Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan: Becoming Sinophone [1 ed.] 9780367458317, 9781003026174

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Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan

This book examines literary representations of mainlander identity articulated by Taiwan’s second-generation mainlander writers, who share the common feature of emotional ambivalence between Taiwan and China. Closely analyzing literary narratives of Chinese civil war migrants and their descendants in Taiwan, a group referred to as “mainlanders” (waishengren), this book demonstrates that these Chinese migrants’ ideas of “China” and “Chineseness” have adapted through time with their gradual settlement in their host land. Drawing upon theories of Sinophone studies and memory studies, this book argues that during the three decades in which Taiwan moved away from the Kuomintang’s authoritarian rule to a democratic society, mainlander identity was narrated as a transformation from a diasporic Chinese identity to a more fluid and elusive Sinophone identity. Characterized by the features of cultural hybridity and emotional in-betweenness, mainlander identity in the eight works explored contests the existing Sinocentric discourse of Chineseness. An important contribution to the current research on Taiwan’s identity politics, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, Chinese migration, and Taiwanese literature, as well as Chinese literature in general. Phyllis Yu-ting Huang is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Routledge Research on Taiwan Series

The Routledge Research on Taiwan Series seeks to publish quality research on all aspects of Taiwan studies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the books will cover topics such as politics, economic development, culture, society, anthropology and history. This new book series will include the best possible scholarship from the social sciences and the humanities and welcomes submissions from established authors in the field as well as from younger authors. In addition to research monographs and edited volumes general works or textbooks with a broader appeal will be considered. The Series is advised by an international Editorial Board and edited by Dafydd Fell of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Series Editor: Dafydd Fell, SOAS, UK 30. Young Adults in Urban China and Taiwan Aspirations, Expectations, and Life Choices Désirée Remmert 31. Taiwan Studies Revisited Dafydd Fell and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao 32. Cross-Strait Relations Since 2016 The End of the Illusion J. Michael Cole 33. Deliberative Democracy in Taiwan A Deliberative Systems Perspective Mei-Fang Fan 34. Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan Becoming Sinophone Phyllis Yu-ting Huang For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-on-Taiwan-Series/book-series/RRTAIWAN

Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan Becoming Sinophone

Phyllis Yu-ting Huang

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Phyllis Yu-ting Huang The right of Phyllis Yu-ting Huang to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-45831-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02617-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

1

2

3

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: What’s in a name? Second-generation mainlander writing as a genre

1

Constructing the mainlander: Self, other, and homeland in Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting (未了) and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life (今生緣)

28

Seeking a new identity: Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang (離開同方) and Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (想我眷村的兄弟們)

59

In the quest of the absent mainlander father: Family, history, and mainlander identity in Hao Yu-hsiang’s The Inn (逆旅) and Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan (月球姓氏)

83

4

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun: Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village (寶 一村)

104

5

Happily ever after?: Homecoming and mainlander identity in Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well (桃花井)

123

Conclusion and epilogue: “Mainlander” as an identity of in-betweenness

147

Index

159

Acknowledgments

In the years of conceptualizing and writing this book, I have received invaluable support from many people and institutions that I would like to express my appreciation. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Gloria Davies, who guided me through the long process of research. She was always supportive and extremely knowledgeable in Chinese studies. She is both my academic advisor and life mentor who has inspired me throughout. I am also grateful to Associate Professor Christiane Weller, who provided insightful comments on theories of memory studies. I would like to thank academics in both Monash University and the University of Melbourne: Professor Carolyn Stevens, Dr. Du Liping, Associate Professor Fran Martin, Dr. Lewis Mayo, and Dr. Justin Tighe. They provided me with opportunities to explore broader cultural issues in Asian studies that enrich my own research project. Thanks go to Professor David Der-wei Wang and Professor Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang for their kind encouragement and valuable comment. Thanks go to Monash University, which generously provided me with a Monash Graduate Scholarship and the Faculty of Arts Top-up Award from 2012 to 2017. Thanks also go to Taiwan Fellowship for supporting my research trip to Taiwan in 2020. I would like to thank my friends: Dr. Li-hsuan Chang (張俐璇), Dr. Shih-wen Sue Chen, Dr. Xiaoqing Huang, Dr. Francis Chia-Hui Lin, Ms. Philippa Riley, Mr. Paul Steed, Dr. Wang Yu-ting (王鈺婷), and Dr. Shu-yu Yang for their valuable input on my research. I would like to acknowledge two journals Archiv Orientálni and Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies, which kindly granted permission for me to use excerpts of my published articles in this book. Thanks go to Taiwan series editor Dr. Dafydd Fell and my editor Ms. Stephanie Rogers of Routledge, who have been extremely helpful during the process of publication. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Scott Chen, who has supported and encouraged me throughout. Thanks to my adorable daughter Iris. Thanks go as well to my family in Taiwan for their constant support and trust. The writing and publication of the book would have been impossible without them.

Introduction What’s in a name? Second-generation mainlander writing as a genre1

The concept of “the second-generation mainlander” (外省人第二代) is unique to Taiwan. These people are children of the Chinese civil war émigrés who fled Mainland China for Taiwan from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Sociologist A-chin Hsiau sees “the phenomenon of second-generation mainlanders” as involving “not only an objective question of family background (身份), but more importantly a subjective question of identification (認同)” (2011, p. 88). In other words, people who identify as “second-generation mainlanders” are likely to have a strong emotional attachment to the term, because it is generally a self-chosen identity, and to the meanings that have come to be attached to the idea of “mainlander” in the context of Taiwan. “Mainlander” is an evolving identity. Literary works produced by self-declared second-generation mainlander writers have played a large part in keeping alive the idea of what it means to be a mainlander in Taiwan and in representing “firstand second-generation mainlanders” as meaningful subject positions in public discourses in Taiwan and, by extension, in the Chinese-speaking world. As the Taiwan-born American literary critic David Der-wei Wang notes, the secondgeneration mainlanders’ literary works show the first and second generations’ feelings of loss and helplessness in the face of rapidly developing Taiwan-centric discourses in the twentieth century (2004, pp. 12–13). Mainland Chinese critic Chen Meixia, on the other hand, sees second-generation mainlander writers’ works as “inseparable from the cross-Strait perspectives (兩岸視野) and concern for Mainland China (大陸關懷)” (2011, p. 77). These divergent perspectives by Wang and Chen reflect the different interest and focus of Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese readers in interpreting the “mainlander” identity articulated in the works. This monograph concerns eight literary works published from 1982 to 2011 by second-generation mainlander writers, most of whom are based in Taiwan. The works are Yuan Chiung-chiung’s (袁瓊瓊) This Love, This Life 今生緣 (1988), Chu Tien-hsin’s (朱天心) Everlasting 未了 (1982/2001) and “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compounds” 想我眷村的兄弟們 (1992/2003), Su Wei-chen’s (蘇偉貞) Leaving Tongfang 離開同方 (1990/2002), Lo Yi-chin’s (駱以軍) The Moon Clan 月球姓氏 (2000), Hao Yu-hsiang’s (郝譽翔) The Inn 逆旅 (2000), Lai Sheng-chuan (賴聲川) and Wang Wei-chung’s (王偉忠) The

2

Introduction

Village 寶 一村 (theatre 2008, play 2011), and Chiang Hsiao-yun’s (蔣曉雲) Peach Blossom Well 桃花井 (2011).2 The selection of these eight works is primarily based on their perceived importance, impact, and influence on literary culture in Taiwan. Some of these works have received attention in Mainland China.3 The authors of the eight works are well-known for their engagement with issues concerning mainlander culture and identity. They are often regarded by literary critics as representative second-generation mainlanders’ works. These works are also chosen as texts in this monograph because they demonstrate how “mainlander” identity had been influenced and thus evolved in the rapidly Taiwanized society during the three decades. The eight works offer narratives of the lives of the civil war migrants and their children in Taiwan. While these writers have lived for most, if not all, of their lives in Taiwan, “China” has arguably been the most important theme in their writings. Cultural ambivalence and the enactment of an acute sense of identity crisis are key features of these works, in which characters display their complicated relationships with both their country of ancestral origin and their place of settlement. This book contests the presumption that all Chinese migrant communities, whom many scholars call the “Chinese diaspora” (e.g., Tsu 2010), retain strong positive ties to their original country. It argues that, as this genre of works developed from the 1980s onwards, there was initially a widely shared form of diasporic yearning for China (presented as both a geographical destination and a cultural concept). Over the next 30 years, this yearning evolved into a far more complex range of attitudes. The constant feature of these works is that “China” remained the central literary theme. Over time, what these works dramatize is the increasing cultural and emotional distance of second-generation mainlanders from their parents’ homeland. The book argues that “China” in these second-generation mainlander writings is best understood as a source of subjective interrogation. The narratives of the eight works revolve significantly around the reactions of the main characters to “what China means” to them, with a focus on the emotional complexity (of pride and shame) resulting from seeing oneself as a mainlander. This book reads mainlander cultural identity as a literary construct developed out of the authors’ characterizations of “China” and “Chineseness”, based on their own lived experiences in Taiwan. In other words, “second-generation mainlander literature” is constitutively hybrid and “in-between” to use Ien Ang’s term (2005, p. 35). It is both “Taiwanese” and “Chinese”, or more accurately, a Taiwanese-based sense of Chineseness. Stuart Hall’s idea of cultural identity provides this book with a starting point. According to Hall, cultural identity is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as being”, and thus it keeps changing and evolving: “cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation” (1990, p. 225). Since identities are “constituted within, not outside representation” and “they arise from the narrativisation of the self”

Introduction 3 (1996a, p. 4), literary works, as a type of narrative and representation of the authors’ understanding of the world they see, are excellent materials for exploring the evolution of mainlander identities in Taiwan. There are strong feelings among the people of Taiwan about the future of their country vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC), which has resulted in the proliferation of research on cross-Strait issues and matters of diaspora and identity that are bound up with the cultural politics of being “Taiwanese” or “Chinese”. Taking account of mainlanders as migrants in Taiwan, this book positions second-generation mainlander writings in the genre of Sinophone literature, considering the “second-generational” issues (or “the phenomenon of second-generation mainlanders” in A-chin Hsiau’s term) as represented in key literary works. It seeks, in particular, to examine how “Chineseness” is articulated and problematized by these second-generation mainlander writers.

Mainlanders and mainlander literature in Taiwan “Mainlanders” is an inaccurate translation of waishengren (外省人) which literally means people from other provinces. The use of waishengren to refer to the Chinese civil war migrants who fled to Taiwan marks them as outsiders. Among these migrants were approximately 600,000 soldiers and a comparable number of civilians, including soldiers’ families (Yang 2010, pp. 536–543). From 1949 to 1987, political tensions between the Kuomintang (hereafter KMT) in Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) in Mainland China prevented families who were separated by the Taiwan Strait from having any form of contact with each other. In this roughly 40-year period, the second generation of mainlanders who were born and brought up in Taiwan shared experiences of living with parents who lamented their physical separation from loved ones in China. They also lived under the strict censorship system that operated in Taiwan during the martial law period (1949–1987). Accordingly, the “China” that their parents experienced and remembered became the received version of “a homeland” they were taught. From the 1950s onwards, the KMT strategically promoted Taiwan to the world as the protector of traditional Chinese culture and presented itself as the only legitimate government of China during the cold war (from the 1950s to 1970s). As Gary D. Rawnsley states, “The Kuomintang (KMT) had galvanized its power on Taiwan through its pursuit of political tutelage, a strong state to protect the island from the Communist menace and the eventual recovery of the mainland on its own terms” (1999, p. 83). As an authoritarian party-state raising the banner of reviving traditional Chinese culture, in many aspects it placed the exiled mainlanders in a superior position to the Taiwanese, whose dialects and local ways the KMT viewed as inferior. It implemented the policy of Sinicization and Mandarin as the national language (國語). Japanese, the previous official language, was banned. Hoklo, Hakka, and indigenous languages were not allowed to be spoken in schools and workplaces, or during prime time broadcasts in the media, in

4

Introduction

an attempt to “correct” what the Japanese government had done in the preceding period (1895–1945) (Shih 1980; Jacobs 2012).4 In addition, the discourse of China as an eternal homeland, a place to which all residents in Taiwan, including the native Taiwanese and mainlanders, would be returning one day, was enforced, especially in media and education. With the KMT’s China-centric cultural policies, native Taiwanese writers, who grew up during the Japanese colonial rule and wrote in Japanese, lost their market, and mainlander writers dominated the field of literature. Anti-Communist literature (反共文學) and nostalgic literature (懷鄉文學), which center on mainlander writers’ memories of Mainland China with the main themes conforming to the KMT’s cultural and political stand, became the mainstream in the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile, there arose oppositional voices from both mainlander and native Taiwanese writers that contested the KMT’s hegemonic cultural ideology. The most prominent ones were the Modernist literary movement (現代文學) in the 1960s and the xiangtu (or nativist) literature movement (鄉土文學) in the 1970s. While the former, which was supported by many mainlander and Taiwanese writers and critics, adopted the cultural values of individualism and liberalism from the Western modernism to seek literary liberalization, xiangtu literature, which was primarily promoted by native Taiwanese writers, expressed the down-toearth concern with Taiwanese social issues and lives of the laboring-class people. With its feature of a strong sense of social awareness, xiangtu literature has often been seen by later literary critics as the precursor of Taiwanese literature, which promoted Taiwan-centric values and identities (Hsiau 2000). Second-generation mainlander writers, of whom most were born in the 1950s and 1960s in Taiwan, began writing professionally as early as in the late 1970s.5 Their early works, which can be seen as inheriting the first-generation mainlander writers’ nostalgic literature, often showed a deep sense of cultural attachment to an imagined China complemented by a sense of aloofness or detachment from the local Taiwanese culture that surrounded them. The protagonists in the works of authors such as Chu Tien-hsin, Yuang Chiung-chiung, and Su Wei-chen are invariably from Mainland backgrounds and are presented as culturally alienated from Taiwan. However, different from the nostalgic literature which narrates stories that happened in China, most of these works are set in the military dependents’ villages/juancun (眷村)—communities the KMT government had set up specifically for mainlander KMT soldiers and their families in Taiwan. The emergence of second-generation mainlander writers’ juancun literature (眷村文學), to a certain level, reflects the ways in which these writers were influenced by the xiangtu literature movement. Nevertheless, juancun writings which were produced in the 1980s, such as the two works I will examine in Chapter 1, often reflect the writers’ acceptance of the state-sanctioned Chinese nationalism, whose key features include the unity of the Chinese in terms of culture and ethnicity, China as the center of civilization, and Taiwan as a part of the Chinese nation-state. They depict mainlander characters as people who possess higher cultural literacy than local Taiwanese residents, because they inherit the Mainland Chinese values and tradition. Since this sense of cultural bias and exilic mentality was encouraged by

Introduction 5 the KMT government, the second-generation writers’ identification with China as a longed-for home—the “Other Land” (waisheng)—became problematical after the lifting of martial law in 1987. This was because a growing majority of people in Taiwan, encouraged by Taiwanese politicians, called for Taiwan’s political and cultural independence from Mainland China. The dramatic cultural and political transformations in Taiwan after 1987 are an important context for our engagement with the issues of identity crisis and the subsequent transformation of mainlander identity in the writings of the second-generation mainlander writers. Stuart Hall argues that social transformations result in transformations of personal identities and the deconstruction of a consistent subject. He wrote: This loss of a stable “sense of self” is sometimes called the dislocation or de-centering of the subject. This set of double displacement—de-centering individuals both from their place in the social and cultural world, and from themselves—constitutes a “crisis of identity” for the individual. (1996b, pp. 596–597) The lifting of martial law in Taiwan marks the turning point of second-generation mainlander writers’ attitudes and viewpoints toward China, changing from reverence and admiration to the emergence of often critical interpretations based on personal experiences. Thereafter, the images of “China” have become multiple, uncertain, and even negative. They are clear examples of Hall’s description of a “crisis of identity”. Among all social changes after the lifting of martial law in 1987, the rapid development of the discourse of Taiwanization (or bentuhua 本土化) along with the idea of Taiwan consciousness (台灣意識) is arguably the most significant, since it brought Taiwan to a new stage of democratization and released the island from the KMT’s quasi-colonial ideology, thus helping to develop post-colonial ways of thinking among Taiwan’s cultural and intellectual elite.6 In the 1990s, it became commonplace not only among nativist politicians, but also academics, artists, intellectuals, journalists, and other professionals, to defend Taiwan as a de facto autonomous entity, with emphasis being placed on the distinctive culture that had been developed by the native Taiwanese. Their negation of the KMT’s former cultural monopoly was aimed at distinguishing Taiwanese culture from both the Chinese culture that the KMT had fostered as well as the culture of Mainland China. Whereas the KMT has presented Taiwan as “Free China”, supporters of Taiwanization sought to construct cultural and historical narratives of Taiwan that are largely free of Mainland Chinese influence. It was in the social milieu of Taiwanization that the first Department of Taiwanese Literature was established for undergraduate education in 1997 with the support of the government during the presidency of Lee Teng-hui (Xu 2013, p. 46).7 It declared the necessity of institutionalizing Taiwanese literature as a distinctive literature in its own right. As Chiu Kuei-fen, a key scholar of Taiwanese Literary Studies, states, “The establishment of Department of Taiwanese Literature

6

Introduction

resulted from the implementation of the policies of Taiwanization. The department shoulders the responsibility of promoting Taiwan consciousness” (2012, p. 19). Departments of Chinese Literature were set up in universities in the 1950s, in line with the KMT’s Sinicization policy. With the rapid rise of Taiwanese literature, mainlanders’ literary works, particularly juancun literature, which in many ways did not conform with the objectives of Taiwanese literature, faced being marginalized in academic research and the publishing market. Literary critic Jaw Ching-hwa notes, from 1996 to 2003, no literary works on juancun were published in Taiwan (2010, p 120). Although the decreasing number of mainlander writings reflected the readers’ change of interest, it also demonstrated the second-generation mainlander writers’ struggles and hesitation with regard to their self-identification during the cultural and social transitional period. As this trend of Taiwanization has developed into a social consensus since the late 1990s, the position of mainlanders, especially the second generation who grew up in Taiwan but were taught to love China, became awkward and difficult. “Mainlander” has become a sensitive term in post-martial law Taiwan. Given that the influence of the KMT’s Chinese nationalism dwindled, many mainlanders began to see themselves as a cultural and ethnic minority in Taiwanese society, and the use of the term “mainlander” was taken by them as an indication of their being excluded from Taiwanese society and the movement of Taiwanization (Wu 2009; Yang & Chang 2010; Wang 2018). As a result, many mainlanders, particularly the younger generations, choose not to identify or proclaim their identification with mainlanders (Corcuff 2011, p. 116, p. 124). In this regard, second-generation mainlander writers’ self-proclaimed identity as a mainlander that is presented through their literary works is especially significant, as it demonstrates their strong emotional attachment to their unique lived experience and determination to keep alive the culture developed upon it. As mainlander literary writings have no longer occupied the position of mainstream literature in Taiwan, they have most often been seen by critics and readers as part of ethnic writings (族群書寫) in multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Taiwanese society (Chen 2007). Ethnic issues (族群問題), referring to cultural and ideological tensions between the native Taiwanese and mainlanders,8 intensified after the lifting of martial law in 1987 and have remained a problem ever since, especially because these issues are entangled with the unsolved political issues of cross-Strait relations and the transitional justice of the February 28 Incident that happened in 1947 (in which thousands of Taiwanese people were killed by KMT troops).9 The fierce political competition between the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (hereafter DPP) since the 1990s has worsened the ethnic division between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese.10 As sociologist Wang Fu-chang observed, a Taiwanese/mainlander dichotomy was often used as a tactic in election campaigns, particularly between 2000 and 2008 during Chen Shui-bian’s presidency (Wang 2018, p. 77). As a result, mainlanders’ internal diversity is often neglected, and instead, they are often (mis-)interpreted in media as collectively sharing the views of the KMT. The emergence of the discourse of “mainlanders’ original sin”

Introduction 7 (外省人的原罪) in the 1990s, referring to mainlanders’ collective responsibility for the KMT’s atrocities in the February 28 Incident, is an example that demonstrates how mainlanders were imagined by the wider public as bonded to the KMT’s authoritarianism and cultural discrimination (Chen 2008). In Stéphane Corcuff’s research on mainlander identity, he argues, “there is no collective and unified opinion among mainlanders, concerning their attitudes towards the KMT’s central value of reunification with China and the issues of identification with Taiwan” (2011, p. 142). One example is a student protest called the Sunflower Movement, which broke out in March 2014. Under the leadership of President Ma Ying-jeou (from 2008 to 2016), who is also a mainlander,11 the KMT gave up its anti-Communist stance by building closer cultural and economic bonds to the PRC, in apparent contrast to the expectations of most Taiwanese citizens.12 The KMT legislators, who vastly outnumbered the opposition parties in the Legislative Yuan, had the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement passed in order to tighten the economic links between China and Taiwan. The students protested against what they saw as the illegitimate and non-transparent process adopted by the government in expediting the review of the Agreement. Some of the important leaders and participants of the Sunflower Movement are from Mainland backgrounds such as the student representatives Wu Zheng (吳崢) and Liu Jingwen (劉敬文), both of whom are third-generation mainlanders. One of the movement’s advisers, Fan Yun (范雲), is a second-generation mainlander. Moreover, second-generation mainlander writers, such as Lo Yi-chin, wrote articles on Facebook to support the students.13 Nonetheless, the protest led to disputes between supporters of reunification with China and those who favor Taiwan’s independence. As the general public in Taiwan still held the impression that most of the KMT-supporting mainlanders favored reunification, mainstream media and social media coverage of the protest included anti-mainlander commentaries.14 When disagreements concerning Taiwan’s future relations with China arise, mainlanders as a group are often attacked in Taiwanese media reports and online commentaries by labeling them as identifying with the KMT’s pro-China policies. This disparagement of mainlanders was evident in literature as early as the 1990s. Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies in the Military Compounds”, which will be examined in Chapter 2, expresses a mainlander author’s anger with regard to the prevailing discourse that took mainlanders as “the comrades of the political authority that suppressed the native Taiwanese” (Chang 2002, p. 13). It shows the author Chu’s attempt to justify their being in Taiwan and defend their emotional attachment to the KMT by presenting mainlanders as victims who were used by the KMT during the martial law period and discriminated against by the Taiwanese in the post-martial law period.15 As such, second-generation mainlander writers’ works, like that of Chu, reveal subtle changes in the attitude of the mainlander characters toward the KMT: from trust and admiration to disappointment and distance. As Taiwan consciousness has become a vital part of Taiwanese identity, second-generation mainlander writings in the 2000s presented more complexity and

8

Introduction

diversity in form, narrative style as well as the characterization of mainlanders, which reflects the writers’ deep thinking about mainlander identity and its relationship to Taiwanese identity in the context of Taiwan. These works will be closely examined in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. In 2000, two younger second-generation mainlander writers, Hao Yu-hsiang and Lo Yi-chin, gave alternative accounts of the mainlander group by delving into the lives of non-juancun mainlanders. Their autobiographical and rather postmodern novels The Moon Clan and The Inn re-configure the mainlander identity by cutting the ties between mainlanders and the KMT and showing that not all mainlanders are supporters and followers of the KMT, but may oppose it. Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s play The Village revolves around mainlanders’ life in juancun. While the topic seems to be a throwback to juancun literature in the 1980s and 1990s, Lai and Wang’s work reveals the playwrights’ effort to turn the mainlander culture into an integral part of Taiwanese culture. Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well adopts a realistic narrative style to consider the issue of mainlander identity from a global perspective, presenting “mainlander” as a fluid and changeable identity in the highly mobile, contemporary world. Mainlander identity, narrated from different perspectives, is thus presented as divergent and difficult to pin down in literary works of the 2000s. Mainlanders’ predicament in the post-martial law period has had economic and social consequences. During the martial law period, literary works by mainlander writers used to enjoy a dominant position in Taiwan’s publishing market, often winning literary awards and attracting many readers.16 Since the 1990s, however, they have lost their appeal as more readers have become interested in literature addressing local Taiwanese issues and dealing with the history of the KMT’s state violence, information about which the former KMT government had suppressed.17 Yet, even if the works of the second-generation mainlander writers lost their leading status from the 1990s, they still retained literary and historical significance: they attracted the attention of literary critics as well as a core readership in Taiwan, since they demonstrated, historically, the ways in which the mainlander experience from 1949 to 1987 was an identity that formed and evolved through its dependence on the KMT’s China-centric ideology. The works also demonstrate the ways in which mainlanders have modified and re-articulated their identification to (or not to) fit into the new discourse of Taiwanese history and identity. In more recent years, the literary merit and the daring post-/modernist style of several second-generation mainlanders’ works, as well as the overarching theme of identity struggles depicted in them, attracted international readers and thus helped the writers to win international fame. For instance, in 2010, Lo Yi-chin’s Hotel Xi Xia (西夏旅館) won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World’s Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese (awarded by Hong Kong Baptist University). The work was praised for the surrealistic narrating style, complicated structure, and sophisticated language (“The Third Year of the Red Chamber Award” 2010). Chu Tien-wen (朱天文) won the 2015 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature (hosted by the University of Oklahoma). Her Fin-de-siècle

Introduction 9 Splendor (世紀末的華麗) was especially acclaimed by her nominator Margaret Hillenbrand because the “texture, fragrance, color, and taste leap out from her uncommonly crafted prose with such force that that they suck the reader into the text in ways not usually associated with the short-story form” (“Chu Tien-wen wins 2015 prize” 2015, para. 8).

Defining second-generation mainlander writers The term “second-generation mainlander writers” (外省第二代作家) has been widely used by literary critics in Taiwan, such as Chiu Kuei-fen (邱貴芬) (1993), Yang Chia-hsian (楊佳嫻) (2004, 2005), Hu Yan-nan (胡衍南) (2005), and Wu Hsin-yi (吳忻怡) (2011) to refer to writers who grew up in Taiwan but whose parents came from Mainland China. These critics treat the term’s meaning to be selfevident, which it indeed is in everyday discourse in Taiwan. However, a literary genre is nonetheless created through the use of “second-generation mainlander writers” to describe a group of writings. The categorization of this literary genre can only ever be ambiguous, as “second-generation mainlander” can be defined in a number of ways. As this genre is tightly connected to the authors’ own selfand cultural representations, the writings that are normally perceived as “secondgeneration mainlander literature” indicate narratives that focus on the articulation of mainlander identity. San Mao (三毛), one of the most well-known Chinese language writers in the 1970s and 1980s, is a good example for us to consider the complexity of the mainlander identity and the question of which works belong to the genre of second-generation mainlander writings. San Mao was born in China in 1943 and moved to Taiwan in 1948. Arriving in Taiwan at a pre-school age, she would not have remembered much about China, and thus her views on China would be similar to those of many second-generation mainlanders living in Taiwan. However, her writings have never been discussed as the works of a first- or second-generation mainlander. Rather, her fans regarded her as a nomadic writer (流浪作家) or “Bohemian writer” (Koetse 2018). What readers notice are the cosmopolitan, trans-ethnic, and transnational themes that she addressed in her writings, and these themes reflect how she saw herself: as a Chinese woman living in the Sahara rather than a mainlander in Taiwan (Lang 2003, p. 76).18 San Mao’s case conveys an important message that one’s identity is not necessarily tied to given definitions of ethnicity, nationality, or gender, but is rather open to interpretation and can be subjectively chosen. Whereas San Mao presented herself as a cosmopolitan woman in her autobiographical writings, the second-generation mainlander writers depict their mainlander characters as strongly attached to or haunted by a given place, history, or culture called “China”. The classification of second-generation mainlander writers emphasizes the generational, hence, collective, nature of mainlander children who have inherited aspects of, or witnessed, the previous generation’s traumatic experience of war and exile. In other words, the authors’ deliberate attempts to preserve the memories of their families, which they took to mean the memories of mainlanders

10

Introduction

as a distinctive group (as shown in many of their interviews or the prefaces to their key texts), is taken into account. However, even though the Mainland family backgrounds of these authors have resulted in certain similarities in terms of the way they represent mainlanders’ cultural identity in their literary works, there are important differences among the individual works, particularly in terms of how “China” is presented in their narratives. Family genealogy is important in second-generation mainlander narratives and often provides the basis on which the sense of “being a mainlander” is narrated and dramatized. The term “mainlander” was originally used in Taiwan to distinguish civil war Chinese migrants from native Taiwanese residents, whose families had lived on the island for generations.19 In the early days after the KMT government relocated to Taiwan, it used jiguan (籍貫, the original domicile) to identify citizens’ original home provinces in China. In this system, each citizen’s provincial origin was marked on the household registration record and ID card. One of the goals of this system was to integrate people with different provincial backgrounds under the big umbrella of Chinese nationalism (Li 2002, p. 118; Wang 2005, pp. 79–80). However, since the government was wary of a resurgence of national identity among the pre-existing Taiwanese population after the 50 years of Japanese rule, the jiguan system was also conveniently used as a method to segregate residents in Taiwan. As Wang Fu-chang (2005) notes, before the 1970s, a disproportionate number of civil servants in the central and local governments were mainlanders, and the native Taiwanese were discriminated against in this regard (p. 101). Whether intentionally or not, the practice of jiguan divided the population into two groups, benshengren (本省人 people of this province) and waishengren (外省人 mainlanders). The political use of jiguan to differentiate the Chinese “self” from the Taiwanese “other” enabled and encouraged mainlanders to see themselves as culturally superior during the martial law period up to 1987. But as democratization took hold in the 1990s, in tandem with Taiwanization, jiguan was abandoned as an institution in 1992. Instead, the term itself became understood as part of Taiwan’s unhappy history under the KMT. Writers, intellectuals, and academics now present jiguan as evidence of the KMT’s institutionalized “racism” against the local population (Li 2002; Wang 2005; Simon 2006; Yang & Chang 2010). In the early 1990s, the discourse of ethnicity took the place of the ideas associated with the jiguan system, categorizing the Taiwanese population into four ethnic groups—the indigenous people, the Hoklo, the Hakka, and mainlanders. Akin to Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities (1983/2006), the concept of ethnicity (族群), as it has been used in Taiwan from the 1990s to the present, illustrates the invented kinship and collective memories that bind people together. While the indigenous people belong to the Austronesian family and possess distinctive cultures of their own,20 the Hakka and the Hoklo, like mainlanders, originated from China and now identify as ethnically “Han”. They share a common experience of Japanese colonization, the arrival of the KMT government, and subsequent episodes of state violence, such as the February 28 Incident. Therefore,

Introduction 11 their experience of Taiwan has been quite different from that of mainlanders. In addition, the languages and cultural practices of these two groups further distinguish them as the Hoklo and the Hakka. In the discourse of ethnicity, language, culture, and shared memory, instead of original domicile, are regarded as key features that define ethnic groups in Taiwan. Although ethnic classification criteria are still widely debated, they have remained the most popular way of describing the Taiwanese population in official and non-official sources. According to a report issued by the Taiwanese government in 2011, around 67.5 percent of the inhabitants are Hoklo, 13.6 percent are Hakka, 7.1 percent are mainlanders, and 1.8 percent Aboriginal (Hakka Affairs Council 2011).21 In public discourses, the emphasis on ethnic groupings is used to encourage inclusion and acknowledgment of each of the groups as a part of Taiwanese society, their social and cultural equality, and an appreciation of diversity (Wang 2005, pp. 107–109). References to “second-generation mainlanders” are, in many ways, the result of the ethnicity discourse. However, the use of “second-generation mainlander” as a literary genre based on the authors’ jiguan and ethnicity is problematic. It neglects the extent to which the authors themselves identify as a “second-generation mainlander”. The complexity of intermarriages between mainlanders and Taiwanese and the various possibilities of identification that are available to the children of such marriages are issues that have not been widely explored in relation to this genre.

A genre of subjective identification The categorizations of jiguan and ethnicity are based on a patrilineal system. Apart from some special cases, it only takes paternal lineage into consideration. Even after the registration system was abolished in 1992, when it comes to one’s ethnic background, the paternal side is prioritized over the maternal one. However, most Chinese civil war migrants were male. Intermarriages were not uncommon, and many of these writers’ mothers were non-mainlanders. For example, the siblings Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-wen have a Hakka-Taiwanese mother, Hao Yu-hsiang’s mother is Hoklo Taiwanese, as is Lo Yi-chin’s. Labeling these writers as second-generation mainlander writers, based on the concepts of jiguan and ethnicity, excludes the role and influence of their maternal ethnicity. As mentioned above, all of the eight texts studied are, at different levels, autobiographical. This choice of autobiographical narratives can be understood as a strategy the writers adopted to show how they wished to be identified in public. As Ien Ang (2005) remarks, autobiography can be considered as “a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purpose: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work” (p. 24, her italics). Ang’s remark about autobiography as a political act is related to my point that “China” is a strategic theme enabling second-generation mainlander writers to express their self-chosen identities in the face of Taiwanization. Their narratives must win at

12

Introduction

least some support if they are to sustain their increasingly marginalized ethnic self-identification in Taiwan’s multi-ethnic society. The success of their works, many of which are on the list of bestsellers in Taiwan, indicates that writings about mainlander identity remain in demand. Identity, as the product of a social system and ethnicity, also results from how individuals subjectively understand and explain their personal experiences, values, and feelings. Indeed, some writers with Mainland backgrounds write of their strong identification with their fathers, out of which they project a mainlander identity to the main characters in their works. However, it should not be conveniently interpreted as a direct reflection of their jiguan or ethnicity but derives more from the way they present their life stories. Chu Tien-hsin is a notable example. Her short story “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (Chinese 1992, English 2003), which was first published in the 1990s when mainlanders’ cultural identity was being strongly challenged by the nativists, defends the mainlanders’ sense of identity crisis, arguing that they did not identify with Taiwan because “they didn’t have any tombstones to sweep” there (2003, p. 248). While the narrator tells readers that the leading mainlander character, like Chu herself, has a Hakka-Taiwanese mother, the Taiwanese culture is depicted as strange and unfamiliar to the character. The character’s culture shock when interacting with the local Taiwanese is exaggerated so as to emphasize her mainlander identity. Similarly, Hao Yu-hsiang, who was brought up by her Hoklo Taiwanese mother, makes it clear in her autobiographical works The Inn (逆旅) (2000) and Hot Spring Washing Away Our Melancholy (溫泉洗去我們的憂傷) (2011) that her identity is a selective decision, and she chose to identify with her mainlander father. She notes that her deep affection for her father is the source of her curiosity about the history of the Chinese exodus and leads her to strongly identify as a mainlander (2000, p. 189). Although these works are narrated from the perspective of a mainlander, their articulations of what the mainlander identity means to the characters differ greatly. Unlike Chu, who recounts mainlanders’ stories in the military dependents’ villages with an aim to defend the mainlander culture in Taiwan, Hao’s character reveals a more personal yearning for a father. Chu’s and Hao’s works are separated by around ten years. They reveal highly different perceptions of being a mainlander. As such, the authors’ descriptions of mainlander identities can be understood as reflecting their own emotional lived experience. The following chapters in this monograph demonstrate that there is no stable mainlander identity. Instead, the types of identity depicted in this genre have kept evolving and are highly individualized. In addition, mainlander identity, or identities, is/are inherently vulnerable because it is/they are constructed defensively, in a situation of rapid Taiwanization. As the examples given in the previous paragraphs show, a writer’s identification as a second-generation mainlander rests on a selective definition. In this book, the term “second-generation mainlander writers” is used in this specific sense. Therefore, it does not include writers of Mainland parentage who do not

Introduction 13 write their works from the perspective of a mainlander, or who do not deal with mainlander-related topics, like San Mao. Liglav A-Wu (利格拉樂‧阿烏) is also a case in point. A-Wu’s father was a mainlander soldier and her mother was indigenous (Paiwan tribe). Like Chu Tien-hsin, she grew up in a military dependents’ village, and was ascribed the ethnic label of a mainlander. However, experiencing racial discrimination herself, and witnessing her mother being treated unfairly by other residents, she underwent an identity transformation. She eventually adopted an indigenous name and devoted herself to defending the preservation of indigenous culture and promoting women’s rights. The issues that A-Wu writes about exclude her from the genre of “second-generation mainlander literature”, as she would not want to be categorized as such.

From diaspora to the Sinophone It is notable that most research published in the Chinese language defines mainlanders as an ethnic group but understates that they are culturally diverse migrants. The ethnic analytical viewpoint contributes to the positive recognition of mainlanders as a group in Taiwanese society, yet it overlooks and sidelines their cultural diversity and treats “mainlanders” as a single collective identity. Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang and Mau-kuei Chang write (2010): [T]he ethnicity framework leads to homogenization and generalization—seeing civil war migrants and their offspring as a privileged ruling minority and overlooking the important class difference within as well as the complex relationship between the KMT party-state and the migrant community in the past. (p. 118)22 In fact, the only thing that the first-generation mainlanders share as a whole is that they were mostly unwilling migrants. This is essential to recognize if we are to make sense of their struggle with feeling alienated from both their homeland (China) and the land of their settlement (Taiwan). Second-generation mainlanders’ narratives are centered on the experience of dislocation as a consequence of this forced migration. In the earlier works, mainlander characters are presented as unwilling to settle in Taiwan. In the later works, the focus is placed on how the second-generation characters attribute their frustration with their lives in Taiwan to their family backgrounds as unhappy migrants. Wang Gungwu in his article “Chineseness: The Dilemmas of Place and Practice” (1999/2013) excludes Taiwan from the Chinese diaspora, arguing that the government of Taiwan (under the KMT from 1949 to 1987) refused to see itself as an overseas community (p. 132). However, in examining ordinary mainlanders’ experiences in Taiwan, a number of historians and anthropologists, such as Scott Simon (2006), Meng-shuan Yang (2010), Mahlon Meyer (2012), and Joshua Fan (2012), consider the status quo of these people’s forced migration, the long separation across the Strait, and their cultural-linguistic displacement in Taiwan, as placing them squarely within the framework of diaspora. These

14

Introduction

scholars emphasize mainlanders’ nostalgia for and emotional ties to China and highlight their unanimous view of China as the motherland. Literary critic Hou Ju-chi’s book Between Two Homelands (雙鄉之間) (2014) also applies the concept of diaspora to the works of the first- and second-generation mainlander writers. In Mahlon Meyer’s oral history-based research (2012), he argues that this group felt disconnected from Taiwanese society when Chen Shui-bian was president (from 2000 to 2008), and their skepticism over Taiwan’s new, democratic system led them to admire the CCP’s rule in the PRC, which they saw as bringing about prosperity and the pride of “being Chinese”. However, Meyer’s findings about civil war migrants and second-generation mainlanders’ wanting reunion with China because of the economic rise of the PRC do not resonate with the narratives produced by second-generation mainlander writers in the 1990s and 2000s. Their own emotional and cultural alienation from Mainland China informs the ambivalence they invest in their Mainland characters’ understanding of “Chinese identity” and imagination of “China”. One of the key features of diaspora is the inseparable cultural tie, support, and yearning for the original homeland, be it geographical, cultural, or historical. Because of this affective attachment, scholars have generally argued that diaspora communities display feelings of transnational similarity and solidarity no matter how dispersed they are. William Safran (1991) states, “they [the diasporas] regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return—when conditions are appropriate”, and “they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship” (pp. 83–84). While James Clifford (1994) and Stuart Hall (1990) underscore the hybridity and diversity of diaspora identities, they similarly argue that the (imagined) homeland plays a vital role in framing and anchoring diasporic people’s feeling of belonging, by which they develop a sense of transnational solidarity. The second-generation mainlanders’ literary works examined in this monograph reflect certain features of a transnational, collective attachment of Chinese diaspora communities to the idea of a motherland. However, what the mainlander characters in these works display much more, especially in the works written after the lifting of martial law, is feelings of anguish and frustration because of their ancestral connections with China. We should also note that although the texts written in the 1980s reveal a strong sense of emotional attachment to Mainland China as homeland, “China” is never presented as a lifeworld. Rather, it functions as a vague and abstract symbol, signifying both the past and the future place of return. In most of the works I examine, the Chinese origin of the first-generation mainlander characters is depicted as a cultural burden that haunts the secondgeneration mainlanders, as they can neither embrace nor be rid of it. While it may be appropriate to interpret the first-generation mainlander writers’ writings as a literature of nostalgia (Ming Yang 2010; Hsin-yi Wu 2011), and thus as representative of diaspora consciousness, the second-generation mainlander writers’ writings do not fit the existing definition of diasporic literature. This is

Introduction 15 because they represent the homesickness of the first-generation mainlanders as problematic and tragic. This aspect of second-generation mainlander writings is implicit in the earlier works from the 1980s but increasingly explicit from the 1990s onwards. In fact, these writings could be said to increasingly treat the idea of the ancestral homeland as an object of critical reflection. In Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan (2000), the second-generation mainlander narrator sees his father’s narratives of homeland as tall tales, expressing the second generation’s doubt over the distant homeland where they have never lived: “I felt that what he told us were his ‘tall tales’ (故事), not our family’s background (身世). Have we ever seen the people in his stories?” (p. 146). Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well (2011) addresses the issue of mainlanders’ re-settlement in the original homeland, depicting the leading character Li’s homecoming trip as a bitter disappointment, because both he and his “homeland” have severely changed during the four decades of separation. Stéphane Corcuff (2004, 2011) has observed that an increasing number of mainlanders, including the first and second generations and their descendants, have chosen to identify as Taiwanese. Noting that most mainlanders do not prioritize the goal of reunification (2004, p. 142) and that third-generation mainlanders even regard the CCP’s possible military attack on Taiwan as the threat of an “invasion (侵略)” (2004, p. 141), Corcuff argues that whether they recognize it or not, mainlanders have long developed a sense of identification with Taiwan. While concurring with Corcuff’s argument, I argue that the mainlanders’ ideas of cultural identity—that is, what Taiwanese culture or being Taiwanese means, are still significantly different from that of most native Taiwanese. This is an issue that has been rarely addressed in scholarship. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book tackle the ways in which the writers position mainlander culture in Taiwan. The idea of diaspora requires the framework of a periphery and its center. This framing is widely used in the media and scholarship to discuss Taiwan’s relations with China, and a key articulation of this periphery-center imaginary was produced by philosopher Wei-ming Tu in his essay “Cultural China” (1991) where he included the overseas Chinese communities in the three “symbolic universes” (p. 12) of cultural China and presented China as the symbolic cultural center. Although Tu’s aim was to reverse the center-periphery relationship by arguing that the more modernized overseas Chinese communities, such as those in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, had actively influenced the meanings and direction of Chineseness, the structure of his argument was still set upon the premise that there exists a hegemonic standard of Chineseness. Rather than replicate this center-periphery framing, I read the second-generation mainlander writers’ works from the perspective of a non-hierarchical world of Sinophone speakers. The idea of Sinophone literature, which re-interprets the meaning of Chinese cultural identity in both Mainland China and the overseas Chinese communities, allows us to more productively account for the second-generation mainlander writers’ representations of the tensions between the desire to return to “China” or to identify with “Chineseness” and the frustrations generated by this desire. Theoretical engagement with the Sinophone was proposed by Shu-mei Shih in

16

Introduction

her Visuality and Identity (2007) and was further developed in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013) (edited by Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards) through the contributions of scholars, such as Wei-ming Tu, Ien Ang, David Der-wei Wang, and Rey Chow, to support Shih’s overarching argument of Sinophone Studies.23 Shih’s account of the Sinophone acknowledges the complexity of “Chineseness” in today’s highly globalized reality. Against the essentialist notion of “Chineseness”, she argues that the view of Chinese culture in Mainland China as the eternal model or center of “Chineseness”, and those developed overseas as on the periphery, is no longer suitable to explain the variety and complexity of Chinese cultures that exist in different parts of the world. In contrast to the hegemonic concept of “Chineseness”, the idea of the Sinophone appreciates the autonomous status and different interpretations of Chineseness in Chinese communities outside Mainland China. As Shih argues, these plural Sinophone cultures are tied to social/geographical/political contexts, and thus “Chinese culture” or “what Chineseness is” also varies from one place to another. As such, the relations between Chinese migrant communities and Mainland China are not necessarily expressed through nostalgia. Drawing upon Shih’s argument, this book contends that the eight secondgeneration mainlander works under study all demonstrate an evolving Sinophone cultural identity outside Mainland China and in the particular context of Taiwan. As Shih notes, a diaspora always has an expiration date, since migrants will one day become settlers and then turn into the local population (2013, p. 37). Similar to Stéphane Corcuff’s argument of mainlanders becoming Taiwanized, the mainlander protagonists are portrayed as envisioning a cultural identity that, while derived from Mainland Chinese culture, is quite distinct from it. The feedback from readers from Mainland China (which will be discussed in the Conclusion) further indicates that the mainlander culture shown in these works has influenced Mainland Chinese readers’ understanding of the concept of China as a cultural homeland (Liang 2014). In this monograph, I take second-generation mainlander literature to be a distinctive Mandarin-language culture located and developed in Taiwan, rather than one that is attached and subordinate to the Mainland. Although the works revolve around the mainlander characters’ preoccupation with “China” and their varying degrees of perceived alienation from Taiwan, they are unique cultural products of Taiwan. While the discourse of bentuhua Taiwanization has been resistant to a hegemonic and essentialist view of Chinese culture with many advocates of Taiwanization being reluctant to accept “Chinese culture” as part of Taiwanese cultural identity,24 this study of the second-generation mainlander writers’ works shows that the concept of “Chineseness” can be multi-faceted and that mainlanders’ cultural identities, which are “Chinese” because of their genealogical attachment and emotional entanglement to “China”, have developed in diverse and complex ways in Taiwan. In short, this book argues that the second-generation mainlander works under study exemplify how the category “mainlander” includes diverse ways of relating to China and one’s Chinese “roots”. Over time,

Introduction 17 the culture of mainlanders presented in the second-generation mainlander writers’ texts has increasingly distinguished itself from the discourse of “Chineseness” promoted by the KMT in the period of military rule. It shares even less in common with the official view of Chinese culture in the PRC.

Memory writing and Sinophone mainlander identity All eight second-generation mainlander writers’ works examined are either autobiographical or contain autobiographical elements. The authors use different forms of memory (personal, family, cultural, or national) to construct mainlander identities, and elaborate on mainlanders’ identity questions concerning how the first-generation mainlanders’ traumatic memory may pass down to their children and how mainlanders have struggled between the KMT fostered collective memory/culture and their personal experiences. These eight works all delve into the second-generation mainlander characters’ accounts of their childhood experiences. Yet, with different articulations of mainlanders’ lived experiences, “mainlander” is presented as a continuously changing identity, which resonates with Shu-mei Shih’s idea that Sinophone identity is “place-based and sensitive to time to attend to the process of its formation and disappearance” (2013, p.36). Second-generation mainlander writings, which emerged when mainlanders’ dominant culture and privileged social status lost their edge in Taiwan, can be seen as examples of lieux de mémoire (sites or works of memory), to use Pierre Nora’s term, the aims of which is not to “resurrect” but “represent” the past (Nora 1996, p. 12). As Pierre Nora argues, when the natural environments of memory no longer exist, people invent sites or works of memory to preserve the past. Yet, since works of memory are products of imagination, the meaning of the past is open for interpretation. Whereas the genre of second-generation mainlander writings reveals the authors’ attempt to keep mainlanders’ family memories alive, the changeable nature of remembered lives and events in these literary works is in opposition to the homogeneous historical narratives which aim to fix the meaning of the past, especially those that have been produced by political parties in Taiwan such as the KMT and the DPP and by the CCP in China. Therefore, each of the narratives represents multiple acts of revision and re-inscription of past experience on the part of the authors, as they sought to give shape to the idea of being a mainlander at different times and in different contexts. The best example is juancun literature: Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting (1982) and “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (1992) deal with the same topic of military dependents’ villages but present two different attitudes. The former shows a narrator who loves her childhood home and the latter depicts one who has a complicated love-hate relationship with it. These different recollections by the same author reflect the enormous change in mainlander identities as Taiwan underwent dramatic social, political, and cultural change from the 1980s to the 1990s. The image of juancun is further reshaped by Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung in their play The Village (2011), which attempts to “depoliticize” the meaning of juancun, portraying them as sites that embrace cultural diversity.

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Introduction

The second-generation mainlanders’ narratives examined in the chapters that follow can be described as reflecting a tension and continuous negotiation between collective memory and personal memory. While the mainlander identity in works written in the 1980s tend to echo the KMT’s construction of “collective memory”, texts written after the 1990s show the authors’ questioning of this “collective memory”. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) wrote of “collective memory” that it is produced at the expense of personal memories. His argument that the construction of individual memories can only occur within the context of existing collective memory, which is a highly selective process regarding what to remember and what to forget, sheds light on the second-generation mainlander writers’ cultural bias against Taiwanese and the yearning for Mainland China, such as Chu Tienhsin’s Everlasting and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life, both of which were written during the martial law period. The rapid evolution of mainlander identities alongside Taiwanization and democratization from the 1990s onwards presents a situation in which “collective memory” is much less easy to define. Second-generation mainlander writers’ works in the post-martial law period demonstrate the authors’ continuous exploration and alignment of themselves against the KMT-inspired collective memory through a conscious reworking of the past based on their own lived experience in comparison with the rapid dissemination of native Taiwanese’s life stories. To a large extent, the second-generation mainlander writings show a sense of “postmemory” (Hirsch 2008, p. 107), since the authors’ narratives of China and Chineseness are related more to the investment of imagination, projection, and creation. Marianne Hirsch defines “postmemory” (2008) as a kind of transgenerational memory that is passed from those who had actually experienced the Holocaust to their children who did not have any direct experience of it, but still felt and “re-imagined” it. Although it is important to note that each historical event occurs against complicated cultural, political, and social backgrounds which should be carefully dealt with to avoid its specific significance from being generalized, Hirsch (2008, p. 108) reminds us that theories concerning psychological mechanisms can be deployed to examine the psychological effects of traumatic historical events more generally. The second-generation mainlander writings reflect how the second-generation mainlanders inherit yet struggle against the first-generation mainlanders’ narratives of their traumatic memory. A-chin Hsiau (2010) develops his idea of “quasi-exilic mentality” based on Hirsch’s postmemory, arguing that second-generation mainlanders inherited the previous generation’s traumatic memory, which is represented in their feelings of alienation from Taiwan and nostalgia for China. Unlike the second generation of the Holocaust victims who received the traumatic postmemory from their parents and family members, second-generation mainlanders’ quasi-exilic mentality was more constructed by the government’s strict ideological control during the martial law period and reinforced through familial communications. Postmemory is unstable due to the lack of personal experience. In particular, second-generation mainlanders’ postmemory of China is an educated and practiced form of “memory”, which may easily collapse once the memory bearers find that their daily experience is in conflict with the postmemory they inherited. The

Introduction 19 gap between inherited postmemory and actual personal experience explains why in stories, such as Yuan Chiong-chiong’s This Love, This Life and Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting, even when the mainlanders’ longing to return to China is emphasized, the image of China is presented as ambiguous and ideological. This idea also accounts for the diverse literary imagining of China in second-generation mainlander literature of the post-martial law period.

Chapter arrangement The chapters have been chronologically ordered. This is to track important changes of perspective about the mainlander identity over time. Based on a historical and socio-political contextual analysis, this book maps the changes in literary conceptualizations of mainlander identity in relation to the politics of Taiwanization and democratization in Taiwan over time. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 investigate juancun literature, the most popular genre in second-generation mainlander writings since the 1980s. Chapter 1 deals with Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting (未了) (1982) and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life (今生緣) (1988). Both works are reflective of literature produced in the repressive climate of the authoritarian KMT rule. Both concern mainlanders’ life in the military dependents’ villages (juancun) during the martial law period. Both works present a view of Taiwan heavily influenced by the KMT, particularly in relation to the “othering” of native Taiwanese characters. Chu and Yuan were born in Taiwan, but their birthplace is portrayed as an alien land in their writings. “China” is referred to as the homeland. In Chapter 1, I argue that we should nonetheless consider both works as part of xiangtu literature, since they are literary accounts of a unique cultural site and a way of life in Taiwan. Chapter 2 examines two key works of the early 1990s: Su Wei-chen’s novel Leaving Tongfang (離開同方) (1990/2002) and Chu Tien-hsin’s short story “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (想我眷村的兄弟們) (1992/2003). Chu Tien-hsin’s works are examined in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 because the author occupies a special place in this genre. She has been known for having publicly defended the cultural integrity of mainlander identity. However, as her views changed, her characters are presented as undergoing a crisis of identity. Published in the early 1990s when tensions between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese reached a high level, both Chu and Su make use of the theme of nostalgia to express their views about the demolition of military dependents’ villages and the trend of Taiwanization. Rendering the villages as depressing places, both works show the authors’ re-interpretation of mainlanders’ status in Taiwan as an ethnic minority and historical victims. These two works also reveal the authors’ anxiety concerning the marginalization of mainlander writings in the newly emerged field of Taiwanese literature. The idea of “China” in the two works is largely based on accounts of the military compounds in Taiwan. Chapter 3 examines texts written by two younger second-generation mainlander writers, Hao Yu-hsiang and Lo Yi-chin, who were born in the late 1960s, and are thus more than ten years younger than the three writers discussed in the preceding chapters. In Hao’s The Inn (逆旅) (2000) and Lo’s The Moon Clan

20

Introduction

(月球姓氏) (2000), the second-generation narrators trace their fathers’ family histories in order to account for their own frustrations in the present. Telling their family stories, the narrators however take a critical stance toward their fathers’ Chinese identity and the historical narratives articulated by the KMT. This chapter argues that mainlander identity had become much more fluid by the 2000s. In both works, the narrative focus on identity is less about a received identity than a self-chosen one, based on the narrator’s decision to feel a bond with his or her mainlander father. “China” in these two works is a symbolic site that reflects the second-generation mainlander narrator’s love-hate relationship with one’s father rather than a homeland. Chapter 4 examines a highly successful play, Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village (寶 一村) (2011), which played a key role in reviving mainlander culture in Taiwan, and is marketed as the representative Taiwanese culture in China and other Chinese communities in Singapore, Australia, and the US. The strategies that Lai and Wang employed to present mainlander culture as an integral part of Taiwanese culture are a focus of analysis in this chapter. The play presents a positive and nostalgic picture of juancun and portrays juancun residents and Taiwanese people as having shared the same collective life experiences during the martial law period. Yet critics’ and general audiences’ polarized responses indicate that their treatment of juancun culture and mainlander identity is seen as problematic for some, which in turn highlights the increasingly contested nature of mainlander identity. In Chapter 5, I examine the US-based second-generation mainlander writer Chiang Hsiao-yun’s work Peach Blossom Well (桃花井) (2011). I argue that Chiang’s work challenges the general impression of the Chinese diasporas’ emotional ties to and longing for Mainland China. The novel unravels mainlanders’ imaginings of China as a homeland and presents their desire to return home to be a futile pursuit. Chiang’s narrative is unusual because the novel was written over a period of 30 years. Depicting the return of four generations of mainlanders to their “hometown” in China, Chiang’s narrative highlights the hybrid and mobile nature of mainlander identities as the forces of globalization gathered strength, changing both China and Taiwan and the relations between them. In the concluding chapter, I consider the so-called “Taiwanese literature fever” (台灣文學熱) in China from 2008 to 2011. During this period, the works of many second-generation mainlander writers, such as Lo Yi-chin, Hao Yu-hsiang, Lung Ying-tai, Chu Tien-hsin, and Chang Ta-chun grew in popularity in China. Since then, these writers have been regarded by many Mainland Chinese readers and critics as representative Taiwanese writers. In the chapter, I consider the predicament as well as the potential of the “second-generation mainlander” genre in Taiwanese literature, explore why the second-generation mainlander writers are more easily welcomed by the Chinese government and publishers in China, and examine how these works are perceived by Mainland Chinese critics and readers. While these writers did not write with a Mainland readership in mind, their works have acquired a novel appeal in the PRC not least because they provide a different sense of what “being Chinese” means.

