a partial post: I inhabit the role of "girl," the city government inhabits some bulldozers
From what I could make out from the yelling right outside my door last night, my silent Taiwanese roommate seems to be remiss in paying his (admittedly exorbitant) rent; and my locquacious Brazilian roommate—what they call the “second landlord” in this land of widespread urban homeownership, the person who rents the apartment from the owner and then rents pieces of it out to others—is exasperated. He’s also exasperated because of the weather. He’s organizing a Fun Cultural Event for Tuesday’s festival involving people in big, white, moonlike costumes performing something or other outside the presidential palace—that’s his job, is Fun Cultural Event Organizer—and if Tuesday looks anything like this last week or so, he won’t have much of an audience. I caught him apologetically this morning—he is no doubt ripping us off, but still it must be frustrating to have someone who had agreed to an exorbitant rent decide he doesn’t want to pay it after all—to tell him I had a little problem. You know how sometimes you can see someone on the verge of an exasperation-tizzy? What kind of problem did I have, now? Well, two of my ceiling lights had burned out, and they seem to be some special sort of lightbulb, and besides I am too small to replace them myself—I always end up having to ask a guy to help me with ceiling lights—so could he possibly help? And it was like I’d handed him a kitten. His eyes almost seemed to change shape and he blinked slowly, smiled sweetly, and said in a brand new, Downy-brand softener softened voice, “Of course, I’ll help you with that.” I guess all the Taiwanese girlness in the air is rubbing off; if only I can retain these masculinity-bolstering instincts in non-Taiwanese environments. My apartment will never be dark.
Tuesday is the Mid-Autumn Festival, a day for bar-b-queing things with your family and looking up wistfully at the year’s fattest moon. Recently, however, the moon has fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid her face amid a crowd of clouds. We’ve been sitting on the edge of yet another typhoon and it has been either drizzling or pouring for several days. Yesterday in the middle of the day there was a sudden parting of the clouds and such a ray of sunlight as you’d see in a Renaissance painting, but in a minute it was replaced by the same old grey. I’ve noticed a pattern to the drizzle-pour alternation by which the really heavy rain tends to start when I set off to go somewhere on my motorscooter, and ends shortly after I’ve parked. (Luckily body-sized plastic bags with buttons are widely available and offer pretty good protection against the rain.)
Saturday night during a brief respite from raininess Tiffany took me and My American Friend to the half-destroyed, then mostly-rebuilt, housing block called Sisi Nancun, Four-Four South Village.[i] Actually I had heard a bit about Sisi Nancun before: a guiren told me about it right when I first came to Taiwan in 2001.[ii] Sisi Nancun was a “military village.”[iii] These are areas settled by soldiers fleeing the mainland with the KMT in 1949. Some of them, the houses for higher-ups, are legal and built by the government, like the little housing block where Jennifer lives (her father was in the military). This consists of around ten four-floor cement apartment buildings (with several rooftop apartments built by the fourth-floor residents for use by their married sons, their spinster daughters, and the odd anthropologist). Other military villages are more modest but also government-built—like where Jennifer’s maternal grandmother lives in central Taiwan, in an orderly row of one-story brick houses.
But most military villages—and what most people think of when they hear the term—were places with “complicated” ownership relations and buildings rights, and relatively "backwards" living conditions. These were places settled by soldiers who had nowhere else to go, often built up around their workplaces (in this case some sort of military-run factory), with one-story houses, bad facilities, no planning, and no formal land rights. They did not own the land that they built on, but they did own the houses that they built, but those houses were technically illegal, but they were soldiers and had nowhere else to go. A classic case of fuza, complication. People could sell their houses, but probably not for much—the buyer would be taking the risk of getting kicked off the land, and besides these were poor, marginalized neighborhoods to begin with.
The complication of rights-relations seems to lead to the result that a state agency that wants to kick these people out and reclaim the land that they’ve been using for forty years can do so, but not without a ruckus. In the 1990s, when Chen Shuibian was mayor, the residents of one enormous military village located in an otherwise middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood protested for months against the threat of having their land converted to a park. They held rallies themselves and recruited some people from the world of Scholars and Experts, who ordered their students to participate in the protest (now that's democracy), and it was all very loud and big. Then one morning it turned out that the place had been bulldozed overnight. People were unhurt but the buildings had been razed. (Maybe this was before everyone owned a cell phone?) Now there’s a big park there, and the land rights are no longer considered complicated.
