the necklace from san gimignano

doesn't it kind of look like worms? sunset had me set it down and took a bunch of pictures.

names and renames

First of all, let’s just everyone kindly ignore the fact that it’s already the thirtieth, and a Tuesday at that, and just keep going about your business as though nothing had happened, okay? This is not a story about how late on in the season it’s getting, nor about how quickly a weekend passes by with no one the wiser. It is, ostensibly, a story about names. But it will take a little while to get there, as you may have realized already.

Last Friday was a day of disparate temporal chunks. I got up to a bout of translation—the city government had once again sprung something on me at the last minute. They are starting to get worried about how much I am doing for them and there is some talk going on of finding some way to pay me. Of course I don’t have a work permit so they can’t legally pay me for the work I’m doing for them; I know people who have worked for public institutions in the past and been paid illegally but apparently they are not considering this option. The option they are considering, much to my consternation, is to invite me to give a lecture or two in my capacity as foreign expert; there are apparently funds for this, and obviously a visiting guest speaker does not need to hold a work permit from the Republic of China. I am consternated because, first of all, as I think I’ve mentioned, I don’t like giving talks very much—and although it is very progressive to do so as an anthropologist, the idea of giving a talk that would potentially be about the people I was talking to is still a little bit daunting. And second of all, even though I do feel like they’ve been giving me a little more to do than I am really happy with (although mostly what I am unhappy about is the timing—almost every single thing I’ve been asked to do, I’ve been asked to do by tomorrow), still getting money for doing your fieldwork, however unproductively you may be doing it, smells a little funny. When I voice this concern to my boss—using my advisor’s ostensible disapproval to give the claim some weight—he says, “That’s fine, if you don’t feel like you can take the money, you can treat all of us to a night of karaoke with it.” So it looks like there will be no getting around it. Although I am kind of looking forward to the karaoke. (It grows on you, like the fatty meats.)

As soon as the translation was finished I rushed off to be at peace. My friend Ten, a dancer and actress,[1] had invited me for a bit of improvisation work. She picked me up at a party a while ago—I mean, she squatted down a bit and lifted me onto her back, where I flapped my arms in what must have been a rather flightless fowl sort of way. Whatever it was, she liked my reaction, and invited me to come practice with her and her boyfriend. She just moved in to a very big by Taipei standards apartment and turned the living room into a little dance studio. The studio is floored with some springy, cushiony material. At her last party, every woman who walked in started stretching out as soon she stepped on it, it just has that effect on you. We did some relaxation exercises first, with two people at a time manipulating the third person’s arm and leg joints. It turns out I am incapable of relaxing my right arm. I probably could have guessed this myself, but the boyfriend, who was in charge of that part of me, seemed very disheartened by it. He’s not a dancer and has only just started this kind of work, and he spent half the relaxation exercise time whining about how I wouldn’t give my right arm over to him. In case you’re wondering, having someone complaining about your failure to relax does not, actually, make it any easier to relax.

Then we started the dancing. I have no dancing skills at all beyond just the ability to move, and all my intuitions come either from yoga—which is more about reaching a pose and holding it—or from the midnight dance floor—which, in my case, is all about flailing about in whatever direction the ground seems to move me. Neither of these approaches is very interactive: yoga is a relatively solitary practice, and dance club dancing, well, I realize that one can be quite interactive about it, but in fact if you try to dance with me, you are likely to end up being thwacked. Accidentally, of course. Because I really am flailing. So, just like my favorite theater exercises in college, this was an exercise in Dealing with Others. I had much more success in dealing with Ten than with her boyfriend, which may have had something to do, aside from the obvious reasons of relative comfort, with her size and her experience. She’s a tiny skinny body of total muscle, around the same size as me, but so well-packed that I tend to feel a bit clumsily fleshy around her. And she’s a dancer to begin with, so when she’s improvising she has a huge range of moves to choose from and impulses to act on; all I was doing was trying to react in time. Whereas the boyfriend is almost as much at a loss as I am. There are some pictures somewhere that I will put up when I get them. It was incredibly fun and kind of inspiring—I’ve been feeling a little closed in on myself and on much too much of an even keel lately, and the way this exercise made me focus on things outside me and my own interaction with them was exactly what I needed.

The boyfriend left, Ten and I had a bite to eat, and then it was time for the next stage of the day, which was the going away party for the group of Australian students who have been here doing an urban design project along with some students from a local university, and their two professors who I’ve been translating for. We milled about, me mostly chatting with city government coworkers and the one sweet Taiwanese student in the Australian group, and occasionally being accosted by someone from the university who hadn’t met me yet and needed to express the fact that I spoke Chinese. (When someone tells you that your Chinese is very good, you can say, “Nali nali [where where],” meaning “not at all.”[2] But often people will just come up to you, after having observed you talking to someone else, and say, “Hey! You can speak Chinese!” I have gathered that “Yes!” is not the appropriate response, but I still don’t know what is.)

The highlight of this party for me was when the students made two three- or four-foot tall paper lanterns that they sent off into the sky. Sending off paper lanterns is a traditional ritual that happens at least on the middle day of ghost month, and I think on some other day as well, but I’ve managed never to see it happen. The lanterns express our hopes and dreams. The students wrote their wishes on the yellow lantern papers before hooking them up to several round wires connected at the bottom by a circle of flammable something. Then they lit the something, held up the lanterns until they straightened out on their own, and released them from the eighth floor veranda where we were gathered. The lanterns bobbed off into the night sky with a sunny glow. They made it all the way out of sight without burning, but it’s okay that they eventually will burn, because burning things is, of course, the most efficient way to deliver a message to the spirit world—once burned, a request goes directly into the bloodstream of the universe. Somebody is sure to hear it.

Then the party was over, the Australian professors left to pack up and get ready for the next leg of their trip, the students stayed, presumably to decide on where the afterparty should be, and us lower-level city government folks shuffled out with a bit of Friday-night expectancy that no one really knew what to do with. “Let’s go out for dinner!” the section head said. “Don’t tell me you can eat again,” I, the wet blanket, commented. “Then let’s go drinking!” My Former Object said. I turned to the other two guys left from our office. Section Head and My Former Object are nice guys, but they are both just around ten years too old to have caught the sarcasm and self-mockery that make Che and JZ so much fun to be around. (Personality types in this country change very quickly.) Unfortunately Che and JZ are not only young enough to have a sense of humor about themselves, they are also young enough to have a sense of obligation to their wives, who were waiting at home with their children. “I’m due home at nine,” Che said, pointedly looking at his watch, which said nine. “Let’s make a plan to go out next week.”

So we all got in to My Former Object’s car, and drove to somewhere completely different. A few other people from the department were having spicy hot pot in a restaurant neither near nor far from where we were, so My Former Object skinnied his way through the alleys to drop us off right at the front door, and then drove off in search of a parking space. We found the group inside and greeted them, chatted for a while, and then went back outside to be picked up by My Former Object, who had, predictably, failed to find a parking space in this, one of the busiest and most alley-ful of all Taipei districts at dinnertime on a Friday night. Che and JZ did not look unrelieved, but the weekend moods of Section Head and My Former Object were unsated. My Former Object’s children are a little older than the younger guys’, and, I suspect, his wife a little more obedient; Section Head’s children are cared for by a nanny, a cousin of some sort, during the week. (Although the one time I met her, his wife, very pretty and quite young looking, did not seem obedient at all. She had studied in America for a while, for six months. “I was supposed to go for a year, but I missed him so much I came back early,” she said, sitting a couple of seats away from her husband. “Really?” I gave my generic response, thinking, that’s pretty sweet. She tossed her head a little as she laughed: “Of course not!”) Finally we dropped Che and JZ off by their motor scooters, promising to go singing and drinking next week, and Section Head and My Former Object and I drove off to Jennifer’s bar, which I realized is where they had been gunning for all along.