Introduction 21

Notes 1 Part of this chapter was published in the Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies in 2013. The publication information is as follows: Huang, Yuting. “What’s in a Name?: Secondgeneration Mainland Writers’ Literary Works as a Contested Genre”. Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies 1.4 (2013): 44–58. 2 In this monograph, the second-generation mainlander writers’ names are based on Wade–Giles transliteration, which is most commonly used in Taiwan. The authors I discuss in this book spell their names as such in their websites, media, international events, or articles. The Wade–Giles transliteration of names is also most often used by critics when referring to these writers. The characters’ names in the novels are spelt in pinyin, as it is a more widely circulated and recognized system of transliteration. 3 Some second-generation mainlander works which are well-known in Mainland China are not chosen as the major texts examined in this book in that they do not fit into the central argument and structure of this book. For example, Chang Ta-chun (張大春)’s As One Family (聆聽父親) (2003) was a bestseller in China, but it was not chosen, since this book is focused on the ways in which the changing socio-political context in Taiwan informs the writers’ idea of mainlander identity. Compared with Hao Yu-hsiang’s and Lo Yi-chin’s works which were similarly published in the early 2000s on the theme of family history, Chang’s As One Family, which is often seen by critics as very different from Chang’s previous cynical and playful writing style, is shown as less concerned with the interactions of the discourse of Taiwanization in Taiwanese society and the transformation of mainlander identity in the late 1990s. It instead presents a son’s monologue, considering his relationship to his aging and ill father. Lo Yi-chin’s award winning novel Hotel Xi Xia (西夏旅館) (2008) is a lengthy and highly complicated work which, I believe, requires detailed analysis of its writing style and the surrealistic images, and thus makes it less suitable to be included in this comparative study that aims to trace the evolution of mainlander identity in second-generation mainlander writings from the 1980s to 2010s. As I will discuss in the Conclusion, the success of certain works in Mainland China may reflect the Chinese readers’ appetite and imagination of Taiwan. It is an interesting question, but it is beyond the scope of this monograph. 4 During the Japanese colonial period, the Japanese government attempted to systematically assimilate the Taiwanese through the kominka movement (1937–1945), aiming to make them truly Japanese by forcefully “promoting” the Japanese language and religion, as well as changing Chinese surnames to Japanese ones. 5 The definitions of second-generation mainlanders vary a lot from one scholar to another. For example, Li Kuang-chün (2004) and Chang Jui-fen (2001) have different definitions of second-generation mainlanders. In this monograph, second-generation mainlanders refer to those who moved to Taiwan with their parents at their pre-school age, and those who were born in Taiwan from the late 1940s to the 1960s. 6 Since the presidency of Lee Teng-hui, the KMT has also undergone a process of democratization and political reform, with a number of party members maintaining that it should become more localized and focused on Taiwan instead of China. 7 As of 2014, 17 universities in Taiwan had departments or graduate institutes of Taiwanese literature. 8 According to Wang Fu-chang’s research, benshengji (本省籍) included the Hoklo, Hakka, and indigenous people based on the rules of Taiwan population census in 1956 (2005, p. 65). However, when talking about ethnic issues in Taiwan, the term “native Taiwanese” (benshengren) often refers only to the Hoklo, the group that accounts for the highest percentage of the population in Taiwan, although occasionally it also includes the Hakka when emphasizing the contrasting historical perspectives between those who have lived in Taiwan for generations and those who moved to Taiwan during

22 9

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Introduction and after the Chinese civil war. It is notable that Taiwan’s indigenous people are often neglected in this debate. The February 28 Incident or 228 Incident (二二八事件) is the more neutral and widely accepted term for general use in media and academia in Taiwan to indicate the serious conflicts that happened between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese in 1947. Some scholars such as Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou in their A Tragic Beginning (1991) defines the event as an uprising, and thus call it the February 28 Uprising. The Democratic Progressive Party was founded in 1986. It is one of the major political parties in Taiwan. Former president (2000–2008) Chen Shui-bian and the current president Tsai Ing-wen are members of the DPP. Ma Ying-jeou was born in Hong Kong in 1950, and he moved to Taiwan in 1952 with his family. His parents were both from Hunan. Interestingly, from the late 1990s, Ma called Ma Village (馬家庄), a place in the northern part of Taiwan (Miao-li), his hometown. Although the majority of the population in the village are Hakka, Ma claimed that his ancestors and those of the residents in Ma Village were relatives. Based on a long-term survey of Taiwan residents’ identity, which has been conducted annually by the Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, since 1992, there is a clear trend of an increasing number of Taiwan residents (including Taiwanese and mainlanders) regarding themselves as Taiwanese. In 1992 around 17.6 percent called themselves Taiwanese. The percentage has kept increasing, and the number of people who see themselves as Taiwanese reached 57.1 percent in 2013, the year before the Sunflower Movement happened. This survey has often been used as evidence to show Taiwan residents’ increasing Taiwanization. However, Bruce Jacobs and Paul Kang’s Changing Taiwanese Identities (2018) points out problems of the quantitative approach this survey uses. See “Taiwanese/Chinese Identification Trend Distribution in Taiwan (1992/06~2017/12)” by the Election Study Center, National Chengchi University http: //esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=166#, accessed on March 3, 2018. See https://zh-tw.facebook.com/louyichin/posts/678014202257402 and https://zh-tw.f acebook.com/louyichin/posts/676242932434529, accessed on August 26, 2015. For example, see http://www.appledaily.com.tw/realtimenews/article/new/201403 20/363243/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoQNWmH9Vuo, accessed on September 1, 2015. See also Mahlon Meyer’s Remembering China from Taiwan: Divided Families and Bittersweet Reunions after the Chinese Civil War (2012) and Wu Jinxun’s Taiwan, Please Listen to Me (2009). Both works are based on interviews in which mainlander interviewees express their discontent concerning their position in Taiwanese society since the lifting of post-martial law. Second-generation mainlander writers also enjoyed certain privileges in the publishing market owing to the previous generation’s social network. That is, they were more easily recognized because of the help of the previous generation. Taking Chu Tien-hsin as an example, Chu’s father was a well-known mainlander writer Chu Hsi-ning (朱西甯), and her mother Liu Mu-sha (劉慕沙) worked as a translator. Both of them had good connections in the world of publishing. When Chu Tien-hsin’s work Everlasting was under the review for a literary award sponsored by the United Daily News, one of the judges praised the work and said that even if the works were reviewed anonymously, he could identify the author because of the themes and writing style. This indicates that in addition to the writers’ talents and efforts, the personal connections that existed among mainlanders might have helped the careers of second-generation mainlander writers, like Chu Tien-hsin and her sisters. Some of the English articles on such topics include Peng Hsiao-yen’s “Historical Revisionism in Taiwanese Literature and Culture: A Post-Martial Law Phenomenon” (2003), Nancy Guy’s “Feeling a Shared History through Song: ‘A Flower in the Rainy

Introduction 23 18 19 20 21

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Night’ as a Key Cultural Symbol in Taiwan” (2008), and Craig Smith’s “Aboriginal Autonomy and Its Place in Taiwan’s National Trauma Narrative” (2012). Miriam Lang in her article (2003) points out that to a certain extent San Mao’s works did show her love for the Greater China, yet rather than dealing with the patriotic theme of “saving the nation”, San Mao was more interested in romance. Based on Wen-Hsiung Hsu’s “From Aboriginal Island to Chinese Frontier: The Development of Taiwan before 1683” (1980), the earliest wave of Chinese migrants from China to Taiwan started in the seventeenth century. Taiwan’s indigenous people are not a unified group. To the present, there are 16 officially recognized tribes, who speak different languages and have different cultures. This survey was conducted by the rule of single self-identity. It is significant that aside from the four ethnic groups, around 7.5 percent of the interviewees insisted that they were Taiwanese, which may indicate the rise in the acceptance of this ethnic identity and the mobile boundaries of the idea of ethnicity itself. In addition, since the early 2000s, “New immigrants” (新住民) were categorized as the fifth ethnic group in Taiwan. New immigrants primarily refer to people of other nationalities who migrated to Taiwan because of intermarriage after the lifting of martial law. See also Tanguy Le Pesant’s “Generational Change and Ethnicity among 1980s-born Taiwanese” (2011), and Li Kuang-chün’s “Generation Discrepancies and Ethnic Transformations” (2006). Taiwan-based sociologist Antonia Chao also points out the framework of ethnic studies may mirror the mainlanders’ and Taiwanese’s different political identifications (with the DPP or the KMT) in post-martial law Taiwan, yet it neglects mainlanders’ exile experiences and simplifies the varieties of mainlanders (2001, pp. 58–59). It is notable that in David Der-wei Wang’s “The Politics of ‘Root’, the Poetics of ‘Propensity’: Sinophone Discourse and Chinese Literature” (2014), he has noted his different views about overseas Sinophone communities’ relationships to China and Chinese culture from those of Shu-mei Shih. While Shih believes that the Sinophone will eventually cut all ties with China, Wang argues that some of the Sinophone may retain an ambivalent and complicated relationship to “China” and “Chinese culture”. One of the most conspicuous examples is the de-Sinicization movement under the presidency of Chen Shui-bian between 2000 and 2008, during which the government sought to eliminate Chinese cultural and political influence on Taiwan. Related policies include removing the words “China” or “Chinese” from public institutions, introducing the subject of local languages (Hoklo, Hakka, and indigenous languages) to the primary school curriculum in 2001, and printing the word ‘Taiwan” on the ROC passport in 2003.

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Li, K. C. 李廣均. (2004). Toshi san ge shidai waishengren 透視三個世代外省人 [Analyzing Three Generations of Mainlanders]. Caixün 財 訊 [Wealth Magazine], 266, 86–92. Li, K. C. 李廣均. (2006). Shidai chayi yu zuqun bianqian 世代差異與族群變遷 [Generational Discrepancies and Ethnic Transformations]. Dangdai 當代 [Contemporary], 229, 20–31. Liang, J. 梁静. (2014, May 16). Wei he women ai Taiwan zuojia 为何我们爱台湾作家 [Why Do We Love Taiwanese Writers?]. Xin kuai bao 新快报 [New Express Daily], p. B09. Retrieved 16 July, 2015, from http://news.xkb.com.cn/wenhua/2014/0516/324810.html Lo, Y. C. 駱以軍. (2000). Yueqiu xingshi 月球姓氏 [The Moon Clan]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxue. Lo, Y. C. 駱以軍. (2008). Xixia lüguan 西夏旅館 [Hotel Xi Xia]. Taipei: INK. Meyer, M. (2012). Remembering China from Taiwan: Divided Families and Bittersweet Reunions after the Chinese Civil War. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP. Nora, P. (1996). General Introduction: Between Memory and History. In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past Vol. 1 (pp. 1–20). New York: Columbia University Press. Peng, H. Y. (2003). Historical Revisionism in Taiwanese Literature and Culture: A PostMartial Law Phenomenon. In C. Neder & I. S. Schilling (Eds.), Transformation! Innovation?: Perspectives on Taiwan Culture (pp. 13–28). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Rawnsley, G. D. (1999). Taiwan’s Propaganda Cold War: The Offshore Island Crises of 1954 and 1958. Intelligence and National Security, 14(4), 82–101. Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1(1), 83–99. Shih, M. 史明. (1980). Taiwanren sibainian shih 台灣人四百年史 [Four Hundred Years of Taiwanese History]. San Jose: Paradise Culture Associates. Shih, S. M. (2007). Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shih, S. M. (2013). Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production. In S. M. Shih, C. H. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 25–42). New York: Columbia University Press. Shih, S. M., Tsai, C. H. & Bernards B. (Eds.). (2013). Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Simon, S. (2006). Taiwan’s Mainlanders: A Diasporic Identity in Construction. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 22(1), 87–106. Smith, C. (2012). Aboriginal Autonomy and Its Place in Taiwan’s National Trauma Narrative. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 24(2), 209–240. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2002). Likai Tongfang 離開同方 [Leaving Tongfang]. Taipei: Lianjing. The 3th Year of the Red Chamber Award. (2010). Retrieved 20 December, 2019, from http://redchamber.hkbu.edu.hk/tc/winners/3rd/dream Tsu, J. (2010). Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tu, W. M. (1991). Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center. Daedalus, 120(2), 1–31. Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2004). Xu er: Lao qü kong yü duhai xin 序二：老去空餘渡海心 [Preface II: As the Soldiers Grew Old]. In P. Y. Chi & D. D. W. Wang (Eds.), Zui hou de Huangpu 最後的黃埔 [The Last of the Whampoa Breed] (pp. 9–13). Taipei: Rye Field Publications.

Introduction 27 Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2014). ‘Gen’ de zhengzhi, ‘shi’ de shixue: huayu lünshu yü Zhongguo wenxue ‘根’的政治，‘势’的诗学—华语论述与中国文学 [The Politics of ‘Root’, the Poetics of ‘Propensity’: Sinophone Discourse and Chinese Literature]. The Yangtze River Criticism 扬子江评论, 1, 5–14. Wang, F. C. 王甫昌. (2005). You ‘Zhongguo shengji’ dao ‘Taiwan zuqun’: hukou pucha ji bie lei shu zhuanbian zhi fenxi 由「中國省籍」到「台灣族群」： 戶口普 級別類屬轉變之分析 [From Chinese Original Domicile to Taiwanese Ethnicity: An Analysis of Census Category Transformation in Taiwan]. Taiwan shehuixue 台灣社會學, 9, 29–117. Wang, F. C. 王甫昌. (2018). Studies on Taiwan’s Ethnic Relations. International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 1, 64–89. Wang, G. W. (2013). Chineseness: The Dilemmas of Place and Practice. In S. M. Shih, C. H. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 131–144). New York: Columbia University Press. Wu, H. Y. 吳忻怡. (2011). Zuori de xuanhua: juancun wenxue yu juancun 昨日的喧嘩：眷村文學與眷村 [Hubbub from Yesterday—Literature and Juancun]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yü jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 3–34). Taipei: Qünxue. Wu, J. X. 吳錦勳. (2009). Taiwan qing ting wo shuo 台灣請聽我說 [Taiwan, Please Listen to Me]. Taipei: Tianxia wenhua. Xu, S. L. 許素蘭. (2013). Dakai Taiwan wenxue xisuo fazhan shi 打開台灣文學系所 發展史 [History of the Development of Departments and Institutes of Taiwanese Literature]. Taiwan wenxueguan tongxün 台灣文學館通訊 [Newsletter of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature], 40, 46–48. Yang, C. H. 楊佳嫻. (2004). Huijiu shenzhi, ye yi bushi jiushi de ziwei: tan waisheng di er dai (juancun) xiaoshuojia de xinbiaoxian 懷舊甚至，也已不是舊時的滋味：談外 省第二代（眷村）小說家的新表現 [Nostalgia, yet No Longer the Same]. Wen xun 文訊, 229, 40–47. Yang, D. M. H. & Chang, M. K. (2010). Understanding the Nuances of Waishengren: History and Agency. China Perspectives, 3, 108–122. Yang, M 楊明. (2010). Xiangchou meixue—1949 nian dalu qiantai zuojia de huaixiang wenxue 鄉愁美學：1949年大陸遷台作家的懷鄉文學 [Aesthetics of Homesickness: Literature of Nostalgia by Writers Who Moved to Taiwan in 1949]. Taipei: Xiuwei Zixün. Yang, M. H. 楊孟軒. (2010). Wuling niandai waisheng zhongxia jieceng jünmin zai Taiwan de shehuishi chutan 五零年代外省中下階層軍民在台灣的社會史初探 [The Pilot Study of Mid-Lower Class Mainland Soldiers and Civilians during the 1950s in Taiwanese Sociology]. In Taiwan Association of University Professors (Ed.), Zhonghuaminguo liuwang Taiwan liushi nian ji zhanhou Taiwan guoji chujing 中華民國流亡台灣六十年暨戰後台灣國際處境 [ROC in Taiwan for Sixty Years and Post-war International Status of Taiwan] (pp. 525–599). Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe [Avant-guard Publishing House]. Yuan, C. C. 袁瓊瓊. (1988). Jin shen yuan 今生緣 [This Love, This Life]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxue.

1

Constructing the mainlander Self, other, and homeland in Chu Tienhsin’s Everlasting (未了) and Yuan Chiungchiung’s This Love, This Life (今生緣)

Framing juancun literature The genre of second-generation mainlander writings has two basic features: an emphasis on mainlanders as a unique cultural group in Taiwan and a focus on the mainlander characters’ ambivalent relations to China. An important characteristic of works written by second-generation mainlanders published in the 1980s was the depiction of childhood experiences in the military dependents’ villages (眷村or juancun). These were communities established by the KMT government in the 1950s to accommodate soldiers and their families who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek’s army. In these works of the 1980s, representations of mainlander parents and other mainlanders of the parents’ generation made up a large part of the narratives. Unlike the dominant anti-Communist literature (反共文學) and nostalgic literature (懷鄉文學) of the 1950s and 1960s, which were focused on China, this so-called juancun literature (眷村文學) can be seen as primarily an outcome of the xiangtu literature debate or nativist literature debate (鄉土文學論戰) in Taiwan which occurred from 1977 to 1979. The xiangtu literature debate was a series of arguments primarily between mainlander and Taiwanese writers concerning whether literary works in Taiwan should engage with local issues, such as the lives of the working class and rural areas. As literary critic Chiu Kuei-fen notes, Taiwan’s xiangtu literature emerged with an aim to counter the trend of modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, yet discussions concerning the question of what “xiangtu” is—China or Taiwan—unexpectedly become the most important influence of the debate (2007, p. 86, p. 91). The growing interest in literary representations of the lives of ordinary people in Taiwan generated by the debate directly and indirectly inspired many secondgeneration mainlander writers to give accounts of the Chinese civil war migrants and their descendants’ lives and identities in Taiwan. Of the two writers discussed in this chapter, Yuan Chiung-chiung appeared less concerned with the debate (as she never commented on how the debate influenced her writings), while Chu Tien-hsin, a founder of the San San literary group, which promoted and defended traditional Chinese cultural values and identity, expressed great anxiety over the literary trend shift and was deeply ambivalent about the idea of xiangtu. In an interview conducted in 2010, she stated that because of the

Constructing the mainlander 29 xiangtu literature debate, she started to see the other side of Taiwan—i.e., the experience of the native Taiwanese—and to re-consider the issue of what a true homeland means (原鄉) (Tang 2010). In her study of Taiwanese films and literature, the US-based scholar June Yip interprets the xiangtu literature debate as a key event that helped to foster Taiwanese nationalism and sees most mainlander writers’ attitudes as against the trend of nativism (2004, p. 29). Conversely, Taiwan-based critic Chen Fang-ming argues that juancun literature should be seen as part of xiangtu literature insofar as second-generation mainlander writers of this genre were seeking to portray the lives of people living in Taiwan. I am more persuaded by Chen’s argument. When discussing Taiwanese literary works produced in the 1970s and 1980s, Chen wrote: Local space in Taiwan (台灣鄉土) became the ultimate concern of literary works. Local writers depicted the countryside, and mainlanders described military dependents’ villages. Both formed the literary landscape of the new [post-war baby boom] generation. […] The subjects they delved into are different, but they all belong to Taiwan. (2011, p. 565) It should be noted that even though the second-generation mainlanders started to place their focus on life in the juancun as part of the social and cultural landscape in Taiwan, they diverged from the aims of writers and critics promoting Taiwanization (bentuhua). Unlike representative xiangtu writers, such as Ye Shih-tao (葉石濤) and Wang Tuoh (王拓), who celebrated “Taiwan consciousness” (台灣意識) and argued that xiangtu literary works should reflect Taiwanese people’s collective experience under colonialism or ordinary people’s struggles in the face of capitalism and imperialism (Wei ed. 1978, pp. 72–73, pp. 118–119), second-generation mainlander writers, by contrast, were exploring their foreignness in relation to Taiwanese. They depicted their characters as people who were acutely conscious of being “Mainland Chinese” Zhongguoren (中國人), and their writings revolved around how mainlanders found it difficult to settle into life in Taiwan. Moreover, the cultural values presented in the works, more often than not, conformed to the KMT’s ideology of Chinese nationalism, as these characters all reflect a sense of moral and cultural superiority solely on the grounds of being Mandarin speakers from China. This snobbery was enabled by the KMT’s insistence that Taiwan is a province of the Chinese state.

Chu’s and Yuan’s novels as juancun literature This chapter examines two works—Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting (未了) (1982/2001)1 and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life (今生緣) (1988)—in an attempt to analyze how the second-generation mainlander writers in the 1980s perceived the group’s collective identity by narrating the mainlander characters’ situations in Taiwan. Chu Tien-hsin and Yuan Chiung-chiung are both prolific

30

Constructing the mainlander

female novelists.2 These two works were chosen as they were well received by both readers and critics in the 1980s. In 1981, Everlasting won the United Daily Novella Award (聯合報中篇小說獎),3 one of the most important literary awards in Taiwan during that period, and was published as a book in 1982, while This Love, This Life was originally a popular serialized story in one of Taiwan’s leading newspapers, United Daily News, in 1987, before being published as a book the following year. Both works center on the lives of the female protagonists, namely Xia Jinyun in Everlasting and Wang Huixian in This Love, This Life. The two characters are depicted as acquiring a distinctive mainlander identity through growing up or settling in a juancun community and through dealing with issues specific to that community as well as living in an authoritarian political environment in which mainlanders were viewed as different and superior to the native Taiwanese. Chu’s Everlasting revolves around a mainlander family with the surname Xia living in a military dependents’ village. The plot is largely focused on the second daughter, Xia Jinyun, whom reviewers have often written about as a fictionalized version of Chu the author. The story starts from the days when the family first moves into the village in 1965 and ends with their revisiting it in 1980 after they have lived away from it for several years. Everlasting is loose and fragmented in its plot and structure, as it sketches discrete events in the juancun residents’ daily life. Chu herself also admits that the novel was written in a hurry when she realized that the village she lived in from childhood to adolescence was about to be torn down (2001a, p. 21). Despite the fact that the style and structure of this work may not be as sophisticated as Chu’s later works, such as “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (想我眷村的兄弟們), examined in the next chapter, this early novel demonstrates how a younger Chu, then still in her twenties, represented mainlanders and their attitude to Taiwanese people during the martial law period when the KMT’s ideology dominated Taiwanese society. Unlike Chu’s Everlasting, which narrates lives of people in a military dependents’ village, Yuan’s work revolves around the female protagonist Wang Huixian’s “frontier” story as she moves from China to Taiwan in 1949, from adolescence until her husband dies and she remarries (Chiu 1996, p. 160). The plot spans a period of over ten years, and is in three parts: the first and last are set in neighborhoods that are populated predominantly by the native Taiwanese, and the second part shows Wang following her husband to live in a military dependents’ village. The first part of This Love, This Life is especially significant, in that it depicts Wang’s anxiety as a mainlander when she first arrives on the alien island. Yuan takes pains to highlight the character’s sense of isolation from her local Taiwanese neighbors. This is a notable aspect of Yuan’s novel because the subject of mainlanders’ lives outside military dependents’ villages was seldom addressed in other second-generation mainlander writers’ works of the 1980s. However, Yuan’s inclusion of this theme of isolation was not to problematize mainlander identity but to sympathize with the hardship and loneliness that those so identified felt.

Constructing the mainlander 31 The two novels I examine in this chapter, particularly Chu’s Everlasting, have been criticized for presenting mainlanders’ stereotypical impressions of Taiwanese (e.g., Chiu 1996; Chao 2005; Chai 2009; Tseng 2010). Nevertheless, both have been widely discussed in scholarship on Taiwanese literature because of their detailed treatment of juancun residents’ everyday lives, the realism of which has also enabled the two works to be viewed as having a historical documentary importance (Wu 2011, p. 12, p. 25). Sociologist Wu Hsin-yi observes that the narration of juancun in literary works, such as the two works examined in this chapter, “allows readers to experience multiple aspects of reality and the general mindset of juancun groups” (2011, p. 25). Literary critic Chi Pang-yuan also notes that the mainlander characters in Yuan’s This Love, This Life represent all types of people who lived in juancun (1998, p. 162). In Chu’s and Yuan’s novels, the characterization of mainlanders as “Mainland Chinese” Zhonguoren reflects the simple equivalence of mainlander and Chinese that was an integral part of the national ideology during the KMT martial law period. This chapter addresses three aspects of the construction of mainlander identity in Chu’s Everlasting and Yuan’s This Love, This Life: first, the implicit privileging of “Chinese culture” through negative portrayals of the native Taiwanese, their culture, and everyday practice; second, an emphasis on cultural and linguistic barriers between mainlanders and Taiwanese; and third, the representation of the military dependents’ villages (juancun) as sites of cultural consolidation as mainlander migrants from different backgrounds are shown as sharing a Mandarin-speaking Chinese identity and developing a common outlook from their everyday communications and experiences within juancun. In both works, China is portrayed with ambivalence, as a place—a “homeland”—that the mainlander characters are strongly identified with although they know little about it. The words “China” or “homeland” (老家, 家鄉) are thus presented as signs of an intense emotional attachment that remain couched in abstract and ideological terms. In this regard, the two works reveal the authors’ anxiety and confusion concerning the Mainland Chinese or Zhongguoren identity in the context of Taiwan.

Theorizing collective memory Maurice Halbwachs’ theory of “collective memory” (1925/1992) and Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory” (2008) are useful approaches to the issues raised by these two novels. Both Halbwachs and Hirsch emphasize the importance of seeing individual memories and identities as guided by and developed within the frameworks of collective entities, particularly those of the nation-state and family. In the two works examined in this chapter, while Chu Tien-hsin incorporates uncritically ideological statements from the KMT, such as “retaking the mainland” (反攻大陸) (2001b, p. 69), and directly dismisses the opinions of the native Taiwanese in the exchanges and interior monologues of her mainlander characters, Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life employs a metaphorical

32 Constructing the mainlander approach by portraying Taiwan as a frightening “alien land” (異地) (1988, pp. 58–59) and Taiwanese characters as mysterious others. In his On Collective Memory, first published in 1925, Maurice Halbwachs proposes that individual memories upon which one’s identity is developed are not so much based on personal experience, as constrained and shaped by collective memory. He states, “There exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection” (1992, p. 38). The memories and events which do not fit in the narratives of collective memory are doomed to fade into oblivion. Halbwachs emphasizes the importance of social context and social institutions, such as family, social class, and religion, in deciding what is to be remembered and forgotten. For him, collective remembrance precedes individual memory, since the latter is constructed through a group’s conscious and unconscious consensus. Halbwachs’ work contributes to explaining the intertwined nature of collective and individual memories and identities. He underscores the power of collective memory to exert influence on an individual’s perception of their environment and personal experience. His theory has been criticized as overstating the force of social structures and neglecting the role of the individual. As Jeffrey Olick (1999) argues, “the social frameworks shape what individuals remember, but ultimately it is only individuals who do the remembering” (p. 338). In Prosthetic Memory (2004), a study of the influence of mass culture on personal memory, Alison Landsberg notes that Halbwachs’ theory works best for studies of a more stable, “geographically bounded community with a shared set of beliefs and a sense of ‘natural’ connection among its members” (p. 8), and that “the force of modernity and the changes wrought by modern mass culture have made Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory inadequate” (p. 8). Indeed, Halbwachs’ notion of location- and class-bounded collective memory may not work well in today’s hybrid, Internet-dependent, and globally connected societies. However, his basic argument is helpful to consider in relation to the situation in KMT-ruled Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1980s, during which the government controlled all aspects of education, media, and publishing through censorship, propaganda, and severe penalties for outspokenness. The two works examined in this chapter are by writers who grew up in juancun, the communities most closely managed by the KMT’s military, making them a useful case study for assessing the importance of collective memory in particular types of literary creation. Halbwachs describes collective memory as existing everywhere in ordinary life and in various forms and symbols, such as names, holidays, traditions, or rituals, and reinforced through the interactions that people have with these shared experiences. That is to say, the influence of collective memory is exercised in a rather imperceptible way, and individuals who are informed by it may not even be aware of this process, but simply act and recollect in accordance with its rules. Jan Assmann (2008) further expands Halbswachs’ idea of collective memory to the cultural realm, stating that “cultural memory

Constructing the mainlander 33 is a form of collective memory, in the sense that it is shared by a number of people and that it conveys to these people a collective, that is cultural, identity” (p. 110). According to Assmann, the external symbols such as monuments, museums, rites, and ceremonies are to construct a collective cultural identity (p. 110). Halbwachs’ and Asmann’s points are persuasive if we consider the clear similarities between Chu’s and Yuan’s representations of mainlander identity and their lived experience which were heavily influenced by the KMT Chinese nationalist ideology. Yet, we should also bear in mind that the variety of individual experiences may also result in variation of interpretations of the shared history or memory. While Halbwachs focuses on how individual identity is dominated by collective memory, Stuart Hall’s analysis of national culture (1996) is useful for understanding martial law in Taiwan as an agent of collective memory formation. It was through the exercise of brute force and careful censorship that the KMT’s invention of a national identity was disseminated. Akin to Eric Hobsbawm’s idea of invented traditions (1983), which are created and institutionalized in order to shape people’s collective identification in accord with the authorities’ discourse, Hall (1996) argues that the narratives of national culture are told and retold from many perspectives in order to form what Benedict Anderson (1983/2006) terms an imagined community, the nation. Echoing Anderson’s concept of imagined communities that interprets national identity as a socially constructed comradeship, Hall states: National cultures construct identities by producing meanings about “the nation” with which we can identify; these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it. (1996, p. 613; his italics) Accordingly, such thinking about a national culture articulates identity as something fixed, continuous, and already existing from birth. To draw upon Hall’s ideas, it could be argued that the KMT’s strategies of implementing martial law and the related censorship policies were precisely aimed at swiftly constructing a Republic of China (hereafter ROC) national culture and identity in Taiwan, which had been under Japanese colonial rule for 50 years from 1895 to 1945. Reviving traditional Chinese culture (復興中華文化) and fighting Communism (反共) were the two guiding principles of the KMT’s national culture. Politically, the KMT claimed to be the legitimate government of both Taiwan and Mainland China. Raising the banner of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (三民主義), it vowed to defeat the Chinese communists. The KMT’s political ideology was tied to its self-representation as the protector of Chinese cultural heritage. Similar to the KMT’s New Life Movement (新生活運動) in the 1930s and 1940s, which promoted Confucianism in opposition to the values of the CCP, when the Cultural Revolution began in Mainland China, the KMT countered it by initiating the Movement of the Chinese Cultural

34  Constructing the mainlander Renaissance (中華文化復興運動), vowing to make the ROC a state of courtesy and justice (禮義之邦). The KMT’s attempts to create a national identity, which emphasized the cultural-political bond between China and Taiwan, were especially apparent in education. In order to promote Chinese consciousness (中國意識), Mandarin Chinese was used in schools and government offices, with other languages (or dialects) being banned.4 Aleida Assmann, a German researcher who has engaged with the issues of collective memory and the tensions between individual memory and collective memory, examines how education can be used to serve the political purpose of constructing a unified identity, stating: Education is an important factor in the building of the nation-state because it was by learning their history that the heterogeneous members of a population were transformed into a distinct and homogenous collective, conceiving of themselves as “a people” with a collective “autobiography”. (2008, p. 64) During the martial law period, the KMT argued the urgent necessity of promoting Confucianism and defending traditional Chinese culture in the face of the cultural destruction underway in Maoist China (Huang 2006, 2009). However, as historian Huang Chun-chieh (2009) has pointed out in his analysis of the 1986 edition of a Taiwan-based high school textbook, Basic Textbooks for Chinese Culture (中國文化基本教材), these textbooks manipulated the content of Confucianism so as to fit into the KMT’s political ideology (or, to use Hall’s term, the KMT’s “national culture”): “Having identified the Confucian Way with the ‘Three Principles of [the] People,’ the six volumes of Textbooks provide controversial interpretations of the main concepts of Confucian teachings” (p. 33). Similarly, when examining Taiwan’s elementary geography textbooks from 1945 to 1968, Chang Bi-yu (2010) notes that they were one of the ways used by the KMT to reinforce the sense of Chineseness in Taiwan (p. 385). She lists five major themes in the textbooks, including patriotism to the ROC, anti-communism, the claim of sovereignty over China and Taiwan, homesickness for China, and the subordination of Taiwan to China, to illustrate how the KMT constructed a China-centric identity for the post-war generation who were born in Taiwan and had no actual experience of life in China (pp. 389–403). The KMT’s endorsement of Chinese culture and national identity resulted in the first- and second-generation mainlanders’ romanticization of this distant “homeland” and their prejudice against the Taiwanese whom they regarded as “tainted” by Japanese colonialism. Literary critic Hou Ju-chi (2014) takes the well-known mainlander writer Chu Hsi-ning (朱西甯)5 as an example of this, noting that even in the 1970s, after the KMT had ruled the island for over three decades, Chu still expressed his doubts over native Taiwanese’s loyalty toward China during the xiangtu literature debate. Chu Hsi-ning once wrote, “[we] should

Constructing the mainlander 35 pay attention to the loyalty and purity [of the native Taiwanese writers] toward national culture (民族文化), as the land had been occupied and governed by Japan for half a century” (1978 cited in Hou 2014, p. 81).6 Sociological studies of the KMT rule during the martial law period indicate that the first-generation mainlanders’ memories of homeland also played a vital role in shaping the second generation’s identity. Shang Tao-Ming (2010) and Sun Hung-Yeh (2010) both note that while the second-generation mainlanders’ selfimage was nurtured by education and the patriotic atmosphere that the KMT’s dictatorship created, it was also a self-image influenced by people’s experience of listening to the stories of the previous generation and living with homesick Mainland parents, whose views were very much in accord with that of the KMT government. To draw upon Halbwachs’ theory, we may argue that the second-generation juancun mainlanders were situated not only within the framework of the national memory fostered by the KMT, but also their family memories and their collective memory of living in military dependents’ villages, which were in line with the KMT’s ideology. It is because of the “personal participation” in the previous generation’s lived experiences that the KMT’s Chinese nationalist ideology became deeply inscribed in many second-generation mainlanders’ self-identity. A short story “Taipei Homeland” (台北故鄉) (1999), written by Li Yu (李渝), who was born in 1944 in China and moved to Taiwan in 1949, tells how the mainlander narrator was influenced by her father’s view of the native Taiwanese when she was young: The only Taiwanese in my home was probably the old maid who cleaned for us and took out the garbage for us. My father arrogantly and blindly indulged himself in recollections of life on the mainland, and saw his flight to Taiwan as a calamity. Thus, he often complained that the place was small, the weather was terrible, and the people were vulgar. Unconsciously this led me to avoid interacting with Taiwanese people in my adolescence. I shared his bias and believed that Taiwanese people were vulgar. (p. 172) Although this quotation is the author’s fictionalized representation of her father’s attitude, it nonetheless reflects the bias of many mainlanders against the native Taiwanese during the 1960s to 1970s. As Mahlon Meyer notes in his oral historical study Remembering China from Taiwan (2012), the KMT government encouraged this form of mainlander prejudice and was fond of saying that mainlanders “had come to civilize to save the locals from fifty years of shame as Japanese slaves. […] They [mainlanders] lost the war, but they were the real winners because they represented Chinese culture” (p. 44). Under the double influences of the state and family, many second-generation mainlanders (and many post-war Taiwanese as well) took the constructed Chinese national identity for granted, without recognizing the fact that the KMT invested enormous efforts in promoting

36 Constructing the mainlander a set of Chinese values as national values for Taiwan conceived of as the Republic of China. It should be noted that even under the KMT’s strict political control and overwhelming propaganda, in the 1980s, by the time when the two novels we examine in this chapter were written, there was growing unrest in Taiwan. The wave of rapid modernization that swept over the island in these years brought about a new middle class, along with growing calls for democracy (Yip 2004, pp. 20–21). One of the early and most notable examples of this trend was the Formosa Incident, the largest pro-democracy protest during the martial law period, which occurred in December 1979. This (in)directly led to the lifting of martial law and the relaxation of restrictions on travel to China in 1987. In 1989, Hou Hsiao-hsian’s highly acclaimed, and now classic film, A City of Sadness (悲情城市), was released. It tells the story of a Taiwanese family during the February 28 Incident (or 228 Incident) of 1947. The movie can be seen as one of the earliest works that criticized KMT’s authoritarian regime and its atrocities. Prior to the lifting of martial law,7 the February 28 Incident was still a censored topic (Smith 2008; Shih and Chen 2010), and thereafter, it became a subject of intense debate in terms of transitional justice because tens of thousands of native Taiwanese (and some mainlanders) were killed by KMT troops in the event. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang argues that the rising of juancun literature exhibited second-generation mainlander writers’ anxiety in the face of the state’s retreat from censorship and dictatorship toward democratization. She interprets the genre as the presentation of their “emotional needs to revisit their own childhood and adolescent years, as well as political needs to tackle current political situations” (1992, p. 66). Chang’s explanation is convincing for there were several mainlander authors who were keen to write and publish juancun stories during the 1980s and 1990s. What makes Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting and Yuan Chiungchiung’s This Love, This Life interesting is that both works continued, seemingly, to present an image of mainlander identity that was very much aligned to the KMT view of what “being Chinese” is all about.

Unconscious representation of state ideology Literary critic Chiu Kuei-fen notes, compared with other novels on ethnic memory in Taiwan that often show the authors’ strong attempts to argue against certain stereotypes or to explicitly defend a particular group, Yuan’s This Love, This Life appears much more “unintentional” in presenting the migrants’ experience of settling in a new land (1996, p. 162). In her Preface to the novel, Yuan Chiungchiung states that the characters are based on acquaintances from her childhood, and that she still misses these people very much (1988, p. 3), which shows that her motivation for writing the book is personal. Similarly, Chu Tien-hsin, who remains widely regarded in Taiwan as a key spokesperson for mainlanders, has remarked in an interview that when she wrote Everlasting, “she simply expressed her nostalgia for and reminiscence of juancun” (Su 2011, para. 40). In truth, in both works, the authors do not seem to be defending their imagined “home state”

Constructing the mainlander 37 (家國) or the KMT’s ideology, but instead, by revisiting and narrating their childhood and their parents’ lives, they express a nostalgic hope of preserving “mainlander” culture as they had experienced it in Taiwan, when this culture was at its strongest. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang argues of second-generation mainlanders’ juancun writings that they make a “claim to a legitimate share of Taiwan’s recent history” (1992, p. 66).8 In these two works, that claim is understated rather than explicit. This apparent simplicity of Yuan’s and Chu’s recollections of their childhood and family stories allows us to identify as unconscious motivations, the ideological values that their narratives produce. Chang Mau-kuei explains the unconscious promotion of state ideology in mainlander works of this and earlier periods as follows: When the concept of ‘home state was not a problem at all, or we may say when ‘home state’ was only a problem of “fighting to take back the old home (打回老家)”, the writers wrote simply about their life experiences and childhood memories. Some writers represented accurately how they lived and what they perceived and imagined. (1998, pp. 413–414) However, to describe the two novels as providing a “simple” account of real-life experiences is to miss the point that to a large extent their narratives replicate and reflect KMT ideology. Chu and Yuan exemplify the biased attitudes of mainlanders toward the Taiwanese people precisely because their narratives treat such attitudes as natural and authentic. To be more specific, because the two authors did not question the KMT-articulated national culture and mainlander identity as a construct, their narratives are useful case studies of how literary representations of mainlander identity in the 1980s were greatly influenced by the KMT’s discourse. In the next section, I examine how the mainlander identity arose out of the mainlander characters’ realization of the linguistic and cultural differences between themselves and the native Taiwanese. This is especially pertinent in relation to Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life, the first part of which revolves more around the mainlander characters’ lives in Taiwanese communities. The focus of my discussion will be placed on the gap between the narrator’s depiction of the mainlander characters’ isolated and marginalized situations in Taiwan and the Taiwanese characters’ lack of narrating power. The result is that the mainlander characters are portrayed as members of an unhappy, culturally “superior” minority in Taiwan. This is a direct albeit unwitting reflection of the KMT government’s construction of collective memory. An important part of this form of exilic mentality is that it defends the culture of the absent homeland by passing negative judgment on the Taiwanese majority as alien, inferior, and other.

38 Constructing the mainlander

Under the gaze of the other In “From Sojourners to Settlers” (1996), sociologist Li Kuang-chün highlights the importance of seeing that mainlanders’ “collective consciousness” (群體意識) (p. 369)9 was a collective identity formed only after they had moved to Taiwan, and that it developed as a result of their continuous interactions with other ethnic groups on the island after they arrived. Indeed, mainlanders are a highly diverse “group” who are defined as a collective only because of the historical event of their flight (with the KMT) from Mainland China to Taiwan. Yet, mainlander bonds of comradeship are an important feature of Yuan’s and Chu’s novels. Both works underscore that mainlanders’ collective cultural identity is bound up with their common experience of fleeing China and leaving behind all that was dear to them. This Love, This Life starts with a scene when Wang Huixian’s husband Lu Zhilan sends her on a crowded ship to Taiwan. Yuan shows these Chinese migrants’ diverse backgrounds when they are on the Mainland, in terms of their social class, home provinces, and even reasons for leaving China. However, these differences are shown as gradually diminishing once they are onboard the ship and sharing the same difficult journey.10 One of the mainlander characters tells another, a soldier, “We are all from the Mainland, so you are our family (自己人), aren’t you?” (1988, p. 84). In Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting, Mr. Xia has six good friends, all of whom are from the Mainland, and he calls them his “sworn brothers” (2001b, p. 24). Although both novels present mainlanders’ comradeship as if it is developed naturally in the course of their flight from China to Taiwan, and nothing is said of the KMT’s authoritarian rule, the narratives, in fact, reflect the success of the KMT’s active encouragement of a sense of Chinese belonging among mainlanders. As Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang and Mau-kuei Chang (2010) have argued, the migrants’ difficult circumstances in exile provided fertile ground for the KMT’s cultural ideology to take root: “The breakdown of community and alienation from the culturally semi-Japanese local population contributed to the growing dominance of the KMT party-state in the lives of civil war migrants as they established new families and rebuilt communities in exile” (p. 119). In this sense, the shared sense of a mainlander identity helped to consolidate the party’s political and cultural legitimacy in Taiwan. The mainlander characters’ emotional ties to one another are also presented as developing out of living in exile, alienated from Taiwanese and their way of life. In the scene of the civil war Chinese migrants’ arrival in Taiwan, Yuan uses as many as ten pages to delineate the mainlander characters’ negative first impressions of Taiwan and their anguish as unwilling migrants. Taiwan, through the account of the anonymous mainlander narrator, is an exotic, alien land in contrast to the civilized homeland China. The depictions of landscape, food, and language highlight the mainlander characters’ disconnection from the island. Upon the mainlander characters’ arrival at Kaohsiung Harbor, the protagonist Wang sees Taiwan as a “foreign land” (外地), and Taiwanese people as mysterious and strange: they “all wear a straw hat with a wide brim. Beneath it is a floral cloth tightly covering most

Constructing the mainlander 39 of their faces, except for the two eyes” (pp. 51–52). Wang then expresses surprise at the unintelligible language the local people speak and describes her first meal as “weird” (奇怪) (p. 56). While Taiwan was known as a leading exporter of bananas since the early 1920s, and this was widely known as one of the island’s most representative fruits, the mainlander characters are depicted as ignorant of what bananas look like. The author has them seeing “baskets and baskets of yellow and stick-shaped fruit” (p. 51).11 This description indicates the author’s insistence on presenting Taiwan as if it was an exotic mystery to the mainlander characters. The following scene in which the mainlander character Wang experiences the natural landscape on her first night in Taiwan further illustrates the author’s emphasis on the migrants’ unhappiness at having been forced to live in exile: The clear croaking of frogs along with the faint buzz of insects make up the strange sounds of the night. It feels totally different from the peaceful and quiet nights in her homeland (老家). Night time in her homeland was as transparent as water. The pale moon hung above the yard with the shadow of the trees on the ground, as if it was a painting which made one feel relaxed, even if one did not understand the meaning of it. Over here, the night in this foreign land (異地) is murky. The cool night wind feels dangerous like it is tormenting the newcomers with the strange stench of weeds and small animals. (1988, pp. 59–60) The tranquil homeland is set in contrast to the presentation of Taiwan as a strange and dangerous place. Yuan’s portrayal of Taiwan here has a resonance with colonial works such as Rudyard Kipling’s writings about India. Taiwan is presented as untamed, disorderly, and foreboding, in contrast to the character’s memory of his hometown in China as peaceful and safe. Scholars like Bruce Jacobs (2012) have presented the KMT as a colonial regime in Taiwan.12 Whether the KMT qualifies as such is a matter of on-going debate in academic and political circles.13 However, in the cultural realm, second-generation mainlanders’ literature in the 1980s clearly demonstrates similarities with the imaginings of strange and intimidating local environments in British colonial works. Yuan’s narration of the contrastive landscapes in Taiwan and China above certainly reflects a quasi-colonial reaction to Taiwan. The scene above depicts Wang’s first day in an alien place, and one might argue that the author may have merely wanted to underscore the character’s homesickness and anxiety. But examples of a similar cultural bias against the native Taiwanese are evident throughout the novel. One example is that while Wang’s mainlander friends Guanzhi and Yuping try hard to fit in with the Taiwanese communities by learning Taiwanese and cooking Chinese dishes to share with their neighbors, the narrator comments that “Xu Guanzhi smiles at everybody and greets them passionately. His unproficient Taiwanese does not improve, but he always thinks that he is popular” (p. 81). Yuping’s hospitality is ironically interpreted by the narrator as “flattering” (籠絡) their Taiwanese neighbors and

40

Constructing the mainlander

showing off her ability to make friends (p. 81). As such, the novel seems to suggest that it is unnecessary or even wrong for mainlanders to fit in Taiwanese society as well as its culture. To indicate that some mainlanders chose to become Taiwanese, the author includes a mainlander character Dong Xiang, who favors life in Taiwan over China, but depicts him negatively as “neither eastern nor western”, as speaking “strange Taiwanese” and dressing like a Japanese gangster (p. 296). Dong is also one of the very few negative mainlander characters who was imprisoned because of corruption. Dong is presented as unable to hold down a good job and as having had an affair with a married mainlander woman, Wu Baoling. In contrast, the native Taiwanese characters who devote themselves to learning Mandarin Chinese, such as Wang Huixian’s colleague Xi Jiang,14 are described favorably by the narrator. Yuan’s text implies that assimilation or acculturation into Taiwanese or even Japanese culture is undesirable and presents Chinese culture as the only suitable culture for both mainlanders and Taiwanese. An important feature of This Love, This Life is its biased view of language, showing a strong preference for Mandarin Chinese over the local dialects spoken in Taiwan. Cultural and linguistic competence in Mandarin, equated throughout the novel with a higher level of civilization, thus reflects the KMT’s cultural policies during the martial law period. Todd L. Sandel writes of the KMT’s language policy that it led to a situation where “before the 1990s teachers and government officials politicized, or ideologized, a speaker’s ability or inability to speak Standard National Language (標準國語): ‘standard’ pronunciation indexed a person’s intelligence and patriotism” (2003, p. 545). In Yuan’s novel, more than once the narrator criticizes the Hoklo Taiwanese characters’ Mandarin, pointing out that Jiang Qianhui’s putonghua (普通話, the term the author uses in the novel) “has some bensheng accent” (p. 66). The narrator also comments that Xiumei, Wang Huixian’s Taiwanese neighbor in the military dependents’ village, speaks bad guoyu (國語): “both grammar and intonation are bad. Huixian did not know what she [Hiumei] was saying at the start” (p. 226).15 On the other hand, the mainlander heroine Wang Huixian, a well-educated Chinese young woman, enjoys the cultural privilege to teach the Hoklo Taiwanese characters Mandarin. Moreover, the narrator presents her attempts to learn Taiwanese as unsuccessful but valiant (p. 138), and thus as not a failing. Similarly, in Everlasting (2001b), Chu the author has the narrator depicting mainlander school children as performing better than their native Taiwanese schoolmates, emphasizing that mainlanders speak good Mandarin and excel at speech contests (p. 75). In an episode in which the mainlander protagonist Jinyun (as noted earlier, alleged by some to be the author’s alter-ego) is harassed by a construction worker, the author makes a point of noting that the man speaks Taiwanese (p. 62). These examples demonstrate how Yuan and Chu present the ability to speak Mandarin well as signifying a superior mode of being. This prejudice is reinforced through the narrator’s presentation of Taiwanese characters as morally lacking, which is best exemplified by the authors’ narratives of Taiwanese women in juancun that will be discussed in the latter part of this chapter.

Constructing the mainlander 41 Political scientist Denny Roy (2003) notes that the KMT’s authoritarian politics and education policies constructed a “cultural imperialism” (p. 96) in Taiwan in which Mandarin Chinese was elevated far above the local dialects: Hoklo and Hakka and the aboriginal languages. Sociologist Scott Simon (2006) also argues that local Taiwanese culture was unfairly treated so as to achieve the goal of cultural assimilation: “In order to force the Taiwanese to learn Mandarin Chinese, children were often beaten, humiliated, or fined for speaking Japanese, Taiwanese, or even aboriginal languages in school” (para. 21). The situation of Mandarin in Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1980s is an extreme example of a state-imposed language. The adoption of Mandarin as the official language made all other languages subordinate. In this way, those for whom the official language was their first language became a privileged social class. On the contrary, those who were not proficient in the official language were regarded as unfit for career advancement. To recall Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the function of an official language: In order for one mode of expression among others (a particular language in the case of bilingualism, a particular use of language in the case of a society divided into classes) to impose itself as the only legitimate one, the linguistic market has to be unified and the different dialects (of class, region or ethnic group) have to be measured practically against the legitimate language or usage. (1992, p. 45) Bourdieu’s insight into how powerfully political authority can be exercised via an official language (and the ideology conveyed in that language) is helpful for us to understand Yuan’s and Chu’s portrayals of mainlanders as competent Mandarin speakers. In the KMT’s unified linguistic market, the two authors’ denigration of people who spoke Taiwanese as culturally inferior is hardly surprising. What is worth noting is that the central mainlander characters of both works are middle- or high-ranking soldiers, and most other mainlander characters are presented as coming from rich and upper-class families in China: in This Love, This Life, Wang Huixian’s husband is a company commander in China and a military instructor after moving to Taiwan; in Everlasting, readers are told that two of the juancun residents hold the rank of colonel and many others worked for secret intelligence. In reality, however, a large proportion of mainlanders, particularly lower-ranking soldiers, who arrived in Taiwan during and after the Chinese civil war were working class, poor, and with little education (e.g., Yang 2010; Wu 2010; Shu-yu Chang 2010). These people are not mentioned in the novels. Instead, both works are squarely focused on the cultural discrepancies between the native Taiwanese and mainlanders, and the resulting narratives have the effect of privileging mainlanders as leading more civilized lives than their culturally incompetent Taiwanese counterparts. Chu’s and Yuan’s highly politicized characterization of mainlanders as proficient Mandarin speakers reflects the extent to which they had internalized the

42 Constructing the mainlander KMT’s propaganda. While it may be true that mainlanders were more competent in written Chinese, both Chu and Yuan understate the fact that, in terms of language use, most mainlanders were from different areas in China and thus spoke the dialects of their home provinces. Very few people in the 1950s and 1960s spoke a standard form of Mandarin or the national language guoyu. Even Chiang Kai-shek himself, the leader of the KMT, who came from Zhejiang, had a strong accent when he spoke in Mandarin.16 This issue of the variety of accents among Mandarin-speaking mainlanders is not addressed in either work. In this regard, the depiction of the mainlander characters as highly competent Mandarin speakers is a conspicuous distortion that reflects the authors’ complicity in constructing the KMT version of cultural hierarchy in Taiwan. The effect of an imposed official language, Bourdieu explains, is that “speakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence” (1992, p. 55). In the case of the martial law period Taiwan, Taiwanese intellectuals were indeed much less active than elite/upper-class mainlanders, not only because of their lesser competence in Mandarin, but also because the KMT government suppressed all views other than its version of Chinese nationalism. To a large extent, the image of Taiwanese as a silent group in Chu’s and Yuan’s novels reflects the reality of the martial law period in which Taiwanese people were prevented from claiming their own identity. They had no public voice but were spoken for and represented as “natives” to be managed by the mainlander elite. In the first part of Yuan’s novel, language barriers between mainlanders and Taiwanese are presented as one major reason that deepens the mainlander characters’ feeling of uneasiness and fear in Taiwan. The following scene from This Love, This Life, which depicts Wang Huixing’s friend, a mainlander woman Yuping, in labor when the two mainlander women were living in a Taiwanese community, exemplifies how Yuan portrays the mainlanders as victims of circumstances beyond their control. The derogation of Taiwanese people, as presented by the anonymous narrator, is particularly striking in this scene. Many neighbors came to the door to look at [Yuping]. All are women and children. They packed into the room speaking in the local dialect. Wang couldn’t understand most of what they said. […] That was an eerie scene. Outside the light grey mosquito net are the pale shadows of people, attempting to get closer. The room is full of a strange language. Inside the net, Yuping’s baby is struggling in her belly, with up-and-down movements. It is not like a festival for giving birth to a new life, but instead a rite of ghosts […] and she is the sacrifice, waiting for the blood to drain. (p. 119) No communication occurs between mainlander Wang and her curious Taiwanese neighbors. Rather, the narrator highlights the discomfort of the mainlander characters upon hearing the “local” and “strange” dialect, using it to justify the narrator’s bizarre description of the character Yuping as a would-be sacrifice attended

Constructing the mainlander 43 by ghost-like Taiwanese people. The atmosphere is tense, not because of Yuping’s painful delivery, but because the mainlander narrator is repulsed by the gaze of the Taiwanese spectators. The author implies that although the Taiwanese were visiting their mainlander neighbor out of care and concern, the mainlander narrator finds their attention unwelcome. While Yuan uses the scene to show the mainlander narrator’s anguish in regard to the gaze of the “Taiwanese ghosts”, the Taiwanese neighbors are in fact the ones under the gaze and narration of the mainlander narrator. As the Taiwanese characters are not given voices to express themselves, readers only hear the one-sided story from the perspective of the mainlander narrator, who sees Yuping as a victim. This tendency of presenting mainlanders as a victimized minority is one of the major features of second-generation mainlanders’ literary works, although the presentation takes varied forms in works of different periods as the following chapters will show.

