self-presentation to self via others, part 2

It’s now the next day from whenever the last day was, but it is no longer morning. Today was taken up entirely with more The Neighborhood related activities—meetings meetings meetings, in which my heart was not. Then just enough time putzing around to have Tai-ke Joe drop a line saying that he was practicing his English by reading my blog (who ever thought I’d be writing a textbook) and that “if you printed out the whole thing I bet it would be longer than most Taiwanese dissertations.” Then dinner, and now sitting down to continue this I find that I have not come up with any more amusing way of telling the fieldnoty part of it; but I must write it down; but I am too lazy to write first and then rewrite for a non-me audience. So bear with me or, alternatively, don’t.

When you last us, I was sitting at a table with John Friedmann, Vivian, and The Professor.

When we’d first sat down, as everyone was milling about and no one was talking to him, I had given Mr. Friedmann a brief outline of that recent history of the neighborhood that I took to be the reason that Professor Hsia had sent him to take a look around: the residents’ protest about the disposition of a parcel of neighborhood land, which has now more or less been turned into a park; their work to get several neighborhood buildings declared heritage sites (making them undestroyable public property); and the current agitation against a plan by the Taiwan Electric Company to move underground and considerably enlarge an electric distribution station it has in the neighborhood and to build a fourteen story office building on top of it.

Vivian, still facing the audience and speaking in a loud, clear voice, now started talking about these issues. “So now we are facing several main issues. We have these newly declared heritage sites, which will give our neighborhood some much-needed public space. But now we have to figure out how to manage these buildings. Usually what the government does with such buildings is to OT, to give it over to someone else to run. But this takes it out of community hands. We’d like to maintain community control over the buildings, but on the other hand we do not have any experience running such a space, so it will be very difficult. This room, the Shenghuo Guan, is actually our first experiment in operating our own community space. We hope to make it a very lively place, a place people love to go to and everyone uses.”

Heritage site There are two levels of historical protection offered to built structures on Taiwan, which I have translated as heritage site and historical structure. Heritage sites can only be preserved; they cannot be altered in any way except for the purposes of preservation. Historical structures have much less protection—I’m not sure exactly what the conditions are, but I think you are just supposed to maintain the façade and can do what you want with the rest. Maybe not even that. The important factors in determining whether a structure is worthy of preservation are (1) its age; (2) its condition; (3) its architectural value; (4) its historical value; (5) its current social value—meaning whether people come out and say they want it preserved.

The Cultural Association lobbied the Cultural Affairs Department of Taipei City very hard and very long to get all three buildings that currently serve as Taiwan Sugar Corporation storage houses declared heritage sites. The people who decide whether something is or is not a heritage or historical site are a group of “scholars and experts” convened by the Cultural Affairs Department from a list of all scholars and experts resident on Taiwan. There was quite a lot of argument at the time about whether all three buildings should be declared heritage sites or whether one or two of them should be declared historical structures or nothing at all.

About fifty neighborhood residents showed up to the open meeting with the scholars and experts group at which private citizens could express their views, and many of them spoke with passion, conviction, and organization about their desire to preserve the buildings. (We’d had a neighborhood meeting the night before so people could practice their speeches and get commentary on rhetorical strategy.) Around twenty showed up for the scholars’ and experts’ tour of the premises. All of the buildings in question here were built in the Japanese era, so they’re too recent to be preserved on age grounds alone. The factors emphasized by people lobbying for preservation were architectural value (Japanese structures are rare enough now and considered valuable in and of themselves, and one of these buildings has a two-peaked, what they call “M-shaped” roof, which is unique in Taisugar buildings and maybe in all Japanese era buildings); historical value (this was the only sugar refinery in northern Taiwan); and, most importantly, current social value, as expressed by the sheer number of people who bothered to come to the discussions. The lone Taisugar representative at the open meeting, who opposed any preservation requirements for the company’s buildings, more or less floundered and drowned in the sea of polite but insistent residents.

The city government people I talked to about this case seemed generally to feel that the scholars and experts had acted less on their professional judgment than on the emotions that the residents’ enthusiasm stirred up in them, and expressed admiration for the residents' stirring-up abilities.

OT operate-transfer. I don’t know if this is a term in English. It’s culled from BOT, build-operate-transfer, a very popular way of sharing the burden of building large structures among different states, or among state and non-state organizations. (E.g. Taipi 101 was built by a private company with a lot of incentives from the city government—tax breaks, zoning breaks, some other kind of breaks—and maybe some subsidies. It will be run by that company for the next seventy years, after which it will be turned over to the Taipei City Government.) Again, OT is pronounced first tone-first tone.