Once there, Section Head admitted that he had never been to “this sort of place” before. Usually when we gather with our friends, he explained, it’s at a restaurant, there is a lot of food, and you drink along with the food. Ah, or, otherwise, if you’re just drinking, maybe you’ll go somewhere where there are young ladies to accompany you while you drink. You can go by yourself or with a group of friends. The young ladies might get paid by the hour, and also by how much beer you drink, so there is a little pressure to drink more beer. Anyway those sorts of places I am used to. But this sort of place, you don’t really come here to eat—gesturing at the assortment of snacks we had gotten—and you don’t come here to converse with a young lady. I guess this is a place where you go if you just want to hang out and talk with a few good friends. Are there a lot of places like this in Taipei? The fact that he’d never gone to a western-style bar before seems pretty normal, but I am kind of surprised to hear him ask this last question. Taipei is bursting at the seams with bars and café’s. The density of places to go with a group of friends to enjoy their company is kind of unreal, and it is part of what gives Taipei that atmosphere of busy relaxation, of something for everyone, of buzzing social networks. It is, in my opinion, part of what gives Taipei its own particular character; and the Section Head is in charge of the section that is charged with figuring out what kind of character Taipei has and making it more so, in a way that is ever more attractive to its own citizens and, of course, to foreign visitors and investors.

Aside from this initial comment, both Section Head and My Former Object spend most of the time taking turns telling me how great the other one is, how he is very promising and talented, and how they have known one another for fifteen years. This is an unfortunate turn of events for me—both of these people have a habit of going off into abstract discourses on how things ought and ought not to be when asked questions about specific occurrences, and both of them tend not to leave any room for anyone else to speak (which is good in principle, especially when you’re recording, but, it turns out, makes me a little tired and dilutes my focus), and putting them together only exacerbates these tendencies, so I was somewhat relieved when it became clear that Section Head was not going to want more than one beer, and that My Former Object was not going to insist on having another one. I walked out with them but started chatting with Jennifer on the porch, and when they walked away I turned around and sat back down. There were people there that night but t Jennifer did not have to spend all her time taking care of them. Everyone was in more or less self-sufficient groups: a group of IT workers headed by Jennifer’s former colleague, another group of guys I didn’t know, and a very lively table of very drunk lesbian artists who had been dancing barefoot in the bar’s very little remaining open space when we came in and had only gotten more drunk and more lively since then.

I was really just picking up my stuff to start off for home when one of the artists came outside and squatted next to my chair. “How do you feel about old ladies?” She asked. “Come have a drink with us weird aunties.” She looked younger than me, but people here tend to. There was a lot of affection going on inside, with everyone falling all over each other in indistinguishable variations of hugs, kisses, and dance, standing, sitting, and lying down on one of the long benches at the long table they occupied. A glass of whiskey appeared on the table before me. Everyone was a little too drunk to engage in conversation so I sat around waiting for things to happen and participating in whatever was happening to me—when pulled up to dance I danced, when sat down to hug I hugged. The woman I was sat down next to said she worked in metal, and had recently started working in silicone as well. These happen to be two of my favorite materials, and I started going on and on about something, something about how amazing the versatility of metal was and then about how I’d just discovered silicone on my trip to Italy last spring, when I happened to see some incredible silicone sculpture and jewelry in a place in San Gimignano—I’d liked the woman’s work so much I actually bought something, which is almost unprecedented. Maybe not every girl she meets in a bar starts off telling her how much she loves metalwork and silicone. For my excitement she gave me an interesting look and a card. One character of her given name means sunset; and the other means the glow of dusk or dawn. Which made Jennifer conclude it was a taken, not a given, name.

A little while later we were joined by their friend A-he, a publisher of pornographic comic books in the Japanese manga style (“We also do literary stuff! And we have connections with European authors. Currently we’re doing a manga version of Remembrance of Things Past. I’ll give you a copy. Along with some other stuff.”), and his girlfriend, a corporate lawyer. Things livened up when A-he got there, I don’t know if because he is more talkative or because he was less drunk, and somehow someone eventually started agitating to go to a real dance club. So the evening ended with me somehow finding myself, with A-he and the girlfriend and one of the artists, at a huge, warehouse-sized dance club way out in the northeast part of town, having my eardrums put to the test by mediocre electronic dance music that was having a difficult time imitating a nice hip-hop beat. Which was really all I wanted. (I’d heard that this dance club was the disco to end all discos, but actually it’s just really big and a little too clean. It has four separate rooms, each large, each with its own live dj putting on equally mediocre music in different styles.)

A couple of days later I called up the metal woman. I wanted to see her stuff, and I wanted to show her the necklace I’d gotten in San Gimignano. I went over to her studio, where she explained to me the difference between welding and soldering (I never knew!) and showed me some of her stuff, among which were some necklaces in the shape of scissors (the blades point downward from the dip in your collarbone, and the handles go around your neck; to put it on or take it off, you open the scissors as though to cut), saws (like if you cut off the teeth and one inch of what goes beneath them and wrapped it around your neck), and hooks (a jointed, moveable piece that is simultaneously delicate-looking and kind of dangerous—the edges of the hooks are sharp). There was also a purposely rusted-over piece of metal whose shape I could not even get a grasp on visually, much less verbally. Ah-ne, one of the guys who shares her studio, was in the other room teaching a Mama how to hammer out a metal wine glass, and his boyfriend, visiting from San Francisco, was practicing his Chinese with another friend in the front room. After the hammering lesson was over and the Mama had left, we sat around chatting for a while before going out to dinner and then driving almost an hour to go to a nice hot springs in the mountains (“Are you busy tonight? Any plans? Okay then.”).

The San Franciscan boyfriend is staying in Ah-ne’s home, with Ah-ne’s family. “His parents would probably be happier if he weren’t, but they don’t seem to have a problem with it. His father puts on music every time I come into the living room. They’re being really nice.” On the way back from the hot springs, Ah-ne mentioned how his parents had told him to change his name when he was 25 years old. They had gone to a new fortune teller, who had told them that his original name, in combination with his bazi (the result of all combined data about the time and place of your birth, on which auspicion can be judged), rendered an imbalance of yin and yang, the feminine and masculine principles. So they should change his name to bring the feminine and masculine principles into greater harmony. There was a very soft collective giggle in the car as he explained this. “And,” I asked, “did it bring your yin and yang into better balance?” “Well,” he said from the front seat, taking his boyfriend’s hand, “I have a better wife.”

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[1] Recently nominated pan-Asian best TV drama actress! Winners announced in Japan next week.

[2] There are jokes about foreigners saying this wrong or misinterpreting it, one of which I had actually acted out at Ten’s that afternoon: after we had finished eating, her boyfriend called to arrange something. On the phone with him, she called out, “He says you have a great body,” to which I distractedly (I was writing something in her little guestbook and was blanking on a character that every first-year Chinese student knows how to write) responded, “Nali (where).” Saying it only once makes it sound more like a question, so of course he had to respond, and she had to call out, “Everywhere!” Then she came out and thunked me on the head to remind me that you have to say twice for it to have the appropriate effect of false modesty.

socute

ding dong the bells

Hey did I mention that I went to a wedding recently? Jennifer, her friend Eric, and I drove down to Taizhong for the wedding of Jennifer's xuedi, younger-brother-in-study. They graduated from the same university years and years apart—I don’t think they overlapped at all. A girl we know who works with puppets brought him to the bar one day a long time ago, and they quickly established their close relationship. Now he sits at the bar and says, xuejie (older-sister-in-study), can I have another beer? And when they’re in Taizhong at the same time (Jennifer’s grandmother lives there), they visit. Weddings are generally wide-ranging affairs and not exactly restrictive—a few weeks ago I happened to walk into the bar just as Jennifer’s xuedi was leaving. We gave the effusive greetings appropriate to people who like each other in principle but are not about to go out of their way, and as he was walking out the door he turned around and said, “I’m getting married in November! You should come! It’ll be fun. You can drive down with xuejie.” I thought it would be fun to go on a little road trip (if one and a half hours can be called a road trip) and see Jennifer’s grandmother, who in some very strange way reminds me of my paternal grandfather, something I have not yet told her about. The way she speaks and the general bearing, but especially the way she laughs, at everything but especially at bad things. So on Sunday a week ago Jennifer and Eric and I spent the afternoon eating hot pot and wandering around Taizhong, and then headed to the hotel where the wedding was being held. Half the people I know were going to weddings that day: that weekend had a series of auspicious days in the lunar calendar. Although as Tai-ke Joe says, “These days any weekend day is an auspicious day.”