Mandarin-speaking enclosures: Military dependents’ villages Both Yuan and Chu present juancun as the most important site of mainlanders’ collective identity. In these two novels, the narratives of mainlander characters’ lives in the military dependents’ villages have the effect of consolidating their “Chineseness”, enabling them to see themselves as a unified group, and as not only culturally but also morally superior to the Taiwanese. Juancun were first established in the 1950s as temporary shelters for mainlander soldiers and their families. Yet, these civil war exiles stayed in Taiwan much longer than they had expected, and these sites eventually became the places they settled themselves in the new land. After years of construction and expansion, there were around 880 such villages in Taiwan by the time the government decided to demolish them in the 1980s (Ko 2011; Lo 2011). In these enclosed and self-sustained communities, except for some Taiwanese women (including the Hoklo, the Hakka, and the indigenous people) who married Mainland soldiers and moved to the villages, mainlanders made up the majority of the population.17 It is important to note that not all Chinese migrants had the opportunity to live in these villages, and since many of them were not soldiers or were not given housing in the compounds, they were scattered and integrated into local Taiwanese communities. According to sociologist Li Kuang-chün (2010), only one-fifth of the Chinese soldiers and their families ever lived in these villages (p. 35). Despite the small proportion of the juancun residents in comparison with the total number of Chinese civil war migrants, the communal lifestyle and unique culture developed in these villages came to serve as cultural symbols in media and literature that represent the mainlanders’ collective memories and validate the presence of the mainlander culture in Taiwan. Sociologist Chang Mau-kuei (2010) argues that the KMT did not mean to use the military dependents’ villages to segregate Taiwanese from mainlanders, but simply as a way of accommodating the otherwise homeless soldiers. According to Chang, juancun were established because the government hoped to ease the tensions between mainlander soldiers and Taiwanese civilians, and, after 1955 when

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Constructing the mainlander

the government gradually allowed single mainlander soldiers to get married, to meet the need of the increasing number of soldiers’ families. However, the enclosed environment of the villages18 alongside the KMT’s political control of society deepened the residents’ ideological prejudice against the Taiwanese. In her 1992 work “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound”, Chu Tien-hsin writes, “Many kids from the military compound … had no experience at all with the ‘Taiwanese’ before they left [juancun] in their twenties to attend college or serve in the military” (2003, p. 263).19 Another second-generation Mainland author Su Wei-chen wrote in her novel Leaving Tongfang that “People of One-one-seven Highland [the location of the narrator’s village] know too little about other places” (2002, p. 294). Literary critic Chen Kuo-wei (2007) observed that military dependents’ villages, as presented in literary works by second-generation mainlander writers, seem to be filled with various fantasies of China. He likened juancun to “castles in the sky” (p. 281) floating over the land of Taiwan. That is, although these communities were located in Taiwan, they developed and held on to a group identity distinct from that of the Taiwanese majority. In the preface to A Collection of Taiwan’s Juancun Stories (2004), the editor Su Wei-chen interprets juancun as the cradle of mainlander identity. For her, these places account for the mainlanders’ complicated ethnic and genealogical backgrounds, as well as their feelings of belonging to a collective. She writes: There was a group of people. They hardly had any relatives, but they had a lot of neighbors. Their idea of relatives was developed upon their relations with neighbors. All of these families commemorated their ancestors on important holidays, but they didn’t have tombstones to sweep. Their parents spoke with strong accents. When they were at home, they talked to their parents in the dialects of their parents’ home provinces; in the neighborhood and in schools, they spoke a variety of dialects with other children (They learned other people’s mother tongues very early, and were happy to show off this ability. …); when they left the village, they spoke Mandarin, Hakka or Taiwanese. … Jiguan [One’s original province or ancestral province] on their ID cards could be patched together as a small China […], but they were born in Taiwan and lived in Taiwan. … [These communities] are so-called juancun. These people are known as second-generation mainlanders. (pp. 7–8) Su’s statement above in 2004 emphasizes the juancun inhabitants’ collective experiences of living within a linguistic and cultural diversity. In stark contrast, as noted earlier, Yuan’s and Chu’s works in the 1980s present images of a homogeneous juancun culture. In narrating the lives of people in military dependents’ villages, both Chu and Yuan focus on the pleasant atmosphere and strong emotional links among the mainlander residents. The story of Everlasting starts with a joyful birthday party in the Xia family, attended by Mr. Xia’s six sworn brothers, presenting how

Constructing the mainlander 45 these exiles became effectively connected and formed a different kind of family. Although both novels touch on the migrants’ financial difficulties, the villages are portrayed as happy communities, with all the children going to school together, their fathers working in related sectors in the army, and neighbors helping one another.20 Tseng Yi-ching comments that Chu’s Everlasting presents an energetic picture of juancun, just like “a harmonious big family” (2011, p. 42). This image of the military dependents’ villages as a quasi-family is repeatedly shown in both novels. What the happy scenes reveal is not only the residents’ comparatively stable life, but also a strong sense of spiritual and cultural support that juancun provided for the residents to construct a collective view and identity in Taiwan. In the article, “Doesn’t My Memory Count?” (2002), Chu Tien-hsin wrote about the impact of the KMT’s policies on how she saw the world. She recollects the days before the lifting of martial law, noting that “the symbolic meaning of ‘nation’ and a life in juancun (military dependents’ village), coupled with a KMT education and the enormous nostalgic sentiment from my parents …, all of these elements weaved into a system of ‘value and belief’” (p. 104). Everlasting presents the KMT’s discourse as part of the juancun residents’ daily lives. For example, one of Mr. Xia’s sworn brothers decides to get married on a Double Tenth Day, hoping to make the National Day a family festival (p. 83). When the ROC loses its seat in the United Nations, Xia Qingyun, Jinyun’s sister, bursts into tears, since it means that the PRC instead of the ROC was recognized as the legitimate government of Mainland China. In addition, recovering China is shown as a common topic in the Xia family’s conversations (p. 41, p. 69). Although mainlanders and Taiwanese alike were indoctrinated into the state’s version of history and its imposed Mandarin-speaking culture during the martial law period, since the KMT also provided the juancun residents with actual financial benefits, such as jobs, tax deduction, living allowances, and low tuition fees, its residents thus relied on the party and internalized its worldview more deeply. This Love, This Life reflects the juancun residents’ complete dependence on the KMT, depicting how the government gave the juancun families financial support in the form of a monthly allowance and grocery supplies (眷補 juanbu, 眷糧 juanliang),21 and also offered the housewives casual work.

Virtuous mainlander women versus indecent Taiwanese women The narratives of Taiwanese women in juancun present both authors’ closest observations of Taiwanese people. However, they see the cultural differences between mainlanders and Taiwanese as evidence of mainlanders’ superiority in terms of morality. This is shown in the distinction both works make between indecent Taiwanese female characters and virtuous Chinese protagonists, represented by the mainlander Wang Huixian in This Love, This Life and the Sinicized Hakka Taiwanese Mrs. Xia in Everlasting. Mirroring the KMT’s argument that “morals and ethics” (倫理道德) are a vital part of Chinese culture, the two novels suggest that only women who abide by Chinese cultural values and its rules of etiquette

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are “virtuous” (Hou 2014, pp. 130-139). In contrast, Taiwanese women, who are not “Chinese” enough, are described as immoral. In examining Yuan Chiung-chiung’s perspective on gender relations, Sungsheng Yvonne Chang describes it as conservative. Chang writes that Yuan’s characterization of female figures “seems to harbor a deeper sympathy toward women who possess a ‘female consciousness,’ who have a natural instinct toward responsibility and the role of preservation” (1988, p. 218). This is true when we consider the female protagonist of This Love, This Life Wang Huixian. Wang is presented as well educated and from an upper-middle-class family. She flees to Taiwan in 1949 and lives alone for several years, waiting for a reunion with her husband who is fighting in the civil war. Even though there is another mainlander courting her, she always keeps a distance from him and insists on waiting for her husband. She takes care of the family well and struggles to bring up her four children after her husband dies from a heart attack. Most of Yuan’s other female Chinese characters share these virtues. Jiang Ruixiang, a mainlander wife of Wang Huixian’s neighbor, gives up the opportunity to have her own children, and instead devotes herself to raising those of her husband’s late wife, while another mainlander Yuping voluntarily takes care of her neighbor’s children. Devoting themselves totally to family responsibilities, these “good” mainlander female characters in This Love, This Life are embodiments of the KMT’s Confucian-inspired model of a loyal and faithful woman. Historian Yu Chien-ming’s study of a free monthly magazine Women’s Friends (婦友), published by the KMT from 1954 to 1997, points out that it served as a propagating tool to “educate women”, cultivate their “ability to take care of family and manage the country” (齊家治國), and revive the “national spirit” (民族精神) (2011, p. 83). These characteristics are reflected in the images of ideal mainlander women in Everlasting and This Love, This Life. Yu notes that, in the 1950s and 1960s “[the ideal] women’s image constructed in Women’s Friends was optimistic, confident, attentive and anti-Communist. […] For those who did not obey the social moral standards were regarded as required to be corrected and modified” (2011, p. 108). The magazine also emphasized that the primary responsibility of women was to look after the family (2011, p. 110). This is also mirrored in the two novels discussed here. In both stories, the female characters are judged on their roles as mothers and wives. In both novels, a KMT-inspired image of the ideal Chinese woman is projected to signal the character’s depth of Sinicization. In This Love, This Life, only the mainlander female characters are virtuous. In Everlasting, interestingly, a Sinicized Taiwanese female was portrayed as the representative good woman. The character in question is Mrs. Xia, a Hakka Taiwanese from “a local rich family strict on education” (p. 104). Chu portrayed her as someone who had been totally assimilated into the mainlander culture in the villages: she never speaks Hakka and expresses an eagerness for the KMT to retake the Mainland (Chu 2001b, p. 68). She refers to her fellow-native Taiwanese as the “common folk” (老百姓) (p. 133). In contrast to Mrs. Xia, a non-Sinicized Taiwanese character, Mrs. Liang, a Hoklo Taiwanese woman in the village, is presented as a bad woman. She speaks

Constructing the mainlander 47 Mandarin poorly, does not fit in with the mainlander community, and her conduct is judged by the narrator and other mainlander residents as indecent (pp. 45–46, p. 77). Concerning Chu Tien-hsin’s very different portrayals of these two native Taiwanese women—the Hoklo Taiwanese Mrs. Liang and the Hakka Taiwanese Mrs. Xia, Taiwan-based critic Chun Mai-Umiau suggests that Chu’s narrative is most likely reflecting her admiration for her own mother who is a Hakka Taiwanese. Chun also quotes Chu’s own words and notes that her early impressions of Hoklo Taiwanese were to a large extent influenced by her Hakka relatives’ accounts of their personal experiences (Chun 2003, p. 143). In her study of Chu’s novel, Chun elaborates on the complex relationship and ethnic rivalry between the Hoklo Taiwanese and the Hakka Taiwanese from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, which she believes is reflected in the young Chu’s narratives of her characters. Drawing upon Chun, it can be argued that Chu seems to want to overcome the perceived class and ethnic distinction between at least the Hakka Taiwanese and mainlander Chinese. Chu’s portrayal of Mrs. Xia reveals her attempt to assimilate this Hakka Taiwanese character into mainlander culture. In contrast to the exemplary Mrs. Xia, however, the Hoklo Taiwanese Mrs. Liang is presented as unassimilable to life in juancun. Similarly, in This Love, This Life, there is a negative Hoklo Taiwanese female named Xiumei. Like Mrs. Liang in Everlasting, Xiumei comes from a poor, working family but is unhappy with her lot. Both Mrs. Liang and Xiumei are shown to be lazy and irresponsible, and as neglecting their husbands and children. They are also depicted as sexually attractive and unfaithful. Chu describes Mrs. Liang as “a wolfish woman, who is beautiful but shrewish, tall and vigorous. She is a bensheng person, so her Mandarin is not good” (p. 46).22 She eventually elopes with a Taiwanese man, leaving her “gentle and polite” (p. 45) mainlander husband and three children behind in the village. Mrs. Liang is an entirely negative character and appears almost as a caricature; in contrast, Xiumei, in Yuan’s novel, is a more complex character. In This Love, This Life, Taiwanese women tend to be described as ghost-like, suggesting their distant, mysterious, and unpredictable nature in the eyes of the mainlander characters. Xiumei is thus described as having a pale face and long dark hair, and the narrator likens her to a fox spirit (p. 191, p. 193), a creature from Chinese folklore said to possess a dangerous power to attract men. The narrator notes that the mainlander Li Dexing marries Xiumei because he cannot resist her sexual appeal. The marriage ends in tragedy, as Li Dexing, Xiumei, and their two children are found dead in their house after a big typhoon. The exact cause of their deaths is unstated, but Yuan’s narrator suggests that it may be because Li Dexing can no longer stand Xiumei’s infidelity, and thus kills her before committing suicide. The author however does make an attempt to show that Xiumei’s flawed character is the result of childhood abuse. She was raped by her Taiwanese adopted father and then forced to work as a prostitute. This attempt at providing a social reason for Xiumei’s bad behavior shows Yuan’s novel to be directed at affirming the mainlander identity by highlighting

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Taiwanese society’s oppressive patriarchy, family dysfunction, and cultural flaws. With the explanation of Xiumei’s family background, the narrator portrays her as an object of pity yet a dangerous woman nonetheless. The mainlander protagonist Wang Huixian is shown as sympathizing with Xiumei because of her unfortunate background and her loneliness in the juancun. The novel describes Wang as feeling grateful to Xiumei for her generosity in lending her money when Wang’s government allowance was stolen. However, Wang is also presented as filled with unease because of her “friendship” with this “mysterious” and “abnormal” woman (p. 192). Yuan spends three sections (as many as 50 pages) describing Wang’s ambivalent feelings toward Xiumei. This Taiwanese character thus acquires a symbolic significance in Yuan’s novel as a representative non-mainlander. In her review of This Love, This Life, Chiu Kuei-fen (1996) argues that the key trait shared by all Taiwanese characters in This Love, This Life, including Xiumei’s parents, Xiumei and Qianhui, is their lack of “discipline” (p. 164). They are presented as a form of “untamed and unsolvable power in the alien land” (p. 164). Chiu’s observation is useful for it highlights the quasi-colonial mentality toward the Taiwanese characters that frames This Love, This Life. However, I disagree with Chiu’s claim that Yuan’s characterization of the Taiwanese characters was less the result of ethnic bias than of an attempt to faithfully represent the types of interactions between juancun mainlanders and Taiwanese of the lower class Yuan had personally encountered (p. 164). This Love, This Life displays clear signs of ethnic bias. One of the conspicuous examples is that the narrator’s remarks about the deaths of the Li family are clearly directed against the Taiwanese woman Xiumei. The narrator says: Nobody knows what actually happened, but all of them believe that Li Dexing killed them all. What Dexing did earns their respect (欽佩), because they all know about Xiumei’s adultery. There had been gossip about Dexing. They saw him as a character in a play and before the end of the play came, he had transformed himself from a comedian to a hero. (p. 291) Here the homicide is not interpreted as a crime, but as a heroic act that enables Dexing to overcome the shame and humiliation he had suffered because of his Taiwanese wife. In choosing to judge the Taiwanese woman Xiumei’s infidelity as unforgivable, and to see Dexing’s act of murder as both understandable and respectable, the narrator in effect exalts the dignity of the male mainlander as something sacred. Yuan may be showing a hint of irony in this regard, as the narrator compares the Li family’s tragedy to a drama, stating that “tragedy and comedy have no meaning for both serve as gossip in juancun” (p. 291), yet interpreting Li’s murderous act as just is also problematic. The contrast between Yuan’s portrayal of Xiumei and another “bad woman”, the mainlander character Baoling, is striking. Although Baoling, like Xiumei, is portrayed as a bad woman type who is unfaithful and does not care about her husband and family, Yuan takes special pains to account for her psychological

Constructing the mainlander 49 struggles, portraying her as rebellious but brave: she is determined to find true love despite the many frustrations she encounters. Unlike the poorly educated Xiumei, Baoling is described as having received a good education and coming from a rich family. While Xiumei’s story is always depicted from a distance, and she is presented as a mystery to all, including the omnipresent narrator, the narrator’s detailed and in-depth narratives of Baoling’s feelings, by contrast, makes this character likable. Similar to Yuan’s depiction of Wang Huixian and Yuping’s neighbors in the scene of Yuping giving birth to a baby, Yuan’s different treatments of Xiumei and Baoling reflect a kind of colonial mentality: the Taiwanese do not deserve as much attention as the mainlander even when the mainlander is a flawed character, although it may also reflect that the author does not attempt to understand the Taiwanese. The belittling of Taiwanese people is evident even when a Taiwanese character is presented as an object of desire. This is particularly striking in Chu Tien-hsin’s description of Xia Jinyun’s love interest in Everlasting. The Taiwanese boy Chen Zhengpeng is Xia Jinyun’s primary school classmate. We are told that Jinyun falls in love with him when they are in grade six. Chen is described as rebellious and masculine. The narrator depicts him “as strong and dark as a calf” (2001b, p. 109). He makes a deep impression on Jinyun when he brings a lotus to class and pins it to the doorframe. Readers are told that this scene remains a strong memory for Jinyun throughout her life, but she only ever admires him from a distance. He becomes the object of her gaze only. She never speaks to him. Chen is described as dying young after getting into a fight. As Chao Kang, a Taiwan-based sociologist who is also a mainlander, comments, “For the Chu Tienhsin of that time [when she wrote Everlasting], it was virtually impossible for mainlanders and bensheng people to develop a promising intimate relationship” (2005, p. 117). Jinyun’s feelings for the Taiwanese boy are presented as fantasy and the strength of her feelings for him are thus linked to the impossibility of their union despite their proximity. Instead, Jinyun is courted by a well-educated, tender, and polite juancun boy, Li Pingluo. His personality and background are in sharp contrast to Chen Zhengpeng’s. We are told that Pingluo’s and Jinyun’s similar memories of life in juancun cause her to feel “extremely relieved” (2001b, p. 145). The episode with Chen Zhengpeng takes up only three pages of the novel, but it is important because Chu narrates Chen’s death right before the episode of Jinyun’s romance with Li Pingluo, suggesting that it forms an important part of the reason for Jinyun’s decision to go out with Li. The character Chen is reminiscent of the figure of the noble savage. Jinyun sees him as exemplifying spontaneity and physical beauty. The fact that Chu married a native Taiwanese may have something to do with her interest in exploring a mainlander girl’s love for a Taiwanese boy in this early work.23 What Chu shares with Yuan Chiung-chiung is the objectification of Taiwanese characters as figures to be made sense of or to be judged. Mainlanders are described as being either attracted to or repulsed by the native Taiwanese, but never really communicating with them as people. Such narratives also reflect the effectiveness of KMT ideology and political control. Even in the 1980s, after mainlanders had

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settled in Taiwan for over 30 years, interactions and communications between mainlanders, particularly juancun mainlanders, and Taiwanese were few and remained fraught with problems. As Stéphane Corcuff remarks in Neighbour of China—Taiwan’s Liminality (2011): “Generally speaking, before the lifting of martial law mainlanders neglected the sorrow of the native Taiwanese, and from their perspective, they lived peacefully with Taiwanese people” (p. 134).

China as a conceptual homeland The contrast between Taiwanese and mainlander characters in these two works turns on the question of what being Chinese (Zhongguoren) means. This is related to the idea of China as homeland, which is presented throughout the two works as the reason for mainlander characters wanting to preserve their unique collective identity. Yet, in both works, “China” is treated less as an actual geographical place or political entity than as a state of mind. All that the novels present as figures of “China” are vague and drawn from the KMT’s slogans and statements. In Everlasting, the eight-year-old Xia Qingyun says on her birthday, “we should not forget the thousands and thousands of poor compatriots in Mainland China” (p. 137). Similarly, in This Love, This Life, in a scene when a group of mainlanders talk about their experience of flight, Yuan writes, they felt confident, and “started to use all sorts of information to strengthen the point that it is impossible for the Communists to occupy the Mainland for a long time. Chairman Chiang (蔣委員長) would lead [them] back home (帶大家回去) very soon” (p. 85). In considering the second-generation mainlanders’ (or post-war generation’s) views on China as their homeland, A-chin Hsiau emphasizes the importance of understanding their emotional attachment as based on the knowledge they learned in school, as well as on the influence of their parents. Their unreflective internalization of their parents’ memories is highly significant. This is why Hsiau found Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory” particularly helpful here. As a special type of emotional impact transmitted from the Holocaust survivors to their children who did not experience the ordeal first-hand—Hirsch’s “postmemory” can be adapted to explain the second-generation mainlanders’ peculiar feeling of rootlessness in Taiwan, which Hsiau calls a “quasi-exilic mentality” (2010, p. 16). Although each historical event is unique in its essence, and this is particularly true for human catastrophes such as the Holocaust and the Chinese civil war, Hirsch suggests that the psychological responses of people who have experienced trauma share many elements across cultures (2008, p. 108). In explaining how one’s traumatic memory can be passed down to the next generation, she states: Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences

Constructing the mainlander 51 were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. (2008, p. 106) Such “memories” bear some resemblance to Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, since postmemory is developed under the previous generation’s traumatic memory, and thus it emphasizes the power of social structures over individual memory and identity. In this regard, postmemory can only make sense as a form of collective memory. Yet, while Halbwachs’ collective memory stresses the aspect of social restraint, Hirsch’s postmemory places emphasis on both connection and divergence. It has to be the experience that the first and second generations recognize that they share, yet remains distinct between the generations. As Hirsch contends, “postmemory is not identical to memory: it is ‘post’, but at the same time, it approximates memory in its affective force” (2008, p. 109). That is, although the second generation inherits their parents’ emotions and feelings, the children’s memory of the past has been mediated and belongs to a different spatiotemporal order. Hirsch’s argument is insightful with regard to our understanding of the two novels’ ambiguous narratives of China. Unlike the war generation’s accounts of their hometowns in China, such as Lin Hai-yin’s Memories of Peking: South Side Stories (城南舊事) (1960/2010), published in 1960 and Chi Jun’s Sweet Olive Shower (桂花雨), published in 1976, in which the scenes of their homelands are vividly depicted in detail, and their childhoods in China thus come alive to readers, in Everlasting and This Love, This Life, the images of China stay on a superficial and stereotypical level, and China is mentioned only when the narrator describes the previous generation’s anticipation with regard to “going back”. Nothing concrete about China is depicted. The resulting confusion and ambivalence with regard to the idea of homeland is clearly described in Everlasting. When the Xia family moves out from the village to a new home, Jinyun feels that she “will only stay here temporarily. She will go back. But she is not sure where to return to” (p. 130). Yearning for a distant homeland and feeling detached from the Taiwanese community, this second-generation character is shown as ultimately “homeless”: belonging neither to juancun she has left behind nor the Taiwanese society she has just moved into, and feeling distant from that so-called Chinese homeland she had been taught to love. In the account presented above, I have sought to show, on the one hand, the extent to which second-generation mainlanders’ works published in the 1980s such as Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life replicated KMT propaganda. On the other hand, however, in the authors’ privileging of mainlander lives as more authentic and meaningful than Taiwanese lives, we are also afforded insights into the everyday drama of the life of mainlanders in Taiwan. During the xiangtu literature debates in the late 1970s, mainlander writers’ literary works were more often than not excluded from the emergent xiangtu genre. Since the 1980s, the term “xiangtu” has been associated with Taiwanese identity, and xiangtu literature has almost come to be synonymous

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with Taiwanese literature. It has thus become even more difficult to claim a place for juancun literature in this genre. If we take a closer look at juancun literature, as I hope to have demonstrated through reading Chu’s and Yuan’s 1980s novels, we can see how juancun generated tensions between mainlanders and their Taiwanese neighbors and how these tensions formed part of the cultural and social landscape of post-1949 Taiwan. As David Der-wei Wang wrote in “Discourses of Nationalism and Xiangtu Rhetoric” (2000), it is important to explore and appreciate broader meanings of xiangtu, in the concept of Taiwan nationalism (p. 78–79). Although the two authors’ narratives of mainlanders’ lives in Taiwan differ significantly from the narration of Taiwanese lives that characterize xiangtu literature, nonetheless, their insights into how mainlander characters see Taiwan are part of Taiwan’s history. While the deep love and care about Taiwan society that the Taiwanese writers express in their works comprise a major part of xiangtu literature, Yuan’s and Chu’s secondgeneration mainlander narratives are also of a particular kind of local life. What is more important is that the mainlander identity and how they see themselves as Chinese, as narrated in these two works, is one that was constructed within the unique context of martial law in the first four decades of the Republic of China before the discourse of Taiwanization and Taiwanese consciousness gained momentum.

Notes 1 Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting was first published as a book in 1982. This chapter primarily uses the 2001 version (published by Lianhe Wenxue) when quoting this work. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations are mine. 2 Both writers are well known for their critical insights into the status of women in patriarchal society in general, and mainlander communities in particular. Yuan Chiungchiung’s most discussed work is probably “A Space of One’s Own” (自己的天空) (1981), which addresses the main female character’s struggles and transformation in the face of her husband’s infidelity. Chu Tien-hsin’s The Old Capital (古都), which was first published in 1997, is often regarded as her representative work. Chu uses the narrative technique of intertextuality to depict the female character’s feeling of loss in a modernizing, rapidly changing Taipei in contrast to the slow-paced Kyoto. Their engagement with issues of gender inequality however is not a significant aspect of the two juancun writings I examine in this chapter. Their depictions of female roles in these two works are more conservative, as the female mainlander characters are rendered as traditional virtuous Chinese women who stayed at home and devoted themselves to taking care of their children. 3 The United Daily Fiction Award (聯合報小說獎) and China Times Literary Award (時報文學獎) were unofficially sponsored by the KMT government during the martial law period, which indicates that the winning works to a certain extent reflected the official ideology. 4 In many other fields, although dialects and Japanese were not banned, they were oppressed. For example, in the 1950s, the KMT government established a lot of government sponsored arts associations to promote China-related works and events, such as Association of Chinese Art and Association of Chinese Language. They held different competitions and provided monetary awards to encourage Taiwan residents to write in Mandarin and learn Chinese arts. Another example is that TV programs in the

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8

9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17

Taiwanese language were restricted to certain time periods. See Peng Jui-chin’s Forty Years of the New Taiwan Literature Movement (1991). Chu Hsi-ning is a well-known military writer and he is also Chu Tien-hsin’s father. Even until today a number of KMT supporters still express their concern regarding the native Taiwanese’ loyalty toward the ROC. One example is the election for Taipei City Mayor held in November 2014. Lian Zhan, the Honorary Chairman of the KMT, questioned an independent candidate Ke Wenzhe’s loyalty to the ROC, claiming that Ke’s forebear worked for the Japanese government and his family changed to a Japanese surname during the colonial rule. By pointing out the family history, Lian argued that Ke did not love the ROC enough. The related ideological issues are often taken as a weapon to attack candidates in elections. See http://www.peoplenews.tw/news/cc0f1 309-c918-4c06-a7d6-8263b0276aec, accessed on November 17, 2014. In 1990, President Lee Teng-hui formed a special team to investigate the Incident, which can be seen as the first official recognition of the Incident. Before then, there were several campaigns organized by social activists to demand justice and ask to release the documents of the event. In an interview with a Mainland Chinese student in 2010, Yuan claims that she did not have much national-ethnic consciousness, and that she deliberately excluded the issues of Taiwan’s ethnic conflicts from her works because “when one day Taiwan actually returns to Mainland China, [those] statements would become meaningless” (Si, p. 26). This shows that even in the 2000s, Yuan was still a supporter of reunification with China, and that the social changes and political upheavals in post-martial law Taiwan did not seem to have affected her cultural identity. In Li’s paper, he translates the term cunti yishi to “conscience collective”. Since his translation may result in misunderstanding of the meaning of the term, I have changed it to collective consciousness. When depicting mainlanders’ flight to Taiwan, many literary works and memoirs mention traumatic scenes of people falling into the sea and drowning or dying in other ways during the journey. See Lung Ying-tai’s Big River, Big Sea 1949 (2009), Chi Pang-yuan’s The River of Big Torrents (2009), and Sang Pin-zai’s “Shore to Shore” (2003). In 1989, an award-winning film Banana Paradise, directed by Wang Tong, used bananas as a symbol to represent Taiwan. The movie tells a mainlander couple’s absurd life story as a result of the Chinese Civil War and subsequent exodus to Taiwan. In Bruce Jacobs’ book, Democratizing Taiwan (2012), he maintains that the Japanese and the KMT were the two key colonial regimes in Taiwan, although this idea remains controversial. After Taiwan was ceded to Japan and under its rule for 50 years from 1895 to 1945. Whether Taiwan was “returned” to its motherland after the Second World War or was “occupied” by the KMT is still a question under debate from a historical and political perspective. The character Xi Jiang is a Taiwanese girl who has a Chinese name Ling Likuan and a Japanese name Xi Jiang. The term Putonghua is used in Mainland China, while Guoyu in Taiwan. Both of them refer to Mandarin. The change in the usage of the terms may be regarded as an indicator of the character Wang Huixian’s changing identity after she moves to Taiwan. Concerning Chiang Kai-shek’s Mandarin, the National Central Library preserves a series of audio files of his speeches. The following is one example of his talks: http:// mdava.ncl.edu.tw/content.php?vid=470 (assessed on 5 November 2014). Only soldiers with families were eligible to apply for houses in juancun. In 1952, the government passed a law forbidding single mainlander soldiers from getting married. The policy had been relaxed since 1955 and was cancelled in 1959. As a result of this policy, many lower-ranking mainlander soldiers missed the appropriate age of getting married.

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18 A large number of military dependents’ villages were located in the remote areas away from Taiwanese communities, and thus were enclosed communities with schools, shops, and even markets. Li Kuang-chün suggests that these villages were self-sustained living space for the convenience of military management (2010, p. 30). 19 This quote is from the English version, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2003. 20 Unlike Chu Tien-hsin and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s portrayal of these villages as hosts to one big happy family, from the 1980s onwards many films of the Taiwan New Cinema Movement often showed the darker sides of life in these communities, revealing the juancun residents’ plight in terms of lower social status, financial difficulties and unhappy marriages, such as Li Youning’s Old Mo’s Second Spring (1984) and Chen Kunhou’s Growing Up (1983). 21 Juanbu and juanliang are the terms to designate the provisions especially for juancun residents. From the late 1980s to the 1990s, the government no longer offered provisions. Instead, cash replaced grocery supplies. To date, this is still a part of welfare benefits for soldiers, veterans, and their families. See http://www.vac.gov.tw/content/ index.asp?pno=228#gsc.tab=0, accessed on October 23, 2015. 22 In This Love, This Life and Everlasting, local Taiwanese, including the Hoklo and the Hakka, are often called as benshengren (本省人) and mainlanders as waishengren (外省人) or neideren (內地人). The terms indicate that when writing the novels, both authors regarded Taiwan as a province of China, and mainlanders were interpreted as people from other provinces. Indigenous people are absent in both novels. 23 Chu married the Taiwanese writer Xie Caijin in 1984.

References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Assmann, A. (2008). Transformations between History and Memory. Social Research, 75(1), 49–72. Assmann, J. (2008). Communicative and Cultural Memory. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (pp. 109–118). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bourdieu, P. (1992). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Chai, J. N. 蔡振念. (2009). Lun Chu Tien-hsin zuqun shenfen rentong de zhuanzhe 論朱天心族群身份認同的轉折 [On the Shift of Chu Tien-Hsin’s Ethnic Identity]. Cheng da zhongwen xuebao 成大中文學報 [Journal of Chinese Literature National Cheng Kung University], 25, 179–204. Chang, B. Y. (2010). So Close, yet so Far Away: Imaging Chinese ‘Homeland’ in Taiwan’s Geography Education (1945-68). Cultural Geography, 18(3), 385–411. Chang, M. K. 張茂桂. (1998). Jiangping yijian: Ba jiuling niandai juancun xiaoshuo (jia) de jiaguo xiangxiang yu shuxie zhengzhi 講評意見：八九零年代眷村小說（家）的家國想像與書寫政治 [Comment on Mei Chia-ling’s “Home State Imagery and Writing Politics of the 1980s and 1990s Juancun Novelists”]. In Y. Z. Chen (Ed.), Taiwan xiandai xiaoshuoshi zonglun台灣現代小說史綜論 [A Comprehensive History of the Modern Taiwanese Fiction] (pp. 410–17). Taipei: Lianjing. Chang, M. K. 張茂桂. (2010). Xiangxiang juancun 想象眷村 [Imagining Juancun]. In Q. Zhang 张嫱 (Ed.), Baodao juancun 宝岛眷村 [A Glimpse of Taiwan Military Villages] (pp. 37–49). Beijing: China Renmin University Press.

Constructing the mainlander 55 Chang, S. S. Y. (1988). Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan’s ‘Feminine’ Writers. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 4(1/2), 201–23. Chang, S. S. Y. (1992). Chu T’ien-wen and Taiwan’s Recent Cultural and Literary Trends. Modern Chinese Literature, 6, 61–84. Chang, S. Y. 張素玉. (2010). Lao you suozhong? Sili anyang jigou nei de danshen laorongmin 老有所終？私立安養機構內的單身老榮民 [An Exploratory Study of Single Elderly Veterans’ Life Quality: A Case Study of a Care Centre in Taipei]. In K. C. Li (Ed.), Li yu ku: zhanzheng de yanxu 離與苦：戰爭的延續 [Sufferings of Waishengren under the War Regime] (pp. 75–98). Taipei: Qünxue. Chao, K. 趙剛. (2005). Sihai kunqiong: zhanyun xia de zhengci 四海困窮：戰雲下的 證詞 [The Poverty of Chic: Notes under Cloud of War]. Taipei: Tangshan. Chen, F. M. 陳芳明. (2011). Taiwan xin wenxue shi 台灣新文學史 [A History of Modern Taiwanese Literature]. Taipei: Lianjing. Chen, K. W. 陳國偉. (2007). Xiangxiang Taiwan: Dangdai xiaoshuo zhong de zuqün shuxie 想像台灣：當代小說中的族群書寫 [Imagining Taiwan: Ethnic Writings in the Contemporary Novels]. Taipei: Wunan. Chi, J. 琦君. (1976). Gui hua yu 桂花雨 [Sweet Olive Shower]. Taipei: Erya. Chi, P. Y. 齊邦媛. (1998). Wu jianjian san de shihou 霧漸漸散的時候 [When the Fog Gradually Lifted]. Taipei: Jiuge. Chi, P. Y. 齊邦媛. (2009). Ju liu he 巨流河 [The River of Big Torrents]. Taipei: Tianxia yuanjian. Chiu, K. F. 邱貴芬. (1996). Xibu tuohuang shi: Ping Yuan Chiung-chiung Jin sheng yuan 西部拓荒史：評袁瓊瓊《今生緣》 [‘History of the Western Frontiers’: On Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life]. Zhongwai wenxue 中外文學 [Chung Wai Literary Quarterly], 25(2), 160–66. Chiu, K. F. 邱貴芬. (2007). Zaidixing lunshu de fazhan yu quanqiu kongjian: xiangtu wenxue lünzhan sanshi nian 在地性論述的發展與全球空間：鄉土文學論戰三十年 [Development of the Local Discourse and the Global Space: Thirty Years of the Xiangtu Literature Debate]. Sixiang 思想, 6, 87–103. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (1997). Gu du 古都 [The Old Capital]. Taipei: Rye Field. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2001a). Renshen nande 人身難得 [Life is Precious]. In Weiliao 未了 [Everlasting] (pp. 20–21). Taipei: Lianhe Wenxuei. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2001b). Weiliao 未了 [Everlasting]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxuei. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2002). Doesn’t My Memory Count? (O. Lam Trans.). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 3(1), 101–06. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2003). Epilogue: In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound. In M. Wu (Trans.), P. Y. Chi & D. D. W. Wang (Eds.), The Last of the Whampoa Breed (pp. 242–270). New York: Columbia University Press. Chun, M. U. 曾美雲. (2003). Cong juancun dao Taiwan 從眷村到台灣 [From Military Dependents’ Villages to Taiwan]. Guoli xinzhu shifan xueyuan yuwen xuebao 國立新竹師範學院語文學報, 10, 135–71. Corcuff, S. (2011). Zhonghua linguo: Taiwan de yujing xing 中華鄰國--台灣的閾境性 [Neighbour of China—Taiwan’s Liminality]. Taipei: Yunchen. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory (L. A. Coser Ed. and Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hall, S. (1996). The Question of Cultural Identity. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert & K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (pp. 595–634). Oxford: Blackwell. Hirsch, M. (2008). The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today, 29(1), 103–28.

56  Constructing the mainlander Hobsbawm, E. (1983). Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (Eds.), The Invention of Tradition (pp. 1–14). New York: Cambridge University Press. Hou, H. H. 侯孝賢 (Director). (1989). Bei qing cheng shi 悲情城市 [A City of Sadness] [Film]. Taipei: Niandai. Hou, J. C. 侯如綺. (2014). Shuang xiang zhi jiang 雙鄉之間 [Between Two Homelands]. Taipei: Lianjing. Hsiau, A. C. 蕭阿勤. (2010). A ‘Generation in-Itself’: Authoritarian Rule, Exilic Mentality, and the Postwar Generation of Intellectuals in 1960s Taiwan. The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 3(1), 1–31. Huang, C. C. 黃俊傑. (2006). Taiwan yishi yu Taiwan wenhua 台灣意識與台灣文化 [Taiwan Consciousness and Taiwanese Culture]. Taipei: Taiwan University Press. Huang, C. C. 黃俊傑. (2009). Confucian Thought in Postwar Taiwanese Culture. Contemporary Chinese Thought, 41(1), 28–48. Jacobs, J. B. (2012). Democratizing Taiwan. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Ko, L. H. 柯林斯. (2011). Yi er san dao Taiwan: juancun de xingjian yu gaijian 「一二三、到台灣」「眷村」的興建與改建 [The Origin and Construction of Juancun Policies]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 253–274). Taipei: Qünxue. Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Li, K. C. 李廣均. (1996). Chong guoke dao dingjüzhe 從過客到定居者： 戰後台灣「外省族群」形成與轉變的境況分析 [From Sojourners to Settlers: A Circumstantial Study of the Making of Mainlanders as an Ethnic Group in Contemporary Taiwan]. Shehui wenhua xuebao 社會文化學報 [Journal of Social and Cultural Studies], 3, 367–90. Li, K. C. 李廣均. (2010). Rongguang juanying 荣光眷影 [Capture the Glory of Juancun]. In Q. Zhang 张嫱 (Ed.), Baodao juancun 宝岛眷村 [A Glimpse of Taiwan Military Villages] (pp. 25–36). Beijing: China Renmin University Press. Li, Y. 李渝. (1999). Ying da de xiang an 應答的鄉岸 [The Echoing Homeland]. Taipei: Hongfan. Lin, H. Y. 林海音. (2010). Cheng nan jiu shi 城南舊事 [Memories of Peking: South Side Stories]. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lo, Y. L. 羅於陵. (2011). Juancun: kongjian yiyi de fuyu han zai jieding 眷村：空間意義的賦與和再界定 [Juancun—Define and Re-define Its Spatial Meanings]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 187–214). Taipei: Qünxue. Lung, Y. T. 龍應台. (2009). Dajiang Dahai 1949 大江大海1949 [Big River, Big Sea 1949]. Taipei: Tianxia Zazhi. Meyer, M. (2012). Remembering China from Taiwan: Divided Families and Bittersweet Reunions after the Chinese Civil War. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP. Olick, J. K. (1999). Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory, 17(3), 333–348. Peng, J. C. 彭瑞金. (1991). Taiwan xinwenxue yundong sishi nian 台灣新文學運動四十年 [Forty Years of the Taiwan New Literature Movement]. Taipei: Zili wanbao. Roy, D. (2003). Taiwan: A Political History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sandel, T. L. (2003). Linguistic Capital in Taiwan: The KMT’s Mandarin Language Policy and Its Perceived Impact on Language Practices of Bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi Speakers. Language in Society, 32, 523–551.

Constructing the mainlander 57 Sang, P. Z. 桑品載. (2003). Shore to Shore. In M. Wu (Trans.), P. Y. Chi & D. D. W. Wang (Eds.), The Last of the Whampoa Breed (pp. 4–25). New York: Columbia University Press. Shang, V. T. M. 尚道明. (2010). Juancun jümin de guojia rentong 眷村居民的國家認同 [Military Village, Life History and Identity]. In M. K. Chang (Ed.), Guojia Yu Rentong: yi xie waishengren de guandian 國家與認同：一些外省人的觀 [Nation and Identity: Perspectives of Some ‘Waishengren’] (pp. 3–30). Taipei: Qünxue. Shih, C. F. & Chen, M. M. (2010). Taiwanese Identity and the Memories of 2-28: A Case for Political Reconciliation. Asian Perspective, 34(4), 85–113. Si, F. 司方维. (2012). Taiwan ‘waisheng nü zuojia’ fangtan lu (yi): fangtan Yuan Chiungchiung 台湾‘外省女作家’访谈录（一）—访谈袁琼琼 [Interviews with Taiwan ‘Female Mainlander Writers’ I: Yuan Chiung-chiung]. Journal of Changzhou Institute of Technology (Social Science Edition) 常州工学院学报, 30(2), 23–26. Simon, S. (2006). Taiwan’s Mainlanders: A Diasporic Identity in Construction. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 22(1), 87–106. Smith, C. (2008). Taiwan’s 228 Incident and the Politics of Placing Blame. Past Imperfect, 14, 143–163. Su, H. Z. 蘇惠昭. (2011, April). Xiezhuo yu bu xiezhuo: Chu Tienhsin寫作與不寫作：朱天心 [To Write or not to Write: Chu Tien-hsin]. Taiwan guanghua zazhi 台灣光華雜誌 [Taiwan Panorama]. Retrieved 15 March, 2015, from http://www.taiwan-panorama.com/tw/show:issue.php?id=201140004116c.txt&table =0&h1=&h2= Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2002). Likai Tongfang 離開同方 [Leaving Tongfang]. Taipei: Lianjing. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2004). Xu: juancun de jintou 序：眷村的盡頭 [Preface: The End of Military Dependents’ Village]. In W.C. Su (Ed.), Taiwan juancun xiaoshuo xüan 台灣眷村小說選 [A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories] (pp. 7–13). Taipei: Eryu Wenhua. Sun, H. Y. 孫鴻業. (2010). Waishengren dierdai de guojia rentong 「外省人」第二代的國家認同 [National Identity of Waishengren, the Second Generation in Taiwan]. In M. K. Chang (Ed.), Guojia Yu Rentong: yi xie waishengren de guandian 國家與認同：一些外省人的觀 [Nation and Identity: Perspectives of Some ‘Waishengren’] (pp. 31–74). Taipei: Qünxue. Tang, C. 唐骋华. (2010). Chu Tien-hsin: shenwei zuojia, wo haipa shiqu fennu 朱天心：身为作家，我害怕失去愤怒 [Chu Tien-hsin: As a Writer, I Am Afraid of Losing My Ability to be Angry]. Shenghuo zhoukan 生活周刊, 1315. Retrieved 12 March, 2014 from http://www.why.com.cn/qnzhg/HTML/shzk/portal/index/index .htm Tseng S. H. 曾淑惠. (2010). Taiwan wenxue zhong de laobing xingxiang 台灣文學中的老兵形象 [Mainlander Veteran Images in Taiwanese Literature]. In K. C. Li (Ed.), Li yu ku: zhanzheng de yanxu 離與苦：戰爭的延續 [Sufferings of Waishengren under the War Regime] (pp. 207–246). Taipei: Qünxue. Tseng, Y. C. 曾意晶. (2011). Jiyi yu yiwang: Chu Tien-hsin yu Ligelale a-Wu wenxue chuangzuo li de juancun 記憶與遺忘：朱天心與利格拉樂·阿女烏文學創作裡的眷村 [Remembering or Forgetting? Images of Juancun in Chu Tian-Hsin’s and Liglav a-Wu’s Albums]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 35–63). Taipei: Qünxue. Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2000). Guozu lunshu yu xiangtu xiuci 國族論述與鄉土修辭 [Discourses of Nationalism and Xiangtu Rhetoric]. In D. D. W. Wang (Ed.), Shuxie

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Taiwan—wenxue shi, hou zhimin yu hou xiandai 書寫台灣－文學史、後殖民與後現代 [Writing Taiwan: Strategies of Representation] (pp. 65–84). Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company. Wang, T. 王童 (Director). (1989). Xiangjiao Tiantang 香蕉天堂 [Banana Paradise] [Film]. Taipei, Taiwan: Zhong Ying; San Yi; Hua Song. Wei, T. T. 尉天聰. (Ed.) (1978). Xiangtu wenxue taolun ji 鄉土文學討論集 [The Anthology of Taiwan Xiangtu Literature Debate]. Taipei: Yuan Liu & Chang Chiao. Wu, H. Y. 吳忻怡. (2011). Zuori de xuanhua: juancun wenxue yu juancun 昨日的喧嘩：眷村文學與眷村 [Hubbub from Yesterday—Literature and Juancun]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 3–34). Taipei: Qünxue. Wu, M. J. 吳明季. (2010). San chong shiluo de huayu: Hualian waisheng laobing de liuwang chujing ji qi lunshu 三重失落的話語：花蓮外省老兵的流亡處境及其論述 [Triple Lost Discourses]. In K. C. Li (Ed.), Li yu ku: Zhanzheng de yanxu 離與苦：戰爭的延續 [Sufferings of Waishengren under the War Regime] (pp. 1–48). Taipei: Qünxue. Yang, D. M. H. and Chang, M. K. (2010). Understanding the Nuances of Waishengren: History and Agency. China Perspectives, 3, 108–122. Yang, M. H. 楊孟軒. (2010). Wuling niandai waisheng zhongxia jieceng jünmin zai Taiwan de shehuishi chutan 五零年代外省中下階層軍民在台灣的社會史初探 [The Pilot Study of Mid-Lower Class Mainland Soldiers and Civilians during the 1950s in Taiwanese Sociology]. In Taiwan Association of University Professors (Ed.), Zhonghuaminguo liuwang Taiwan liushi nian ji zhanhou Taiwan guoji chujing 中華民國流亡台灣六十年暨戰後台灣國際處境 [ROC in Taiwan for Sixty Years and Post-war International Status of Taiwan] (pp. 525–599). Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe [Avant-guard Publishing House]. Yip, J. (2004). Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. London: Duke University Press. Yu, C. M. 游鑑明. (2011). Shi wei dangguo yi huoshi funü? 1950 nian dai de Fuyou yuekan是為黨國抑或是婦女？1950 年代的《婦友》月刊 [For Party-State or for Women? Fuyou Monthly in the 1950s]. Jindai Zhongguo funü shi yanjiu 近代中 國婦女史研究, 19, 75–130. Yuan, C. C. 袁瓊瓊. (1981). Ziji de tiankong 自己的天空 [A Space of One’s Own]. Taipei: Hongfan. Yuan, C. C. 袁瓊瓊. (1988). Jin shen yuan 今生緣 [This Love, This Life]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxue.

2

Seeking a new identity Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang (離開同方) and Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (想我眷村的兄弟們)

The 1990s witnessed a dramatic social change in Taiwanese society. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan moved from the KMT’s authoritarian one-party rule to a more democratic system, a shift that was accompanied by a great wave of Taiwanization that rapidly undermined the KMT’s China-centric Mandarin-speaking culture. Mainlander writers’ works, which had dominated literature in Taiwan during the martial law period, lost their superior status, and their representativeness (hitherto unchallenged) was widely debated.1 As a result, doubt spread quickly about the KMT’s depiction of Taiwan as Chinese. These remarkable changes in cultural perception can be seen in the writings of secondgeneration mainlander writers in the 1990s. The preoccupation with what it means to be a mainlander in Taiwan is a key feature of all second-generation mainlander works, and the writings of the 1990s differed significantly from those of the 1980s. Whereas the works of the 1980s (as discussed in the preceding chapter) are characterized by self-confidence and a sense of mainlander superiority, the works of the 1990s reflect a significant degree of self-doubt. This chapter discusses two literary works published in the early 1990s. They are Su Wei-chen’s novel Leaving Tongfang (離開同方) (1990/2002) and Chu Tien-hsin’s short story “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” (想我眷村的兄弟們) (1992/2003).2 The fact that these two works have been widely discussed, and Chu’s story has been reprinted in several different collections that center on mainlander-related issues, reflects the importance accorded to both these texts in representing second-generation mainlanders’ inner struggles during this transitional period.3 The two writers both achieved local recognition because of their earlier works on juancun in the 1980s: particularly Chu’s Everlasting in 1982 and Su’s All for Love (有緣千里) in 1984. The two texts we examine in this chapter can be seen as the authors’ re-interpretation of juancun and mainlander identity. Both works delve into social life in the military dependents’ villages with similar intentions of defending the cultural authenticity of mainlander experience. The fact that the works were produced at a time of enormous cultural and socio-political change in Taiwan cannot be understated.

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Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang is narrated by a male second-generation mainlander, Feng Lei, who, following the verbal instructions of his late mainlander mother, carries her ashes back to the village where he and his family lived from when he was four years old until his adolescence. On his way back to the village called Tongfang, his memories of the people there come rushing back. The main plot centers on Feng Lei’s family and their relationships with several other families in the village, including the Yuans, Fangs, Lis, and Duans. The novel is ambivalently narrated. The narrator maintains a light-hearted tone throughout via the perspective of the child Feng Lei. The stories the boy tells of the lives of Tongfang’s residents, however, are heavy-hearted ones, filled with sorrowful lives and accounts of madness and death. Nonetheless, the village is portrayed as the home and spiritual haven of the narrator and his mainlander mother. Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” has a set of characters similar to those in her 1982 novel Everlasting, but she gives juancun a radically different interpretation in the 1992 short story. No actual plot is presented in the work, but readers are invited to follow the flow of the female narrator’s accounts and enter the remembered world of her village in which the sad mood of displacement prevails and recounting of sexual molestation is common. However, akin to Leaving Tongfang, the narrator in Chu’s work is depicted as being strongly attached to her memories of military dependents’ villages, and it suggests that talking about such experiences is not welcomed in the post-martial law society. Chu does not resolve the problems explored in this short story. Instead, she ends with the narrator wrestling with her mixed feelings for the people of juancun, expressing anger at the KMT, and admitting to her feelings of loneliness as a mainlander in an increasingly Taiwanized society. In the two works, both authors are concerned to defend the cultural relevance of mainlanders in Taiwan, and to explore how mainlanders as a group understand themselves in relation to other ethnic groups (族群), particularly the majority Hoklo Taiwanese. The residents in military dependents’ villages are portrayed as victims of history, with the authors highlighting the dark side of life in juancun and the hardships the residents endured. This can be seen as the strategy they deploy to argue against the general public’s impression of mainlanders as a privileged minority, since, in the 1990s, resentment of mainlanders by the majority Hoklo Taiwanese was widely shared. Juancun is depicted as a site of ambivalence in both works – it is a nostalgic home and a burden, and this dual representation reflects the mainlander protagonists’ identity crisis. Both works feature substantial monologues, through which the second-generation mainlander characters are continuously analyzing themselves and their inner conflicts. Both works present the mainlander identity as unresolved and with no viable solution to the perceived problem of an identity crisis. In portraying juancun as a home, these two works reveal that while the mainlander characters still rely heavily on their Chinese cultural values in defining themselves, China the country was beginning to play a much less important role in how mainlanders in Taiwan understood their identification.

