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How
should even local, regional, or national memories be secured, structured,
and represented? Of course, this is a fundamentally political question
about the nature of the public sphere, about democracy and its future,
about the changing shape of nationhood, citizenship, and identity.
Andreas Huyssen
*
Introduction: East Asia, Tradition and Globalization
As economic globalization looms ever larger in East Asia, we must
raise the question of how the local cultures in this region are
responding to this epochal change. The economy of East Asia is post-Fordist
since the technological advances in communications and the intensification
of capital flow allow such areas as China and Hong Kong to be "increasingly
differentiated and segmented" as markets and industrial production
areas (Tomaney 159). In this context, the "alternative modernity"
theory is one dominant discourse that seeks to address such a pressing
issue, maintaining that there should be various approaches to modernity
to accommodate differences embedded in the multitude of locales
and local cultures. For example, China asserts her particular approach
to development and modernization, in a way that could be summarized
in Deng Xiao Ping's famous slogan, "Marxism in the Chinese Way."
As seen in this phrase coined by Deng, central to the discourse
of alternative modernity is the notion of reworking tradition. Michael
Watts explains the plasticity of tradition: "the realm of 'tradition'
or 'custom' provides much of the symbolic raw material around which
local communities, interest groups, and classes rework and refashion
the modernizations of capitalist transformation"(15). Aihwa Ong,
arguing that the reworking of tradition is the dominant logics of
transnationality in East Asia, identifies the pertinence of this
concept to the discourse of alternative modernity in her book Flexible
Citizenship. Tradition is a pool of resources and thereby East Asian
countries and their people have means at disposal for their own
economic, social and urban development not necessarily repeating
the footsteps of the West. Moreover, the flexible re-use of tradition
also helps East Asian countries, which already have a long and complicated
history of mutual interaction, to envision regional communications
and alliances across national boundaries. In this sense, the discourse
of alternative modernity seems to offer an antidote to any pressure
resulting from the onset of the capital accumulation space. The
inventive use of tradition, something old and familiar, is thought
to deal with the shock of change brought about by the flexible accumulation
in the era of globalization.
I will argue, however, that the discourse of alternative modernity,
with its core concept of reworking tradition, is insufficient to
map out the relationships between traditions and globalization in
contemporary East Asian countries. In spite of the possibility of
a "flexible" integration of tradition and globalization, there are
still "bumps on the road to this end," so to speak. I will seek
to qualify the optimism embedded in such a development discourse
as "alternative modernity" by examining how tradition has become
abstracted and reduced into nothing more than a myriad of images
in globalization. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theoretical concept
of differential space and David Harvey's time-space compression,
I will study with close analysis how a contemporary Chinese woman
writer, Tzu Tianxing, gives out the half-revealed jarring relationship
between Chinese nationalism and contemporary globalization in her
writing of a melancholy urban history embodied in the historical
novella, "The Old Capital (1995)."1. Showing the major patterns
of how traditions are reshaped by forces of globalization in Taipei,
this literary work leads us to see sites of contraction between
tradition and economic globalization in East Asia, a critical vista
repressed in the optimistic discourse of alternative modernity,
which advocates the collaboration of the local and the global.
* Kyoto, Taipei and Nostalgia: Tzu's "Old Capital"
The novella "The Old Capital" narrates a nolstalgic journey in the
second-person point of view2. The main character, without a name
(henceforth referred to as You), a middle-aged woman, is compared
to a spectral being, overloaded with memories that cannot be corroborated
anymore by the fast-changing urban landscape of contemporary Taipei.
What is more ironic, the urban changes, that which alienates her
away from her own city, take place in the name of the return to
the local during the process of globalization. To avoid a direct
confrontation between her memories and the new cityscape, the main
character assumes the identity of a tourist, first to Kyoto and
then to Taipei, to indulge herself in the nostalgia of the lost
time. In this sense, she is what Wolf Lepenies would describe as
a melancholiac, who "has reached a stage where everything [one]
regarded as self-evident has been forfeited; this in turn directly
causes him to question legitimation and thus to establish new self-evident
truths" (164).
Tzu's story consists of two major trips taken by the female "you"
character. Receiving a fax from her best friend, asking to meet
her in a hotel in Kyoto, You flies to Japan from Taipei as soon
as possible without waiting for any further confirmation from the
friend, referred to as "A." Later she realizes that her friend,
whom she has not seen since they graduated from college, would never
come to Kyoto. Her trip in the ancient city then turns into an introspection
of her bygone past. Walking alone on the streets of Kyoto, she remembers
the old looks of her hometown Taipei during the time when both she
and her friend shared adolescent romantic longings. Without seeing
her friend as planned, You shortens the trip and flies back to Taipei.
Interestingly, she returns to Taipei to start another trip in her
home city by sheer chance. When she steps out of the airport in
Taipei, a local tourist guide mistakes her for a Japanese. She goes
along with this mistake and joins Japanese tourists in a packaged
tour that commemorates colonial Taipei for nostalgic Japanese. With
a tour map of the old Taipei city in her hand, she discovers another
past of Taipei: during the time of occupation (1895-1945), Japanese
imperialists built Taipei as a duplication of Kyoto to construct
another imperial city where the emperor could reside outside of
Japan. The juxtaposition of contemporary Taipei and its colonial
history hrows into sharp relief for her an intolerable fact that
the old city of Taipei as she knows since childhood cannot be reclaimed.
The urbanization accelerated by globalization has transformed Taipei
beyond recognition. It is no surprise that the novella ends at the
point where the main character finds herself lost at home, crying
desperately to herself, "Where am I?"