They had the principal of the school at which the groom’s father worked, and other notables with very very short speeches. Upon microphoned prodding from the groom, his friends gave embarrassed toasts, a classmate to the effect that they hoped that they would all soon be toasting one another at one another’s’ weddings; and strangely off-key toasts, a childhood friend to the effect that although everyone had suspected that the toaster was the groom’s secret male lover, here was the groom getting married after all, and a college roommate to the general effect, among other things, that he’d heard them having sex in college. The statement that impressed me most was that all of their friends soon learned that when they were together, the couple would turn off their cell phones. That is how devoted they were to one another. (And if you think that is nothing, you should have seen how the male part of one of the couples we were seated with took a cell phone call in the middle of the dinner and proceeded to talk, loudly, quietly, and with much laughter, for about half an hour while his date sat next to him picking at her food. Usually nobody talks to each other at these things unless they are already acquainted, and people are grouped not according to prearranged plans but according to category: groom’s classmates, groom’s coworkers, miscellaneous. The male part of the other couple we were seated with introduced himself—he was a coworker of the groom’s father—before spending the entire meal correcting his four-year-old daughter’s table manners, in English, while her mother sat next to her picking at her food.) There were no speeches, and no speech, from the bride’s side; although she looked pretty lively. Eric and Jennifer spent the whole time insulting the wine (which is what you get for going to weddings with people who run bars).

We were in three adjacent huge dining rooms with unbelievably scaled ceiling moldings and chandeliers. Different parts of the meal were punctuated by things like waiters carrying torches in a synchronized-swimming type arrangement around the room before finally introducing the lead chef, who put the lobster dish on the marriage party’s table to the backdrop of mini, indoor fireworks. The bride and groom left twice so that the bride could, as is customary, appear in three different outfits (although in this case all of them were somewhere between white and pink; usually there’s at least one red, the traditional color of celebration, presumably to offset the by now standard white, which was the traditional color of mourning before people started wearing flounce). The wedding was about 60 tables of 10—unless you are personally implicated in the events, weddings here consist entirely of eating. There are rituals that the bride and groom and their families go through to formalize the marriages, but for the assembled masses the wedding is completely ceremony-free. They have managed to hang on to the kitsch, though.

japanamania: permutations of us and them

Last weekend my roommate had a little party, spur of the moment, for a friend that was getting married, also on the spur of the moment. I stopped in on the roof, where his chic Japanese-style room is, to check it out when I got home. The guest of honor had not yet arrived; I was given to understand he was still pacifying the kinfolk. Medium-loud Brazilian music was playing on the stereo, and there were a couple of Brazilians dancing crazy in the corner (I like the music but I can’t catch the crazy in it, and tend to be in awe of, and to stare at the bare midriffs of, those who can). Among other guests was one guy I responded to in Chinese who turned out, hours later, to be Japanese (oops); two rosy-cheeked boys who had just bought a repossessed office for about two and a half songs in the busy Taipei train station district and were living and working there, in the process of opening “a business” which would be in the area of “trade: we’ll go out and find things, and buy them, and then sell them to other people;” a tall skinny guy working for a Japanese company and ragging on the Japanese for thinking that spending more time at the office made them seem more industrious even though in his opinion they were not very efficient,[1] but who positively bowed when he left a little while later (the normal Taiwanese way is more a kind of apologetic shrugging and bobbing of the head); and a goateed and bespectacled man of around forty who gave the most common response to my statement that I was studying Taiwan: a disbelieving “What’s interesting about Taiwan?”

Don’t be so self-deprecating! I joked. “It’s not self-deprecation,” Skinny corrected me, “it’s modesty.” Meantime Goatee was thinking. No, he said, slowly, actually Taiwan is pretty interesting. I can see it. For instance, in Taiwan you have this interesting phenomenon, this very strange phenomenon, where a bunch of people—say maybe 70% of the people—want to be Japanese. They just want to turn into Japanese. But then there is another group of people—say around 30%—who absolutely with all their hearts hate the Japanese. So isn’t that an interesting thing? Here you have a group of people who want to be what the other group of people hates.

Already in Nanjing, a long time ago, a bunch of us had noticed the 70/30 split phenomenon. Our teachers (professors at Nanjing University) taught us things like: we used to say that Chiang Kai-shek was 70% bad and 30% good; but now some people are starting to revise their opinions and say that he was 30% bad and 70% good. And, we used to say that Mao Zedong was 100% good, and then many people said that he was 70% good and 30% bad; but now some people are revising their opinions and saying that he was 30% good and 70% bad. Having heard it a couple of times in class, we started realizing that we were hearing it all over the place: something was 70% savory and 30% sweet; the people of some nation were 70% bastards and 30% decent. For some reason, anything that didn’t have actual proportions attached to it could always be reproportioned 70% : 30%, especially if the object were values or other non-percentilizable things. I’ve found this to be a pretty robust trend across both the mainland and Taiwan, though it seems to come up less here, and I felt a moment of delighted recognition when Goatee came out with it. Especially since it doesn’t correspond to the ethnic makeup of the population, which is usually quoted as from 16% to at most 20% mainlander, 80% to 84% Taiwanese, and 2% aborigine (which people tend to forget about).[2] And yet somehow I suspected that this was, at least to some extent, what he was talking about.

There was probably a more clever way to ask what he meant than by making myself feel like a racist, but none occurred to me right away, so I asked, with a shy duck of the head, if he was ‘this-province registered’ or ‘other-province registered’—that is, if he was Taiwanese or mainlander.[3] He answered, with unusual coyness, “I myself am Taiwanese [this-province registered], because I was born in Taipei.”[4] Well, I thought, that’s very Gricean of you.

As far as I know the census no longer distinguishes on the basis of this-province and other-province ji—at least the statistics published by Taipei city don’t. But in everyday conversation, people whose paternal ancestors (or who themselves) came from the mainland after retrocession (1945) are mainlanders; while those whose paternal ancestors came from the mainland before that, and stayed, are Taiwanese (very few people came from the mainland during the Japanese colonial era, 1895-1945, so it usually is paternal ancestors and not selves).[5] Nobody who was categorized as Taiwanese in common parlance would give such a precise delimitation of their ji, so, like a good racist, I prodded him: and, where was your father born? And his father? Turns out his paternal grandfather[6] is from Liaoning, one of the northeast Chinese provinces that was occupied by Japan before the second world war.

At this point Skinny, who had been standing along with us, interposed to explain to me, first in English and then in Chinese, that “Taiwan has a lot of different ethnicities and so it is very complicated. The biggest problem on Taiwan is national identity.” He sounded like he had memorized something from his textbook, which, given that he had been a political science major, he very well might have. However, it came out his paternal grandfather was also from the Japanese-occupied northeast part of the mainland, so it may have been more heartfelt than it sounded.

