation). However, he states that when the aggressive culture spreads through the invaded culture, it is a victory that takes time: “This slow and gradual process imperceptibly reforms one’s ways of thinking and values, and further, it infiltrates one’s private unconscious world.

Once the word ‘American’ appears, it releases synonyms like happiness, satisfaction, and might”

(Chen 542, my translation). It is equally possible that the elites have bought into the ideology of the non-elites. Elites and non-elite/subalterns alike adopt the significations for ‘American.’ The chain of signifiers unites the separate levels of Taiwanese society, but it should be noted that the elites have the power to challenge these erosions of Taiwanese culture. Instead, their investment accelerates it.

What is most alarming about this is that the transformation of Taiwanese culture, in this case, comes from within by its elites instead of cultural imperialism imposed by powers in the

West. Yet, according to Johann Arnason, the elites’ strategy serves the construction of nationalism for Taiwan: “integral - or exclusivistic - nationalism must also be seen as a response to the globalizing process. Its most extreme forms culminated in imperial projects which aimed at a restructuring of the global context” (233). Wang Chen-ho’s novel charts the beginning of the globalizing process in which Taiwan becomes linked to the United States—commercially, politically, and militarily. Arnason continues:

This double background—the ultimately self-destructive project of bringing not

only the structural differentiation of modernity, but also its de-centering global

expansion under control—helps to explain another aspect of the phenomenon in

question: the need for interpretive reinforcements which would make the nation

more capable of assuming the role of a supreme value and an exclusive focus of

integration. (233)

The Taiwanese elites in Wang Chen-ho’s novel are performing an essentially self-destructive act through their schemes, but it is through this scheming they hope to integrate Taiwan into the

American sphere of influence, protection, and capital. They seek to position Taiwan as valuable in more than one way to the Americans.

Dong Siwen promotes the argument that their efforts are serving Taiwan’s interests by helping the United States’ soldiers. Early in the novel, he talks with his assistants about planning the training classes, and he says: “Understand? Just think of it, we’re performing a diplomatic function for the nation! We’re obliged to treat our guests with the very best, ensuring them a pleasurable holiday. We must do everything in our power to ensure that our guests take home with them an unblemished impression” (Wang 71). He frames their plan as a form of diplomacy.

He argues that they should please their guests such that they carry home a good impression of

Taiwan. Divorced from Dong Siwen’s conceptualization is that these are soldiers on leave from a bloody and brutal war that caters to the whims of the ideological struggle of the Cold War, and the fact that these guests are simply soldiers temporarily escaping the battlefront and invading their community for R&R. It is as if Dong Siwen ignores many other dimensions of what he calls a page later, “an international exchange” (Wang 72), in the interest of moving the project forward despite obvious issues of concern that should be addressed. He goes on to worry: “If [the prostitutes] treated the GIs that badly, if they came on to them like that, it could absolutely ruin relations between the two countries” (Wang 96). However, he frames the importance for Taiwan in terms of the way the nation appears to the soldiers. This is reported to the reader via one of the brothel owners, Big-Nose Lion, telling his girlfriend A-hen what he has learned from Dong

Siwen:

[Teacher Dong] says that only a high-class place . . . is suitable for American GIs

in the market for full-service treatment. After all, our national honor is at stake!

He reminded us that the whole world knows how Taiwan’s economy has made

great strides in recent years, and foreigners are convinced that Taiwan is now an

economic giant. So how would it look if the sabisu31 [service] in an economic

giant was dispensed in a shabby, filthy place like our Rouge Tower? (Wang 119)

The brothel owner accepts Dong Siwen’s argument that “our national honor is at stake,” because the world sees Taiwan as an “economic giant.” To maintain the appearance of an “economic giant,” Dong Siwen has persuaded them that they must serve the interests of the soldiers on the level of a “high-class place.” If they falter in this project, how others perceive Taiwan would be disastrous. In effect, Taiwan would lose face as a result.

During their preparations, Dong Siwen worries about how the prostitutes will interact with the soldiers and how the bar will appear to the soldiers where they meet the prostitutes.

Imagining how the prostitutes might interact with the US soldiers, he considers:

Right, that’s a spot, a big, dirty spot, a frightening and very serious spot he’d have

to guard against and not give a chance to make an appearance in his endeavor. So

he took out his pen and notebook and scribbled a note to himself: “Arrange for a

crash course in global etiquette.” He drew three lines beneath it to underscore its

importance, like adding est to an English adjective. (Wang 96)

He imagines how the prostitutes might act toward Taiwanese johns, which prompts him to imagine the “spot” (the author gives in this word in English even in the original Chinese- language novel). The “spot” refers to the worst aspects of how the prostitutes might act in front of the soldiers—being rude or violent. Later, in his internal monologue, he says: “I should have

54 gone over to check out the bar. If it looks anything like one of these slum buildings, it’ll be a great loss of face for the nation, and a miracle if the GIs don’t go back talking about how backward we are! I really ought to go take a look before everything too late” (Wang 98).

Essentially, he is worried that Taiwan might not look appealing enough for the Americans. He frets over the appearance of things, because he worries that surface appearance of the brothel

(and not the fact that they are promoting brothels as the ‘face’ of Taiwan) will lead to the soldiers speaking poorly about Taiwan when they return home. In effect, he positions Taiwan as being inferior to the United States, and the Taiwanese as being less than Americans. By presenting themselves in the best way possible, they can overcome a sense of inferiority to the Americans and raise themselves to the same perceived level as the foreigners.

The Taiwanese elites—whether subconsciously or not—reinforce the idea of their country’s inferiority to the United States. In many ways, the Taiwanese elites denigrate aspects of Taiwanese culture and the Chinese language that reinforces the sense of inferiority and puts them into a lower position to the United States by their own beliefs and actions. Fang-Ming Chen argues:

Wang Chen-ho . . . uses subalterns as main characters in the novels. . . . However,

the important roles of subalterns weigh much more than what they appear to be,

because the weight of American aid culture and capitalism both press them

down. . . . From the eyes of subalterns, they see what is overlooked by the middle

class. . . . When observing the American aid culture from the margin, one can

detect the big gap of value difference between the elites and the subaltern. (540-

541, my translation)

Wang Chen-ho illustrates this value difference throughout the novel in the operation of the elites denigrating the people over whom they have control, the subalterns or non-elite peoples. For example, late in the novel, Dong Siwen talks to the bar girls at the opening ceremony about his concern. He fears that the US soldiers will have difficulty pronouncing their names, so he devises a plan:

I think it’s too much to ask the Americans to pronounce the names in Chinese.

How can we expect them to distinguish among all those zhi chi shi, zi ci si, yi and

yü sounds? So I’ve come to a decision, one perfectly suited to the situation: I’m

going to give every one of you a name in English that is elegant, sounds pretty,

and is easy to say. (Wang 166, emphasis added)

By giving the girls Americanized, English names, Dong Siwen hopes to make it easy for the soldiers to pronounce and remember their names. In addition, it will in a sense please the soldiers, because it will make their cognitive and linguistic efforts easier by saying names and words that they are more familiar with. However, this indulgence for the US soldiers comes at a high cost to the Taiwanese bar girls. By giving the girls foreign names, it makes them alienated from themselves. Names have meanings in Taiwanese culture in a deeper way than in the West. When their names are changed, it changes who they are in a sense. Furthermore, Dong Siwen puts them down by saying that their names are not as elegant as those in English, and he denigrates

Chinese/Taiwanese names by saying the Americanized names are more graceful and prettier.

In many ways, the Taiwanese elites belittle the non-elite Taiwanese people—particularly men—in relation to their American counterparts. Dong Siwen tells the bar girls: “From now on you’re going to be servicing American GIs, a different class of clientele altogether! Different, you understand? You can’t be coddling some john off the street, you know” (Wang 61). His

56 emphasis on “different” carries with it a trace of importance and significance. In a sense, he is saying different and better. This is reinforced when Big Nose Lion relays to A-hen things that he learned from Dong Siwen (revealing the transmission of his ideas and persuaded acceptance of those ideas): “He reminded me that we’d be servicing American GIs this time, soldiers fighting in Vietnam, not a bunch of horny locals” (Wang 57). The implied meaning is that “American

GIs,” who are “soldiers fighting in Vietnam,” are superior clients compared to locals, who are neither American nor soldiers. Moreover, Dong Siwen denigrates local business owners, too.

While discussing plans with his assistants, he says:

“We’ll print up and distribute free of charge to every GI who comes to Hualien as

a welcoming gift. With this ‘Hualien Goods and Services Price List’ in hand, a

‘Huh? No way’ reaction from our visitors will greet anyone who tries to fleece

them”. . . . [He] planned to list telephone numbers for Hualien Police Department

and district station houses on the inside back cover of the handbook. Right above

a reminder in English, in red, that if a GI thought he was being cheated, he could

call any of the above numbers to have the dispute settled quickly and with a

minimum of inconvenience. (Wang 71)

The implication of this brochure is that local business owners will attempt to take advantage of the US soldiers. The assumption that local business owners will conduct dishonest business with the soldiers is such a concern to Dong Siwen that he plans to create this brochure to help the soldiers resolve any problems in as painless a process as possible. On the one hand, Dong Siwen imagines everyone coming together to make this project happen, but on the other hand, he distrusts his own people enough to provide US soldiers with this handbook for legal remedies.

In another scene, Big Nose Lion repeats how Dong Siwen belittles his fellow Taiwanese in the conversation with A-hen. Concerned about the hygiene of the brothels, Dong Siwen says:

I have no objection to entertaining our own countrymen in filthy rooms like this,

since we Chinese have never been very picky about hygiene. Eat in garbage, get

fat in garbage, sleep in garbage, thrive in garbage. It’s no big deal to us if we

have illicit dealings in a barn or a pig sty, but it is a big deal to Americans if you

ask them to do so in unsanitary conditions. Besides, if we let the GIs QK [quickie]

or tomari32 [spend the night] in shabby, filthy rooms, the whole nation loses face.

Am I right or aren’t I? Well, am I? (Wang 115)

Dong Siwen compares his fellow countrymen to pigs. He sees both as living and thriving in garbage. As such, he sees no problem with the brothels being dirty to the Taiwanese johns, but it is an altogether different story for the American GIs. Again, Dong Siwen frames Taiwan as losing face if the visiting American soldiers are displeased with their experience in Hualien. Of course, the irony of the situation and the humor of the satire comes from these kinds of juxtapositions: an unclean brothel leads to losing face while the more pressing issues of prostitution and its associated issues are not a concern for losing face.

In addition to putting down Taiwanese people and the Chinese language, the Taiwanese elite characters promote American products and brands, and they even recognize the hierarchies of American brands.33 The Taiwanese elites want access to global culture, which is in large part generated by the economic powerhouse of post-World War II United States. Anthony D. Smith describes global culture as: “tied to no place or period. It is context-less, a true mélange of disparate components drawn from everywhere and nowhere, borne upon the modern chariots of global telecommunication systems” (177). The Americans represent one of the major exporters

58 of global culture to the Taiwanese elites, and they can be conceptualized as gatekeepers of developing nations to take part in the homogenized global culture the United States promotes.

For instance, characters smoke a variety of imported American cigarettes: “second-class

American cigarette—a Camel” (Wang 7), “Kent” (21), and “American Mixture 79 tobacco” (44).

Doctor Yun Songzhu recommends his patient to use American deodorants such as “Ban and

Right Guard” (87). Locally prepared foods are described in reference to American soft drinks:

“This is ke-kou ke-le [mouth-watering good], you know, like that American soft drink, Coca-

Cola” (111). Importance is given to American products, such as when an American made pen is presented: “Hell, that pen almost blinded me. Somebody said it was American” (129).

In a similar vein, Dong Siwen adopts American trends and culture: “a woman in America who had discovered the benefits of pink. . . . After reading this story, Si-wen not only saw pink in a new light, he developed an infatuation with the color” (Wang 41). He takes the color pink— made important to him by what he had read about it in the American context—and paints his office that color: “Now that the goal was in sight, clearly in sight, he roared like a lion in his pink room . . . four phrases, no more, no less, a la the MGM lion, which always roars four times” (42-

43). Here, he remixes American culture—the promotion of the color pink and the MGM movie studio lion—as a part of his own projection of identity. In a sense, the tension inherent in this juxtaposition mirrors Dong Siwen’s and the other Taiwanese elites’ identity crisis as a result of putting down their own culture while trying to integrate elements borrowed from the West into their new, emergent identities—identities that erode what it means to be Taiwanese, unless to be

Taiwanese means to be remixed, tense, and unresolved. Perhaps this is a recipe for cultural identity in the age of globalization—a process that began in earnest following the inauguration of the Cold War. Yet, Edward Said cautions that: “all cultures are involved in one another; none is

59 single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic”

(Culture and Imperialism xxv). Viewed from this perspective, the global culture that the

Taiwanese elites pursue with earnestness is simply a part of the always, already hybridity that communication, trade, imperial escapades, etc. make possible. However, Fang-Ming Chen argues:

It is most noteworthy for the author to use rose as the metaphor of the United

States, especially the background of [the novel] is the Vietnam War. . . . ‘Rose’

undoubtedly implies the infamous syphilis at that time, which is also known as

‘Saigon Rose.’ To embrace the mighty United States, one has to unconditionally

accept the grand syphilis as well. Being on this historical stage, the role of the

elites is exceptionally important. . . . In [this novel], do the elites jeopardize their

own national interests, or do they save the country? (544, my translation)

If Chen is correct and the United States represents the “Saigon Rose” within the story, the reader is left to weigh if the intermingling of cultures and capital that Said remarks as inevitable are worth the cost of this syphilitic gift. In a sense, engaging with the Americans leads to a venereal disease of the nation.

The criticisms by the elites of the Taiwanese people are not limited to the men at the center of the story. Big-Nose Lion’s girlfriend, A-hen, holds similar attitudes. When she makes an appointment with her hairdresser:

She asked for an appointment with the overseas Chinese34 beautician, Franco,

insisting that he make time to do her hair. Hualien beauty operators were much

too rustic for her tastes, so she was forced to travel to Taipei once a month to get

her hair done. If Franco was unavailable, she asked for Stephen Kano, the Filipino.

Those two stylists always got a thumbs-up from well-to-do Taipei women with

names like Stella (si-diao-le—dead as a doornail), Anne (ai-ne—love ya), Ruth

(Le-si—driven to death), or Helen (hai-ren—assault and battery)35. If they thought

the two men were ichiban (tops), then so did she. (Wang 50)

First, A-hen does not like the stylists in Hualien where she lives and where the American soldiers are going to visit. She sees her hometown’s beauticians as unsophisticated. Her taste necessitates something better, which automatically puts down that which does not fit her tastes. To fit her tastes, she travels to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, but even there, she does not seek out

Taiwanese stylists. Instead, she prefers Franco (from the United States) or Stephen Kano (from the Philippines).36 Furthermore, her opinion of these two stylists’ abilities was formed by the opinions of upper class Taipei women with Western names—Stella, Ruth, and Helen—which have terrible meanings when pronounced in the Mandarin Chinese linguistic register!

COMMODIFICATION OF TAIWANESE BODIES

The Taiwanese elites demonstrate a desire for the branded commodities and services provided by global capital. The networks of capital and new transportation technologies make it possible to bring commodities and Western culture to Taiwan. Besides the manufacturing and technological advancements, some of which do not materialize until about a decade after the time of the novel, what does Taiwan have to offer in exchange to Americans—especially

American soldiers—visiting the shores of Taiwan? It is the one thing behind the plot and an undercurrent of all of the preceding discussion: prostitution. The Taiwanese elites (who are all men) plan to use Taiwanese bar girls or prostitutes as a commodity for the purposes of making money. Thus, the women are remade as commodities for the operation of global capital, and

61 through their function in the transactional system, they are imbued with the weight of nation and the nation’s face. We see this explained in an extended episode of the novel when Big-Nose Lion explains to A-hen about Dong Siwen’s plans. It is important to note that this is a third-hand account, but not for any appearance of illegitimacy. Instead, this means that Dong Siwen’s plans have dispersed through the networks of capital from the planning elites to the managers below, and that the managers have been persuaded by his words and promises of capital wealth to adopt the plan of the elites. First, the Taiwanese elites reconfigure the girls as a commodity produced for consumption by the American soldiers. In order to accomplish this, they believe that: “The success of this business venture depends entirely on our ability to manufacture and package our product to fit the tastes of the American soldier boys” (Wang 114-115). They assume an attitude of material production: “our ability to manufacture,” “package our product,” and “fit the tastes of the American soldier boys.” The elites think in terms of consumers: “Now we know that our clientele are American GIs, and we’ve got a handle on what they like, which is sanitary conditions, hygiene above all, so we must make sure that our product is manufactured to those specifications” (116). They have a “clientele,” and they define the “specifications” that their

“product is manufactured to.” Moreover, in the previous quote and the following one, “sanitary” is the primary condition of the product to consider: “The product has to be sanitary, and that isn’t limited to the materials and the tools of production. Even the place of production has to be clean and sanitary to avoid the possibility of polluting the product” (116).

Furthermore, the elites think of the girls as “materials” built for specific purposes through training or in their terms, “the tools of production.” As discussed earlier, the location where the girls work has to likewise “be clean and sanitary to avoid the possibility of polluting the product,” or “polluting” the girls. This “polluting” could include disease or injury, which would take one

62 girl out of the operation and reduce the amount of capital generated by one person. To use the logic of the elites, this would be tantamount to removing one “unit” from the line of production.

Put another way: “First [Teacher Dong] had us see the ‘training course for bar girls’ as a

‘factory,’ then he wanted us to see this picture: ‘The girls selected for training are the raw material’” (Wang 117). The girls are “raw material” before going through the training, and the

“training course” remakes them into commodities that can make the whole operation money. The elites think ahead to how the money made from the prostitutes’ work can be used to make more money—the fundamental operation of high capitalism:

More of that money makes money, interest generates interest, old Fan-something-

fucking-lin37, blah blah blah. He got on our case, but with a smile, saying the four

of us had no brains. He said that all the money we spent would be transferred to

the consumers, so why worry about it? And the consumers this time are American

GIs from Vietnam, big-nosed foreigners with deep pockets. So why worry about

spending money? Remarried, know what that means? . . . Your capital is married

off to a customer who treats it like his old lady. . . . after Teacher Refinement

scolded us with a smile, he turned real serious, like a preacher. (Wang 121)

Dong Siwen persuades the four brothel owners to make investments that will yield them greater returns on their money. Thus, money makes money. Of course, this ignores the subjectivity of the bar girls and the labor that they do with their bodies. Dong Siwen appears to address this on the next page of the novel:

But now all of a sudden he turns into a saint . . . telling us we mustn’t forget that

these girls who will be pulling in all those U.S. dollars are people, and that we

must see them as more than just merchandise . . . . He informed us that we have to

treat the girls with the tenderness of a spring wind and concern as deep as the

ocean! We have to value their existence and respect their personalities . . . . Our

numbskull teacher doesn’t want us to forget that these girls who are going to

make us a pile of U.S. dollars have parents of their own, and that we should treat

them like our own children or grandchildren. (Wang 122)

However, this passage serves two purposes. First, Dong Siwen wants the brothel owners to make more investments in the project on the part of the prostitutes and the material conditions where they will be doing their work. Second, he realizes that there are limits to how commoditized the women are willing to become, especially at the hands of the brothel owners—their managers. By encouraging the managers to “treat the girls with the tenderness of a spring wind and concern as deep as the ocean,” it maintains the bar girls within the system. Instead of coercing the girls, it is far better from his perspective to have the bar girls complicit in the system, and the surface gesture of feigned respect can serve to keep the bar girls from walking off and reducing how much capital is being generated by the system overall.

Additionally, to maximize how much money could be made, other plans were developed to improve efficiencies with the bar girls during training: “And in order to save even more money, they can double up, two to a room, which will also make it possible to encourage and keep an eye on each other” (Wang 126). The organizers save money on housing, and they maintain surveillance and control over the girls. Finally, as a part of the process of remaking the girls into commodities, they are processed during a check-in at the hotel. Described as “like a fucking voting precinct,” the queue of bar girls fed them one by one to “[prove] they were who they said they were” before “[reporting] in to another assistant, who made them sign in,

64 fingerprinted them, did just about everything but ask them for a footprint” (Wang 129).

Processed as cogs in the system, the training commenced on the bar girls.

The operation of capital and commodification knows no boundaries for the Taiwanese elites and the brothel managers. For example, Big-Nose Lion equates prostitution for the US soldiers with tennis, as part of an extended argument meant to convince A-hen that she should be a reserved prostitute if the need arises:

Just treat it as a form of entertainment, like playing tennis. You can learn some

English from Teacher Dong, increase your knowledge, and what’s wrong with

that? Hang out with some Americans, drink a little, dance with them, you know,

the good life. Good, clean fun. . . . Just treat it like a two-week vacation. . . . What

I’m talking about is a great opportunity. You can learn some English, you can

service the Americans, and you can have a great time doing it. (Wang 68)

While A-hen decides not to help out, others involved in the project discuss other possible reserve prostitutes from Taiwan’s aboriginal people, family, friends, and a range of generations. To provide equal ethnic diversity, Dong Siwen requests girls from Taiwan’s aboriginal people:

“First [Teacher Dong] asks for twenty girls, then thirty, now it’s fifty, and this many or that many are supposed to be mother-humping aborigines . . . . That’s how you get a fair representation of Hualien’s unique ethnic makeup, he says” (Wang 45). Like the other bar girls, the aboriginal girls are enlisted for the training: “every one of them knew their boar pour mores, they could write a little, and they were flowers, every one of them, noses and mouths just the way you like them, especially the aboriginal girls, all up to par” (62). What is troubling about this is that Taiwan’s aboriginal people, who have been marginalized by the Chinese and other colonists since the 17th Century—were discriminated against and mostly forced to retreat into the

65 mountains. What is more, the military of Chiang Kai-shek fleeing to Taiwan from the loss of

China to the communists placed the aborigines at an even significant disadvantage materially in addition to the loss of their traditional way of life and to the clash of different educational and cultural backgrounds. If it seems that money can be made by easing of historical discrimination, this seems to be one progressive aspect of this operation, but of course, the inclusion of aboriginal girls is only a means to an end for the elites. Widening the net for prostitutes, the brothel owners discuss including older women for the project:

[Teacher Dong] said that some of the GIs coming on R & R will probably be

looking for girls who are a little older, ones with motherly ways. After spending

all that time making war, they’ll be missing home and their mothers. ‘So, Aniki,

you might as well go easy on the age limit, expand it by a generation or so.’