Often labeled as a spokesperson for what can be called pro-China
cultural nationalism, Tzu Tianxing received much critical attention
in the recent literary debates during 1990s when Taiwan starts to
challenge vehemently the dominant hegemony of pro-China ideology
and begins to develop a Taiwan-centered cultural nationalism3. The
critical reception of her "Old Capital" is produced amidst this
political turmoil. A reading of her work often means an interpretation
of what the ideology of Great China means culturally in contemporary
Taiwan. As a cultural politics closely associated with the ideological
controls by Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan after 1949, Great China echoes
the concept of Great Germany, and speaks of the supreme national
pride in being a Chinese. Such interpretations of her works often
focus on the cultural significance of Tzu's political stance. A
sympathetic reading of Tzu's works is to urge the readers to suspend
their political judgment against Tzu's supposedly conservative ideology
(referring to her not being politically correct in the trend of
localization (pen tu hua). David Der-wei Wang, for example, argues
that it would be premature to reach the conclusion that Tzu is a
cultural conservative since it is not yet clear in which political
direction Taiwan is heading, let alone determining which political
assumption is conservative or progressive (14). Another reading
is to take Tzu's cultural concerns as vocal manifestations of minority
cultures. For one, Chaoyang Liao takes Tzu as a supporter of multiculturalism,
who values cultural heterogeneity as witnessed in Taiwan: "the dystopian
vision [of the ending] . . . points not only to th fear of historical
fossilization but to the fear of the total assimilation of difference
in national and ethnic rigidity." Despite their different views
of Tzu's identity politics, these critics all seem to discuss her
work from within the context of post-Chiang Taiwan. Here I will
employ a comparative and global framework to produce a revisionist
reading of Tzu's literary politics, examining Tzu's "Old Capital"
as a case study of writing history at a time when the sense of history
seems to be eliminated by the forces of globalization.
* Globalization, Autochthony, and Erasure of History in urban Taiwan
To better understand the relationship between nationalistic discourses
in Taiwan and contemporary globalization, it is imperative to turn
to the geopolitics of East Asia in the last quarter of the twentieth
century and concentrate on the upsurge of Taiwanese consciousness
in the middle of the transition from the Cold-War period to a globalized
era. Let us rehearse here a commonly known section of history. During
the Cold War, the cultural and political identity of the Taiwanese
are moored on the concept of Great China4. As Mainland China developed
closer relationships with United States both politically and economically,
the halo around Chiang's political claim of Taiwan as the only orthodox
representative of Great China started to rapidly fade. Such geopolitical
change in East Asian consequently brought about a tremendous ideological
crisis in Taiwan. In the 1980s the nationalistic ideology of Great
China, constructed officially by the KMT, started to be severely
challenged5. Without a readily available scaffolding of credible
legitimation, the Taiwanese began to dub themselves as the Orphan
of Asia, a nation without international recognition of its sovereignty.
At this moment, Taiwan is typical of minor states in globalization,
witnessing fast economic development while the state and local culture
are rapidly losing their established authority6. The Taiwanese consciousness
thereby emerged in this set of circumstances7. As Joseph Bosco argues,
the recognition of the uniqueness of Taiwan "began in the mid-1980s
when surreptitious exchange with the PRC began" (quoted in Chang
25). The Taiwanese consciousness arises also because of a strong
desire to on the par with other developed countries of the world.
A-chin Hsiau comments. "a significant aspect of Taiwanese cultural
nationalism emergent in the early 1980s under KMT rule was the disappointment
in the slow progress of the native culture toward 'full' modernization"
(21). Thus, the assertion of Taiwan as the local thereby surfaces
to defend the Taiwanese from being trapped by an ideological and
cultural void created by the arrival of global integration8 and
seeks to claim its own participation in the global scene.
While Western countries often defend its cultural identity by a
tight legal regulation of immigration against the inrush of aliens,
minor states are likely to secure itself against an unstable cultural
position by the claim of being rooted to the land. Weller describes
where Taiwan stands now: "The island floats in limbo, not quite
a nation and not quite a state, with no change in sight, but vibrant
all the same with its economic success, its politics, and its people's
arguments about who they really are" (477). The contemporary response
to global changes with the Taiwanese consciousness cannot be adequately
explained by the classical account of cultural nationalism, and
a new theoretical vocabulary is in demand to comprehend the discourse
of localization in Taiwan9. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, in their comparative
studies of contemporary African states, provide a provocative theoretical
model, proper for me to appropriate to describe the Taiwanese localization
as a response to globalization. They bring our attention to a curious
phenomenon in Africa, the intensifying and shifting distinction
between the local people and the strangers.
Thus political liberalization leads, somewhat paradoxically, to
an intensification of the politics of belonging: fierce debates
on who belongs where, violent exclusion of "strangers" (even if
this refers to people with the same nationality who have lived for
generations in the area), and a general affirmation of roots and
origins as the basic criteria of citizenship and belonging (Geschiere
and Nyamnjoh 423).
The two anthropologists call this contemporary redefinition of citizenship
and belonging "autochthony": with the etymological and mythological
meanings of birth from the earth, this term refers to a latter-day
claim of legitimacy based on whether one has access to land. To
be more specific, the issue of the place of burial, Geschiere and
Nyamnjoh note, is of supreme significance in differentiating so-called
local people from outsiders; it is often asserted that home should
be where one's ancestors are buried. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh allege
that the local, central to the concept of autochthony, can only
be "a trope without a substance of its own. It can be used for defining
the Self against the Other on all sorts of levels and in all sorts
of ways" (448). Witnessing the "forceful forms of exclusion" rampant
in Africa and Europe in the millennial capitalism, they construe
autochthony, the incessant and violent distinction between Self
and the Other on the basis of the access to land, as a resistance
to the unprecedented mobility in the era of globalization (449)10.
We can borrow their theoretical formulation of autochthony to allow
us to distinguish the localization prompted by globalization in
Taiwan from the 19th-century nationalism resulted from the uprising
of the bourgeois class in the Western Europe. As we might remember
from the classical articulation of cultural nationalism by Ernest
Renan, a shared history rather than geographical boundaries is required
for the rise of nationalism. A nation of people that shares a common
past will strive to work together for a common future. In contrast
to Renan's cultural nationalism, autochthony lays emphasis on access
to the physical place to be the basis of distinction among the people
inhabited on the same piece of land.