Seeking a new identity 61

Re-writing juancun in the context of the 1990s The late 1980s to the 1990s was perhaps the most painful and turbulent period with regard to second-generation mainlanders’ identity evolution. The lifting of martial law in 1987 led to both political liberalization and an open critique of the KMT’s formerly unopposed vision of Taiwan as Chinese and the KMT’s eventual restoration of the Republic of China on the mainland. The belief of mainlanders in their cultural superiority also began to collapse from this point onwards. In early 1988, Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, died and his successor Li Deng-hui became the first Taiwan-born president of the Republic of China. During his presidency, Li put forth a series of constitutional reforms, and made efforts to democratize Taiwan.4 Bruce Jacobs argues that the process of Taiwanization is tightly linked to democratization, in that under the democratic system, the Taiwanese majority, rather than the mainlander minority, determine the direction to the island’s future (2005, p. 34). Although the KMT’s political and historical views during the 40 years of martial law deeply influenced the population in Taiwan, since the majority of people had little or no personal experience of China, it was inevitable that the long-repressed Taiwanese identity and culture gradually began to dominate public discourse. With the emergence of various Taiwanization movements, the prevailing China-centric cultural and historical narratives were revised or replaced by pro-local narratives in the media and literature. During this period, many Taiwanese educators and cultural producers were keen to establish a national culture and identity to distinguish Taiwan from China. One of the most obvious examples is the new junior high school curriculum that was introduced in 1997. The subject “Knowing Taiwan” (認識台灣) was added to the existing Mainland-China-focused educational materials (Vickers 2007).5 For the first time, students in Taiwan were officially allowed to learn more about the island they lived in. Facing this change in cultural and political life, mainlanders underwent what Stuart Hall called “double displacement” (1996, p. 596): they embarked on a journey of self-exploration, induced in large part by their feeling left out from the wave of Taiwanization sweeping across society. Chu Tien-hsin called it the “waishengren’s sense of loss” and dated it as occurring from 1987 (2002a, p. 103). While other ethnic groups’ (e.g., Hoklo, Hakka, and the indigenous inhabitants)6 articulations of the past were welcomed and often recognized as part of Taiwanese culture and identity, mainlanders found themselves suddenly an ethnic minority and many mainlander writers, such as Chu Tien-hsin, Chang Chi-jiang, and Chang Ta-chun, wrote of feeling “expelled” from mainstream culture and politics. What came along with the formation of a Taiwanese identity, or “Taiwanese consciousness”, was the general public’s (particularly the Hoklo public’s) hostility to mainlanders as a whole, based on the view that they were all collaborators with the KMT as well as “privileged outsiders” (Yang and Chang 2010, p. 110). A researcher of Taiwan politics Shen Shiau-Chi (2010), who is a secondgeneration mainlander, notes that in the 1990s, mainlanders were often asked

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by nativists to be grateful to Taiwan for sheltering them, arguing that “they ate Taiwanese rice, drank Taiwanese water”, and had lived on the island for a long time, so they should identify with Taiwan (p. 113). Although not all mainlanders were followers of the KMT, it is undeniable that this group had developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the KMT during the martial law period, and many enjoyed special state benefits and advantages, even after the lifting of martial law (Yang and Chang 2010, p. 116). One of the examples is that before 1992 the quota for the Senior Civil Service Examination was based on the ratio of provinces. In 1991, of a total of 599 vacancies, only 21 were for people whose jiguan (籍貫original province) was Taiwan (Luoh 2003, pp. 90–91).7 The rapidly developing discourse of Taiwanization reflected the native Taiwanese’ discontent with mainlanders’ superior attitude toward them and indifference to Taiwan, as well as the dominance of the KMT’s China-centric cultural ideology over the whole society. In the face of the growing hostility toward mainlanders, the two mainlander writers that we examine in this chapter, Chu Tien-hsin and Su Wei-chen expressed their anxiety, confusion, and fear at being marginalized and “misunderstood”. In the preface to her edited A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories (台灣眷村小說選) (2004), Su rebuts the accusation that mainlanders do not identify with Taiwan. Arguing that they do indeed see Taiwan as their home, she nonetheless asks why writing about mainlanders and juancun is often seen as “inauthentic” in the genre of Taiwanese literature. She wrote, “Love Taiwan”? This is their [second-generation mainlander writers’] parents’ last and only place to stay, and the national territory (國土) they grew up in. Isn’t it an over-simplified slogan or mathematic formula to claim one’s love? “Love Taiwan”? Did they write about Switzerland, France or Spain? Did they write in Arabic or cuneiform? It’s in Chinese. Is it really another country outside the bamboo fence and the big stone on which Chiang Kaishek’s words were inscribed? (p. 10)8 In an interview in 2009, Chu also stated, This is the place where I was born, grew up, reached the prime of my life, and gradually grew old. I did not evade paying my taxes, and I did not commit crimes. Except for travelling on some occasions, I have never left this place. (Therefore, don’t ask me to go back to somewhere else, just like those overseas revolutionists,9 who love to accuse us, who actually have another country and home to go back to.) This is the only place that I reside on this planet. Can I love [Taiwan] in this way? Can I? Can I? Can I? (Wang 2009, para. 15) By describing themselves as locals who were born and brought up on the island, Chu and Su express their anger at being referred to as people who do not belong

Seeking a new identity 63 to Taiwan and love Taiwan. At the same time, their words reveal a desire to be accepted by the native Taiwanese and to be seen as (mainlander-)Taiwanese. It is important to note that the quotations above reflect Chu’s and Su’s views of mainlander identity in the 2000s, after they had undergone more than ten years of exploration and questioning their own self-identification as mainlanders. Yet, the two works we discuss in this chapter reflect their identity struggle in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the works were written. Their attitudes at the later date show huge differences to what appears in their texts in the 1990s, as the earlier ones are characterized more by the feelings of anguish, loss, and ambivalence in terms of the mainlander characters’ position and relationship to Taiwan. However, their comments on mainlander identity in the 2000s help us to understand the trajectory of their transformed views about cultural and national identity during the ten-year period from the 1990s to 2000s. Another social change that should be noted when examining Chu’s and Su’s works in the early 1990s is the legalization of visits to China, which resulted in mainlanders’ reconsideration of what it means to be “Chinese” (Zhongguoren). In late 1987, the KMT government lifted the ban on traveling to Mainland China. Chinese émigrés and their families were eventually allowed to go back to their homeland in Mainland China to visit their relatives after around 40 years of separation. More often than not their long-expected homecomings had disappointing endings, as the real China was far different from their imagined and remembered homelands, which had been portrayed based on the accounts of the exiles and the KMT. Upon arriving at the beloved homeland (故鄉), many of the mainlanders and their children came to realize that China had become the original land (原鄉)—the place where their ancestors lived, but to which they no longer felt emotionally attached (Wong 2006). While Su’s Leaving Tongfang does not address the issue of visiting China, Chu’s “In Remembrance” puts forth mainlanders’ identity dilemma in regard to their position between China and Taiwan: It was only when we returned to the mainland to visit relatives that we found out that in the eyes of our remaining relatives, we were Taiwanese citizens (台胞, 台灣人). The Taiwanese, however, even though we have lived on the island for forty years, continue to refer to us as “You mainlanders”. (2003, p. 264) Chu added that mainlanders thus “resemble the bat who is neither bird nor beast, a being with no identity” (2003, p. 264). Chu’s story tells of the disjuncture between mainlanders who imagine their trips back to their hometowns as fulfilling their lifelong dreams and the actual shock of “the return”, which deepened the mainlanders’ angst about their identity. In many juancun stories, the mainlander characters’ feelings of loss when “returning” to their homeland in China are often compounded by the actual loss of their homes in Taiwan. In the 1980s, the government started to demolish military dependents’ villages and transform them into high-density areas or public spaces.10 Many juancun residents were thus forced to retreat from the homes they

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have lived for years, and move to communities mostly populated by Taiwanese. Since juancun were unique communities, this had the effect of alienating residents from Taiwanese society at large; the second-generation mainlanders who had previously lived in these villages experienced the awkward situation in which they had to learn to adapt to a new culture and reconfigure a new identity. Unlike most diasporic groups, who have to adjust to the host society immediately after they arrive, cultural shock and assimilation of mainlanders in juancun did not begin until four decades after they arrived on the island. It is notable that during the cultural-political transitional period of the early 1990s, the number of juancun writings continued to increase in an attempt to defend as well as preserve mainlanders’ cultural memory (Jaw 2010). As I have argued in the previous chapter, military dependents’ villages played a vital role in shaping mainlanders’ collective identity during the early days of their settlement in Taiwan. It is thus no coincidence that Chu and Su, and several second-generation mainlander writers turned to their most familiar environments, juancun, when their cultural identification with “China” was challenged.11 In the article “Between Memory and History” (1996), Pierre Nora, a French historian who published widely on the issues of French collective identity and memory, analyzes how narratives may function to preserve past experiences from oblivion, and how recollections may be modified in different contexts. Nora’s work is helpful for explaining the second-generation mainlander writers’ concern with the theme of juancun in their works of the 1990s. Nora writes that when “the settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience”, the milieu de mémoire, no longer exist, people create their own sites of memory, lieux de mémoire, in which “a residual of continuity remains” (1996, p. 1). Nora argues that the lieux de mémoire preserves the past in the sense of giving new meanings to the past by investing its material and imagined remains (such as locations, texts, and events) with relevance for creating new meanings of that past for the present. The unapproachable past is thus animated through lieux de mémoire. Nora highlights the contradictory features of fixity and mobility in lieux de mémoire, stating that: For although it is true that the fundamental purpose of a lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial […]—all in order to capture the maximum possible meaning with the fewest possible signs—it is also clear that lieux de mémoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections (that is what makes them exciting). (1996, p. 15) Military dependents’ villages could be understood as milieu de mémoire; Chu’s and Su’s literary works, which were written after the authors left the villages and the places were about to disappear, function as lieux de mémoire. They show the authors’ attempts to keep alive the residents’ collective memory, yet the meanings and images of juancun become diverse and fluid in their narratives. While

Seeking a new identity 65 military dependents’ villages are often portrayed as happy communities in the works of the 1980s, both the 1990s texts discussed in this chapter portray them more darkly. The genre of juancun literature thus reflects an important shift in mainlanders’ perception of mainlander identity: from identifying with an imagined China to exploring the Chinese identity of mainlanders in Taiwan, focusing on the “Chinese” experience that juancun provided.

Juancun as a nostalgic home Both Chu Tien-hsin’s and Su Wei-chen’s works focus on the theme of nostalgia, telling of the second-generation characters’ nostalgic memories of the villages. Svetlana Boym’s (2001) theory of nostalgia sheds light on the leading mainlander characters’ nostalgic feelings narrated in both novels. Boym associates nostalgia with the concept of home, stating that “[Modern nostalgia] could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history” (p. 8). Boym underscores the memory bearers’ recognition of the importance of a place and a period of time to them, thus calling it a home that transcends the spatiotemporal concept to refer to values, a feeling, or a milieu. By depicting juancun instead of China as the narrators’ nostalgic home, both authors have turned their focus of identity from the framework of China, the place their parents long for, to that of Taiwan, a place in which they themselves experience the loss of home. This is a key change in terms of their configuration of mainlander identity. The idea of juancun as a home is not explicitly and consciously shown in the works published during the 1980s. Unlike Yuan Chiungchiung’s This Love, This Life or Chu’s Everlasting in which military dependents’ villages are presented as communities where the characters temporarily reside, or even if juancun is depicted as very close to the idea of home, the leading characters are still presented as desiring to return to China. Conversely, in Leaving Tongfang, the male protagonist Feng Lei directly calls the juancun where he grew up his home. Although Su Wei-chen named her novel Leaving Tongfang, the work is in fact a story of return—to both a space, Tongfang New Village, and a time, the narrator’s childhood. Taking his mother’s ashes back to Tongfang, twice Feng Lei says, “Mum, we are home” (p. 6, p. 316). Although it is many years since he left the village, he still calls himself “a person from Tongfang New Village” (p. 7). The novel starts with Feng Lei’s trip of return, suggesting that this is a story of home and homecoming. While the image of home is not explicitly stated in Chu’s story, juancun is depicted as the core of the group’s identity and the source of their cultural uniqueness. Echoing Boym’s argument that nostalgia has to be developed upon a state of the no longer existent (2001, p. XIII) which functions to accelerate and further stimulate the tendency to idealize the past, sociologist Janelle L. Wilson, in her study on nostalgia (2005), has also noted, “Nostalgia requires a supply of memories” (p. 23). Because certain places or experiences are no longer accessible,

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they become more valuable to us, and the distance between here-and-now and there-and-then stirs the emotion of nostalgia. Nonetheless, memories are only generated when time passes, and one never feels fully nostalgic unless one leaves one’s home or native community. Therefore, in addition to the strong spiritual attachment to home, departure becomes one of the most important factors for kindling nostalgia. And this departure, presented in the two texts, does not simply refer to the physical separation from juancun, but more critically it involves the loss of the mainlanders’ belief and values that conform to the KMT ideology during the martial law period, and the loss of a self-identity developed upon them. The loss is thus physical, psychological, and culture related. Literary critic Chen Fang-ming has said of juancun literature that it is the product of “multiple losses” (2002, p. 127): namely, the loss of not just an idealized vision of China but the loss too of an obsolete experience of Taiwan. Both these losses are evident in Chu’s and Su’s juancun works in the emphasis the authors place on the leading characters’ emotional ambivalence about leaving and returning to their juancun homes. This ambivalence is particularly evident in Su’s novel when Feng Lei’s family moves away from the village. On the day of their departure, most of their neighbors come to wish them well. A neighbor’s mother makes them a dessert and juancun children let off firecrackers to see them off. In contrast to this festive spirit, once the truck is about to leave the gate of the village, Feng Lei’s mother shouts to her children, “Don’t look back! Once you turn your head and look, you’ll never be able to return to Tongfang New Village! Remember?” (2002a, p. 3). Su does not explain why Feng’s mother says this. However, the fact that she chose to include this statement in the story suggests that she wanted to present the character as longing for the family’s eventual return to the village. It is possible that Su based this scene loosely on the Biblical story in which Lot and his family flee Sodom. Lot’s wife looks back to mourn her loss and is turned into a pillar of salt. Later in the novel, Feng says that in the last several years of his mother’s life, she likes to listen to the radio and television in their house with the volume turned up “as if she still lived in the bustling Tongfang New Village” (2002a, p. 1). The place—a temporary refuge—is shown as a Chinese migrant’s lifelong yearning, and to return to it is her dying wish. The origin of juancun is important for understanding the complex emotions it arouses in those who were associated with it. Su (2004) notes that since military dependents’ villages were established to provide temporary refuge, to reside in them for an extended period of time was regarded by juancun residents themselves as evidence of their failure. If someone still lived in such a village many years after first arriving in Taiwan, it meant that they had been incapable of living a better life and finding a better job (pp. 8–9). Inhabitants of the military dependents’ village thus saw their departure from it as a necessity. As Chu Tien-hsin wrote in “In Remembrance”, “For some peculiar reason, the brothers and sisters that she knew all thought of leaving this place” (2003, p. 247). Another secondgeneration mainlander writer Ku Ling (2004) also notes:

Seeking a new identity 67 Our family was the first to move away from the village. I still remember that they all came to see me off. […] I think their feelings might have been the same as mine: we all wished we could have moved away earlier. (p. 100) While departure is presumably the residents’ best choice for a better future, Su in the novel casts doubt over it, showing that what follows the departure is often a deeper loneliness and sense of displacement. As Feng Lei recollects, “My father was transferred to another base. After that, we moved around and never lived in the same place for more than three years. Therefore, Tongfang New Village is more like our homeland” (p. 312). As for other characters, Fang Jingxin and Yu Peng elope because of Mr. and Mrs. Fang’s objections, but afterward, they learn that Mrs. Fang becomes insane because of their departure, while two of the Yuan family’s children are sent to an orphanage, and one to a mental institution. Leaving Tongfang brings out the ambivalent attachments of the juancun residents to their “home”, and the adult Feng’s expression of his longing for the village, years after his departure, is bound up with dark feelings. The cultural differences between mainlanders and Taiwanese are shown as a major reason for Feng Lei’s nostalgia for juancun. Even though the novel does not directly touch on how the KMT’s ideology influenced the characters’ identities, China is mentioned by Feng now and then, showing that this distant land which the second-generation mainlander character never experiences personally plays a role in his identity, although all he knows about it is through his childhood in juancun. He says that “We [the narrator and children who grew up in the juancun] believed that people of One-one-seven Highland [where Tongfang New Village was located] were Chinese; to be outside the juancun is to be outside China” (p. 153). Whereas the quote underscores how much the residents in Tongfang are isolated from the broader society in Taiwan, it also makes explicit that second-generation mainlanders identify the idea of being Chinese with their juancun experience: in other words, a Taiwan-based imagining of being Chinese. Compared with Su’s first novel on juancun, All for Love (1984), which focuses on the conflicts between a pair of lovers—a Taiwanese male from a wealthy family in Tainan and a mainlander female from a juancun in Kaohsiung—whose different cultural backgrounds eventually cause them to break up, Su appears more reserved in delving into such ethnic and cultural tensions in this 1990 work. This is probably because Leaving Tongfang was published when “mainlanders” had become a politically sensitive issue in Taiwan, and Su tried not to emphasize the ethnic conflicts. However, the fact that the novel does not deal with Feng’s present life (in the 1990s) suggests that the past holds greater meaning for a mainlander like him, which implies the difficulty of being a “mainlander Chinese” in an increasingly Taiwanized society. Like Leaving Tongfang, Chu Tien-hsin also presents “In Remembrance” as a nostalgic story about life in juancun, but the focus of this work is mainly on how much the environment of the villages differs and is isolated from that of the

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outside world in Taiwan, and thus results in the narrator’s desire for a return to juancun. As stated earlier, Chu describes juancun as a cultural site of mainlander identity. At the beginning of the story, the unnamed female narrator, who is apparently a second-generation mainlander, addresses readers directly, asking them to play the English pop song “Stand by Me” before they read on. In this relaxed and nostalgic manner, readers are thus encouraged to think that the story before them is of the leading character’s happy memories. However, except for a very brief depiction of how the female protagonist feels safe and secure when staying with other mainlander children (p. 242), most of the narrative is focused on explaining to readers how the villages were shaped and dominated by the KMT’s nationalistic ideology. The mainlander narrator presents her leading character as feeling at odds with Taiwanese society in the 1990s. Chu depicts the village as an isolated community with everyone supporting the KMT candidates in each election, expressing a sincere patriotism for the country that the KMT built, and firmly believing that they would one day return to their homes in China and that fertile farms, big houses, and servants were waiting for them. Like Leaving Tongfang, which shows how little the juancun residents knew about Taiwanese society, in “In Remembrance”, the narrator is shown as keen to justify the juancun mainlanders’ lack of Taiwanese cultural experience. For instance, the narrator states: It would be difficult for someone who didn’t live in a military compound, or for those who were born after the 1960s, Taiwanese and mainlanders alike, to understand that many kids from the military compound (especially if their compounds were equipped with markets, restaurants, and schools) had no experience at all with the “Taiwanese” before they left in their twenties to attend college or serve in the military. The only few exceptions were those with Taiwanese mothers, who could go to their grandmas’ homes during summer vacation, and those who had Taiwanese friends in school. For the large number of mainland mothers, their only contact with the Taiwanese through the years was with the “civilians” who sold vegetables in the market. Therefore, in the minds of the mainland mothers, the Taiwanese are basically divided into two categories: those who can do business and those who cannot. (2003, p. 263) Chu’s narrator attributes the segregation between Taiwanese and mainlander cultures to the existence of the villages. By highlighting the leading character’s inexperience of Taiwanese culture and her attachment to the villages, the narrator argues for the right to feel displaced and dislocated in a “Taiwanized” society—or in Chu’s own words, “the freedom of not identifying [with the mainstream Hoklo Taiwanese culture]” (不認同的自由) (2002b, p. 43). Literary critic Rosemary Haddon (2005) has noted that this short story was published in a collection of stories that revolve around the theme of “not being at home” (p. 108), stating that “the misfits find themselves ‘not at home’ not so much for reasons of gender, ethnicity, and class, but rather, because of

Seeking a new identity 69 their dysfunctionalism and their lingering nostalgia for the past” (p. 108). “In Remembrance” tells more than a specific character’s story. It is presented as an account of the juancun mainlanders’ collective experience of displacement and nostalgia. Chu calls her main character “you” or “she” without giving her a name or a face, so as to generalize her as any one of the girls who grew up in juancun. While Feng Lei’s nostalgia in Su’s Leaving Tongfang is simply presented as an individual character’s present-day attachment to his childhood memories, Chu’s narrative has a consciously symbolic dimension. She portrays juancun as a place that, by giving shelter to the migrant mainlanders while also secluding them from Taiwanese society at large, had allowed the mainlanders to become, symbolically, a particular “species” (2003, p. 264), to use her provocative word. As the narrator writes, when the unnamed central character moves away from juancun, “all her ties with the flock she identified with were severed; she was like a river that had merged into the ocean” (2003, p. 247). The protagonist’s experience of being part of a “flock” (族/群) evokes a collective experience of being a “juancun person” (眷村人). Unlike Feng Lei in Leaving Tongfang, who refers to the juancun population as “Chinese” (Zhongguoren), the narrator of “In Remembrance” refers to the mainlander characters not as Chinese, but as “waishengren”, thus highlighting their location in Taiwan as a special ethnic group. In distinguishing the mainlanders from Zhongguoren, this work reveals that Chu had distanced herself from the Chinese identity she portrayed in Everlasting (1982), to contemplate and construct a Taiwan-based mainlander identity in the post-martial law period. This move problematizes the second-generation mainlander narrator’s identity and creates a productive confusion in the narrative. The Taiwan-based critic Chiu Kuifen comments of Chu’s “In Remembrance” that “unwilling to identify with the Taiwanese and being unable to regain the orthodox Chinese identity, juancun people can thus only exile themselves” (1993, p. 105). Chiu’s observation is most apt. The narrator in “In Remembrance” tells how quite a number of juancun girls, like the protagonist, are stuck in an awkward situation: they are unable to identify with either Taiwanese or Chinese identity: they “once wanted to leave the compound and this land, in whatever way” (2003, p. 260), but afterward, when they left juancun and married a Taiwanese husband, they felt lonely because they did not fit in Taiwanese society and thus missed their juancun buddies.

Juancun as sites of suffering Although both Su’s and Chu’s works portray juancun as the second-generation mainlander characters’ nostalgic home, their representation of the villages as dark places where civil war migrants experienced displacement, trauma, and misery is the most striking feature of 1990s mainlander writings. Pierre Nora (1996) has noted that by narrating histories, “we seek not our origins but a way of figuring out what we are from what we are no longer”, which is “a sudden revelation of our elusive identity” (p. 13). By portraying the leading mainlander characters as ambivalently and self-consciously nostalgic for a “bad” home, both authors

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present a less ideological view of juancun, and construct a mainlander image which is insecure yet motivated by a desire to be “Chinese” (in a Taiwan-based sense) in the aftermath of the lifting of martial law. Su Wei-chen employs the narrating technique of magic realism to portray Tongfang New Village as an unusually sad place. Literary critic Liu Jin (2007) remarks that the characters are eccentric, and the plot is absurd in terms of the social milieu described, the interpersonal relationships, and the moral values of the characters (p. 82). Indeed, the plot is grotesque with fantastical elements, particularly in the part of the mentally ill Mrs. Li who mysteriously disappears from the village for a while and comes back as a leading actress of a theatrical troupe. The frequent references to never-ending rain and the thick scent of flowers present the village as subject to natural forces beyond human control. These references are part of the author’s deliberate use of a magic realist mode of narration to explore the mainlander characters’ lives as driven by the negative experiences they endured as people who had no power over their fate. The history of war had brought them to Taiwan and to juancun. The mainlanders in Tongfang are depicted as trapped by their memories of violence and exodus. Su uses the theme of marriage in different ways to elaborate on the consequences of war. One story tells how Mr. Li, injured during the fighting in China, was later diagnosed as infertile. When his mentally ill wife gets pregnant again and again with other men, Li chooses to “escape” from the village and from the family tragedy. He voluntarily serves on an island hundreds of miles away from Taiwan, leaving his two children and his wife in Tongfang. Similarly, marriage is depicted as unhappy for Mr. and Mrs. Duan, who come from different social classes. Mr. Duan cannot have sex with his wife because of his suspicions that this rich and beautiful woman would not have married him, a peasant’s son, if it were not for the war. Suffering from a feeling of inferiority as well as frustration and anger at himself, he abuses his wife by confining her at home and forbidding her to speak to other men. It is not only within the context of unfortunate marriages that the Mainland migrants’ loneliness and sorrow are represented. Several characters in the village are described as bachelors who fled to Taiwan with the KMT, such as Old Ma, who has long since passed the proper age for marriage. Despite his feelings for Fang Jingxin, he dares not express them because of their differences in social class and age. Through these different stories, Su shows how the civil war has derailed the life paths of the characters, leaving them only unhappy stories to tell of their lives in juancun as involuntary and helpless migrants. Throughout the novel, the emotional anguish of mainlanders across different social classes is foregrounded, with each character presented as suffering equally, although for different reasons. Su uses madness symbolically to represent juancun residents’ collective pain, which reflects Miriane Hirsch’s idea of “postmemory”, suggesting that the firstand second-generation mainlanders in juancun are affected by the war even if not all of them had experienced it. Leaving Tongfang thus revolves around how the residents deal with the madness spreading among them. People who are unable to cope with their misfortunes, real or imagined, become mad. For example,

Seeking a new identity 71 Mrs. Li is described as becoming mentally ill during the war when she is forced to flee from place to place (pp. 138–140); Mrs. Fang suffers a total breakdown when, in the absence of news, she becomes convinced that her only daughter is dead (p. 14–21); Yuan Bao’s mental disorder results from a serious disease when he is young (p. 51), while Li Qiao’s insanity is due to her failed relationship with Mr. Yuan (pp. 97–98). In addition to the characters who suffer from actual madness and mental illness, there are also those on the edge of mental collapse, such as Fang Jingxin and Mr. and Mrs. Duan. The plot, framed around the intertwined themes of leaving and return, divides the characters into three types: the first are successful individuals who choose to leave the village to escape the curse of madness but who are permanently wounded in some way. The second type are characters who become deranged because they are susceptible to the village’s collective misery. And the third are those who make up the majority of the village’s population, including members of Feng Lei’s family, who endeavor to live in the village, despite the difficulties they face there. In Leaving Tongfang, the line between sanity and insanity is often blurred deliberately. This effectively reinforces the image of juancun residents’ collective suffering. The case of Mrs. Li exemplifies the bizarre relationships between the “insane” and “normal” villagers and emphasizes the dangers in the apparent symbiosis between the two. When readers first meet her, she is already a mad woman who roams about the village. After disappearing for a period, she changes her name, becomes the leading actress of a theatrical troupe, and attracts many villagers to watch their plays. Her reappearance not only affects her son and daughter, Zhong Zhong and Skinny, but also indirectly leads to the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Yuan (although it is Yuan Bao, Mr. Yuan’s oldest son, who kills his father). Showing that the characters are all caught up in pain because of the war, Su presents juancun as a hellish place created by the collective trauma of its inhabitants. Whether they leave or stay, whether they become mad or stay sane, the characters are all victims of history—China’s history—and their family ties. Akin to Leaving Tongfang, Chu’s “In Remembrance” attributes juancun residents’ suffering and trauma primarily to their psychological and physical unease in Taiwan. She describes how the narrator remembers the previous generation acting “strangely” on each Tomb Sweeping Day. Unlike the Taiwanese people who prepared offerings to commemorate their ancestors, these mainlanders were not sure whether their relatives had become ancestors: they burnt paper money for people who might still be alive (2003, pp. 248–249). In this story, Chu presents mainlanders’ acute pain and anxiety in an age when any communications with their relatives left behind in China were forbidden. As the narrator states, “a land where none of your relatives are buried cannot be called home” (p. 249). The story implies that this was one compelling reason why the mainlanders could not bring themselves to settle down in Taiwan or to see it as their new home. The secondgeneration narrator argues that her generation has been obsessed with achieving a sense of belonging and stability, although they do not really know what they are looking for. Chu’s story revolves around mainlanders’ grief for the past and their

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anxiety about the future. As her personal remarks in interviews and her essays make plain, she wants the mainlanders’ exilic mentality to be understood by her readers. It is notable that a large part of “In Remembrance” revolves around the female narrator’s memory of sexual molestation, demonstrating how some first-generation mainlanders’ misery may turn into the second generation’s nightmare. Although the sexual desire of war veterans is a key topic in the literary works produced by second-generation mainlander writers (Tseng 2010), sexual harassment in juancun is a topic that is less often addressed. However, the narrator in Chu’s story makes a point of stating that it has happened to many juancun girls. Chu suggests that the trauma of war is partly responsible. In “In Remembrance”, several war veterans are portrayed as people who are victimized by the KMT’s dictatorship and then become sexual predators of girls of the second generation. This marks an interesting shift from Chu’s treatment of sexual harassment in her 1982 work Everlasting. In this earlier work, the sexual predators are people from the local Taiwanese communities: Xia Jinyun’s best friend is molested by a distant relative of their neighbor, and Jinyun is almost attacked by a Hoklo Taiwanese construction worker when she spends a holiday with her grandmother. However, in “In Remembrance”, the sexual predators are the unmarried war veterans. The narrator refers to these veterans as a group, calling them the “Old Xs” (老X), and states that they are the source of many girls’ unpleasant memories of juancun. Like the female central character, who is not given a name or face, these molesters are also shown as a type rather than an individual: these Old Xs came to Taiwan pennilessly with the KMT. The narrator describes them as pathetic single men who were “way past the marrying age with no possibility of starting a family, and most often possessed no special skill as a retired sergeant” (2003, p. 254). They are allowed to stay in the villages only because of other villagers’ sympathy. Their huts are often as dirty and messy as garbage dumps, but they can always attract children to come and listen to war stories and folk tales, or to look for treasures. Young juancun girls become victims of these Old Xs’ perverted sexual desires, but somehow these acts are never disclosed to the girls’ parents but are kept as secrets until they grow up. The narrator states that the memories of the Old Xs are many juancun girls’ earliest understandings of men and sex. As such, in “In Remembrance”, repression and anxiety replace the sweet-home image to form a new picture of the villages, which shows the collapse or even reversal of Chu’s earlier views in Everlasting. To a certain extent, in “In Remembrance”, Chu still projects some of the cultural pride of mainlanders that is so explicitly expressed in her earlier work Everlasting, but here it more reflects a mainlander writer’s anguish in defining herself or her place in a rapidly changing society. Chu accentuates juancun residents’ sorrow of being exiles in “an alien land” and refusal to accept or assimilate into Taiwanese culture. The narrator describes her astonishment at the cultural disparities between her local Taiwanese friends and juancun residents during the martial law period, depicting the Taiwanese’s lifestyle and the dishes they eat as “strange” (奇怪) (2003, p. 250)—the same term was used by Yuang

Seeking a new identity  73 Chiung-chiung in her This Love, This Life (1988) to describe Taiwanese food. The native Taiwanese classmates’ attitudes of “calm and contentment” (怡然篤定) is especially highlighted to elaborate on the cultural gap between mainlanders and Taiwanese: They [second-generation mainlanders] were so surprised that local boys could choose not to take exams and continue their education (even though, in private, they wished they could do that too), and instead go home to help with the farming, or become apprentices to carpenters or plumbers. For they had no other choice but to continue their schooling. (2003, p. 251) Chu’s narrator relates her ambivalent emotions of pride and self-pity. While she sees the Taiwanese as culturally inferior, she shows a contradictory feeling of envy for the Taiwanese children’s freedom in choosing their future jobs. Having a good education and maintaining high cultural standards were once seen by Chu’s mainlander characters in Everlasting as proof of the group’s cultural superiority over the native Taiwanese. However, these same traits are interpreted as a burden in “In Remembrance”, as necessary tools for mainlanders’ survival in “an alien land”. In “In Remembrance”, mainlanders are portrayed as exiles who were reluctant to stay but had nowhere else to go to. This is a sharp contrast with the description of mainlanders in Everlasting as soldiers who had liberated Taiwan and its people. David Der-wei Wang evocatively captures the tenor of Chu Tien-hsin’s works of the 1990s by describing them as texts of “enmity” (怨毒). He notes that Chu’s enmity is “from her helplessness in terms of her literary and political experience” (2002, p. 19). A lot of her characters are people “who are dispelled from the mainstream history. Their identities are constructed upon their situations of being excluded. And such identities often make them feel lost” (2002, p. 19). Wang’s idea of “enmity” resonates with Edward Said’s notion of exilic resentment. Said writes: Exiles look at non-exiles with resentment. They belong in their surroundings, you feel, whereas an exile is always out of place. What is it like to be born in a place, to stay and live there, to know that you are of it, more or less forever? (2000, pp. 180–181) What Chu expresses in “In Remembrance” can be seen as this kind of resentment, producing effects of enmity. The narrator of “In Remembrance” suggests that no matter how much the second-generation children are convinced by their parents’ accounts of their families’ former glorious histories—which, from her viewpoint, are based on the parents’ distorted memories of homeland— they, like their parents, are haunted by the very genuine melancholia of rootlessness and fear of uncertainty. As the narrator recounts, after so many years, she eventually realized that the sense of

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“anxiety and instability” that obsessed her during the teenage days “was an anxiety caused by the incomprehensible fear of not being able to take root anywhere” (2003, p. 249).

Embracing a dismal past for the future Boym (2001) argues that “nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future” (p. xvi). In this sense, nostalgia, understood as fantasies of the past, allows the memory-bearer to turn her memories into an expression of yearning for something better than what the present offers. Thus, nostalgia is a constructed past that conveys the values the memory-bearer cherishes and seeks to defend in an unhappy present. Memory, as employed in Leaving Tongfang and “In Remembrance”, shows us the authors’ views of the present and their attempts to find a way forward, as second-generation mainlanders, in an unknown future. Both works depict the second-generation mainlander characters’ ambivalent nostalgia for their juancun childhoods, yet they present two distinct attitudes of coping with such difficult emotions. Whereas Su’s Feng Lei embraces the traumatic past and accepts that the “Chinese identity” which developed in the villages is an important part of him which he will take with to face his future outside the community, Chu’s narrator is extremely pessimistic about the future of mainlander juancun culture, believing that she is making a last effort to preserve the memories which are doomed to disappear in an increasingly “Taiwanized” society. Yet implicit in Chu’s gloomy story is the message that mainlanders must continue to defend their complex identity in Taiwan’s new socio-political context, if they wish to lead meaningful lives. In the case of Leaving Tongfang, Su emphasizes how return to juancun leads Feng Lei to recall the feelings of love, support, and security he enjoyed, despite the sorrow and madness that he witnessed at the juancun. The novel strongly connects Feng Lei’s mother with juancun, and it is this maternal love that Su presents as a source of the male protagonist’s sense of belonging to juancun. In contrast to Feng Lei’s father, who is portrayed as quiet and who has a very minor part in the story, Feng’s mother is the parent who helps him to develop a concept of home, extending it from family to community. She is described as a compassionate woman who takes care of other children in her village and mediates in the various arguments that occur in her juancun. The story is set in the patriarchal community of a military dependents’ village, but in contrast to the stereotype of submissive women and strong men, as was formerly encouraged by the KMT’s Confucian-based ideology, most male characters in Leaving Tongfang are presented as passive, while the female characters are brave and strong.12 Leaving Tongfang shows a situation that is known to have existed in the juancun, where most fathers/husbands were away from their households because of their jobs. The portrayal of the village is very similar to the sociologist Vincent T.

Seeking a new identity 75 M. Shang’s observation (2010): unlike most societies, where the individual family works as a foundational unit, in juancun, the whole community is the family writ large. That is, a military dependents’ village is like a communal family in which mothers of different families help one another (pp. 22–23). Since most men were serving in the army, and the villages were often located in remote rural areas, the necessity of cooperation evolved into a unique culture within which mothers took the responsibility to tie different families together.13 As Su shows, in a military dependents’ village like Tongfang New Village, individual needs often become a collective responsibility, and private problems are usually taken up as public issues. For example, most villagers in one way or another become involved in Fang Jingxin and Yu Pong’s romance and in Mr. Duan, Mrs. Duan, and Tong Jie’s love triangle by showing concern for or even taking sides to help them. This excessive intimacy inevitably leads to a lack of privacy, and as Su points out in her 2004 article, most second-generation children were sick of their interfering neighbors (p. 8). However, what this novel emphasizes is the community aspect of juancun’s unique culture. Su implies that solidarity and emotional closeness can arise in this context and that despite the misery of life in such villages, they can nonetheless still elicit powerful feelings of home and belonging, as is evident in the account of the character Feng Lei. As is shown, after his mother dies, the juancun community becomes for Feng the most important and intimate link to his sense of belonging somewhere. His intertwined emotions about his mother and the village are mirrored in his expressions of nostalgia. At the end of the novel, Su writes, when he finally arrives at the alley where he once lived, Feng looks forward to meeting his old friends and learning how they have changed. The story ends when Skinny comes out from her house to welcome him, while Feng, holding his mother’s ashes, is walking quickly into the alley. We readers are not told of what happens after Feng Lei goes back to his old house and what he says to Skinny, but Su clearly shows Feng’s exhilaration and anticipation for seeing the changes. In this last scene where Feng returns to the village, Su symbolically unites the past and the present through the blending of Feng’s reminiscence with the fulfilled anticipation of meeting his old friend Skinny. To draw upon Boym’s ideas of nostalgia (2001), Feng’s feelings accord with “reflective nostalgia” (p. 49), the focus of which is “not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time” (p. 49). Reflective nostalgia celebrates the passing of time. The memorybearer understands that he longs for something that is no more but recognizes in that longing something of the value of remembrance. As Boym says: Through such longing these nostalgics discover that the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore, but, to quote Henri Bergson, the past “might act and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality”. (p. 50)

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That is, the aim of such type of nostalgia is to face the present, equipped with a proper appreciation of the past. In Su’s novel, the memories of juancun are shown as ultimately positive as they provide a source of comfort for the adult Feng Lei. She demonstrates that Feng Lei does not desire a return to a comfortable mainlander identity in Tongfang, as he now recognizes how the place represents the previous generation’s war trauma and its terrible consequences. Leaving Tongfang was written in the transitional period of Taiwan from 1987 to 1989 (Su 2002b, p. 1). Su highlights the importance of juancun to the mainlander identity of the post-martial law period. Feng Lei’s journey back to Tongfang is presented as a process of re-affirmation of the value of having grown up as a mainlander. Although the juancun characters are called Chinese (Zhongguoren), the work shows that juancun (rather than Mainland China) is the place from which the concept of “being a Chinese” developed, and that this juancun-cultivated “Chinese” identity is crucial for the second-generation characters like Feng.

Post-loyalist nostalgia Whereas the nostalgic emotion shown in Leaving Tongfang is more a positive journey of introspection, the nostalgia in Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance” can be seen as a destructive sentiment from which the narrator must separate herself in order to live. However, by using a monologue, Chu demonstrates how the narrator oscillates between the nostalgic past and the frustrating present, love for juancun and hatred of the KMT, and thus is unable to achieve a unified self. Rosemary Haddon (2005) points out that Chu locates the short story on the border that “separates monologue from dialogue and self-address from audience-address. This type of narration exemplifies both the diagnosis and the symptom of the identity crisis” (p. 109). The narrator’s identity crisis is presented in the first half of the story by using “she” to address the unnamed protagonist, but later she starts to call her “you”. From the more calm and distant “she” to the more emotionally attached “you”, the narrator, to a great extent, represents Chu. The narrative is thus written to dramatize the difficulty of telling the story in a detached manner. As the author is gradually dragged into the narrative to defend the values of juancun (by addressing the narrator as “you”), Chu suggests that the narrator has no choice but to defend a fantasy of national responsibility, just as she, the author, had no choice but to reflect what she had been taught by the KMT during the martial law period. “In Remembrance” presents the unnamed female narrator as facing two opposing discourses of Chinese nationalism and Taiwanization. On the one hand, the narrator depicts how she feels at being deceived by the KMT, comparing mainlanders’ relationship with the KMT as like that of an unhappy couple who should have gotten divorced long ago, since the political party caused their dilemma of being neither Chinese (Zhongguoren) nor Taiwanese. On the other, she cannot help defending the KMT when other Taiwanese people criticize it. Similarly, while she is at pains to justify juancun mainlanders’ inability to identify with Taiwan, she maintains that the mainlanders were neither collaborators of the

Seeking a new identity 77 KMT nor privileged outsiders. Chu’s account of the female protagonist’s disillusionment with the KMT’s ideology effectively distinguishes between cultural identification with juancun and political identification with the KMT. David Der-wei Wang’s concept of post-loyalism is the best way of interpreting the narrator’s conflation of nostalgia for juancun with disappointment at the KMT. In explaining post-loyalism, Wang argues that although loyalism develops out of the loss of a regime or orthodoxy, the logic of post-loyalism does not need to rely on an actual loss to induce feelings of grief or resentment. Even without a previous dynasty or polity for one to mourn, “the logic of the post-loyalist is still able to fabricate one, creating an affinity to a historical—nay, desired—object that he seeks to recover or restore” (2013, p. 102). Wang’s concept of post-loyalism is focused on people’s cultural needs for a sense of national or political belonging. As Wang writes: Post-loyalist writings are concerned with more than the shattering of nation and faith—those are still components of history’s “grand narrative”. […] [P] ost-loyalist writings are more concerned with varied understandings of temporality, the disintegration of the cultural imaginary, and minor acts of disobedience in routine daily life. (2013, p. 103) That is to say, unlike loyalists who aim to restore a vanquished dynasty or regime, post-loyalists aim to recover something of cultural value. Post-loyalism is illustrated in Chu’s depiction of the narrator’s longing for the values and social milieu of juancun. This longing is both intensified and corroded by her growing discovery of the KMT’s political and ideological dictatorship. In other words, the narrator is shown as upset at the emerging discourse of Taiwanization, and while she resents the KMT’s ideology, she finds herself longing for the values that developed in the military dependents’ villages—a byproduct of the KMT’s regime. Ultimately, the ambivalent nostalgia of the narrator is for the simple trust and patriotic passion which she experienced in the period of authoritarian KMT rule and which, she believes, characterized the juancun mainlander culture. The narrator describes how her dispersed juancun “buddies” all still have this much-missed quality of patriotism and that it is typical of people with a juancun mentality to be concerned about the welfare of their society: You are surprised that a successful businessman like him [who grew up in juancun], with billions of dollars’ worth of assets, would still harbor such an ambiguous, unfathomable, and hopeless love for his country, like the patriotism that you showed a dozen years ago. (2003, p. 267) The second-generation mainlander writer and critic Chang Ta-chun’s comments are worth noting in this regard. He contends that the female narrator of “In Remembrance” (as well as other characters in the five other stories in the same

78  Seeking a new identity volume) is an “old soul” who desires to freeze time and reshape history or memory through fictional narratives (2002, p. 5), and that the story reveals that what Chu yearns to preserve is “a sentiment of calm and contentment” (篤定怡然) (2002b, p. 13). However, “In Remembrance” implies that this ideal disposition is unsustainable in the chaotic 1990s. Amid the tensions between Taiwanese and mainlander positions in public debate that were occurring at this time, “In Remembrance” defends the need for a mainlander cultural identity through the narrator’s post-loyalist decision to embrace the values she learned in juancun, even as she rejects the dictatorship of the KMT. Ng Kim Chew maintains that after the KMT’s ideology of “recovering China” collapsed, and the military dependents’ villages gradually disappeared, it was highly likely that the mainlanders’ collective memory of this time would also disappear, and so Chu’s mainlander character tries hard to gather the scattered “buddies” to keep this memory alive, however much it appears to be outdated in the new social contexts (1991, pp. 87–88). With the lyrics of the old Chinese song, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, we’ll meet again in our dreams” (Chu 2003, p. 270), at the end of the story, the narrator seems to express her preparation for the dwindling of juancun culture, but is dragged back by memories, hiding herself in the nostalgic yet bleak home, despite her awareness that it is time to bid farewell to the past. As David Der-wei Wang argues, post-loyalist bereavement is a choice, a deliberate posture of disobedience (2013, p. 98). By showing how the narrator is torn between the cultural identity she cherishes in juancun and her repulsion toward the political dictatorship that made this identity possible, Chu argues for the right to retain her difficult feelings and ambivalent nostalgia as part of public and literary culture in Taiwan. Presenting a rather pessimistic view with regard to the future of the mainlander culture in Taiwan, Chu makes explicit that assimilating into the local culture and identity would mean a denial of an important part of herself. Thus, rather than negotiating a new mainlander-Taiwanese identity, the narrator is shown as willingly carrying the unwelcomed burden of juancun memory, insisting on remembering a bleak past where her identity belongs. Leaving Tongfang and “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” both exemplify the complex emotions that motivated second-generation mainlander writings in the post-martial law period immediately after 1987. By portraying the second-generation mainlander characters as feeling nostalgic for the bleak juancun, both works reflect the important transition of mainlanders who struggled to position themselves in the cultural context of post-martial law Taiwan. The theme of mainlanders’ self-identification as Chinese and as coping with an “alien” Taiwan is central to the two works discussed in the previous chapter. Yet, this theme is problematized in the two texts discussed in this chapter. “China” effectively becomes the name of a place that the main characters do not quite know how to feel toward. Juancun, conversely, becomes the site of affective cultural belonging, the “Chinese” place to which the characters feel deeply attached. By showing the juancun characters’ cultural distance to Taiwanese society, both works leave an open ending which implies that their mainlander characters are not ready to accept Taiwanese culture, and thus remain unsettled and without a new identity.

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Notes 1 One example of this is that the popular mainlander writer Chu Tien-hsin is not included in Yeh Shih-tao’s Taiwan Wenxue Shigang (Summary of Taiwanese Literature); a work that has been generally seen as presenting the canon that defines Taiwanese literature. Another example is seen in Chu Tien-hsin’s “The Modest Jar” (那一個謙卑的小水罐) (2009), in which she notes that when In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound was published, a Taiwanese writer asked her if she regarded her literary works as Taiwanese literature. Chu writes that she felt shocked and humiliated by the question, seeing this as a kind of discrimination against mainlander writers. 2 Su’s work was first published in 1990, and it was republished in 2002. Chu’s work was first published in 1992 in Chinese, and the English version was published in 2003 in The Last of the Whampoa Breed edited by Chi Pang-yuan and David Der-wei Wang. All the quotations from Chu’s work in this book are taken from the English version. In the rest of the chapter, Chu’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” is shortened as “In Remembrance”. 3 Two important anthologies on mainlanders and military dependents’ villages, Su Wei-chen’s A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories (台灣眷村小說選) (2002) and Chi Pang-yuan and David Der-wei Wang’s The Last of the Whampoa Breed (最後的黃埔) (Chinese 2004, English 2003), both include Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound”, which indicates that Chu’s work is highly regarded by the critics and seen as a notable example of this genre. 4 In 1996, Taiwan held the first direct election of president and vice president. Li was the first democratically elected president. 5 The textbook of “Knowing Taiwan” is divided into three components: history, society, and geography. 6 On the other hand, Liou Liang-ya (2002) suggests that Taiwanization movement that arose during the 1990s can be seen as “Hoklo chauvinism” (福佬沙文主義), which centered on the Hoklo communities’ historical narratives, thus neglecting the voices of the Hakka and indigenous people. 7 Although Luo Ming-ching suggests that the government modified the policies to hire more Taiwanese due to the lack of enough candidates from other provinces, the regulation itself showed the bias of the authorities. 8 During the early 1990s, when Taiwanese identity and nationalism were rapidly developing, one’s identification with and loyalty to Taiwan became the politically correct doctrine. Mainlanders’ family backgrounds as well as their tight connections with the KMT were often regarded as factors that might result in their “betrayal” of Taiwan. “Love Taiwan” (愛台灣) became a popular political slogan, used especially by the Hoklo politicians to express their Taiwanese identity. 9 The “overseas revolutionists” refer to the overseas Taiwan nationalists who supported Taiwan democracy and independence. 10 Plans for rebuilding the military dependents’ village started in 1971, but the government did not take action until the 1980s. 11 Other second-generation writers, such as Chang Chi-jiang 張啓疆 and Hsiao Sa 蕭颯, have also written about the topic of juancun since the late 1980s and 1990s. 12 Another example in this novel is the female character Fang Jingxin. While Fang insists on fighting for her love, her lover Yu Pong compromises himself by accepting the arrangement of her parents. 13 This is also closely related to the KMT’s party-state regime. It established institutions, such as the National Women’s League and Women’s Work Team (婦女工作隊 funu gongzuo dui), in order to encourage women to participate in public affairs in military dependents’ villages.

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References Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Hostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Chang, T. C. 張大春. (2002). Xu: yize lao linghun 序：一則老靈魂 [Preface: An Old Soul]. In Xiang wo juancun de xiongdi men 想我眷村的兄弟們 [In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound] (pp. 5–15). Taipei: INK. Chen, F. M. 陳芳明. (2002). Hou zhimin Taiwan: wenxue shilun ji qi zhoubian 後殖民台灣：文學史論及其周邊 [Postcolonial Taiwan: Essays on Taiwanese Literary History and Beyond]. Taipei: Chengbang. Chiu, K. F. 邱貴芬. (1993). Xiang wo (ziwo) fangzhu de (xongdi) jiemei men: yue du di er dai weisheng (nü) zhuojia Chu Tien-hsin 想我 （自我）放逐的 （兄弟）姐妹們：閱 第二代外省（女）作家朱天心 [Missing My (Self-)Exiled (Brothers and) Sisters: Reading the Second-Generation “Mainlander” (Female) Writer Chu Tien-hsin]. Zhongwai wenxue 中外文學 [Chung Wai Literary Quarterly], 22(3), 94–110. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2001). Weiliao 未了 [Everlasting]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxuei. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2002a). Doesn’t My Memory Count? (O. Lam Trans.). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 3(1), 101–106. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2002b). Xinban shuoming 新版說明 [Explanation for the New Version of The Old Capital]. In Gu Du 古都 [The Old Capital] (pp. 43–45). Taipei: INK. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2003). Epilogue: In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound. In M. Wu (Trans.), P. Y. Chi & D. D. W. Wang (Eds.), The Last of the Whampoa Breed (pp. 242–270). New York: Columbia University Press. Haddon, R. (2005). Being/not Being at Home in the Writing of Zhu Tianxin. In A. C. Hsiau & J. Makeham (Eds.), Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan: Bentuhua (pp. 103–24). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Hall, S. (1996). The Question of Cultural Identity. In S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert & K. Thompson (Eds.), Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (pp. 595–634). Oxford: Blackwell. Jacobs, J. B. (2005). ‘Taiwanization’ in Taiwan’s Politics. In J. Makenham & A. C. Hsiau (Eds.), Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan: Bentuhua (pp. 17–54). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Jaw, C. W. 赵庆华. (2010). Xiangchou yu lisan: juancun wenxue zai Taiwan 乡愁与离散－ ‘眷村文学’在台湾 [Homesickness and Diaspora: Juancun Literature in Taiwan]. In Q. Zhang 张嫱 (Ed.), Baodao juancun 宝岛眷村 [A Glimpse of Taiwan Military Villages] (pp. 111–122). Beijing: China Renmin University Press. Ku, L. 苦苓. (2004). Xiang wo juancun de dixiong men 想我眷村的弟兄們 [In Remembrance of My Brothers in the Military Dependents’ Village]. In W. C. Su (Ed.), Taiwan juancun xiaoshuo xian 台灣眷村小說選 [A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories] (pp. 89–101). Taipei: Eryu Wenhua. Liou, L. Y. 劉亮雅. (2002). Jioling niandai nüxing chuangshang jiyi xiaoshuo zhong de chongxin jiyi zhengzhi: Chen Ye Nihe, Li Ang Miyuan, yu Chu Tien-hsin Gudu weili 九 零年代女性創傷記憶小說中的重新記憶政治：以陳燁《泥河》、李昂《迷園》 與朱天心〈古都〉為例 [Politics of Re-remembrance in Novels of Female Traumatic Memory during the 1990s: Case Studies of Chen Ye’s Muddy River, Li Ang’s Bewailed Garden and Chu Tien-hsin’s “The Old Capital”]. Zhongwai wenxue 中外文學 [Chung Wai Literary Quarterly], 31(6), 133–155.

Seeking a new identity  81 Liu, J. 劉俊. (2007). Cong Youyuan Qianli dao Likai Tongfang 从有缘千里到离开同方 [From Youyuan Qianli to Likai Tongfang]. Jinan xuebao. 暨南学报（哲学社会科学版） [Journal of Jinan University (Philosophy and Social Sciences)], 129(4), 82–87. Luoh, M. C. 駱明慶. (2003). Gao pu kao fengshengqu ding e luqu yu tezhong kaoshi de shengji shaixuan xiaoguo 高普考分省區定額錄取與特種考試的省籍篩選效果 [Senior Civil Service Exams, Special Service Exams and Provincial Backgrounds]. Jingji lunwen cong kan 經濟論文叢刊 [Taiwan Economic Review], 31(1), 87–106. Ng, K. C. 黃錦樹. (1991). Bei dushihua yiqi de juancun: Taiwan 被都市化遺棄的眷村：台灣 [The Forsaken Military Dependents’ Villages in the Modernized Taiwan]. Haixia pinglun 海峽評論, 18, 85–88. Nora, P. (1996). General Introduction: Between Memory and History. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past Vol. 1 (pp. 1–20). New York: Columbia University Press. Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on Exile. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (pp. 173– 186). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shang, V. T. M. 尚道明. (2010). Juancun jümin de guojia rentong 眷村居民的國家認同 [Military Village, Life History and Identity]. In M. K. Chang (Ed.), Guojia yu rentong: yi xie waishengren de guandian 國家與認同：一些外省人的觀點 [Nation and Identity: Perspectives of Some ‘Waishengren’] (pp. 3–30). Taipei: Qünxue. Shen, S. C. 沈筱綺. (2010). Guxiang yu jiayuan: tansuo ‘waishengren’ guojia rentong de liang ge neihan 故土與國家：探索「外省人」國家認同的兩個內涵 [Fatherland and homeland]. In M. K. Chang (Ed.), Guojia yu rentong: yi xie waishengren de guandian 國家與認同：一些外省人的觀點 [Nation and Identity: Perspectives of Some ‘Waishengren’] (pp. 111–149). Taipei: Qünxue. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (1984). Youyuan qianli 有緣千里 [All for Love]. Taipei: Hongfan. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2002a). Likai Tongfang 離開同方 [Leaving Tongfang]. Taipei: Lianjing. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2002b). Zaiban xu: fenjie jiyi 再版序：分解記憶 [Deconstructing Memory]. In Likai Tongfang 離開同方 [Leaving Tongfang] (pp. 1–2). Taipei: Lianjing. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2004). Xu: juancun de jintou 序：眷村的盡頭 [Preface: The End of Military Dependents’ Village]. In W. C. Su (Ed.), Taiwan juancun xiaoshuo xüan 台灣眷村小說選 [A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories] (pp. 7–13). Taipei: Eryu Wenhua. Tseng S. H. 曾淑惠. (2010). Taiwan wenxue zhong de laobing xingxiang 台灣文學中的老兵形象 [Mainlander Veteran Images in Taiwanese Literature]. In K. C. Li (Ed.), Li yu ku: zhanzheng de yanxu 離與苦：戰爭的延續 [Sufferings of Waishengren under the War Regime] (pp. 207–246). Taipei: Qünxue. Vickers, E. (2007). Frontiers of Memory: Conflict, Imperialism, and Official Histories in the Formation of Post-Cold War Taiwan Identity. In S. M. Jager & R. Mitter (Eds.), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (pp. 209–232). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2002). Xü lun: lao linghun qianshi jinsheng—Chu Tien-hsin de xiaoshuo 序論：老靈魂前世今生—朱天心的小說 [The Old Soul’s Past and Present]. In Gu du 古都 [The Old Capital] (pp. 5–30). Taipei: INK. Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2013). Post-Loyalism. In S. M. Shih, C. H. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 93–116). New York: Columbia University Press. Wang, Y. 王堯. (2009, June 24). Chu Tien-hsin: Wo zhiyao bu bei tie biaoqian de ziyou 朱天心：我只要不被贴标签的自由 [Chu Tien-hsin: I Just Want Freedom of Not

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Being Labelled]. Retrieved 24 March, 2014, from http://tw.people.com.cn/GB/14814 /14892/9534289.html Wilson, J. L. (2005). Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Wong, B. C. 翁柏川. (2006). Xiangchou zhuti zai Taiwan wenxueshi de bianqian 鄉愁主題在台灣文學史的變遷 [The Topic of Nostalgia in History of Taiwanese Literature], (Master’s Dissertation). National Tsing Hua University. Retrieved from National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan. Yang, D. M. H. and Chang, M. K. (2010). Understanding the Nuances of Waishengren: History and Agency. China Perspectives, 3, 108–122.