(Wang 67)

Going beyond this, they even want to include more family members as prostitutes despite their blood relations and the concern that one might suspect would attend this bodily connection:

“Sister Red Hair said she’s got an adopted daughter who’s not bad looking. Her husband died recently, so if we need somebody to help out, she’s available. And Stumpy Courtesan said she has a good-looking twenty-nine-year-old niece. She’s married, but we can call her over. I feel pretty good with those two in reserve” (68). By their logic, this also includes familial males to

“entertain” homosexual American soldiers, too. For example, Black-Face Li offers to bring his nephews into the system of production: “I’ll bring my three nephews over. They’re all eighteen or nineteen, weight-lifters, and strong as oxen. Nothing to keep them from entertaining the

American fairies, I assume” (137). Additionally, Big-Nose Lion reports to A-hen:

I volunteered my son, the one in college. He’ll be coming home for spring break,

so I’ll get him into the program. And he can bring along some friends. . . . What’s

wrong with that? It’s all in good fun, and it won’t leave any scars, like it would

with one of you girls. So what’s wrong? What’s the problem? Don’t worry

yourself. It’s a terrific chance for him to practice his American and earn a few U.S.

dollars while he’s at it. He’ll jump at the chance. And if he doesn’t? I’ll tie him up

and drag him over. Teacher Refinement was shocked to hear me volunteer my son,

just like you. . . . ‘Why not,” I asked him, ‘if there’s money in it?’ . . . it’s no big

deal! He has a good time and gets paid for it. Why shouldn’t he do it? (Wang 137-

138)

In all of these attempts to acquire more commodities, or bodies, the Taiwanese elites and brothel managers do not acknowledge the labor of the prostitutes; much less the psychological and physical trauma each will likely endure from their sex work. To the elites, it is “all good fun” and

“a good time.” The potential horror of the work and the indelible experiences of each prostitute are erased as points of concern by those in control of the capital that trains the prostitutes, remakes them into commodities, and reaps the greatest rewards from the endeavor. By the logic of the owners of capital, they are put at the greatest risk by investing their capital, but nowhere in their calculations do they allow for the far greater risk to their workers and the greater body their workers represent: Taiwan.

Rose, Rose, I Love You is one of the few examples of Taiwanese literature written in

Chinese and translated into English. Nevertheless, it is emblematic of a long-standing and ongoing tension in Taiwan between what it means to be Taiwanese in Taiwan and Taiwanese in a global context. Because Taiwan has been colonized many times in its long history and it has

67 been strongly influenced by global culture due to its status as an innovative technology hub and a connection between the rest of the world and many manufacturing interests located in mainland

China, it pulls and is pulled by the global networks of capital and culture in a way unique to this tiny, yet populous country. Taiwanese media imports Japanese, South Korean, and PRC culture in addition to the pervasive global culture of movies, music, and video games from around the world, and in particular, from the United States. Wang’s novel captures the essence of these things at a particular point in Taiwan’s past, but those captured illusions and tensions continue to haunt Taiwan and its people to this day. It reveals how the United States reconfigured its relationship with Taiwan—the never appearing US soldiers, and the continued economic investment—which Fang-Ming Chen describes as: “The fact shows that, even though the United

States has politically distanced itself from Taiwan, it has increased its economic investment. This policy of separating economy from politics shows that the United States disrespects the

Taiwanese government, and only keeps its close tie with Taiwan for economic benefits” (540, my translation). It is this reconfiguration that the Taiwanese elites do not anticipate. Additionally, while on the one hand, the networks of capital can break down barriers (e.g., the conservative prohibition against homosexuality) and be more inclusive (e.g., inviting aboriginal girls to participate in the project), but on the other hand, the Taiwanese elites and brothel managers— those in control of the operations of capital—do not calculate the cost of their plans on the individuals who work for them or the potential loss of the face of the Taiwan nation to the rest of the world. The operation of capital goes hand-in-hand with modernization, as Shuang Shen observes:

Although this novel is built upon a series of highly exaggerated events and

characters, what makes it believable is that that the writer does not attempt to

conduct social criticism from a detached and moralistic standpoint. Rather, the

novelist shows that all of the characters, Westernized or nationalist, are implicated

in the historical “trap” of modernization. (182)

While the elites give lip service to how their plan will maintain and improve the face of Taiwan to the Western world and the United States in particular, they ignore what effect the operation of capital and modernization will have on Taiwan’s people. The novel configures all Taiwanese people as potential prostitutes whose services are sold to the client with American dollars. In this configuration, the will and subjectivity of the individual, and by extension—the Taiwanese people, are erased in favor of the will and subjectivity of the client. Through the exchange of dollars, Taiwan’s culture is in danger of erasure in favor of serving the needs of the West. Wang

Chen-ho’s novel encourages its readers to heed this warning, because its indictment is not just leveled at Taiwan, but against the power of global capital to perform cultural erasure anywhere.

Worse still is the fact that individual greed by a few within is what makes this all possible.

CHAPTER TWO

CHAN KOONCHUNG’S THE FAT YEARS: SCIENCE FICTION, CHINESE NATIONALISM,

AND GLOBAL CAPITAL

Chan Koonchung’s novel The Fat Years (2009, trans. 2011) presents a near-future vision of Chinese affluence and success in a world where the Western powers—especially the United

States—are in decline after the 2008 economic crisis.38 Originally published in traditional

Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2009 as 盛世：二〇一三 (which translates literally as

Prosperity Age: China 2013), it was read there and in China where “no mainland Chinese publisher has been willing to publish it” (Hagarty par. 11). Its popularity derives not from the fact that this is a work of science fiction, but instead from what various readers describe as its thought-provoking and realistic qualities: “It’s a long time since I read anything that made me think so much;” and “I almost forgot it was science fiction. . . . It’s more like a documentary”

(qtd. in Lovell xiv).39 Coupled with these cognitively engaging aspects are the novel’s estranging properties, which in part derive from its realistic and near-future narrative.40 In the following discussion, I assert that these science fictional aspects—the cognitive and the estranging—play an important role in the way that readers in different places and with different cultural

70 backgrounds conceptualize the nations involved in its narrative—in particular, Taiwan. I argue that this novel opens opportunities for its readers that are closed off to the novel’s characters. In this chapter, I describe the novel through a discussion of its thematic elements, discuss the relationships between the characters and nations, explore the relationship between the characters and truth(s), and finally, examine the novel’s description of the operation of Chinese nationalism and global capital.

Critical commentators generally draw attention to The Fat Years as a “controversial sociopolitical work” (Quan 111), or a “wonderfully subversive novel” (Bethune 62). Others focus on its literary heritage and political leanings. For example, Peter Millar notes: “It is tempting to label this book as China's Doctor Zhivago, but the plot is more obtuse and the cynical commentary on a society that brooks no opposition has more in common with Aldous

Huxley's Brave New World” (45). Including Huxley’s literary descendant, Julia Lovell describes the novel as being written “in high Orwellian/Huxleyan style—and with laudable narrative constraint” (26). Hong-Chi Luo reiterates these connections when he writes: “The prosperous

China depicted in The Fat Years has rapid economic growth, flourishing cultural production, and happy citizens, but it leaves the readers feeling unsettled and disturbed. From this perspective, this book achieves the same effect as Brave New World and 1984” (150, my translation). While

Mark Featherstone rightly characterizes The Fat Years as a “Chinese dystopia” and “a thinly veiled fictional attack on contemporary Chinese capitalism, which it accuses of creating a kind of fake utopia, where poverty, misery, and despair are hidden behind the fantasy life of the new

Chinese consumer society” (183), I would go a step further and call it a near-future detective story. It is at its heart a near-future science fiction novel with a puzzle to be solved. Yet, its veiled criticism forms another aspect of its science fictional register, which is that science fiction

71 is by definition always about the here-and-now due to its extrapolation from the cultural context of its creation. In this case, The Fat Years originate in a contemporary Chinese cultural context, and even though it does level an attack on the ruling party, it does so through the veil of science fiction, which makes it less challenging to the ruling elites than a leveled attack of journalism, for instance.

Additionally, a science fictional question arises in the novel from the mysterious missing month of February 2011 experienced, but forgotten by the people in China. Lao Chen, the protagonist who has familial connections to Mainland China and Taiwan, and who earned an

English Literature MA in Detective Fiction, is a journalist who observes the world’s changed conditions.41 He is a reporter who through the development of the story moves from the center to the margins to discover a secret truth, in much the same way Edward Said remarks: “Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities toward the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable” (“Intellectual Exile” 124). Furthermore, the character Lao

Chen shares the same family name and a similar background with the author, which provides a further layer to this character and Said’s drawing our attention to the margins—a movement that the writer via his character might be said to be doing. Lao Chen’s counterpart Fang Caodi, who is Mainland Chinese, but who also spent a few years abroad in the United States, attempts to resolve the ontological and epistemological questions surrounding the missing month. Little Xi,

Lao Chen’s love interest and former “legal clerk-secretary” (Chan 45), is a paranoid and argumentative person who spends much of her time online starting flame wars, and she suspects that the government is behind the operation of the missing month. These characters kidnap He

Dongsheng, a Central Politburo member or what the Chinese call ‘National Leader,’ hoping the interrogation can unveil the mystery. During the investigation, he asks for a bottle of water to drink but is given tap water instead: without access to filtered water and now under the influence of MDMA put in the general water supply by the government, He Dongsheng happily answers all of their questions to reveal the truth.

In a similar vein, reviewer Xejun Eberlein describes The Fat Years as, “a hotly controversial Chinese science-fiction novel” (par. 5) and as, “a work of social science fiction, a subgenre that has become virtually nonexistent since the establishment of the People’s Republic”

(par. 7). For Eberlein, “social science fiction” is the kind of science fiction that emphasizes

“social or political criticism, as you might read in books like George Orwell's 1984,” but it “is almost completely lacking” in mainland China following the communist revolution (par. 7).

Unsurprisingly, the original book was unavailable in China for sale, but the author “pirated” it for Mainland China by making it a free online download.42 According to Sebastian Veg, it “was published only in Hong Kong. However, [Chan Koonchung] encouraged the dissemination of pirated versions on the Internet and even reportedly proofread a simplified-character version circulated as a PDF file, with the result that the book was apparently widely read on the mainland” (208). Julia Lovell adds that: “by highlighting so clearly where most mainland novelists fear to tread, it became a major talking point among liberal intellectuals in the People’s

Republic” (26). Perhaps some of its popularity in intellectual circles comes from, as Peter Millar point out: “Sometimes banning a book can be the making of it. Think of Lady Chatterley’s

Lover” (45). But, I agree with Brian Bethune’s assessment: “Still banned in China proper, this . .

. . was first published in Hong Kong in 2009, when its 2013 setting made it a safely near-future tale. . . . the sly conceit at the heart of his story remains not just metaphorically, but in a very real

73 sense, literally true” (62). Chan Koonchung chose to write his novel as a “near-future tale,” because it veils the narrative behind the “sly conceit.” This conceit is the mode of science fiction, which deserves further discussion to explore how it opens up possibilities that would otherwise not be possible.

The Fat Years gains its narrative energy from the fact that its near-future tale is firmly rooted in the recent past. The novel’s near-future extrapolation of near-past historical events makes it even more alarming and simultaneously more ‘real.’ Science fiction author and critic

Kim Stanley Robinson argues that there is a link between science fiction and the historical basis for its extrapolations: “Science fiction is an historical literature . . . . In every [science fiction] narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment of our past” (54-55). Robinson’s definition of science fiction relies on the extrapolative element of the story being strongly connected to the historical past or contemporary present. These initial conditions are what the science fiction extrapolation rely on to make it plausible and contained within reality in contrast to ahistorical fantasy, which is disconnected from history via the narrative’s unique world building and internal logic. The Fat

Years is science fiction, because it is a near-future extrapolation that takes its initial conditions from the global economic downturn that began in 2008. In fact, one of the main causes of the economic downturn is manipulation, which is also one of the core themes of the novel that emerges in two ways: first, China’s control of global capital, and second, China’s control of its people. The Chinese government’s influence and its economic advantage allow it to make deals with other Asian countries to exert a Chinese version of the Monroe Doctrine. China forges an alliance with Japan for technology and expertise that solidifies its government’s desire to be a

Big Brother (not in an Orwellian sense, but in an Eldest Prince sense) to the Asian-Pacific

74 region. As such, it forces out the United States and moves to end the age of American

Imperialism. China is presented as a country reasserting its pre-19th century glorious status by challenging the United States’ belief in hegemonic destiny. Unlike the United States, China does not want to be the world police or world government. Instead, it wants to maintain control over its sphere (at least, this is how it is presented at this point in the novel). However, China’s control cannot succeed without the support of its people and its regional neighbors. In order to gain the support from its people, China develops a two-forked approach. First, in 2011 during the month of February, China uses its media and control over text-messaging networks to create the appearance that the economic crisis is leading to anarchy in the country. This evokes fear in the people of China and then they demand salvation from chaos by the supreme rule of its government. This Hobbesian re-enactment of the Leviathan secures the approval of the people in a social contract where the government has their consent to prevent the simulated anarchy. What follows is a three-week crackdown that solidifies the control by the government.

Secondly, the Chinese authorities follow these eventful four weeks, the so-called missing month, with an orchestrated manipulation of all records during this period. Promoting the move of paper journalism and books to the Internet, the government can more easily alter contemporary discourse and historical records. Books related to modern Chinese history and politics are removed from bookshelves, libraries, and online catalogs. References to the supposed week of anarchy and the resulting crackdown are erased from all publicly available records. The erasure of the missing month is reinforced through newspaper headlines that connect the previous economic collapse with the Chinese ascendency without the intervening month. An editorial in the People’s Daily announces: “Since the global economy has entered a period of crisis, China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy has officially begun” (Chan 284).43 This reporting

75 collapses two disconnected statements together into a repeated and celebrated truth by eliminating the radical upheaval that made Chinese prosperity possible.

Chan Koonchung, however, is not simply indicting the Chinese government for their role in the missing month and China’s solidification of power—the people are also complicit with the government for allowing this to happen. However, the government helps them with their complacency by doping the national water supply with MDMA without the people’s knowledge.

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health: “MDMA produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth, and distortions in time, perception, and tactile experiences”

(par. 1). A low dose combined with the drug’s non-addictiveness makes for an effective solution to making people happy and content with the situation. Opening the Chinese economy further to market capitalism allows people to make more money at home and abroad through trade, but it requires the government to maintain greater control over the past and present in order to guide the country into a planned future of further Chinese prosperity. However, MDMA should not make the people forget the past even with the government controlling access to and manipulation of the past. In perhaps the most interesting part of the novel, the protagonists learn from National

Leader He Dongsheng that the people have willfully forgotten the missing month. The people have let go of the past without being made to do so, and even the authorities do not understand why. Chinese citizens could talk and reminisce, but they choose not to. Fear has been supplanted by happiness, and critique has been supplanted by complacency. It is only the protagonists who remember the past, because they are immune to the effects of the MDMA due to their unique illnesses and medically prescribed drugs. This alienating realization at the end of the novel is perhaps the most estranging aspect of The Fat Years.

Isaac Asimov gives us one way to think about these estranging qualities, which depend on science and technology: “The best definition of s-f that I know of is, indeed, almost sociological in its gravity. It goes as follows: Science-fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” (148). In The Fat Years, the missing time and the psychopharmacology of the MDMA’s effect on the characters are a result of science and technology, but as Asimov points out, these are not the primary focus of the story.

Instead, the novel explores “the impact of scientific advance upon human beings,” albeit in this case in a negative sense, or in the way the advance of science might be used to control a population for various ends.

Similarly, Judith Merril defines science fiction using the broader category of speculative fiction as a way of exploring meaning through a story’s characters. Using the term “speculative fiction,” she defines it as a kind of thought experiment: “stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper- experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, or ‘reality’” (Merril 60).

She describes how speculative fiction achieves this in the following way:

the mode which makes use of the traditional ‘scientific method’ (observation,

hypothesis, experiment) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by

introducing a given set of changes—imaginary or inventive—into the common

background of ‘known facts,’ creating an environment in which the responses and

perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the

characters, or both. (Merril 60)

Chan Koonchung uses The Fat Years to explore and discover what the future might hold for

China, Taiwan, and the United States, and within China, what that success might do to its

77 peoples and visitors. Through Chan’s writing, his characters use empiricism in order to find the truth behind their lived reality, and in so doing, he gives his readers an opportunity to learn what possibilities present conditions might permit in an uncertain future. Extrapolating from Merril’s definition, the story reveals something about the cultures rooted in the stories—in this case,

China and Taiwan most specifically.

Finally, Darko Suvin, one of the most influential science fiction critics of the twentieth century, addresses the estranging qualities of science fiction stories by focusing on the relationship between the imagined world of the novel and the known world of the reader. He argues: “[Science Fiction] is . . . a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 7-8). The rational or cognitive element that facilitates the government’s mass erasure of a whole month comes from their expert use of media technologies coupled with the pharmacological introduction of MDMA into the general water supply. The happiness that people feel strengthens communal bonds and eases their acceptance of the supposedly prosperous era, as China emerges economically victorious from the global recession. The other familiar cognitive elements of the story include Chinese cyberpolice that enforces official policies on the Internet.

Another example between cognition and estrangement is the integration of Chinese capital around the world as emblematized by the takeover of Starbucks, which becomes

Starbucks Want-Want. The narrator reports: “This is one big new global market guaranteeing that anywhere the Chinese live in the world there will be a Starbucks. In business never forget culture—a wonderful expression of China’s soft power” (Chan 17). This exercise of soft power or co-optation of American culture by the Chinese also serves an estranging function—keeping

78 things slightly the same, but also changing them slightly such as the inclusion of new popular drinks in all of the Starbucks stores, including Lao Chen’s favorite: Lychee Black Dragon Latte.

The estranging power of a Chinese-owned Starbucks also underscores Steven Belletto’s assertion that the novel responds to “the rudderless materialism that obscures the lessons of the past”

(805). However, before I discuss these estranging aspects of the novel and connect them to the operation of Chinese nationalism and global capital, I need to elaborate on how Lao Chen and his interest in hard-boiled detective fiction reveals Taiwan’s significance in the novel.

LAO CHEN AND TAIWAN

It is important to note that The Fat Years is not explicitly about Taiwan. However, Chan

Koonchung makes an important choice in the way he constructs the story and the reader’s access to it primarily through the protagonist Lao Chen. In this section, I argue that Lao Chen is a stand- in for Taiwan in the novel. His characteristics, while certainly connected in a number of significant ways with the author, have another level of importance to the reader’s understanding of the narrative and its political dimensions. To establish Lao Chen’s role in my reading of the novel, I discuss his background, how he views himself, and how his character development forms a commentary on Taiwan implicitly within the novel.

Lao Chen sees himself as Taiwanese. First, he tells the reader that he spent much of his earlier life split between Taiwan and Hong Kong: “I’ve lived over half my life in Taiwan and

Hong Kong” (Chan 18). More importantly, he self identifies as Taiwanese: “I was born in Hong

Kong. . . . Still, I have always genuinely thought of myself as Taiwanese” (27-28). Since he was born in Hong Kong and spent over half of his life in Hong Kong and Taiwan, it seems reasonable to assume that he spent his formative years in Taiwan. Nevertheless, Lao Chen makes a choice

79 about how he sees his nationality, which is one important aspect of his personal identity, and his choice colors how other characters perceive and treat him based on his self-identification as

Taiwanese. Furthermore, Lao Chen’s identification as Taiwanese is significant to this story about

China’s future prosperity. While Lao Chen is “Chinese,” he is politically an outsider from the contested island nation of Taiwan or the Republic of China. It is through his eyes we experience much of the story, and it is through his development as a character that we see an implicit glimpse of Taiwan.44

Chan Koonchung and Lao Chen share some biographical details, which Chaohua Wang considers significant: “The first half of the novel is narrated by several characters in the first- person voice, mostly by a Taiwanese writer, Old Chen, who happens to also have some roots in

Hong Kong and now resides in Beijing, perhaps a mirror image of the author himself” (29). Chan

Koonchung and Lao Chen were both born in Hong Kong. Chan Koonchung lived in Taiwan for some years after graduate school, and Lao Chen spent his formative years there as well. They both have an interest in detective fiction (Chan Koonchung is an avid reader of the genre, and

Lao Chen studied detective fiction in graduate school) and practice journalism (Chan Koonchung studied this subject in graduate school, and Lao Chen wrote as a journalist). Perhaps mirroring the journalism background of his creator, Lao Chen sees himself as “an observer” (Chan 10). His position as an observer and outsider is made possible by his being Taiwanese and living in mainland China, specifically in Beijing. He is confident in his judgments based on his observations, which he reports to the reader: “I believe in myself—my knowledge, my wisdom, and my independent judgment” (Chan 8). However, this confidence is tempered by some self- awareness: “In Little Xi’s mind I’m probably a reasonable, mature, and fairly knowledgeable person. At least, that’s what I’d like people to think” (Chan 13). He likes to think the best of

80 himself, and he hopes others see him that way. Sometimes his observations about himself miss the mark, such as when he opines: “I’m quite cynical about human nature” (Chan 10), because the reader never sees this self-professed cynicism at work in this character’s actions. Later, he reflects: “I used to be a very cool guy. Why am I so sentimental these days?” (Chan 19). As we learn through the narrative’s development, his sentimentality—a side effect of the happiness solution in the PRC—likely played a crucial role in the shift from his cynical past (and how Lao

Chen sees himself) to his present reality as one accepting the status quo of yet-unexplained happiness.