[i] Si is pronounced like the si in “sir,” kind of. It’s not “sissy” so don’t even start (you know who you are). The “c” in this romanization system is pronounced as “ts.” Romanization systems, by the way, are yet another thing that gets translated into the terms of unification / independence here. There was a group set up by the government to choose the official romanization system for Taiwan about two years ago, and although I think they themselves in their public discussions did not explicitly relate their choices to their stands on cross-Straits relations, everyone who talked about them did. The Tongyong Pinyin system that they finally voted to officialize differs only slightly from the Hanyu Pinyin system that we learn in America, the major difference being that Tongyong Pinyin not used by anyone else in the world. In fact, it’s not even really used in Taiwan. Throughout most of Taiwan, romanized names (mostly of places and streets) are derived from what seems to be a pretty random combination of the various romanization systems out there, plus maybe people’s own sense of how it ought to translate. And in the city of Taipei, streets are now romanized into Hanyu Pinyin, any mistakes in which are my fault—they had me correct all the maps last year when I started at the city government (where everyone seemed impressed with my uncanny ability to unhesitatingly write out a character’s pronunciation, despite my explanation that “I just write it like I hear it”). So the whole hulaballoo over an “official” romanization system seems in the end to have been little more than a chance for people whose positions on cross-Straits relations were already well known to take an official vote which unofficially acknowledged those positions.
[ii] Guiren貴人 (the characters are ‘expensive’ and ‘person,’ so: ‘valued person’ or ‘valuable person’) is someone who helps you in your hour of need, a benefactor. Yudao guiren 遇到貴人, to "happen upon a valuable person," is a stock expression, e.g. a friend of mine used this phrase recently when describing the kinds of things he baibais (prays) for (“You know, like, Guanyin, oh, I need a little help, I need to yudao guiren, stuff like that”). The fortune teller I went to last year with Jennifer told me exactly how many guiren I would have in my life (I think it was three), and, at Jennifer’s prompting, even specified their ethno-nationality (they were all “foreign,” as in non-Taiwanese, which is kind of disappointing). This was the same fortune teller who told Jennifer, aged thirty-six, with no apparent desire to find a partner, and with a stated antipathy to childbirth, that she would marry and have three children. Jennifer figured she had to either take it metaphorically or start looking around for a child-saddled divorcee. I similarly take my three guiren quota metaphorically: “three” is sometimes used for “many” in Chinese sayings and besides if I take it literally then I’m done for—I’d have used up my supply long ago. This particular guiren in this particular instance really brought home the monetary nature of the character gui, expensive or valuable: his description of Sisi Nancun inspired the as-you-can-see-I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-talking-about grant proposal that has funded this (only be sure always to call it please) “research.” Now that’s gui.
[iii] Military village, juancun 眷村, would be more accurately rendered as “dependents’ village,” though I don’t think that they were built only for or by people with families.
Tuesday is the Mid-Autumn Festival, a day for bar-b-queing things with your family and looking up wistfully at the year’s fattest moon. Recently, however, the moon has fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid her face amid a crowd of clouds. We’ve been sitting on the edge of yet another typhoon and it has been either drizzling or pouring for several days. Yesterday in the middle of the day there was a sudden parting of the clouds and such a ray of sunlight as you’d see in a Renaissance painting, but in a minute it was replaced by the same old grey. I’ve noticed a pattern to the drizzle-pour alternation by which the really heavy rain tends to start when I set off to go somewhere on my motorscooter, and ends shortly after I’ve parked. (Luckily body-sized plastic bags with buttons are widely available and offer pretty good protection against the rain.)
Saturday night during a brief respite from raininess Tiffany took me and My American Friend to the half-destroyed, then mostly-rebuilt, housing block called Sisi Nancun, Four-Four South Village.[i] Actually I had heard a bit about Sisi Nancun before: a guiren told me about it right when I first came to Taiwan in 2001.[ii] Sisi Nancun was a “military village.”[iii] These are areas settled by soldiers fleeing the mainland with the KMT in 1949. Some of them, the houses for higher-ups, are legal and built by the government, like the little housing block where Jennifer lives (her father was in the military). This consists of around ten four-floor cement apartment buildings (with several rooftop apartments built by the fourth-floor residents for use by their married sons, their spinster daughters, and the odd anthropologist). Other military villages are more modest but also government-built—like where Jennifer’s maternal grandmother lives in central Taiwan, in an orderly row of one-story brick houses.
