self-presentation to self via others, part 3

When Vivian finished her presentation, people in the audience clapped. She had done a very good job of presenting the story that the community tells itself about itself, and had snuck in a few of her own additions to the normal story as well. John Friedmann, somewhat inscrutible but I think maybe a little impatient with being the enabling witness to a little bout of consciousness-raising, said, “Okay, but what is the community that you are talking about? You keep talking about community, but what is the scope of this community? Who participates in it?” Vivian said, “About 6,000 people in this neighborhood.” The Professor said, “About 15,000 people in this neighborhood.” Then we opened the question up to the audience: “What is our community? What is its scope?” Here were the answers that people called out:

1. “arising through struggle/demand” 爭取來的
2. “in common” 共同的
3. “the people around here are all [part of it]” 這邊的人都是

6,000…15,000 I’m not sure exactly how Vivian and The Professor were getting their numbers, but I suspect it is through rough senses of the population of the relevant li, or boroughs (or neighborhoods, or subdistricts--there is no standar), in the area. The Cultural Association is associated by name but not by administration with the Tangbu (Sugar Refinery) Borough, official population 5,718 in September. The other two boroughs that tend to participate in our activities and to have members in the Cultural Association are the Lüti (Green Levy) Borough, official population 4986, and the Heping (Peace, and the name of a street that bounds it) Borough, official population 7,555. When pressed, by me, for a relatively long time, The Professor concluded that the core, consistently active members of the Cultural Association numbered 20-30 (which accords with my sense of things), the technical members of the Cultural Association numbered 100-200, and the number of people who were not regularly active in the group but could be drawn out to participate in particular events or protests was 300-400.

When it became clear that 1, 2, and 3 above were not what Mr. Friedmann was looking for, people started calling out: “Heping West Road, Huanhe South Road, Mengjia Boulevard, Xiyuan Road,” among other names, giving him the geographic boundaries of what they think of as their own place (although in every other situation in which I’ve asked people, here or elsewhere, about the meaning of the word “community,” they have denied a physical or geographic scope to it).

“Okay,” said Mr. Friedmann, speaking with a very very slight accent that I just noticed then for the first time, “so you have talked about what you don’t want. But what would like to see? Do you have any ideas about what you would like the neighborhood to become? Ask them,” nodding toward the residents in the audience.

The Professor jumped in: “I’d like to supplement a bit what Vivian just said. You see, area is one of Taipei’s oldest areas, and in the context of the development of Taipei city, what happens is that old neighborhoods tend to be rather more run down. The quality of their environment is not very good, and their residents’ educational and cultural level is not very high. The local government does not see these areas as very important and does not distribute resources to them.” The Professor, like Vivian, was not exactly speaking to Mr. Friedmann; but unlike Vivian he was not so explicitly speaking to the audience either. He faced a little bit towards me (making a kind of line-of-sight loop around Mr. Friedmann, who sat in between us) and a little bit outwards on a slight diagonal, and spoke clearly but not with oratorial projection, as perhaps befits a man of his stature. Or at any rate that is pretty much his normal speaking style—loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to look like he cares about, unnervously and unembarrassedly taking his time regardless of what he is talking about, and, in this case, ignoring my eventual signals to stop for a sec so I could translate. (The people who tend to forget the translator have been, in my experience so far, at the high and the low ends of the status hierarchy: high-ranking city government officials and everyday neighborhood residents.)

Supplement補充 buchong is kind of like “So, …” or “Right, and …” It announces that a new speaker is wresting the floor away from someone else, in a polite way, and signals a sometimes specious connection to the previous topic or line of reasoning.

Taipei’s oldest areas The development of Taipei city started from right around this area, which was already settled in the early 18^th century. Wanhua, the city administrative district in which The Neighborhood sits, borders the river and served as the major port in the area until it was silted up sometime in the I think 19^th century. In case you were looking for pristine bounded communities or something, it’s always nice to keep in mind that the name Wanhua is the Mandarin pronunciation of the Japanese characters assigned by the colonial regime to the Taiwanese pronunciation of the Aboriginal name for the area, which was the word for the kind of boat that people made here (from what I understand a dugout canoe sort of arrangement).

People currently call the area Wanhua (when they are referring to the administrative district, whose boundaries have changed considerably over time); M/Banga (when speaking Taiwanese or when wanting to add a little Taiwanese flava to their Mandarin); or Mengjia (the Mandarin pronunciation of the Taiwanese pronunciation of the Aboriginal name for the area, which does not go through Japanese)[1] for reasons I can’t pinpoint but that I have a feeling are linked to an evocation of the area’s historical status (rather than its current role as the dirty, Taiwanese, chaotic area of Taipei). The area was famous enough in imperial era Taiwan to appear in a saying that lists the three most important places in Taiwan—a saying that, if everyone wasn’t saying it then, they sure are now, as soon as you tell them you are working in Wanhua: “One Fu, Two Lu, Three Mengjia 一府, 二鹿, 三艋舺,” where Fu is Tainan in the south (the first area settled by non-indigenous people, including Chinese from the southern mainland coast and operatives of the Dutch East India Company who soon set up shot there and ran the island for a few years), and Lu is Lugang, a formerly important port city.

Be all this as it may, the actual houses in this neighborhood, and most of its current residents, did not come around until the 1970s and 1980s. This is not exactly the 18^th century, but it already counts as pretty old. At that time the area in which I live now was mostly farmland.