Perhaps the most important point of contact between author and protagonist, and for our understanding of the novel’s significance as a commentary on Taiwan comes from the affinity for detective fiction between the writer and his character. Chan Koonchung is noted as a reader of detective fiction including: “Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, [and] Dashiell Hammett”

(qtd. in Lovell xvii-xviii). Likewise, Lao Chen earned an MA in English Literature with a specialization in Detective Fiction, which he describes in this way: “I was obsessed with the hard-boiled detective novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. My MA thesis compared the logic of Charlie Chan with Western detective novels. I slogged for a year and a half, right through the summer vacation without taking a break, and got my masters degree”

(Chan 28).45 In this passage, we see the hard-boiled detective fiction writers enjoyed by the novel’s author also being favorites of his protagonist. Additionally, he constructs his protagonist as someone who explores the relationship of the Orientalism-inspired Charlie Chan to the canon of hard-boiled detective fiction. This choice on the part of the author is significant for further identifying Lao Chen as an outsider who uses his lived experience as a Chinese/Taiwanese man coupled with a love for genre fiction to figure out “the logic of Charlie Chan,” a problematic

81 character who defies some stereotypes (for example, sharp dressed, soft-spoken, and highly intelligent) while re-inscribing others (for instance, a yellow-face actor). Furthermore, Lao

Chen’s status as an observer is supported through his work as a detective fiction aficionado and writer: “I like to read detective stories and I’ve even written a few myself . . . I was nothing more than a self-indulgent writer of very ordinary bestsellers” (Chan 14). Therefore, in addition to studying the generic tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction as a fan and an academic, Lao Chen becomes an author within the genre, too.

If Chan Koonchung constructs the character of Lao Chen as someone who has read, studied, and written detective fiction—a genre aimed at uncovering the truth by sleuths, driven by self-interested curiosity—why then is Lao Chen also depicted as aloof, carefree, and uninterested? It is my assertion that these qualities typify how the author views the Taiwanese

(and Hong Kong citizens, too) as not having changed their views about China as the mainland has continued to change and grow into a tremendously influential political and economic power.

Chan Koonchung elaborates on this point in an interview: “One reason why I wrote The Fat

Years back in 2009 is that the Chinese people’s mentality had changed, but people in Hong Kong and Taiwan had not revised their view of China. I wanted to write a novel that would help to bridge this gap in perception” (qtd. in Jiang par. 4). He hopes that The Fat Years would enlighten

Hong Kong and Taiwanese readers, and also would serve as a wake-up call. In addition to the surface level of the PRC’s plans in the narrative to create an artificial peace through chemistry, the reader sees the observer Lao Chen, and in turn, questions what kind of observer he is and what effect his observation (or lack thereof) might have.

Lao Chen’s aloofness is demonstrated in a number of passages in the novel, and interestingly, these seemingly aloof episodes are paired with a tenseness for which he does not

82 recognize consciously. For example, he narrates: “For the past year, I’ve noticed that I, too, have often felt some sort of unaccountable cheerfulness” (Chan 9). For Lao Chen and others, everyday living is colored by this “unaccountable cheerfulness.” Another time early in the novel, he reflects on recent events and thinks to himself: “Things like getting so worked up that I burst into tears” (26). These happy tears well up in him without explanation, but he accepts them without questioning them. More to the point, early in the novel when Lao Chen visits a bookstore for a spring gathering with other writers and editors, he is given the cold shoulder by some of the attendees, so he changes tact: “I readjusted my attitude and returned to my usual one—that of an observer. I have to admit I was pretty moved by what I saw: so many celebrated and diverse members of the intellectual elite gathered together in one place looking happy, even euphoric . . . . This really must be a true age of peace and prosperity” (10). Despite being snubbed by those he tried to speak with, Lao Chen’s observations are positive about those people at the gathering. He demonstrates himself as being delighted and observing others as being happy despite what seems to have been a negative experience in his attempts to interact at the party. However, there is a tension in his observations. At the beginning of the next paragraph, he quickly realizes: “I was feeling pretty good, but very quickly I got the feeling that it was time to leave” (10). While he feels good and observes those around him as being lighthearted, there are moments like this one in the novel where he is drawn away from the happiness despite himself. It is almost as if he unconsciously recognizes that something is amiss, but he cannot (or will not) articulate what it is or investigate the cause.

Initially, Lao Chen accepts his happiness, and praises himself for his life in Beijing:

“every day I congratulate myself on living in China” (Chan 19-20). However, he begins to identify the origin of his troubles when he realizes:

I have lost all inspiration. It disappeared exactly two years ago, just as official

Chinese discourse announced that the global economy had entered a period of

crisis while China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy had begun. From that time on, I

began to see that everyone in Beijing, and everywhere in China, was living well. I

felt so spiritually and materially satisfied that I began to experience an

overwhelming feeling of good fortune such as I never had before. (Chan 33)

The moment at which China announced its “Golden Age of Ascendancy” coincides with Lao

Chen’s loss of inspiration. While he observes everyone around him in China “living well,” he cannot find within himself his raison d'être other than his everyday happiness. He was seemingly

“spiritually and materially satisfied” by the “overwhelming feeling of good fortune,” but this feeling was devoid of his life’s pursuit as a writer and seeker of truth. Co-terminus with China’s

“Golden Age of Ascendancy,” Lao Chen had lost touch with his past success as a recognized writer and public intellectual from Taiwan. Instead of questioning the status quo or simply wanting to understand why everything was as good as he believed it to be, Lao Chen found himself stuck in the present of his happiness. He tells the reader: “I wanted to write stories only about contemporary China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. I didn’t want to discuss past events anymore. I didn’t even want to look at the historical materials . . . I just wanted to forget all those things” (Chan 90). He wants to focus on his here-and-now while ignoring the path from the past to the present. His revulsion to the past is made most evident when he emphasizes that he “didn’t even want to look at the historical materials.” While he does not want to look at those historical documents, Lao Chen does list them for the reader’s sake at the end of chapter two:

I didn’t even want to look at the historical materials on the KMT-CCP Civil War,

Land Reform, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three-anti

and Five-anti Campaigns, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward

that caused thirty million people to starve to death, the Four Clean-ups or Socialist

Education Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution

Campaign, the Tiananmen Massacre, the Campaign to Suppress the Falun Gong,

and so on and so on . . . I just wanted to forget all those things. (Chan 90)

While Lao Chen wants to forget these things due to his new-found happiness, he has not erased them yet from his memory, and he is quite explicit about listing this long laundry list of past atrocities and catastrophes. Additionally, he chooses an explicit way to describe some of these events—for example, “massacre,” “suppression,” and “starve to death”—that obviously, the

People’s Republic of China would denounce. His memory of these events is shaped by his outsider status, and despite any amount of happiness that he now enjoys, he cannot erase the suffering caused by these events from the memory of history.

Coupled to his desire to avoid remembering or knowing the past is Lao Chen’s

“increasingly conservative tastes” (Chan 94). Instead of investing in his past liberalism and questioning approach as a public intellectual, he finds himself lighthearted and disinterested in figuratively “rocking the boat.” He is happy and he finds himself going along with the conservatism of maintaining the status quo and avoiding criticism, questioning, or challenging.

This is perhaps most starkly illustrated when, running into Little Xi for the first time after not seeing her for several years, he feels compelled to avoid the tugs at his heart strings and return to

Starbucks where his favorite Chinese-inspired beverage waited: “no matter how heavyhearted he felt, life must go on—so he went out in search of his customary Starbucks Lychee Black Dragon

Latte” (Chan 132). Thus, Lao Chen moves forward without looking backward, and seeks out his overpriced coffee.

FANG CAODI, LITTLE XI, AND TWO APPROACHES TO UNCOVERING THE TRUTH

Fang Caodi and Little Xi are two Chinese characters that share a history with Lao Chen, and they provide additional first-person voices to the narration of the novel. In fact, the novel’s multiple voices give the reader an important insight into the different stakeholders and their views on China’s ascendancy and their place within the country’s success. Leo Ou-Fan Lee explains:

Instead of having an omniscient narrator, the author uses ‘multivocality’ narrative

style to introduce characters and creates several monologues for the main

characters. The novel’s structure, if we borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory,

produces a ‘carnival’ effect. Yet the seemingly comical ambience still implies

irony, and it forces the readers to ask: ‘What is the actual spirit of the nation in the

back of this merry and prosperous country?’ (par. 5, my translation)

Drawing on these additional voices that form the novel’s narrative, I assert that these two characters represent two different approaches to uncovering the truth behind the missing month in China—Fang Caodi offers a unique viewpoint based on his cosmopolitan experience, and

Little Xi offers a point of view based on the rule of law and public activism. As we see in the novel, their approaches are not mutually exclusive, but instead, they offer valuable insights that move the narrative forward while opening Lao Chen’s eyes to the things that he cannot or will not see. In this section, I discuss these two characters’ backgrounds and relationship to Lao Chen, and demonstrate how their respective ways of seeing serve as a warning to Lao Chen/Taiwan as represented in the novel.

Lao Chen first knew of Fang Caodi when the latter wrote letters to the monthly magazine where Lao Chen worked. Later, they met in Hong Kong in the summer of 1989 when many

86 people in China were trying to flee after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. However, Fang Caodi was trying to get back in! Lao Chen thinks of Fang Caodi in these terms: “He always moved against the mainstream” (Chan 88). For Lao Chen, this means that Fang Caodi is the kind of person who goes against the flow, questions the status quo, and seeks to unsettle things in order to uncover hidden truths or meanings. Before this important meeting, Fang Caodi survived the

Cultural Revolution, escaped to Hong Kong, obtained a visa to the United States, and eventually

US citizenship. He lived as a hippie in New Mexico, then worked as a chef in Boston, and conducted business in Africa later. He grew up in a Taoist temple in China after his father switched parties from the communists to the KMT and fled to Taiwan without him and his mother. He traveled all over China, met people from different ethnic groups, and experienced their regional cultures. Unlike Lao Chen, he only has a high school diploma. Simply put, he is a cosmopolitan character whose viewpoint and personal logic is enriched by his lived experience and eagerness to make friendships with those he meets.

Fang Caodi’s desire to form bonds with others must be informed in some way by a desire to understand the Other. How else can one be friends with someone from another language and culture without some curiosity to understand and recognize their similarity and difference? As a cosmopolitan character who seeks out connections with others, Fang Caodi is a witness. He serves as a personal witness to events others ignore or wish to forget, and he serves as witness to conscience when others—such as, Lao Chen—try to ignore the past. For example, after they meet again, Fang Caodi challenges Lao Chen on the censorship taking place in the bookstores after the beginning of the Age of Ascendancy. He tells Lao Chen: “There’s nothing worth reading in the bookstores these days. . . . it’s the same everywhere; all they have are officially doctored books. Don’t imagine you are going to find anything about the true state of things. . . .

They’re all a pack of lies” (Chan 137-138). This provokes Lao Chen to look for specific, government monitored authors when he next visits the bookstore. After interrogating the bookstore clerk about the lack of titles, Lao Chen considers: “He hadn’t read those kinds of books for a while himself, but did it mean that the tastes of the general public had changed, too?”

(Chan 142). Then, the narrator reports: “Lao Chen could not find one single book that might explain the true facts about contemporary Chinese history” (143). Lao Chen thinks to himself:

“There is a profusion of books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts are still being suppressed. It’s just that people are under the illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and freely choosing what they read” (Chan 143). This is an important step for Lao Chen to begin questioning the missing month, and he only begun this line of inquiry after the instigation of Fang Caodi.

Furthermore, Fang Caodi takes his witnessing one step further with Lao Chen by reminding him who he should be and aspire to be, based on his background, education, and personal recognition. For instance, Lao Chen brings Fang Caodi to meet the scholar Hu Yan, who “knows more about the lower strata of society than [anybody] does” (Chan 149). Fang

Caodi concludes that Hu Yan does not remember the missing months, and he is disappointed.

Lao Chen responds: “Forget all about that so-called lost month. It’s not worth it. Life’s too short; just look after yourself” (152). Concerned about this response from someone he respects greatly,

Fang Caodi replies to Lao Chen: “You’re an intellectual. You’ve spent your whole life seeking truth and beauty. You’ve struggled to uphold what is true . . . you ought to be able to understand all the work I’ve done on this” (Chan 153). Lao Chen begins to think about what he learns from

Fang Caodi, but he still reluctantly pursues truth unlike Fang Caodi and Little Xi.

Like Lao Chen, Little Xi is well educated, but her educational background is in law from the Peking College of Political Science and Law. At the age of 22, she began her work assignment as a legal clerk-secretary in the “county-level court under the Beijing jurisdiction,” where she says her “nightmare began” (Chan 45). This was a nightmare for her, because while she “always hated to see the guilty prosper and the innocent suffer” and “was naturally very much in favor of the Party and government’s policy of severely and rapidly punishing criminal activity according to the law,” she was unprepared for the fact that “the ‘severely and rapidly’ that [she] had in mind was not the ‘severely’ or ‘rapidly’ that they [Party Central] practiced” (45-

46). In this passage, it is important to note that Little Xi believes in the rule of law according to the letter instead of its spirit, because the law limits the exercise of power by the state and establishes the rights of the individual accused of crimes. The spirit of the law, which she quickly surmises, has to do more with a competition of numbers between districts and the heavy handed

(literal) execution of criminals of all kinds, serves a perverted spirit that ignores the implementation of law as it is written—balancing the power of the state with the rights of the individual. While Fang Caodi seeks understanding through his movements and associations,

Little Xi seeks understanding through the application of law equally. Put another way, the law, for Little Xi, can act as an equalizing force that uncovers the truth if the application of law is not corrupted. However, she sees from the inside how perverted the application of law is on the small scale, which prompts her later to realize that the system of law is very broken at the beginning of the crackdown that leads to the Age of Ascendancy and the resulting missing month.

In addition, like Lao Chen, Little Xi gains a reputation as a public intellectual after leaving the judiciary. She begins by participating in an intellectual salon and eventually takes her arguments to the Internet, which gains her a semi-anonymous voice and some governmental

89 notoriety. She starts as “the female host of an intellectual salon in the 1980s and 1990s,” but

“when the intellectuals appeased the government or were ‘harmonized,’ Little Xi rose up in opposition and threw herself into solitary combat” (Chan 208). Despite the forceful or collaborative actions of her fellow intellectuals, Little Xi “argued strongly for truth and justice, expressing her opinions on the Internet. This process forced her to clarify her own thoughts and use rational arguments to state her case in the face of her opponents, who used emotive language, rhetoric, populism, and even violence” (Chan 208-209). Little Xi leverages reason and evidence against the forces of populism that wish to enforce and maintain the status quo ordered by the government. Her efforts made her “an obscure but genuine public intellectual” whose pursuit of truth, “is her armor, her vocation, the air she breathes to live, her loveliness and her repulsiveness”

(Chan 209). While Lao Chen gains recognition as a public intellectual for writing things that he believes will sell, such as his literary-cultural book, “Endowment and Remembrance: In Search of One Hundred Forgotten Mainland Masters of Art and Literature,” which resulted in him being labeled a “China expert” or “an expert on mainland issues” (Chan 30), or his self-help book, “The Chinese EQ,” which earned him recognition as “a self-improvement specialist”

(Chan 31), Little Xi uses the new media of the Internet to wage “combat” against the

“harmonization” of the Chinese intelligentsia. Lao Chen and others like him choose to avoid political issues, but Little Xi sought them out to “[argue] strongly for truth and justice.” In doing so, she took the mantle of the public intellectual from those people who arguably ought to be doing it and made it her own “armor” and “vocation.”

Little Xi’s personal crusade takes place primarily online using Internet-based guerilla tactics of hiding behind a multitude of different screen names. Her mother, Big Sister Song, describes her online activities to Lao Chen: “She’s on e-mail. She spends all her time arguing

90 with people on the Internet, and she keeps changing her address” (Chan 22). Little Xi defends her online political activities: “Am I causing trouble, making a fuss? I know it’s none of my business, but I can’t act just like nothing’s happened. How can things change just like that? I don’t get it and I can’t stand it” (Chan 14-15). She refuses to accept how people like Lao Chen feel—as if nothing had happened, and she refuses to accept not acting toward changing the status quo that enables the feeling that nothing had happened. Something obviously happened during the missing month, and Little Xi makes it her own crusade to discover what it was. For Little Xi, she sees the work that she does online as an important part of remembering or provoking a kind of cultural memory: “I am reminding everyone that they should never forget that the Chinese

Communist Party is not the great, glorious, always correct party of their propaganda” (Chan 55).

Little Xi sees the CCP as not rising up to the level of greatness that is promoted by propaganda.

According to the rule of law, the CCP should be made to acknowledge its deficiencies and problems, but since this would undermine the party’s power, Little Xi works on her own to discover truth about the actions of the CCP through establishing evidence and crafting arguments based on that evidence. Furthermore, she declares: “I will persevere to the end because I believe that human beings are rational and that the truth cannot be suppressed forever” (Chan 157).

While Little Xi’s point of view seems to be influenced by Jürgen Habermas, she nevertheless aspires to find the truth through rational communication with others online.46 Lao Chen shows concern about her behavior and tactics, because he does not want to see her hurt by the authorities. In conversation with Big Sister Song, Lao Chen worries that Little Xi is merely “a troublemaker” instead of “one of those intellectual-style dissidents” (Chan 41). What Lao Chen sees as her troublemaking led to “political trouble [that] had been dogging her for decades, all because she was too outspoken and too stubborn. She hated injustice and thus easily offended

91 people” (Chan 41). Little Xi’s single-minded pursuit of justice alienates her from those who would help or choose not to: “In the past, many people had been willing to help her, including some foreigners. But today foreigners like that have disappeared—none of them want to upset the Chinese Communist Party. Foreigners willing to risk offending the CCP don’t get a visa.

Everybody around her was living the good life and couldn’t be bothered with her” (Chan 41).

Perhaps most troubling about Lao Chen’s image of Little Xi is that he does not recognize the work that she does online as being important or significant. He sees her as “outspoken and stubborn” instead of an “intellectual-style dissident.” Little Xi regards herself as the latter instead of the former, and she backs up her appraisal based on the process of development she had undergone as an online public intellectual hidden behind layers of anonymity. Furthermore, Lao

Chen sees Little Xi’s hatred of injustice as causing offense to others. Either he does not recognize the injustice, or he values not offending some more than acknowledging the injustice suffered by others. It would seem that the latter is more accurate for Lao Chen, because he sees the injustice as the wages of sin—of maintaining the Age of Ascendency—while the offense can lead to trouble with the CCP, which he and others enjoying the happiness of the Age of

Ascendency would like to avoid.

In a scene where she is preparing dinner, Lao Chen asks Little Xi, “Why can’t you forget?

This is a different age” (Chan 113). Meaning, he wants her to forget about the missing month and cease agitating for an answer to what happened and continues to happen to the people of

China. Little Xi looks at Lao Chen with “an expression of vague disappointment,” and tells him that, “I’ve already forgotten too much. When I was locked up in that mental hospital for so long,

I forgot so many things. I don’t want to forget anymore” (Chan 113). At the beginning of the missing month, Little Xi had been hospitalized after running into the street and shouting

92 profanities against the CCP loudly and uncontrollably as the crackdown began. In this scene, she is disappointed that Lao Chen does not want to seek justice through the truth as she does. Instead,

Lao Chen is like the others that Little Xi sees around her—satisfied with the status quo and unwilling to upset the status quo to understand how it came to be and how it continues to be.

Additionally, she admits to losing some memories while she was in the hospital. She is not the observer like Fang Caodi, but she is an advocate—an advocate for those who were made to suffer, and an advocate for the truth.

Little Xi’s admission of amnesia emblematizes the forgetting about which the entire novel is based, but it goes deeper than that, too. Paul Levine warns us: “Forgetting is a fundamental part of Chinese Communist thought. All the Party-inspired blunders . . . . have been air-brushed out of history. The Tiananmen Massacre cannot be publicly commemorated” (par. 5).

The Party erases its catastrophic mistakes and vicious crackdowns to remove history from discourse and eventually from memory. Levine asks: “How, then, does memory survive in this miasma of forgetting,” and answers: “One way is through literature” (par. 5-6). Literature, including Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, operates in both registers that Little Xi represents— forgetting and advocacy. The novel acknowledges the forgetfulness while it also advocates for remembering, questioning, and confronting. Furthermore, Little Xi’s advocacy uses the same channels of distribution that the writer relied on to distribute his novel on the Mainland. Chaohua

Wang observes: “Little Xi has learned to argue anonymously but tirelessly on the Internet, with clarity and lucidity, about steadfastly looking at historical truth and fighting for justice” (29).