3

In the quest of the absent mainlander father Family, history, and mainlander identity in Hao Yu-hsiang’s The Inn1 (逆旅) and Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan2 (月球姓氏)

Since the 1980s, authors who have written about military dependents’ villages (juancun) have played the most prominent role in shaping the Taiwanese reading public’s understanding of mainlanders as a group. However, not all secondgeneration mainlander writers fall into this category. There are those who did not live in juancun and who have constructed other forms of mainlander identity. As sociologist Li Kuang-chün (2010) reminds us, mainlanders should not be viewed as a cohesive group. Among them, there are different senses of self-identification, not only because of differences in gender and age but also because of differences in military rank among those living in juancun. More fundamentally, there are differences between juancun and non-juancun residents (pp. 7–8). This chapter examines two works of autobiographical fiction published in 2000, Hao Yu-hsiang’s The Inn (逆旅) (March 2000) and Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan (月球姓氏) (November 2000). Hao and Lo differ from the writers discussed in the previous two chapters in terms of age and their non-juancun backgrounds.3 Both Hao and Lo grew up in Taiwanese communities with a Hoklo Taiwanese mother and a mainlander father. They are more than ten years younger than Chu Tien-hsin, Su Wei-chen, and Yuan Chiung-chiung. These two works are starkly different from the previously discussed juancun writings, in which military dependents villages are described as sites that cultivate and affirm the mainlander characters’ cultural identity. Both The Inn and The Moon Clan narrate mainlander identity as a source of doubt, frustration, and fragmention. As critic Chang Jui-fen (2001) comments, the two works investigate mainlander characters’ family history “cynically (戲謔荒謬) and introspectively (反思的眼光)” (p. 30). Xu Zongjie (2003) also sees the two works as reflecting the second-generation mainlanders’ “perplexity and awkwardness with regard to historical and self-identification” (p. 174). These two works project the authors’ perception of mainlander identity via the narrators’ ambivalent relationships with their fathers. In fact, at the beginning of the 2000s, not only Hao Yu-hsiang and Lo Yi-chin, but also some older secondmainlander writers who grew up in the juancun, including Chu Tien-hsin and Chang Ta-chun, wrote on the theme of family history.4 Taiwan-based critic Hu Yan-nan categorizes the four texts as “father (family) writings” (2005, p. 109), as they all revolve around the mainlander characters’ family history on the father’s

84 In the quest of the absent mainlander father side. Nonetheless, while Chu’s and Chang’s works center around the second-generation mainlander narrators’ reflections on their deep love for their fathers, Hao’s The Inn and Lo’s The Moon Clan express a far more complex range of emotions to their fathers: the narrators are portrayed as passing critical judgment on their fathers’ mainlander identity Hao’s The Inn delves into the female narrator’s exploration of her trauma at being abandoned by her father. Her parents divorce when she is still a baby. She lives with her mother, and her father seldom visits or shows her any love. The Inn consists of 11 chapters. The first five delineate the character Hao’s complicated feelings of love and hatred for her father. The last five chapters tell of how Hao and her mother, the two women who are left behind by their father and husband respectively, cope with their feelings of abandonment. In the middle of the novel is the longest chapter “Journey of Winter” (冬之旅), which consists of nine sub-chapters. It is Hao’s account of her father Hao Fuzhen’s life. This chapter is arguably the most important in the book, as the perspective the narrator adopts to tell her father’s story reveals the author’s ideas of being a mainlander. The nine sub-chapters represent the narrator Hao’s attempts at imagining her father’s life in relation to the Penghu Incident of 1949 that her father experienced personally. The narrator recounts a story of how more than 100 Chinese students and teachers from the province of Shandong are killed by the KMT troops in Penghu, a set of islets off the western coast of Taiwan, because they refuse to join the KMT army. By weaving historical documents together with stories full of surrealistic and fantastical elements, the narrator highlights the difficulties she faces in trying to better understand her father through imagining what he must have experienced. The novel reveals the narrator’s distrust of received historical accounts, as she regards the narrators of history as “forgetful” (2000d, p. 92) and standard ways of presenting past events as “falsifying, scribbling, inventing and filling out the detail” (p. 93) of people’s lived experience. Unlike the group identity of mainlanders depicted in works of juancun literature, The Inn presents an individual’s solitary journey to draw close to what being a mainlander means by means of reflecting on her absent father and his unhappy past. The Penghu Incident was a banned topic in Taiwan until 1997. Therefore, there is no affirmation of mainlander identification in this novel. Instead, it presents mainlander identity as something that the narrator wrestles with on an ongoing basis. Lo’s The Moon Clan (2000) is also a narrative built around the life story of the narrator’s father Lo Jiaxuan, who flees to Taiwan when he is 24, and marries the narrator’s Hoklo Taiwanese mother at the age of 38 (p. 66). The narrator tells readers that his father has an affair for over 20 years and that his father “abandons [his family] and disappears” (p. 54), although the detail related to this affair is not given. The novel is divided into 21 chapters, more than half of which are titled by places, such as the zoo, the hospital, Chungshan Hall, and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. If The Inn delineates the narrator’s lonely journey as based on extremely limited clues to discover her father’s life, The Moon Clan shows an opposite situation in which different people narrate their memories differently.

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 85 As a result, the work produces a vague and inconsistent picture of the past. The second-generation mainlander narrator’s accounts of his childhood experience in Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Chungshan Hall are particularly important because they expressly question the credibility of the KMT’s historical narrative. Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, together with Chungshan Hall, are two state buildings that symbolize the history of KMT’s authoritarian rule over Taiwan and the KMT-imposed Chinese cultural heritage in Taiwan (Taylor 2009). Similar to Hao’s view of history in The Inn, history in Lo’s novel is presented as stories to be challenged, reconstructed, and continuously revised. Lo’s work portrays a family whose history is in fragments, underscoring the incompleteness of the reality experienced by the family members. The mainlander identity in Lo’s The Moon Clan is thus shown as ambiguous and elusive. The two novels display similar features regarding their articulation of mainlander identity: first, the mainlander identity is presented as a chosen identity of the second-generation narrators. The narratives are focused on the narrators’ love-hate relationship with their fathers as the basis of their chosen identity. Unlike earlier juancun writings, Lo’s and Hao’s works show no attempt to represent second-generation mainlanders as feeling obliged to defend mainlanders’ collective memories of their Chinese “homeland” and their experience in Taiwan. The mainlander fathers in both works are presented as “atypical” mainlanders. The variety of mainlanders’ experiences in Taiwan is thus emphasized. Second, the narrators’ self-identification with mainlanders does not tie them to “China”; instead, China—both the China of their fathers’ narratives and the People’s Republic they themselves have experienced as visitors—is depicted as a foreign country and a source of family stories or even myths. Third, the second-generation narrators’ mainlander identities are not narrated as attached to or entangled with the KMT’s indoctrination, but, on the contrary, as against the KMT, its rule and ideology. With these three features, the mainlander identity, which used to be defined and characterized with regard to this group’s intimate ties to the KMT and China, becomes much more complicated and difficult to pin down.

Frustrating father figures The Inn and The Moon Clan both project a mainlander identity through the narrators’ intense feelings for their fathers. However, the father figures are depicted as displaced from the Taiwanese society they live in and alienated from their children. The narrators’ fathers are trapped in their memories of their younger days in China and their traumatic flight from China in the 1940s. The second-generation narrators are shown as troubled personalities. They seek to understand themselves by piecing together their own vague memories of their fathers and stories they have heard from their Hoklo Taiwanese mothers. In their quest to understand their absent fathers, both narrators also hold an inquest—in terms of judging and pronouncing judgment—into these father figures and the impact they have had on the narrators’ self-identification as second-generation mainlanders.

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Critic Chang Jui-fen (2001) has noted that second-generation mainlander writers vary greatly in age and has identified three distinct age-based groupings: those who followed their parents to Taiwan in adolescence, such as Pai Hsien-yung5; those who grew up in military dependents’ villages, such as Chu Tien-hsin and Su Wei-chen; and those like Lo Yi-chin and Hao Yu-hsiang, who were born in the late 1960s and represent the youngest of the second-generation writers (p. 30).6 As Chang suggested, these age differences mean that the three groups of writers have had very different life experiences, and their perceptions of Taiwan as a society, Taiwanese politics, and mainlanders as a group also differ. Unlike Chu Tien-hsin and Yuan Chiung-chiung, who witnessed the prime of their fathers’ lives and grew up in a society dominated by the KMT’s Chinacentric ideology, the fathers in Lo’s and Hao’s novels are portrayed as old men who no longer enjoy a superior social and cultural standing in post-martial law Taiwan. The second-generation mainlander narrators in both Hao’s and Lo’s works have the same names as the authors.7 The fact that both The Moon Clan and The Inn are explicitly (semi-)autobiographical8 allows us to refer to the authors’ family backgrounds as an important source of information for the narrative representation of the father figure in both novels. Chang Jui-fen (2001) notes that Hao and Lo are typical of younger second-generation mainlanders who have a mainlander father and a Hoklo Taiwanese mother (p. 30). Mainlander men who arrived in Taiwan in the late 1940s and early 1950s were often convinced that they would soon return to China, and many already had wives and children in their hometowns.9 When these forced migrants realized that they were unlikely to ever return to China, they started a second family in Taiwan often after they were 40 years old. This meant that there was often a considerable age gap between the younger second-generation mainlanders and their fathers, and this may explain the depressing portrayal of the fathers as old and outdated men in the two novels examined in this chapter. In The Inn, the narrator Hao describes her father as “being imprisoned in the castle of memory” (p. 50) and states that he and his room are filled with “the smell of the elderly” (p. 50). Similarly, in The Moon Clan, the narrator Lo recounts that when he was born, his father was already over 40 years old, and that his father is always “an old man who likes to talk endlessly about his family [in China] ” (p. 242). He notes that his father is often forced out from taxis because he is immediately recognized as “an old taro” (老芋仔)10 by Hoklo drivers (p. 116), a situation that was often mentioned in mainlanders’ accounts of their lived experience during the 1990s. Chu Tien-hsin, in one talk, also refers to mainlanders’ collective fear of being “kicked out by taxi drivers” (2002, p. 102) after the Hoklo Taiwanese Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party won the Taipei Mayoral election in 1994. When ethnic conflicts between the Hoklo Taiwanese and mainlanders got heated, the old mainlander veterans, whom the Taiwanese public perceived as yearning to return to China and as loyal to the KMT, became easy targets of people’s anger. In Hao’s and Lo’s novels, this unhappy image of the mainlander fathers is projected onto the narrators’ construction of mainlander identity.

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 87

Individualizing the mainlander identity The social contexts in which the two works were published provide us with important information concerning Lo’s and Hao’s problematization of the previously well-established received identity of mainlanders in earlier works such as Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life, Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting, and even Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang. As mentioned above, in the 1990s and early 2000s, democratization and Taiwanization had already had significant cultural and social effects that seemed to be irreversible, especially after Chen Shuibian was elected President in 2000, which many Taiwanese regarded as a victory for Taiwanese identification and Taiwan consciousness (Corcuff 2004, 2011). Based on polls conducted by the Election Study Center National Chengchi University each year since 1992, people in Taiwan increasingly identified themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese (Zhongguoren). In 2000, the year when the two novels were published, the poll showed that 12.5 percent of residents in Taiwan identified as Chinese, 36.9 percent as Taiwanese, and 44.1 saw themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese. Creating a Taiwan-centric cultural and historical narrative was thus a goal widely shared by those who identify as Taiwanese and as Taiwanese/Chinese. The KMT itself also underwent a process of Taiwanization during the presidency of Lee Teng-hui (from 1988 to 2000), which emphasized the subjectivity of Taiwan. In 1994, Lee stated that Taiwan and China were two equal political entities, and in 1999, he further defined the relations between the two as those of “two special states” (兩國論) (Corcuff 2004, p. 80; Liao et al. 2013, p. 280).11 The idea of Taiwan as a de facto autonomous political entity— even if it was not internationally recognized as a state—thus replaced the discourse of Taiwan as part of China and was widely accepted by the majority of people in Taiwan. In 1997, the first Department of Taiwanese Literature was established, which institutionalized Taiwanese literature and emphasized its distinction from Chinese literature (Xu 2013, p. 46).12 Scholars of Taiwanese literature tend to see Taiwan as a part of Asia (as opposed to China) and to do so from a post-colonial perspective. The literary works that drew the most attention during this period were those which distinguished Taiwanese history and culture from those of China, and this was especially evident in works by indigenous, Hoklo, and Hakka writers on their groups’ unique history and cultural development in Taiwan. In this context, literary works or scholarship that focused on the connections between Taiwan and China were less welcomed or were even implicitly viewed as politically incorrect. By the end of the twentieth century, literary works on mainlanders that present them as yearning to return to China almost disappeared from Taiwan’s publishing market.13 The Inn and The Moon Clan reflect the younger second-generation mainlanders’ contemplation and adjustment regarding the position and content of mainlander identity in response to the social change of Taiwan during the 1990s. It is worth noting that both novels were bestsellers, indicating that while the themes of these two works were related to mainlanders, the ways in which they articulated

88  In the quest of the absent mainlander father the mainlander identity struck a chord with many Taiwanese readers. Lo’s The Moon Clan was on the “ten good books of the year” lists (開卷十大好書), based on selections by two of the most widely read newspapers in Taiwan, the United Daily News (聯合報) and China Times (中國時報).14 The Inn was adapted into a play in Taiwan.15 Interestingly, the works are perceived by Taiwan-based critics and reviewers to echo the discourse of Taiwanization: the second-generation characters are presented as mainlander-Taiwanese, that is, as one of the ethnic groups in Taiwan, rather than as people who identify with China (Yang 2004; Hu 2005). The narrative style of both novels, which blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy, facilitates the depiction of a fluid mainlander identity, making it not so much an inherited culture as one that is the result of an individual pursuit of self-understanding, based on one’s own family history (Hao 2000b, pp. 9–15; Lo 2001, pp. 100–101). This narrative style creates distance between the narrator and his/her father and places the second-generation narrator in an active position to construct and interpret the previous generation’s life experience by means of which “mainlander” is shown to be a self-proclaimed rather than a given identity. In Hao’s The Inn, surrealistic elements appear mainly in the chapter “Journey of Winter” in which the narrator Hao imagines her father’s life experience. Critic Hu Yan-nan (2005) comments that the chapter “Journey of Winter” is “not so much a historical record as a legend (傳奇)” (p. 112). For example, in the subchapter “Dream of Spring” (春之夢), when the narrator imagines her father Hao Fuzhen being interrogated by a KMT agent during the Penghu Incident, she presents the episode as if it is a latter-day version of A Thousand and One Nights. The KMT agent keeps telling her father that “tell one more story, and I will keep you alive till tomorrow” (p. 100, p. 113). The story Hao Fuzhen tells the agent turns out to be a tale about a female ghost he encountered in Hunan. The bizarre plot presents a daughter’s fantasy of her father’s life experiences. Similarly, in The Moon Clan, Lo uses numerous entangled or fragmented memories in practically every chapter to create overlapping scenes that interweave reality with fantasy. In “The Night Train” (夜車), the narrator’s memory of himself as a high school student taking a night train to run away from home is blended with his imagining of his father’s flight by train in 1949. His memory is projected onto that of his father, and the two scenes seem to merge into one as if they happen in the same time and space. The textual space devoted to these imagined scenes in Hao’s and Lo’s novels have led critics to be divided on whether the two works should be read as “family histories” (家族史). For example, Li Sher-shiueh (2004) argues that Hao’s The Inn should be regarded as the author’s “psychological history” or memoir (心靈史) (p. 106). I agree with Li. There is no distinctive mainlander identity in either novel. No group stands out as the keepers of mainlander experience, collective memory, life goals, and values. Unlike Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting and “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound”, which often appear

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 89 to be allegorical as their characters are created to represent the mainlanders as possessing a distinctive set of collective experiences (Hillenbrand 2006), The Inn and The Moon Clan consist of personal stories that amplify the narrators’ ambivalent relations with their fathers. In fact, Lo (2001) described The Moon Clan as an “I-novel” (私小說) about the second-generation mainland protagonist Lo’s inner pain and struggle.16 This idea of si (私) accords with Li Sher-shiueh’s reference to Hao’s psychological history, in which felt experience (rather than social norms), whether the experience is based on actual or imagined events, is perceived as the basis of a person’s identity. In both works, the narrators’ search for stories of their fathers—to understand who their fathers are—turns out to be exercises in evaluating the problems that come of being, as it were, too attached to China.

Father’s story, my pedigree: Mainlander as a chosen identity The mainlander identity of the second-generation characters in juancun literature, as discussed in the previous two chapters, is often depicted as being shaped and constrained by the enclosed environment in which they grew up. In The Moon Clan and The Inn, both narrators’ mothers are Hoklo Taiwanese, and the political, educational, and cultural settings of the two novels are deliberately presented as complex. Ethnic identification is an important theme in both novels and is presented through the narrators’ experience of having to choose between their maternal and paternal family lines. They ended up identifying with their fathers’ stories. In The Inn, the narrator Hao’s mainlander identification is presented as a result of her intense desire for her father’s love. Conversely, The Moon Clan shows more complicated reasons for the character’s choice of being a mainlander, with the narrator Lo attributing it to a combination of the KMT’s dictatorship in education (p. 52) as well as the narrator’s family experience, such as his childhood memories of his father’s mainlander friends in the chapters “Debris” (廢墟) and “Hospital” (醫院), the stories of his Chinese family that his father had repeatedly told him (pp. 236–237), and most importantly, his inability to speak Taiwanese (p. 257). In The Inn, the narrator Hao Yu-hsiang is shown as identifying with mainlanders because of her preference of her mainlander father over her Hoklo Taiwanese mother. She states that since her parents were divorced when she was a baby, she never gets to know her father. She is brought up by her Hoklo Taiwanese mother whom she has never liked. The critic Chen Chien-chung (2000) notes of the author’s self-consciously biased depiction of the narrator’s parents in The Inn: “Of course, the father is the protagonist of the novel, the initiator of the daughter’s destiny. But where is the mother? I think there are not enough descriptions of nor sufficient compassion for the mother” (p. 198). Hao’s Electra complex can be exemplified by a scene in the chapter “Lovers” (情人們), which depicts Hao’s conversations with her mother about her father’s lovers. The narrator is described as feeling increasingly upset at her mother for not being able to keep her man and

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blaming her mother for the divorce, although she recognizes that it is her father who is unfaithful. The fight begins when Hao is annoyed at her mother’s thrift: “No wonder papa divorced you”. “What is the relation between this [thrift] and that [divorce]?” Mother took the bun. “Divorce is not my fault. He made the assistant in his clinic pregnant. Even the judge [of our lawsuit] felt sorry for me, and called him an asshole”. “This is not all because of him, is it?” I knew I should have stopped here, but the words that popped straight out of my mouth could not be swallowed back, “Papa got married because he wanted a home. But grandmother and you bullied him because he is a mainlander, and you spoke Taiwanese in front of him intentionally. No wonder papa eventually went back to the Mainland to get married”. (p. 155) The narrator describes her father as a womanizer who is indifferent to his children, yet she expresses a longing to be close to him. The author Hao thus presents a complex self-image via the narrator Hao, who is shown as inexplicably tolerant about her father’s poor treatment of her mother, his wife, even if she acknowledges that her mother was abandoned by a cold and unsupportive man, and she endured the humiliation of her husband’s many affairs (pp. 158–165). However, the narrator does not express gratitude to her mother for singlehandedly bringing up her and her sister. Instead, the author shows how she bullies her Hoklo Taiwanese mother with taunts about her inability to understand her mainlander husband. As the dialogue above indicates, the narrator even argues that her father is a victim of the alienation caused by his wife and mother-in-law speaking in Taiwanese, a language he has never learned. What is interesting is that by this means, the author reveals in retrospect how the allure of the mainlander identity causes the narrating “self” to be cruel to her Hoklo mother. In contrast to the narrator’s tense relationship with her mother, the episodes that narrate her “encounters” with her father highlight her tolerance of his indifference. The narrator states that she and her father seldom meet as if to explain her longing to be with him (pp. 44–45). The fifth chapter “Lullaby” (搖籃曲) depicts an episode in which the teenage narrator accidentally finds a poem written by her father on the theme of loneliness. She says that not until many years later does she realize that her father’s poem is an imitation of the Chinese poet Du Mu’s (AD 803–852) poem A Night at an Inn (旅宿), yet the poem serves as an important reason for her to “forgive and even sympathize with him” (p. 52), since it tells her that he has been as lonely as, or perhaps much lonelier than, her and her mother (p. 51). The narrator’s ambivalence about her parents is resolved only at the end of the novel, which accounts for her decision to identify as a mainlander. In the last chapter, “The Night Prayers” (晚禱), the narrator imagines her father’s and mother’s prayers respectively, “Mother says, are you my daughter? Can I choose not to bear you? […] Father says, are you my

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 91 daughter? Can I hug you? […] I finally realize that I love you just as I’m about to die (直到死時，我才終於知道原來我愛妳)” (pp. 185–186). Unlike the earlier juancun works, The Inn puts the mainlander identity in a private domain, seeing the narrator’s ethnic identification as the outcome of her complex feelings about her divorced parents, which results in her inability to be both mainlander and Hoklo Taiwanese. Unlike The Inn, which shows narrator’s mainlander identity as a result of her entangled relationship with her parents, in The Moon Clan, the narrator Lo sees his mainlander identity as an outcome of “an enormous project of memory construction” (記憶工程的龐大建造計劃) (p. 52), suggesting that his mainlander identity is the result of a process of systematic indoctrination via KMT rule and ideological control as well as family life and practice. As a result, the narrator identifies as “a second-generation immigrant” (p. 231). Yet, the author Lo wants readers to see that being a mainlander is in fact a conscious decision made by the adult narrator Lo. In the chapters “The Supermarket” (超級市場) and “Flood” (大水), the narrator Lo discusses his mother’s family, but he interprets her background as an adopted daughter as causing her to have “no pedigree” (無身世) (p. 146). He says that except for his mother’s adopted mother, his family have “almost never” contacted her biological family (p. 146). Contradictory, while the narrator Lo says that his father also has no pedigree like his mother, since both of them are disconnected from their family in one way or another, later in the novel he says that “my pedigree is none other than my father’s stories” (p. 236). He uses the vivid image of a “human pyramid” (疊羅漢) (p. 237) to illustrate his imagining of his paternal genealogy, which is like a circus act with his father sitting on his shoulders, and his grandfather, whom he has never met, sitting on his father’s shoulders. In focusing on his paternal family history to “resolve the problem” of his identity, the author presents the narrator Lo as deliberately understating the influence of his mother’s genealogy on him.

In quest and inquest: An identity of ambivalence In both The Inn and The Moon Clan, the narrators’ love for their fathers is presented as the emotional source of their attachment to the idea of being a mainlander. Yet, as outlined above, this is an attachment that is accompanied by anxiety about not being loved by untrustworthy fathers. Therefore, while both works depict the narrators’ efforts to understand and sympathize with their fathers, what comes with the emotion of love is loss, anger, and pain. In the epilogue of The Inn, the author Hao says that she wrote the novel to settle not only “the wandering, rootless spirits (of the victims of the Penghu Incident)” but also her own history (2000c, pp. 188–189), that is, to find a meaningful explanation for herself as a member of a family with a complicated history (2000b, p. 6). Hao chose to use her father’s history to do this, stating that “even today, when I am asked about my jiguan (籍貫 original home province), I always says Shandong. This, of course, is a stubborn, unsolvable and terribly ‘politically

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incorrect’ provincial complex (省籍情結)” (2000c, p. 189). She argues that the numerous questions that arise in her life can only be answered indirectly by examining the impact of her father’s life on her own (2000c, p. 189). Critics, including Li Sher-shiueh (2004) and Hu Yan-nan (2005), comment that the author of The Inn does not successfully tackle the issue of mainlander identity and history, but instead is engaged too much with the autobiographical narrator’s love-hate relationship with her father. Yet, I take Hao’s narrative of her ambivalent relationship with her father as a representation of the author’s interpretation of mainlander identity. Without a solid and intimate father-child relationship and strong memories of a happy childhood to support her self-identification, the mainlander identity in The Inn, and in The Moon Clan as well, is depicted as rather alienated and unstable. It is reflected in the narrators’ attitudes toward China, their fathers’ homeland. Critic Chen Chien-chung (2000) argues that The Inn is “a book of interrogations of and an obsession with the father” (審父與戀父之書), in which the two contradictory emotions of love and hatred are intertwined (p. 192). Although The Inn shows the narrator Hao’s obsession with her father, it also tells us that his absence is the cause of her constant questioning of herself. The narrator is thus aware that her father’s absence has powerfully affected how she sees herself. These ambivalent emotions are evident in a scene in the chapter “Lullaby” (搖籃曲), which begins with the question, “Where on earth has Father gone?” (p. 44). The narrator Hao then describes a Chinese New Year’s Eve when she is in grade five. Without any explanation, her father fails to show up at the family dinner. We readers are told how she feels hurt when her father appears two months later, telling them that he has been on a great holiday with his girlfriend. Hao says that the moral she learns from the event is to be indifferent like her father. The narrator, however, is presented as forgiving her father for his cruelty by explaining to herself that he is a nomad who can never belong to anyone (p. 45). It is on this ambivalent basis that the rest of the chapter depicts how the narrator Hao devotes herself to chasing after her father, actually and in her imagination. The narrator then concludes that only through her writing can she find (or create) justifications for her father’s behavior. She also states that her narrative cannot rescue her father from “going further and further away from reality” (p. 48). However, it is the only way that she can make sense of his life for her own sanity: Therefore, I deliberately misrecognized my father, even with a sense of selftormenting pleasure to expand my imagination. Otherwise I could not understand the relationship between me and his life. Thereafter, his identity and his existence are meaningful only through my language. From this perspective, he is no longer my father, but more like my son to whom I have given birth and raised. I open my arms to him, saying “Come! Sleep well! You will find a place to rest in my arms, and you will be able to sleep well”. (pp. 48–49)

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 93 The author Hao thus shows how the narrator Hao’s connection with her father is a work of active imagination. Yet as the narrator’s words indicate, what she reveals to herself is an unbridgeable gap between herself and her father. He has been absent to the extent that she can invent him as she pleases. She can even imagine him as her “son”—the child of her creative labor. This unfamiliar and distant father figure in Hao’s work can be read as a symbolic representation of “China” from a second-generation mainlander’s perspective. Compared with the texts discussed in the preceding two chapters, in which the second-generation characters’ idea about “China”—or the imagined China— is shown as deeply informed by the mainlander parents’ homesickness (as well as the feeling of cultural superiority that the KMT fostered during the martial law period), this novel portrays “China” not as a cultural home but as a form of ambivalent longing. In The Inn, the narrator makes a trip to Mainland China with her father. The episode is written to highlight that despite being a second-generation mainlander, the narrator has failed to inherit her father’s longing for the Chinese homeland. Instead, she judges her father’s return trip and his hometown critically. The narrator calls her father’s hometown, Shandong, “the old home” (老家), and she notes that when she was a child, she once believed her father’s stories about his old home as a land of milk and honey (pp. 36–37). Yet, the negative account of the narrator’s actual experience of visiting China presents a dramatic contrast to her father’s homecoming dream. She shows no affection whatsoever for the place or for her relatives who live there. The novel explores instead the narrator Hao’s acute disappointment with Nantanpo Village (南坦坡村), her father’s home. Hao describes the language the locals use as difficult to understand and the village as the home of “a savage tribe” (p. 36). The narrator addresses herself in this manner: You [Hao Yu-hsiang] suddenly feel that these malicious yellowish faces [of your mainland relatives] are so distant and strange, so totally different from the world in which you grew up. You put down the book, feeling the surrounding summer heat as if in a nightmare. And you start to doubt if you are really where you think you are. (p. 38) To emphasize the different stages of modernization in Taipei and Nantanpo, the narrator states that even her father is not comfortable in his hometown. He runs away from Nantanpo to the big city Qingdao on the fourth day of his trip simply to take a proper bath (pp. 35–39). As such, Taiwan’s mainlanders are shown as either disconnected from China or as emotionally disturbed when they return to their hometowns (as the narrator Hao’s father is when he visits). This portrayal of the PRC as a foreign and hostile land is increasingly evident in second-generation mainlander literature published in the 2000s. Chiang Hsiao-yun’s The Peach Blossom Well, which I will discuss in Chapter 5, is arguably the most conspicuous example of this style of narration.

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In analyzing Lo’s volume of poetry, Stories of Abandonment17 (棄的故事) (1995), Ng Kim Chew argues that the work creates an “aesthetics of desertion” (遺棄美學) (2001, p. 36). Ng writes that the characters in Lo’s literary works often suffer from anxiety caused by loss and abandonment and this is because they long to be loved. Unfulfilled longing is thus the love that results from abandonment and neglect (2001, p. 39). This complex intertwined treatment of love and abandonment occupies a large part of Lo’s narrative in The Moon Clan. The narrator Lo’s love for his father develops out of his bewilderment and anguish at being abandoned. Thus, in his account of his father’s stories, the narrator Lo presents his own mainlander identity as the result of an irresolvable hurt. In the second chapter of Lo’s novel “The Office” (辦公室), the narrator relates how his father once left him alone, as a child, in his office with his mistress. He remembers that he was teased by the woman and depicts the awkward situation when they waited together for his father to come back. However, his father did not return, even after it became dark. The sentence, “My father eventually did not come back” (p. 26, 27, 33), is repeated several times in the chapter, registering the narrator’s anxiety, disappointment, and helplessness. This episode in the office is narrated right before another scene that happens years later after his father dies. The narrator goes to the woman’s place to help pack up his father’s things. He finds a lot of food rotting away in the refrigerator, all of which are his father’s favorites. The narrator muses that the rotting food seems to be waiting for someone to consume it, in the same way that he and his mother, and his father’s mistress, have rotted away while waiting for Lo Jiaxuan to come back to them. The feelings of bewilderment and perplexity as a result of loss and abandonment are expressed repeatedly throughout the text. Helping his father’s mistress to remove his father’s belongings, Lo is surprised to find that he does not really understand this man: “Each garbage bag is stuffed with unexpected things”, and twice he expresses his shock and bewilderment about the things that he finds in the bags (p. 35). If one’s belongings are the materialization of one’s life, in the novel they do not tell a consistent story about his father, but instead are presented as incomprehensible fragments. Although the author Lo has stated that the plot of his father’s adultery in The Moon Clan is fictional, the fact that the old man is portrayed as remote and unfaithful in the novel nonetheless reflects his view about the mainlander father figure as someone that could not be relied on (Xie & Lo 2012). The narrator Lo’s distrust of his father is exemplified by his doubt over the stories he has heard from his father about his former life in China. He comments that: The ancestors’ stories my father told us repeatedly—stories of his father, his mother, his brother and sister-in-law, his teacher, and his former wife (童養媳)—for me, are more like stories about a group of silent people. My father is like a film projectionist—except for the boring and fixed plot, he cannot tell me the details of the stories. (p. 242)

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 95 As critic Hu Yan-nan (2005) points out, in Lo’s novel “every character’s family story, whether as memory or history, is displayed in a broken, fragmented, fractured and incomplete way. The pieces cannot be matched and put together as a picture” (p. 126). In the 11 pages of the chapter “The Big Black Bird” (黑色大鳥)18 the author uses the phrase “my father said” 18 times to emphasize the subjectivity of the mainlander father’s narrative, so as to distinguish the narrator’s view from that of his father. In the eyes of the narrator, the father’s stories are myth-like. He imagines and refers to his father’s homeland in China as “an empty house” (空屋)—describing it as a once-grand but now abandoned mansion (p. 245). This metaphor of emptiness seems to also imply that the family home in China has little practical as well as symbolic meaning for the narrator. The only relevance to it is when he uses the section on official forms in Taiwan that require people to fill out their jiguan (place of origin): “The image of the empty house only appears when I need to fill in my jiguan. I then write down, somewhat apprehensively (心虛地) a place name about which I know so little” (p. 246). This sentence makes explicit the narrator’s heightened awareness of his cultural and emotional distance from China.

Personal narrative versus national narrative Critic Hu Yan-nan (2005) wrote that in the early 2000s, the common theme of second-generation mainlander writers on “rescuing family memory” (p. 129) suggests an attempt to construct “a mainlanders’ collective identity” (p. 130). I would argue that The Inn and The Moon Clan are less attempting to rescue than to contest the previously established image of mainlander identity. In The Inn and The Moon Clan, we see the relations between mainlanders and the KMT redefined into one that is full of conflicts. The KMT’s authoritarianism is presented as the cause of the two mainlander fathers’ suffering. Lo’s The Moon Clan presents the conflicts more implicitly. For example, in the chapter “Debris” (廢墟) he tells a story of his father’s acquaintance Yue, a mainlander who works in the military for the KMT but is spied on by the KMT secret police. Without narrating further details of Yue’s life story, the narrator recounts his vague memory of this sad old man and quotes from his father that “Yue’s life was destroyed after he moved to Taiwan” (2000a, p. 81). Hao’s The Inn, on the other hand, shows the conflicts explicitly and critically by portraying Hao Fuzhen as a character who is loyal to the KMT government but is exploited by it. During his flight from Shandong to Taiwan, he plays a leading role in patriotic dramas in order to support the KMT government (p. 86). Yet, when he arrives at Penghu, he is accused of concealing information about the Chinese communists and thus interrogated by KMT agents. Hao writes, Hao Fuzhen’s patriotism turns out to be “a farce” (p. 92). Not until years later, when he is already old, does he eventually realize that he has never understood the Chinese communists and knows even less about the KMT although “it was once his only belief” (p. 92). This presentation of mainlanders as victims of KMT authoritarian rule and as abandoned by the party is

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very different from the mainlander identity depicted in the works we discussed in the preceding chapters, in which the influence of KMT ideology is evident. Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to history (1984) is helpful for understanding how these two novels treat mainlander’s family history. Foucault sought to focus on errors, accidents, and faulty calculations “that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us” (p. 87). As Foucault states, genealogy “is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents” (p. 81). His idea of history as genealogical analysis presents discontinuities and disparities between the past and present, in contrast to the traditional presumption of history as the search for a true origin. In this regard, Foucault highlights the combination of accidents or “mistakes” that complicate what we mean by identity. Concepts such as a native homeland, native language, and the laws that govern people’s lives are thus always under contestation. The intention of genealogy “is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity” (p. 95). In The Moon Clan and The Inn, the concepts of homeland and political belief are presented as always elusive and the narrators are emotionally attached to yet ambivalent about their mainlander identity. Neither author presents Taiwan or China as “homeland”. Both novels highlight the accidents of war in China that led the first-generation mainlanders to seek refuge in Taiwan with the KMT. Both works depict mainlanders as outsiders in Taiwan. In The Inn, the author Hao describes mainlanders as positioned on “the margin of the margin” (邊緣又邊緣的位置) in Taiwan society (2000c, p. 190). Hao states in the novel’s epilogue that The Inn is dedicated to the civil war Chinese migrants who “were both abandoned by the political power they had trusted for life and spurned by Taiwan island. Now as the discourse of Taiwanization gathers momentum, history is ready to lead them into oblivion” (p. 190). By positioning mainlander identity through the narrator’s imagining of her father Hao Fuzhen’s experience of the Penghu Incident, the author also draws attention to the fact that the Penghu Incident has been seldom discussed in the histories of Taiwan presented by the KMT and the DPP alike. The mainlanders’ marginal status is thus further sharpened by reference to this marginalized historical event. Similarly, in analyzing what he calls Lo’s “aesthetics of desertion”, Ng Kim Chew argues that Lo writes about love and abandonment not only personally but historically. Ng describes Lo’s style as that of dramatizing the mainlander’s anguish at “being abandoned by history” (歷史的棄兒) (2001, pp. 41–42). Although Ng does not further elaborate on what he means by this phrase, his view echoes critic Yang Chia-hsien’s idea of the “orphan mentality” (孤兒意識) of people in Taiwan (2003, p. 116). As Yang notes, the orphan mentality became a feature of Taiwanese literature because of Wu Chuo-liu’s novel Orphan of Asia (亞細亞的孤兒) (first published in 1946 in Japanese), which depicts the Taiwanese protagonist’s identity struggles during Japanese colonial rule; he finds himself abandoned by both China and Japan, and unable to secure a Taiwanese

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 97 identity. He is thus forever torn between the two dominant political and cultural forces of China and Japan. At the beginning of The Moon Clan, the narrator Lo asks a question that is highly pertinent to the awkward situation in which second-generation mainlanders see themselves in post-martial law Taiwan: he wonders why he and his brother have “to pretend that [they] were born on the island [Taiwan] when [they] were actually born there” (p. 16).19 The question projects the narrator’s ambivalent relationship with his father to second-generation mainlanders’ relationship with Taiwanese society that they were born in. The quote implies that they feel unloved, as they see themselves as excluded from and discriminated against in Taiwanese society. A similar loneliness is evident throughout Lo’s novel. The narrator feels excluded from the China of his father and the Taiwanese society he was born into. In an episode when Lo attends the wedding of one of his wife’s relatives, readers are told that the narrator at first feels sympathy for the Indonesian bride, because he believes that she, like him, is “a stranger” (異鄉人) who cannot speak the Hoklo language of the family she has married into (p. 226). Later on, however, he is surprised to find that the Indonesian girl speaks Hoklo well, since her family moved from Fujian to Indonesia, and that she is familiar with the culture of Penghu, her husband’s hometown. The narrator Lo says that this makes him feel very alone, as he is the only outsider in the family. Exclusion and alienation through language and culture are repeatedly underscored in The Moon Clan. While neither Lo nor Hao may have written self-consciously postmodern novels, both The Moon Clan and The Inn share much in common with postmodern novels such as Flaubert’s Parrot, Famous Last Words, and A Maggot which “openly assert that there are only truths in the plural, and never one Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just others’ truths” (Hutcheon 1988, p. 109). Both works present the family histories of the narrators as open to interpretation. Both imply that truth is something felt and lived-in as well as actively constructed from a given viewpoint or a given individual’s need. Critic Chen Chien-chung argues that Hao’s The Inn does not aim to restore “the fathers’ cities or forts”—that is, an absolute past, but rather to tell one mainlander’s life story from a mainlander’s perspective (2000, p. 198). Similarly, critic Yang Chia-hsien writes that “historical memory” in Lo’s The Moon Clan “is not linear, but is instead stereoscopic and chaotic, with numerous stories developing and intertwining at different speeds” (2003, p. 115). Linda Hutcheon’s description of postmodern historiographic fiction as either narrating multiple points of view or arranging the story around “an overtly controlling narrator” (1988, p. 117) is applicable to these two novels. The Moon Clan can be seen as an example of the former, whereas The Inn is an example of the latter. Hutcheon argues, “In neither [ways of narration], however, do we find a subject confident of his/her ability to know the past with any certainty. This is not a transcending of history, but a problematized inscribing of subjectivity into history” (p. 117–118). The two works examined in this chapter, echoing Foucault’s historical view of genealogy, distrust both received history and the mainlander

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identity developed out of the received history. Given that the KMT’s version of history was still influential among mainlanders in the late 1990s when these two works were written, the two authors’ deliberate problematization of mainlander identity is all the more noteworthy. In The Inn, the narrator states that she had treated Hao Fuzhen’s memories of his life as an unreliable record, since there are no documents to support the man’s solitary recollections for some 50 years. The narrator Hao tells us that when her father tells people about how he flees China, they often react with surprise or indifference and that this makes him doubt his own memories (p. 79). In analyzing memory, historian David Lowenthal notes the importance of collective support to keep one’s personal memories alive: “We need other people’s memories both to confirm our own and to give them endurance. […] Sharing and validating memories sharpens them and promotes their recall” (1985, p. 196). The Inn portrays the narrator’s father as pathetically fading into oblivion in the absence of any narratives that consolidate his memory. In the chapters “Looking Back” (回首) and “Ghost Fire” (鬼火), two works of historical studies are employed as intertexts in order to question to what extent historical narratives or studies reflect a person’s participation in history. These are History of Shandong Schools in Exile (山東流亡學校史) and A Study on Shandong Students in Exile 1945–1962 (山東流亡學生研究1945–1962). These two works are cited and used in the novel to reconstruct stories the narrator remembers her father telling her about accidentally missing a train to Hunan and his participation in important student protests. In this way, the narrator acknowledges that her father’s stories have historical value. However, she also describes her father as historically insignificant. She recounts that when Hao Fuzhen looks in the History of Shandong Schools in Exile, he is sad to find that his name, as a former student leader, is not even mentioned.20 In The Moon Clan, Lo expresses his distrust of history by presenting the narrator’s personal memory as irreconcilable with official history. The chapter on the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall describes how he gets lost in a huge construction site when he is a child. He is forced to walk for hours through an ugly and frightening place, stepping into mud everywhere, not knowing that this construction site would eventually become Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Instead of showing it as a solemn and sacred space for commemorating a former president and the KMT’s great leader, the narrator Lo offers us a dark mud hill with a “huge tall and strange building which looks like a space station” (p. 125). As with the narrator’s conscious distinction between his perspective and that of his father, the reader is constantly being drawn to ask: whose version is more real and reliable? In the chapter “Chungshan Hall” (中山堂), Lo adopts a different approach to storytelling. Here, he sets his childhood memories alongside the memories of the native Taiwanese of the February 28 Incident in 1947. The effect of this juxtaposition is that the reader encounters a gulf between the two sets of memories while also seeing how they are entangled.21 The February 28 Incident, which resulted in the deaths of some 10,000–20,000 Taiwanese at the hands of KMT troops, has become the focus of advocates of Taiwan independence in their efforts to

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 99 highlight the KMT’s brutality toward the local population. Since Chungshan Hall was built in the Japanese colonial period and was handed over to the Nationalist Government in 1945, Lo used it as a symbolic carrier of history to reflect on the trauma and struggles of both Taiwanese and mainlanders. Unlike the previous works we examined, in which the mainlander culture and identity are depicted as largely alienated from the local community, in The Moon Clan the second-generation narrator’s concept of mainlander identity is positioned squarely in Taiwanese history and society. This novel is one of the very few mainlander works to deal with the February 28 killings. In the 1990s, when this historical tragedy was finally allowed to be discussed and investigated, mainlanders were often criticized as a group for their links to the KMT. Unlike Chu Tien-hsin, who presented mainlanders as victims of Taiwanese criticism during this time, Lo sought to present a more complicated picture of how mainlanders stood on these historical issues. The Moon Clan shows that the native Taiwanese and mainlanders see history differently and that each side has its own set of facts. Thus, Lo points out that Chungshan Hall, for the narrator Lo, is a place that holds his happy childhood memories because it is where the KMT Government stages concerts and screens movies. On the other hand, Lo also reminds readers of the terrible memories that the same venue holds for the families of the KMT’s Taiwanese victims on 28 February 1947. The narrator tells us that he wonders if those who sit in the hall with him and his father in his childhood may be the same people who kill the Taiwanese. He then imagines himself hiding among a group of Taiwanese, terrified that his mainlander identity will be found out (pp. 281–282). In this chapter, Lo categorizes mainlanders and Taiwanese respectively as perpetrators and victims of crime, and the narrator considers himself as a guilty member on the side of perpetrators. Lo seems to have intended his depiction of a second-generation mainlander child’s position within the framework of Taiwanese history to be instructive. He wants his readers to see that the experience and memory of the two ethnic groups are different yet form parts of Taiwan’s history. The striking departure of The Inn and The Moon Clan from earlier mainlander writings requires us to regard them as distinctly non-juancun mainlander literature. Both present the mainlander narrators as being stuck between China and Taiwan and equally distant from juancun mainlander and Hoklo cultures alike. Yet both works are also clearly Taiwan-centered in that both see mainlander identity as part of Taiwanese experience and Taiwanese identity. In the Epilogue of The Inn, the author states that her novel tells of “the first case of the White Terror in Taiwanese history, the Penghu Incident, which involved the largest number of victims” (My italics, p. 189). Whether the Penghu Incident is the first and the largest case of the White Terror is arguable, but this statement reveals Hao’s view of mainlander identity as belonging to Taiwan and as meaningful only when read as part of Taiwan’s post-war history. In The Moon Clan, Lo chose to end the novel with Lo Jiaxuan’s diary on the date of February 28, 1950. While Lo’s father is recording how much he misses and worries about his beloved wife who is left behind in China, the author uses the date to remind readers of those who

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lost their loved ones in the Taiwanese-mainlander conflicts three years earlier. Both works are conceptually sophisticated insofar as they treat identity and history as constructed and subjective. The rise of bentuhua Taiwanization discourse and Taiwanese consciousness of the 1990s is implicit in the authors’ concern with depicting mainlanders’ experiences and mainlander identities as complex, conflicted, and ultimately, marginal.

Notes 1 The term Nilü 逆旅 originally refers to a hotel, which is often used to indicate the concept that our life in the world is a brief journey. Hao Yu-hsiang may also take the term literally to trace her father’s journey, examining how he ends up in Taiwan. 2 The English translation of the title of Lo Yi-chin’s Yueqiu Xingshi is based on Shumei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards’ edited volume Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. 3 Hao Yu-hsiang’s father was a doctor who studied at a military medical college, and Lo Yi-chin’s father was a teacher. Neither of the two writers had the experience of living in juancun. 4 Chu Tien-hsin’s The Wanderer (漫遊者) (2000) is a commemoration of her late father and exploration of the meanings of life and death. Chang Ta-chun’s As One Family (聆聽父親) was published in 2003. He stated that he wrote the novel for his future children. By trying to understand his own father, he considered the role of being a father in general. 5 Chang Jui-fen’s definition of second-generation mainlander writers is slightly different from that used in this monograph. In this work, second-generation mainlander writers refer to those who were born in Taiwan or who went to Taiwan at a pre-school age, while Chang includes those who went to Taiwan in their adolescence, such as Pai Hsien-yung. 6 Lo Yi-chin was born in 1967 and Hao Yu-hsiang in 1969. 7 In Hao’s novel, the protagonist is female, in Lo’s male. 8 Or “quasi-autobiographical” novels in Margaret Hillenbrand’s term, which emphasizes the mix of the real and fictional in the texts. 9 In the 1950s, lower ranking KMT soldiers in Taiwan were banned from getting married, so as to intensify their determination to fight back to the Mainland. The policy also explains the reasons why the KMT soldiers often delayed their marriages in Taiwan. 10 This is a term the native Taiwanese often use to call old mainlander males, and especially old KMT veterans. Since the shape of Taiwan is very similar to a sweet potato, many Taiwanese nationalists call the native Taiwanese children the sweet potato. The image of a taro is thus used in contrast to that of a sweet potato. In this sense, children from mainlander-Taiwanese intermarriages are often called “taro-sweet potato” (芋仔番薯) in Taiwanese. 11 It should be noted that Lee Ten-hui’s political stand was criticized by many KMT fundamentalists, and thus resulted in severe debates and disagreements within the party. 12 As of 2014, 17 universities in Taiwan had departments or graduate institutes of Taiwanese Literature. Some universities prefer the term “Taiwan literature” instead of “Taiwanese literature”. 13 Chu Tien-hsin’s The Old Capital (1997) is one of the very few works that focuses on the theme of mainlanders’ experience, and was published in late 1997. Arguably, it deals with mainlanders’ life in and views of Taiwan rather than their relations with China. 14 The two newspapers are known as more friendly to the KMT and its cultural-political stance of Chinese nationalism.

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 101 15 Both Hao’s and Lo’s novels were published in China. Hao’s work was published by Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe人民教育出版社 in 2012. A play of the same name was performed by Fantasy Theatre 狂想劇場 in late 2011 in Taiwan. Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan was published in China in 2016 by Guangxi shifandaxue chubanshe广西师范大学出版社. 16 In “The Frozen Family History” (2001), Lo Yi-chin maintains that The Moon Clan is an I-novel (p. 101). Yang Chia-hsin’s “In the Ruptures of History” (2003) also suggests that Lo’s writing revolves around a private domain. The genre of “I-novel” originates from Japanese literature, referring to self-confessional novels. 17 In Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards’ edited volume Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, the title 棄的故事 (Qi de gushi) is translated as Abject Stories, which may be associated with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. In analyzing Lo’s aesthetic concept, I primarily employ Ng Kim Chew’s argument of “aesthetics of desertion”. Therefore, I adopt the English term he uses in his article in order not to lead to confusion, and thus I deliberately avoid using the terms “abject” or “abjection”. 18 “The Big Black Bird” is the 15th of the 21 chapters. 19 The quote may read illogical. I offer the original sentence in Chinese here: “是什麼原 因你們必須假裝是在這 上出生，但其實你們本來就是出生於此？” 20 The novel does not mention whether Hao Fuzhen is included in another work A Study on Shandong Students in Exile 1945–1962, but it highlights the absence of his name in History of Shandong Schools in Exile. 21 The site of Chungshan Hall was originally the civil administration office in the Qing Dynasty. In the Japanese colonial period, the building was torn down, and Taipei Civic Auditorium (臺北公會堂) was constructed and completed in 1936. After the KMT took over Taiwan, the building was re-named as Chungshan Hall, after San Yat-sen. See http://english.doca.taipei.gov.tw/ct.asp?xitem=53574311&CtNode=64665&mp =119002, accessed on December 17, 2014.

References Chang, J. F. 張瑞芬. (2001). Fangfu zai jünfu de chengbang 彷彿在君父的城邦 [As If in Father’s City]. Mingdao wenyi 明道文藝 299, 29–37. Chang, T. C. 張大春. (2003). Lingting fuqin 聆聽父親 [As One Family]. Taipei: Shi Bao. Chen, C. C. 陳建忠. (2000). Jünfu de chengbang shuaitui zhihou: chongdu Hao Yu-hsiang de Nilü 君父的城邦衰頹之後：重 郝譽翔的《逆旅》[In the Aftermath of the Collapse of Fathers’ Cities: Re-reading Hao Yu-hsiang’s The Inn]. In Nilü 逆旅 [The Inn] (pp. 191–199). Taipei: Lianhe wenxue. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2000). Manyouzhe 漫遊者 [The Wanderer]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2002). Doesn’t My Memory Count? (O. Lam Trans.). Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 3(1), 101–06. Corcuff, S. (2004). Fenghe rinuan: Taiwan Waishengren yu guojia rentong de zhuanbian 風和日暖：台灣外省人與國家認同的轉變 [Light Wind and Warm Sun: Taiwan Mainlanders and the Transformation of National Identity]. Taipei: Yunchen. Corcuff, S. (2011). Zhonghua linguo: Taiwan de yujing xing 中華鄰國--台灣的閾境性 [Neighbour of China—Taiwan’s Liminality]. Taipei: Yunchen. Foucault, M. (1984). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 76–100). New York: Pantheon Books. Hao, Y. H. 郝譽翔. (2000a). Chunzen niandai 純真年代 [The Age of Innocence]. In Nilü 逆旅 [The Inn] (pp. V–3). Taipei: Lianhe wenxue.