Someone coming from the Chinese northeast in the middle of the last century—in the case of Goatee’s grandfather, someone running from it while conscripted into the KMT army—would have pretty good reasons to not like the Japanese.[7] And in fact tensions over the status of the Japanese are widely held to have contributed to the mutual mistrust of mainlanders and Taiwanese after retrocession. For Goatee it seems to still be a source of tension, though a minor one: he said he’d recently talked to someone who had insisted that the Japanese invasion of China was justified. (I’m not sure if he was talking about the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, or the 1937 invasion of Shanghai and points west. Neither of them sounds very nice, but the second one was famously brutal, rape and murder and flaying and so on.) It wasn’t someone old enough to have been educated under Japanese colonialism; it was someone Goatee’s own age who’d read a history book published in Japan, which surprised me.

When I first came to Taiwan, I was struck by the multiplicity of opinions I heard here. People you didn’t know at all would tell you their views on whatever—politics, culture, whatever you happened to stumble upon—and there seemed to be a great variety of them. Big change from my experience on the mainland, which was a constant rerun of the same conversation in two lines: party line and anti-party line. (There are many reasons for this, I’m sure, among which are not only lack of access to alternatively viewpointed media but also my sucky Chinese at the time, and the fact that I was having mostly run-in conversations with strangers rather than long-term conversations with friends.) That feeling decreased with increased familiarity; there will always be a limited number of positions out there for people to choose from, and it doesn’t take long before you start to get a sense of the range.

I’ve never before heard anyone enter the topic of ethnic difference via conflicting attitudes toward Japaneseness; but the lights in that circuit started flashing as soon as he started talking. Maybe it’s exactly when someone sets off a known circuit from a new plug that you become aware of the way that the lights flash, the sequence of it and the way one word or topic leads naturally into some particular other.[8] The way that a division of the people on Taiwan into some percent who feel X and some percent who feel Y will always at least potentially suggest ethnic difference—and in a few minutes, Goatee was talking about a fight he’d had with his wife over the proper way to say “boiled meat dumplings” when calling their daughter to dinner. Where he comes from (a military village whose adults, when he was growing up there, were born on the mainland) it’s jiaozi (dumpling + nominalizer); but for “you Taiwanese” it’s shuijiao (water + dumpling). “But we can’t fight about it all night, we’d starve to death; and besides we don’t like our daughter to see us fighting.” The way that the mention of any kind of identity issue will potentially suggest the issue of independence versus unification—and a few minutes later, Goatee was talking about how lame the current presidential party is for always yelling about independence but never presenting a viable plan for it. “If you gave me a plan, I would consider it, I’m not dead set against independence. But you can’t constantly be using the issue for your own political gain and never give us a realistic way of doing it.” And the way that a discussion of ethnic differences and national identity problems often (though somewhat less predictably) ends in the assertion that all these things are figments “fried” or “stirred up” by politicians every time there’s an election, just to get votes: “I hate elections.”

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[1] I did not mention that at least the statistics that everyone here quotes have the Taiwanese spending more time in the office than any other nationality on earth. I also didn’t bother to describe my one experience working for a private Taiwanese company, which was when I helped edit an English-Chinese dictionary for one of the major publishers here. This was the state of the dictionary when I got there: they had gone out and compiled all the entries from all the English-Chinese dictionaries they could find. Then the project head, who speaks pretty decent English, went through and edited what she could, eliminating some of the more outrageous entries. Then her boss (who speaks pretty terrible English despite having a master's degree from some US university) wanted to publish it. After a protracted lobbying period, the project head convinced her boss—the son of the company’s founder and its current C Something O—that they really should get a native English speaker to look the thing over before going to press, and they really should include something to give some indication of the circumstances under which different words should be used (the boss was dead set against giving example sentences: they take up too much time, money, and space). Her boss finally found an American girl he knew, who went through and edited the whole thing. The project head looked it over and felt that the girl had not done very much editing, so she introduced two Americans—a former student of hers and me (a student of her friend’s)—to her boss and asked if we could look it over again. She had been right: the other girl had barely corrected any mistakes and had even added some of her own. So then this guy and I each spent a couple of months editing it and providing usage ‘hints’ (using, it turned out, completely different standards). And then, as far as I know, it was published. So the thing went through at least four different total edits, each one with its own, articulated or unarticulated, approach, and each one using different, more or less equally unqualified, people; which is pretty much all I can say about efficiency. Although I should also say that I’m very grateful for this inefficiency: there are, it turns out, few more pleasant ways to spend Sunday mornings than having brunch in Jennifer’s bar and correcting dictionary proofs. Getting drawn into this sort of thing is a consolation for being a short, dark-haired foreigner; if you are tall and blonde you eventually end up on TV.

[2] Caveat: this "usually" is based on my vague sense of what people say (and people do not use percentages very frequently) and what I’ve seen written.

[3] 本省籍 benshengji and 外省籍 waishengji. 籍 ji, location of one’s family or ancestral household registration (as well as record, census registration). I may be wrong but I have the impression that, especially in the case of this-province/other-province or other potentially tense ethno-national situations, using ‘ji’ is a little more PC than saying 人 ren, person.

[4] “我自己是本省籍, 因為我在台北出生.”

[5] There are some confusing cases like my friend’s mom who grew up in a Taiwanese immigrant community in Malaysia and came to Taiwan after the war; the fact that she grew up speaking Taiwanese seems to push her into the this-province category.

[6] Several this-province ji people have told me that only other-province ji people regularly use the kinship terms that distinguish maternal from paternal grandparents. In Mandarin it’s 爺爺yeye and奶奶 nainai, specialized terms, for father’s father and mother; and外公 waigong and外婆 waipo, outside-(kin-)man and outside-(kin-)woman, for mother’s father and mother. In Taiwanese it’s ah-gong and ah-ma, nickname-form + (kin-)man and nickname-form + mom, for both sides; people I know tend to refer to their grandparents in these terms even when speaking Mandarin, regardless of what ji they themselves are.

[7] Can you say that on the radio?

[8] Or when you learn that something you thought was an off-the-wall comment was actually part of a circuit, like, for me, George Bush’s apparently whacko insistence, in the second debate, that he would not nominate a judge who would support the Dred Scott decision, which I later learned was not whacko at all.

Also, I’ve figured out how people take left turns here

It’s not random at all, in fact there is a norm so strong I would almost call it a rule. If the person in the oncoming lane can reasonably be expected to have enough time to stop or swerve before crashing into you, it is safe to take a left turn in front of them. So once again, 亂中有序 luanzhong you xu: in chaos, there is order.

sanxia temple

sanxia temple

pre-post post-script

Joe’s response to “ghostly nonsense and Taiwanese guests,” just in over msn messenger: “論文通過，畢業了...我會好好練習英文的, The thesis passed, you can graduate ... I'm going to have to practice my English.” Which I think is a nice way of saying, “Jesus, do you always talk so much?”

Tai-ke slippers, in red and blue, and a "very Tai-ke" textile, of unknown utility, formally presented to me by the students in Yunlin the day after our long dinner-time Tai-ke conversation

ghostly nonsense and Taiwanese guests

Tuesday morning I was sitting around taking much too meticulous notes on an article by Steven Sangren[1] which was somehow a little less tightly organized than I’d remembered it being (though still, like everything he writes, great). I’m going to teach it this winter, is the only reason I’m wishing it were a little more simply organized. Because of course I’m terrified of teaching, and it’s taking me a very long time to come up with class outlines for even the simplest pieces (my notes for the Freedman[2] article I’ll teach in week two are almost as long as the article itself, e.g.). As a student, I am picky and demanding and need to be entertained, and now that I’m about to be a teacher, I’m imagining a whole group of eighteen year old me’s sitting around the seminar table, rolling their eyes. It’s very unlikely that this will actually be the composition of our class (I’m thinking maybe four very sleepy Chinese-American kids from California); but what can you do about your imagination? Besides, it’s been interesting to discover that I myself am my deepest fear.