The rise of Taiwanese consciousness is the key to understanding
Tzu's "Old Capital." You in the novella experiences this historical
change in Taiwan, known as "localization," in terms of the transition
from the cultural nationalism of Great China to the phenomenon of
autochthony in Taiwan. She yearns for a homogeneous nationalistic
culture that has disappeared: "The people at that time were very
nice and innocent, willing to sacrifice their lives or confront
death for a belief or a loved one, no matter to which political
party each of them belonged" (151). You is startled to find that
the exalted sensibility associated with the space in Taipei can
only be traced from her memories of those glorious days11.
Back then, the Milky Way and meteors were crystal clear in the summer
night. A long while of gazing at the night sky often brought out
grandiose contemplation over the survival and demise of generations,
and the rise and fall of dynasties. If you were naďve enough, you
would vow on the spot to achieve something epic so as not to depart
this life with nothing done (152).
It is noteworthy that her lament is not about the collapse of nationalism
per se but the majestic national space where one intimates a harmonious
identification with history, nation and the people. You's chronic
moodiness is in fact a symptom of a dislocated cultural elite, who
has adhered to the ideology of Great China of Chiang Kai-shek's
time. Specifically, this nationalist ideology of Great China is
an identity mechanism, created to persuade people to disregard Chiang's
political quagmire, to embrace the newly constructed myth of nationhood:
the Taiwanese people are the true inheritors of the sublime Chinese
culture in contrast to the "illegitimate" communist sovereignty
in Mainland China12. Such nationalist ideology always gives culture
the privileged position as the major medium through which one relates
to his/her everyday life. And You proves herself a true cultural
elite grown up in the time of Chiang, who hardly doubts that culture
should have the paramount power to counteract political chaos and
moral crisis. Chiang's cultural nationalism has permeated her sensual
experiences in her urban space to such an extent that every moment
of her childhood and youth she feels calmly integrated with the
august national consciousness. Now in the heat of political turmoil,
as if it were possible to distill one's sensibility and experiences
from their entanglement with the cultural ideology of Chiang's regime,
she wants to keep intact her experiences of growing up in Taipei.
Here one see a typical cultural elite of the nationalist kind, once
immersed in the culturalism of the nationalist elevation, forever
believing that culture, with its uplifting quality, should survive
mundane changes. The melancholy of You, by no means accidental,
a consequence of the fallen nationalism, is doomed to come on once
the utopian ideology of Great China is passe.
If the localization movement in Taiwan has deprived You of her cultural
privileges, she also believes that it questions her identification
with the Taiwan consciousness. For all her life, it never occurs
to her that one day she would be stigmatized as an unwelcome outsider.
Her claim of citizenship and sense of belonging have been questioned
by autochthony in Taiwan, which defines natives as those who have
a family history rooted in the land in question and excludes others
by such a distinction. Yet now You remembers words of a writer of
similar cultural background: "'You come to realize that no place
can become one's hometown when there are no burial grounds of one's
family members'" (187). Such a denial of her citizenship provokes
harshly interior debates and You painfully ponders:
[You often hear that if] you don't want to stay here, you had better
leave. Or, get out of here and go back to XX. It sounds like you
do have somewhere else to go back to and somewhere else to stay,
and you are still here simply because you unabashedly outstay your
welcome (169).
Obsessed with her identity crisis, the major character keeps questioning
the validity of autochthony. As You sees it, what is assumed in
autochthony in Taiwan is an essentialist, unbreakable connection
between the Self and the land, mistaken for the basis of the politics
of exclusion. You experiences this dramatic transformation as a
fall from a pedestal of grandeur into a pit of abjection. It is
not until the city she knows disappeared that she comes to realize
how much she takes for granted her strong sense of belonging to
the old Taipei. Strangely, the political and cultural changes in
her urban space seem to become internalized: You begins to notice
changes taking place in her own body. She starts to excrete a briny
odor, as smelly as bodily fluids and sweat, hard to be suppressed
and impossible to be eliminated (168). Symbolizing the invisible
and ever-widening distance between her and the once familiar urban
space, now a foreign land for a wai-sheng-ren (a mainlander) like
her, the salty stench coming from her body allegorizes You's bewilderment
over the new politics that seems to have changed her relationship
to the everyday space overnight.
You accuses the current urban development in Taipei of erasing local
spatial history in the name of autochthony. She laments the fact
that Taipei has become a city without history: "Perhaps whatever
you were familiar with or remembered in the city has passed away
before you do" (195). Indeed, Taipei for You has become a generic
city as Frank Lloyd Wright describes: "'A city, where skyscrapers
grow like weeds, is the seedbed of prostitutes and banks' " (quoted
in "The Old Capital" 190, 229, 230)13. As profit-oriented commercialism
dominates the growth of the city, like many other metropolis in
the era of globalization, You finds her hometown expanding and shifting
chaotically: for all their trendy looks, the newly opened shops
and just expanded roads nonchalantly wipe out old spatial arrangements.
From the eyes of a pedestrian, You observes how she is isolated
from the river, the sky and the sea by high-priced apartment complexes,
elevated highways and kitsch shops. Once she took her fiancé right
before their wedding to her childhood "secret garden" only to see
an eight-lane highway in front of them, she recollects how she responded:
For one moment, you couldn't remember what it had been here. It
felt like witnessing a murdered body. Yet after calling the police
you returned to the scene to find that there was no body at all,
no traces of blood, as if nothing had ever happened. (200-01)
To her, the mushrooming commercial projects in Taipei deal one blow
after another to terminate for good the organic connection between
the city and the nature.
Contemplating at the sight of a strip of old houses, built at the
time of the Japanese rule. You envisions that these beautiful historical
buildings are about to "be confiscated efficientlly" only to be
rebuilt into [functional] apartments for postal office clerks, customs
officials, university staff, and government officials (187).
When there is no longer anything irreplaceable on this land to draw
people together, the latter cannot do anything but stay here with
great reluctance. The new rulers must have been aware of this point,
so they propagate with great frenzy the slogan of communalism, hoping
that people will ignore the accountability of whoever is in power
and just set their mind on their dear land and their fellow people.