But most military villages—and what most people think of when they hear the term—were places with “complicated” ownership relations and buildings rights, and relatively "backwards" living conditions. These were places settled by soldiers who had nowhere else to go, often built up around their workplaces (in this case some sort of military-run factory), with one-story houses, bad facilities, no planning, and no formal land rights. They did not own the land that they built on, but they did own the houses that they built, but those houses were technically illegal, but they were soldiers and had nowhere else to go. A classic case of fuza, complication. People could sell their houses, but probably not for much—the buyer would be taking the risk of getting kicked off the land, and besides these were poor, marginalized neighborhoods to begin with.
The complication of rights-relations seems to lead to the result that a state agency that wants to kick these people out and reclaim the land that they’ve been using for forty years can do so, but not without a ruckus. In the 1990s, when Chen Shuibian was mayor, the residents of one enormous military village located in an otherwise middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood protested for months against the threat of having their land converted to a park. They held rallies themselves and recruited some people from the world of Scholars and Experts, who ordered their students to participate in the protest (now that's democracy), and it was all very loud and big. Then one morning it turned out that the place had been bulldozed overnight. People were unhurt but the buildings had been razed. (Maybe this was before everyone owned a cell phone?) Now there’s a big park there, and the land rights are no longer considered complicated.
[i] Si is pronounced like the si in “sir,” kind of. It’s not “sissy” so don’t even start (you know who you are). The “c” in this romanization system is pronounced as “ts.” Romanization systems, by the way, are yet another thing that gets translated into the terms of unification / independence here. There was a group set up by the government to choose the official romanization system for Taiwan about two years ago, and although I think they themselves in their public discussions did not explicitly relate their choices to their stands on cross-Straits relations, everyone who talked about them did. The Tongyong Pinyin system that they finally voted to officialize differs only slightly from the Hanyu Pinyin system that we learn in America, the major difference being that Tongyong Pinyin not used by anyone else in the world. In fact, it’s not even really used in Taiwan. Throughout most of Taiwan, romanized names (mostly of places and streets) are derived from what seems to be a pretty random combination of the various romanization systems out there, plus maybe people’s own sense of how it ought to translate. And in the city of Taipei, streets are now romanized into Hanyu Pinyin, any mistakes in which are my fault—they had me correct all the maps last year when I started at the city government (where everyone seemed impressed with my uncanny ability to unhesitatingly write out a character’s pronunciation, despite my explanation that “I just write it like I hear it”). So the whole hulaballoo over an “official” romanization system seems in the end to have been little more than a chance for people whose positions on cross-Straits relations were already well known to take an official vote which unofficially acknowledged those positions.
[ii] Guiren貴人 (the characters are ‘expensive’ and ‘person,’ so: ‘valued person’ or ‘valuable person’) is someone who helps you in your hour of need, a benefactor. Yudao guiren 遇到貴人, to "happen upon a valuable person," is a stock expression, e.g. a friend of mine used this phrase recently when describing the kinds of things he baibais (prays) for (“You know, like, Guanyin, oh, I need a little help, I need to yudao guiren, stuff like that”). The fortune teller I went to last year with Jennifer told me exactly how many guiren I would have in my life (I think it was three), and, at Jennifer’s prompting, even specified their ethno-nationality (they were all “foreign,” as in non-Taiwanese, which is kind of disappointing). This was the same fortune teller who told Jennifer, aged thirty-six, with no apparent desire to find a partner, and with a stated antipathy to childbirth, that she would marry and have three children. Jennifer figured she had to either take it metaphorically or start looking around for a child-saddled divorcee. I similarly take my three guiren quota metaphorically: “three” is sometimes used for “many” in Chinese sayings and besides if I take it literally then I’m done for—I’d have used up my supply long ago. This particular guiren in this particular instance really brought home the monetary nature of the character gui, expensive or valuable: his description of Sisi Nancun inspired the as-you-can-see-I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-talking-about grant proposal that has funded this (only be sure always to call it please) “research.” Now that’s gui.
[iii] Military village, juancun 眷村, would be more accurately rendered as “dependents’ village,” though I don’t think that they were built only for or by people with families.
posted by blahgstein at 9:58 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home