102  In the quest of the absent mainlander father Hao, Y. H. 郝譽翔. (2000b). Guanyu xiaoshuo zhe yi huishi 關於小說這一回事 [Preface: About Fiction]. In Nilü 逆旅 [The Inn] (pp. 5–8). Taipei: Lianhe wenxue. Hao, Y. H. 郝譽翔. (2000c). Houji 後記 [Epilogue]. In Nilü 逆旅 [The Inn] (pp. 187–190). Taipei: Lianhe wenxue. Hao, Y. H. 郝譽翔. (2000d). Nilü 逆旅 [The Inn]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue. Hillenbrand, M. (2006). The National Allegory Revisited: Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan. Positions, 14(3), 633–62. Hu, Y. N. 胡衍南. (2005). Lun waisheng dierdai zuojia de fuqin [jiazu] shu xie 論「外省第二代」作家的父親(家族)書寫 [The Father (Family) Description of a Second Generation of New Chinese Immigrant Writer]. Qinghua zhongwen xue lin 清華中文學林, 1, 109–134. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Li, K. C. 李廣均. (2010). Yi hunda shushuo Waishengren de shuming zhutixing 以《混搭》述說「外省人」的庶民主體性 [Narrating Mainlanders’ Civilian Subjectivity in Mix and Match]. In C. H. Jaw (Ed.), Hunda: Women (Women) de gushi 混搭：我們（Women）的故事 [Mix and Match: Our (Women) Stories] (pp. 7–10). Taipei: INK. Li, S. S. 李奭學. (2004). Shuhua Taiwan: 1991-2003 Wenxue Yinxiang 書畫台灣：1991– 2003文學印象 [‘Reviewing’ Taiwan: A Literary Chronicle, 1911–2003]. Taipei: Jiuge. Liao, D. C., Chen, B., & Huang, C. C. (2013). The Decline of ‘Chinese Identity’ in Taiwan?!—An Analysis of Survey Data from 1992 to 2012. East Asia, 30(4), 273–290. Lo, Y. C. 駱以軍. (2000). Yueqiu xingshi 月球姓氏 [The Moon Clan]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue. Lo, Y. C. 駱以軍. (2001). Tingge de jiazushi: Yueqiu xingshi de xiezuo qiyuan 停格的家族史：《月球姓氏》的寫作起源 [The Frozen Family History: The Motifs of The Moon Clan]. Wen xun文訊, 184, 100–102. Lowenthal, D. (1985). The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ng, K. C. 黃錦樹. (2001). Gebi fangjian de liexi: Lun Lo Yi-chin de shuqing zhuanzhe 隔壁房間的裂縫：論駱以軍的抒情轉折 [A Crack in the Room Next Door: On Lo Yi-chin’s Lyrical Turn]. Zhongshan renwen xuebao 中山人文學報 [Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities], 12, 31–44. Taylor, J. E. (2009). Discovering a Nationalist Heritage in Present-Day Taiwan. China Heritage Quarterly, 17. Retrieved 24 April, 2019, from http:​/​/www​​.chin​​aheri​​tageq​​ uarte​​rly​.o​​rg​/i​n​​dex​.p​​hp Xie, L. 谢岚and Lo, Y. C. 骆以军. (2012, June 4). Lo Yi-chin: Fuqin xiang zai nulangli xing guzhou, xinli shi huangde 骆以军：父亲像在怒浪里行孤舟，心里是慌的 [Lo Yi-chin: Father is Like Riding on a Lonely Boat, in a State of Panic]. Retrieved 26 May, 2014, from http://www​.chinawriter​.com​.cn/ Xu, S. L. 許素蘭. (2013). Dakai Taiwan wenxue xisuo fazhan shi 打開台灣文學系所 發展史 [History of the Development of Departments and Institutes of Taiwanese Literature]. Taiwan wenxueguan tongxün 台灣文學館通訊 [Newsletter of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature], 40, 46–48. Xu, Z. J. 徐宗潔. (2003). Women shi nayang bei sheding le shenshi: lun Lo Yi-chin Yueqiu xingshi yu Hao Yu-hsiang Nilü zhong de xingming, shenshi yu rentong 我 們 是 那 樣 被 設 定 了 身 世 —論 駱 以 軍 《 月 球 姓 氏 》 與 郝 譽 翔 《 逆 旅 》 中的姓名、身世與認同 [Our Pedigree Was Defined in that Way: On Name, Pedigree

In the quest of the absent mainlander father 103 and Identification in Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan and Hao Yu-hsiang’s The Inn]. In Wen Xun Publishing (Ed.), Di qi jie qingnian wenxue huiyi lunwen ji: Taiwan wenxue de bijiao yanjiu 第七屆青年文學會議論文集：台灣文學的比較研究 [The Seventh Young Scholars Conference of Literary Studies: Comparative Studies of Taiwanese Literature] (pp. 173–196). Taipei: Wen xun文訊. Yang, C. H. 楊佳嫻. (2003). Zai lishi de liexi zhong: Lo Yi-chin Yueqiu xingshi de jiyi shuxie 在歷史的裂隙中：駱以軍《月球姓氏》的記憶書寫 [In the Ruptures of History: Memory Writing in Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan]. Zhongwai wenxue 中外文學 [Chung Wai Literary Quarterly], 32(1), 109–125. Yang, C. H. 楊佳嫻. (2004). Huaijiu shenzhi, ye yi bushi jiushi de ziwei: tan waisheng di er dai (juancun) xiaoshuojia de xinbiaoxian 懷舊甚至，也已不是舊時的滋味：談外 省第二代（眷村）小說家的新表現 [Nostalgia, yet no Longer the Same]. Wen xun 文訊, 229, 40–47.

4

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village (寶 一村)1

In the early 2000s, juancun literature and the mainlander culture it represented seemed to have reached a dead end, as most of the military dependents’ villages had been demolished, and the residents had moved away or been resettled. Hardly any new literary works on the theme of juancun were produced. Juancun’s literary meaning thus seemed to be fixed and dated. Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village (寶 一村), which was first staged in December 2008, with the play being published in 2011, marked a turning point and renewal of the juancun narratives. The play was well received and highly acclaimed. It brought new life to the then already vanishing juancun culture. In October 2011, Lai’s Performance Workshop was invited by the Taiwanese government to perform The Village (along with other theatrical troupes’ plays which dramatize different ethnic groups’ experience in Taiwan) as part of the ROC’s centennial celebration program.2 This indicates the significant role of the play in representing Taiwan’s mainlander culture. In 2010, Lai Sheng-chuan was named as “A Person of Influence” (影响力人 ) by the Mainland-based news magazine China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊) mainly because of The Village. The magazine stated: [Lai] is the only playwright and director in the field of Chinese theatre, who is concerned with the present-day, with reality and the inner world of human experience. He brought The Village to Mainland China in 2010, allowing Mainland Chinese audiences to share the pain and love of another group of people during the past sixty years. (Ding 2010, p. 104) The Village has been staged in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and the US, with over 200 performances. The play is significant since Wang and Lai give juancun a bright and happy treatment that stood in sharp contrast to the literary representations of juancun in the 1980s and 1990s. In her review of the play in 2011, Crystal Tai commented that Lai Sheng-chuan “has turned the 1949 tragedy of China and Taiwan into a comedy, like making sour lemons into lemonade” (2011, para. 14). Although earlier juancun writings during the martial law period, such as Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life and Chu

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 105 Tien-hsin’s Everlasting, portray juancun as a place of mental and cultural shelter, they nonetheless highlight the mainlander characters’ feelings of displacement and alienation in Taiwan. The juancun in The Village is a comedic utopia with an emphasis placed on love and goodwill among the residents, and between mainlanders and the Hoklo Taiwanese. As such, it turned juancun into a fashionable topic in the media and print culture of Taiwan in the 2000s. It also turned the dark history of juancun into a “Taiwanese” cultural commodity to be consumed as entertainment.3 Like many earlier juancun writings, the story of The Village is autobiographical. It is based on Wang Wei-chung’s childhood memories, of which he chose to present only the positive aspects of juancun (Zhu 2011). The Village consists of the stories of three families, the Zhou family, the Zhu family, and the Zhao family, in a military dependents’ village, and follows them across three important stages in Taiwanese history: the Nationalist Government’s retreat (Act One: from 1949 to 1950), the White Terror (Act Two: from 1969 to 1975), and the postChiang Kai-shek period (Act Three: from 1982 to 2006). While most general audiences responded positively to the play, with online comments describing it, for instance, as a “touching” story with many comic scenes,4 critics, including Chang Tieh-chih (張鐵志), Chen Cheng-hsi (陳正熙), Hong Hong (鴻鴻), Kuo Li-hsin (郭力昕), Bruce Lai (賴勇衡), and Liu Yu-ning (劉育寧), regarded the play as a failure in terms of representing the historical reality and cultural uniqueness of juancun. Chen Cheng-hsi writes of the stories of the three families, I cannot see the characteristics of diversity-cum-fusion of juancun, neither can I tell the differences between juancun society and the outer world. The uniqueness of juancun, as a type of life/lifestyle, lies in its being a carrier/embodiment of a number of conflicts, ambivalence and ridicule of post-war Taiwanese history—politically, ethnically and linguistically. It influenced as much as the direction of the entire country, and as little as individuals’ life decisions. The Village, or any other actual military dependent villages, should be remembered, recorded and understood within this context. (2009, p. 26) It is notable that the play drew much commentary from second-generation mainlander critics: Kuo Li-hsin, Chiang Tieh-chih, and Hong Hong are all from mainlander backgrounds, and they have publicly described themselves as mainlanders. Chiang’s review analyzes The Village from the perspective of a second-generation mainlander who once lived in a juancun, stating that “the jokes made all other audiences laughed heartily, and some audiences even cried at the end of the story. However, as a Taiwanese who grew up in a juancun, I did not laugh. Instead I felt only disappointment” (2014, para. 2). Similar to Chen Cheng-hsi’s comment quoted above, Chiang wrote that the play does not show “serious historical introspection and deep exploration of the uniqueness of

106 Inventing a Taiwanized juancun juancun” (2014, para. 5). Chiang’s criticism is justified in that the play makes light of the juancun residents’ everyday life and their traumatic experience during The White Terror. We can better appreciate Chen’s and Chiang’s critiques of The Village by considering Fredric Jameson’s remarks about postmodern nostalgia films. Jameson wrote that these films were disconnected from history and people’s experience of the past. Their purpose as entertainment meant that they were “never a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’ of historical content, but instead approached the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (1991, p. 18). Similarly, what the critics of The Village take issue with is the way that Lai and Wang had used juancun and its mainlander culture as the subject of cultural entertainment. The real-life issues and the dark history of juancun as sites of ethnic and cultural conflicts between mainlanders and Taiwanese are elided in the play. Other issues that the play avoided included the entrenched hierarchy of juancun society in which the residents’ military ranking determined their place within society and the struggles of the residents in dealing with their traumatic experience of fleeing China. The latter is writ large in Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang and Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound”, which tackle the everyday psychological stresses of mainlanders within the enclosed environment of juancun. Kuo Li-hsin described The Village as a “product of emotion”, arguing that Lai and Wang adopted a commercialized approach to history (2009, para. 5). Liu Yu-ning (2013) also regarded The Village as an example of how nostalgia can be commercialized (p. 54). He argued that the play is not so much a historical drama as a nostalgic drama: Nostalgic dramas only use historical events as a sign of an era. The lives of the characters and the development of the plot are not necessarily tied to “the historical event”. The ultimate goal is to exploit the language and clothes of the past to achieve the effect of nostalgia. (p. 54) In Liu’s view, Lai and Wang do not attempt to make The Village a faithful reflection or representation of any actual military dependents’ villages, but instead, the juancun in the play is merely an invented context which functions as a backdrop to create effects of nostalgia. A theoretical issue that the popularity of The Village has raised is whether literary works should aim to faithfully represent the past. In the case of The Village, from the favorable reception of audiences, we may argue that what attracts audiences is precisely Wang and Lai’s depiction of juancun as a warm and harmonious place, rather than the dark and depressing historical juancun typically presented in second-generation mainlander writings. In this regard, Lai and Wang have successfully created a new representation of juancun for public consumption, one that has allowed juancun to be regarded as an integral, nostalgic part of

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 107 Taiwanese culture and society. This impression of juancun is widely accepted among younger generations of people who were born in Taiwan and have never experienced juancun life personally. In this sense, the significance of The Village is that it has localized and Taiwanized the concept of juancun, and in so doing, it has also transformed the mainlander identity that had previously been associated with juancun life. When Fredric Jameson (1991) described postmodern nostalgia films as “pastiche”, he meant that the effect was a kind of blank parody (p. 16), or a “simulacrum, the identical copy for which no original has ever existed” (p. 17)— suggesting that what the postmodern nostalgia films bring to audiences is not history but ideologies of the present. I do not see The Village as a blank imitation of the past. Instead, Lai and Wang’s nostalgic representation of juancun is a form of serious pastiche by means of which the play raises important questions about Taiwan’s mainlander identity. As sociologist Chang Mao-kuei states, secondgeneration mainlanders’ trend of nostalgia (懷舊風) in the 2000s is a reflection of their thoughts about identity; it can be seen as their attempt to be re-accepted in Taiwanese society after the turbulent 1990s during which mainlander identity was often denied or even stigmatized (2010b, pp. 281–282). The play can thus be described as postmodern, in the sense that it presents a deliberate departure from historical truth. Lai and Wang drew on elements from the historical juancun to create a pastiche of a literary juancun, which emphasizes the aspect of acculturation between mainlanders and the Hoklo Taiwanese. The ways in which the play downplays the differences between mainlanders’ juancun experiences and the lives of the Hoklo Taiwanese is the focus of my discussion in the following part. The playwrights’ articulation of juancun mainlander identity as Taiwanese is also explored in relation to its social effects. This chapter argues that Lai and Wang’s narratives of Taiwanized juancun throw new uncertainty and ambiguity into “juancun mainlander identity”, since mainlanders’ waisheng awareness was most often seen by the public and narrated in earlier juancun literature as formed upon their continuous conflicts and negotiations with the native Taiwanese.

Generalizing and popularizing juancun Before The Village, there had been several attempts to commemorate juancun in the early 2000s. According to sociologist Wu Hsin-yi (2010), most of the works about juancun in the early 2000s were historical records and surveys published by the central and local governments and public institutions. The TV drama A Story of Soldiers (再見，忠貞二村), which was released in 2005, was the first work that attempted to commercialize the topic of juancun. While it did not attract huge public attention, Wu argues that they paved the way for the success of more popular works that followed, including The Village (2010, p. 7). An important precursor for The Village was Time Story (光陰的故事), a top-rated TV drama on the theme of juancun released in November 2008. Wu believes that this drama, including its re-release in DVD format and the CD album of the TV

108 Inventing a Taiwanized juancun series soundtrack, successfully popularized the issue of juancun (2010, p. 7). The renewed interest in juancun reached its peak with the staging of Wang and Lai’s play. Tickets for the ten-day Taipei run in December 2008 sold out a month before the opening night, and it broke box-office records in Taiwan (Bartholomew 2008; Tai 2011). The play also produced a so-called “juancun phenomenon” (眷村現象) and a “juancun fever” (眷村熱) (Hsin-yi Wu 2010).5 Thereafter, juancun has become a fashionable topic in Taiwan’s public culture, or in Alison Landsberg’s term, “a prosthetic memory” (2004, p. 20)6 of many people, no matter whether they had lived in the villages or not. In examining the reasons for the play’s success, Taiwan’s changing social climate in terms of ethnic relations and government policy played a key role. As sociologist Li Kuang-chün states in an interview, “it would have been too politically incorrect if the juancun plays were produced ten years ago, when the voice of Taiwanization reached its peak” (Li & Liang 2009, p. A3). Li argues that after years of ethnic tension and discord, the whole of society had grown weary of conflicts, and to a certain extent had learned to recognize that the experiences of different ethnic groups were all important aspects of Taiwanese culture and identity. While the story of The Village is told from a mainlander’s perspective, the success of the play indicates that in 2008 Taiwanese society had reached or at least wished to reach reconciliation, as the historical memories of one group could be appreciated and respected by other groups. Since the 2000s, the government has re-oriented its plan for juancun from one focusing on demolition and rebuilding to cultural heritage preservation, which further acknowledges the importance of mainlander culture in Taiwan, and which, to a certain extent, has soothed mainlanders’ anxiety with regard to their collective identity and memory (Kao 2011).7 By the time The Village was staged, a number of juancun had already been preserved as museums or cultural heritage sites, such as the well-known Four Four South Village (四四南村) in central Taipei City. The play’s debut in 2008 was the year when mainlander Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT succeeded the Hoklo Taiwanese Chen Shui-bian of the DPP as the president. This timing was symbolically important as it granted a certain political and psychological legitimacy for mainlanders to express pride in their culture.8 The Village reflects a distinctly twenty-first-century mainlander perspective. Although there was still a degree of ethnic tension in Taiwan, particularly with regard to the sensitive issue of cross-Strait relations, the social milieu of reconciliation between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese enabled Lai and Wang to re-invent a benign juancun identity. As critic Bruce Lai noted, during the eight years of Chen Shui-bian’s presidency, the relationship between mainlanders and Taiwanese had become tense. The play took advantage of the timing of party alteration to “turn the disparaged label of ‘mainlander’ into a tolerant and neutralized ‘Taiwanese’ identity” (28 March, 2018). An important question in relation to the literary representation of juancun is that, if the earlier works published in the 1990s, such as Chu Tien-hsin’s “In

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 109 Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” and Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang, aimed to defend the authenticity of mainlander identity at a time when the discourse of Taiwanization was gathering momentum and the KMT’s Chinese nationalism was waning, then what was the aim of The Village, given that the mainlanders’ culture and unique experience had already been recognized in Taiwanese society? I believe the answer to this question is closely linked to Wang and Lai’s use of comedy as a genre. As Wang Wei-chung states in an interview, his motivation for writing the play was “to help [the second-generation juancun mainlanders’] late parents deliver a certain message to the society” (Zhu 2011, p. 277). Lai and Wang wanted their play to revive and pass down juancun and mainlander culture to younger (mainlander) generations in Taiwan. The fact that The Village was staged in 2008 meant that members of the audiences who were born after the 1980s had no direct experience of juancun. Therefore, The Village was a conscious attempt to evoke the nostalgic memory of those who had lived in a juancun, and more importantly to create an easily accepted image of the villages for those who had not. In their work on Chinese humor, Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland have pointed out that comedy “emerges as a highly flexible and adaptable genre that joins rather than separates different audiences from different backgrounds” (2008, p. xiv). By using the form of comedy to represent a time of ethnic divisions and social turmoil, Lai and Wang sought to mend the historical and cultural rift between the Hoklo Taiwanese and mainlanders, and thus to create a collective memory the two groups could share. Previously known as masters of comedy,9 the duo’s use of gentle humor rather than sarcastic mockery in the play indicates how they want their audiences to imagine juancun and the past of the martial law period.10 The box office has proven that Wang and Lai’s strategy has successfully attracted younger non-juancun audiences. The resulting cheerful nostalgia meant that the play was not intended to represent an authentic past, but instead to demonstrate the historical importance of mainlander culture to Taiwanese culture. This aim can be gleaned from the very symbolic title of the play. By naming the play寶 一村, meaning A Village on Treasure Island, the playwrights have delinked juancun from the KMT, China, and Chinese culture. In fact, juancun were typically named after different branches of the KMT military (e.g., Luguang 陸光 [Glory of the Army] and Haiguang 海光 [Glory of the Navy]), patrons of the communities (e.g., Fulian 婦聯 [National Women’s League of the ROC]), the districts in which they were located (e.g., Sanchong 三重 [A place in Taipei county]), or patriotic slogans (Zhongxing 中興 [reviving the culture or country] or Jianguo 建國 [establishing a country]) (Ko 2011, pp. 265–267). With this intentional departure from the historical reality, the play’s name was to suggest juancun’s cultural and historical ties to Taiwan (as a treasure island), even though military dependents’ villages were in fact very special sites whose culture and lifestyle were highly different from those of the ordinary villages of the native Taiwanese.

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Taiwanizing juancun The Village provides the audience with an idealized yet problematic image of a “Taiwanized juancun”. The “Taiwanese features” are especially clear in two aspects: an emphasis on the friendly relations between Taiwanese and mainlanders, and the stress on mainlanders as victims of the KMT’s authoritarian rule. In other words, the play presents mainlanders and Taiwanese as sharing the similar lived experience under the KMT’s dictatorship during the martial law period. The characterization of the two Taiwanese characters Mrs. Zhu (Chen Xiuer) and carpenter Xiao Huang demonstrates how the Taiwanese and their culture are treated in the play. In earlier mainlander writings, such as This Love, This Life, and Everlasting, the native Taiwanese characters, particularly Hoklo Taiwanese women, are often depicted as social, linguistic, and cultural inferiors, who marry mainlander soldiers for money or in order to survive in a patriarchal society. In The Village, however, Mrs. Zhu, a Hoklo Taiwanese and the only Taiwanese character living in the village, is portrayed as a “graceful” (秀氣) (p. 47) and courageous woman who elopes with Mr. Zhu despite her parents’ opposition. She works hard, shoulders the primary financial responsibility of the Zhu family, and quickly integrates into the village. Similarly, the carpenter Xiao Huang, who represents a Taiwanese man living outside the village, is portrayed as a kind-hearted and compassionate person. He helps Mr. Zhou to make a coffin for his motherin-law, even though he knows that Mr. Zhou does not have enough money to pay for the cost, and they become good friends. This very positive characterization of Mrs. Zhu and Xiao Huang suggests that the playwrights strove consciously to undo the KMT’s Sinocentric ideological legacy and to reverse the bias against the native Taiwanese of previous second-generation mainlander writers. Wu Hsin-yi has noted (2010, p. 14) that as a highly commercialized work, Wang and Lai might have avoided negative portrayals of Taiwanese characters primarily for marketing reasons. In any case, the respect accorded to the Taiwanese and their culture in this play stands in striking contrast to the representations of Taiwanese in second-generation mainlander juancun stories of the 1980s and 1990s. Poet and literary critic Hong Hong (2011), who is also a second-generation mainlander, notes, “The characterization [of Mrs. Zhu] is too politically correct, which does not reflect the realistic problems of Taiwanese-mainlander inter-marriages” (p. 285). Indeed, the Taiwanese woman Mrs. Zhu is depicted as inheriting the skills of making authentic Tianjin meat buns from her mainlander neighbor, Granny Qian, who owned a huge restaurant in China, but she decides not to pass the skills to her own daughter. In an interview, Wang Wei-chung notes that the character Mrs. Zhu is based on his memory of a real person in his village, but that the real woman who made Tianjin meat buns was a mainlander (Wang & Xu 2011). By rendering his character Mrs. Zhu as Taiwanese, Wang demonstrates his intention to make this character a symbolic figure of cross-ethnic/cross-cultural integration.11 Lai and Wang’s positive depictions of Taiwanese characters, on the other hand, reveal their makeover of the image of mainlanders. Whether intentional or

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 111 not, the play glosses over mainlanders’ cultural bias during the martial law period. All the juancun mainlanders are depicted as kindly and wholeheartedly accepting this Hoklo Taiwanese woman without any hostility or hesitation, thus enabling Mrs. Zhu to easily call the juancun her home. The mainlander characters are even portrayed as very interested in learning the Taiwanese language. This of course is a false representation of that period as the KMT suppression of Taiwanese culture was severe, the effects of which provoked the Taiwanization movement and in turn resulted in mainlanders’ identity crisis after the lifting of martial law in the 1990s. This narrative of the harmonious relation between mainlander residents and the Hoklo Taiwanese woman Mrs. Zhu, in a sense, reveals a romantic and biased imagination of the relationship between the two ethnic groups from “a mainlander-centric perspective”, as this female Taiwanese character is portrayed as a poor and lonely Taiwanese girl abandoned by her family, but she is sheltered, welcomed, and taken care of by the mainlander “big family” in the juancun. With the help of the mainlander old lady, the Taiwanese girl is finally able to survive and become better off. In a scene that depicts the mainlanders’ first Chinese New Year in Taiwan, most of them are lamenting their separation from parents. Mrs. Zhu says (in Taiwanese), “My parents are here [in Taiwan], but I was expelled… All because of him! (Pointing at Mr. Zhu and hitting him) All because of him!” (p. 64) Her Taiwanese family is not mentioned again in any other part of the play, as if she has assumed a new identity since she entered the village. In showing Mrs. Zhu’s situation of being homeless in her own homeland, the play shortens the emotional distance between this Taiwanese character and the mainlanders in exile, and further depicts juancun as a refuge for both Taiwanese people and mainlanders. Different from the earlier juancun writings we have discussed, in which Mandarin is shown as the only language used in juancun, suggesting that all mainlanders speak Mandarin well, The Village presents mainlander characters as speaking Mandarin with different accents of their home provinces such as Shandong, Tianjin, Sichuan, and Shanghai. This diversity of accents is in fact closer to the real situation of juancun, as Su Wei-chen has noted in the preface to A Collection of Taiwan’s Juancun Stories (2004). The idea of the juancun population as a coherent cultural group was the result of the KMT’s political propaganda, and was also the unintentional invention of earlier juancun literature, since the genre was formed to construct and defend juancun mainlanders’ unique cultural identity (Wu 2011). Not until the 2000s did critics and writers, such as Su Wei-chen (2004) and Chang Mao-kuei (2010a), start to highlight the cultural diversity in juancun. In The Village, the story of mainlander Mr. Zhu and Taiwanese Mrs. Zhu is one of love overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers. The story of Ji Guai further presents the linguistic barrier that exists among mainlanders in juancun. He is portrayed as a person who comes from a remote, unnamed province, and who speaks a dialect unintelligible to the other juancun residents. Even after he has lived in the village for many years, he is unable to communicate in Mandarin. In the transcript of the play, Ji Guai’s words are shown

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as unreadable symbols. However, footnotes are included to provide explanations of what he has said. In the staging of the play, Ji Guai speaks gibberish that is left unexplained to audiences. In Act One Scene Two, a group of soldiers sit together chatting about the army’s preparations for the recovery of China, Zhou Ning: Old Zhao, have you heard that? We bought new fighters! Old Zhao: Really? Mr. Zhu: A huge amount of money. A hundred brand new F51s. Old Zhao: (Amazed) A hundred!! What do you mean? Do we need so many? Mr. Zhu: Do we need so many?! Zhou Ning: (Being ironic) Do you think they are only for defence? Ji Guai: □◎∵◇∪□‚□☆□∩□※‚8∵⊿□◎∴◇‚8∴△□◎! *12 (An awkward pause. Old Zhao breaks the silence.) Old Zhao: Okay, now don’t talk about these. Have you read the Zhongyang Daily News? Now it’s turbulent on the other side of the Strait. The Cultural Revolution! Eat tree bark! * Summary: “It is hard to say if it is for defence. Now the other side of the Strait is chaotic. I think it is time for us to buy fighters”. (p. 101) While Ji Guai’s speech is being deliberately treated as inconsequential, the character himself is nonetheless presented as vitally important in this episode. Because language is often regarded as an important indicator of one’s ethnic identity in Taiwan and is seen as a cause for tensions between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese, this character serves to generalize the situation of the linguistic barriers between people. That is, Ji Guai’s unintelligible speech is used to demonstrate that linguistic barriers also exist among mainlanders. Consequently, the play conveys a message that linguistic and cultural differences should not be obstacles that hinder love and goodwill among either mainlanders or Taiwan’s other ethnic groups. As Lai and Wang have stated in their interviews, they had hoped to re-create juancun as a place that embraces cultural diversity and welcomes cultural fusion (Zhu 2011; Liao & Zhu 2011). Episodes such as the ones that depict the friendship between the Hoklo Taiwanese carpenter Xiao Huang and Old Zhao as well as Ji Guai and his mainlander friends are striking examples of this celebration of diversity and fusion. This type of friendship is then shown as extending to the lives of the next generation, as Zhu’s second son marries a Vietnamese woman who then inherits Mrs. Zhu’s skills of making Tianjin meat buns. Similarly, Zhao’s oldest daughter marries an American, and his second son-in-law works for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the main opposition party to the KMT. A reunion banquet in the final scene is a main feature of the play, one in which all of the juancun residents and their new family members get together for a happy multicultural and multilingual gathering absent of any tension. However, this happy ending is possible only because Lai and Wang had simplified the tensions and divisions caused by the KMT’s language policies and understated, if not erased,

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 113 the suffering of native Taiwanese people under these policies. It is worth noting that no other critics have criticized the play for attempting to mitigate the harm the policies had brought to the lives of the native Taiwanese. Akin to Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” and Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang which we have discussed in Chapter 2, Wang and Lai’s portrayal of juancun projects to a fantasy of the present and hope for the future rather than the reality of the past. The sociologist Janelle L. Wilson (2005) writes that our nostalgic imagination of the past reveals what we perceive ourselves as lacking in the present: “What we are nostalgic for reveals what we value, what we deem worthwhile and important” (p. 26). A similar point was made by Svetlana Boym (as discussed in Chapter 2), arguing that although the nostalgic past shows the memory bearer’s loss in the present, it also points to one’s hopeful expectations of the future (2001, p. xvi). If what Wang and Lai portray in The Village is a nostalgic picture of juancun, then the harmonious image well reflects the valuing of diversity that was to become an important social goal in post-martial law Taiwanese society, yet one that many perceive as still unachieved. Hong Hong (2011) commented, The Village “can be seen as a symbolic presentation of contemporary Taiwanese society’s expectation to mend ethnic schism. Although such a theatre delves into the past, it in fact reflects the state of mind of the contemporary society” (p. 284). This may explain the popularity of the play in Taiwan. As Mainland Chinese literary critic Chen Meixia argues, the play brings about the effect of healing, reminding the audience of a sense of simple happiness in a difficult time (2011, pp. 77–78). In this regard, The Village’s portrayal of juancun residents and the Hoklo Taiwanese as suffering in common during the martial law period is highly significant. Lai and Wang use three episodes to describe how juancun residents, like the native Taiwanese, were under the strict control and close surveillance of the KMT. This theme of mainlanders as victims of KMT rule is a key feature of second-generation mainlanders’ works in the post-martial law period (as discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). By this means, the play presents mainlanders and the native Taiwanese as having not only shared hopes but shared suffering too. Act Two Scene Two shows a group of juancun residents chatting about their neighbor Wei Zhong, who was arrested and did not come back, but no one knows the exact reasons. In Act Two Scene Eleven, the Zhao family’s phonograph is confiscated by the military police as they suspect that the record player as well as the record might be smuggled from Mainland China recently. In Act Two Scenes Twenty-One to Twenty-Four, Old Zhao is arrested because he is falsely accused of being a Communist spy. These episodes all underscore that ordinary, lowerranking Mainland soldiers, like people of other ethnic groups in Taiwan, also suffered under the KMT’s political suppression. The White Terror, a subject which used to be narrated mainly by the Hoklo and Hakka Taiwanese, is presented in this play as inflicting pain during the martial law years on the mainlanders living in juancun as well. The play treats the White Terror as common knowledge. Undoubtedly, local audiences would know something of the period between the 1950s and the 1980s, during which the KMT’s

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secret police not only suppressed political dissent but imprisoned and executed many people. However, the play presents this painful history in a farcical manner by making light of the KMT’s authoritarianism. For example, when the mainlander characters are talking about their neighbor Wei Zhong who was arrested by the secret agents, there is no mention of whether he had actually committed a crime or that he might be executed on false charges. Zho Ning: (Seriously) Wei Zhong is a spy. Mr. Zhu: Oh oh. Old Zhao: Nobody knew it for the past twenty years? Zhou Ning: I knew it a long time ago. Old Zhao: Bull shit! You were the person that helped him [years ago to stay in the juancun]. Zhou Ning: I meant to observe him secretly. He always asked us when we should take action [to win back China]. When to take action? Didn’t he? Mr. Zhu: I also asked the same question very often. Zhou Ning: Oh, this is different. The way you asked about it is different. When Wei Zhong did it, he appeared keen and emotional. (Imitating Wei Zhong) Isn’t it? Isn’t it? (High and firm voice) Yes! (p. 102) These lines reflect the playwrights’ ambivalent emotions toward the KMT. Although the episodes that discuss the White Terror implicitly paint the KMT in a negative light, nonetheless, the pain and suffering that the KMT had caused is never mentioned. Lai and Wang’s recounting of the KMT’s past touches on political suppression but mainly produces a pleasurable nostalgia. This is evident in Act Two Scenes Twenty-One to Twenty-Four. This is an episode in which villagers find two verses of Li Po’s (李白) poem Night Thought (夜思) written on the wall. People gather to examine the verses carefully and even start to believe that they may have been left by Communists, with the intention of passing on a secret message, inciting them to rise up against the KMT government. Old Zhao is arrested because he tries too hard to figure out the message and helps to clean the wall. More than once, the character Zhou Ning, based on his personal experience, talks about the KMT’s use of torture by forcing suspects to sit on a huge block of ice. After Old Zhao is released, and is asked about his experience, his response is surprisingly ambiguous: Er Mao: Did they ask you to sit on ice? Old Zhao: (Seriously) Don’t mention the word “ice”. (Mrs. Zhao looks sad.) Xiao Mao: Serious? They did? Old Zhao: Just kidding! Just kidding! … Old Zhao: (Sitting down, but jumps up immediately) Ouch!…

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 115 Everybody: (Nervously) What’s up? What’s up? Old Zhao: Just kidding.

(pp. 208–210)

This vague depiction of the traumatic experience that the juancun mainlanders underwent during the White Terror may suggest that those who experienced it did not want to remember it or were unable to recount it in detail because they did not comprehend the meaning of the terror to their lives. However, without further addressing how the state violence impacted on ordinary people’s lives and changed them, the focus of this episode instead is on how the characters help one another and strive to survive with a sense of humor. The implication is that by maintaining their sense of humor these ordinary mainlanders were able to endure the dark political times. However, by failing to deal with the terror that people experienced, Lai and Wang were justifiably criticized for disrespecting and distorting the past. Commenting on the scenes about the White Terror in The Village, Chang Tieh-chih remarked, “these jokes alleviate the terror, and downplays the heaviness of history” (2014, para. 9). Critics Chang Tieh-chih and Kuo Li-hsin both take the highly acclaimed 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件) (by new wave cinema director Edward Yang, who is also a second-generation mainlander) as a benchmark to criticize The Village as lacking clarity in representing state violence. The film addresses the pathos of mainlanders in the 1960s, presenting the first generation as under the government’s strict surveillance, and the second generation as feeling lost and helpless about their future. One example is the dramatic personality change of the protagonist’s father after he is arrested by the secret police. After being interrogated day and night, he is forced to write a “confession” before being released. He accidentally sees a man in a dark room sitting on a large block of ice, shaking, and being interrogated. This experience shocks him such that after returning home, he falls silent and is always fearful. When we consider that historically accurate depictions of people’s suffering during the White Terror had become widely accepted in the 1990s, the erasure of this suffering in The Village drew quite a few criticisms, but interestingly this did not undermine its popular appeal. In this regard, sociologist Wu Hsin-yi maintains that Lai and Wang’s choice of understating the dark side and emphasizing the positive side aims at “reversing the meaning and values of juancun experience” (2010, p. 14), making it a place and a time that people can feel nostalgic for. The positive feedback of audiences, as well as the box-office success, may indicate that, despite the concern of the critics, general audiences in Taiwan in the 2000s had become less interested in revisiting the dark past of the White Terror but were more concerned with how they might glean hope from the depressing past.

Return, reunion, and settlement “Returning to China” is one issue that is integral to the portrayals of juancun and mainlanders’ lives in Taiwan. The Village deals with this in the scene “Visiting

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Families” (探親) which depicts three mainlander families’ “return” (回去) to their “old homes” (老家) (p. 224). Mainland Chinese critics, such as Lin Ting (2013) and Ding Chengxin (2010), interpret the scene as showing the strong ties between families across the Taiwan Strait. However, they seem to miss the point that the three reunions are quite different from the traditional idea of a grand reunion (大團圓) in which all family members return home to have a happy gathering. Old Zhao dies and his son takes his father’s place to visit the “old home” where he has never lived and “reunites” with family members that he has never met. In her trip to China, Mrs. Zhu realizes that Mr. Zhu was already married in China before he fled to Taiwan, and she becomes an outsider in Mr. Zhu’s reunion with his wife, son, and grandchild. As for Zhou Ning, his only surviving relative in China is his sister. The people he misses, including his parents and his lover, died years earlier. All he can do is visit their tombs. These three depictions of return reflect both attachment to the past and the inaccessibility of the past. In a 2008 interview,13 Lai Sheng-chuan described The Village as “a type of Taiwanese story” (一種台灣的故事) focused on the experiences of mainlander immigrants as they progressed from feeling themselves in exile to settling into their new lives in Taiwan (Liao & Zhu 2011, p. 279). The message of these mainlanders’ becoming Taiwanese is especially evident in three inter-connected scenes in three Acts with the same title “Under the Big Tree” (大樹下). All of the scenes are similar in terms of setting, with almost the same mainlander characters Zhou Ning, Old Zhao, Mr. Zhu, and Ji Guai chatting under a big tree.14 The scenes are brief but important, since they present the juancun residents responding to their environment at different periods. Remarkably, these scenes demonstrate the mainlander characters’ changing idea of “home”. “Under the Big Tree (One)” takes place when the mainlanders have only been in Taiwan for one year, with several characters talking about the possible measures that the KMT may take in order to defeat the Communists. Lai and Wang use Dai Li, the mysterious leader of the intelligence agents, to represent the hope of a return to the Mainland. Although Dai had already died in an aircraft accident in 1946, whether he is really dead or not becomes a recurring topic in the conversations of the characters Zhou, Zhao, Zhu, Wei, and Ji. The scene reveals that the characters’ wanting to retake China is somewhat like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which Didi and Gogo’s wait is ultimately in vain. In The Village, Dai’s death also suggests that the dream of retaking China was doomed to fail. “Under the Big Tree (Two)”, set in 1970, continues with debates over retaking the Mainland. This time the conversation is more farcical when set against the backdrop of the White Terror with the focus placed on Wei Zhong’s “disappearance”. The characters connect the myth of Dai Li with Wei Zhong, who has been arrested by the secret police, saying that both of them disappear in mysterious circumstances. In this way, the topic shifts from the question of Dai Li, his death and the plan of retaking China, to the fearful political situation in Taiwan, suggesting that these mainlanders suffer from not only uncertainty of their future, but also perplexity with regard to their life during the White Terror.

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 117 The scene “Under the Big Tree (Three)” occurs right after “Visiting Families” toward the end of the play, showing that after the mainlanders’ emotional reunions with their families in China, they implicitly recognize Taiwan as their “home”. Sitting under the big tree, as before, they no longer talk about retaking Mainland China, and instead, the conversation that takes place in the post-martial law period is turned to the then president, Lee Teng-hui. Mr. Zhu: Let me tell you. When Chiang [Ching-kuo] was about to pass away, do you know why he wanted to assign Lee Teng-hui, a Japanese who had once been a Communist, as the President? This took deep consideration. This was suggested by a master. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Yeah? Zhou Ning: Dai Li! Mr. Zhu: Dead! Zhou Ning: He wasn’t dead. Mr. Zhu: Crazy! Zhou Ning: This was organised by him. If not, how would you explain this! Mr. Zhu: Why do you still talk about Dai Li after so many years! (p. 238) In this scene, Mr. Zhu called Lee Teng-hui “a little asshole” (小王八蛋) (p. 236), reflecting the dismissive attitude that some juancun mainlanders held toward Lee. Other first-generation mainlander characters are also portrayed as agreeing with Mr. Zhu’s opinion. As Lee is widely praised in Taiwan for his role in democratizing Taiwan and for promoting bentuhua Taiwanization in the KMT, the play’s disparagement of Lee via a mainlander character was a pointed political comment. This episode seems to attempt to show first-generation juancun mainlanders’ collective distrust and dislike of the discourse of bentuhua Taiwanization that Li represented, so as to find resonance in the mainlander audience. Nonetheless, this scene does not convince Chen Le-rong, a Taiwan-based cultural critic who is a second-generation mainlander, as he states, “[The play] does not represent all Taiwanese-mainlanders and their children’s political stance and their complicated feelings about ‘China’” (2009, para. 14). Chen comments that the portrayal of these mainlander characters’ attitudes toward Lee Teng-hui fits better with Mainland Chinese audiences’ imagination of “KMT exiles” (流亡老國民黨人) (2009, para. 13). Despite Chen’s critique, the three scenes of “Under the Big Trees” outlined above reveal Wang and Lai’s nostalgic defense of juancun mainlanders’ settlement in Taiwan, and more importantly, they are a strong portrayal of how mainlanders came to call Taiwan home and to see themselves as members of Taiwanese society. The Village presents the juancun experience of mainlanders as part of Taiwan’s story, developing alongside the experience of the majority Hoklo Taiwanese, yet it obviously is quite different from the Taiwanese’ view of “Taiwan”. At the end of the play, a banquet is held for the juancun residents to bid farewell to their village, as it is about to be demolished. This farewell party scene is presented as a sharp contrast to the earlier scene of the characters’ visits to China.

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Compared with the scene “Visiting Family” in which the three family unions are filled with regret and sorrow, this scene “Take Another Look” (再看一眼) is staged more like a typical great family reunion (大團圓). The title “Take Another Look” evokes the nostalgia of the residents who know they must leave yet remain strongly attached to the juancun. The characters are presented as living, by this time, in many different places, in Taiwan and the US. However, as former residents of the compound, they have all returned for this last gathering. Unlike the earlier juancun writings and films, such as Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” and Yu Kan-ping’s Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? (搭錯車) (1983), which present the demolition and re-development scheme as the total destruction of the residents’ lives, the final farewell banquet scene in The Village takes place on Chinese New Year’s Eve. It is the traditional day of family reunions, and it symbolizes the anticipation of a new start. Old Zhao’s statement at the end of this scene best sums up the playwrights’ idea of juancun mainlanders’ relationship with the village and with Taiwan. He tells his son Xiao Mao that since he moved to Taiwan, he “has set roots down” (落地生根) (p. 259) in the village, and therefore his “home is here” (p. 260). The play ends with a group photo shot in which everyone is smiling. This marks a happy end to the juancun era. The group photo presents the residents of juancun as a family brought together by historical circumstances as war refugees. In contrast to the earlier juancun writings, Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Weichung’s The Village presents a strong call for audiences to see juancun culture and juancun mainlanders as “Taiwanese” instead of “Chinese”. Its success at the box office in Taiwan indicates that general Taiwanese audiences in the 2000s were more flexible with regard to this new narrative of juancun. However, this chapter demonstrates that by emphasizing juancun mainlanders’ smooth and harmonious transition into their lives in Taiwan and understating the divisions, conflicts, and tensions that had existed between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese, The Village makes the meanings and content of “being a mainlander in Taiwan” more contested and ambiguous. While the significance of The Village lies in its affirmation of juancun and mainlander identity as belonging to Taiwan, in the controversy that The Village caused in intellectual circles, particularly among mainlander critics, we can see that the ways Lai and Wang articulate juancun culture as part of Taiwanese culture are still far from being appreciated by those who are concerned with accurate representations of juancun life.

Notes 1 The early version of this chapter was published in Archiv Orientalni in 2014. The publication information is as follows: Huang, Phyllis Yu-ting. “Representing Military Dependents’ Villages: From Tragic Narratives to the Comedic Play Baodao yi cun [The Village]”. Archiv Orientalni 82.1 (2014): 141–162. 2 Other plays include Kara Orchestra (很久沒有敬我了你), a musical on indigenous people’s experience, The Impossible Times (渭水春風), which uses four different languages Hoklo, Japanese, Mandarin, and an indigenous language (Kari Seediq) to

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present the life of an important person in the colonial resistance movement, Chiang Wei-shui, and Human Condition I (人間條件1) which represents ordinary Hoklo communities’ experience. For example, cookbooks such as Wei-chung Sister’s Juancun Dishes I, II (偉忠姊姊的眷村菜I, II) (2008, 2009) were published, and several films on the theme of juancun were produced within several years after the debut of The Village, including Prince of Tears (淚王子) directed by Yang Fan 楊凡 in 2009 and War Game 229 (燃燒吧！歐吉桑) directed by Huang Chian-liang黃建亮 in 2011. See online blogs commenting on The Villages, such as http://yi326.pixnet.net/blog/ post/41173065-%E5%AF%B6%E5%B3%B6%E4%B8%80%E6%9D%91 and http:/ /wandereraw.pixnet.net/blog/post/25448002-%E5%AF%B6%E5%B3%B6%E4%B8 %80%E6%9D%91, accessed on 20 May, 2017. Juancun re or juancun xianxiang refers to the general public’s fascination with the culture of juancun, particularly the everyday life or popular culture in the villages, such as juancun cuisine and juancun-style buildings. It can be regarded as part of a trend toward greater nostalgia. In Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, she argues that prosthetic memories are not based upon personal experiences, but rather emerge through the media or different types of cultural technologies. Such memories are highly influenced by mass-mediated representations of history, through which one’s empathy, love, and social responsibility may be inspired, even if one did not experience the events personally. See also the website of “I am a juancun person” 我是眷村人 http://www.taiwanvillage .org/, accessed on March 3, 2015, for general mainlanders’ feedback on the government’s policies about the juancun. Lai Sheng-chuan has been known as a friend of Ma Ying-jeou. In 2009, when Lai’s daughter got married, Ma was known to call the newlywed couple to congratulate them. In 2011, Lai’s controversial musical Dreamer, which spent around 200 million NT dollars in government funds for the two-day performances, resulted in media and social commentators’ serious critiques concerning the relation between the Ma government and Lai. See Lin Hengzhe’s “On Chen Shui-bian’s and Ma Ying-jeou’s Cultural Construction [Lun Chen Shui-bian yu Ma Ying-jeou de wenhua jianshe]”. Wang Wei-chung is a well-known producer in Taiwan. He has made popular TV programs, such as the variety shows Kangxi Laile 康熙來了 (2004–2016) and Quanmin Da Menguo 全民大悶鍋 (2004–2006), and the TV drama Time Story 光陰的故事 (2008). Lai’s renowned play, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Spring 暗戀桃花源 (1986), also examines the issue of mainlanders’ identity, feeling of belonging/alienation, and struggles between Taiwan and China. Yet, in the play, Lai mingles melodrama with farce, creating a sense of “painful humor”, which is totally different from the techniques he used in The Village. See Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, “A Peach Blossom Diaspora: Negotiating Nation Spaces in the Writing of Taiwan” (1999). Audiences are given Tianjing buns at the end of the play, so that they can bring home the taste of the reified ethnic fusion. In the play, Ji Guai’s lines are written in unintelligible symbols. This quote copies the symbols from the play. The interview was first published in Performing Arts Review in 2008 and was re-printed in Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village (2011). The version I use in this thesis is the one published in 2011. Wei Zhong is one of the characters in “Under the Big Tree (One)”, but he disappears in “Under the Big Tree (Two)”. Audiences are told that he was arrested by the secret police. Old Zhao died before the scene of “Under the Big Tree (Three)”, so only Zhu, Zhou, and Ji are chatting under the tree in this scene.

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References Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bartholomew, I. (2008, December 5). Welcome the Nostalgia All-Stars. Taipei Times, p. 15. Retrieved 17 July, 2018, from http:​/​/www​​.taip​​eitim​​es​.co​​m​/New​​s​/fea​​t​/pri​​nt​/20​​08​/12​​​ /05​/2​​00343​​0331 Chang, M. K. 張茂桂. (2010a). Xiangxiang juancun 想象眷村 [Imagining Juancun]. In Q. Zhang 张嫱 (Ed.), Baodao juancun 宝岛眷村 [A Glimpse of Taiwan Military Villages] (pp. 37–49). Beijing: China Renmin University Press. Chang, M. K. 張茂桂. (2010b). Xiangxiang juancun zhi liujin suiyue 想像眷村之流金歲月 [Imagining Juancun—The Golden Age]. In Zhishi xiangyan知識饗宴6 [Feast of Knolwedge 6] (pp. 261–287). Taipei: Academia Sinica. Chang, T.C. 張鐵志. (2014, January 24). Zai xiao lei jian yiwang lishi de Baodao yi cun 在笑淚間遺忘歷史的「寶島一村」[The Forgotten History in Laughter and Tears: The Village]. The Storm Media 風傳媒. Retrieved 14 January, 2015, from http:// http:// www​.storm​.mg​/article​/22349 Chen, C. H. 陳正熙. (2009, February 26). Bushi tianjin baozi, ershi lengdong baozi 不是天津包子,而是冷凍包子 [Not Tianjin Meat Buns, but Frozen Buns]. Performing Arts Review 表演藝術雜誌 [PAR], 194, 26. Chen, L. R. 陳樂融. (2009, February 22). Baodao yi cun buneng fangong, jiu waixiao daluba 「寶島一村」不能反攻，就外銷大陸吧 [If The Village Cannot Retake China, then Exporting to China]. Retrieved 15 July, 2017, from http://fc​.ktchiu​.com/​?p​=965 Chen, M. 陈美霞. (2011). Shutu tong gui: huai jiu yu Taiwan jing yan—shilün Taiwan juancun wenyi fengchao 殊途同归：怀旧与台湾经验——试论台湾眷村文艺风潮 [Reaching the Same Goal: Nostalgia and Taiwanese Experience—On the Literary Trend of Taiwanese Military Dependents’ Villages]. Forum of Arts 艺苑. 3, 76–81. Chow, E. C. (1999). A Peach Blossom Diaspora: Negotiating Nation Spaces in the Writing of Taiwan. South Atlantic Quarterly, 98(1/2), 143–162. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2001). Weiliao 未了 [Everlasting]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxuei. Chu, T. H. 朱天心. (2003). Epilogue: In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound. In M. Wu (Trans.), P. Y. Chi & D. D. W. Wang (Eds.), The Last of the Whampoa Breed (pp. 242–270). New York: Columbia University Press. Ding, C. 丁尘馨. (2010). Baodao yi cun: zai xixiao zhong biaoda tonggan《宝岛一村》，在嬉笑中表达痛感 [The Village: Conveying Pain by Means of Humor]. Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan中国新闻周刊 [China Newsweek], 48, 104–106. Hong, H. 鴻鴻. (2011). Baodao yi cun: yi qün yimin de liuwang shishi 寶島一村：一群移民的流亡史詩 [The Village: A Group of Émigrés’ Epic of Exile]. In Baodao juancun 寶島一村 [The Village] (pp. 284–285). Taipei: National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center and Performing Arts Review 國立中正文化中心. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kao, Y. C. 高有智. (2011). Juancun wenhua baocun gongzuozhe qünxiang 眷村文化保 存工作者群像 [Portraits of Local Culturati for Juancun Reservation]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 289–322). Taipei: Qünxue. Ko, L. H. 柯林斯. (2011). Yi er san dao Taiwan: juancun de xingjian yu gaijian 「一二三、到台灣」「眷村」的興建與改建 [The Origin and Construction of Juancun Policies]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 253–274). Taipei: Qünxue.

Inventing a Taiwanized juancun 121 Kuo, L. H. 郭力昕. (2009, February 28). Xiaofei juancun yu lishi jiyi 消費眷村與歷史記憶 [Consuming Juancun and Historical Memory]. Zhongguo shibao 中國時報 [China Times]. Retrieved 18 December, 2012, from http://www.coolloud.org.tw/node/35980 Lai, B. 賴勇衡. (2018, March 28). Lai Sheng-chuan Baodao yi cun: Yao guanzhong xiao bian xiao, yao guanzhong ku bian ku—weihe shi wenti suozai? 賴聲川《寶 一村 》：要觀眾笑便笑、要觀眾哭便哭－為何是問題所在？[Lai Sheng-chuan’s The Village: Manipulating Audience’ Emotions—Why is that a Problem?] Retrieved 19 July, 2018, from https://medium.com/%E6%88%91%E4%B8%8D%E6%98%AF %E8%B2%93 Lai, S. C. 賴聲川 &Wang, W. C. 王偉忠 (2011). Baodao yi cun 寶 一村 [The Village]. Taipei: National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center and Performing Arts Review 國立中正文化中心. Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Li, Z. D 李至德 &Liang, Y. F. 梁玉芳. (2009, April 7). Juancun wenhua: jilu dabianqian de shidai 眷村文化：紀錄大變遷的時代 [Juancun Culture: Recording the Age of the Huge Cataclysm]. Lianghe bao 聯合報 [United Daily], p. A3. Retrieved 19 August, 2012, from http://mag.udn.com/mag/people/storypage.jsp?f_ART_ID=188268 Liao, J. C. 廖俊逞 &Zhu, A. R. 朱安如. (2011). Lai Sheng-chuan: rang gushi shuo ziji de gushi 賴聲川：讓故事說自己的故事 [Lai Sheng-chuan: Let Stories Tell Their Own Stories]. In Baodao yi cun 寶 一村 [The Village] (pp. 278–281). Taipei: National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center and Performing Arts Review 國立中正文化中心. Lin, T. 林婷. (2013). Shijian, meijie, shengfen: Baodao yi cun yu Taiwan ‘juancun yanshuo’ 时间，媒介，身份：《宝岛一村》与台湾“眷村言说” [Time, Medium, and Identity: The Village and Taiwan’s ‘Juancun Story’]. Wenxue pinglun 文学评论, 5, 212–220. Liu, Y. N. 劉育寧. (2013). Taiwan jüchang kuashiji de huaijiu xiangxiang 台灣劇場跨世紀的懷舊想像 [On Nostalgic Imagination in the Theatres of Taiwan at the Turn of the Twentieth-First Century]. Taipei Theatre Journal 戲劇學刊, 18, 51–68. Rea, C. G. & Volland, N. (2008). Comic Visions of Modern China: Introduction. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 20(2), v–xviii. Su, W. C. 蘇偉貞. (2004). Xü: juancun de jintou 序：眷村的盡頭 [Preface: The End of Military Dependents’ Village]. In W.C. Su (Ed.), Taiwan juancun xiaoshuo xian 台灣眷村小說選 [A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories] (pp. 7–13). Taipei: Eryu Wenhua. Tai, Crystal. (2011, January 14). A Tragedy Turned into Comedy Draws Crowd to Flint Center. Cupertino Patch. Retrieved 15 August, 2012, from https://patch.com/california /cupertino Wang, W. C. 王偉忠 & Xu, G. H. 許戈輝. (2011, November 23). Wang Wei-chung: Juancun shi ge xiao Zhongguo 王偉忠：眷村是個小中國 [Wang Wei-chung: Juancun is a Small China]. Retrieved 10 January, 2017, from http://big5.taiwan.cn/tsh/zxyd/ smtw/201111/t20111123_2175134.htm Wilson, J. L. (2005). Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Wu, H. Y. 吳忻怡. (2010, December 4). Jüguangdeng xia de zhuliba: cong Baodao yi cun kan juancun jiti jiyi de zaixian yu xinggou 聚光燈下的竹籬笆：從〈寶 一村〉 看眷村集體記憶的再現與形構 [The Bamboo Fence under the Spotlight: Re-presenting and Constructing Collective Memory of Military Dependents Villages in The Village].

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Paper presented at the Annual Conference of Taiwanese Sociological Association, Taipei, Taiwan. Wu, H. Y. 吳忻怡. (2011). Zuori de xuanhua: juancun wenxue yü juancun 昨日的喧嘩：眷村文學與眷村 [Hubbub from Yesterday—Literature and Juancun]. In H. B. Zhang (Ed.), Fusanghua yu jiayuan xiangxiang 扶桑花與家園想像 [Hibiscus and Imaging Home] (pp. 3–34). Taipei: Qünxue. Yang, D. C. 楊德昌 (Director). (1991). Gulingjie shaonian sharen shijian 牯嶺街少年殺人事件 [A Brighter Summer Say] [Film]. Taipei, Taiwan: Zhong yin [Central Pictures Corporation]. Yu, K. P. 虞戡平 (Director). (1983). Da cuo che 搭錯車 [Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing?] [Film]. Hong Kong: Xing yi cheng [Cinema City]. Yuan, C. C. 袁瓊瓊. (1988). Jin shen yuan 今生緣 [This Love, This Life]. Taipei: Lianhe Wenxue. Zhu, A. R. 朱安如. (2011). Wang Wei-chung: Baodao yu cun, gushi weiwan 王偉忠：寶 一村，故事未完 [Wang Wei-chung: The Village, to Be Continued]. In Baodao yi cun 寶 一村 [The Village] (pp. 274–277). Taipei: National Chiang Kaishek Cultural Center and Performing Arts Review 國立中正文化中心.