Who dares to challenge the legitimacy of the latter! Do you ever
see the opposition party, who has bashed everything, dares to say
anything against the cause of the land and the people? (199)
You raises a strong political criticism of autochthony in her paranoid
vision of the impending catastrophe: urban development in the name
of localization means erasure of history to her.
The author appropriates a canonical reference of utopia in classical
Chinese literature, "Plum Blossom Spring" (Tao Hua Yuan Ji), to
describe You's despair at the seemingly no-turning-back spatial
changes in Taipei. In this classical work, a fisherman wanders into
a village whose inhabitants live independently of the outside. The
utopian village denotes a zone free of the trauma of drastic political
and historical changes. The author Tzu reverses this utopian meaning
and satirizes autochthony as a self-enclosing attempt. It seems
that autochthony promises Taipei a new utopian era, but instead,
alienated from the traces of its immediate past, You finds Taipei
no more than a city of concrete. Her walks in the city are thus
repeated experiences of the clashes between the old spatial practices
of nationalism and that of autochthony. The past she remembers is
a life in an unbounded imaginary, a space open enough to accommodate
the personal histories of all inhabitants past and present. Now
You only finds frantic efforts to abuse urban spaces for profit
and to deny so-call the "non-Taiwanese" the right to the identification
with Taiwan, again all in the holy name of localization.
It is interesting to note that You possesses a double vision of
the urban space after she finds all the buttresses of cultural nationalism
gone: Her ghost-like vision is the remains of cultural nationalism
in the wake of globalization.
There was nobody on the beach around this time in autumn. Files
and files of ghosts passed by and you saw none of them, neither
the winter swimmer who had been swallowed up by a shark one or two
years ago, nor the one who would die from his attempt to save others
from be drowned years later, not even the ghost of yourself (163).
Like a ghost cast out from the realm of the alive, You becomes the
excluded in history and starts to see what she cannot see before.
The capacity to see the dead is a transfigured ability of a dislodged
national elite. A national elite like Jules Michelet writes "on
behalf of the dead" (Anderson 197). Furthermore, the violence of
death must be forgotten to be remembered as glorious sacrifice for
the nation (Renan 11; Anderson 204-7). Here You sees the violence
of death, and finds glaringly obstruding fragments of the past deeply
buried from the sight of her fellow urbanites.
* The Seduction by Globalization
If You finds no history in Taipei, she seeks to reclaim the lost
home in a foreign city, Kyoto. The crux of her nostalgic journey
lies in the fact that her desire, a nationalist longing for reconnecting
with the lost past, colludes with the overwhelming power of globalization
in manipulating time and space. You's doomed quest for her own past
in the novella thus poses an irony, since what enables her melancholy
gaze at the history of Taipei, the forces of cultural globalization
(such as time-space compression and the logic of differential space),
are exactly the powers that erase the past of her own city. You
visits Kyoto in the hope of meeting her best friend from college
and thus reliving the memory of their good days together in Taipei.
During her stay in Kyoto, she tries to remember what it was like
to have a sense of belonging. The symbol of historical Japan allows
her to cast a melancholy gaze at her own past in Taipei, which she
believes to be reshaped into a new city without a history.
You's trip to the ancient capital of Japan embodies nostalgic tourism
in the age of globalization as a convenient vehicle to attach to
a history, more often than not a fragmentary one. For one thing,
advanced technology in transportation and communications shrinks
the globe into a small world, the prominent time-space compression
phenomena as described by Anthony Giddens and David Harvey14. At
the same time, as Henri Lefebvre contends, such a global space tends
to be reduced into myriad images for visual consumption: "The symbol
of this constitutive repression is an object offered up to the gaze
yet barred from any possible use, whether this occurs in a museum
or in a shop window" (POS 319). As seen in the novella, the trip
by itself defines how You, seduced by the seemingly undiminished
historical image of Kyoto in the fast changing global era, mystifies
the contemporary mode of nostalgic tourism as a time travel machine
that brings one back to the bygone past.
The
operation of time-space compression, masking the physical distance
between Kyoto and Taipei, allures You to embark on a nostalgic voyage.
Propelled by a fax from her best friend (another one of the modern
communications tools), she acts on impulse, leaving her family behind
to hurry to Kyoto. The magic of another modern technology, a jumbo
jet, takes You to her destination in less than three hours. Kyoto
seems to be within an easy reach, and so should the past, which
will be evoked and shared as soon as she meets her friend. She comes
to realize her own assumption of being able to de-compress time,
and go back to a primeval past during this trip:
For the first time, you realized how strangely this appointment
was made, in a style that can be found only in an agrarian era or
in the time of Wei Sheng15. To begin with, you knew nothing at all
about her flight number and you came only with the information in
the fax. A did not ask you how you were going to get to the hotel
from the Kansai International Airport, only leaving you the address
of the hotel. Perhaps she [A] imagined here to be a tiny old city,
and indeed she can be right: this place is nothing like the metropolitan
cities she visited and not much larger than the towns you two frequented
when young. (202)
The contradiction presented in the passage is apparent. You understands
the logistics involved in travelling to a foreign country such as
arrival information, transportation and accommodation. However,
her desire to link up with the past is so strong that she unwittingly
buys into the convenience of time-space compression in the form
of the seemingly effortless cross-ocean travel, suggested in A's
fax. You imagines she can make the trip as easily as they could
together at 17, always ready to explore the world without worrying
about any potential trouble that might come along the way. In contrast,
such a carefree transnational trip is made possible in a seemingly
uninhibited space. What she downplays in the trip to Kyoto is not
only the geographical distance but also the fastidious details on
the road: having left Taipei at noon, she is already walking on
the streets of Kyoto in the early evening (173). To You, the global
space seems to be as open as the bygone national space to which
she once belonged. The attractive openness and mobility provided
by the modern technology of the global age transform the transnational
space into a mirage of the only open space she knows about, the
national space in Taipei.
As the story unfolds, You's desire to return to the past by meeting
an old friend is deferred, because her friend A never comes as promised.
