self-presentation to self via others, part 4

[When we left our heroes, they were sitting at a table... “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.” ...]

Vivian took up the question and handed it out to the group. Like many educated people here, her ability to understand English far outstrips her ability to speak it. I always feel a little embarrassed by this, for some reason, a little superfluous, as I do when I suddenly can’t think of how to translate some word, in either direction, and people pipe up to tell me. When interpreting live, I have that scene from Bananas always before me. Anyway, here are the answers that people called out:

1. a park公園
2. reuse of heritage buildings 古蹟再利用
3. recover the honor and wealth of the past 恢復以前的榮副
4. liveliness, life-power 活力
5. everyone knows one another 大家都認識
6. sugar refinery culture passed on to our children and grandchildren

A park The current thing that looks quite like a park is actually not a park but land designated for use as a park that is temporarily being used as a park. This has been the situation for tha last five years or so as the city government, having agreed to procure the land and turn it into a neighborhood park, has wrangled with the Taiwan Sugar Corporation. Taisugar, which is technically kind-of nationalized (yes, that’s a technical term) and whose chairman is appointed by the president, does still produce sugar, but its main profit comes from land. The company, formed in Shanghai in anticipation of retrocession in the mid-1940s, inherited the land that had belonged to the Japanese sugar corporations under colonial rule, much of which was seized during the big land survey that determined that there was about 10 times more cleared land on the island than had been declared for tax purposes under Qing dynasty rule. Taisugar has experimented with other profit-making ventures like pig raising, but its main profits now come from real estate.

As a less than only kind-of nationalized corporation, Taisugar had run a variety of extension programs to make up to sugar farmers for the fact that growing cane is not, actually, very profitable: they had insurance and loans and scholarships and schools and fertilizer and irrigation and god knows what all. People seem sometimes still to think of it as a kind of public service enterprise—in a discussion about what to do with the old buildings recently, someone said, “Give them over to Taisugar to run as a sugarcane museum or something, whatever, they can figure out what to do with them and we’ll help.” The city government person presiding over the meeting took the chance to delicately explain that Taisugar has become increasingly privatized, and now has obligations to its shareholders, and has to worry about making a profit, and so is not very likely to have much interest in a predictably unprofitable venture like a museum. “I think it’s important for us to recognize that Taisugar has changed in this way.”

Funnily enough, there are several chunks of neighborhood land that don’t look like parks but are parks: each of the three temples in the five-minute or so walking circumference of what I think of as The Neighborhood sits on what is, on my city government zoning maps, park land. But I think I’ve mentioned this before.

Reuse of heritage buildings is a term in city planning and preservation.

Recover the honor and wealth of the past is a pretty unlikely proposal. The clothing produced and sold wholesale in this area (a little in The Neighborhood itself and more and more as you head east along its main street) used to clothe people all over Taiwan: it was a major island center. But as the city expanded to the east, the center of gravity for the wholesale clothing business went there as well, and this area went into steep economic decline.

Liveliness is not a very precise term, but I think it’s pretty accurate. The Neighborhood is teeming with life, people are always organizing trips or events or dinners in the park; the publicly acknowledged sitting-around places like the corner where Mrs. Z waits for cars to wash and the little breakfast stand across from her, and Mr. and Mrs. L’s rice shop, and the neighborhood head’s office, have a flow of tea and people that varies in size and intensity but never dries up; there are always people sitting around in or near the temples smoking and chewing betel nut and talking and watching the world go by; the lady who spreads information for the neighborhood head is always hitting the screechy breaks of her bicycle to convey something to someone; and underneath all this interaction there is the constant grind of industry, the motor scooter mechanic’s wife sewing her piecework in the back room, people stacking up bags of shirts to take to market; and of course people eating and cooking at the fried egg and sandwich breakfast stands, help-yourself buffet lunch stands, fried rice and shrimp geng dinner stands, snacky scallion pancake and everything fry stands. I mean, it’s a pretty lively place.

Everyone knows one another is probably why the place feels so lively, right?

Sugar refinery culture As you can probably predict, this culture has almost no content aside from things like “there was a sugar refinery here;” and “they used to have cows to pull the sugarcane, they’d come through like this;” and “the coolies, they’d put a strap over one shoulder and they’d pulllll;” and “this land used to be all sugarcane fields, you know;” and such similar facts that people continuously repeat to me, to other outsiders, and to one another, the continuous repetition creating a din that is in some ways similar to content, but not so firmly packed.

The Professor broke in to explain that the visit to Professor Hsia was a turning point in the residents’ approach: they started talking about specific things they wanted, which were missing from the neighborhood. They became aware that the poor state of its public facilities and its minimal green space were things that could be rectified. “That was a moment when we went from protest to demand.”

Mr. Friedmann asked what “liveliness,” number 4 above, meant. The Professor and Vivian both smiled. I posed the question to the group and got the following responses:

1. life/fate 生命
2. lots of people 很多人
3. activities 活動
4. green space 綠地
5. particularities (that is, special characteristics of this place) 特色
6. knowledge, education, exchange 知識, 學習, 交流
7. improvement of the quality of living space 生活空間品質提高
8. having a place to go where people don’t feel pressured or closed in, unlike at home (the pressure referred to is somewhere between emotion and physical layout, I think); a place that is open to everyone …沒有壓迫感…開放空間

Can you determine the category of which these are members?