Anyway, so here I am at my computer, switching back and forth between the article (which I have in pdf format) and my notes for it, which increasingly resemble a reorganized transcription. I’ve already taken my much too meticulous notes on the other piece we’ll be reading for that week, excerpts from two chapters of Donald DeGlopper’s Lukang, which I mentioned a couple of posts ago.[3] I’m starting to think how to put them together—the Sangren is much more complicated and detailed, and written in a much harder style. So I’ll want them to read DeGlopper first; he’ll give them a good sociological introduction to the issues at play in Chinese/Taiwanese supra-familial group formation, and then they can use what energy they have left to try to understand the actual cases that Sangren provides, of groups that slide on the scale of familial to supra-familial, and his very anthro critique of the field. And so on. Suddenly a little square bubble pops up in the bottom right of my computer screen: my friend Joe saying hello on msn messenger.

Being “in the field,” as you know, has been a highly technological experience for me. I got a cell phone for the first time when I got here, and last year I got introduced to the wonders of msn messenger, which has been hands down the best thing that has ever happened to my written Chinese (though not, of course, my hand-written Chinese, which at this point is abysmal—big difference between typing in the sound and recognizing the appropriate character, and remembering how to write it). I happened to come upon online chatting at a time when my fieldwork was in a kind of interstice and I had just made some very literate friends who had a lot of spare time. The first month or so of serious chatting, I would sit and sweat from the concentration of trying to keep up, and be funny, in written Chinese; now I can skip around and do other stuff while waiting for the other person to type their message, but it’s still excellent practice and a nice semi-passive way of keeping in touch with several friends and informants.

So my friend Joe, who works in the central government and is also a PhD student in land management and urban planning, sends a hello my way. Joe recently took a long vacation abroad, after which he disappeared for a couple of weeks, much to my dismay. I had already started on my critical self-reflection,[4] wondering whether I had given him reason to disappear, when he called me up in a boisterous mood last week, announcing that he had finally dug himself out from the shoulder-high pile of work folders that had collected on his desk during his absence, and was ready to paaarty, and did I want to go out with a bunch of people on Thursday night and how about Wednesday night maybe just a quick drink as well, and wheeee. So that was okay, then. And now yesterday he pops in to say hello while I’m taking notes on Sangren, a little after one in the afternoon.

After a little small talk he asks me if I’d like to go to Xinzhu, a city around an hour’s drive from Taipei. Its claim to fame is a big industrial park where a lot of microchip and other high-tech businesses have their offices; it also has a very prettily rebuilt city center and a lot of bars and clubs catering to the lascivious foreigners who come along with the high-tech industry. A very long time ago I was taken out in Xinzhu for goose innards and beer by a semi-lascivious Taiwanese guy who hadn’t really gotten the hang of American-style dating (paid for my drinks but made his friend talk to me, and stared at the [other] dancing foreign girls, it felt very junior high except the guy had an eight year old kid who lived with his--the guy's--mom outside of town), but aside from that and a government meeting last month, I haven’t been. What’s going on in Xinzhu? I ask. What’s the deal?

“I’m teaching a class in a college there. I thought you might want to give a lecture. How about it?” I’m not so hot on giving lectures. Last time I gave a talk, in Yunlin, around this time last year, the preparation almost killed me, and the actual experience—complete with dinner and breakfast with students, two hour class, protracted afternoon outing with the professors in the department, and an hour or two of chatting with the department chair—knocked me out for days. But I realize it’s a good experience, and I am about to start teaching, so I hedge. What kind of lecture? When? To whom? “It’s an undergraduate class, maybe sophomores mostly, you can talk about whatever you want, Wanhua history, community activism, whatever.” Okay, I say, I’ll think about it. When are you thinking of having me? “Well, I’ll leave here around 1:30. I can be at your place by 1:45. Okay?” Huh? What are you talking about? “It’ll be fun, you can practice your bullshit skills. Not that they’re not already very developed.”

So twenty-five minutes later I’m sitting in his car, hair still wet, and he’s talking to me about American politics. For once, I do not want to talk about American politics. I want to talk about what the hell I’m supposed to say to thirty Taiwanese undergraduates in the public affairs department of a small private university in Xinzhu. Joe does not seem to think this is such a big deal. Just give them some ideas to work with, they don’t know anything, anyway they’ll be so surprised to see a foreigner that they’ll think whatever you say is brilliant, talk about your research. What kind of juice do you want? Okay, so what’s the deal with Colin Powell, anyway?

When we met up last week, Joe was telling me that his recent trip to the United States was a journey of self-discovery: “I never thought I was a Tai-ke until I went to America.” Tai-ke 台客, the characters of which are just Taiwan-guest and the most straightforward translation of which would be something like Taiwanese, is a bit difficult to explain.[5] In fact during the dinner with the students at Yunlin, we spent a good long time talking about this term, which one of them claimed laughingly to be interested in researching. Notions associated with Tai-ke are things like song (Taiwanese) low-class, unsophisticated; su 俗 common (as in non-elite), unsophisticated (both of these often used when trying to figure out a Chinese translation for kitsch, as well); sometimes cu 粗 coarse, rough; and, of course, the Taiwanese language (rather than Mandarin) and Taiwanese people (rather than mainlanders). Other notions include three-quarter-length pants (shorts and sandals being the normal outfit of gangsters and low-class individuals),[6] and simultaneous cigarette-smoking and betel nut-chewing, especially while leaning on a motor scooter watching the world go by with nothing in particular to do and wearing blue or red shower flip-flops outdoors (see image below). Tai-ke has become, in recent years I am told, a very definite although still, upon attempted elicitation, usually quite vaguely defined social category. A mostly gay dance club is named Tai-ke, which seems to be a recognized category of (homo)sexual attraction, as a friend of mine who goes to a lot of gay sex parties has indicated.[7]

In fact Joe’s discussion of how he discovered that he himself was Tai-ke was probably the best description I’ve gotten yet of what the term means. He mentioned it when we went out for drinks on Wednesday, and brought it up again when a bunch of us went out to dinner the next day. Joe’s good friend, an old classmate, lives with his girlfriend in Queens. Joe stayed with them for about week, and then the three of them rented a car to drive up to Niagara Falls and other interesting points north. I think the girlfriend doesn’t know how to drive; Joe had gotten an international driver’s license before leaving Taiwan, but then it turned out that it was much more expensive to rent a car with two drivers than with one. They had a long discussion about this at home: Joe wanted to just rent the car in the friend’s name and not have to pay the extra cost; the friend, apparently somewhat Americanized, thought they should eat it up and sign up both their names. When they got to the rental agency, it turned out the company wouldn’t rent cars to international driver’s license holders anyway, so they were force to sign on just the friend and pay the lower amount.

“But did you drive too?” someone asked. “Of course I drove!” Joe replied. Shuping, a lively girl who used to work in the Urban Development Department, added, “阿你不講他怎麼知道 Yeah, if you don’t tell ‘em, how would they even know?” at which Joe burst out laughing: “You’re Tai-ke too!” Then it came time to choose the insurance for the rental car: there were four different levels of insurance, which the agent explained to them in great detail. After listening for a while, Joe turned to his friend and said, “gei ta pin,” as I understand it something like a cross between “whatever” and “fuck it,” and they didn’t take any insurance at all. “Now that is really Tai-ke,” Joe said with some pride, adding a Taiwanese phrase, “chhoe phang chhoe thang, search for the thread, search for the hole”—meaning to seek out whatever works, go where you need to in order to get what you want, rather than following the straight, regulated, open path. “What’s the point of getting insurance? 等你出事再說—If something happens, you can worry about it then.” Shuping agreed. “We’re very well suited to travel together.”