5

Happily ever after? Homecoming and mainlander identity in Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well (桃花井)

At the very beginning of the introduction to Shu-mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity (2007), she uses Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) (which won the Oscar Academy Award for best foreign film in 2001) to contest the concept of a homogeneous Chineseness. She pointed out that the four leading actors (two male, two female) in this martial arts film came from four different Chinesespeaking communities (Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Malaysia). To Western audiences, they may seem to speak the same language, i.e., Mandarin. They, in fact, show stark differences in terms of their accents, and more importantly, the “Chinese cultures” they represent. As she states, “What the film makes audible, hence also visible, is confirmation of the continuous existence of the Sinophone communities as significant sites of cultural production in a complex set of relations with such constructs as ‘China,’ ‘Chinese,’ and ‘Chineseness’” (2007, p. 4). Shih emphasizes the varieties of “Chinese cultures” developed in different social contexts, and argues that being ethnic Chinese and using the Chinese language do not bring about a homogeneous cultural identity nor the same sense of belonging to Mainland China culturally and politically. While there is still a powerful assumption of “China” and “Chinese” as a unified cultural entity in the Mainland Chinese official discourse and media,1 in Taiwan of the 1990s and since, that assumption has given way to a discourse celebrating Taiwanese subjectivity, in which Taiwanese culture is presented as an autonomous cultural entity as a result of its specific historical and socio-political development, even though it has clear links to the language and culture of Mainland China. In fact, scholars like Shih have detected a growing global trend in the Chinese-speaking world of increasing hybridization and multiplicity in terms of Chinese identity and culture. What Wei-ming Tu (1991) calls “the Middle Kingdom syndrome or Central Country complex” (p. 4)—the discourse that sees China as the center of culture and civilization, and overseas Chinese communities as peripheral—is replaced by discourses that recognize the uniqueness and autonomous cultural values of overseas Chinese communities. Chiang Hsiao-yun’s (蔣曉雲) novel Peach Blossom Well (桃花井) can be seen as an important example of this type of self-reflective exploration about what being overseas Chinese means. This US-based writer’s more recent publications, including Peach Blossom Well, A Hundred Years of Happiness (百年好合)

124 Happily ever after? (2011c)2, Tamarisk Baby (紅柳娃) (2013), and Red in Four Seasons (四季紅) (2016), are regarded by literary critics in Taiwan as major works that engage with the lives and identity issues of Chinese Civil War migrants in Taiwan and overseas.3 Narrating stories of mainlanders’ journeys to China, Peach Blossom Well explores the different perceptions of China by mainlanders of four generations living in Taipei City, Taiwan, and the US. Plurality and complexity of identity is the dominant feature of Chiang Hsiao-yun’s novel. It shows that the mainlander characters’ cultural identity is not simply influenced by political factors, such as their wartime experiences and the KMT’s dictatorship. The effects of rapid modernization resulting in cultural integration through globalization is presented as a key factor in complicating the construction of a mainlander identity. The novel underscores how the presumption of Chinese identity as if it were a self-contained essence to be passed from one generation to the next is unsustainable. Instead, mainlander identity is presented as always subject to temporal, spatial, and social change. The novel was published in Taiwan (2011) and China (2014) with readers and critics generally responding positively to it. In China and Taiwan, however, the novel was interpreted differently. Critics in Taiwan often focus on Chiang’s depiction of the wide cultural and social schism across the Strait. As Cheng Kengliang states, “Peach Blossom Well does not address nostalgia, but focuses more on the disillusionment of nostalgia after a return, and on the changes a big family undergoes as a result of different historical and political experiences” (2011, n.p.). Ji Ji (2011) also comments, “The numerous characters in Peach Blossom Well along with multiple interwoven times also bring about the multiple angles of confrontations of values across the Strait” (p. 126). Readers and critics in China, on the other hand, pay more attention to the first-generation characters’ lifelong yearning to return home, and their decision to re-settle in their homeland despite all difficulties. Critic Li Yang states the first-generation mainlanders’ longing for the original homeland “results from ordinary Chinese people’s genuine affection for the home-state. They never talk about their love for their country, but the deep affection for their original country is an inseverable emotion that exists in their blood” (2016, p. 111). Such diverse interpretations of the novel to a certain degree can be seen as a reflection of readers’ different views of “Chinese identity” across the Strait. While Mainland Chinese critics like Li Yang show their belief in a unified cultural value based on ethnicity, Taiwanese critics tend to see Taiwan and China as two cultural sites with distinctive beliefs and values. Chiang’s Peach Blossom Well delves into the issue of the returned mainlanders’ lives in China and their ambivalent relationship with this “motherland”. While the theme of China has been a major concern of Taiwan’s second-generation mainlander writers, in the works discussed in the previous chapters, China is most often treated as a distant, imagined land that exists only in the stories that have been told by mainlander parents, textbooks, media, and the second-generation mainlander characters’ imagination. Although Wang and Lai’s The Village includes a segment dealing with the mainlander characters’

Happily ever after? 125 trips to China, the play is centered around the reunion of the separated families. Nothing about mainlanders’ experience of contemporary Mainland Chinese society is delved into. Whereas Chiang’s novel may seem to be a throwback, reflecting the preoccupation of an earlier literary genre of homecoming writings (返鄉文學) in the late 1980s and 1990s, what makes it unique is the critical perspective it provides on mainlander culture, via the dramatization of Taiwanese mainlanders’ feelings about their Chinese family members with whom they were belatedly “reunited”. While several earlier works such as Hsiao Sa’s “My Relatives in Hong Kong” (香港親戚) (1986/2003) and Show Fong’s “1,230 Spots” (一千二百三十 ) (1996/2003)4 revolve around the first-generation mainlander characters’ anticipation of the moment of the family reunion, Chiang examines the problems that occur after their return. Specifically, Peach Blossom Well tells of the ways in which returning mainlanders feel estranged from the people in their hometowns. Whereas most earlier works treat the mainlanders’ trips to China as visits, Chiang’s novel portrays the leading first-generation character Li’s journey as a process of re-settlement. This was a relatively rare situation. According to historian Joshua Fan (2011), by 2001, only around 2 percent of first-generation mainlanders had moved back to China permanently (pp. 148–149). Nonetheless, the theme of mainlanders’ re-settlement in China brings issues of lifestyle differences between China and Taiwan to the fore as well as problems of adaptation, identity, and self-representation. In this novel, the mainlander character Li Jinzhou is depicted as having undergone a transformation of identity as a result of living in exile. However, he does not recognize how his life in Taiwan had changed him until his return to China. Throughout, the author uses the terms “homeland” (家鄉) and “homecoming” (回家, 返鄉) to refer to China while also highlighting the mainlander protagonist Li’s remembered China as an illusion.

Mainlanders’ homecoming as a theorizing of Chineseness Since Peach Blossom Well revolves around the transformation of different mainlander generations’ Chinese identities, Shu-mei Shih’s and Ien Ang’s arguments regarding Chineseness are vital to my analysis of this novel. Both scholars treat the term as highly interpretable and in so doing, provide valuable theoretical guidance on its usage. As discussed in the Introduction, the term “Chineseness” (中國性) implies a unified cultural identity. It is the notion of an inherited birthright and one that is familiar to people who are educated in Chinese in the twentieth century and since, whether in China or in overseas Chinese communities. Through the reproduction of standardized cultural characteristics, as Shih argues, Chineseness “effectively becomes evaluable, measurable, and quantifiable” (2013, p. 29). However, Shih refuses to accept the presumption that Chinese people, no matter where they are located, possess a univocal Chinese identity or quality.

126 Happily ever after? Shu-mei Shih examines the various Sinitic-language communities5 in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, which together she calls “the Sinophone”, and maintains, The Sinophone is a place-based, everyday practice and experience, and thus it is a historical formation that constantly undergoes transformation that reflects local needs and conditions. It can be a site of both a longing for and rejection of various constructions of Chineseness; it can be a site of both nationalism of the long-distance kind, anti-China politics, or even nonrelation with China, whether real or imaginary. (2013, p. 33) Emphasizing Chinese migrants’ interactions with the society they live, Shu-mei Shih argues that not all overseas Chinese communities have a nostalgic longing for the country of their origin. On the contrary, the immigrants might have been acculturated into the society of their settlement, thereby changing their sense of where “home” is. Shih’s concept of the Sinophone shifts the focus from “homeland” to “route” and “root”. She states that the discourse of the Sinophone “allows us to rethink the relationship between roots and routes by considering the conception of roots as place-based rather than ancestral or routes as a more mobile conception of home-ness rather than wandering and homelessness” (2013, p. 38). Similarly, Ien Ang emphasizes the complexity of cultural politics presented in the Chinese diaspora’s sense of identity: “Chineseness is not a category with a fixed content—be it racial, cultural, or geographical—but operates as an open and indeterminate signifier whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections of the Chinese diaspora” (2013, pp. 58–59). Ang describes herself as a “Chinese” person who was born in Indonesia, educated in the Netherlands, and who does not speak Chinese.6 She refuses to accept that being a Chinese is a “heritage” by nature, noting that one’s identity is more a strategic choice and negotiation among multiple identities. According to Ang, diasporic subjects are not Chinese but “post-Chinese”, with multiple identities that show “continuing cross-influences of diverse, lateral, unanticipated intercultural encounters in the world at large” (2013, p. 70). Thus, Chinese diasporic identity is inevitably “transnational” and “global” rather than univocal (2005, pp. 34–35), and as a result, the characteristics of being Chinese become complicated and flexible. As Ien Ang argues for the hybridity and multiplicity of overseas Chinese identification, Shih contests the longstanding assumption of immigrants as somehow always tied to the original homeland (or ancestral land) and maintains that migrants’ identity is more influenced by the place(s) where they live. Both Ang’s and Shih’s arguments are relevant to the representation of the mainlander characters’ cultural identity in Peach Blossom Well in that the novel presents the four generations of mainlander characters as holding different (place-based and hybrid) views of China and Chineseness. The novel does not evoke an authentic

Happily ever after? 127 or core Chinese cultural identity and can thus be read as challenging the assumption of such an identity. In dealing with the issue concerning how mainlanders’ identification is influenced by their “homecoming journeys” to China, most first- and second-generation mainlander writers have treated it as an either-or choice between Taiwan and China. As critic Wong Bochuan (2006) argues, mainlanders’ homecoming literature, including travel writing, prose, and fiction, published from 1987 to 2001, has revealed a progressive change of attitude with many authors describing Taiwan as their “new homeland” after making trips to China (p. 105). An early example is Chu Tien-wen’s short story “Take Me away, Moonlight” (帶我去吧，月光) (1989/2008), a story of a Taiwan-based mainlander and her children’s trip to her hometown of Nanjing. Chu’s story presents the mainlander characters’ total disillusionment with their “homeland”, as the Mainland Chinese relatives are depicted as caring more about possible financial benefits from the reunion, rather than rekindling family ties. Critic Huang Kuan-hsiang (2014) argues that in Chu’s story, the trip to China pushes the mainlander characters to choose between the two different sets of values and identities of China and Taiwan, and that Taiwan becomes the characters’ choice by the end of the story: “This process is no doubt the deconstruction of their ‘sojourner’ mentality and, at the same time, it is the initiation of the formation of a Taiwanese consciousness” (p. 115). Indeed, many second-generation mainlander writers’ works of the post-martial law era express the authors’ attempts to re-negotiate a mainlanders’ position in Taiwanese society and to redefine themselves as Taiwanese or at least mainlander-Taiwanese. The authors I have discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 fall into this category. What is notable about Chiang’s Peach Blossom Well is that it does not interpret mainlanders’ identity as a choice between being Taiwanese and Chinese. Instead, the novel shows the two named identities as interdependent and a source of emotional ambivalence and complexity, especially for the leading first-generation mainlander character Li, as he finds himself unable to identify with either. As historian Joshua Fan (2011) notes, the first-generation mainlanders “were not just outsiders in Taiwan but also in the places they called home” (p. 146). In Peach Blossom Well, Chiang positions her mainlander characters, both the first generation and their descendants, in the framework of huaren (華人), which signifies a broader but more ambiguous and flexible classification of being Chinese. While affirming certain cultural, ethnic, and linguistic bonds, such a categorization of huaren recognizes the cultural heterogeneity based on the place one resides in and the period one grows up in. As Wei-ming Tu (1991) puts it, “Huaren is not geopolitically centred, for it indicates a common ancestry and a shared cultural background, while Zhonguoren necessarily evokes obligations and loyalties of political affiliation and the myth of the Middle Kingdom” (p. 22). The idea of huaren, so defined, is at odds with a conception of Chineseness as one that presumes overseas Chinese to be ethnically, culturally, and emotionally tied to China. Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity is worth noting here:

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Happily ever after? Strategies of hybridization reveal an estranging movement in the ‘authoritative’, even authoritarian inscription of the cultural sign. At the point at which the precept attempts to objectify itself as a generalized knowledge or a normalizing, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy or discourse opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal. Such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration. It makes possible the emergence of an “interstitial” agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. (1996, p. 58)

Throughout Peach Blossom Well, Chiang shows the hybridity of mainlanders’ identity by making explicit how the mainlander characters are defined differently by different others. The novel emphasizes that mainlander identity is equivocal, even though the idea of “mainlander” presupposes a “generalized knowledge” and a set of normalizing cultural practices, which can be exemplified by Li Jinzhou’s clinging to a fixed notion of Chinese culture. However, his Chinese acquaintances and relatives call him “the Taiwanese old man” (台灣老頭) (p. 65, p. 108, p. 162). It is only in Taiwan that he is regarded as a “mainlander” (waishengren) (p. 39, p. 110, p. 128). Li’s trips to China are referred to as “homecomings” (返鄉) and Yueyang is described as his “hometown” (家鄉) (p. 75). Yet, Li is never referred to as a Zhongguoren by the narrator or himself. This ambiguity of references to the protagonist’s identities and actions is clearly intended to convey the complexity of his connections to both Taiwan and China. Chiang seems to suggest that China and Taiwan are bound together yet set apart. Readers are thus compelled to note the tensions between the cultural identities associated with these two names and to link the tragedy of Li Jinzhou’s death to his fatal attachment to being Chinese. The cultural identities of the four generations of the Li family are presented as being in continuous evolution. The story of the novel spans several decades, from 1949 to the early 1990s, when the two first-generation characters Li Jinzhou and Yang Jingyuan “return home”, through to 2000, when Li Jinzhou dies in China, and ending in 2005, when his relatives in Taiwan and the US go to China to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death. The first-generation mainlander characters are shown as suffering from the KMT’s dictatorship, yet their cultural values are closely tied to the KMT’s articulation. The novel shows that Li Jinzhou’s belief in Confucian virtues leads him to feel repulsed by the “vulgar” and “calculating” culture he encountered in the contemporary society of Yueyang. Li Jinzhou’s two sons, Li Shensi and Li Shenxing, who were born in the 1940s and grew up separately on either side of the Taiwan Strait, are presented as “products” of the two very different political regimes of the PRC and ROC, but they are also victims of the Chinese Communists’ Cultural Revolution and the KMT’s White Terror, respectively. With an emphasis placed on Li Shenxing’s emotional distance from his father’s homeland as well as his brother’s life in China, blood ties in the novel do not draw the two second-generation characters closer, but instead lead them to be mutually hostile and resentful. The PRC government’s one-China policy, which claims Taiwan as part of China and takes ethnicity and

Happily ever after? 129 language as the base of a unified cultural and national identity, is questioned throughout the novel. The third-generation characters, Li Jiabao and Li Jia’ai, who grew up in Taipei, the largest city in Taiwan, are depicted as highly Westernized. They are culturally identified with Taiwan, which is presented in the novel as a globalized and modernized society. The angle the author adopts to present their attitude to China revolves around the contrast these characters draw between the urban Taipei culture they identify with and the rural culture in a small town in Yueyang, which they see as alien, dangerous, strange, and backward. Yet they are in Yueyang because of their grandfather, indicating that they cannot avoid this family connection to a place for which they have no affection. The unnamed fourth-generation character, Li Jia’ai’s son, who was born and grew up in the US, is presented as a boy who knows little about Chinese culture and does not speak Chinese, and thus lacks the fundamental “elements” out of which Chinese identity is formed. Through stories of these mainlander characters of four generations, the novel makes explicit that there is no set qualities of being a “mainlander”, but instead such an identity is one that is flexibly developed in between the country of origin and country of settlement.

A US-based second-generation mainlander writer Chiang Hsiao-yun’s self-identity which is projected to her writing is an important topic to discuss when examining Peach Blossom Well, since the major character Li Jinzhou in many ways can be seen as the dramatization of the author’s father (Li 2014).7 Moreover, in the Preface to the novel, she calls herself a second-generation mainlander (第二代外省人) (2011b, p. 8), stating that the novel is her feedback to Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village and the mainlander image it popularized. Chiang wrote that as a mainlander herself, she had a totally different experience in Taiwan. Therefore, she wanted the readers to know that “Taiwan’s mainlanders are not a homogeneous group. There were also mainlanders’ painful experiences outside the villages” (2011b, p. 9). As such, the novel can be seen as written with an aim to supplement or re-shape Wang and Lai’s narrative of mainlander identity. One of the most notable differences between Chiang Hsiao-yun and other second-generation mainlander writers is that she migrated to the US in her twenties. Chiang was born in Taiwan in 1954 and migrated to the US in 1980. She is often mentioned by critics alongside other second-generation mainlander writers, such as Chu Tien-hsin, Chu Tien-wen, and Chang Ta-chun, since they all started their writing careers in the 1970s and became successful authors. Chiang was a three-time winner of the United Daily News Literary Award in Taiwan. Two volumes of her short stories, Float with Destiny (隨緣) and The Road of Love (姻緣路), were published in 1977 and 1980. The renowned scholar and critic Chih-Tsing Hsia once compared Chiang with Eileen Chang, stating that Chu Hsining had praised Chiang as Chang’s literary successor (2015, p. 2). It is notable

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that Chiang’s early works do not touch on the issue of mainlander identity, but instead focus on romance and marriage. Chiang virtually stopped writing for around 30 years. She produced the occasional short story during this time. She worked in information technology and management, a career that took her to Shanghai for around five years, starting in 2005. Peach Blossom Well was her first work after she resumed writing in 2010, and it was also the first work that addressed issues related to mainlander identity. Since 2011, she has published three collections of short stories. These stories revolve around female characters of her parents’ generation, whom she describes as “ordinary folks of Republican China” (民國素人)8— people who were born before 1949 in China during the Republican era and who migrated to different parts of the world. In this regard, Chiang’s focus on female civilians (in her short stories) and Mainland Chinese intellectuals who fled to Taiwan in the 1940s (in Peach Blossom Well) is relatively unusual as most mainlander writings are focused on the lives of Taiwan’s migrant KMT soldiers. Nonetheless, her recent works reflect a preoccupation shared by other second-generation writers; namely, how do second-generation mainlanders deal with the legacy of their mainlander parents’ attachments to the lives they once lived in China. To explain why she chose to write about mainlanders, Chiang wrote in her introduction to A Hundred Years of Happiness (2011): I cannot point out exactly which stories contain the images of my parents, their friends or some people who appeared in my childhood. But [when I was young], I followed the previous generation’s narratives to experience their Republic of China through a little girl’s innocent eyes. Then, I spent a large part of my life reflecting, inquiring, and contemplating. I did not start to tell these stories until the centennial anniversary of the [first] Chinese Republic. (2011a, pp. 9–10) Peach Blossom Well presents Chiang’s critical response toward the previous generation’s stories after years of contemplation. It is in her choice of topics and the autobiographical concern with the previous generation that most defines Chiang Hsiao-yun as a second-generation mainlander writer even though she does not reside in Taiwan. Yet, her narratives enrich, broaden, and complicate the idea of what it means to be a mainlander today.

Chiang Hsiao-yun’s changing imagery of a “home” in China Peach Blossom Well was written sporadically over three decades (from 1979 to 2010), and thus it can serve to document Chiang’s changing attitudes to China. The first two chapters on Yang Jingyuan’s story of leaving China and returning “home” were written in 1979 and 1995 respectively, and the latter four chapters on Li Jinzhou’s “homecoming” story and re-settlement in China, which are the major focus of the novel, were written in 2010 after Chiang’s five-year stay in

Happily ever after? 131 China from 2005 to 2009. Chiang seems to have sought deliberately to make Li’s story significantly different from that of Yang in terms of the two characters’ experiences of their hometown, Yueyang. Chiang Hsiao-yun had not been to China when she wrote Yang’s story. Therefore, the story about Yang constitutes her imagining of China as an ancestral homeland, and it is not surprising that her narrative was deeply influenced by the KMT’s representation of China as an eternal homeland. Conversely, the story she tells of Li, which was written in 2010—shortly after Chiang left China, conveys a far more complex range of feelings about the idea of China as “home”. The first two chapters of Peach Blossom Well “Leaving” (去鄉) and “Homecoming” (回家) depict Yang’s journey of flight, exile, and return, which highlights the character’s alienation from Taiwan and yearning for China. His story draws to a happy close on his deathbed in Yueyang, where he is reunited with his long-separated wife and son. Yang passes away soon after he returns to China. The chapter of “Leaving” exemplifies Chiang’s writing style in the 1970s, which is focused on the protagonist Yang’s love and intense emotions toward his wife, son, and his homeland. The chapter “Homecoming”, first published in 1995 in United Daily News (聯合報) when the author was living in the US, can be seen as Chiang’s early attempt to deal with the issue of Taiwan-based mainlanders’ identity and their return to China. “Homecoming” does not address the practical problems of cultural and ideological differences that the long-separated family members had internalized. Instead, the story presents family relationships as consisting of such strong affective bonds as to be totally unaffected by socio-political upheavals. Yang’s story ends sadly but romantically, as if homecoming is the best cure for homesickness, and a solution to historical pain: He [Yang] held his family’s hands tightly until he died, taking with him the love he had missed for forty years. Before his return, he was worried that his son would be disappointed with his poverty, but his son and his son’s family felt compensated by the only tens of thousands dollars (幾萬塊) he gave them, which was basically the cost of a meal for rich people in Taipei. (p. 56) This idealized and romanticized imagination of homecoming mirrors the KMT’s narrative of China in the martial law period, as if an unchanged homeland has always been there waiting for the returnees. It also implies the financial inequalities between a wealthy Taiwan and an impoverished China in the early 1990s. Modernity and prosperity in Taiwan is presented as benefiting this character’s homecoming, as Yang’s son is easily satisfied with the amount of money his father gives him. However, the story of Li Jinzhou in the second part is a contrast to this happy homecoming in the first part of Peach Blossom Well. By putting the two stories together, the writer seems to be inviting readers to negate, from the

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perspective of the Li story (written in 2010), her earlier story about Yang (published in 1995). The book is unevenly divided between the stories of Yang and Li. Of its 227 pages, the book’s first two chapters concerning Yang Jingyuan’s departure from and return to China take up only 45 pages. The four subsequent chapters, which are about Li Jinzhou and his descendants, take up 182 pages, or more than four-fifths of the novel.9 The author evidently accords far greater importance to Li’s story and, as noted earlier, she appears to have included the story about Yang in order to present a record of her own evolving attitude to Taiwan and China. In the story about Li, cultural differences, generational gaps, and Li’s feeling of being exploited by his Mainland Chinese relatives are foregrounded. The novel thus presents an interesting disjuncture between the earlier story about Yang, in which Chinese identity is essentialized, and the later story about Li, which throws into question everything that the earlier story takes for granted. The story of Li and his descendants resonates with the complex identification that comes of people leading cosmopolitan lives. To use Ien Ang’s words, the range of mainlander identities presented are “provisional and partial” (2005, p. 36), and the idea of identity is no longer a given but a strategic choice.

The first generation’s China-centric cultural nostalgia Chiang chose to portray her two mainlander protagonists Yang Jingyuan and Li Jinzhou as male intellectuals who were incarcerated in Taiwan because they were falsely accused of collaborating with the Chinese Communists. Yang was imprisoned for 25 years, while Li for five years. Akin to many second-generation mainlander works published in post-martial law period, such as those I discussed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, her characters are depicted as victims of the KMT’s White Terror. They are portrayed as deeply traumatized by their experience of incarceration. After being released, they become timid and distrustful, imagining that they have always been under close watch by the KMT. Their paranoia thus deepens their yearning to return to China. In examining mainlanders’ literary works, Taiwan-based literary critic Yang Chia-hsien (2010) points out that except for several earlier works by older writers, such as Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People (臺北人) (1971) and Li Yu’s Stories of Wenzhou Street (溫州街的故事) (1991), few delve into the lives of “highstatus mainlanders”10 (高階外省人).11 Generally speaking, “high-status mainlanders” are well-educated and from comparatively wealthy families in China. Their occupations are varied: some were high-ranking soldiers; others were senior government officials, academics, and other professional types.12 Chiang’s two first-generation male protagonists fit this definition of high-status mainlanders: Yang Jingyuan was a calligrapher from a gentry family, and Li Jinzhou a welleducated and compassionate county magistrate (縣長). Their portrayal as men who were wealthy and highly regarded when they live in China serves to accentuate their social degradation in Taiwan: Yang resorts to producing counterfeits of ancient masterpieces in order to earn money and save for his trip to China, and

Happily ever after?  133 Li, following his incarceration as a Communist collaborator, fails to find secure employment in Taiwan. Adding to the economic and social distress of these two displaced Chinese intellectual characters is their superior knowledge of and identification with traditional Chinese philosophy, culture, and values. As Yang Chia-hsien notes, high-status mainlanders are usually portrayed as a group “alienated from Taiwan (遠離本土) and fondly nostalgic about Mainland China (親近大陸)” (2010, p. 176). “Cultural nostalgia” (文化鄉愁) is the term Yang quoted from the well-known writer Pai Hsian-yung to describe these highstatus mainlanders’ homesickness, which involves a strong sense of emotional attachment to traditional Chinese culture, rather than simply to a geographical space or the families left behind there (2010, pp. 189–197). As she states, the cultural nostalgia does not refer to “a specific geographical site, but is ‘a collective memory of China’” (2010, p. 192). Chinese literary works, such as the classic cannon of History as a Mirror (資治通鑑) and Tang Dynasty poetry, as well as calligraphy and traditional painting, function as symbolic carriers of the idea of “home”, enabling acts of reminiscence and mourning (2010, pp. 192–193). Cultural nostalgia for China imagined as one’s cultural “homeland” requires a finite and reproducible content of Chineseness. What Wei-ming Tu calls the “Central Country Complex” provides a framework for the kind of cultural preference or even bias that drives this form of nostalgia. To apply Yang’s remarks about cultural nostalgia to Chiang’s portrayal of Li Jinzhou and Yang Jingyuan, we can say that both these characters are presented as persistently adhering to traditional Chinese values and Confucian virtues in particular. Both frequently defend courtesy (禮) and filial piety (孝) and embellish their speech with quotations from Analects. In the second chapter “Homecoming”, Yang planned to take a trip to China in 1991, and thus he decided to meet his acquaintance Li Jinzhou, as Li had gone back to China several times. Chiang employs an episode of the two old men’s accidental encounter with a protest for the direct presidential election to demonstrate how post-martial law Taiwan, in the eyes of these two characters, is a dangerous and chaotic place in which Confucian virtues have been lost, and Yang and Li are outsiders disconnected from the interests of wider society. Watching the protest, Li is upset, saying it is “outrageous” (不像話) (p. 32), while Yang is anxious and worried, quoting Confucius’ teaching of not entering a disorganized state (亂邦不入) to express his disagreement with the protest (p. 52). The cultural gulf between the Taiwanese and first-generation mainlanders is presented in the same episode in which Yang encounters a young Hoklo Taiwanese man speaking to him in Taiwanese. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” He [Yang Jingyuan] moves his arms trying to move forward. “What are you pushing for?” A young man who looks like a ruffian pushes the old man back with his shoulders and stares at him. “I… I want to pass”. Jingyuan protests timidly. “Everybody has things to do”.

134 Happily ever after? “That’s right. You people are crowded on the footbridge. We still have other things to do. What the hell!” A young lady comes to Yang’s rescue and speaks loudly. The thuggish-looking young man immediately feels that she is talking about him. He crosses his arms, shouting, “You nasty woman,13 who are you talking about? What the hell are YOU doing!” He spits out something he is chewing. Scornfully and provocatively he asks, “What do you want?” (pp. 53–54) This brief episode is the only one in the novel that depicts a character speaking in Taiwanese. The scene, at a certain level, presents the Taiwanese person who takes part in the local movement for democracy as rough and impolite. This is an implicitly biased portrayal of the Hoklo Taiwanese character from a mainlander’s perspective. Nonetheless, the episode overall also reflects the author’s impression of mainlanders’ anxiety in post-martial law Taiwan, because their social and cultural status had declined. As the native Taiwanese culture became mainstream, the author implies, first-generation mainlanders like Yang and Li were particularly affected. Their acute estrangement from Taiwan intensifies their yearning to return “home” to China. However, in the later chapter “Peach Blossom Well” the ironic treatment of Li’s return also presents him as a stranger in his “hometown” of Yueyang. Chiang lets her readers see that Li has actually been Taiwanized even if he does not recognize it. This echoes Stéphane Corcuff’s argument of mainlanders’ unconscious Taiwanization in his Light Wind and Warm Sun (2004). As Corcuff states, a huge problem of mainlanders is that “it is still hard for them to recognize, accept and admit that being influenced by the wave of Taiwanization for many years, they already identify with Taiwan” (p. 87).

No place to call home The first-generation character Li Jinzhou’s homesickness is presented as incurable because the particular place he sees as his longed-for “home” is a complex product of memory, imagination, and his life experience in Taiwan. On the changing nature of places that people call “home”, Doreen Massey argues, “The identities of places are inevitably unfixed. They are unfixed in part precisely because the social relations out of which they are constructed are themselves by their very nature dynamic and changing. They are also unfixed because of the continual production of further social effects through the very juxtaposition of those social relations” (1992, p. 13). However, Li’s longing is for what Shu-mei Shih refers to as “eternal China”—“the pristine, essential ‘China’ that had somehow escaped political and ideological contamination by the Chinese Communist Party. China here was not so much a nation-state, but a culture that had not changed much since the communist takeover, or for that matter, since time immemorial” (Shih’s italics, 2007, p. 131). Shih’s “eternal China” resonates with Yang Chia-hsien’s argument of “cultural nostalgia”. In Peach Blossom Well, Chiang’s narrative is

Happily ever after? 135 structured to lead to the conclusion that Li Jinzhou’s beautiful dream of returning home cannot but turn into bitter disappointment. In 2003, when Wen Jiabao, Premier of the PRC, visited the US, he quoted the first-generation mainlander poet Yu Kwang-chung’s (余光中) famous poem “Homesickness” (鄉愁) (1972) to describe the cross-Strait relations, stating, “A shallow strait is our deepest national trauma, our strongest homesickness” (一灣淺淺的海峽，是我們最大的國殤，最大的鄉愁) (Wen 2003, para. 2).14 In response to Wen on another occasion, Yu said that, after having visited China several times, he now realized “there are no solutions to homesickness” (Ru-yi Xu, p. A13). While Wen uses the trope of homesickness to promote closer culturalemotional ties between Taiwan and China, Yu’s response tells of an unbridgeable gap between the remembered home and the one a migrant actually experienced. Akin to Wen’s and Yu’s polarized attitudes with regard to the diverse interpretations of homesickness, Chiang Hsiao-yun’s novel presents two totally different stories: Yang Jingyuan’s happy reunion, as discussed above, and Li Jinzhou’s painful experience, which is the novel’s main focus. Moving back to his hometown Peach Blossom Well in his eighties, Li finds few traces of his remembered homeland. Instead, he has to find a place for himself in what he perceives as a mostly alien community. At the beginning of the chapter “Peach Blossom Well”, which tells Li Jinzhou’s experience of re-settling in his hometown, Chiang uses more than a page to explain the history of Li’s hometown. The town was said to date back to the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 AD). It might have had beautiful peach blossom trees and a well, but now it is a slum, primarily housing brothels and gambling dens. As the narrator puts it, “We don’t have the term ‘slum’ in the local dialect, but if you ask local elder people about Peach Blossom Well, they will describe it as a place like a slum” (p. 61). By calling Li’s hometown Peach Blossom Well, which alludes to the mythical land in the poet Tao Qian’s (365– 427 AD) “Peach Blossom Spring” (桃花源記),15 the author is clearly suggesting that Li is dreaming of an impossible place, and thus priming the reader for what follows in the story: that the real-life practicalities and problems faced by the inhabitants of Peach Blossom Well could lead only to the painful dispelling of Li’s imagined homeland.16 Setting Li’s homecoming in the early 1990s, when small towns in China had just started to be modernized while Taiwan already held the largest foreign reserves in the world, the novel dramatizes the problems caused by socio-economic inequalities between long-separated members of the same family. Dejected and financially desperate in Taiwan, Li finds himself comparatively wealthy and “welcomed” in his hometown. To prove that his homecoming is a victorious one, Li stays in one of the few three-star hotels which primarily serves successful overseas Chinese (p. 68) and gives gold jewelry and money to his relatives as gifts (p. 75). Consequently, in his hometown, he is seen as “a rich old Taiwanese man” (p. 83, p. 86, p. 99) or “a wealthy patron” (p. 147). What his Chinese relatives, including his own eldest son, see in him is not a genial patriarch, the image he seeks to present, but a financial resource. They attribute the torment they have

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gone through in the past decades to this escaped “KMT relative” and expect him to compensate them for the hardships they have endured. While the mainlander character, seeing himself as a returned son to the motherland, struggles to put on a show of personal success, Chiang lets readers see, via the omniscient narrator, that he is regarded as an outsider. Chiang’s novel struck a chord with many returned mainlanders in Taiwan. Anger at being exploited by one’s relatives was one of the common topics in many returned mainlanders’ travel writings published in Taiwanese newspapers during the 1990s (Wong 2006, p. 30). Joshua Fan (2011) terms it the “Santa Claus Syndrome” (p. 133). In examining mainlanders’ lives in China, sociologist Lin Ping (2011) points out that there is a kind of “unspoken relationship” (p. 52) between them and their relatives: During their visits in the early 1990s, they were often asked favors by the Chinese relatives as “compensation” for the period [they had] spent suffering during the separation. […] They felt that their Chinese relatives wanted easy money to improve their lives. (p. 52) Intriguingly, in analyzing the returning mainlanders’ peculiar gift-giving culture, Fan and Lin place emphasis on the migrants’ displeasure at their Chinese relatives’ demands and see the returnees more as innocent victims, but Chiang places the focus on the calculations that are made between the two sides as to what constitutes the right “price” for a mutually beneficial reunion. She complicates the idea of blood-tie relations between the returned exile and his Chinese relatives by presenting them as “business partners” who make efforts to get what they want from each other. The seemingly touching theme of “homecoming” in Chiang’s narration, elaborated via descriptions of the strategies and tactics the characters adopt to achieve their aims, becomes highly ironic. Li’s marriage with Dong Po exemplifies this kind of negotiated relationship, which demonstrates how Li “downgrades” his Confucian cultural values to fit the profit-driven culture in China to fulfill his dream of establishing a home in his homeland. Dong is characterized as a woman in her sixties who is from a lower social class, married twice, and was a prostitute when she was young. Li’s marriage with her is set up by Dong’s daughter-in-law, Xiaohong, who attempts to improve her family’s financial situation to become middle class. The narrator hints that Li is enticed into the marriage because Xiaohong creates an illusion of an ideal Chinese family for him: “Jinzhou almost proposes at the dinner. […] During that meal, the slightly drunk Jinzhou sees an image of a happy family with a devoted son, a virtuous daughter-in-law and a submissive grandchild” (p. 92). However, Chiang depicts Li and Xiaohong’s negotiation of this marriage as if they are doing a business transaction, in which the most important factor of love is totally disregarded. As the narrator puts it:

Happily ever after? 137 Xiaohong is worried that delay will result in hitches, and Jinzhou does not want to delay either since he is staying in a hotel which costs him a hundred dollars per night. The match making is done, and the old and the young quickly enter the formal negotiation. In the local term, this matter is “a single deal” (貨賣一家) which means a deal between one seller and one buyer. The only chance for the agent to get profit is to make the sale done, since there is no chance to sell it to a second buyer. (p. 95) The coding of Li’s family reunion and marriage as a business deal allows for a complex reading of “homecoming”: on the one hand, it is a naïve illusion on the part of the protagonist; on the other hand, he knows that he can maintain the illusion if the price is right. In fact, Chiang shows readers that Li’s frustration with his Mainland Chinese relatives is associated with a more fundamental issue of their cultural differences. An episode in which ancestor worship is narrated reflects the difference between China and Taiwan as societies that have developed in divergent ways. When Li’s two granddaughters from Taiwan visit him during their summer vacation, he organizes a special trip to the Li family temple. The narrator states: Jinzhou takes great pains to arrange the trip to the village to worship ancestors, hoping to teach his grand-daughters who were born “outside” to show reverence to ancestors (敬天法祖) and respect for rites (慎終追遠), the most valuable lesson of traditional Chinese culture. (p. 138) Yet, the trip turns into a farce as the Chinese relatives all grab the chance to profit from this Taiwanese “god of wealth” (財神爺) (p. 134). In a humorous and ironic tone, Chiang describes how the family members hire fake monks to chant Buddhist scripture during the ritual, how they purchase poor-quality incense which cannot be lit in order to earn some extra money, and how the temple becomes a market when Li decides not to have lunch there and the relatives take out all the foods they have prepared to trade with one another. The gulf between Li’s adherence to the virtues of benevolence, social responsibility, and etiquette, and his relatives’ down-to-earth demands for money, is shown as irreconcilable. In Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” (1994), he observes that “for an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus, both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (p. 148). While Said refers to an exile’s experiences in a host country, a similar “awareness of simultaneous dimensions” (p. 148) can also occur in returned migrants. In the portrayal of Li Jinzhou’s experience of return, this old mainlander character, who is described in earlier chapters as feeling detached from Taiwan, finds himself making unfavorable comparisons of his hometown with Taiwan, and complains about the poor service he receives in a Chinese hotel (p.

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68). Such a double perspective can also be seen in Chiang Hsiao-yun’s narration: the omniscient narrator’s voice jumps out now and then using Taiwanese terms or slang, such as “wa-sai” (哇賽) and “dao tue lu” (倒退櫓),17 to explain Li’s view of China or to “translate” his home dialect (p. 114, p. 143, p. 200). By doing so, Chiang hints that Taiwan and Mainland China have developed into two cultural entities that require translation in order to understand each other in terms of not only language but also culture. What Said calls an “awareness of simultaneous dimensions” (1994, p. 148) accords with Shih’s and Ang’s arguments about the necessary hybridity and plurality of “Chineseness”. It is necessary for a person to recognize the existence of multiple perspectives within himself/herself before one can actually embrace his/ her hybrid cultural identity. Presenting to readers that Li is deeply informed by his life in Taiwan, Chiang however tells us that Li himself does not possess the sense of awareness of his acquired cultural hybridity, and thus remains tragically captive to his belief in a singular meaning of Chineseness. David Der-wei Wang’s (2013) idea of loyalism neatly encapsulates the entangled feelings of Li Jinzhou as presented in Peach Blossom Well. For Wang: The literal meaning of “loyalist” or yi-min always indicates a political subject out of touch with the times. The loyalist consciousness is therefore a kind of political and cultural stance one takes to mourn a loss when situations and scenes change. It derives its meaning from the margins where its legitimacy and subjectivity have already vanished. (p. 97) Connecting the concept of cultural identity with political identity, Wang suggests that as these loyalists recognize that the values they believe in are no longer tenable, they choose to adopt a position of bereavement (p. 98) and insist on mourning for what they perceive they have lost. Peach Blossom Well presents Li Jinzhou’s complicated loyalist mentality in relation to the KMT. While the early chapters depict Li as a political victim of the KMT regime, the later chapters narrate how after the KMT’s power declined, Taiwan began to democratize, and he re-settled in China, Li finds himself continuing to long for the cultural values he held as a young man in the Republican period before 1949. In fact, he realizes that he identifies with the KMT’s cultural ideology. As the narrator states, when Li was young, He was a follower of Sun Yat-sen. […] Since he received a good education in the Republican era, he believed that he had the responsibility to educate ordinary people, guiding them to a new China developed on the basis of the Three People’s Principles. (p. 140) This first-generation mainlander character’s ambivalent attitude toward the KMT complicates his identification with “China”.

Happily ever after?  139 Wang links loyalism to spiritual displacement in the face of political transformation, as the orthodoxy one pines for has been consigned to history. In Peach Blossom Well, the anonymous narrator depicts Li’s feelings several years after he moved back to China as such: But people [in China] have changed, society has changed, his homeland (家鄉) has also changed. He, an out-dated old man can only practice calligraphy, writing sentences like “a single loyalist cannot change the situation” (孤臣無力可回天) to express his depression. He asks himself if his era has already gone. (p. 139) The sentence Li writes is from “A Poem upon Leaving Taiwan” (離台詩) by Chiu Fengjia (丘逢甲), a leader of the gentry in Taiwan who established the Republic of Formosa after the island was ceded to Japan in 1895, but was forced to flee to China after they were defeated by the Japanese army. While Chiu’s poem expresses the poignancy of losing the “physical” homeland of Taiwan, in Chiang’s novel it is used as an intertext to convey Li’s sadness about his shattered ideal China. The traditional Chinese teaching of luo ye gui gen (落葉歸根 meaning “fallen leaves returning to the roots”) is presented as the primary reason for Li’s insistence on living in China, despite his inability to feel at home there. Even after he realizes that he has been fleeced by his relatives, and his new wife has stolen his money, while lying in his sickbed, he believes he made the right decision to remain in China. He explains, “No matter how good Taiwan is, fallen leaves should return to the roots” (p. 203). His last wish is to be buried next to his dead first wife in his home village, which symbolizes a return to his nostalgic past. According to Joshua Fan’s oral historical research (2011), luo ye gui gen was indeed the most common reason for many migrants’ return journeys (p. 145). In her story about Li, however, Chiang presents this belief in roots as a delusion. By depicting Li’s return as ending with his death, following a fatal stroke he suffers when he finds out that his new wife Dong Po and her family have stolen all his money, Chiang presents his “homecoming” as a fatal longing. Not able to embrace Taiwan as his new home, he seeks an impossible imagined China and ends up in a China that is dangerously foreign.

Nurture over nature Although Peach Blossom Well primarily delves into the first-generation mainlander characters’ experience of return and re-settlement in China, Chiang uses two chapters to narrate the “Chinese experience” of Li’s descendants. The slogan “blood is thicker than water” (血濃於水), which contains a strong connotation of ethnic nationalism and which rejects the myriad of cultural differences that exist within the so-called Chinese world, is the discourse the post-Maoist PRC government often uses to underscore the supposedly “unbreakable” ties between China

140 Happily ever after? and Taiwan.18 In the chapter “Brothers” (兄弟), the relationship of Li Jinzhou’s two sons, Shensi (who grew up in China) and Shenxing (who grew up in Taiwan), serves to represent the author’s negation of these presumed ties. The huge cultural discrepancy between them is the main theme of “Brothers” (the second last chapter of the novel). Chiang describes the two characters’ identities as shaped by the environments in which they grew up. Shensi, the older son, is left behind in China during the civil war at the age of eight, while Shenxing follows his parents to Taiwan at the age of three. Their brotherhood is severed by their physical separation and subsequent experiences in Taiwan and China. Educated by the Communist Party, Shensi is described as a person who was forced to change his surname during the Cultural Revolution in order to hide his family background. After that he was determined to follow the rules of the Communist Party, is an atheist, and is proud of being a member of the proletariat (p. 184). His brother, Shenxing, conversely, as a second-generation mainlander in Taiwan, is described as never enjoying the advantages of being a mainlander under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. He was discriminated against and was poor and alienated because his father was convicted as a “Communist spy” during the martial law period (p. 186). Chiang portrays both brothers as having endured different types of political hardships and as ultimately embracing very different sets of values. The narrative highlights the failure of blood ties to bind the brothers emotionally. Instead, their kinship is shown as the cause of their mutual dislike and resentment. The following scene of the two brothers’ reunion after more than 40 years of separation demonstrates their lack of closeness. “Shensi… brother…” Shenxing walked forward. He had not called [or seen] his elder brother since he was three. He felt pain. Yet facing this relative about whom he knew little, he had no tears to shed. Shensi nodded stiffly. Seeing his younger brother who was taller and better-looking than him, he felt extremely emotional. But he only said, “Shenxing… brother…” (p. 181) This terse and touching scene evokes the emotional intensity of the two brothers’ first meeting after their decades-long separation. However, whatever affection is implied in this scene is quickly replaced in subsequent scenes by descriptions of the anger and resentment the two siblings feel toward each other. Shensi keeps imagining what he might have become if it were him that had followed his parents to Taiwan, and Shenxing is upset by his brother’s incessant accusation that he had robbed Shensi of the opportunities that might have come his way had he been the one chosen to go to Taiwan. As the narrator says, “Although they have the same parents, their different backgrounds and divergent views about their father mean that they gradually have less and less to say to each other” (p. 192). The relationship between Shensi and Shenxing is presented in a manner that allows readers to see it as representative of the tensions between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese. Chiang foregrounds the brothers’ different backgrounds rather than their blood ties. The novel presents both Shengsi and Shenxing as

Happily ever after? 141 preoccupied with their own needs and problems and as incapable of empathizing with the other. For instance, on several occasions, Shensi refers to Shenxing as “You Taiwanese (你們台灣人)” or “Taibao (台胞)”, and “Taiwan compatriot” (p. 171, p. 187). In one conversation that happens on the day the two brothers first meet after many years of separation, Shenxing suggests that they visit the old house where their family once lived. Shensi says to Shenxing, “You people from Taiwan are all interested in old and broken stuff. […] What is so interesting about these things? I don’t even want to glance at them” (p. 185). Shenxing, on the other hand, is repelled by his brother’s rudeness and fixation on money. Their father’s worsening condition after his return to China is presented as the only topic that facilitates communication between Shenxing and Shensi. Writing about mainlanders’ lives in China, Lin Ping noted that the returned mainlanders and their Mainland Chinese relatives often “regarded each other as ‘brothers only in name’” (2011, p. 57). The relationship between Shensi and Shenxing is a good example of this. After their father dies, Shenxing brings their mother’s ashes to China and buries their parents together. The two brothers’ interactions are not mentioned after this burial and the tensions between them are thus left unresolved. In narrating the third-generation characters, Li Jia’ai and Li Jiabao’s trip to China, Chiang focused on the sharp differences between their views and those of their Mainland Chinese relatives as the result of the different levels of modernization and urbanization between Taipei and Li’s village. For Jiabao and Jia’ai, who were born in the late 1970s and 1980s, and who grew up in post-martial law Taiwan, their Chinese relatives are people whom they happen to be related to but see as strangers. At the beginning of chapter four, “Visiting Relatives” (探親), Li Jiabao tells her father in a phone conversation, at the time when she and her sister are visiting their grandfather Li Jinzhou in Peach Blossom Well: “Papa, don’t come here! No matter what Grandpa has said, don’t come here! It is horrible here!” (p. 105). This conversation summarizes the two girls’ feelings toward their “Chinese homeland”. They refer to their grandfather’s hometown as “a dangerous place” (險地) (p. 157). Interestingly, the narrator describes these two thirdgeneration girls as having embarked on their journey to China “in search of their roots” (尋根) (p. 109) but then complicates this idea by stating that except for the time they spend shopping and eating in Hong Kong, the two girls do not enjoy their trip, finding it filled with trials (苦旅) (p. 109). In June Yip’s account of Taiwan’s cultural identity as one that has been shaped since the late 1970s by Taiwan’s economic rise as an important “world factory”, she observes that what globalization brings to a country is not only foreign products and financial benefits, but also diverse cultures, which “produce fascinating cultural hybridity, resulting in a complex heterogeneity” (2004, p. 215). Yip argues that the dramatic change of lifestyle as a result of globalization had a significant impact on the native Taiwanese and mainlanders in Taiwan. Yip’s analysis can be effectively applied to account for Chiang’s characterization of Jiabao and Jia’ai as Taipei-dwelling, westernized young girls who are not particularly attached to their mainlander status. These two characters wear “brand-name sneakers” (p. 105), speak a mixture of Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English (p. 110), and have no knowledge of their grandfather’s “home dialect”

142 Happily ever after? (家鄉話) (p. 107). They are appalled when they discover that their grandfather’s ancestral house has no bathroom (p. 104) and when a hotel worker enters their room without knocking (p. 126). As such, these two characters are portrayed as feeling none of the responsibility to inherit or even transmit a cultural orthodoxy. And the “Mainland homeland” hardly contains any practical meaning for them: [When Jia’ai] looks at the huts, the pond and the green fields, thinking that this place is her original homeland (原鄉), she suddenly feels moved. She feels that this journey they’ve taken to worship their ancestors and sweep their tombs is so romantic. (p. 130) The gulf between their grandfather Li Jinzhou’s idea of homecoming and these two characters’ translation of that idea into a touristic moment is irreconcilable. As the novel progresses from Li Jinzhou’s story, through the story of his two estranged sons, to the story of his two granddaughters, the narrative also shifts from its initial focus on the intensity of Li’s disappointment with his hometown, the deep-seated resentments between Shensi and Shenxing, to the granddaughters’ daily mishaps in their ancestral town. For instance, when the granddaughters visit their family temple, Jia’ai discovers that to use a bathroom, she has to walk to the farm next to the temple, a long distance away. Her Chinese relative then suggests that she use the pigsty which is close by. Jia’ai is startled by the pigs and steps on pig excrement which ruins her new sneakers. She is deeply upset and tells her grandfather she “wants to go home” (p. 132). The significance of this scene, occurring in the chapter right after the chapter on Li Jinzhou’s decision to re-settle in China, is that it represents a complete negation of Li Jinzhou’s “homecoming” dream. Jia’ai is oblivious to the emotional longing that had brought her grandfather back to Peach Blossom Well. Chiang ends the novel with a brief chapter that describes Shenxing and his family making a trip to China in 2005 to visit his father’s gravesite on the fifth anniversary of Li Jinzhou’s death. The narrator states that, at the end of their trip, Jiabao “thinks sadly that her grandparents are buried in this distant place. It is so difficult to come here to visit their graves. She looks back several times wondering when she will be able to come back again” (p. 240, my italics). This episode calls to mind a line from Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” where she explains why mainlanders, after having lived in Taiwan for several years, initially did not regard Taiwan as their home. Chu writes that, for them “a land where none of your relatives are buried cannot be called home” (2003, p. 249). Lung Ying-Tai in her Big River, Big Sea 1949 (2009) also uses the ritual of sweeping one’s ancestors’ tombs on Qingming Day (Tomb Sweeping Day) to distinguish between mainlanders and the native Taiwanese. She argued that the general absence of ancestors’ tombs in Taiwan was a major reason for mainlanders’

Happily ever after? 143 feelings of alienation and loneliness (pp. 344–345). Chiang in Peach Blossom Well challenges Chu’s and Lung’s argument that the presence of ancestors’ graves is essential for a sense of Chinese belonging. Jiabao’ feeling of loss, as quoted above, implies that even if Li Jinzhou was buried in China, this third-generation Taiwanese mainlander does not have any genuine identification with this Chinese “hometown”, nor should she be expected to identify with it. The absence of longing for China is even more pronounced in Chiang’s portrayal of Li’s fourth-generation great-grandson, “an America-born-Chinese” (ABC) who does not speak or write Chinese and who equates the chanting of Buddhist scripture to musical entertainment (p. 239). Chiang seems to be suggesting a situation similar to Ien Ang’s statement that not to be able to speak Chinese should not be construed as “loss of authenticity” (2005, p. 30). This is a point that Shu-mei Shih also makes when she argues that there are many possible ways of configuring the relationship between the Sinophone and Mainland China (2013, p. 33). As one progresses through the novel, one experiences a progressive erosion of the idea of homecoming, together with the characters’ growing indifference to being mainlanders. As the novel nears the end, and as the story revolves increasingly around the third-generation and fourth-generation Lis, the idea of being Chinese has become merely one identity marker among many. Chiang states in the preface to Peach Blossom Well that she intended to present an alternative mainlander image other than the one that Wang Wei-chung and Lai Sheng-chuan constructed in The Village. The novel shows readers a mainlander identity that is evolving toward cultural hybridity and fluidity as a result of globalization. Unlike the works we have discussed in previous chapters, which tend to position mainlander’s cultural identity within the framework of Mainland China or Taiwan, in Peach Blossom Well, Chiang positions mainlanders in the broader context of overseas Chinese migrants, showing that the very idea of a mainlander identity, as an effect of narrative construction, can only ever be plural, and that in a global world, clinging to a singular cultural identity seems increasingly pointless. Mainlander as a cultural identity also becomes less and less meaningful for their descendants.

Notes 1 One of the examples is the PRC government’s attitude toward “the Taiwan issue”, claiming that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China (台灣是中國不可分割的一部份) because of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural links between the two. The popular book China can Say No (中国可以说不), published in 1996, exemplifies such an ideology. In November 2015, Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou and China’s leader Xi Jinping met in Singapore. The meeting is regarded as historical as the leaders across the Strait met for the first time after the Chinese Civil War. At the meeting, Xi kept emphasizing the point that people in Taiwan and China are compatriots (同胞) and they are a family (家人), and thus they should work together to “bring about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. His statement understated the political and social differences between Taiwan and China, but underscored the racial connections. See the full script of Xi’s speech: http://www.storm.mg/article/73321, accessed on November 24, 2015.