Educational and cultural level Although people do sometimes, often in a lowered voice, mention the fact that there are discrepancies in income in Taiwan and that people living in this neighborhood have relatively low incomes, for the most part people tend not to talk about anything that may be construed as class. People are not poor but poorly educated or uncultured; infrastructure and public facilities are neglected not because the residents have no money but because they do not have the proper connections to the people who could make sure that they are attended to. The Professor has the happy coincidence of having a very high cultural and educational level (a phd from an American university and tenure at one of the high-ranking public universities in Taiwan) and lots of money (in general academia pays better, relative to other jobs, than in the US; and also I hear that he has been in charge of organizing several major construction projects for his university, which at the very least means he now has a lot of friends). He also has many connections, especially in the DPP or “green” side of the political spectrum, which may or may not have something to do with his having lots of money (he has made considerable contributions to politicians who have expressed willingness to help out the neighborhood in its various projects).

Local government as opposed to national level government, which actually also does not distribute resources to this area but (1) is less supposed to, being national level and all and (2) is currently under DPP, or “green,” leadership and is therefore closer to The Professor’s heart than the city government, currently under KMT (“blue”) control.

“This situation,” The Professor continued over my signal to stop for a sec so I could translate and Mr. Friedmann’s somewhat annoyed, “Yes, but what I’m asking—,” “This situation, and when Taisugar wanted to sell the land to Xiyuan Hospital for a large-scale, 700 bed retirement home, it made the residents very sad in their hearts. And it was out of this sadness that we came together as a community. We went to visit Professor Hsia to ask him for advice, and that was really a turning point in our movement. He told us, the important thing is the quality of your living environment. You should not be asking for profit-making ventures for the community; you should be improving the quality of your living space. That was really a turning point in our thinking, and it was after that that we demanded a park—because this area does not have the open green space mandated by law.”

Xiyuan Hospital Here we get to more of the story that I am sick of narrating; you probably get the gist from this and from my previous blabbering on the topic.

Professor Hsia The Professor gave a little not in the direction of Mr. Friedmann as he said this. Professor Hsia, of course, was ‘in charge’ of Mr. Friedmann, was his host, and as such it was quite natural for us to go out of our way in praising him to Mr. Friedmann, who did not seem to pick up on the compliment being given him as the honored guest of so distinguished and capable a person. Earlier in the day, before Mr. Friedmann’s arrival, The Professor had turned to me and said, “So who is this guy anyway?” It may be that he didn’t realize that Mr. Friedmann’s presence was more a compliment to Professor Hsia than the other way around.

Quality of your living enviroment Professor Hsia sees the quality-of-space movement in this neighborhood as the emergence of a civil society on Taiwan.[2] Usually when people make demands about spatial management as a neighborhood or community—and usually such people are middle- to upper-middle class—they want an office building, a commercial center, something that will make money. “I told them,” Professor Hsia told me a long time ago, “money is not as important as quality.” Besides, he continued, if they ask for a big office building, people will say they’re just trying to take the profit away from other people and get it for themselves. If they ask for something that benefits them but does not bring in money, people will see that they are honestly concerned with their own living environment. They won’t look greedy. This tactic has worked admirably. Neighborhood residents report various meetings with various government officials who have expressed amazement that they don’t tend to talk about property values but about the quality of the environment; and that they seem to want to keep living in this neighborhood rather than trying to sell off their apartments and move somewhere ‘better.’

Turning point in our thinking The Professor has been a leader here from the very first, although there used to be a couple of people who would regularly oppose him or present their own, different ideas to the group. One of those people has since died (he sounds like he was a wonderful man, and he was married to a wonderful woman, one of the most straightforwardly kind and giving people I have met in the course of my fieldwork). The other one had a big, public fight with him when they were setting up the organizational structure of the Cultural Association (as it was converting itself from ad hoc protest group to legitimate civic organization), stormed out in tears, and has never come back—although some members of the community have kept up relations with her, which is how I met her. (She is now a close friend of mine.) Although people sometimes express dissatisfaction with some of his actions, for the most part whatever The Professor says is what individual members of the Cultural Association say. So one suspects that the turning point he is talking about here was a turning point in his thinking. His status in the community probably has something to do with his status in the world and his money; but it also probably has something to do with the fact that he really is very effective in getting his ideas listened to by the government and private parties who can do something about them, and has been a driving force behind many of the community’s successful projects. (This also probably has something to do with his status in the world and his money.)

“Yes,” said Mr. Friedmann, facing me of all people, “I understand that. But what I want to know is what do they want, what do they want for their neighborhood? You can’t just always be opposing things. You have to have some idea of what you’d like to see.”

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[1] Actually I just realized I don’t really understand where Mengjia comes from or when it was used, as presumably nobody spoke Mandarin on Taiwan before 1945. Maybe it’s a later Mandarin pronunciation of the Taiwanese pronunciation?

[2] Personal communication, but also I think in an essay somewhere. To tell you the truth, I find the full circle of the residents asking Professor Hsia what they should demand and taking his advice to the letter, and Professor Hsia then touting them and their demands as a sign of the spontaneous emergence of civil society in post-martial law Taiwan a little bit funny. Professor Hsia is deeply enough involved in politics—initially on the Green side but then, abruptly, on the Blue—that someone recently told me, “We can’t really judge him as a scholar anymore, he’s more of a political figure now.” His students can be found at all levels of the city and national government, and many of them have had famous fallings-out with him. He is, however, awfully charismatic.