So yesterday Joe’s driving me to the college, buying me apple juice and talking about American politics, and we get there, and he introduces me, suddenly turning all serious and teacher like, much unlike his normal giggling spasmodic self: “Today we’re very privileged to have with us a scholar from America. Teacher An has deep knowledge of every aspect of Taiwanese culture and a very interesting perspective as a foreign scholar from the world-famous University of blah blah blah,” I’m sitting in the front row watching him perform and trying not to laugh. If you know him, this show is absolutely ridiculous. It’s exactly the voice he uses to propose a title for my thesis, in response to my question about what the hell Taiwanese people did for fun before they had private karaoke rooms to go sing in: “What did they do? Sleep and have kids. Hey! That could be your thesis: The Rise of Karaoke and the Decline of the Taiwanese Birthrate: A Correlation Study.” Then he’s finished performing and hands me the microphone—yes, microphone, no wonder everyone's so at home singing karaoke—and I start, as requested, to bullshit. I’m surprised at how fluent I’ve become in the language of ghostly nonsense (鬼扯 guiche, ‘bullshit’ = ghost + nonsense speech/prevarication/lie). I guess graduate school hasn’t been a total waste.

I tell them a little about anthropology and why as people who are majoring in public affairs (whatever that means, by the way), it would be good for them to learn to understand something about the society for which they may be devising or implementing policies (I give the example of unenforceable zoning regulations); introduce the idea of structure-practice-ideology; and talk a little bit about the neighborhood I work in. There are about thirty to forty kids in the class, densely packed into the four or five rows of desks towards the back of the room. Only a couple of people look like they’re physically falling asleep, but given the typical response of Taiwanese kids to questions posed by someone in a position of authority, which is to giggle, I’ll never know if they found anything I said interesting, or if they spent the whole time being weirded out by a foreigner who could bullshit for so long in Chinese, or if they were thinking about what to eat for dinner and why their boyfriend said that stupid thing on the phone last night.[8] Forty kids giving a total of one single comment, aside some shy wavy goodbyes at the end. Whatever the Chicago class this winter will be, it can’t be less interactive than that.

Jennifer happened to call me up right after the class was over. Hearing where I was and what I was doing there, she remarked, “Wow. That is really Taiwanese; everything at the last minute.” (Of course the reason she was calling me was to ask for a nice English translation for a Chinese slogan that her friend’s firm had decided to use. They needed a good English translation, of course, right now, by tomorrow at the latest, so the friend had run over to Jennifer’s bar to see if she could help out.) I relayed the comment on to Joe, who agreed: “I told you I was Tai-ke. Now I know how Tai-ke I really am.”

Afterward, Joe took me out to the Xinzhu night market, centered around the awesome Xinzhu City God temple. City God temples turn out to be my favorite: the Taiwanese temple that I like the most is the Tainan City God one. City God temples are not yinmiao, not ‘shadow’ temples, but they do deal with the darker side of things—specifically, with the post-death side of things. The Tainan City God temple has a huge abacus over the front door, on which the god’s accountant calculates the merit (gongde) you’ve acquired in your life along with the bad things you’ve done; he informs the god of his calculations, and the god decides what punishments you should suffer. The temple is full of spirits carrying scary implements of punishment, and bears the creepy inscription “爾來了, You have come”—because everyone ends up there sooner or later.

Shall I tell you about the delicious things we ate? Or have you had enough? I’ll just run through the list quickly. The defining aspect, as so often with Taiwanese foods, was texture, and in this case, as so often with Taiwanese foods, the texture was Q. I still have not managed to come up with a good description of Q in English (although I’ve written an almost pornographic description in Chinese, in my first attempt at a Chinese language story). Currently I’m sticking to “a kind of chewy resilience.” But maybe it was originally “a kind of resilient chewiness.” I am a bit preoccupied with this kougan, mouth-feeling, which Joe claims is normally the province of o-ba-san, old ladies. We avoided what are technically known to be Xinzhu specialties—fried rice noodles and savory meat balls—because they have become universal in Taiwan and I’ve had them a hundred times before, and concentrated on stuff I was less familiar with.

We started out with something that looked like a sausage but was actually pieces of very chewy meat wrapped in a smooth brown mass that was softer than Q but harder than pudding, made out of wheat flour and something else. This was complemented by bah-wan, a big, flattish dumpling with a chopped meat and onion heart boiled in a bouncy Q wrap of translucent dough made out of maybe rice flour. Then we went on to gui-zang, which is kind of similar when you describe it, except that it’s steamed rather than boiled, but completely different when you taste it—sweet and with an almost chewing-gum like Q-ness. My absolute favorite. After a couple of other less interesting things just to make sure we were properly stuffed, we finished up with a sweet ginger soup with tangyuan, also super-Q dumplings filled with sweet sesame and peanut concoctions.

Bellies full, we got back in the car and drove towards Taipei, stopping in at Joe’s home on the way and sitting for a while with his absolutely lovely father, younger brother, the eventually screaming three-month-old son of his older brother, and Joe’s also lovely, awakened-by-the-baby mother, who like a good grandmother is in charge of baby raising. The family lives in two neighboring apartments in a pretty high-class gated high-rise complex in Taipei County. Joe, his brother, brother’s wife, and their baby sleep in one apartment, and father, mother, and younger brother sleep in the one next door, which is also where the family altar and hanging-out space is located. It’s basically the ideal traditional living arrangement, a family compound with the third generation already started (and a boy at that), moved into a very modern environment. Joe’s parents sell seafood at the local market; his mother has a middle-school, his father an elementary school, education. I asked him if they had given him a lot of pressure when he was growing up and he said no, they just always made it clear that they thought education was important and that if you were more educated you wouldn’t have to work so hard, like they did, carrying heavy loads and having to be out at all hours all the time. The eldest son is finishing a degree in electrical engineering; Joe, as I mentioned, is also getting a PhD; and the younger brother is getting an MA in science education from Taiwan Normal University.

And that was Tuesday.

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[1] Sangren, P. Steven. 1984. Traditional Chinese Corporations: Beyond Kinship. Journal of Asian Studies 43:391-415.

[2] Freedman, Maurice. 1979. “The Chinese domestic family: models” in The study of Chinese society: essays by Maurice Freedman. G. William Skinner (ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. (235-240)

[3] DeGlopper, Donald. 1995. Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City. Albany: State University of New York Press.

[4] E.g.: Tseng Tzu said, "At the end of everyday, I ask myself three questions. 1) In my acts for others, have I been worthy of their trust? 2) Have I been true to my word? 3) Have I practiced what I taught?”

[5] The etymology of Tai-ke is a mystery to all I ask, but I have my own theory about it. Many years ago, for some mass media reason that I don’t recall just now (maybe a TV show?), the term Niu-yue-ke 紐約客 became a popular way of referring to New Yorkers or people who were like New Yorkers. Niu-yue is just the Chinese for New York. Normally to refer to someone who comes from a place, you’d say Place + ren, where ren is person. The ke in Niu-yue-ke is probably a phonetic play on the ker in New Yorker; that’s how it’s pronounced, anyway. So I suspect that the ke in Tai-ke is transferred from the ke in Niu-yue-ke.

[6] I think I’ve said this elsewhere but I’ll just say it again anyway: last year when the Cultural Association of the neighborhood I work in was having their elections, someone nominated Chairman Lin, a cigarette-smoking, betel-nut chewing owner of a textile business who contributes a lot of money and behind-the-scenes help to the organization, for the position of President. Chairman Lin stood up and made a little speech along these lines: “I never wear long pants [i.e. only wear shorts], and [waving one leg in the air and pointing to it] I never wear socks [i.e. only sandals]. So don’t elect me the Association President. Wait until I start wearing long pants and socks; then you can elect me President.”