What is more, Little Xi’s online advocacy for justice in the face of forgetfulness inverts the typical dystopian model: “We are not told the contents of her postings, but there is a curious inversion of some more familiar dystopian settings: the marginalized figure is holding up

93 clarified ideas while the dominating order is extremely vague and evasive in its political discourse” (Wang 29). Through the character of Little Xi, Chan Koonchung reveals how the

Party’s dominant discourse is ambiguous and ill-defined, which highlights differences between present-day China and fictional dystopias. Wang asserts that: “It brings a notable difference from classical dystopian works . . . . the imagined state of affairs is not as neatly organized as in, say

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four” (28-29).

Furthermore, Chaohua Wang argues that The Fat Years’ relationship to another important dystopian novel: “Missing in this setting are two factors that readers familiar with Huxley’s

Brave New World might be expecting: on the one hand a clearly spelt out, dominating ideology—that is, until to the very end—and on the other a highly disciplined hierarchy issuing orders to members of society with threats of swift punishment” (29). Paul Levine echoes this assessment writing: “The Fat Years have been read as a political satire. Some reviewers compared it to Orwell’s 1984 as dystopian science fiction. But there is this significant difference: whereas Orwell’s future society is grimly miserable, Chan [Koonchung]’s China is brightly affluent. But the difference is only apparent” (par. 10). Unlike Orwell and Huxley’s respective nightmares about totalitarian societies, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years reveals something more sinister: “Rule by fear, the archetypal evil against human liberation in typical dystopian literature, is not present in its daily operation form in The Fat Years, but rather in a bolt of lightning that precedes the novel’s present time by two years” (Wang 29). That “bolt of lightning” has a resonating sound of thunder that hangs over the novel’s characters, which Wang describes as: “fear is not directed at power exercised against individual citizens but rather at potential social anarchy. The ruling power, in turn, becomes the most desired saviour rescuing the masses from fearful chaos” (29). Hong-Chi Luo echoes Wang, pointing out: “In the names of prosperity,

94 rise, and stability, the whole society has been integrated into a massive enclosed system. Anyone who may endanger the goal of the system will be mercilessly eliminated, for he/she is punished with justice by the nation and its fellow citizens” (Luo 150, my translation).47 Unlike the top- down control in other dystopian fictions, The Fat Years reconfigures control from the inside out.

Fear lingers in the minds of the Chinese from the forgotten past, and it is the belief instilled by prosperity and the chemical water treatments that convince the Chinese to put their faith in the government, which promotes itself as the bedrock of a stable and successful China.

The fear is also driven by the apparent prosperity of China in the novel. Fear drives

China’s citizens to avoid those memories that might lead to elimination or harmonization.

Jonathan Mirsky observes: “This is not the grim state of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four; in The

Fat Years the Party state provides most people with more than their material means; intellectuals have never had it so good, and businesses like Starbucks and shopping centres are thronged with well-off customers” (38). Stability and prosperity go hand-in-hand for the characters, and if the tradeoff is to reject memory and avoid recollecting the missing month, then it seems that most

Chinese characters accept the bargain in the novel. However, Chan Koonchung’s inversion of dystopian authority, however, does not square with the idealism of those who realize that a horrific past has been forgotten and must be remembered to achieve some measure of justice— namely, Little Xi and Fang Caodi. These characters have in some sense a greater battle to fight.

Instead of accepting an obviously evil and oppressive government that offers prosperity in return for forgetfulness and obedience, they challenge it.

The narrator deliberates the idealisms of Little Xi and Fang Caodi late in the novel while they are sharing their respective stories. During their conversations, Little Xi breaks down into tears as she remembers the terrible things that she had forgotten—not because she had wanted to,

95 but because the burden of suffering had been too great on her mind. She had not acquiesced to forgetting as Lao Chen had. Instead, the weight of suffering by her and others was simply too much for her to handle. Her memories had been bottled up, but now they poured out. The narrator then discusses Little Xi and Fang Caodi’s idealism, which I quote at length here due to its importance to my argument:

Whose idealism is the most radical, Fang Caodi’s or Little Xi’s? The answer is

Little Xi’s. What do we mean by radical? The original classical meaning of

radical is root (from the Latin radix), to find the essential root of something. Fang

Caodi has a plain and simple sense of justice, of working on behalf of Heaven’s

Way; added to his naturally stubborn character, this sense of justice spurs him on

to search tirelessly for that missing month. Little Xi’s sense of justice is more

abstract, more philosophical. The socialist and internationalist education that she

received as a child engraved the bright words equality, justice, friendship, and

mutual aid firmly on her heart. She really didn’t understand the hypocrisy of the

Chinese Communist Party. In college she studied the Roman and Napoleonic law

that was taught again after the Cultural Revolution ended. During the 1980s and

1990s she was baptized in the tide of Enlightenment values such as Reason,

Liberty, Democracy, Truth, and Human Rights. Both romanticism and rationalism

made deep impressions on her, and she adopted the idealism of a typical

contemporary Westernized Chinese intellectual. Although her idealism is not

without its blind spots and intrinsic limitations, due to all of the above, we know

that Little Xi is more radical, and hers is a radicalism that will remain steadfastly

loyal to the end. (Chan 208)

In this passage, the narrator begins by working toward a definition of a radical. In this case, the narrator begins with the Latin root, radix, or the root or essential meaning of something. The narrator makes the claim that Little Xi is more radical than Fang Caodi, because the former’s sense of justice is “more abstract, more philosophical” and the latter’s sense of justice is “plain and simple . . . . of working on behalf of Heaven’s Way.”48 Due to Little Xi’s education at just the right time—following the Cultural Revolution and the re-introduction of Western intellectual traditions including the Enlightenment, which were previously banned under previous attempts of the CCP to control the development of their citizenry through educational programs, she gained additional ways of seeing that potentially ran against those promoted by the party. She learned about equality and the equal application of the law from her educational background in

Western ideas ranging from ancient Rome to the democratic revolutions of the United States and

France. Based on her education in these cornerstone concepts of Western thought, she was unprepared for the harsh reality of the CCP’s interpretation of law and the strange logics of party members to fulfill competitive quotas for those interpretations. Little Xi was caught in a cognitive bind by her education and her lived experience—a dialectic that she could not cognitively resolve, which ultimately led to her hospitalization. However, Little Xi fought back from that setback, which proves the narrator’s point: “hers is a radicalism that will remain steadfastly loyal to the end” (Chan 208).49 Perhaps more interestingly about Little Xi’s radicalism is how education creates within her mind a kind of hybrid identity. Unlike Lao Chen and Fang Caodi, she has primarily spent her whole life in China, but the education and ideas that she received in school broadened her mind to other ways of seeing that were not necessarily rooted in her place (China) or the party (CCP). Education opened up new avenues of thought and

97 alternative perspectives that provide her with a deeper understanding and a stronger intellectual arsenal to uncover the truth sought by her compatriots, Fang Caodi and the reluctant Lao Chen.

THE OPERATION OF CHINESE NATIONALISM AND GLOBAL CAPITAL

While Little Xi’s law education broadened her perspective, and created her dialectical burden, her son Wei Guo follows his mother’s example as an aspiring lawyer but without any pretension about other perspectives other than the singular vision of the CCP. Wei Guo’s early integration into the lower levels of CCP operations and his youthful zeal antithetical to his mother’s secret online challenges to party power, positions him as a representative of the party’s youth base and eventual controller of the reins of power. Chan Koonchung is warning the reader as much as Little Xi’s digital communications are warning her Chinese message board readers.

In this chapter’s final section, I return to the earlier theme of the novel’s cognitive estrangement as a way to unlock the operation of Chinese Nationalism providing the engine for China’s integration and ultimate domination of the networks of global capital. To begin this discussion, I assert that Wei Guo represents the root/radix of party power and is a warning of what is to come as he and other youths continue their rise in the party, mirroring the path of He Dongsheng, the upper level government official kidnapped by Lao Chen, Little Xi, Fang Caodi, and Zhang Dou.

Little Xi does not know exactly who Wei Guo’s father is. She once thought his father was her former lover, Shi Ping, who is a poet and bohemian. However, after she left Shi Ping, she ran into Ban Cuntou, who was her university classmate and a person from a recognized family in

“China’s Red aristocracy” (Chan 49). Due to the timing of these relationships and how Wei Guo eventually turned out as a commuist zealot, Little Xi is unsure of her son’s lineage. After Wei

Guo grew up, he distanced himself from his given name: Wei Min. Little Xi tells the reader:

“When my son was born, I named him Wei Min, giving him my last name. When Wei Min was twenty years old, he changed his name to Wei Guo, exchanging the word ‘people’ –Min—for

‘nation’ –Guo” (Chan 51). Wei Guo’s choice emblematizes the disconnection between the

“people” and the “nation.” Whereas he was once named for the “people,” he chose instead to be named for the “nation” as if he does not believe that these two things are synonymous or the former creates the latter, which would seem to be aligned with socialist theory. In his new name, he seems to embody the nation and through his self-important actions in the novel, he is the operation of the party. His actions as an informant and provocateur demonstrate the operation of party power that he sees himself as embodying.

To enact the party’s power, Wei Guo identifies his “life’s ambition” as working in the

Chinese Communist Party Central Propaganda Department (Chan 14). He informs Lao Chen with this idea when they first meet at Big Sister Song’s restaurant. During this meeting, Wei Guo begins to interrogate Lao Chen about his background and current work situation. Lao Chen turns the interrogation toward conversation, and inquires about Wei Guo’s ambitions, which Wei Guo is all too happy to share: “The people cannot rely just on material power; they have to have spiritual power, too, for the people to be united. Hard power is important, but soft power is equally important. I think the Propaganda Department is vital, but it’s not doing as well as it could . . . for example, they don’t understand the Internet and netizens well enough” (Chan 24).

For Wei Guo, the Propaganda Department deploys soft power to unite the people spiritually. In his formulation, spiritual unity is achieved through the propaganda engine of the party. Wei Guo declares: “The propaganda Department guides the spiritual life of the entire nation” (24). His use of the word “guide” in this context could be a euphemism for “control.” In addition, it reflects his confusion about the “nation” and “people” discussed above, because the application of this

99 spiritual control is on the individuals who collectively constitute the nation. Put another way, spiritual unity of the people is achieved through mind control—using propaganda to tell people what to think and how to think. Wei Guo even goes so far in his sharing to attempt to convince

Lao Chen to propagandize on behalf of China for the benefit of Taiwan: “Write more articles on the true face of China so our Taiwanese compatriots won’t so easily believe the Western media”

(Chan 25). Here, he sees the work of the party and the Propaganda Department as being aligned with “the true face of China,” and he raises the concern on the part of the party that Taiwan’s historical reluctance to capitulate to the communists is buttressed in part on the messages disseminated by “the Western media.” It would seem that Wei Guo identifies all media messages as propaganda, which supports his patriotic zeal to use propaganda for the benefit of the party and its political messages. In a sense, the minds of the Chinese and Taiwanese are a battlefield where battles are fought between warring ideologies using arsenals of propaganda.50

To achieve Wei Guo’s aspiration to be a member of the propaganda establishment, he records in his diary: “Today, I made a great stride toward my life goal because today I became an official member of the SS Study Group. I feel so proud, because I am its youngest member”

(Chan 64). Wei Guo also describes how the study group “brings together political and business circles” (Chan 64). The SS Study Group is a “network of connections” between its members who

“are not ivory-tower bookworms,” but instead those who “assist the state in governing the nation” (Chan 64). The SS Study Group serves as an indoctrination organization for those wanting to rise in the party, and as a group performing political activities on behalf of the party.

Interestingly, the confusion about the people/party/nation is evident in Wei Guo’s description of the SS Study Group as assisting the “state” govern the “nation,” as if these were separate things.

Also, the SS Study Group favors the political operation of power enforced by the party and it

100 excludes any other political thought by “ivory-tower bookworms.” Of course, this is antithetical to the educational enlightenment earned by Wei Guo’s mother, Little Xi. Another issue of concern about the SS Study Group is the historical trace embedded in its name, and its motto:

“‘perfect wisdom and courage’—we promote a martial spirit, heroism, and the robust qualities of manliness. . . . a sense of mission. . . . we are the genuine spiritual aristocracy of China’s Golden

Age of Ascendancy” (Chan 64-65). First, the SS conjures the haunting image of Germany’s Nazi

Party and its martial and spiritual core: the SS or Schutzstaffel.51 Perhaps recognizing how some readers—especially Western readers—might interpret the SS, Wei Guo adds a post script to his diary: “The ‘SS’ in the SS Study Group refers to two Germans (even though one of them was a

Jew) whose last names begin with S” (Chan 73). On the one hand, he admits the German historical connection, but he attempts to allay the reader’s concern by saying that one of the

Germans was a Jew! In the translator’s notes, Michael Duke cautions that: “‘SS’ has obvious

Nazi overtones for English readers, and Wei Guo’s group certainly has fascist tendencies of the kind many older Chinese establishment intellectuals warned against in 2010” (qtd. in Chan 304).

However, Duke also adds that: “‘SS’ probably stands for Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, two

Western thinkers from whom youthful ultranationalists derive antiliberal and statist ideas” (qtd. in Chan 304). Nevertheless, the trace of fascism cannot be erased despite any explanation on the part of Wei Guo. Schmitt was a Nazi, and Strauss is seen by many as anti-liberal.52

Within the troubling SS Study Group, Wei Guo admires the academic professors who make up part of its membership. He points out: “their position is that ideas and power should be united in order to make China stronger” (Chan 65). In Wei Guo’s words, the professors condone the combination of ideas (propaganda) with the authority of the state (power) to create a stronger

China. He describes the professors in the SS Study Group as:

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[obtaining] the support of wealthy foundations to fund high-level academic

conferences, support like-minded people, and set up united fronts . . . to train the

next generation of the academic elite. . . . The food and entertainment are superb,

but the mentally intensive brainwashing is also terrific; that’s why the conferences

have been dubbed the Devil’s Training Camp, or the New Whampoa Academy.

(Chan 67)

The graduate students who go through these conferences are brainwashed and indoctrinated.

These graduate students will be the future academics and elite intellectuals, and based on their

“brainwashing,” they likely will teach and promote as they have been taught. In effect, the party has established a self-sustaining system of indoctrination initiated by those professors, such as the anonymous X, Y, Z, and Q, who have bought into the party’s power structure and goals. In turn, the indoctrinated graduate students will train the next generation, including those students like Wei Guo, who put power into action as a young member of the SS Study Group, and who eventually will become a member of the propaganda establishment. What is particularly alarming about this arrangement is that Wei Guo has no misconception about how it operates. In fact, he talks about one of these indoctrinated professors, who is called “Q.” Wei Guo writes:

“They call Q the Pied Piper—like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the German fairy tale who played the flute so bewitchingly that he enticed all the children away from home” (Chan 67). Q’s role is to bewitch students and entice them to believe the things that the party wants them to believe, and to create new Chinese citizens who believe the same things. Wei Guo continues: “What the

SS Study Group is promoting is . . . intellectual revolution in which the contemporary Chinese world-view will triumph—there are many roles to be played, and a Pied Piper to lead away the children is indispensable” (Chan 67-68). Professor Q, or the Pied Piper lures people away from

102 other viewpoints and other possibilities in order to grow the nationalist idea in the minds of all citizens. The intellectual revolution, according to Wei Guo, depends on the people, or “the children” in his formulation, to be lead away from knowledge and truth.

While Wei Guo represents the CCP’s next generation, He Dongsheng represents the generation currently wielding power within China. He is described as “a pale, balding, insomniac national leader” (Chan 40). He is paranoid, but perhaps rightly so. For example, earlier in the novel, He Dongsheng gives Lao Chen a ride home from their friend Jian Lin’s house. He pulls out “an anti-bugging and anti-tracking device” from his shirt pocket before speaking with Lao

Chen in the car (Chan 107). Lao Chen asks him: “Who would dare to bug or track you?” (Chan

107). He Dongsheng replies: “They all would!” (107). He Dongshen adds: “There are so many organizations and so many people, who can say for sure? Who doesn’t have enemies? I monitor people and people monitor me. I know your secrets and you know mine, there’s a dossier on everybody, that’s the way the game is played” (107). The many levels of the state and party engage in ouroboros-like self-surveillance. This is one of the most striking ironies in the novel that no one within the Chinese surveillance state is safe from surveillance—even the top-most leaders. In addition, He Dongsheng does not drink tap water until the end of the novel after Lao

Chen and the others have kidnapped him, and he spills his secrets under the happy influence of the MDMA in the national water supply.

During He Dongsheng and Lao Chen’s car ride, He Dongsheng shares his thoughts at the

Prosperous China Conference where they first met years before:

That was when I first realized . . . that the intellectual elite of China, Taiwan, and

Hong Kong think about things in completely different ways—their awareness,

discourse, concepts of history, and worldviews are fundamentally different. And

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furthermore, not only do you not understand us, but we don’t understand you

either . . . we don’t have much interest in understanding. I mean real

understanding—that’s virtually impossible. . . . if the intellectual elite of these

three places are so different, the common people will be even more so. This was a

great help to my later thinking about Taiwan and Hong Kong. (Chan 108)

He Dongsheng observes the different thinking among the intellectuals from China, Taiwan, and

Hong Kong at the conference. He rationalizes that their worldviews informed by their education and lived experience are completely different. As a result of these very different worldviews, none of them can really understand one another in a fundamental way. In his formulation, it is analogous to Thomas Nagel’s argument in “What is it Like to be a Bat?” which is human beings can never really understand the lived experience or phenomenology of other animal species, because our brains and bodies are so fundamentally different.53 Considering He Dongsheng’s theory, unlike the differences of biological structures discussed by Nagel, the structures of lived experience of place, education, language, and law potentially create barriers to truly understanding the Other. While these are potential barriers to understanding, they need not be.

However, He Dongsheng adds that beyond the “virtual impossibility” of understanding, there is little interest in bridging the gap of understanding either. Lao Chen thinks to himself: “I’d lived in all three of these places and understood what he was saying,” and then he tells He Dongsheng:

“The last couple of years the elite of Taiwan and Hong Kong have all been obediently learning from the mainland” (Chan 108). In response, He Dongsheng says: “It is not easy for outsiders to understand Chinese affairs” (Chan 108). In this exchange, he reinforces his idea that the gap of understanding cannot be easily bridged, and perhaps, there is little desire from within China for the gap to be bridged by the Other. Perhaps the easier solution is the establishment of a new

104 world order—the Age of Ascendancy—to create mutual understanding enforced by the policies of the party.

Lao Chen also observes early in the novel that China portrays itself to Taiwan as its Big

Brother. He reflects: “They treat the Taiwanese like their little brothers, and all they ask is that we treat them like our big brothers” (Chan 27). However, this simplified political posturing carries with it certain ideas and responsibilities that place Taiwan at a significant disadvantage to

China in terms of international politics and within the networks of global capital. It would be a total capitulation of Taiwan’s status in the world, its political alliances, and its integration within the networks of capital. During the kidnapping, He Dongsheng tells the kidnappers: “All you have to do is recognize China as your friendly older brother, and everything can be easily accomplished, even if China has to give up some of its advantages” (Chan 265). As in the quote above, China’s position is all surface without the depth of reality. Here, China offers to act in the role of “your friendly older brother” and would even “give up some of its advantages” to make this geopolitical-familial relationship a reality. Of course, China has everything to gain and nothing to lose by Taiwan’s capitulation. He Dongsheng, as the stand-in for China, acts as if a great favor is being offered to Taiwan, but this is not as great a favor as it appears to be.

What seems implied in these supposed favors from He Dongsheng/China is Taiwan’s incorporation into the sphere of China’s influence. On the one hand, China, according to He

Dongsheng, wants to accomplish the things that democratic Taiwan supposedly cannot. He tells

Lao Chen and the other kidnappers:

The preservation of social stability would be only a necessary condition of the

party-states’ legitimacy. This is because democratic systems are not necessarily

unable to maintain stability themselves. Take Taiwan, for example: we ridicule

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them for their democratic chaos, but they carried off a peaceful transition of

power and their political situation remained quite stable. . . . We have to prove

that our one-party rule can accomplish big things that democratic systems are

unable to accomplish. (Chan 228)

He Dongshen understands that the tap water given to him to drink will have the same effect on him as it does for everyone else. He calls this effect the “preservation of social stability.”

Ultimately, the ruse on the part of the Chinese government to make the Chinese people agree to the Hobbesian social contract to restore order, gives the state the opportunity to crack down and implement its pharmacological solution to preserve social stability and thus maintain its legitimacy to power. He Dongsheng admits that democratic systems like Taiwan are able to maintain stability despite the “chaos” of public discourse, but it is the success of Taiwan’s democracy that almost provokes China to do one better—to “accomplish big things that democratic systems are unable to accomplish.”

The form of the big things that China wants to accomplish begins with the so-called

“China’s Monroe Doctrine.” He Dongsheng describes it in these terms: “To prevent the invasion of its territory and to safeguard its national interests, China has to become a friendly older brother to its regional neighbors and not compete with the United States for world hegemony”

(Chan 252-253). Delivered as part of US President James Monroe’s State of the Union Address in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine created a future non-interference by European powers zone in

North and South America, and declared US intervention if this zone was not respected by

Europe. The Chinese Monroe Doctrine is meant to be a corollary to the original US doctrine, but couched in the language of China-as-big-brother and aimed primarily at the United States as

China’s rival for world hegemony. Between the lines, however, and evidenced by the events in

106 the novel, the Chinese Monroe Doctrine seems more like a veil hiding China’s real intentions as a new imperial power pursuing an economic and ideological imperialism to dominate the world.

Acting as the big brother to its neighbors and other countries under its influence in the world

(e.g., African countries), China influences others through economic advantage and ideological promotion via propaganda and cultural dissemination.