Consequently, the ungratified longing is then further projected
onto their meeting place, Kyoto. In other words, her tourist gaze
and walk in Kyoto can be seen as a personal attempt to map out a
city that can protect her from the overwhelming sense of loss brought
about by urban spatial change that globalization brings to Taipei.
Walking in Kyoto while lingering on the memories of her previous
visits with her little daughter, You unwittingly turns herself into
a lonely tourist. Those early trips to Kyoto with her daughter,
vicariously establish the intimacy between You and the ancient city.
In fact, You repeatedly brings her daughter to Kyoto to show the
little girl what she has missed in Taipei, i.e., a timeless utopian
space unaffected by localization and globalization:
You cannot help swearing, every time you see this fir woods, that
if there were tiny fir woods nearby your house that would stay the
same for fifty years, you would be more than happy to see your daughter
loitering in the woods, neither studying nor working for the rest
of her life (193).
Such a utopian longing results from her endorsement of the common
image of Kyoto, an ancient capital that remains timeless in the
maelstrom of urban changes. Needless to say, such a transfixed image
of Kyoto as a city of history has been officially promoted since
the 1950s. At that time, the Kyoto city government enacted "the
Kyoto International, Cultural, and Tourist City Construction Law"
to "make Kyoto an international city of culture and tourism by maintaining
and developing its superb historical, cultural, and artistic resources
and developing cultural and tourist facilities" (Callies 150). The
decades that followed witnessed the new capital of Japan Tokyo's
metamorphosis into a global city; meanwhile, the old capital Kyoto
acquires the significance of representing the authentic Japanese
spirit, that survives rapid changes. As the Japanese set their eyes
on the future, they are assured at the same time that there is always
a past to cling to. In this sense, the image of Kyoto as an intact
city of history serves as a safety valve for Japan's process of
globalization. Indeed, Kyoto exemplifies what Lefebvres calls a
differential space. Lefebvre argues that global spaces are likely
to be reduced to images and signs, whose meanings are defined in
relation to other images of spaces. Here, Kyoto, in sharp contrast
to Tokyo, epitomizes the image of historical Japan. As John Clammer
fittingly describes:
If pilgrimage was often a form of tourism, contemporary tourism
from the cities is itself a form of pilgrimage, the religion in
question being 'Japan' and the underlying motives being not just
consumption as such, but also the construction of a postmodern self,
one situated in relation to Japanese history and concerns with ethnicity
while simultaneously turning towards an increasingly globalized
world in which the actual content of everyday life is the consumer
society, a distinctive form of late capitalism that intrudes on
every area of the psyche and society. (151)
This "pilgrimage to Japan," boltered by tourism, is the condition
that allows You to dream that walking in Kyoto can experience the
transhistorical capacity of culture. Falling prey to the trick of
differential space and time-space compression and thus subscribing
to the stereotype of Kyoto, You is quick to imagine this city as
the utopian space suitable for her daughter and herself to call
home.
Embodying order in a chaotic world, Kyoto becomes You's sanctuary.
This sense of order, again, a melancholic projection enabled by
the differential image of Kyoto, can be reinforced everywhere in
the daily life of Kyoto from the Cherry Blossom Festival, which
symbolizes the harmony between man and nature, to the same menu
and fixed price at the tea shop in the Takashimaya department store.
Year after year, those same shop fronts and cafes in Kyoto, like
the quiet streets and serene temples, welcome her with familiar
hospitality. In contrast to the transgressive spatial practice which
Michel de Certeau describes as the pedestrian's wild footsteps,
You's walking falls into the pattern that can be described as succumbing
to a "suspended symbolic order" that characterizes Kyoto (de Certeau
106).
To You, the order manifested in Kyoto can ultimately function to
counteract the vicissitude of history, figured by the ultimate finality
of death. We might recollect that the preoccupation with writing
about death is inherent in cultural nationalism: with the violence
associated with death forgotten, death is re-evoked as renewal.
You's brooding over death can be read as a melancholic longing of
the nationalist writing of death, in which the survival of popular
sensibility contravene the brutal interruption of death. In this
sense, she is a true follower of the de Certeau's tenet, believing
that travel ironically is the way home16. As she contemplates at
the Seiryo Temple, she remembers a prisoner's reflection before
his execution: "He [the prisoner] saw the sunshine outside of the
window, hearing the warden's radio churn out familiar tunes17. He
thinks to himself that as long as everything remains the same tomorrow,
his death will not matter" (195). Another moment of introspection
on Seiryo Temple leads her to an old director's thoughts on death,
similar to the prisoner's in content: "Old people are forced to
confront death every day. His wish is to sit up from his coffin
to read the newspaper every ten years, feeling contented after knowing
that the world goes around as before"(201). Such thoughts on death
reveal You's yearning for order to overcome loss as symbolized in
its extreme form, death. Pining for a symbolic order (the routine
world mediated through the means of mass communications such as
the radio and the newspaper) in a confining space of their own (the
cell and the imaginary coffin), the two dying persons speak out
You's melancholy imagination. And Kyoto in this sense plays for
her a role similar to the radio and the newspaper respectively to
the prisoner and the director. Specifically, Seiryo Temple, her
personal favorite, registers the site of this imaginary space18.
This temple now becomes a public space for local people of all ages.
She notes the sights and sounds around the temple: a college boy
feeding a stray cat, a middle-age salaryman paying homage to the
lord after work, elementary school students clattering among themselves,
young housewives walking dogs, old timers loitering around (194).
This temple is where You calls home and wishes to die when the time
comes: "If there were any place called home, where one would move
back from the hospital to have the last moment," she thought to
herself that "the temple would be the one" (195). In other words,
Kyoto represents to her the symbolic order defiant against loss.
Here we can observe that her melancholy longing seeks to restore
the national space that Benedict Anderson describes as the homogeneous,
empty time in which "'old' and 'new' were understood synchronically,
coexisting" (187) 19.