[7] “我喜歡台客… 我聽國語我硬不起來” “I like Tai-ke… if I hear Mandarin I can’t get it up” (where “can’t get it up” = hard + not + resultative verb suffix). How’s that for a language ideology?

[8] I shouldn’t condemn the whole lot of them to giggledom, though. At some point I mentioned that many people call the area I work in fuza, ‘complicated,’ and asked if someone could tell me what they thought it meant. Joe picked a name from his list to call on (nobody would volunteer), and a girl sitting in the middle row, wearing a bright pink sweatshirt, raised her hand. She then gave an amazingly complete answer to what must have seemed a pretty odd, or at least unexpected, question, touching on every single area that has been mentioned to me by various people in the entire year and a half that I have been asking people what they mean by the term, from economics (relatively poor) to social structure (very diverse and with many informal elements), infrastructure (run down), public safety (not good), and ideology (makes us uncomfortable). Hope she goes on to graduate school.

light night music

I haven’t been listening to music practically at all since I got here, aside from a brief reacquaintance with Sun Yanzi (decent girl rock for around here, though by American standards still whiny), but this evening I came across the Eminem cds I bought last year in Hong Kong (I don’t think he ever made it over here). So I’m listening to one of the cds, puttering around in my room and absent-mindedly muttering the occasional phrase with him, like you know, like “bitch I’ma kill you, you don’t wanna fuck with me … you ain’t nothin but a slut to me”[1] and stuff like that, and I am reminded of my friend Charlie, going dancing in Taipei in the early ‘90s. I guess maybe hiphop had just recently come to Taiwan at that point and maybe, given the way that any filth in imported fashions is usually efficiently cleaned up around here (grungy clothing meticulously sewn to look torn and dyed to look dirty, but not too dirty, sexy hip-hop moves sanitized for use in old-lady aerobics, etc.) maybe people hadn’t quite gotten the hang of actual filth yet. Or for whatever reason. I just remember Charlie describing going dancing in Taipei, at some teenybopper place for college kids like him, and watching all the adorable twenty year old girls giggling and dancing and singing along with 2 Live Crew the chorus of “We want some pussy.” Never really pictured myself as one of those girls.

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[1] But for the record, haha, let me say that, alhtough the Marshall MacLuhan, I mean Marshall Mathers LP is pretty good, The Eminem Show is way funnier. I was listening to that in the gym tonight and had to go find a deserted corner to giggle and dance in.

all in the timing, part 1 (sensitive political situations; sensitive eyes; and sensitive foreign visitors)

We’ve been hosting Important Foreign Guests these last few days—a group of two teachers and eighteen students from an urban design program in Sydney, here for a two-week field trip in which they tackles the design of several project areas; a kind of practicum. The students come from all over the place. Looking around the room today, I counted 11 East Asian-looking folks, some significant majority from mainland China (although at least one of these spoke English with an American accent); 3 tall blond white girls who my Taiwanese coworkers called “the Australians,” although one turned out to be German (should have known by the funky glasses); 3 boys of South or Southeast Asian extraction (one from Indonesia, the others I don’t know); and one very sweet Taiwanese boy, my boss’s former student, who apparently initiated the whole thing. There’s another comparably sized group doing a similar project in Vietnam; the students get to choose where they want to go. All the mainland Chinese students in the program decided to come to Taiwan, one of the professors informed us with amusement and perhaps a little puzzlement. All the city government people who heard this nodded and smiled knowingly. I would guess they had two things on their mind, one stated—that these mainland kids will very likely never have the opportunity to come to Taiwan again, whereas Vietnam “if you want to go you just go”—the other not stated—that they better not disappear or it’s our heads.

Getting the mainland students in was a feat of connection-pulling worthy of a bureaucratic soap opera. Visas for people from the mainland require precise itineraries; names and dates of hotel reservations; a statement of purpose for the trip; copies of their passports, Australian visas, and student i.d. cards faxed to the Ministry of the Interior; the original passports, Australian visas, and student i.d. cards presented at the Taiwanese non-embassy in Sydney; and an official invitation from an official, but not too official, organization in Taiwan that will also act as guarantor against these people overstaying their visas. For the Department of Urban Development itself to have acted as guarantor, we would have had to apply through several levels of the central government bureaucracy and the whole visit would have basically turned into a diplomatic mission; but a diplomatic mission Taiwanese style, where neither side formally recognizes the other’s diplomatic status. A non-diplomatic mission. (Or a diplomatic mission? Think of what all this newfangled word processing can do for Taiwanese international relations!) So instead we went through people we knew at a local college. LZ, second-in-command of my section, called up an important professor he knew at a local college, who also happened to have been a classmate of the head of the Department of Urban Development when they studied in Germany after college. The professor got his school to issue a formal invitation (which LZ wrote and I translated).

This invitation plus the various forms of documentation should then technically have gone through at least the entire hierarchy of the Ministry of the Interior, and perhaps some other central government ministry as well. This would have taken around two months or more to complete, assuming it would have gotten through all the levels to begin with. But as usual, we were very pressed for time. So my section head whipped out some connections: one of the assistants to the Minister of the Interior happens to be an old friend of his, a friend who specifically called him up when the Minister of the Interior was appointed, to let Section Head know that he was going to be working there, i.e. that Section Head could ask him for favors in that capacity. Section Head says he’d never taken him up on this offer before; but this time there was just no getting around it. The request was approved shortly after this phone call was made, with just enough time for everyone to submit their visa applications in Sydney, those applications to be mailed to the relevant bureau in Taiwan, and the visas to be issued, though not sent back; we arranged with the airlines to have the visas waiting for the students when they arrived. Unfortunately within a day of their arrival, four mainland students had checked out of the hotel rooms that had been reserved for them and moved somewhere else, without telling their teachers or the city government people. I thought I saw Section Head get a little pale when he heard this news; being responsible for some mainlanders running around loose and unaccounted for is probably a very fast route to unemployment, and the professors were asked to rectify the situation. One of them told me that by the time he asked to see the relevant students that evening, they’d already moved back into the original hotel; apparently word had spread fast enough to avoid anyone looking bad.

The two professors arrived last Friday and we spent all day briefing them on the potential projects and then taking them to some of the actual sites. Then on Sunday the whole group got a tour of Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world, which is in the Xinyi Plan District. Taipei 101 is currently only open up to the fifth (shopping mall) floor; the rest is still under construction. Only very special people like valued foreign guests get to go all the up to the 90^th floor, to the observation deck. (Like the idiot that I am, I forgot my camera that morning (that one morning!), but the professors said they’d give me some of the pictures that they took.) The building has the fastest elevators in the world, which may have contributed to a very scary event: one of the professors has in the past had detached retinas in both of his eyes (“from doing my PhD, so be careful”). A little while after we got out of the building, having taken the high-speed elevator up and down, his eye started bleeding. They rushed him to a hospital, where the doctor said he’d be okay; but a little while later the bleeding started again. The sweet Taiwanese student called up Section Head; and Section Head called up the leading ophthalmologist at the leading hospital in all of Taiwan, who just happens to be a friend of his. The ophthalmologist saw the professor right away and confirmed that he would be okay; apparently there is some sort of gel in the eye that condenses as we get older, and the fast vertical movement of the elevator jiggled it around, causing some minor damage. (Don’t ask me, man, that’s how the other professor explained it over lunch.) The professors were very happy with the level of service. “That’s it,” Section Head told me this morning, “I’ve used up all of my connections. I don’t know anybody else. I hope nothing else happens!”