While China is acting on these things outside of the novel as discussed in the concluding section of this chapter, there is an important element of the novel that stands out as emblematic of China’s imperialism through economic buy-in into the networks of global and cultural capital.

This specific trajectory of Chinese imperialism in the novel is Starbucks. Outside of the novel, when you think of Starbucks, you might think of coffee, espresso, lattes, Seattle, and the United

States. You might also think about how there seems to be one on every corner here in the United

States and abroad. Starbucks seems to be everywhere! Within the novel’s narrative, we discover that Starbucks, an international corporation that conveyed caffeinated Seattle culture and a recognizable US-based corporation around the world, is now part of a Chinese conglomerate:

Want-Want.54 Lao Chen from the beginning of the novel always finds an excuse to visit

Starbucks—usually when he does not want to immediately return home or as a salve for things not going how he might have originally intended them to go. In one passage, early in the novel,

Lao Chen takes a taxi to a Starbucks in Sanlitun. He tells the reader:

Ever since the Wantwant China Group acquired Starbucks, many Chinese drinks

have gone global. Take this great-tasting Lychee Black Dragon latte I’m drinking

now. I’ve heard that Wantwant Starbucks together with a Chinese investment

consortium called EAL Friendship Investments (EAL for Europe, Africa, and

Latin America) have opened outlets in several Islamic cities in the Middle East

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and Africa, including Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Khartoum, and Dar es Salaam.

This is one big new global market guaranteeing that anywhere the Chinese live in

the world there will be a Starbucks. In business never forget culture—a wonderful

expression of China’s soft power. (Chan 17)

What Lao Chen describes as “China’s soft power” is what I characterize as China’s new cultural imperialism. In this case, Lao Chen notes that Starbucks is now owned by Want-Want, and they have collaborated with a Chinese investment consortium to bring Starbucks and their new

Chinese drinks to anywhere in the world where Chinese live. In this case, the narrator points out the Middle East—a growing point of contact between the rest of the world and China due in part to their large petroleum resources, which China needs for its growing industrial engine and consumer base.

Beyond what is explicitly said in the novel, there is more to be said about this emblem of

Chinese economic and cultural imperialism. First, Want-Want was originally a Taiwanese firm, but as it has grown, it has reconfigured and re-identified itself as a Chinese firm: Want-Want

China. According to its English-language corporate website: “Want Want began operations with

I Lan Foods Industrial Co.,Ltd in Taiwan. Want Want officially invested in the China market and became a pioneer in registering the first Taiwanese trademark and now owns the most registered trademarks in China” (Want-Want China par. 1). Following the chain of acquisitions in real life and the novel, Want-Want began as a Taiwanese firm, registered the first Taiwanese trademark in China, became a Chinese firm (now registered in Shanghai), and acquires Starbucks (a US- based international corporation. Put another way, a large Chinese-based corporation assimilates a

US-based international corporation with an immediately well-recognized brand, and reinvents

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Starbucks as a corporate dissemination of Chinese culture via its brand, its caffeinated drinks

(another drug), and its omnipresence.

Lao Chen, Little Xi, and Fang Caodi fight to uncover the truth of China’s missing month and Age of Ascendency while people like Wei Guo and He Dongsheng machinate within the

CCP to stabilize Chinese society and broaden China’s imperialist forays into the wider world.

Starbucks Want-Want serves as one emblem of the operation of China’s economic and ideological imperialism that works through the networks of global capital. Now, in the concluding section of this chapter, I would like to further explore the ways in which the closeness of the novel’s narrative to our present and the novel’s narrative style evoke estrangement and alienation. In particular, I assert that its estrangement arises from the relationship between Taiwan, China, and the United States, and through the tension of real world events to those of the novel’s fictional world.

The closeness of the story to reality makes it eerily like the present, in which China rises above the current economic downturn through market success, social control, and military innovation. For example, Jing Ulrich, managing director and chairman of China equities for

JPMorgan, argues around the time of The Fat Years original release in Hong Kong and Taiwan that while markets were rising in China, “Investors are always looking for the potential risks that have not been discounted. . . . One area that we need to pay attention to is social tension. That’s why the government is targeting low-income housing and inflation control to try to ease the social tension that exists” (qtd. in Barbajosa par. 2-3). In this real-world case, investors are looking at the “social tension” within China before making their investment decisions, and they were watching what the government was doing to ease that tension and support investment. In addition, China has maintained control over labor unrest and region instability in the wake of the

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Arab Spring through its expert control over Internet and media discourse. What is more, China has expanded its operations in the South China Sea: “[to engage] in an undeniable naval expansion” (Kaplan par. 2); responded to Libyan unrest with naval evacuations: “The frigate

Xuzhou’s presence – the first time a Chinese military vessel has ventured into the

Mediterranean” (Ford par. 4); and unveiled its first stealth fighter jet days before U.S. Defense

Secretary Robert Gates traveled there: “to begin a long-delayed visit to Beijing on Sunday— almost exactly a year after China suspended military ties in protest over U.S. arms sales to

Taiwan” (Page par. 15). More recently, China asserted military power in the South China Sea:

“The United States has spotted a pair of mobile artillery vehicles on an artificial island that China is building in the South China Sea, a resource-rich stretch of ocean crossed by vital shipping lanes” (Rosenberg par. 1); former NSA Director Mike McDonald warned about China’s computer espionage: “The Chinese have penetrated every major corporation of any consequence in the United States and taken information” (qtd. in Pagliery par. 2); and China developed new weapons delivery systems: “After decades of maintaining a minimal nuclear force, China has reengineered many of its long-range ballistic missiles to carry multiple warheads, a step that federal officials and policy analysts say appears designed to give pause to the United States as it prepares to deploy more robust missile defenses in the Pacific” (Sanger and Broad par. 1).

Furthermore, many Taiwanese businesses establish manufacturing factories in China and many travel to the mainland as management for trading and manufacturing firms and as professionals in the information technology field. When Chan Koonchung’s novel was first published, the

United States was in two foreign wars and struggled to restart its stalled economy, keep people in their mortgaged homes, and find a balance between social services and governmental spending.

Now, the US is involved in the efforts to combat ISIS/ISIL in the Middle East, particularly in

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Iraq, and it is faced with a widening chasm between the rich and working classes that has the potential to shake the foundations of its democracy more than the financial crisis that preceded the present. These real events make the fictional events in the novel seem not that implausible.

The narrative style further complicates the boundary between the real world and the fictional world. Despite being told from multiple points of views, the novel assumes a factual and didactic tone that feels historically genuine and accurate, perhaps because of what Alison

McCulloch dismisses as the novel being “larded with the kind of analysis more common to foreign policy journals” (16). Nevertheless, the author employs what can be described in English as future perfect tense. As readers may know, Chinese does not use verb tense. Instead, they use chronological or relative terms. In the case of this novel, the author tells the story in such a way that it makes it seem like the events in the novel have already taken place. This additional layer to the story elevates its factuality to the reader, which in turn alienates the reader from the present reality even more. The recent past of the novel supplants the recent past of our reality through its aspect and narrative reporting. It bears repeating that the author stated that this book serves as a wake-up call to the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan. As a Taiwanese reader, I wonder how much of this novel is a warning and how much is a critique of the present? Reading the Taiwanese characters might demonstrate inevitability for Chinese ascendency and a pragmatic rationalization for individuals powerless to change the networks of power and economics that lead to a weakened Taiwan and United States and a more powerful China. I am concerned by the author’s fictional portrayal of Taiwanese people and his indictment of Chinese and Taiwanese alike as complicit in the Chinese government’s solidification of control, even if it is not as sinister as world domination. There are only two Taiwanese characters in the novel: the main protagonist Lao Chen, who is passive and reluctant to uncover the truth despite his being a

111 journalist and his past studies in detective fiction. The other one is an unnamed Taiwanese businessman character who scolds Little Xi on a blind date: “Your government is wonderful . . . they take such good care of you. You mainlanders don’t know how to be grateful. You think it’s an easy thing to feed 1.3 billion people? What right do you have to criticize the government?

What do you women know anyway?” (Chan 60). Hearing this, Little Xi’s later compatriot,

Zhang Dou, kicks the Taiwanese guy’s chair out from under him. This scene illustrates the tension in the novel: should you live miserably knowing the truth, or should you live in ignorance if you are happy?55 Lao Chen raises this very question with Little Xi:

But between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise, which one will people

choose? . . . many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise is better than a

good hell. They know perfectly well it’s a counterfeit paradise, but they don’t

dare expose it. As time goes by, they will even forget that it is a fake paradise.

They start arguing in defense of this fake paradise, asserting that it is actually the

only paradise. But there’s always a small number of people . . . who will choose

the good hell no matter how painful it is, because in the good hell at least

everyone is fully aware that they are living in hell. (Chan 114)

Lao Chen and his compatriots learn the truth from National Leader He Dongsheng, but it does not change anything except that the truth they have gained allows them to live in the good hell.

They cannot challenge the system, because they are powerless in front of the nation machine, and too many people are content with making money, drinking the local water, and essentially living in the fake paradise. This tension is perhaps the most estranging aspect of the novel, but it is also a commentary on the present reality. In particular, Little Xi feels alone in her fight for truth and justice, because there are no other dissenting voices online. There do not seem to be

112 any intellectuals opposing the status quo. Leo Ou-Fan Lee observes: “Little Xi’s conclusion

(which might represent the author’s opinion) is that when one does not have to worry about the basics of life, it has made the Chinese intellectuals forget their duty to voice their criticism. They have all been strategically bribed by the government” (par. 4, my translation). If you are doing well and are happy, why question the status quo?

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CHAPTER THREE

BRENDA LIN’S WEALTH RIBBON: LOCATING GLOBALIZED IDENTITY IN

TAIWANESE-AMERICAN LITERATURE

In my earlier analysis of Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You, I demonstrate how

Taiwanese elites erase the nation and national identity by kowtowing to a country that they see as higher—in this case, the United States. Then, in my discussion of Chan Koonchung’s The Fat

Years, I explore how its characters—especially the Taiwanese journalist Lao Chen—respond to and question a science fictional Chinese hegemony that aims to use globalizing homogenization to erode and control identity for China’s benefit. In this chapter, I discuss Brenda Lin’s Wealth

Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound (2004).56 Lin’s memoir is told from her perspective as a

US-born Taiwanese American who struggles with understanding what “Taiwanese American” means to her. Invoking Derrida, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud describes the mode of writing akin to Lin’s book:

Writing to evoke the past is not always about creativity, nor is it always a matter

of choice. The act of returning to fragmented memories reflects what Derrida calls

‘learning to live with ghosts,’ a condition that disrupts normative fixed binaries

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and oppositions such as the ‘other’ versus the assimilated, individualism versus

collectivism, and cultural nationalism versus transnationalism. (64-65)

It highlights the challenge of articulating and understanding identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan, globalized, and immigration-legislated world. Furthermore, Brenda Lin has a soft spot for Taiwan, and she does not register any overt difficulties integrating into American life.

However, unlike the other novels discussed in this dissertation, her work illustrates the problems with returning to her mother country of Taiwan and ancestral homeland of China.

When looking for a literary text for this chapter connected to the American side of the triangle formed with Taiwan and China, I discovered that there are scarce American authors who discuss Taiwanese identity in their works. When it comes to the topic of Taiwan, most of the novels by these American writers focus on the issues of Japanese colonization and its aftermath, like Julie Wu’s The Third Son (2013); or the early KMT ruling period, such as Hualing Nie’s

Mulberry and Peach (1981) and Syd Goldsmith’s Jade Phoenix (2006). However, no work has given enough attention to the tension between Taiwanese, Chinese, and to some extent,

American, identity like Wealth Ribbon, in which Brenda Lin writes about her own identity crisis and experience. The uniqueness of her work and the fact that the author is just a little older than myself, makes it more personal to me, and also easier for me to relate to her writing. These things led me to select this book as being important to this dissertation’s argument as well as giving the memoir additional attention within the academe, which I believe it deserves. Unlike the other two novels that I discuss, this book is a memoir, and as such, it is unclear how the autobiographical elements are balanced with its literary aspects.

Brenda Lin was born in San Francisco, California, to Taiwanese parents in 1976. Her parents chose to do that because they hoped to provide a better future for their children, like what

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Ronald Takaki points out: “America, to the new . . . immigrants, is not Gam Saan, a place to work temporarily, but a new home where they hope to find greater economic opportunities for themselves and educational advantages for their children” (423).57 Lin spent her first four years in the United States, and then moved to Taiwan. During her stay in Taiwan, she attended

American schools. Afterwards, she returned to the United States for undergraduate and graduate degrees. Likely from her place of birth and her education from an American perspective and in the English language, she self-identifies as American. She never informs the reader if she holds both American and Taiwanese citizenships, despite the likelihood that she holds that state- sanctioned dual citizenship. Why does she not mention this fact? It does not seem to be that important to her. Her parents want her to stay and live in Taiwan, but she deliberately chooses to live in the United States. This is not because she has work-related opportunities here which are absent in Taiwan. Instead, where she chooses to live seems to have much more to do with where she feels comfortable, where she feels her identity can be expressed easily and naturally, as an

American citizen. For Lin, racial and national identities are the focal points for her sense of self and sense of place. Also, Elaine Kim describes some of the challenges articulated by second- generation writers like Lin:

second-generation writers, when confronted with racial barriers, could not so

easily identify with Asia, since they had been born, raised, and educated in the

United States. Their autobiographical writings therefore reflect the conflicts

caused in their personal lives by race discrimination and popular misconceptions

about the relationships between race and culture. (58)

Lin’s Wealth Ribbon addresses these same issues in detail as she writes about her lived experience in the United States, Taiwan, and China.

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ISSUES OF WRITING ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITIES

Brenda Lin’s Wealth Ribbon is a book of love stories: the love between parents and children, men and women, and individual and nation. The author depicts incidents in her life that are composed of conflict and confrontation with her parents, which builds on her dilemma of finding her identity. She is born as an American citizen, because her parents decided that it would provide security for her if Taiwan fell into Communist China’s hand. However, they still prefer her to be Taiwanese and to stay in Taiwan. Not only is she torn between choosing to be

American or Taiwanese, but she also has to deal with the relationship between Taiwan and

China, and how it affects her sense of self. While the maternal bond is among the ways mediating Lin’s identity crisis, it is one among a constellation of mediations and challenges confronting her exploration of identity.

Unlike the stereotypical offerings in works by well-known Asian-American authors such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, who some argue commoditize and exploit Chinese culture, Brenda Lin does not do that.58 Her book is different from many other Asian-American novels because unlike those authors rooted in the United States, her family’s socioeconomic status and background enable her to freely move between both sides of the Pacific Ocean. She has the mobility that many immigrants do not have. And it is this mobility (and her American identity) that causes her to question who she really is. This is the trouble of being an American- born Chinese, which Iris Chang describes as: “identity issues for generations of American-born

Chinese: a sense of feeling different, or alien, in their own country; of being subjected to greater scrutiny and judged by higher standards than the general populace” (xi-xii). Virginia Shen narrows the focus of these Taiwanese descendant identity issues: “The definition of ‘Taiwanese

American’ is somehow controversial due to its political implication. In general, Americans born

117 in Taiwan whose ancestors immigrated to Taiwan from China during the Chinese Civil War in

1949 are called Taiwanese Americans” (1192). However, there are complexities associated with the term, which Shen describes: “Whether Taiwanese Americans should be considered as

Chinese Americans is a subject of controversy. Supporters of Taiwan independence often object to classification of Taiwanese Americans as Chinese Americans and overseas Chinese, while advocates of Chinese reunification often object if Taiwanese Americans are not included in these groups” (1192). One’s allegiances to homeland politics can have ramification on one’s identity where they currently reside—in this case, Lin living in the United States and being a United

States citizen. Nevertheless, these issues of identity in the American context are not as troubling for Lin as is her desire for acceptance as Taiwanese/Chinese in her parent’s homeland of Taiwan and her ancestral homeland of China. When she returns home, she comes to realize that she cannot really return home. One’s culturally infused and educated identity distances and separates the self from ever rejoining the potential identity of having experienced the place of ‘home’ first hand as part of her personal development. Writers like Tan and Kingston offer up slices of cultural identity and experiences as something to be consumed by the audience, but Brenda Lin does something different: she confronts the stark reality of how her identity separates her from her family’s heritage in Taiwan and China.

Of course, cynics might allege that Lin is in a sense performing for a Western audience in the same way that Shirley Lim describes:

The “problem” of ethnicity becomes “resolved” in the writers’ facility and ease

with majority rhetoric and aesthetics, and the “danger” posed by the unfamiliar

and alien is thus defused. Instead of defamiliarization, that radicalizing technique

by which the complacent majority are made uncomfortable, Asian American

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writers who have mastered the resources of American English literariness are able

to elide the alien in Asian American culture and make it accessible to American

audiences. (161)

Moreover, Lim describes one such strategy: “to abstract, intellectualize, and refine upon ethnic experience in a fairly logocentric manner, so that the ironizing distance parallels the white reader’s cultural distance from the ethnic materials” (161). It is my assertion that Brenda Lin is precisely not doing this. In fact, I argue that her American upbringing distanced herself from understanding, realizing, and acknowledging her racial heritage and identity. It is not whiteness alone but an increasingly homogenized American culture constructed around commoditization— another side of the homogenization illustrated in The Fat Years—that disconnects Lin from the cultures of her heritage. Put another way, Lin’s experiences, outlook, and sense of identity are largely affected by her upbringing in the United States or in American schools based in Taiwan.

She received an American education, which cannot be understated as formative in her construction of identity as inclusive of certain values, beliefs, and norms and exclusive of others, such as those of Taiwan or China. Additionally, her American education put her in a bind described by Amy Ling as being caught “between worlds,” because, “Their facial features proclaim one fact—their Asian ethnicity—but by education, choice, or birth they are American”

(Between Worlds 20). Lin’s racial signifiers and her education bring about her uneasiness in

Taiwan and her marginalized Otherness in China.

Another way of approaching Lin’s identity-based dilemma is to consider Shirley Geok- lin Lim and Amy Ling’s reading of Asian American identity through literature, in which they argue: “the identity of the Asian American is itself heterogeneous, multinational, multiracial, and multicultural—a site of contestation, of shifting, unstable, discontinuous boundaries and of

119 straining limits” (6). As I demonstrate in the following, these contestations are made evident in

Lin’s struggle with her own identity. Furthermore, Lim and Ling continue: “nation borders are no longer—perhaps have never been—sealed, that individuals and characters transverse nationality at will but often involuntarily, and that much of the energy in Asian American literature is released through the political disjunctures of identity” (8). The involuntariness of overlapping nationalities that Lim and Ling describe can come from different sources such as one’s birth, education, and legislation. Brenda Lin experiences the extension of her own identity across national boundaries, but she discovers how difficult if not impossible it is to balance or resolve these extensions into a stable, fixed, and accepted identity. In another context, Amy Ling importantly distinguishes the fluidity of self that is beneficial for understanding Brenda Lin’s writing: “the self if not a fixed entity but a fluid, changing construct or creation determined by context or historical conditions and particularly by power relationships” (“Creating One’s Self”

306). The following sections explore how Lin grapples with her own shifting and contested identity as a Taiwanese American.

THE IMAGE OF MAO DUN

Brenda Lin opens her memoir with an uneasy feeling about her identity. She feels that her identity is unresolvable due to it being pulled in different directions across time/history and place/nations. This feeling followed her throughout her life to the point of writing her memoir. In response to this feeling, she recalls a story that her father told her when she was little, which I quote at length due to its significance to this discussion:

A long time ago, there was a street vendor who hollered loudly on the street

corners to advertise his products. He sold only two things: mao (spears) and dun

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(shields). “Come everyone! The vendor yelled earnestly. “Come and buy my

mao! These are the best you will ever find because my mao can spear through

anything! He paused. Then he said, “And you won’t believe the superior quality

of my dun! These are the most powerful dun; nothing in the world could ever

pierce through them!” A passerby who had heard the vendor’s cries stopped

before him and asked, “What would happen if you took your mao to your dun?”

(1)

The mao dun story presents a paradox.59 It is about an unstoppable force striking an indestructible object. It is an unresolvable situation, because the two elements are mutually exclusive. The paradox of mao dun is illustrative of Brenda Lin’s experience as a Taiwanese

American, which she describes as: “It wasn’t until I had come to a place where I had to search for an approximate translation of mao dun that I remembered to give name to this feeling that perfectly and poetically described how I felt every day about almost everything” (2). Her recollection of the story of mao dun coincides with her return to the United States at the age of seventeen. Having been educated in American schools in Taiwan during her childhood, she moves back to the U.S. to continue her education. On this occasion, mao dun captures the feelings that she “treated…as if they were nothing. In fact, ignoring those feelings . . . had become so habitual that it wasn’t until I left home to go to school in the States that I recalled this phrase” (Lin 2). Mao dun gives her access to the uneasiness with her own divided identity. She notes: “The power of language—of giving names to things, ideas, and emotions—is so essential to our cognition that if nameless, a thing does not exist. Without its signifier, the signified is nothing” (2). Nevertheless, mao dun gives her access to the emotions associated with her identity crisis, but at this point, they do not give her power over the emotions generated by her

121 unresolved sense of identity. She is Taiwanese. She is American. She has lived in two different places—Taiwan and the United States. Within the United States, she was born on the West

Coast, and then later in life, she moved to the East Coast. All of these places—and their corresponding national identities and ethnicities—could easily be described as worlds apart, and those worlds left an indelible imprint on her layered and as yet unresolved sense of identity.

Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu offer two terms that capture the operation of difference within mao dun for the transnational subject and in terms of Lin’s lived experience as someone with transnational movements and heritage: “politics of motion” and “politics of longing” (20).

According to Schultermandl and Toplu, the politics of motion “[highlight] the multiple routes of migration that the protagonists have undertaken before they reached their respective homes,” while the politics of longing “[examine] the interpersonal connections through which the protagonists maintain relationship with their transnational communities” (20). Brenda Lin’s sense of uneasiness with her unresolved identity and her grappling with mao dun exemplify the politics of motion and longing, place and heritage, culture and connection. While mao dun forms the central theme of Lin’s memoir, it is her experience of the politics of motion and the politics of longing that drive her to understand who she is in the world despite the paradox of mao dun.

THE IMPORTANT FIGURE OF MEIGUO AH-MA

In Wealth Ribbon, Brenda Lin chronicles what Virginia Shen describes as “a distinctive view of what it is like to have a transnational identity” (1199). Shen’s use of the term

“transnational identity” has specific and deep roots in the American experiment. Randolph

Bourne, who is credited with popularizing the term in the early twentieth century, celebrates

“trans-national” American identities when he writes: “We are not dealing with static factors, but

122 with fluid and dynamic generations” (88). However, Bourne warns against: “a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity” (90). Ultimately, Bourne suggests that the embrace of one’s multilayered identity, rooted in nations, cultures, languages, and ethnicities “is for the American of the younger generation to accept this cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful purpose” (93).

Assuredly, Brenda Lin is a much younger generation than Randolph Bourne was addressing in his essay, but Wealth Ribbon responds to the spirit of his challenge. She weaves her experiences with those of her closest relatives (including her grandmothers, mother, and father) and their presentations of identity in an attempt to construct her own sense of self and an identity that reconciles her American, Taiwanese, and Chinese layers of identity. Unlike Arjun

Appadurai’s “culturalism,” or “identity politics mobilized at the level of the nation state” (15),

Brenda Lin’s exploration of identity is personal and mobilized at the level of the individual.

Perhaps the most important of these explorations is Lin’s focus on her paternal grandmother, who Lin calls her “Meiguo Ah-ma.”60 She describes this grandmother as a cosmopolitan pioneer and a global person of her day, even more impressively so because she is a woman living an independent, worldly life. Calling her grandmother “independent” and “American,” Lin writes:

“In my mind, she was the quintessential independent American woman who was single and strong, a product of the Feminist movement who seemingly didn’t need anyone” (23). She also notes that Meiguo Ah-ma had been through two world wars, became a widow when she was 40 years old, and carried the responsibility of raising five children alone. Not only is Lin impressed with Meiguo Ah-ma’s independence, she recognizes her uniquely crafted sense of identity. Lin observes: “Her identity—her nationality—seemed to have an effortless fluidity to it. I could place her in any one of the places she’d been to, and the fluency with which she spoke a certain

123 language and adapted a certain culture was a thing I could—and would—easily assume” (22).

Lin imagines how her grandmother’s identity was fluid, meaning that it changed for the place and context where she was. She adapted her identity to be a citizen of the world. Lin continues:

The notion of an international and global identity seems a rather recent one—one

that belongs to my generation. Certainly, when my grandmother was young in the

1930s and 1940s, nationality was a much more rigid idea in which geographical

boundaries drew stark lines that differentiated between cultures, ethnicities,

languages, and allegiances. But my ah-ma seemed to embody a global identity

and world view well beyond her time. (22-23)

In a sense, Meiguo Ah-ma is a pioneer of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism for Lin.

Meiguo Ah-ma seems to be like a twentieth-century Diogenes, who when asked where he is from, replies: “I am a citizen of the world.”61 Kwame Anthony Appiah gives us a way to describe Lin’s Meiguo Ah-ma when he describes his father as having “[a] rooted cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan patriotism. Like Gertrude Stein, he thought there was no point in roots if you couldn’t take them with you. ‘America is my country and Paris is my hometown,’ Stein said. My father would have understood her” (618). Lin’s Meiguo Ah-ma likely would understand Stein as well. Considering a world of cosmpolitans, Appiah describes the cosmopolitan patriot as one who “can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people” (618). Likewise, Lin describes Meiguo Ah-ma as one who enjoys the company of others in different places in the world.

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Based on her own observations of her grandmother, she believes that Meiguo Ah-ma’s identity, which she links to nationality, is fluid and changing. Its fluidity enables her immersion in different places and cultures despite the historical challenges likely faced by an Asian woman.

However, Lin discovers that even Meiguo Ah-ma confronts her own crisis of identity when she learns about the Rape of Nanking. Meiguo Ah-ma thinks of herself as ethnically

Taiwanese/Chinese, but she sees herself also as being Japanese due to the colonization of Taiwan by the Japanese throughout her younger years. During that time, she receives a Japanese education, and she even studies in Japan where she obtains her medical degree. Her educational experience and cultural indoctrination through Japanese colonial and educational systems mirror those of her granddaughter, Brenda Lin, who matures under the influence of the English language and American culture. Meiguo Ah-ma’s and Lin’s separate experiences demonstrate how significant education is to the development and formation of one’s identity. This education echoes Lin’s observation about language itself. Education and language provide concepts, ways of seeing, and ways of not seeing based on the knowledge acquired. In other words, education is a form of indoctrination, or learning without questioning. Meiguo Ah-ma breaks with her indoctrinated Japanese identity when she finds out about the horrors of the Rape of Nanking. Lin records this when she writes: “Even so many years after the fact, I could tell that at times she was still unable to fully reconcile the part of her identity that is Japanese with the part that is Chinese and Taiwanese. She was, by indirect association, simultaneously the perpetrator of the crime and the victim” (29). When she learns about the Rape of Nanking, Meiguo Ah-ma, who identifies herself as Japanese, is horrified not just of the terrible events but the fact that the people she identified with were the perpetrators. This generated her own sense of mao dun with her layered identity as Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese.

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Another significant event that challenged Meiguo Ah-ma’s identity happens after General

Chiang Kai-Shek’s evacuation to Taiwan following the Communist’s rout of mainland China and the KMT. When General Chiang establishes his military dictatorship of Taiwan, suddenly others view Meiguo Ah-ma as a traitor, because she does not speak Mandarin Chinese, which is the official language of the Republic of China. Brenda Lin describes this episode in Meiguo Ah- ma’s life: “Many times, when the soldiers discovered that she could not speak Mandarin fluently, they would be impatient and short with her. They called her stupid, and ri ben qui zi—‘Japanese ghost’” (34). Before, her knowledge of other languages had helped elevated her, but now:

“Fluency in the same language that had so recently helped my grandparents attain their high social status now flung them down the social ladder. Meiguo Ah-ma was looked down upon by the Nationalist soldiers and viewed as a traitor to her own country” (34). Meiguo Ah-ma’s education and language signify to others something about her identity. In this case, the signification triggers prejudice and a disavowal of understanding. Put another way: “What language you spoke on the streets revealed to which side you belonged” (Lin 36). Here, Lin reveals how important language is to who you are. Education inculcates language, meaning, and customs, but in this instance, others use Meiguo Ah-ma’s acquired languages and education against her as a marker of difference and Otherness.

Like her paternal grandmother’s experience as being identified as Other based on her language, Lin experiences something similar to this when she visits China with her white,

American boyfriend. Before her own trip, her parents visited mainland China in 1988. Her father experiences no strong connection with China: “[he] felt nothing more than a tourist traveling to a place he’d never been. The only difference was that he could point out some similarities between

Chinese and Taiwanese” (68). For Lin’s father, he recognizes connections between the two

126 places, cultures, and nationalities, but he does not regard these connections as being connected within his own identity. In fact, Lin writes: “In the end, he had no feeling of belonging when he was on the mainland. When he returned home, my father felt more Taiwanese than ever before.

China was not for my father, as it was for many people living in Taiwan, his homeland” (68).

While her father’s trip to China may have been precipitated on a sense of nostalgia of a home that was never his, he comes to understand that China is simply the home of his ancestors and not a place upon which his own sense of self hinged. However, he learns from the trip about differences between Taiwanese and Chinese, and he shares this experience as a warning to his daughter. Before Brenda Lin travels there, he advises her: “People are going to look at you and know that you are not Chinese, and they will discriminate against you” (Lin 68). More to the point, her father warns her: “People will see a Chinese girl together with an American man, and they won’t like that” (68). Here, it is not just a matter of language but also of race. Her association with a white man signifies her Otherness to the Chinese. Lin reflects: “Suddenly, next to Billy’s brown hair, blue eyes, and six-foot-one stature, I became utterly Chinese. . . . my father wanted me to understand that my identity and actions would be interpreted as an act of betraying Chinese solidarity” (68-69). Her father’s observation reminds her that as a woman who possesses a Chinese appearance, she should not consort with a “foreigner”—in this case, her white American boyfriend, Billy. Lin’s insubordination to Chinese norms would result in prejudice towards her. The recognition of this prejudice sets her apart as Other despite the fact that she is of Chinese descent, much like the marker of language set Meiguo Ah-ma apart when the KMT seizes control of Taiwan.

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CONFRONTING DIFFERENCE IN THE ANCESTRAL HOMELAND

When Brenda Lin and her boyfriend travel to China, she confronts her differences with the Chinese people, and she begins to play with her own identity by rewriting it on the fly for the purposes of overcoming the prejudices she fears and experiences. After landing in the mainland, she reflects: “In China, I found I was intimidated by the Chinese” (Lin 77). She experiences alienation from the people and culture there.62 For example, she gets to a point where recounting her personal lineage leaves her searching faces for their nonverbal reaction. Specifically, when she is asked by a Chinese man if she is Chinese, she tells him: “I’m American . . . I was born in

America. . . . But yeah, I’m Chinese. . . . [my parents] were born in Taiwan” (85). Her self- consciousness makes her: “[search] [his] face to see whether [her] being from Taiwan bothered him” (85). In another scene, a Chinese bus driver laughs at her when he realizes that she and

Billy are a couple. When he overhears that they only intend to check into one room at a hotel, he exclaims to the receptionist: “They are married! . . . I just can’t believe this. A Chinese girl and a foreigner. Can you believe this?” (81). She describes how the bus driver “went on and on, mumbling and shaking his head, looking at me disdainfully. . . . as though I had betrayed our race” (81). To the bus driver, the Chinese norm that Lin is breaking is that she, being of Chinese descent, should not marry someone of another race. As Homi Bhabha argues about the signification of racialized features: “Skin, as the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype, is the most visible of fetishes, recognized as ‘common knowledge’ in a range of cultural, political and historical discourses, and plays a public part in the racial drama that is enacted every day in colonial societies” (112). By extension, Brenda Lin’s race in Chinese society ties her to cultural and gender-political discourses that when she resists by ignoring a hawker, she is publicly called out and made to feel shame for her transgression of the norms

128 emergent from these discourses in mainland China. Of this scene, she reflects that: “Sometimes people were genuinely curious; at other times their eyes betrayed a look of judgment, the way the driver in Qufu had made me feel I should be ashamed of myself” (Lin 81). The disdain and public confrontation of the bus driver make her feel ashamed. These interactions and confrontations from the mainland Chinese who are not “genuinely curious,” cause her to be uneasy and lead her to be more self-conscious despite her physical resemblance to the mainland

Chinese. In spite of appearing Chinese, Lin cannot find a sense of belonging there and she feels like a stranger in her ancestral homeland. Iris Chang describes being a stranger in this context as:

“At various times in history, the Chinese Americans have been treated like strangers on both shores—a people regarded by two nations as too Chinese to be American, and too American to be Chinese” (xiii).

While Brenda Lin appears Chinese, she does not feel or act Chinese. Her experiences and education have robbed her of the kinds of experiences gained only from having lived and experienced culture through immersion. The intimidation she experiences has a lot to do with the gazes of others. She reflects: “When we walked around the streets in China . . . I always felt self- conscious because of the way people unabashedly stared at us” (Lin 77). This gaze, however, was different than the kind she had known growing up in Taiwan after having been born in the

United States. She recalls: “Growing up, I had been used to being stared at. . . . People had stared.

They had known we were different from other kids, and I didn’t mind that attention. Then, I prided myself in being different—being, specifically, American. But in China, I wanted to be left alone. I missed my anonymity and wished at times that I could be invisible” (Lin 78). Here, she differentiates between different gazes—one of awe and one of condescension. She enjoys or accepts gazes in Taiwan from those who recognize her American difference, because it reflects

129 her ‘higher’ position as an American. On the other hand, the gazes she receives in China makes her feels lower, because they imply close examination and criticism. Her Otherness via association with her white American boyfriend offers her no elevated status in China. Instead, it degrades her in the eyes of the mainland Chinese. In fact, her association with Billy amplifies her

Otherness, because she is of Chinese descent. However, this association does not reflect on Billy though: “[Billy] could, in his utter contrast in physical appearance to Chinese people, become invisible. . . . I, on the other hand, could not pretend I didn’t understand Chinese. I could not pretend I wasn’t, in some small way, Chinese. I became, in my undeniably Chinese physical appearance . . . utterly, and sometimes painfully, visible” (79). Iris Chang asserts that: “none can truly get past the distinction of race or entirely shake the perception of being seen as foreigners in their own land” (xiii). Through her association with Billy, her Chinese appearance makes her simultaneously the same and Other in relation to the mainland Chinese. Her contrast with Billy amplifies her Chineseness. This amplification in the eyes of the mainland Chinese calls for her to demonstrate Chinese norms, which she does not follow, and therefore establishes her Otherness to the Chinese. In this instance, her desire to be invisible mirrors that of the Japanese-American writer Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who writes with her husband James D. Houston about her experiences in a Japanese internment camp in the US: “I lived with this double impulse: the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be acceptable” (159). In these passages, Lin seems similarly torn between disappearance and acceptance. The acceptance that Lin seeks seems as impossible to achieve as it is for her to return to her ancestral home or any place she calls home in the future for that matter. Edward Said describes this phenomena as: “You can’t go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation” (“Intellectual Exile” 117). This condition,

130 which Said calls “exile” is “the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by the natives” (“Intellectual Exile” 117). This applies both to

Brenda Lin’s attempts to return to her ancestral home—“the familiar world inhabited by the natives”—as well as her uneasiness fitting in anywhere, which is her exile. Said explains:

Your home is not in fact so far away, and that the normal traffic of everyday

contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with

the old place. The exile therefore exists in the median state, neither completely at

one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half

involvements and half detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, and

adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. (“Intellectual Exile” 114)

Lin’s account of her exile reflects Said’s explanation. The tension exists between the place lived in exile and the place from which one originates, but another tension arises from the negotiations, performances, and adjustments required by the exile anyplace where she might find herself.

While Brenda Lin cannot change her appearance, she attempts to learn from the Chinese people she encounters about how best to “be” or what identity she should adapt and project for the purposes of lowering barriers to acceptance by the mainlanders. She reports: “I relied on the

Chinese to show me how much they wanted to accept me as Taiwanese. And American. And

Chinese. Sometimes I believed that it would be better if I lied and told people that my parents had emigrated to the United States and that I had grown up there, and not in Taiwan. I would appear less harmful if I were more American than Taiwanese” (Lin 77). She discovers that the

Chinese are less accepting of and more hostile towards a young woman who seems to be

Taiwanese as opposed to being American. Why would this be so? She surmises that if she is

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Taiwanese, she should embrace her Chineseness and its accompanying norms, such as not being with a “foreigner.” On the other hand, if she is American, there is an innocence to her that can be forgiven when she does not abide by accepted Chinese ways. The American layer to her identity then becomes a shield for herself while simultaneously being a connection between herself and the local Chinese people she meets. This realization leads her to lie about her background while speaking with two soldiers at Mao Zedong’s birthplace: “As I eyed the soldiers’ steel-toed boots and gleaming rifles, the lie rolled off my tongue easily, persuasively. Out of the corner of my eye,

I could see Billy looking at me; he was amused by this editing and reconstructing of my background” (77). While she emphasizes the boots and rifles of the soldiers—their implements of control and death dealing—which could account for her deciding to tell the lie as a form of protection, it seems more likely that it is at this point that Lin decides to construct her sense of identity through “editing and reconstructing” her personal history. This agency on her part seems confirmed by Lin’s lie “rolling off [her] tongue” and Billy’s amusement captured in the “corner of [her] eye.” This is an important point about identity—the memories of our experiences inform the narratives that we tell about ourselves. Normally, our memories explicitly inform a truthful telling of this self-narrative of identity. However, we can tell invented stories involving large or small lies that enable connecting a constructed self or identity with others. In this scene, Lin asserts her agency to create a new identity by telling a story of self that is informed by memories of her life experiences, such as being born in the US and going through American schools in

Taiwan. The invented story that she tells the soldiers inaugurates a newly constructed identity for

Lin that serves her immediate purpose of building a connection between herself and the Chinese soldiers.

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Despite Brenda Lin’s best attempts at constructing her own identity to bridge the gap between herself and the mainland Chinese, she faced the insurmountable hurdle of mao dun, the paradox, mutual exclusivity. She observes: “In China, one’s identity is either/or—you are either inside, or you are outside” (Lin 79). Identity to the Chinese is specific, stable, and discrete. There are no layers or ambiguity. This, of course, is not the real lived experience of many people, including the author herself. She notes: “I was both, and people were not sure what to make of me. Extremes were much easier to understand and accept than all the possibilities that existed in between. How Chinese was I? How Taiwanese? Did I threaten to worsen the Chinese diaspora?”

(Lin 79). Lin’s bridging of these extremes—Taiwanese, Chinese, and American—blur lines and avoid easy resolution. Worse for the mainland Chinese is that Lin’s identity challenges their inculcated beliefs of solidarity and racial loyalty. Her blurring lines of identity and association threatens them. The problem of her identity to the mainland Chinese lies perhaps in its dispersion across ethnic, cultural, and national lines. Brenda Lin observes that she was “not very” any one part of her identity:

This is another reason why I think I posed a bit of a problem for the Chinese—I

was not very Chinese (because I was more Taiwanese), nor was I very American

(the way Billy clearly was), nor was I very Taiwanese (because I was also a little

American and a little Chinese), and I really wasn’t even very foreign, because I

spoke Chinese fluently and was accustomed to most of the Chinese cultural

nuances that I had grown up with in Taiwan. (80)

Edward Said comments on these issues of identity as: “no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions” (Culture and Imperialism 52). Lin’s appearance, her education, and her languages make her a person of many places and no places,

133 but these same characteristics are what position her as opposite and in opposition to those alienating cultures. Like her Meiguo Ah-ma, Brenda Lin’s identity enables dynamic adaptability, but in some regards she is skilled at several language/ethnic/cultural identities, but master of none. And this dispersion of her identity troubles her, because she lacks roots into any one specific identity, and this lack of roots exposes her in uncomfortable ways based on her appearance, language, and choice of cultural norms to follow. One scene drives home this point for Lin when a rickshaw driver calls her a wai guo ren or foreigner. Not wanting to respond to his peddling, she initially ignores him, but he yells at her: “What? Have you forgotten your

Chinese? Do you not know how to speak a word of it?’ (Lin 79). This elicits laughter from others nearby, which encourages the peddler, who says: “Yeah, yeah, she doesn’t understand a word it!

Haha. You! Who do you think you are anyway? You are a wai guo ren!” (79). Lin “winced” at hearing this, and she explains: “Literally, ‘wai guo ren’ means a ‘person’ (ren) from outside (wai) the country (guo),’ or foreigner” (79). The rickshaw peddler calls Lin out as being a foreigner for not having responded to his hawking. Furthermore, his putting her down and gaining support from the crowd for his snub of her, makes her wince from public shaming and the shaming of his language by calling her wei guo ren. The shame reinforces her feeling about mao dun: “One is either Chinese or wai guo ren. You cannot be both” (Lin 79).

It is Lin’s struggle with mao dun and being called wai guo ren that triggers her attempts at resolving the conflict and finding a solution to the seeming paradox of the mutually exclusive extremes of identity. While contemplating her trip to China and its influence on her understanding of her own identity, Lin writes: “I blindly assumed that the root of my identity was Chinese, and not Taiwanese, because China was so much larger than Taiwan, its history so much longer—because Chineseness seemed to precede Taiwaneseness” (94). In this initial view,

134 she sees the mainland as being the center and Taiwan being the margin. China is the point of origin and Tawian is the point that follows. Seen in this way, China’s physical size and longer history makes it the originator of her ancestry, culture, language, and ultimately, identity.

However, she comes to realize that this configuration assumes no change for the nation, for its culture(s), or its people’s diaspora. She comes to a realization that: “But I had been wrong.

Going to China did not feel like a homecoming; my journey made me feel all the more

Taiwanese, all the more American, and only a little bit Chinese” (Lin 94). This is her epiphany of identity. By changing her way of thinking, she arrives at a possible resolution for her own identity and by extension that of the Taiwanese. Her visit to China made her acutely aware of her

Chineseness (racial appearance and language mastery), but her encounters with its people distanced her from its center. By most markers, she should have been on the inside, but she is marked as an outsider, marginalized as Other. Therefore, she comes to understand that learning and knowing Chinese history and language does not make you Chinese any more than the fact that your ancestors might have come from that place. Lin finally realizes that how the happenstance of life and personal experience shape one’s identity more than the historical trace of one’s lineage. However, she does not discount the latter’s significance, but she dampens its effect for her own experience. She claims: “I’m both, I’m American. . . . But I’m also Taiwanese”

(Lin 134). Her experiences in mainland China solidify her identification as American through citizenship and education. However, she goes on to write: “Taiwan will always be the place where I come from. That could never change” (135). This is the historical trace—an undeniable influence, but not one that determines her identity in any way greater than her lived experience and education. David Der-wei Wang describes the effect of this history on the Taiwanese subject in this way: “Elements of diaspora are filled with Taiwan’s 400-year literature and history. The

135 trauma caused by colonialism, immigration, and surviving has cast a shadow on the writings of our predecessors” (475). Later, Lin opines that she is: “a by-product of multiple cultures, multiple histories, multiple identities” (158). Her experience and the historical trace of her ancestry all play a role in layering different aspects and meaning to her identity. However, she admits that this multifaceted identity means that its uniqueness results in her marginalization:

“Most likely, I will always feel a little bit like an outsider wherever I am” (158-159).