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2 The volume was published in 2011, the 100-year anniversary of the Republic of China, in order to commemorate the ordinary people who lived through that chaotic age. The phrase, and also the title of the book, Bai nian hao he, is used to express one’s best wishes to newly wedded couples. I believe Chiang uses the term as a pun to indicate the 100-year anniversary of the ROC. 3 The later three works together are seen as Chiang’s trilogy of ordinary people of Republican China. 4 The Chinese versions of Show Foong’s “1230 Spots” (1996) and Hsiao Sa’s “My Relatives in Hong Kong” (1986) were originally published separately in United Daily News. They were translated into English, collected and reprinted in a book that Chi Pangyuan and David Der-wei Wang edited called The Last of the Whampoa Breed (2003). 5 According to Shih, Sinitic languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, which includes around 400 spoken languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukienese, Hakka, Teochiu, and so on. However, in terms of written form, the standard Sinitic script is often used (2013b, p. 9). She defines the Sinitic-language communities and cultures as those “outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted or imposed” (2013b, p. 11). 6 In Ien Ang’s “On Not Speaking Chinese” (2005), she notes that she cannot speak Chinese, but she does not specify whether she refers to Mandarin, Chinese dialects, or both. 7 Like Chiang’s father, Li Jinzhou was born in Hunan and was a county magistrate in his homeland. 8 The subtitle of A Hundred Years of Happiness is Stories of the ROC Ordinary People (民國素人志). Chiang coined the term of minguo suren. The term suren (素人) is originally from Japaneseしろうと, meaning non-professional people. 9 The page information is based on the INK version, published in 2011. 10 高階外省人 is translated as “high-status mainlanders” in Yang’s article. I thus use her term in this chapter. 11 There is a distinction between Yang Chia-hsien’s “high-status mainlanders” (高階外省人) and the idea of “high-class mainlanders” (高級外省人). In 2009, a government official Guo Kuan-ying (郭冠英) was found posting discriminatory articles online, in which he called himself a high-class mainlander (高級外省人) in contrast to the lower-class, “bastard” Taiwanese. His articles provoked a lot of criticism, and he was forced to leave his job as a result. Since then, the term “high-class mainlanders” has been regarded as containing politically, culturally, and ideologically discriminatory meanings against the native Taiwanese. 12 Yang also suggests that among the upper-class mainlanders, some of the high-ranking soldiers and government officials might have had close relationships with the KMT. 13 恰 某 is a term used here. It is a Taiwanese term, with which the novel implies that the youth is Hoklo Taiwanese. 14 Yu wrote the poem “Homesickness” (Xiangchou) in the 1970s. “A shallow strait” is from Yu’s poem. 15 Tao Qian is also known as Tao Yuanming (陶淵明), a poet in the Six Dynasties period. His poems are mainly on topics related to country life. His “Peach Blossom Spring” has been used by many second-generation mainlander writers to show their confusion in terms of identity or to express the feeling of dystopia. Lai Sheng-chuan’s play and the film Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land also use the image of Peach Blossom Spring as an important intertextual reference. 16 There is indeed a place called Peach Blossom Well in Yueyang, but Chiang seemed to intentionally choose this place as the setting of Li’s story to symbolize the disillusionment of his homecoming dream. 17 “Wa-sai” (哇賽) is used to show one’s surprise. “Dao tue lu” (倒退櫓), which is Taiwanese, means moving backward or becoming worse. 18 See Xi Jinping’s talk to Lian Zhan http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/0226/c64094-2 0597089.html, accessed on December 18, 2019.

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146  Happily ever after? Li, C. 李昶伟. (2014, October 26). Chiang Hsiao-yun kuobie wentan sanshi nianhou chongshi xiezuo tancheng shi wei jilu fubei蒋晓云阔别文坛三十年后重 拾写作坦诚“是为记录父辈” [Resuming Writing after Thirty Years, Chiang Hsiaoyun is to Commemorate Her Father’s Generation]. Retrieved 21 July, 2018, from https​ :/​/cu​​lture​​.ifen​​g​.com​​/a​/20​​14102​​6​/422​​995​80​​_0​.sh​​tml Li, Y. 李扬. (2016). Wenxue yu lishi de pingtu youxi—lün Chiang Hsiao-yun Tao hua jing han Bai nian hao he 文学与历史的拼图游戏—论蒋晓云《桃花井》和《百年好合》 [The Puzzle Game of Literature and History: On Chiang Hsiao-yun’s The Peach Blossom Well and A Hundred Years of Happiness]. Shijie huawen wenxue lüntan 世界华文文学论坛 [Forum for Chinese Literature of the World], 1, 109–112. Lin, P. (2011). Chinese Diaspora ‘At Home’: Mainlander Taiwanese in Dongguan and Shanghai. The China Review, 11(2), 43–64. Lung, Y. T. 龍應台. (2009). Dajiang Dahai 1949 大江大海1949 [Big River, Big Sea 1949]. Taipei: Tianxia Zazhi. Massey, D. (1992). A Place Called Home? New Formations, 17, 3–15. Said, E. W. (1994). Reflections on Exile. In M. Robinson (Ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (pp. 137–149). London: Faber & Faber. Shih, S. M. (2007). Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shih, S. M. (2013). Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production. In S. M. Shih, C. H. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 25–42). New York: Columbia University Press. Show, F. 曉風. (2003). 1230  Spots. In M. Wu (Trans.), P. Y. Chi & D. D. W. Wang (Eds.), The Last of the Whampoa Breed (pp. 59–71). New York: Columbia University Press. Tu, W. M. (1991). Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center. Daedalus, 120(2), 1–31. Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2013). Post-loyalism. In S. M. Shih, C. H. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 93–116). New York: Columbia University Press. Wen Jiabao fang mei yu Taiwan shiren de xiangchou 溫家寶訪美與台灣詩人的鄉愁 [Wen Jiabao Visited the U.S. and the Taiwanese Poet’s Homesickness]. (2003, December 8). Da ji yuan 大紀元報. Retrieved 3 June, 2015, from http://www​.epochtimes​.com/ Wong, B. C. 翁柏川. (2006). Xiangchou zhuti zai Taiwan wenxueshi de bianqian 鄉愁主題在台灣文學史的變遷 [The Topic of Nostalgia in the History of Taiwanese Literature], (Master’s Dissertation). National Tsing Hua University. Retrieved from National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan. Xu, R. Y. 徐如宜. (2003, December 10). Yu Kwang-chung de xiangchou shi wujie de 余光中的鄉愁是無解的 [Yu Kwang-chung’s Home Sickness Finds no Solutions]. United Daily News 聯合報, p. A13. Yang, C. H. 楊佳嫻. (2010). Guoqi guizu? Guchen yimin? Tan Pai Hsien-Yung yu Li Yu xiaoshuo nei de gaojie waishengren 過氣貴族？孤臣遺民？談白先勇與 李渝小說內的「高階外省人」[A Comparative Study of High-Status Mainlanders in the Works of Pai Hsien-Yung and Li Yu]. In K. C. Li (Ed.), Li yu ku: Zhanzheng de yanxu 離與苦：戰爭的延續 [Sufferings of Waishengren under the War Regime] (pp. 173–206). Taipei: Qünxue. Yip, J. (2004). Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. London: Duke University Press.

Conclusion and epilogue “Mainlander” as an identity of in-betweenness

The eight second-generation mainlander writers’ works published across three decades from 1982 to 2011 demonstrate how “mainlander identity” has been in transformation from one that is strongly tied to the KMT-fostered image of Mainland Chinese Zhonguoren to one that is elusive and open to interpretation. This genre, as a unique cultural product of a generation whose parents were forced migrants to Taiwan in the mid-1900s, but who were born in Taiwan, educated under the KMT’s dictatorship, and later on, faced with the dramatic political and cultural change of democratization and Taiwanization after the lifting of martial law, marks a progressive transition from a diasporic Chinese to a Sinophone identity, indicating that this identity is getting complicated with regard to its relationships to China and Taiwan. Examining how mainlander identity is constructed through the second-generation mainlander writers’ dramatization of their family memories, this book demonstrates that while this identity presents the second generation’s “postmemory” (Hirsch 2008) of the previous generation’s traumatic experience of war and flight, it also reflects the second generation’s mediation of their own lived experience in Taiwan. Therefore, this genre displays a complicated case of identification involving the entanglement of collective and individual memories, trans-generational memories, and traumatic and nostalgic memories. As a result, mainlanders’ “Chineseness” is presented as developed upon multiple layers of memories and feelings in Taiwan, which make this identity distinct from the homogeneous sense of “Chineseness” in the discourse of Chinese nationalism held by either the KMT or the CCP. The two works published during the martial law period by Yuan and Chu, which I discussed in Chapter 1, demonstrate how mainlander identity in the early days was constructed as unquestioned identification that was largely subject to the KMT’s vigorous propaganda of Chinese nationalism. A strong sense of “quasiexilic mentality”, to use A-chin Hsiau’s term (2010), is the key feature of the two works, which present mainlanders as the Chinese diaspora belonging to and yearning for “China”. This sojourner mentality in the post-martial law works is presented as a troubled sentiment, which haunts the second-generation characters and is shown as the main cause of their identity crisis in the 1990s. Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance

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of My Buddies from the Military Compounds” is the most conspicuous example that narrates the second-generation protagonist’s identity struggle when faced with the rupture between what she experienced and was taught in her childhood and what she knew about the KMT’s dictatorship and brutal acts years later. Second-generation mainlander writings in the post-martial law period reflect a common preoccupation with defending the authenticity of mainlander subjectivity and consolidating a cultural space for mainlander identity that is distinct. “Being a mainlander” is presented as a conscious, self-chosen identity of the second-generation mainlander characters rather than a given identity as is shown in Chu’s Everlasting and Yuan’s This Love, This Life. The works published in the 1990s and 2000, which I examined in Chapters 2 and 3, are especially characterized by the narrators’ inner monologues, which can be seen as an important turning point of mainlander identity. The narrative approach reflects the writers’ continuous introspection and exploration of a new meaning of being a mainlander in a new post-martial law social context. Mainlander identity in Hao’s and Lo’s works is focused on individual experience with the authors highlighting the nonjuancun mainlander characters’ everyday life as different from or even in conflict with the KMT’s articulation of mainlanders as faithful supporters of the party and its cultural values. In fact, the post-martial law works examined in this book show, to varying degrees, an increasingly deliberate distance from the KMT. They present ordinary mainlanders as benefitting little from the KMT’s rule. Those published in the year 2000 and afterward further portray mainlander characters as victims during the KMT’s dictatorship and the White Terror, indicating that mainlanders’ historical bond to the party has gradually turned into a burden in the process of this group members’ re-defining themselves. “China” is symbolically important in this genre but is presented as a flexible term that has attracted divergent meanings. In these eight works, “China” is increasingly self-consciously represented as an effect of the characters’ imagination and perceptions of it in the context of Taiwan. In the early writings during the martial law period, as we discussed in Chapter 1, representations of “China” reflect the authors’ unquestioning acceptance of the KMT’s ideology. In the juancun works of the early 1990s, the second-generation characters are presented as aware that their understanding of “China” is limited to their experience in juancun. And in Lo Yi-chin’s and Hao Yu-hsiang’s works in 2000, the first-generation mainlander characters’ lived experiences in China are viewed by the second-generation protagonists as emotionally powerful fabrications. In The Village, “China” is presented as the first-generation mainlander characters’ empty anticipation for the future during the martial law period and an irrecoverable past after their or their children’s trips “home”. Peach Blossom Well, the only work studied in this book that revolves around the mainlander characters’ life experience in contemporary Mainland Chinese society, shows that the mainlander characters’ ideas of “being a Chinese” and “Chineseness” have been changed by their lived experience in their host countries, i.e., Taiwan and the US, and have thus become incompatible with the culture and lives of people in the People’s Republic.

Conclusion and epilogue 149 In all eight works, the second-generation mainlander characters’ perceptions of “China” are more akin to Marianne Hirsch’s idea of “postmemory” (2008), signifying the subjective interrogation, inevitable change, and diversification in different time periods. The actual geopolitical territory of Mainland China is secondary to what the second-generation mainlander characters understand by “China”. The name “China” is presented as causing their anxiety about their identity and place in Taiwan. Only by continuously exploring and investigating what “China” means from the perspective of a mainlander in Taiwan can the second-generation characters make sense of their life. However, first-generation mainlander characters are often presented as the second generation’s most intimate connection to and understanding of the idea of “being a Chinese”. In this context, Shu-mei Shih’s observation, “With the Sinophone, it is the local translation, revision, and reinvention of Chinese culture that is of importance”, is highly relevant (Shih 2007, p. 122). The diverse meanings of “China”, “Chinese”, and “Chineseness” presented in the eight texts constitute different local translations of Chinese culture in Taiwan. It is noticeable that the works published in 2000 and after place much emphasis on elaborating mainlander identity as part of Taiwanese identity and on describing mainlander culture as integral to Taiwanese culture. Lo Yi-chin’s and Hao Yu-hsiang’s works both underscore that the first-generation mainlander characters’ experience of flight from China to Taiwan and their life afterward should be positioned in the framework of Taiwan’s history and be understood alongside the experiences of other ethnic groups in post-war Taiwan. Lai Sheng-chuang and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village and Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well narrate mainlanders’ family stories across three and even four generations, highlighting mainlanders’ cultural hybridity and presenting the trajectory of mainlanders’ identity construction as changing from mainlander-Chinese to mainlander-Taiwanese. Chiang even suggests that mainlander identity will become further eroded in later generations, as people become increasingly globalized. While the post-martial law works accentuate mainlanders’ “Taiwanization”, the second-generation mainlander characters are also portrayed as feeling alienated from the native Taiwanese. All eight works reveal their authors’ inability to engage robustly with local Taiwanese culture, and it is striking that there are hardly any important native Taiwanese characters in the eight works, nor any detailed descriptions of Taiwanese society and culture. Although Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan includes a comparatively detailed account of the mainlander protagonist’s Hoklo Taiwanese mother and wife, most episodes that narrate the mainlander characters’ encounters with the Taiwanese and Taiwanese society are focused on the conflicts and frustrations experienced by mainlanders. Wang and Lai’s The Village demonstrates the playwrights’ ambition to “Taiwanize” juancun by arranging two Hoklo Taiwanese as the main characters in order to emphasize a harmonious relationship between the Taiwanese characters and juancun mainlanders. Yet, throughout the play, the question concerning what Taiwanese culture is, is not addressed, but narrative related to Taiwanese culture is mainly focused on linguistic assimilation, as if Hoklo Taiwanese language represents all of Taiwanese culture. Mainlanders’ “Taiwanization” that is presented in the eight

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second-generation mainlander writings is often limited to mainlanders’ unique lived experience in Taiwan, highlighting their cultural distinctiveness in relation to the island’s other ethnic groups. The juancun stories of the 1980s and 1990s are particularly distinctive in this regard, allowing juancun to become a marketing feature of second-generation mainlander literature. By 2008, Lai and Wang can thus easily promote The Village as a juancun work. In the eight works studied, second-generation mainlander identity is best described as an evolving subjectivity characterized by “in-betweenness”. The authenticity of this identity is bound up with the characters’ ambivalence about both China and Taiwan. The characters see themselves as belonging to yet alienated from Taiwanese society. Their preoccupation with “China” contributes to their alienation. This “in-betweenness” makes this genre difficult to locate in the field of Taiwanese literature, particularly as Taiwanese literature, which is normally framed around post-coloniality, defends Taiwan’s cultural distinctiveness and political independence from China. This is a defense absent from the eight second-generation mainlander works studied. Taiwanese literature, emphasizing the local cultures developed by the native Taiwanese, often negates “Chinese culture” and sees it as evidence of cultural imperialism that is associated with the KMT’s rule. As A-chin Hsiau states, “the narrativized indigenization (本土化) paradigm in literature… authenticated a specific form of Taiwanese identity through constructing a pattern of ‘de-Sinicized’ and ‘nationalized (Taiwanese)’ historical narrative” (2005, p. 127). Shu-mei Shih also notes, “There is a tendency to excise indiscriminatingly what is ‘Chinese’ from all aspects of Taiwan culture” (2007, p. 122). Particularly in recent years when the PRC has grown into a new economic superpower to pose an even greater threat to Taiwan’s independence, “Chinese culture” has become something that is intentionally excluded in the field of Taiwanese literature. Whereas works of the Hoklo Taiwanese, Hakka Taiwanese, and indigenous writers often show strong identification with the land and local culture, and native Taiwanese writers even developed the genres of Taiwanese language literature (台語文學) and Hakka language literature (客語文學) so as to completely distinguish themselves from literature written in Chinese, second-generation mainlander writings which obtain their distinctiveness by addressing the topics of “China”, “Chineseness”, and mainlanders’ alienation in Taiwan seem to remain “trapped” by the shadow of “China”. This probably explains why the two key studies on the history of Taiwanese literature, by Yeh Shi-tao (葉石濤) (1987/2010) and Peng Jui-chin (彭瑞金) (1991), which contributed to the rise of Taiwanese consciousness among intellectuals in Taiwan, have marginalized second-generation mainlander writers and their works. In fact, Yeh strongly criticized first-generation mainlander writers’ exilic mentality, arguing that their works were irrelevant to the experiences of the general Taiwanese population (2010, p. 148). Conversely, more than two decades later, Chen Fang-ming has sought to be more inclusive in his A History of Modern Taiwanese Literature (2011). Chen’s book discusses works of both firstand second-generation mainlander writers and highlights the shared suffering

Conclusion and epilogue 151 of mainlanders and native Taiwanese during and after the Second World War. Nonetheless, Chen has not referred to second-generation mainlander writings as a genre in their own right. Instead, he has placed these writings under different genres such as “women’s literature” and “postmodern literature”, which may suggest an intention to dismiss or downplay these writers’ preoccupation with their mainlander identity. As the discussion in Chapters 2 and 3 has shown, the rise of Taiwanese literature has placed mainlander writers and their works in an ambiguous and awkward position. It is noteworthy that the characteristics of ambivalence, in-betweenness, and cultural hybridity in second-generation mainland literature have helped it to gain a new market in China in recent years. In 2008, Mainland newspapers began referring to a “Taiwanese literature fever” (台灣文學熱) in China. According to Liang Jing, it reached a peak in 2011, during which many second-generation mainlander writers and their works were introduced to Mainland Chinese readers (2014, p. B09). This was however not the first “Taiwanese literature fever”. The first happened in the late 1980s, after Taiwan relaxed restrictions for its citizens to visit China as tourists. Many Taiwan-based writers from a mainlander background were first introduced to China and gained popularity during this period, such as Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇), Yu Kwang-chung (余光中), San Mao (三毛), and Chiung Yao (瓊瑤) (Liang 2014, p. B09). In the second wave, the most prominent authors included Chang Ta-chun (張大春), Chu Tien-hsin, Chu Tien-wen, Lo Yi-chin, and Lung Ying-tai (龍應台). Although the works of some Hoklo Taiwanese writers were also introduced to China, such as those by Wu Nien-jen (吳念真) and Tang Nuo (唐諾), second-generation mainlander writers accounted for a much higher proportion than native Taiwanese ones. A large number of these works were published by Wenjing Culture and Media Co. (世紀文景) in the series of Sinophone writers (華語作家).1 This classification is significant, in that instead of seeing these works as part of Chinese literature, as claimed by the PRC government, it demonstrates the distinctiveness of these works from Chinese literature, as well as general Chinese readers’ awareness and appreciation of these distinctions, at least in the terrain of the publishing market. These second-generation mainlander writers’ works were quickly accepted and well received in China. For example, in 2008, Chang Ta-chun’s As One Family (聆聽父親), a story about his family history, was selected as one of the ten best books of the year,2 and his newly released book The Tang Dynasty Poet Li Bai: His Younger Years (大唐李白：少年遊) (2014), a re-writing of Li Bai’s life, sold as many as 70,000–80,000 copies within six months. Lo Yi-chin’s Hotel Xi Xia (西夏旅館) (2011), a highly complicated, surrealistic, and lengthy novel (amounting to some 470,000 words), which uses the non-Han Xi Xia ethnic group to consider the experiences of mainlanders in Taiwan, also sold more than 30,000 copies in China (Liang 2014, p. B09).3 This suggests that the second-generation mainlander writers’ works have a certain impact on Mainland Chinese readers and have become an important part of the Taiwanese literature genre in China’s publishing market.

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Several newspapers, such as Beijing Youth Daily and New Express Daily, published articles that discussed the phenomenon of the Taiwanese literature fever, with titles such as “The Revival of the Taiwanese literature Fever. Is the Moon Better-looking There? 台湾文学热重来 那边的月亮更圆吗?” (Zhou, Jiang & Zhang 2014), “Why Do We Love Taiwanese Writers? 为何我们爱台湾作家?” (Liang 2014), and “How Much Do We Know about Taiwanese literature? 我們對 台灣文學知多少?” (Wei 2015). This trend can also be seen in academic research. According to the Mainland Chinese scholar Cao Huimin (2010), from 1990 to 2009, the number of MA and PhD theses written in China on Taiwanese literature increased rapidly. In the case of MA theses, between 1990 and 1999, there were only eight projects on related topics, whereas from 2000 to 2009, the number jumped to 184 (p. 274). Aside from dissertations, more than 7000 journal articles are listed under “Taiwanese literature (Taiwan wenxue)” used as a search keyword on the China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database (in November 2018), most of which were published in 2000 and since. Among them, around 3700 papers— that is, more than half the number—were published after 2008, when “Taiwanese literature” was actively introduced to China and recognized as a distinctive genre. Comparatively speaking, this number of journal publications is not huge. However, the trend indicates the rapidly growing interest in this genre in China. Mainland Chinese critic and writer Zhang Yiwei, who had lived in Taiwan as a graduate student from 2010 to 2016, made a point of stating that, “‘Taiwanese literature’ in Taiwan is quite different from the ‘Taiwanese literature’ referred to in the recent ‘Taiwanese literature fever’ in Mainland China” (2014, p. B09). While most Mainland Chinese readers see literary works by the first- and secondgeneration mainlander writers as representative works of “Taiwanese literature” (Linrong Li 2009a), their writings are perceived more ambivalently by critics and readers in Taiwan. The texts that are regarded as “classics” in the field of Taiwanese literature in Taiwan, are those that have contributed to constructing a Taiwanese consciousness and Taiwanese subjectivity, in particular those written during the Japanese colonial period by Taiwan-born writers such as Yang K’uei (楊逵) and Wu Zhuo-liu (吳濁流). These texts, however, have been neglected or deliberately ignored in China (Cao 2010, p. 280; Linrong Li 2009a, pp. 169–170). Zhang Yiwei has observed that the problems of classification have arisen out of the ambiguities of mainlander identity in Taiwan over time. Taking Chiang Hsiao-yun as an example, Zhang states that Chiang, who writes about ordinary mainlander civilians in Taiwan and whose works have been well-received in China, is difficult to categorize: while Chiang’s works are regarded as “Taiwanese literature” in Mainland China, in Taiwan, they lack the characteristics that would make them recognizably “Taiwanese”. Zhang also notes that “Taiwanese literature” is generally studied with the aid of cultural theories of post-colonialism, post-modernism, and modernism, and that Chiang’s works do not fit this mode of analysis (2014, p. B09). The complexity of second-generation mainlander writings owes to the dramatization of mainlander characters finding themselves increasingly unable to settle into either a “Chinese” or “Taiwanese” identity. Yet, this complexity is absent

Conclusion and epilogue 153 from the rising popularity of Taiwanese mainlander writings in the People’s Republic, marketed as “Taiwanese literature”. Rather, a process of politicization is at work in their cross-Strait dissemination, with an emphasis placed by Mainland Chinese scholars on the cultural relevance of these “mainlander” works for assimilating Taiwan to China. Since 1949, the Chinese government has never given up its stated aim of reunification, claiming that Taiwan is part of China. For this reason, Taiwanese literature is mostly presented as a subset of Chinese literature in the Mainland scholarship. For instance, Mainland Chinese scholars such as Gu Yuanqing (2013, 2014), Zhong Dingyuan (2013), and Zhao Congna (2010) all refer to Taiwanese literature as a form of local literature (地方文學) within Chinese literature. It is thus understandable that literary works by Taiwan’s mainlander authors (whether first or second generation), particularly works in which familial ties to China are a strong theme, would fit this definition more neatly than works that promote Taiwan’s cultural uniqueness. Many Mainland Chinese critics, however, such as Zhou Limin, Zhao Xifang, and Li Linrong, have explained the popularity of the second-generation mainlanders’ works as the result of their cultural differences from writings produced in the PRC. Zhou Limin uses “heterogeneity” (异质性) to characterize the “Chineseness” represented in second-generation mainlander writers’ works, noting that the language these writers use is the heritage of the May Fourth Movement, which for contemporary Mainland Chinese readers is “convoluted” yet “extremely appealing” (Liang 2014, p. B09). According to Zhou, this heterogeneity can also be observed in the (first- and second-generation) mainlander writers’ understanding of modern Chinese history, which presents a completely different perspective from the history that Mainland Chinese readers were taught in school and via the media. Critic Zhao Xifang links the popularity of the works to Mainland Chinese readers’ nostalgia for the Republican period (Liang 2014, p. B09). He speculates that it is perhaps the strong sense of humanity expressed in secondgeneration mainlander writings that Mainland readers find attractive, suggesting that this humanistic quality is lacking in Mainland Chinese works (Liang 2014, p. B09). Similarly, Li Linrong argues that what Mainland Chinese readers see in Taiwanese literature is a “familiar strangeness” (2009a, p. 171). Li does not use the term “heterogeneity”, but he echoes Zhou’s view. We should note that “heterogeneity” is a key concept in Sinophone studies and is often used to describe the Sinophone communities’ cultural identity (Tsai 2013, p. 17; Shih 2013, p. 30). In Sinophone studies, heterogeneity refers to migrant cultures as distinctively developed out of the environments in which the migrants live. The effect of “heterogeneity” that second-generation mainlander writings bring about for critics in the PRC is aptly explained by Li Linrong as follows: The uniqueness of Taiwanese literature lies in its ‘being but not belonging to’ (在而不属于) the literary system developed by Chinese socialism. As a result, on the one hand, Chinese academia has to adopt different attitudes and approaches to Taiwanese literature. On the other, Chinese scholars take pains

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The reception of Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well in China illustrates the tension that Li describes. Mainland Chinese critics such as Xu Xiang (2017), Shi Wenting (2015), and Li Yang (2016) praise Chiang’s vivid narratives of the wide cultural gap between the mainlander characters and their Mainland Chinese relatives. However, they also highlight the first-generation character’s determination to resettle in China, regarding it as showing a mainlander exile’s sincere love for his “homeland”. Another example is Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village. While Lai and Wang’s aim was to introduce juancun as part of Taiwanese culture, Mainland Chinese critics, unlike Taiwanese critics, have not paid any attention to the play’s downplaying of sociocultural tensions between Taiwanese and mainlanders. Instead, Mainland Chinese critics, such as Zhao Pu (2011) and Zhou Liming (2011), while regarding juancun stories as a type of Taiwanese experience, underscore the importance of the mainlanders’ Chinese origins (by using well-worn expressions such as “blood is thicker than water” and “born of the same root”) to reinforce the ethnic ties across the Strait. Even though Mainland Chinese critics have sought to assimilate these works into Chinese literature, they encounter difficulties that arise out of the heterogeneous qualities of these works which resist the essentialist view of seeing all “Chinese” as belonging to a cultural unity, an idea both the CCP and KMT share in the discourses of Chinese nationalism. David Der-wei Wang’s argument of post-loyalism, which complicates the relationship between “China” and descendants of Chinese migrants, sheds light on how second-generation mainlander writings have departed from former mainlander political identification with the KMT. As discussed in Chapters 2, 3, and 5, second-generation mainlander authors seek to explore the futility or even absurdity of their migrant mainlander parents’ loyalty to the KMT and its values. In their preoccupation with this topic, these second-generation mainlander works are distinctly post-loyalist for they “still construct, deconstruct, add, alter, and mock their loyalty or betrayal of their home-state and homeland” (Wang 2014, p. 10). While Mainland Chinese critics attempt to exploit second-generation mainlander writings for the service of Chinese nationalism, drawing upon Wang’s perspective of post-loyalism, the “Chineseness” and “China” that are dealt with in the eight works never aim to guard any political orthodoxy, but present second-generation mainlander writers’ fictionalization of their entangled memory and emotional attachments to the first generation. From this perspective, these are works of a second generation’s postmemory, in which parental experiences are figured as the loss of “the old ‘doctrine’ and ‘nation’” (Wang 2013, p. 103). These expressions of loss are complicated by the writings being produced over some three decades of Taiwanization, in which the status and experience of being a mainlander underwent significant shifts. As Wang states, “The post-loyalist’s sense of loss and

Conclusion and epilogue 155 his inability to let go of his love and resentment […] become endlessly evolving burdens and quagmires—or ghostly seductions” (2013, p. 102). While Wang regards the post-loyalist mentality as a complicated diasporic condition (2013, p. 103), Shu-mei Shih notes, the diaspora will one day settle in the host country and become culturally localized (2013, p. 37). The ambivalence of being “in-between” has become less relevant among third- or fourth-generation mainlanders, as dramatized in the later stories in Peach Blossom Well and as presented in publications by third-generation mainlanders.4 The recent socio-political research on the transformation of Taiwanese identities by Bruce Jacobs also shows that Taiwanese identities “have become much more ‘Taiwanese’ as Taiwan has democratized” (2018, p. 10), particularly for the younger generations. “Mainlander” as “outsider” waisheng has become increasingly incoherent for Taiwanese millennials. As such, second-generation mainlander literature should be regarded as a historically situated genre, since it reflects the social experience of ordinary (that is, non-KMT-affiliated) mainlanders as complexly bound up with the KMT’s quasicolonial rule. The legacy of KMT rule from the 1990s onwards has involved for mainlanders, as much as local Taiwanese, a process of “de-colonization” from the KMT-imposed culture of the martial law period. The struggle to construct a new Mainland Taiwanese identity (rather than Mainland Chinese identity) is a key feature of post-martial law second-generation mainlander works. As Taiwanese literature has developed toward heteroglossia (眾聲喧嘩), suggesting that multiple identities are recognized and appreciated, second-generation mainlander literature’s focus on “China” and “Chineseness” should not be simply perceived as evidence of mainlanders’ inability to settle in Taiwan, but instead what it presents much more is the mainlanders’ trajectory of becoming “Taiwanese”, the legacy of which enables the popularity of “mainlander culture” (外省文化) in contemporary Taiwan.

Notes 1 The works of some Hong Kong writers, such as Dung Kai-cheung (董啟章), and Malaysian Chinese writers, such as Li Yong-ping (李永平), were also included in this series. 2 The event was held by the Shenzhen Reading Committee (深圳读书月组委会). 3 See footnote 2 in the Introduction regarding the reasons for not including Chang Ta-chun’s As One Family and Lo Yi-chin’s Xi Xia Hotel in this book. 4 One example is Chu Tien-hsin’s child Hsieh Hai-meng (謝海盟). Born as female, she underwent a sex-change operation in 2017. His literary work in 2017, On the Shu-lan River (舒蘭河上), has drawn much attention not only because his mother is a prominent writer in Taiwan, but also because of the content of the book, in which he traces the river Shu-lan running through Taipei City. It was hardly known since the river has been covered underground for many years due to urban design. The book is viewed by critics as presenting the author’s strong affection to and identification with Taipei.

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Conclusion and epilogue 157 Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2013). Post-loyalism. In S. M. Shih, C. H. Tsai & B. Bernards (Eds.), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 93–116). New York: Columbia University Press. Wang, D. D. W. 王德威. (2014). ‘Gen’ de zhengzhi, ‘shi’ de shixue: huayu lünshu yü Zhongguo wenxue ‘根’的政治，‘势’的诗学—华语论述与中国文学 [The Politics of ‘Root’, the Poetics of ‘Propensity’: Sinophone Discourse and Chinese Literature]. The Yangtze River Criticism 扬子江评论, 1, 5–14. Wei, P. 魏沛娜. (2015, August 13). Women dui Taiwan wenxue zhi duoshao? 我們對台 灣文學知多少？ [How Much Do We Know about Taiwanese Literature?]. Shenzhen News 深圳商報. Retrieved 18 October, 2017, from https://read01.com/jNk8Bd.html# .Wn02NGKCyRv Xu, X. 徐翔. (2017). Waishengren de xüngen zhilü: Chiang Hsiao-yun de Tao Hua Jing 外省人的寻根之旅－蒋小云的《桃花井》 [Mainlander’s Journey of Seeking Roots]. Journal of Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics (Social Science Edition) 郑州航空工业管理学院学报, 36(1), 74–78. Yeh, S. T. 葉石濤. (2010). Taiwan wenxue shi gang 台灣文學史綱 [History of Taiwanese Literature]. Kaohsiung: Chunhui. Zhao, C. 赵从娜. (2010). Dalu zhi Taiwan wenxue yanjiu 大陆之台湾文学研究 [Studies on Taiwanese Literature in Mainland China]. Journal of Changzhou Institute of Technology (Social Science Edition) 常州工学院学报, 28(6), 18–22. Zhao, P. 趙普. (2011). Baotze, liang ge, rehude…包子，兩個，熱呼的… [Two Hot Meat Buns]. In Baodao yi cun 寶 一村 [The Village] (pp. 288–289). Taipei: National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center and Performing Arts Review 國立中正文化中心. Zhong, D. 钟丁源. (2013). Taiwan wenxue yu dalu de guanxi 台湾文学与大陆的关系 [The relationship between Taiwanese Literature and Mainland China]. Culture and History Vision (Theory) 文史博览(理论), 4, 32–34. Zhou, L. 周黎明 (2011). ‘Baodao yi cun’ tamen Taiwan zhexie nian 《寶 一村》他們台灣這些年 [The Village: Their Taiwan in These Years]. In Baodao yi cun 寶 一村 [The Village] (pp. 286–287). Taipei: National Chiang Kaishek Cultural Center and Performing Arts Review 國立中正文化中心. Zhou, L., Jiang, Y. & Zhang, Y. 周立民，姜妍，张怡 (2014, January 28). Taiwan wenxue re chong lai, nabian de yueliang geng yuan ma? 台湾文学热重来 那边的月亮更圆吗? [The Revival of the Taiwanese Literature Fever. Is the Moon Better-looking There?]. Beijing Youth Daily 北京青年报, B09

Index

Locators in bold refer to tables and locators in italics refer to figures. 2015 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature 8 A-Chin, Hsiau 3, 18, 50, 147 All for Love (Su) 59 ancestral homeland, treatment of in writing 14–15 Anderson, Benedict 10 Ang, Ien 2, 11, 16, 125–126, 132, 142 anti-Communist literature 4 As One Family (Chang) 151 autobiographical fiction 78 autobiographical narratives 11–12 Beijing Youth Daily 152 benshengren 10 bentuhua Taiwanization 5, 16, 29, 100, 117 “Between Memory and History” (Nora) 64 Between Two Homelands (Hou) 14 Bhabha, Homi, and theory of hybridity 127 Bohemian writer 9 Bourdieu, Pierre, and an official language 41, 42 Boym, Svetlana: theory of nostalgia 65, 74–76, 113 Cao, Huimin 152 Chang, Chi-jiang, feelings as an ethnic minority 61 Chang, Mau-kuei 13, 37, 38, 43 Chang, Ta-chun 20, 78, 151; As One Family 151; The Tang Dynasty Poet Li Bai 151; commentaries about “In Remembrance” 77–78; feelings as an ethnic minority 61 Chang, Tieh-chih 105 Chang, Yvonne Sung-sheng 36, 37, 45

Chen, Cheng-hsi, commentaries about The Village 105 Chen, Chien-chung, critique of Hao’s The Inn 89, 92, 97 Chen, Fang-ming: A History of Modern Taiwanese Literature 150, 156; and juancun literature 29, 66; and secondgeneration mainlander writings 151 Chen, Kuo-wei 44 Chen, Meixia 1, 113 Chen, Shui-bian 6, 14, 108 Chi, Jun, Sweet Olive 51 Chiang, Hsiao-yun 152; A Hundred Years of Happiness 123; Peach Blossom Well 2, 8, 15, 20, 123–143, 149; Red in Four Seasons 124; Tamarisk Baby 124; as a US-based mainlander writer 129–130 Chiang, Kai-shek, and Mandarin Chinese 41–42 Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall 85, 98 childhood memories 37, 69, 89, 98, 99, 105 China: Chinese migrant communities and 2, 51; as homeland 39, 50–52, 63–64; Kuomintang reunification efforts and 7; presentation of in military dependents’ villages 44; returning to 115–118; as a symbolic cultural center 15; views of in Peach Blossom Well 130–132; see also Mainland China China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database 152 China Newsweek 104 China-centric cultural ideology 62 China-centric cultural policies, Kuomintang and 4 China-centric ideology 8

160

Index

Chinese (Zhongguoren), being 31, 50, 147 Chinese Civil War 1, 41, 50, 124 Chinese Civil War migrants 1, 3, 11, 28, 43, 124; and ethnicity 11; as outsiders 3 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and political tension with Kuomintang 3, 14–15, 17, 33, 147, 154 Chinese communities 15 Chinese Cultural Renaissance 33–34 Chinese cultures 123; in Taiwan 149 Chinese diaspora 2; Taiwan and 13 Chinese experience, in Peach Blossom Well 139–143 Chinese identity, hybridization of 123; see also hybridity Chinese literature 6, 87, 151, 153–154 Chinese migrant communities: and the meaning of Chineseness 15; and relations with Mainland China 16; and ties to China 2 Chinese nationalism 10, 42, 76, 154; and Kuomintang propaganda 147 Chinese origin, as a cultural burden 14 Chinese origins 154 Chinese women, narratives of 45–49 Chineseness 2, 3, 15–16, 123, 155; heterogeneity and 153; juancun and 43; KMT and 34; and mainlander identity 125–129; meaning of 15; nature of 16–17 Chiu, Kuei-fen 5, 9; critique of This Love, This Life 36, 48; and Taiwan xiangtu literature 28 Chiung, Yao 151 Chu, Tien-hsin 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 37, 78, 151; characterization of mainlander school children 40; “Doesn’t My Memory Count?” 45; ethnic bias portrayal in 49; Everlasting 1, 17, 18, 19, 29–31, 36, 40, 59; Everlasting (Chu) 148; feelings as an ethnic minority 61; and mainlander identity 62–63; and the martial law period 45; and military dependents’ villages 66–69; portrayal of Taiwanese women 46–47; racial discrimination and 13; “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” 1, 7, 12, 17, 19, 43–44, 59, 108–109, 147–148 Chu, Tien-wen 151 Chungshan Hall 85, 98, 99 City of Sadness, A (film) 36 civil war Chinese migrants 2, 10, 38 Clifford, James 14 Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories, A (Su) 44, 62

collective consciousness 37 collective cultural identity, mainlanders and 37–38, 107 collective memory 10, 31–36, 37, 50–51, 64, 78, 107–109; KMT-inspired 18; versus personal memory 18 Corcuff, Stéphane 7, 15, 16, 134; Light Wind and Warm Sun 134; Neighbour of China—Taiwan’s Liminality 49 crisis of identity 5 cross-Strait perspectives, and secondgeneration mainlander writers 1 Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement 7 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee) 123 cultural bias 4, 18 “Cultural China” (Wei-ming Tu) 15–16 cultural discrimination 7 cultural heritage preservation 107 cultural identity 2; mainlanders’ idea of 15 cultural imperialism 40 cultural nostalgia 132–134 culturally diverse migrants 13 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and the Kuomintang political competition 6 Department of Taiwanese Literature 5–6, 87 Departments of Chinese Literature 6, 87 diaspora 14–16 diasporic literature 14–15 “Discourses of Nationalism and Xiangtu Rhetoric” (Wang) 51 “Doesn’t My Memory Count?” (Chu) 45 Dream of the Red Chamber Award 8 ethnic background, patrilineal system and 11 ethnic issues, between Taiwanese and mainlanders 6 ethnocommunal consciousness 14 Everlasting (Chu) 1, 17, 18, 19, 36, 40, 59, 148; characters in 41; and China 51; as juancun literature 29–31, 44; military dependents’ villages 45 family history 96; from the father’s side 78–79 family memory, rescuing 95 Fan, Joshua 13, 125, 127, 135, 139 Fan, Yun 7 father (family) writings 78 fathers: as frustrating figures 85–86; narrators’ ambivalent relationships with 78; writers’ emotions about 79 February 28 Incident 6–7, 10, 36, 98–99 Feng, Lei 60, 67–69, 71–76

Index Fin-de-siècle Splendor 8–9 first-generation mainlanders 13; and Hao Yu-hsiang’s work 148; and Lo Yi-chin’s work 148; and second-generation mainlanders writings 149 forced migration 13 Formosa Incident 36 Foucault, Michael 96–98 “From Sojourners to Settlers” (Li) 37 gender relations 45–48 “Ghost Fire” 98 Gu, Yuanqing 153 Haddon, Rosemary 68, 76 Hakka 10–11 Halbwachs, Maurice 18, 50–51; theory of collective memory of 31–32 Hall, Stuart 2, 5, 14, 61 Han 10 Hao, Fuzhen 95, 98 Hao, Yu-hsiang 8, 11, 19, 20; and civil war Chinese migrants 96; Hot Spring Washing Away Our Melancholy 12; The Inn 1, 8, 12, 19–20, 78, 83–99 hegemonic cultural ideology, Kuomintang 4 heterogeneity, cultural identity and 127, 141 Hillenbrand, Margaret 9 Hirsch, Marianne 18, 31, 50–52, 149; see also postmemory History of Modern Taiwanese Literature, A (Chen) 150 History of Shandong Schools in Exile 98 Hoklo 10–11 Hoklo Taiwanese writers 151 Holocaust 50 homeless soldiers 43 Hong, Hong 105 Hot Spring Washing Away Our Melancholy 12 Hotel Xi Xia (Lo Yi-chin) 8, 151 Hou, Hsiao-hsian, A City of Sadness (film) 36 Hou, Ju-chi, Between Two Homelands 13 “How Much Do We Know about Taiwanese literature?” 152 Hu, Yan-nan 9, 78, 95 Hundred Years of Happiness, A (Chiang) 123 Hutcheon, Linda 97 hybridity of 14, 126–128, 137–138, 143, 147, 149, 151 identity 1–3, 8, 12–13, 60–61, 147, 152; mainlander identity 5, 7, 8, 12, 17–19,

161

35, 59, 63, 65, 83–87, 90–96, 107, 123, 128, 147–148, 151–152; Chinese identity 14, 30–31, 65, 69, 74, 124–126, 132; collective identity 29, 33, 37, 64; cultural identity 10, 15–17, 33, 78, 125, 138, 153; identity crisis 60, 76; and juancun 43–46; and KMT 33–34; Mainland Taiwanese identity 155; self-proclaimed identity 6; Taiwanese identity 7–8, 51; Sinophone identity 147 imagined communities 10 in-betweenness 147, 150–151 “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” 1, 7, 12, 17, 19, 59, 69, 108–109; characters in 60; commentaries on by Chang Ta-chun 77–78; and military dependents’ villages 43–44; nostalgic emotions in 76 indigenous languages 3–4 indigenous people, of Taiwan 10 Inn, The (Hao) 1, 8, 12, 19–20, 78, 83–99; characters in 98; Chen’s critique of 97; and mainlander identity 95; and nonjuancun mainlander literature 99 institutionalized “racism,” of the Kuomintang 10 intermarriages 11 invented kinship 10 Jacobs, Bruce 39, 61, 155 Jameson, Fredric 106–107 Japanese colonization 10 Japanese language 3 Jaw, Ching-hwa 6 jiguan system 10–12, 44 juancun 20, 107–108; in a 1990s context 61–65; Lai and Wang’s treatment of The Village 104–105, 150; and mainlander identity 43–46; and mainlanders’ collective identity 43; in military dependents’ villages 60; as nostalgic home 65–69; origins of 66; as sites of suffering 69–74; see also military dependents’ villages juancun communities 64 juancun culture 104 juancun literature 4, 6, 8, 17, 19, 66–68, 104; Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting as 29–31; framing of 28–29; Lai Sheng-chuan and Wang Wei-chung’s The Village as 104–107; second-generation characters in 89–91; Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life as 29–31 juancun mainlander identity 49, 107 juancun works 148

162

Index

KMT see Kuomintang Ku, Ling 66–67 Kuo, Li-hsin 105; commentaries about The Village 106 Kuomintang: authoritarianism 8, 38, 59, 110, 77, 85, 95, 113–114, 124; and China-centric cultural policies 4–6, 31–35, 60–62, 109–110; Chinese nationalism 10, 29, 42, 76, 131, 154; institutionalized “racism” of 10; and political competition with DPP 6, 112; and political tension with CCP 3; propaganda and 41, 51, 147; and relationship with mainlander 61–62 Lai, Bruce 105 Lai, Sheng-chuan: Performance Workshop 104; “A Person of Influence” 104; The Village 1, 8, 17, 20, 104, 118, 154 Landsberg, Alison 107; Prosthetic Memory 31, 108 Leaving Tongfang (Su) 1, 19, 44, 59; characters in 60, 66–69, 74–75; nostalgic emotions in 76 Lee, Ang, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 123 Lee, Teng-hui 5, 87, 117 Legislative Yuan 7 Li, Kuang-chün 43, 83, 108; “From Sojourners to Settlers” 37 Li, Linrong 153 Li, Yang 154; critique of Chiang’s Peach Blossom Well 124 Li, Yu, “Taipei Homeland” 35 Li, Yu-ning 105 Liglav, A-Wu 13 Lin, Hai-yin, Memories of Peking 51 literary liberalization 4 literature of nostalgia 14; see also nostalgia Liu, Jingwen 7 Lo, Yi-chin 7, 8, 11, 19, 20, 151; Hotel Xi Xia 8, 151; The Moon Clan 1, 15, 19–20, 83–103, 149; Ng’s review of writing of 96 “Looking Back” 98 Lowenthal, David 98 Lung, Ying-tai 20, 151 Ma, Ying-jeou 7, 108 Mainland China 123; and Chinese migrant communities relations 16; cultural alienation from 14; and secondgeneration mainlanders 149 Mainland Chinese works 153

mainlander women, virtuous, vs. indecent Taiwanese women 45–49 mainlanders 6–12; ambivalence toward identity of 91–95; collective cultural identity of 37–38; cultural bias towards Taiwanese people 37; and cultural identity 15; culture of 8; depiction as characters in novels 70–74; disparagement of 7; double displacement of 61; as an ethnic group 13; as forced migrants 96; hostility to 61–62; identity of 17–19, 35–37, 59, 63, 65, 78, 83–87, 90–96, 107, 123, 128, 147–148, 151–152; and Kuomintang 61–62; original sins of 6–7; secondgeneration 1, 99; as Taiwanese 15; writers views and 12 mainlanders and mainlander literature, in Taiwan 3–9 mainlanders and the native Taiwanese, ethnic divide between 6 mainlanders’ Taiwanization 149 Mandarin Chinese, as official language 40–41 Mandarin-language culture 16 Mandarin/Mandarin Chinese: in military dependents’ villages 43–45; as official language 3; culture 59 martial law period 7; lifting of in Taiwan 5, 59, 147; and mainlander writers 8 mass culture 31 maternal ethnicity 11 May Fourth Movement 153 Memories of Peking (Lin) 51 memory writing 17–19, 147 Meyer, Mahlon 13, 14; Remembering China from Taiwan 35 military dependents’ villages 64–65, 78, 104; and China 44; and Everlasting (Chu) 45; and the Kuomintang 43; Mandarin Chinese language in 43–45; “In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound” 43–44; social life in 59–60; and This Love, This Life (Yuan) 43–45; writers views and 78 Modernist literary movement 4 Moon Clan, The (Lo) 8, 15, 19–20, 78; characters in 97, 99, 149; and mainlander identity 95; the narrator in 98; Ng’s critique 94–95; and nonjuancun mainlander literature 99; and postmodern novels 97; secondgeneration narrator’s and mainlander identity 99; Yang’s critique of 97

Index national narrative, vs personal narrative 95 Nationalist Government’s retreat 105 nativist literature movement 4; see also xiangtu literature movement Neighbour of China—Taiwan’s Liminality (Corcuff) 49 New Express Daily 152 New Life Movement 33 Ng, Kim Chew 78; views about Lo’s writing 94, 96 Night at an Inn, A (Du) 90 nomadic writer 9 non-juancun mainlanders 8, 83, 99, 148 Nora, Pierre 17, 69–70; “Between Memory and History” 64; lieux de mémoire 17 nostalgia 77; China-central cultural 132–134; Leaving Tongfang and 74–76; Peach Blossom Well and 124; postloyalist 76–78; theory of 65, 74–76; The Village and 109, 114, 118 nostalgic home, juancun as 65–69 official language 40; Bourdieu and 41, 42; and social status 42 original sins, of mainlanders 6–7 orphan mentality 96 Orphan of Asia (Wu) 96–97 overseas Chinese communities 123 Pai, Hsien-yung 151 Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? (Yu) 118 patrilineal system 11 Peach Blossom Well, and mainlander identity 155 Peach Blossom Well (Chiang) 2, 8, 15, 20, 123; characters in 134–139, 148; Chiang’s views as a mainlander 129–130; critiques of 124; and mainlander identity 124, 149; reception of in China 154 Peng, Jui-chin 150 Penghu Incident 96, 99 People’s Republic of China 3, 7, 17, 45, 93, 128, 139, 151, 153 Performance Workshop, Lai’s 104 personal memory 98; versus collective memory 18 personal narrative, vs national narrative 95–100 post-loyalism 77, 154 post-martial law period, literature of 149 postmemory 18–19, 31, 50–51, 70, 147, 149 postmodern historiographic fiction 97 postmodern literature/novels 97, 151 Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg) 31

163

quasi-exilic mentality 18, 50, 147 Rawnsley, Gary D. 3 Rea, Christopher 109 Red in Four Seasons (Chiang) 124 Remembering China from Taiwan (Meyer) 35 reunification 15 “The Revival of the Taiwanese literature Fever” 152 Rey, Chow 16 Roy, Denny 40 Safran, William 14 Said, Edward 73; “Reflections on Exiles” 137 San, Mao 9, 13, 151 Second World War 151 second-generation mainlander characters 149–155 second-generation mainlander writers 1, 8, 12–13, 14, 19–20, 66, 151; defining 9–11; and experience of dislocation 13; and family memories 17; identity of 147; and juancun 64; and juancun as nostalgic home 65–69; juancun literature and 19; literature of 16; as a mainlander in China 59; narratives of 18; postmemory and 18–19; and Taiwanese culture 37; and their relations with their fathers 79; theme of 95; US-based 20, 129–130 second-generation mainlander writings 150, 151; complexity of 152–153; and Kuomintang 154–155; popularity of 153; the post-martial law period 148 second-generation mainlanders 1; and family genealogy 10; identity of 150; literature of 2, 9, 151, 155; views on China 50 self-identification, marginalized ethnic 12 Senior Civil Service Examination 62 Shang, Vincent T. M. 74–75 Shen, Shiau-Chi 61 Shi, Wenting 154 Shih, Shu-mei 17, 142, 149–150, 155; Sinophone Studies 16; Visuality and Identity 15–16, 123, 134 Simon, Scott 13 Sinicization policy, Kuomintang’s 3, 6, 46 Sinicized Hakka Taiwanese 45 Sinophone communities 123; cultural identity of 153 Sinophone identity 17 Sinophone literature 3, 15, 151

164

Index

Sinophone studies 153; Sinophone Studies (Shih, ed.) 16 sites, juancun 69–74 state ideology, representation of 36–37 state-imposed language, Mandarin Chinese 41 Study on Shandong Students in Exile 1945–1962, A 98 Su, Wei-chen 4, 44, 70, 78; All for Love 59; A Collection of Taiwan Juancun Short Stories 62; Leaving Tongfang 1, 19, 44, 59, 59–82; and mainlander identity 62–63 Sunflower Movement 7 “Taipei Homeland” (Li) 35 Taiwan: characteristics of ethnic groups in 11; Chinese cultural heritage 85, 149; cultural and political transformations 5; democratization in 19, 36, 147; lifting of martial law in 5, 59; mainlanders and mainlander literature in 3–9; mainlanders in 149; post-martial law period 6, 7, 8; tightening of economic linkage with China 7 Taiwan consciousness 5, 7 Taiwanese, prejudice against 43–44 Taiwanese characters, objectification of 49 Taiwanese culture 8, 123 Taiwanese identities 155 Taiwanese literature 20, 150, 152–153; and Chinese literature 153–154 Taiwanese literature fever 20, 151, 152 Taiwanese people, killing of 6–7, 36 Taiwanese population: ethnic classification of 11; ethnic groups of 10 Taiwanese women: indecent, vs virtuous mainlander women 45–49; portrayal of 46–47 Taiwanese writers 4 Taiwanization 5–6, 10, 16, 19, 59, 61, 76, 96, 107, 147; bentuhua 5, 16, 29, 100, 117; identity 12; in literature 19, 149–150; rise of bentuhua 100; and self-chosen identities 11 Taiwanized juancun 110–115 Tamarisk Baby (Chiang) 124 Tang, Nuo 151 Tang Dynasty Poet Li Bai, The (Chang) 151 third-generation mainlanders 15, 155 This Love, This Life (Yuan) 1, 18, 19, 29–31, 36, 37, 38, 148; characters in

41, 42–43, 46; and China 51; ethnic bias portrayal in 48–49; portrayal of Taiwanese women 47–48 traditional Chinese culture, Kuomintang as protector of 3 Tu, Wei-ming 16, 123; “Cultural China” 15–16; huaren and Zhonguoren 127 US-based mainlander writer 129–130 Village, The (Wang and Lai) 1, 8, 17, 20, 104; commentaries about 105, 154; critique by secondgeneration mainlanders 105–106, 124; first-generation mainlander characters in 148; juancun in 104–105, 150, 154; and mainlander identity 149 Visuality and Identity (Shih) 15–16, 123 Volland, Nicolai 109 waishengren 3, 10, 69, 128 Wang, David Der-wei 1, 73, 77–79, 138, 154–155; “Discourses of Nationalism and Xiangtu Rhetoric” 51; post-loyalism 77, 154 Wang, Fu-chang 6, 10 Wang, Gungwu, Chineseness 13 Wang, Wei-chung 109; The Village 1, 8, 17, 20, 104, 118, 149, 154 Wenjing Culture and Media Co. 151 White Terror, The 99, 105–106, 113–116, 128, 132, 148 “Why Do We Love Taiwanese Writers?” 152 Women’s Friends 46 women’s literature 151 works of memory (lieux de mémoire) 17, 64 Wu, Chuo-liu, Orphan of Asia 96–97, 152 Wu, Hsin-yi 9, 107 Wu, Nien-jen 151 Wu, Zheng 7 xiangtu literature 4, 19, 28–29, 34, 51 Xu, Xiang 154 Yang, Chia-hsien 9; critique of Chiang’ Peach Blossom Well 132, 134; critique of Lo’s The Moon Clan 97 Yang, Dominic Meng-hsuan 13, 38 Yang, K’uei 152 Yang, Meng-shuan 13 Yeh, Shi-tao 150 Yu, Chien-ming 46 Yu, Kan-ping, Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? 118

Index Yu, Kwang-chung 151 Yuan, Chiung-chiung 78; characterization of Taiwan 38–40; and gender relations 45–46; This Love, This Life 1, 18, 19, 29–31, 36–38, 148

Zhang, Yiwei 152 Zhao, Congna 153 Zhao, Pu 154 Zhao, Xifang 153 Zhong, Dingyuan 153 Zhou, Limin 153, 154

165