Despite the fact that Kyoto, a city of culture and history in the
globalized world seems to promise You a symbolic order, the stability
and security implied by the order has always been in crisis. With
the image of crisis resurfacing time and again to disrupt her ideal
projection of a symbolic order, this unceased tension between meaning
and loss accounts for You's melancholy nostalgia for a forgotten
past. Not long after she arrives in Kyoto, she prays that this trip
will not be a catastrophe, a sense of crisis somehow remains inexplicable
to her (173). The conflicting anxiety over meeting A suggests You's
sense of crisis during her quest for order and meaning. Ironically,
she worries that A would really come and the two old friends would
surprise each other with how fast they had aged over the years of
separation:
God, you will see A tonight when you go back to the hotel. You wish
she would not behave like those who have been away from home for
years and always bluster in English during conversation... Also,
you wish she would not be as sloppy as many Americans in her dress.
You are worried that you two would sit at different corners of the
hotel lobby, side-glancing at each other for a while and exclaiming
silently, "Oh, God, have I become as hard to recognize as she!"
(192)
The stream of consciousness of You is juxtaposed contantly with
paragraphs from Yasunari Kawabata's Old Capital, passages mirroring
the anxiety of You. Kawabata's novel narrates a story in which twin
sisters (Chieko and Naeko), separated at birth, fail to stay together
in spite of a fleeting moment of reunification. Likewise, A and
You are also the twins destined to be apart. The twins of Kawataba
is a modern parallel to the pair (You and A) of Tzu's "Old Capital"
in the globalized East Asia. Writing at the beginning of the Japanese
economic boom, Kawabata "wanted to set down the beauty of the old
city, Japan's capital from 794 to 1868, before it disappeared forever"
(Seidensticker, quoted in Brown 378). Here the allusion to Kawabata's
Old Captial, stories of historical beauty before impending disappearance,
imparts the hidden crisis inherent in the symbolic order represented
by Kyoto.
The tension between her desire for a tangible order and her anxiety
over the irrevocable loss of a splendid and comfortable urban space
at home dominates not only her brief stay in Kyoto but also her
consequent trip back home to Taipei. As a typical symptom of a melancholiac,
she always struggles between a vision of a symbolic order and an
acute pain over the loss of it. She is a true melancholiac, who
remains in "proximity to the world, despite loss of world" (Lepenies
127).
Notably, it is the forces of globalization that sustain the emotional
tug-of-war between hope and frustration, if one may say so. As Lefebvre
emphasizes, the drastic spatial changes brought about by contemporary
globalization redraw boundaries of all kinds and signal fast-changing
spaces with images or visual mirages. Meanwhile, spatial changes
in the global era often seduce one to take mobility, fluidity, or
openness for granted and further render concrete spaces invisible.
These spaces of contemporary globalization often present a reservoir
of tantalizing possibilities. You in "The Old Capital" typifies
how one is beguiled by the phatasmagoria produced by global spatial
changes. A pertinent example of such mirage in the global space
is the privilege for one to be at home in the world. Stepping into
an elegant café in Kyoto, You mumbles to herself in Japanese, "I
am home (Tadaima)" (183). At one moment she accelerates her pace
of walking in Kyoto: "You hurried up and decided to take a shortcut.
As if you could reach the Café you have in mind before dark, you
would see your daughter at age five, crouching at the rim of the
garden pond, feeding and petting the fish inside" (172). Likewise,
the Middle East figures in her imagination prominently as a magic
land where whatever one loses can be retrieved. During a trip to
Cairo, it dawns on her at the sight of the bazaars on the crowded
streets that the long-gone street vendors around the old amusement
park in Taipei found themselves a new home here (164). She also
fantasizes about what travels do to manipulate the imaginary boundary
between home and foreign lands. Her melancholic longing intensified
by the imagination of the exotic lands can be well described by
a quote from Freud in the novella: "There you see a giant Aryan
king as tall as a tree, colorful reliefs of Egyptian motifs, gigantic
statues of the king, and the real statue of the Sphinx. Here is
a fantasy land" (quoted in 183). You tends to think that there are
chances "out there" to be connected with the past, and deceptive
conditions of globalization make it possible for her to play out
such deep-rooted melancholy longing time and again.
Paradoxically, You's sense of loss has been deferred constantly
by her role as global trotter. It is the chance encounters with
the local in the foreign lands that motivate her to embark on one
trip after another. The sparks of emotions experienced on the road
sometimes echo the recollected familiarity, intimacy, or safety,
and for You another trip may bring her closer to the home she remembers.
Always imagining her trip as a pilgrimage in search of the lost
order at home in Taipei, she would deny to herself her identity
as a tourist, but her self-cast role as a homeward-bound pilgrim
never strikes anyone else as anything other than an ordinary tourist.
In other words, the tours, always ready-packaged, have framed You's
trips before she endows them with the significance of a personal
quest. When she leaves Kyoto, no one sees her off except the hotel
manager "and [You] couldn't explain to him why [You] would not wait
till the Cherry Blossom Festival starts and have canceled the reservation
for that week" (210). In short, You's trip to Kyoto is an attempt
to retrieve a typical national space, with "empty, homogeneous time,"
in a seemingly similar space, the global space, enabled by time-space
compression. We can conclude for the moment our discussion on the
seduction by the global space with Lefebvre's remark: "Not that
this space [the global space] 'expresses' them in any sense; it
is simply the space assigned them by the grand plan: these classes
find what they seek" (POS 309).
* An Apocalyptic Vision of Globalization:
Reluctantly returning from Kyoto, You can only face Taipei by once
again indulging herself in another trip in this home city. Keenly
aware of the fact that Taipei has transmogrified into an unfamiliar
city, she chooses to assume the persona of a foreigner to see the
city (211). If she cannot do anything about the spatial changes,
at least she can take on a different identity, one that has suffered
no shocks of urban changes in Taipei. She tries to calm herself,
"That's fine. You have another week off before going back to work.
