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.