GLOBALIZED IDENTITIES

Brenda Lin’s admission of likely feeling “a little bit like an outsider wherever I am” also sounds like a burden (Lin 158-159). Perhaps it is the burden of globalized identities—a figurative cross to bear across borders, which she recognizes when she discusses the act of language translation: “When I read that the word ‘translation’ comes etymologically from Latin for ‘bearing across,’ it struck a chord with me as I clearly saw the connection between the act of translating—the act of bearing across languages, cultures, and emotional worlds—and the person who translates and, as a result, is translated” (159). The culturally and language-laden cultures that Brenda Lin encounters, learns from, adopts, and accepts becomes so many weights to bear across cultural divides. These abstractions of language and culture weigh on the individual like so many garments, accouterments, and accessories to carry across cultural, linguistic, and national demarcations, and thus signify an identity made of these weighty layers. And, they are transformed from one place to another through their movement across borders. Importantly, she recognizes that by carrying the weight or burden of cultural abstractions, one’s identity is transformed through this process.

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Through translation of culture and languages, the individual is in turn transformed or put another way, translated. The abstractions of culture and language leave their mark on the individual externally (e.g., nonverbal cues, verbal communication, and non-normative choices) and internally (e.g., thought, reflection, and language). The individual performing these translations “has an identity that moves across geographical borders, fluidly and sometimes not so fluidly, but always crisscrossing histories, languages, and traditions” (Lin 159). Edward Said’s explanation of the intellectual provides an important comparison to the experience Brenda Lin describes:

An intellectual is like a shipwrecked person who learns to live in a certain sense

with the land, not on it, not like Robinson Crusoe, whose goal is to colonize his

little island, but more like Marco Polo, whose sense of the marvelous never fails

him, and who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a freeloader, conqueror,

or raider” (“Intellectual Exile” 121).

The translating individual is an imperfect human being, who might move across borders with ease or not, but the one always-true component of the translator is that she moves back and forth over more than physical borders. The translator navigates repeatedly over the abstract borders and blurred lines between history, language, and traditions. This places an additional burden on an individual like Brenda Lin, because the movement in the physical and abstract worlds untethers her from a sense of home—a place of origin and a place to return to. Or, as Isabelle

Thuy Pelaud describes it: “The absence of a home coexists with the absence of identity” (107).

This is also true that if you cannot decide where your home is, you are unable to determine who you really are.

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However, Cristina Bradatan, Adrian Popan, and Rachel Melton suggest that there are possibilities for maintaining a transnational identity, in the same mode as Mei-guo Ah-ma:

“Social identity is created and maintained through social contacts, so only those with a good knowledge of two or more languages, cultures and societies would be able to claim a transnational identity” (177). Brenda Lin attempts to establish social contacts through travel, language, and culture, but she experiences how difficult could be. Furthermore, Bradatan et al. assert that social identity depends on in-group/out-group relationships: “transnational identity implies the concomitant identification with two different national groups. This is not impossible, however, as in some cases national identity is given by common ancestors, while in others it is given by accepting and respecting a certain set of rules and values” (177). Brenda Lin relies on her ancestral connections to build new ones in the present. Her familial connections to Taiwan and ancestral one to China play important roles for her exploration of what those links mean as she builds her transnational identity. Lin’s lived experience filters into the formation of her identity, which is never permanent or crystalized. It shifts as her experiences and choices change.

Bradatan et al. also echo this: “Defining social identity as a fluid rather than rigid characteristic brings up the idea of a fluctuating national identity depending on the contexts and relationships with other social actors” (177). Identity is fluid and changing based on context and relationships.

Lin’s memoir records the joy and pain of learning those contexts and establishing relationships:

“Different contexts require different sets of actions and behaviors and the one who knows both sets of rules well can feel comfortable and can function well in various situations” (Bradatan et al. 177). Lin’s Meiguo Ah-ma seems to have managed these contexts artfully, while Lin discovers that there are challenges to her development of a transnational identity. The fact is that we learn of Meiguo Ah-ma’s experience through Lin—a history filtered through stories and

138 memory. It would seem likely that Meiguo Ah-ma would have struggled in her own right with these challenges as she constructed her own transnational identity. As Bradatan et al. suggest: “If national identity can be seen as a role, a transnational would be one that plays different roles in front of different audiences, a flexible social actor that internalized the rules and constraints of different social contexts. In this perspective, we can say that the self is on a continuum of transnationality” (177). In a similar way, Lin describes her Meiguo Ah-ma: “her identity . . . . seemed to have an effortless fluidity to it” (22). Lin herself attempts to be, in Bradatan et al.’s terminology: “a flexible social actor” (177). However, the difference between Lin and Meiguo

Ah-ma seems to lie along a “continuum of transnationality” (Bradatan et al. 177).

These approaches to transnational identity confirm Brenda Lin’s assertation: “For a person who is truly transnational, who is able to adapt relatively easily to any place and situation—perhaps that person’s notions of home must be even more distilled and crystallized because home for the translated person is not simply a geographical place or one cultural notion”

(159). Perhaps, the idea of home gives the transnational person like Brenda Lin an anchor for her identity that holds her in place despite the changing currents of identity brought about by the physical and abstract: “Home for her is the ribbon of cumulative experiences and memories—an umbilical cord that can never be severed” (Lin 159). Lin returns to the centrality of lived experience and memories as being the arbiter, translator, and creator of identity. She reconfigures home not as a single place but as her “cumulative experiences and memories.” Furthermore, she appropriates the language of the motherland to suggest that the home of her formative experiences is the “umbilical cord,” or the life-giving connection between herself and the social world.63 It cannot be “severed,” because it gives as long as she is in the world, alive, and experiencing language and culture.

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Another image that the “umbilical cord” metaphor serves is that it places Brenda Lin in the position as a child to the cultural and linguistic parent of this “home” in much the same way that Susan Gillman writes about Mark Twain: “that process of continual self-construction and destruction by someone who is both critic and child of his culture” (13). In addition, this “home” that constitutes her identity, situated in an on-going process that changes as her lived experience, changes over time. In this way, Lin’s “home” is analogous to what Stuart Hall argues about the production of identity: “We should think . . . of identity as ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation” (629). Likewise,

Lin’s “home” for her identity is a continuous process that emerges within lived experience in the social world—always within representation of language and culture.

While Brenda Lin discovers her own “home” in her “ribbon of cumulative experiences and memories,” she significantly spends the epilogue of her memoir discussing Taiwan, its past, and its future. Her discussion seems to imply concern on her part about what that future might be.

A passage earlier in the book signals where Lin’s worry might originate:

Albert Camus once wrote, “to be pure means to rediscover that country of the soul

where one’s kinship with the world can be felt, where the throbbing of one’s

blood mingles with the violent pulsations of the afternoon sun. It is a well-known

fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.”

The key is in one’s rediscovery of what has always been true. The act of coming

back, of reacquaintance, of seeing through fresh eyes and making new something

that was old and taken for granted, is the act of reclaiming and recognizing one’s

homeland and one’s relationship to it. (43)

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Lin’s quote of Camus comes from his essay “Summer in Algiers,” which is included in his early collection Nuptials (Noces, 1938). “Summer in Algiers” captures Camus’ atheistic championing of the beauty of the world in which we live over that of some imagined hereafter. Camus’ observations and thoughts are rooted in his experience and acknowledgement of the world. In the case of the quoted passage above, Camus connects lived experience with one’s experience and memory of homeland. His “country of the soul” is “one’s kinship with the world.” Recognition of one’s homeland comes “at the moment when we are about to lose it.” The realization of loss of one’s homeland engenders recognition of what one’s homeland actually is. Through the fear of loss, a person reconnects with her homeland, and ultimately, realizes how important the homeland is to an individual. This realization says a lot about who the individual is. That which was taken for granted comes to assume a greater importance to the individual. So, while Brenda

Lin arrives at an idea that home for her is the “ribbon of cumulative experience and memories,” her homeland is still Taiwan—two distinctly different things and concepts.

Even earlier in her memoir, Brenda Lin struggles with understanding her relationship to

Taiwan through the paradox of mao dun:

I saw that the real mao dun I was feeling was the fact that even at home, I was not

all that ‘authentic’ of a Taiwanese either, having been born in the States and

grown up speaking English. I ached to be entirely one way or the other when the

reality was that it was not possible. And that so much of Taiwan’s history was

itself enmeshed in mao dun emotions was a truth that I had lived and breathed but

never understood, or had ever tried to articulate. (11)

It is at the end of the memoir that she attempts to confront Taiwan’s history and future. She undertakes an articulation of her connection to Taiwan through its recent history and politics,

141 because these things reveal the potential of loss to Lin. It is at the point of loss that she realizes her connection to her homeland—Taiwan, but her writing helps provide another Taiwan-related identity. Bronislaw Malinowski suggests: “Every change of culture, . . . every transculturation, is a process in which something is always given in return for what one receives, a system of give and take. It is a process in which both parts of the equation are modified, a process from which a new reality emerges, transformed and complex, a reality that is . . . a new phenomenon, original and independent” (lviii-lix). Lin’s writing is a part of this give and take, which leads to new discursive possibilities, because she has shared her experience of Taiwanese identity. Following

Camus, she realizes what is important to her through the possibility of loss, and she arrives at this understanding through the give and take of her lived experience explored through her reflection and writing.

TAIWAN AS HOMELAND

Brenda Lin’s connection to Taiwan as her homeland, via its historical trace as a key component of her identity, is complicated, but it becomes energized by the potential of its loss.

While Lin’s parents “wanted [her] to become a Taiwanese citizen” (69), she tells her mother that in Taiwan, she does not “feel completely [herself] here anymore” (156). In this scene, she observes: “My mother looked away. I knew my answer was painful for her to hear, because it was also painful for me to admit” (Lin 156). Pain is bound to her admission about not becoming a Taiwanese resident and living there permanently. This is a loss that comes about from her deliberations and ultimate decision. She realizes: “I am beginning to feel a much more profound connection to my Americanness” (158). However, her connection to the US is dependent upon

142 its mythical ‘melting pot’ and it providing her transnational identity more comfortable surroundings. She writes:

I feel American in the ‘New World,’ conceptual sense of the word; I feel

American precisely because I also feel Taiwanese. While I was on my trip to

China, I couldn’t . . . feel a strong connection to my ancestral culture. I can in

America because there is the premise of everyone being from someplace else;

there is the understanding and freedom for different histories that all journeyed in

different ways to continue here. (158)

Because the United States is cosmopolitan in the sense that most people there are from somewhere else, Brenda Lin does not feel marginalized in the same way that she did when she visited China with her boyfriend, Billy. However, she spends a considerable amount of space in her memoir’s epilogue on reflections about Taiwan—reflections that mirror the concerns in Rose,

Rose, I Love You about the historical relationship of Taiwan to the United States, and the concerns in The Fat Years about the emerging relationship between Taiwan and China. On the one hand, she observes: “even with all of Taipei’s cutting edge modernity, I still knew of many more childhood friends who were now opting to move to Shanghai over Taipei. What Shanghai represents to the Taiwanese today is very similar to what the United States represented to the

Taiwanese in the 1970s—opportunity” (154). China’s influence in Taiwan and its allure as a business opportunity greater than the US leads to further connections between the mainland and the island: “An exodus of Taiwanese to Shanghai, however opportune the move would be for

Taiwanese businesses because of China’s inexpensive cost of labor and living, will only encourage the formation of ‘one China,’ in which Taiwan would presumably come under the rule of its motherland” (154). Here, the author illustrates how the circulation of capital and business

143 opportunities that comes from what amounts to labor exploitation will accelerate the adoption of the “one China” policy explored in The Fat Years. The business realities of the opportunities in

China and Taiwan’s economic slump feed into what Brenda Lin identifies as the Taiwanese spirit:

“But it is part of the Taiwanese spirit to aggressively seek out business opportunities—especially in the recent economic slump—and even people who were once adamant supporters of Taiwan’s independence are now considering the move to cities like Shanghai and Beijing” (154).

Capitalism, in effect, undermines political ideals of even the staunchest supporters of Taiwanese independence. This is obviously another worry for her—not only for her growing awareness of her connection to the Taiwanese homeland but also likely due to her Americanness and its democratic ideals. It is bound within the process of globalization, which Mike Featherstone describes as:

A process whereby a series of cultural flows produce both: firstly, cultural

homogeneity and cultural disorder, in linking together previously isolated pockets

of relatively homogeneous culture which in turn produces more complex images

of the other as well as generating identity-reinforcing reactions; and also secondly,

transnational cultures, which can be understood as genuine ‘third cultures’ which

are orientated beyond national boundaries. (6)

Brenda Lin experiences these cultural flows as she grapples with her emergent identity.

Nevertheless, even Lin feels in Taiwan: “this undeniably palpable excitement in the air—the inevitability of something big about to explode in China” and “the magnetic pull from the mainland” (154). The networks of capital and the possibilities that they empower are overwhelming and heady.

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The author’s concern bridges the economic to the political as well. For example, she notes: “The KMT, the government that is largely responsible for bringing about Taiwan’s economic miracle and changing its political structure into a democracy, is the very government that still hopes for reunification with mainland China” (Lin 154). On the one hand, General

Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuo Ming Tang (KMT) seeks reunification with the mainland albeit on uncertain terms that have shifted over time. On the other hand, “The supporters of the DPP . . . may theoretically stand for Taiwan’s independence from the mainland, but when asked and polled, the majority of them still favor the status quo—in which Taiwan is suspended in an international political state of limbo” (154). The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which emerged in 1986, represents the ideal of Taiwanese independence, but even their stance results in

“an international political state of limbo” without the surety of resolution. The result of these opposing political factions combined with the economic possibilities afforded by mainland China is that: “Many people in Taiwan seem to be unsure, and perhaps they feel that economic stability will somehow guarantee or bring about political stability” (Lin 154). The resolution seems to point towards economics first and politics later, which is itself a powder keg of problems as evidenced by the British return of Hong Kong to mainland China: economic integration and eventual political seizure and control. Despite this likely reality, Brenda Lin entertains an open viewpoint when she poetically observes: “Even as I conjure a mental image of Taiwan, the geographical metaphor for its political future is ambiguous—in one view, the tiny, tobacco-leaf shaped island looks as though it is curled away from the mainland, but in another view, the island leans eagerly toward the motherland” (154-155). Resolved in this way, one’s perspective on the island’s geography in relation to the mainland implies a particular resolution devoid of the social and economic implications. The perspective on the location of the island of Taiwan to

145 mainland China is equally analogous to the historical accounts that Lin offers—an account that mirrors Lin’s account of identity, which as King-Kok Cheung rightly points out: “not only is identity perceived as unstable and multiple, but history itself becomes suspect—a human construct not to be equated with ‘truth’” (15). Nevertheless, this is one brief passage among many more that raise significant concerns about the future sustainability of Taiwan. Though,

Brenda Lin’s stance might simply be a regurgitation of her parents’ political viewpoints:

“Whether our generation feels Taiwan should be reunified with China or be granted full independence, we largely base our opinions on the way our parents feel. The issue is more complex than mere politics—it is about family and history, nationality and Chinese solidarity”

(Lin 76-77). Parents provide education to children in the home in overt and implicit ways— sometimes small ways through conversation, opinions, and stories. Obviously, the education that we receive from our parents has a tremendous influence on who we are and what we become when we grow up. This is even more so when parents give their children choices and opportunities to find their own way. Then, the child/adult has the power to weigh the education received against their experience gained beyond the home. In Lin’s case, her parents want her to be a Taiwanese citizen, especially in light of her father’s experience visiting China. This implies that her parents are pro-Taiwanese independence, and it seems that Lin is worried about the growing political closeness and economic connections between her homeland of Taiwan and mainland China. In fact, her worries are likely rooted in a different kind of shame that she felt when she visited China. It is the shame of disappointing her parents, because she chooses to be

American instead of Taiwanese, despite the connection of homeland that she identifies in Taiwan.

This is the ultimate unresolvability of mao dun—choosing her identity, understanding her homeland, and respecting her parents—another paradox.

146

Brenda Lin presents one Taiwanese-American woman’s struggle with resolving the conflicts of identity centered on nation, place, race, language, and culture. Ultimately, she solves her identity dilemma in favor of the “home” of her “ribbon of cumulative experiences and memories” and the homeland of her parents’ nation, Taiwan. Together, the home and homeland constitute her unique and individualized identity. And as Isabelle Thuy Pelaud argues, literary works by marginalized groups heals and gives its subjects the power to move forward: “As [the stories] are produced, along come new formulations of self and emotion, and by extension of perception and identification, potentially promoting healing from trauma, as well as strategies to make sense of the past and the present and pave the way toward a more peaceful future” (64).

“To make sense of the past and the present” is an important step for Brenda Lin to determine her own destiny, and it is through the act of writing the memoir, she may be able to finally find peace and resolve her crisis of identity.

Wealth Ribbon is an important contribution to understanding not only one individual’s grasping for identity in an increasingly globalized world, but also for creating a record of the unrecorded aspects of history. Brenda Lin draws on her family’s past and her own experiences to resolve her identity crisis, but this working with the past reveals more, which she describes:

Mere facts and timelines are hardly adequate to reveal the deep and hidden

emotional struggles that make a nation and a people what and who they are.

History’s great moments—triumphs, failures, atrocities, and achievements—are

enmeshed in the mundane routine of which we are all a part; it is the ordinary that

makes the extraordinary transcendent. It requires a lot of imagination to

understand our past, ourselves. (30-31)

147

Lin shares her personal struggles as a record of her own conflict, but it also serves as a record of minutiae, emotions, and choices that are otherwise erased. And while Alan Shelston is right to warn that biography, “by its nature . . . embodies a preconceived attitude to its subject: the biographer will have clearly in his mind the image of the subject which he wishes to project”

(52), those persons who are like Lin—freely and openly sharing their struggles following the rise of globalization—deserve to be heard before others jump to cynical conclusions about their particular motivations without having listened first. Lin’s memoir is a testament to transnational identity and emergent globalized subjectivity that records the triumphs and failures of discovering and negotiating her own identity despite the seeming paradox of mao dun.

148

CONCLUSION

LOOKING AHEAD: MAKING SPACE AND SHARING STORIES OF THE HAKKA

The preceding three chapters provide a glimpse at the cultural construction of Taiwan through the fiction of Wang Chen-ho, Chan Koonchung, and Brenda Lin. These writers’ works speak to the discursive practices that contribute to the cultural construction of Taiwan. Through the chapters of this dissertation, I have explored how Taiwan is culturally constructed through literature written by different stakeholders and from their own perspectives. Their ideas about

Taiwan and their contributions to the discursive practices that generate the cultural construction of Taiwan are admittedly not exhaustive, but they are illuminating in their own right. Even in the intricate snapshots that these three novels present of the cultural construction of Taiwan, they reveal how complicated the larger picture must be. They demonstrate that the best that we can do in terms of understanding what Taiwan is as a cultural construction is to study them in context, explore their connections and layers, and negotiate meaning based on these things as well as our own relationship to the text. As they are each a contribution to the discursive practices that culturally construct Taiwan, I am playing a role in the construction through this dissertation,

149 too. Yet, the novels which this dissertation explores do so primarily through the postcolonial and postcoloniality registers of Taiwan, as admittedly do my reading of their works, too. This is a problem at worse or a challenge at best. According to Ania Loomba:

Analyses of ‘postcolonial’ societies too often work with the sense that colonialism

is the only history of these societies. What came before colonial rule? What

indigenous ideologies, practices and hierarchies existed alongside colonialism and

interacted with it? Colonialism did not inscribe itself on a clean slate, and it

cannot therefore account for everything that exists in ‘postcolonial’ societies. (17)

For Taiwan, this is difficult. For example, I sometimes have difficulty communicating with my maternal grandmother. The reason for our difficulty speaking with each another is that she was born and raised during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan. Throughout that period, she and others of her generation were forced to learn the Japanese language while secreting away their

Hakka language. While I wish for nothing more than to understand her stories and learn from her experience, she speaks in Hakka and Japanese. Due to my limited lived experience, learning primarily Mandarin at school, and only some Hakka at home, I cannot express myself clearly to my grandmother in Hakka and I cannot understand completely the things that she says to me.

Our lived cultural experience inscribed by the first languages we acquired as children prevents us from the kind of shared experience conveyed through discursive practices within the home and over the phone. There is a cultural instead of generational gap that separate us from connecting and constructing a shared sense of Taiwan. It is heartbreaking to me.