My ostensible job for the last few days has been occasional translation for the it turns out very few people who either really don’t speak English at all or are too embarrassed to speak it in public. Mostly I’m just a safety net for the city government people, relieving them from worrying about what would happen if their English suddenly broke down, and also relieving them from having to chitchat in English, which of course is harder than speaking professionally about your specialty. In other words, I am supposed to pei, accompany and take care of, the professors, which is just fine with me, as they are both interesting and nice (though one noticeably more so than the other). On Saturday, after the visit to Taipei 101 but before the bleeding eye, Professor More So and I somehow got on the topic of America and its political culture. He has a brother in the States whom he’s visited a few times. I asked him about his impressions. Starting with some polite caveats, he continued, “but it seems to me that Americans are rather sentimental. They want to believe. They want to be moved. We Australians are quite cynical; we don’t trust our politicians. If someone has succeeded in politics, we assume that he is not a very good person. But Americans seem to really want to believe in their politicians. When you watch the news, people are very respectful; even in interviews, they’re very sensitive to the position of the person they’re interviewing. In Australia, interviews are all about attacking.”

comment, by Anonymous, brought up to text

Just because it is so cool:

"In the whole of feudal Europe...there existed groups founded on blood-relationship. The terms which served to describe them were rather indefinite--in France, most commonly, parente [accent over the e] or lignage. Yet the ties thus created were regarded as extremely strong. One word is characteristic. In France, in speaking of kinsfolk, one commonly called them simply 'friends' (amis) and in Germany, Freunde. A legal document of the eleventh century originating from the Ile de France enumerates them thus: 'His friends, that is to say his mother, his brothers, his sisters and his other relatives by blood or marriage.' ... The general assumption seems to have been that there was no real friendship save between persons united by blood."

--Marc Bloch, Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Dependence, Volume 1 (1961:123-24).

what's the difference between blog and diary again?

I think I’ve already told the story of my first really Taiwanese friend-making process. It started with a very pleasant, hours-long interview with a person relevant to my fieldwork. We found ourselves very tandelai 談的來, ‘able to talk,’ and the interview culminated in her taking me back to her house, feeding me tea, introducing me to her parents, and sending me home with a bagful of auspicious fruit that her mother had dedicated on the family altar that morning. A week later she emailed me an essay she’d written in English; she needed to revise it for publication and asked if I could look it over. I did and, partly because I am a little obsessive in this area and partly because her English is not very good, spent the better part of the next week editing it. To thank me, she took me out to a nice dinner which again lasted something like six hours because we just couldn’t stop talking.

A while later I saw her again and mentioned that I was having trouble figuring out how to do fieldwork in the city government: I wanted a place in an office so that I would have an excuse to be around bureaucrats all the time, but nobody I knew who was in a position to help me with this seemed interested in doing so, and I couldn’t think of a way of setting something like this up myself. The next day she called me up with the contact information of someone she knew in the city government who said he might be able to help; I met with him a couple of days later and by the end of the week I was officially installed as the volunteer “foreign consultant” in the Department of Urban Development.

Probably the most general explanation of the term renqing 人情, human-emotion, is people doing nice things for one another. Donald DeGlopper[1] places renqing within the greater category of relations having to do with qing 情 or sentiment. The most basic of these is ganqing 感情, feeling-sentiment, which is often used to describe the state of the relationship between closely associated people like friends and lovers, but which is also an “ultimately instrumental tie” that can very broadly refer “to the affective, variable component of any two person relation” (30-31).[2] Renqing, for DeGlopper, is “a more narrowly instrumental and restricted exchange of favors than” ganqing (32); but still in my experience it never quite loses its grounding in qing, sentiment. City dwellers often talk about the countryside as a place where people are less cold, more kind, a place with renqing wei人情味, the taste-smell or aura of human emotion. Anyway apparently when my benefactress called her contact in the city government to see if he could help me out, she expressed the urgency of her need by explaining, “I owe her a big chunk of renqing.”[3]

A week later I thanked her by taking her out for a nice dinner; the conversation lasted well into the middle of the night, extending beyond our previous scope of Taiwan politics and into our personal and family lives. Somewhere between the exchange of two big chunks of human-emotion, the establishment of a clear pattern of an ability-to-talk, and the little interactions in between, it seemed pretty clear that we had become close friends. Although the word for friend here, pengyou 朋友, is about as general a term as any I’ve run into—anyone, people you just met and people you don’t even know, can be pengyou—the actual practices of close association encompass, it seems to me, something slightly other than they typically do (for many people I know) in America. The something other, as best I can tell, is this “big chunk of renqing” explicitness about practical concerns, the recognition that mutual aid and mutual obligation are part of sentimental attachment, rather than being opposed to or separate from it, as they are in (what I understand to be) mainstream American friendship ideology. (How I hedge on American ideology! I can’t possibly be less expert on that than I am on Taiwanese ideology, can I? And yet I seem to have no trouble spouting on and on about that.)

That all is kind of background to a vague feeling I’m having right now, the realization that having friends here—or rather, being a friend here—has a strange heightened quality for me that exceeds the naturally heightening effect of different definitions and standards for friendship. It may just be that I am more aware, here, of how dependent I am on my friends—partly dependent on their assistance, but mostly, at this point, dependent simply on the fact of their being my friends. A girl I know has been going through a bad time lately, some sad stories. When she called me up to talk about them, I talked with her for an hour, went off to my lunchtime appointment, and then rode over to where she was and talked for another couple of hours.[4] There’s nothing I can do; the problems are not fixable by me; I’m just being-there. In the States I am often a little impatient of people’s problems. My eagerness to “talk people through” things, sympathize, offer support decreased dramatically around age nineteen. I am usually interested in offering advice much in the way that I am usually interesting in responding to a theory, but I’m rarely interested in offering the same advice twice, and tend to become annoyed if I think I’m supposed to just listen, to be-there with someone while they’re having a problem. Here, on the other hand, I find it flattering, heart-warming, self-affirming. And repeated advice, supportive comments, empty emotion talk—well, at the very least I’m practicing a side of my Chinese that doesn’t get much play in the fieldwork environment. And besides which, I’m insinuating myself into people’s lives.

And I guess it makes sense that this would have a big, though puzzling, emotional effect. On the one hand, just because I helped someone with an essay and liked her all the more for it doesn’t mean that it’s completely comfortable to think about my relation with her as an insinuation and an ego-fodder transmission device. On the other hand, here’s what Margery Wolf has to say about families:

“Chinese children are taught by proverb, by example, and by experience that the family is the source of their security, and relatives the only people who can be depended on. Ostracism from the family is one of the harshest sanctions that can be imposed on an erring youth. One of the reasons mainlanders as individuals are considered so untrustworthy on Taiwan is the fact that they are not subject to the controls of (and therefore have no fear of ostracism from) their families.” [5]

I guess things like distraught phone calls, supportive conversations, emotional support (insofar as I can offer very little practical support anyway) are all ways of grounding myself—cobbling together a disjointed group of people, people who might find me trustworthy, and from whom I might fear ostracism.


[1] Donald DeGlopper. Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1995. An excellent ethnography and a great read—DeGlopper belongs to the small clan of anthropologists who have a sense of humor; this clan for some reason seems to be part of the tribe that makes astute observations and trustworthy analyses.
[2] Ganqing “is as vague in Chinese as ‘good relationship’ is in English. It does not and cannot have as precise a meaning as ‘father’s elder brother’ or ‘lienholder to the field identified in the land register of deeds as…’” (32).
[3] “我欠她一大分人情,” this by his report.
[4] (This whole entry was sparked by a text message she sent my cell phone after we talked: 跟妳說話總是給我一些力量, 謝謝! Talking to you always gives me a little strength, thank you!)
[5] Margery Wolf, Women and the family in rural Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972:35.