Takes it out of community hands A very successful case of heritage site reuse, as it’s called, is Taibei zhi Jia, Taipei’s Home, the former residence of the US ambassador. It’s a beautiful building and it’s been beautifully remodeled as an all-purpose culture center, with a small movie theater that plays out of the way movies, a book store, and a coffee shop. It’s considered a very successful case, but Vivian and the Cultural Association are nervous about reproducing a similar result in their neighborhood. Completely giving over the management of the buildings would dilute the whole atmosphere of active community participation that they are interested in fostering. But perhaps more to the point, the residents of The Neighborhood could not afford to get coffee at a coffee shop like that very often. So they’re afraid that opening up the heritage site management for bidding, as the city government usually does, would effectively close off the sites to the people who worked so hard to get them preserved.

“We’ve started a class in community building and environmental planning, and we’re talking about organizing other classes, in Japanese, English, calligraphy, and so on. We hope that by charging a small tuition fee for these classes, we can make everyone happy to participate; support the basic needs of this room, like water, electricity, and DSL; and make sure everyone in the community has a chance to participate, like our community Mama’s, our local elders, and so on.”

Started a class The first two sessions of this class consisted of a professor Vivian had invited explaining the particular characteristics of Taiwanese culture by listing a lot of Taiwanese-language sayings. He also mentioned something that yet further complicated the tension around the terms used to designate…well, I don’t know what terms to designate them with, so it’s kind of difficult to talk about. Basically, okay, you know that there is this tension about whether “Taiwanese” people, i.e. the people who live on the island of Taiwan and have a Republic of China passport, are “Chinese.” (So people often say, “We Chinese people …” but every once in a while when I say “Chinese people” someone corrects me and says, “I am not a Chinese person, I am a Taiwanese person.”)

Similarly, there’s a little bit of an argument about what the various languages relevant to the Taiwanese situation should be called. Nobody ever says “Chinese中文 zhongwen” in Chinese; usually to mean Mandarin people in Taiwan say “the national language 國語 guoyu.”[1] But some people object to this designation on the grounds that the KMT, which instituted it, was interested in its own nation, ruled by itself, and that it’s nothing to do with us. Some people call Mandarin “Beijing language 北京話 Beijing hua,” and some people, including the person who first yelled at me for using ‘national language’ after I’d finally switched over from the mainland term, say “Hua language 華語 Huayu,” named after what I interpret as being the most ethno-racial, least nation-statish, way of referring to Chinese people.

To mean Taiwanese people say either “Taiwanese language 台語 taiyu” or “Southern Min language 閩南語 Minnan yu,” for the area and dialect group in southern Fujian from which the dialect spoken on Taiwan derives (and to which it is almost identical, or considerably different, depending on the political views of who you ask).

So, okay. So this professor had a whole long spiel on how we should not call ourselves Minnan people (as people often do refer to the group of people who are otherwise referred to as this-province-people 本省人 bensheng ren), because the Min of Minnan is a very insulting term. Just look at the character: it’s a door (門), and in the doorway is what? A snake (虫)! So we Taiwanese are like snakes in your doorway? No thanks, I do not accept this name. We should call ourselves Hoklo; that is a better name. After class I asked him where the name Hoklo came from. It was the standard way of referring to my God what am I supposed to call them now bensheng ren, Minnan people minus the snake, in anthropology writing up until recently, but I don’t know where it comes from and I have never noticed anyone using it before in Taiwan. “本來就有 It was always there,” he said, not very helpfully. Thank goodness he’s the only person I’ve ever heard voicing this complaint; the situation is complicated enough as it is.

Japanese, English, calligraphy are what people want to learn.

Water, electricity, and DSL The Shenghuo Guan has two computers that someone donated, sitting on two very old desks from some Taiwan Sugar Corporation office that a member of the community who used to work them got someone to give him.

Community Mama’s, our local elders Mama’s, as you know, are usually housewives with grown children, and often grandmothers. Young people are generally not involved in any of the activist activities in this neighborhood: they are busy studying for tests, working, or having children, and are not expected to show up to things.

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[1] People on the mainland usually say “the common language 普通話 putong hua” but I’ve heard “national language” as well, perhaps especially from people who come from the far south.