However, I want to leverage this loss to do more to connect with other voices and ideas of Taiwan, and share what I find through my writing and teaching. As Carlos Rojas suggests:

“the act of scholarly inquiry is never limited to mining the depths of preexisting orders of

150 knowledge but necessarily participates in the construction and shaping of those same epistemological categories” (4). It is my goal to take a greater participatory role in the cultural construction of Taiwan through my writing, research, and outreach. It is also my intent to move beyond the postcolonial register and attempt to make a connection with Taiwan’s indigenous cultures and other writing, in particular, Hakka literature, which has not yet been translated into

English.64 The rise of “Hsiang-T’u” literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one example.65

Opposed to writing exclusively in Mandarin Chinese, Hsiang-T’u writers experiment in writing with oral Taiwanese languages, such as Mi Nan and Hakka, alongside Mandarin (and even some

Japanese). They attempt to portray the Taiwan experience through themes like Taiwan as the motherland and stories of the aboriginal and early immigrants. An important representative work of Hsiang-T’u literature is Chen Ying-Zhen’s Bell Flowers. Another such writer is Huang Chun-

Ming, who evokes Taiwanese identity and depicts Taiwan’s cultural experience in his novels like

The Taste of Apple (蘋果的滋味), and Sayonara⋅Goodbye (莎喲那啦⋅再見). Also, because of my Hakka origins, I am interested in exploring novelists who focus their writing on Hakka experience, such as Chung Li-ho’s Folks from Home (原鄉人), Chung Chao-cheng’s Taiwanese

Trilogy (台灣人三部曲), and Li Chao’s Winter Nights Trilogy (寒夜三部曲).

These Hakka experience novels are an important but potentially contentious movement.

Hakka is an oral language that does not have a written form. Some writers attempt, like the

Hsiang-T’u literature writers, to emulate the sounds of words by stringing together characters, which correspond to particular sounds or phonemes. Terrence C. Russell suggests in his introduction to the special issue of Taiwan Literature on “The Mythology and Oral Literature of

Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples” that: “The actual context within which the original oral versions of myths and legends were created and performed was also seldom considered” in previous

151 discourse on recovering oral cultures (par. 2). He points to Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy as being an important work that guided his team’s efforts on this special issue, because Ong grapples with the differences between orality and literacy as well as the way they re-converge in the modern world with Internet and smartphone technologies. In particular, Ong argues: “Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it” (11).

For the Hakka, they certainly have a stake in the cultural construction of Taiwan, but as my work has focused on the literary register, my research and that of many others unfortunately ignore the importance of the oral register and its contributions to discursive practices.

Even though Hakka people are the second largest ethnic group in Taiwan (about 18% of the population), the Hakka language and cultural experience are dwindling, despite the government’s attempt to promote them.66 I want to help the Hakka participate in the cultural construction of Taiwan beyond their cloistered oral culture. However, I am reminded of Gayatri

Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which warns of “the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self’s shadow” (266). In effect, the critic can re-inscribe the silence imposed by hegemony and Othering through the act of speaking for or on behalf of the subaltern subject. Of course, I do not want to do this, and I must tread carefully in my work by creating space, facilitating connections, and perhaps most importantly, listening rather than speaking.67 It is my goal to support those who wish to speak and share to do so. It is my hope that by doing this, Hakkan stories, experience, and culture will circulate more broadly and take part in the larger cultural construction of Taiwan. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that even this work that I propose at the end of this dissertation has other considerations such as the distance between myself and the work that I wish to engage. As Trinh T. Minh-Ha maintains:

152

There is no such thing as a ‘coming face to face once and for all with objects’; the

real remains foreclosed from the analytic experience, which is an experience of

speech. In writing close to the other of the other, I can only choose to maintain a

self-reflexively critical relationship toward the material, a relationship that defines

both the subject written and the writing subject, undoing the I while asking ‘what

do I want wanting to know you or me?’ (76)

I also affirm the importance of this self-reflexively critical relationship, between the material that

I study and myself. Ultimately, it is my goal to understand and share stories that lead back to the cultural construction of Taiwan by ‘you’ and not just ‘me.’

153

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Kuei Mei Kuei Wo Ai Ni [Rose Rose I Love You], by Wang Chen-ho. Hung Fan, 2009, pp.

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APPENDIX A (ENDNOTES)

1 For general histories of Taiwan, see Lien, Heng. Taiwan tong shi [General History of Taiwan].

Commercial Press, 1983; Manthorpe, Jonathan. Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan. St.

Martin’s Griffin, 2005; Ross, John Grant. Formosan Odyssey: Taiwan, Past and Present. 2nd edition. Camphor Press, 2014; and Rubinstein, Murray, editor. Taiwan: A New History.

Routledge, 2015.

2 See Lamley, Harry J. “Taiwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895-1945: The Vicissitudes of

Colonialism.” Taiwan: A New History, edited by Murray Rubinstein, Routledge, 2015, pp. 201-

260.

3 See Phillips, Steven. “Between Assimilation and Independence: Taiwanese Political

Aspirations Under Nationalist Chinese Rule, 1945-1948.” Taiwan: A New History, edited by

Murray Rubinstein, Routledge, 2015, pp. 275-329; and Wang, Peter Chen-main. “A Bastion

Created, a Regime Reformed, an Economy Reengineered, 1949-1970.” Taiwan: A New History, edited by Murray Rubinstein, Routledge, 2015, pp. 320-338.

4 There is still not an official death count of the incident. Nevertheless, it was a massacre and occurred during February 27, 1947 to May 16, 1947.

5 KMT stands for the ‘Kuomintang Party,’ or the Chinese Nationalist Party which fled to

Taiwan. CCP stands for the ‘Chinese Communist Party,’ which currently rules mainland China, or the People’s Republic of China.

6 The DPP or Democratic Progressive Party was founded in 1986 before martial law ended. Its platform is progressive, liberal leaning, and pro-independence.

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7 Under the KMT’s rule in the past, the educational system taught students that China is the motherland, and textbooks in literature, history, and geography classes heavily emphasize learning about China.

8 On this point, Chun invokes Karl Marx: “men make history, but not of their own free will” from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852.

9 In this chapter, I use the accepted practice of giving a Chinese person’s surname first and given name last. Please see the Preface for more information.

10 It is important to note that Howard Goldblatt translated Rose, Rose, I Love You from Mandarin

Chinese into English. Goldblatt, a professor at University of Notre Dame and former director of its Center for Asian Studies, is one of the preeminent translators of Chinese into English.

Interestingly, Goldblatt began his interest in Chinese language and culture in Taiwan during the

Vietnam War.

11 A short list of translated works of Taiwanese literature includes: The Old Capital by Chu

T'ien-hsin (Trans. Howard Goldblatt), My South Seas Sleeping Beauty by Zhang Guixing (Trans.

Valerie Jaffee), A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers by Hsiao Li-Hung (Trans. Michelle

Wu), City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong by Shih Shu-Ching (Trans. Howard

Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin), and The City Trilogy: Five Jade Disks, Defenders of the

Dragon City, and Tale of a Feather by Chang Hsi-kuo (Trans. John Balcom).

12 The author references his title of the novel to the Chinese version of the song “Rose, Rose, I

Love You,” in which the lyrics are different than the English version.

13 Quot. in Levitt par. 2.

14 Quot. in Levitt par. 14.

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15 It bears noting that in addition to this English-language translation, Rose, Rose, I Love You and other fictions by Wang Chen-ho have been adapted into film. See Hoare, Stephanie. “Innovation through Adaptation: The Use of Literature in New Taiwan Film and Its Consequences.” Modern

Chinese Literature, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 1993, pp. 33-58.

16 I adapt the terminology from Ranajit Guha and subaltern studies in my discussion. Briefly, I use the term elite “to signify dominant groups, foreign as well as indigenous,” and the non-elite, people, and “subaltern classes” “represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’” (Guha 44). Of course, Guha is discussing postcoloniality in the Indian context, but these terms have utility in other postcolonial contexts, including Taiwan. In addition, Margaret Hillenbrand points out: “the other major writer to have explored Taiwan’s involvement in the Vietnam War is Chen Yingzhen. In his ‘Roses in

June,’ he uses the relationship between a black GI and a Taiwanese bar girl to explore similar issues of war, race, and national sovereignty” (122). This story was originally published in 1967, but it would wait until 1986 before being translated into English in: Chen, Yingchen. Exiles at

Home: Short Stories, translated by Lucien Miller, U of Michigan P, 1986.

17 See Lin, Sylvia Li-Chun. Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White

Terror in Fiction and Film. Columbia UP, 2007; and Hwang, Jau-Yuan. “Transitional Justice in

Postwar Taiwan.” Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Taiwan, edited by Gunter Schubert,

Routledge, 2016. pp. 169-183.

18 Several issues in this sentence need unpacking. First, Councilman Qian’s full name is Qian

Ming-xiong, which is only briefly mentioned in the novel. The author refers to him as

“Councilman Qian” most of the time, probably to emphasize his being a politician. Also, “Qian” literary means, “money.” Second, it is important to note that historically Taiwanese look up to

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those with a degree in higher education. Taiwan University is generally believed to be the best university of the nation. The author sets this as Dong Siwen’s educational background, which further indicates that Dong is well respected by fellow citizens in his community. Third, Dong

Siwen decides to enlist female and male recruits for entertaining the American soldiers, because according to the narrator: “statistics published in an authoritative American magazine showed that one out of every four adult males was a homo case [emphasis in original]” (Wang 93).

19 Dr. Yun instructs the women about “Saigon Rose:” “This super strain of gonorrhea is rampant in Vietnam, and as scary as the Viet Cong. . . . Saigon Rose, the perfect name. Everyone knows that a rose is a beautiful flower, but be careful of the thorns. Ladies, please, please be careful of

Saigon Rose, of this prickliest rose of all. Never try to pick one” (Wang 174). This is from

Goldblatt’s translation. In the original Chinese, the Saigon Rose refers to syphilis (梅毒). This is discussed in further detail in the next section.

20 Zhang Dachun’s Da shuohuangjia [Big Liar] (1989) shares a writing style with Wang Chen- ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You. See Kinkley, Jeffrey C. “On Taiwan’s Missing Crime and Mystery

Fiction: Zhang Dachun’s Postmodern Transformation of the Taiwan Whodunit.” China Review, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 175-199.

21 Ironically, Dong Siwen’s name means a very refined gentleman, but he is anything but refined.

For example, he has a proclivity to fart, especially whenever he has a good idea.

22 Dr. Yun Songzhu’s name means: “praise the Lord.”

23 In the original novel, his name is given as, “Holmes Zhang,” because it is understood in

Chinese culture that “Holmes” refers to “Sherlock Holmes.” The translator used “Sherlock” to make the name and its meaning to the character more recognizable to a native English-speaking audience.

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24 Dong asserts that he has a special technique for teaching English to the girls. However, the girls never learn more than how to say: “My name is …” (Wang 166).

25 The novel depicts the events that led up to the United States’ reconfiguration of the China-

Taiwan political issue. Fang-Ming Chen writes: “In order to solve the stranded development of capitalism, the United States decided to change its political strategy: to start communication, instead of fighting, with communist parties in the Soviet Union and China for peaceful negotiation. This adjustment of the strategy was manifest in Taiwan being forced to leave the UN in 1970, and the last American aid terminated in the same year” (540, my translation).

26 See Gao Quan Zhi. Wang Chen-he de xiao shuo shi jie [The Fictional World of Wang Chen- he]. Taipei: Sanmin, 1997; Xiao Mian Mian. “Hua ji dio ci de mei gui” [“The Comical and

Thorny Rose”]. Afterward. Mei Kuei Mei Kuei Wo Ai Ni [Rose Rose I Love You]. by Wang

Chen-ho, Hung Fan, 2009, pp. 263-78; and Yao Yi-wei. “Wo du Mei Kuei Mei Kuei Wo Ai Ni”

[“My Reading of Rose Rose I Love You”]. Preface. Mei Kuei Mei Kuei Wo Ai Ni [Rose Rose I

Love You], by Wang Chen-ho, Hung Fan, 2009, pp. 1-10.

27 The study area of this department in Taiwanese universities usually focuses on English language and English/American literature.

28 One of the most famous Confucius philosophies and the one implied here, is education for everyone, despite social class (有教無類).

29 See Huang, Hans Tao-Ming. Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan. Hong Kong UP,

2011.

30 Big-Nose Lion and Black-Face Li are brothel owners.

31 “Sabisu” means “service” in Japanese. As a previous colony of Japan, it was common for

Taiwanese people to mix Japanese into their daily conversation.

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32 Both “QK” and “tomari” are Japanese terms.

33 The elite characters also value other Western products, but these are not as foregrounded as those that are American. For example, Dong Siwen wears “a Christian Dior silver-gray silk tie— a gift from Councilman Qian” (Wang 5), Councilman Qian owns “English blue velvet armchairs” (21), and A-hen desires Triumph bras (101).

34 The “Oversea Chinese” refers to Chinese Americans.

35 Inside the parenthesis: first parts are how the names pronounced by A-hen, who does not speak

English; the parts after the doubled dash are the meanings associated with the sounds of these names.

36 In this scene, it is significant that the Philippines was a former colony of the United States.

37 Implied as Ben Franklin. Dong Siwen includes the name of the famous American in his talk to make himself sound more persuasive, even though he knows his uneducated audience does not know whether what he says is true or not.

38 Chan Koonchung (1952-) is a novelist, journalist, screenplay writer, film producer, and publisher. He was born in Shanghai, raised in Hong Kong, studied in the United States, lived in

Taiwan, and now lives in Beijing. All quotations are from the English translation unless otherwise noted.

39 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. includes The Fat Years as one of many works that figure into the growth of a new concept around the phrase, “global science fiction” that he identifies as further blurring of boundaries: “Discursive border wars and erasures will continue. Cultural alliances will change in surprising ways. But perhaps sf in this expanded sense will also be acknowledged as the art that has been most concerned with constructing ways of imagining this technoscientifically constructed—and deconstructed—‘world’” (489). Beyond the importance of

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The Fat Years playing a role in the way Taiwan the nation is constructed in relation to China and the United States, this novel plays another role in blurring the boundaries of the science fiction genre to be more inclusive by creating alliances across borders.

40 Here, I use the term ‘narrative’ synonymously and interchangeably with the term ‘story.’

41 There are some important things to note about Lao Chen’s name. First, “Lao” is an informal and friendly term literally meaning “old,” and it would be used as an address to a man who you know. Second, the novel’s author and Lao Chen share the same character for their family name:

“陳,” but for an unexplained reason, they are Romanized differently.

42 Chan discusses his release of the book in China for free in this 2010 interview: http://hktext.blogspot.com/2010/07/2010_8641.html. Also, Julia Lovell comments on its online distribution: “there was a simple reason why this Sinophone novel could come into existence: although illicitly distributed in mainland China, it was written by a Hong Kong national, [Chan

Koonchung], and published in Hong Kong” (26).

43 Controlled by the Chinese government, People’s Daily is China’s largest newspaper in the country.

44 It bears noting that others recognize Lao Chen’s Taiwaneseness. Lao Chen tells us: “When they write a special report that needs an outsider’s opinion, they may well call on a famous

Taiwanese cultural personality who lives in Beijing like me” (Chan 27). Thus, he is an outsider, but he is one whose opinion and status are respected within China. Big Sister Song, Little Xi’s mother, tells her grandson: “Master Chen is Taiwanese and an old customer” (Chan 22).

Nevertheless, the weight of national identity should come from the individual making such a claim based on one’s lived experience and self-identification.

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45 In general, Michael Duke’s translation of The Fat Years is very close to the original text’s meaning and details. However, in this scene describing Lao Chen’s educational background, it is interesting that Duke writes Lao Chen attended Catholic university in Jamaica, but Chan writes in the original novel that Lao Chen attended a Catholic college called St. John’s in the Midwest of the United States.

46 Jürgen Habermas’ earlier work on discourse theory seems to imply that rational actors could arrive at the truth through speech acts and rational thought. More simplistically, if people act rationally and talk about a problem long enough, they eventually arrive at the truth. Of course, this is an ideal and he later clarified his thinking along more pragmatic lines that makes an important distinction between truth (out there) and consensus.

47 Critic Leo Ou-Fan Lee goes on to use Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov and specifically, “The Grand Inquisitor” parable as a way to understand Chan Koonchung’s The

Fat Years. “The Grand Inquisitor” presents a vision of Jesus returning and being ostracized by the church for interfering it its work. Similarly, The Fat Years presents the tension between a return of freedom that would undo the prosperity created and sustained by the work of the state.

See Lee, Leo Ou-Fan. “Fan feng Zhongguo de shengshi” [The Fat Years: An Irony of China].

My China New Digest, 4 Mar. 2010, par. 7-9. Accessed 13 Dec. 2016.

48 Borrowing an analogy from the American science fiction television program The X-Files

(1993-2002), Fang Caodi is like Fox Mulder (the irrational believer) and Little Xi is like Dana

Scully (the rational scientist). Also, an important, on-going narrative thread in The X-Files is government conspiracy.

49 Further evidence for her rational, Western-inspired radicalism comes from her time in the

Christian community in Warm Springs: “Little Xi didn’t, however, have the urge to believe in

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religion. All her life she had been a faithful disciple of materialism and atheism and she could not change her mind. Her reason made her resist the claims of theistic religion” (Chan 177).

However, she acknowledges the fellowship (not the religion) of those she meets at Warm

Springs: “[the fellowship] was much more sincere than the class solidarity she had been taught since childhood” (176).

50 In this discussion, I am simply recognizing a difference between the guarantee of press freedom in the United States and other Western nations, and the lack of these guarantees in the

Chinese press, which is largely government-owned or controlled. There are certainly deficiencies in the operation of news media in the West, but these issues are beyond what I can discuss in this chapter. For more on this topic, see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing

Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Random House, 2002.

51 For background on the S.S. of Nazi Germany, see Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death’s

Head: The Story of Hitler’s S.S. Coward-McCann, 1969.

52 For further information, see “Carl Schmitt.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1 Oct.

2014. Accessed 30 May 2015; “Leo Strauss.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1 Dec. 2010.

Accessed 30 May 2015; Xenos, Nicholas. “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror.”

Logo, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 2004, n.p. Accessed 30 May 2015; and Drury, Shadia B. Leo Strauss and the American Right. St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

53 See Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, no. 53, Oct. 1974, pp. 435-450.

54 Want-Want uses the hyphenated and unhyphenated name in its corporate branding, but its official website promotes the hyphenated name in its logo. In this discussion, I use the hyphenated name, but the quotations from the translated novel are unhyphenated.

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55 For a widely-anthologized story that serves as a thought experiment about what cost will one bear for utopia, see Le Guin, Ursuala K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in New

Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg, Nelson Doubleday, 1973, pp. 1-8. In this story, a child is kept chained and in pain in a dungeon in the heart of the fictional Omelas as the price for this utopia. All its citizens must see the child, knowing that their prosperity depends on the suffering of this innocent one. Some citizens accept this heavy price and stay in Omelas’ utopia while others, instead of accept this price for utopia, decide to leave Omelas for the harsh world beyond.

56 Brenda Lin (1976-) published Wealth Ribbon when she was 28 years old. True to what she told her father as a child: “I want to grow up to be a CEO” (Lin 118), she is an executive director at

Les Enphants, the company started by her father. See www.enphants.com/html/gov_board.php.

57 “Gam Saan” is Cantonese which means “Gold Mountain.”

58 See Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon.” The

Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu. U of

Minnesota P, 1995, pp. 174-210; and Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian

American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. State U of New York P, 1998.

59 For more information about this idiom, see Jiao, Liwei, Cornelius C. Kubler, and Weiguo

Zhang. 500 Common Chinese Idioms: An Annotated Frequency Dictionary. Routledge, 2011. p.

8. Also, mao dun in this context does not refer to the pen name of Shen Yanbing (1896-1981), who took the pen name Mao Dun as a novelist and critic, and who served in the PRC. See

Sullivan, Lawrence R. Historical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China. 3rd edition.

Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. pp. 397-398.

60 “Meiguo” means “American” or “the United States,” and “Ah-ma” means “grandmother.”

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61 See Hicks, R.D. Ed. “Diogenes Laertius.” Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 1925. Harvard UP,

1972. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0004.tlg001.perseus-eng1:6.2.

Accessed 18 Dec. 2016.

62 The alienation that Brenda Lin experiences is based in part on the diasporic experience of

Chinese immigrants. David Der-wei Wang explains: “One should consider the politics of diaspora when it comes to understanding the history of Taiwan. . . The kind of diaspora I am talking about is not just about the loss of country or one’s exile, but it’s more related to (actively or passively) resist or be odds with one’s own cultural heritage . . . The most eternal diaspora comes from the entanglement and unraveling one’s memory and oblivion, and the fear of nothingness at the end” (475). Furthermore, he stresses the paradoxical nature of diaspora for those alienated by its effects: “The most paradoxical thing about diaspora narrative is that nothing ends with diaspora, but rather, diaspora leaves something that never ends, or it ends something but creates something else that never ends” (Wang 475). For Brenda Lin, she achieves a kind of resolution at the end of her memoir, but ultimately, the work of building an identity in the face of diasporic challenges is unending, ongoing, and continuous.

63 The umbilical cord also represents a real and metaphorical connection between Lin and her mother. Virginia Shen notes: “Lin realizes that her mother was reestablishing their tie and relating to her not only as mother to daughter, but also as one woman to another. This individual spiritual journey and quest for cultural identity in light of national and transnational realm is lyrical and thought-provoking, filled with insight, and poignancy” (1201).

64 See Chiu, Kuei-fen. “The Production of Indigeneity: Contemporary Indigenous Literature in

Taiwan and Trans-Cultural Inheritance. The China Quarterly, Dec. 2009, pp. 1071-1087.

65 “Hsiang-T’u” literally translates as “Native Soil.”

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66 According to the 2014 Census, 18% of the Taiwanese population are Hakka people. See web3.hakka.gov.tw/content.asp?cuItem=136310&mp=2013.

67 Other sources informing my hope and caution include: Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing

Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999; Nakata, Martin.

Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008; and Battiste,

Marie, editor. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. UBC Press, 2000.