The vacation has just started" (211). The next morning, using a
tour map of colonial Taipei that she had bought in Kyoto, she blends
in with other real Japanese tourists to set out on a walking tour
recommended by a guidebook. The moment she decides to accept the
role of a Japanese tourist, mistakenly conferred on her by an eager
local travel guide at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, You
once again takes advantage of her tourist identity to prolong her
melancholy longing for her past. Again, her "tour" of Taipei, like
many other tours in our global age, has been standardized according
to the logic of differential space, which reduces concrete everyday
space to mere images and signs. That is, each tour can be seen as
an attempt to compress the locale into a tour map of points of interest,
prescribed "local attractions" predominantly for visual consumption.
Specifically, You's tour draws on the illusion of time-space compression
to compress Kyoto and Taipei back to the moment when the two cities
were not yet wide apart in urban development.
With her deliberate reduction of her vista into a tourist gaze,
You makes the city tour, visiting old buildings constructed in the
colonial time by the Japanese. For all her attempts to see the familiar
with a foreign eye in the manner of the Japanese tourists, You comes
to realize, as she walks, the difficulty of looking at Taipei in
the way the map instructs. "Sight-seeing" in Taipei evokes her memories
of all the corners she had wandered before; her walk to the Shihmenting
(The West Gate District ) illustrates the complexity of her tour
experience. According to the colonial map of Taipei and her guide
book, the Shihmenting is the "entertainment district" for the colonial
Japanese. But You sees the same space in a different way: she remembers
the last time she came here on a date with her then boyfriend. They
were hassled by pimps. It had already become a seedy area, no more
the "entertainment district" she has seen as a high school girl.
Little does she know that years later she will come back to see
the Shihmenting again, this time as an outsider. Seeing for the
first time after years the degeneration of this district, dirty
and smelly, cheap and sleazy, You cannot bear to continue gazing
on the sad look of this place. Feeling depressed at the sight of
the dirty streets, avoidance is the only way that she can think
of to preserve the sweet memories of the space. Ironically, this
fake tourist's engaging look at the Shihmenting contradicts her
intention of seeing the city with an outsider's gaze, supposedly
more detached and unconcerned. The complicated interaction between
a tourist walking on the streets scattered with personal memories
and a conscious play with a fake tourist identity disorients her.
She then tries to shift back to her tourist identity, trying to
contain and confine the clashing fragments of the past back into
an image.
Like a tourist who has become exhausted from viewing the bewildering
abundance of new objects and strange customs, you choose to sit
down on the bricks surrounding a roadside tree, and take instead
an imaginary journey on the travel guide. (221)
Toward the end of the tour in colonial Taipei, she loses the newly
bought Japanese hat that gives her the look of a tourist and the
map of imperial Taipei. You's walking in the home city as a foreign
tourist finally brings her to understand the futile efforts to be
content with reducing the urban space of Taipei into images on the
colonial map and the travel guide.
More than an ill-fated ending of her nostalgia, You's eventual failure
to excavate the geography of Kyoto in Taipei is also the intolerable
outcome of representing and containing any space in the logics of
differential space. At the time she realizes that Taipei was constructed
in the image of Kyoto as another imperial city, You also finds herself
lost in the city since major spatial reference points with which
she used to map Taipei are no longer there. Here the very different
fate of the twin sisters in Kawabata's Old Capital comes into play
with the destinies of Kyoto and Taipei. For You, both cities are
subject to the power of globalization, but she laments the different
development paths of these two metropolises: Kyoto is preserved
as a timeless town whereas Taipei transmogrifies into a city without
history. She chooses to put on the mask of a foreign tourist to
avoid seeing Taipei as it is. Ironically, her early trip to Kyoto
and now the tour in Taipei reveals to her all the more the gap between
the twin cities, Taipei and Kyoto.
In fact, You's trips in the twin cities of Kyoto and Taipei surprisingly
lead her to witness contradictions that contemporary globalization
fashions. Her melancholic journey catches a glimpse at the contemporary
development of Taipei and Kyoto in the globalized world. As David
Der-wei Wang shrewdly observes, the scope of the novella is much
more ambitious than the length of a novella would suggest (28).
Taipei and Kyoto are also twins separated at birth, as suggested
in the allusion to the severed twin sisters in Kawabata's Old Capital,
and yet represent different ways of appropriating tradition into
economic development. On the one hand, Kyoto, as a differential
space of the past, represents local as an image of eternal past;
meanwhile, the logic of autochthony galvanizes Taipei to become
a curious hybrid of a local as "a trope without a substance of its
own" (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 448). Each signals a major paradigm
of shaping the local in the globalized East Asia. You sees the dark
side of "reworking tradition": Instead of a means to facilitate
the process globalization, reusing tradition in the name of the
local amounts to nothing much more than ruins and empty images.
In this sense, she witnesses the violence of differential spaces
that are not meant to be seen. A global space, as Lefebvre describes,
is one of "images and signs," which "presents itself as transparent
(and hence pure) world, and as reassuring, on the grounds that it
ensures concordance between mental and social, space and time, outside
and inside, and needs and desire" (POS 389). The hardly-ceased deferral
of nostalgic gratification, sustained by her restless transnational
travels, driving her to the point where she sees the contradiction
of urban development between two cities in the contemporary globalized
world, brings her to see, instead of the "concordance" between the
subject and the space, images and signs of two cities that fail
to usher her to the past she remembers. She also let us see the
helplessness of the individual in attempting to close this widening
gap between the two kinds of history-making, as symbolized in Kyoto
and Taipei, to establish a meaningful relationship with a primeval
history in which one finds harmony between urban life and nature.
Where the residents of Taipei see localization and progress, the
eyes of You sees an apocalypse. You comes to a vision of despair
at the end of her many urban walks. Walking to the shore of the
Tanshui River, where she spent many happy days in her youth, she
finds herself in close proximity to the place and the inhabitants,
but feels no connection of any kind. Lifelessness dominates this
aftermath of the total destruction of her past. A stray dog looked
at her with no response whatsoever. The daunting noise in this scene
is merely mechanical, the noise that foretells the fact of a violent
death. "A helicopter hovers above, perhaps to find a floating body
in the river; an old gaffer rushes by on a battered motorcycle,
giving out throttling hubbub and dark exhaust, perhaps in a hurry
to identify the body on short notice" (233). Her home city now can
only appear in the form of a prison: "Approaching the base of an
elevated highway, she found the gray concrete mass more and more
like towering prison walls. It was dead quiet, not even a scratching
sound was heard. Not a bit. 'Where am I?' You started to cry out
loud" (233).
The novella speaks of the "afterlife" of the nationalism of Great
China in the globalized East Asia. While the space of flexible accumulation
destroys the hegemony Chang Kai-shek's cultural nationalism, the
main character in "The Old Capital" goes along with what time-space
compression hopes to find the homogeneous national space again in
the open global space, an illusory space produced by time-space
compression. The apocalyptic vision gives a radical edge to the
otherwise melancholic novella. It provides a glimpse of the inevitable
slippage between the flexible use of tradition as championed by
the discourse of alternative modernity and the unavoidable outcome
of reworked traditions as empty signifers. While adherents of alternative
modernity may see exciting moments in which tradition and globalization
accommodate each other, the melancholic eye of You in Tzu's "Old
Capital" witnesses the relic piles of images of history, scattered
and unnoticed, cast away as traditional practices not fit for the
moment. You wanders around as a romantic adventurer, by means of
tourism in the age of time-space compression, hoping to find a chance
to realize the cultural values (as symbolized in the projected order
of Kyoto) spoon-fed to her. Indeed, one of her blind spots lies
in her failure to see that cultural nationalism of Great China is
no less a form of exclusion. An open space to a member of cultural
elite such as herself can mean a prison cell to some others, such
as pro-Taiwanese nationalists. In spite of her cultural conservatism,
the apocalyptic ending of the novella registers a denial of the
local reconstructed in response to globalization as seen in Taipei
and an aesthetic rendition of the violence of globalization, which
erases history and simultaneously produces prolifically mere images
of the local and history.
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Notes
1
The title of Zhu's novella can also be translated as "The Ancient
Capital." I use The Old Capital instead to be identical with the
English translation of Yasunari Kawabata's work to which Zhu's novella
constantly alludes.
2 Selected excerpts will be presented in translation.
3 Tzu used to receive accusation of political conservatism for her
political penchant, eminently manifested since her story collection
entitled "I Remember . . ." (1989).
4 The ruling party, the Kuomingtang (KMT), waging a zero-sum game
with the Communist China in typical Cold-War fashion, attempted
to justify the state in Taiwan as the only true sovereignty that
succeeded the imperial Ch'ing dynasty to represent the true China.
The end of the Cold War spelled the losing game the KMT played with
communist China. Mao initiated the process of rapprochement, and
sought a normalizing relationship with the United States; Deng Xiaoping
followed up with the open-door policy in 1978 Please see Mao's China
and After by Maurice Meisner for a concise account.
5 A-chin Hsiau considers the Kaohsiung Incident (1979) the event
that marks the blossoming of Taiwanese cultural nationalism and
he says, "Taiwanese anti-KMT political leader's ideological mobilization
has focused on substituting a new state corresponding with the island
territory for the ROC framed according to Chinese nationalism and
the Mainland domain" (181).
6 For a detailed description, please read Robert J. Holton's Globalization
and the Nation-State.
7 Please see the first chapter of Han-pi Chang's Taiwan: Community
of Fate and Cultural Globalization.
8 We can still observe cultural impacts of this geopolitical shift.
Interestingly, after losing the economic monopoly of East Asia,
a Japanese called Yoshinori Kobayashi publishes a political cartoon
book On Taiwan that argues the "genuine" Japan spirit, lost domestically,
is only to be found reasserted in Taiwan. This transnational nostalgia
by a Japanese intringuingly provides a factual counterpart to the
fictional character in the novella analyzed in this chapter, a Taiwanese
who projects the lost ideal onto the Japanese city, Kyoto.
9 Here I want to make a point clearly. Although Taiwanese nationalism
has been seen a major drive in the changes in Taiwan for more than
a decade, I argue that it makes great sense to examine the emerging
nationalism via the strong impact of globalization.
10 Ankie Hoogvelt observes the domestic rivalries begot from the
mobility of finance: "National liberation freed the State; restructuring
and liberalization now freed capital . . . Thus paradoxically, national
economic development that was impelled by the rivalries within the
State system now produces a new component in the market system that
in part contradicts the independence of the State" (216).
11 Examples of this kind abound in the text. Here is another one:
"It was no wonder. You always thought that the sea before your eyes
was the biggest ocean in the world and thus you cherished unbounded
imagination of this open space, like those pirates and adventurers
who had been here several hundred years ago" (162).
12 For example, during the sixties Chiang launched a cultural campaign
called the Movement of Cultural Renaissance to legitimate his political
regime when the Cultural Revolution across the Taiwan Strait destroyed
Chinese culture in an unprecedented manner.
13 I translate this remark by Wright from Tzu's Chinese rendition
of it.
14 For Anthony Giddens' account, please see p. 17-23 of The Consequences
of Modernity.
15 Wei Shen, a character in a story by Tzuang Tzu, went under a
bridge to meet his friend, who did not come. Even when a flood went
down the river, he refused to go. He was found dead, with his arms
embracing a column of the bridge, after the flood ebbed.
16 "What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort
of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,'
the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant
places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends" (de Certeau 106-7).
17 I thank Prof. Chao, Ji-yu for providing the English translation
of the name of this temple.
18 This temple is the burial ground of the head of a feudal lord,
Toyotomi Hideyori (son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), who committed a ritual
suicide at the loss of the battle of Osaka with Tokugawa Ieyasu.
19 Here I would like to suggest in passing that You's understanding
of Kyoto as the symbol of human culture that withstands historical
upheavals is not strikingly different from a commonly held belief
about Kyoto when one hundred and sixty nations of the world gathered
(December 1-11, 1997) in this old capital to draft the Kyoto Protocol
to reduce gasoline pollution worldwide.
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