2001 MMLA
Globalization and the Image
Chi-she Li
National Taiwan Normal University
Globalization, History and Taipei: Tzu Tianxing's "The Old Capital"
Do not cite without permission of the author.
How should
even local, regional, or national memories be secured, structured, and
represented? Of course, this is a fundamentally political question about
the nature of the public sphere, about democracy and its future, about
the changing shape of nationhood, citizenship, and identity. Andreas Huyssen
* Introduction:
East Asia, Tradition and Globalization
As economic globalization looms ever larger in East Asia, we must raise
the question of how the local cultures in this region are responding to
this epochal change. The economy of East Asia is post-Fordist since the
technological advances in communications and the intensification of capital
flow allow such areas as China and Hong Kong to be "increasingly differentiated
and segmented" as markets and industrial production areas (Tomaney 159).
In this context, the "alternative modernity" theory is one dominant discourse
that seeks to address such a pressing issue, maintaining that there should
be various approaches to modernity to accommodate differences embedded
in the multitude of locales and local cultures. For example, China asserts
her particular approach to development and modernization, in a way that
could be summarized in Deng Xiao Ping's famous slogan, "Marxism in the
Chinese Way." As seen in this phrase coined by Deng, central to the discourse
of alternative modernity is the notion of reworking tradition. Michael
Watts explains the plasticity of tradition: "the realm of 'tradition'
or 'custom' provides much of the symbolic raw material around which local
communities, interest groups, and classes rework and refashion the modernizations
of capitalist transformation"(15). Aihwa Ong, arguing that the reworking
of tradition is the dominant logics of transnationality in East Asia,
identifies the pertinence of this concept to the discourse of alternative
modernity in her book Flexible Citizenship. Tradition is a pool of resources
and thereby East Asian countries and their people have means at disposal
for their own economic, social and urban development not necessarily repeating
the footsteps of the West. Moreover, the flexible re-use of tradition
also helps East Asian countries, which already have a long and complicated
history of mutual interaction, to envision regional communications and
alliances across national boundaries. In this sense, the discourse of
alternative modernity seems to offer an antidote to any pressure resulting
from the onset of the capital accumulation space. The inventive use of
tradition, something old and familiar, is thought to deal with the shock
of change brought about by the flexible accumulation in the era of globalization.
I will argue, however, that the discourse of alternative modernity, with
its core concept of reworking tradition, is insufficient to map out the
relationships between traditions and globalization in contemporary East
Asian countries. In spite of the possibility of a "flexible" integration
of tradition and globalization, there are still "bumps on the road to
this end," so to speak. I will seek to qualify the optimism embedded in
such a development discourse as "alternative modernity" by examining how
tradition has become abstracted and reduced into nothing more than a myriad
of images in globalization. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's theoretical concept
of differential space and David Harvey's time-space compression, I will
study with close analysis how a contemporary Chinese woman writer, Tzu
Tianxing, gives out the half-revealed jarring relationship between Chinese
nationalism and contemporary globalization in her writing of a melancholy
urban history embodied in the historical novella, "The Old Capital (1995)."1.
Showing the major patterns of how traditions are reshaped by forces of
globalization in Taipei, this literary work leads us to see sites of contraction
between tradition and economic globalization in East Asia, a critical
vista repressed in the optimistic discourse of alternative modernity,
which advocates the collaboration of the local and the global.
* Kyoto, Taipei and Nostalgia: Tzu's "Old Capital"
The novella "The Old Capital" narrates a nolstalgic journey in the second-person
point of view2. The main character, without a name (henceforth referred
to as You), a middle-aged woman, is compared to a spectral being, overloaded
with memories that cannot be corroborated anymore by the fast-changing
urban landscape of contemporary Taipei. What is more ironic, the urban
changes, that which alienates her away from her own city, take place in
the name of the return to the local during the process of globalization.
To avoid a direct confrontation between her memories and the new cityscape,
the main character assumes the identity of a tourist, first to Kyoto and
then to Taipei, to indulge herself in the nostalgia of the lost time.
In this sense, she is what Wolf Lepenies would describe as a melancholiac,
who "has reached a stage where everything [one] regarded as self-evident
has been forfeited; this in turn directly causes him to question legitimation
and thus to establish new self-evident truths" (164).
Tzu's story consists of two major trips taken by the female "you" character.
Receiving a fax from her best friend, asking to meet her in a hotel in
Kyoto, You flies to Japan from Taipei as soon as possible without waiting
for any further confirmation from the friend, referred to as "A." Later
she realizes that her friend, whom she has not seen since they graduated
from college, would never come to Kyoto. Her trip in the ancient city
then turns into an introspection of her bygone past. Walking alone on
the streets of Kyoto, she remembers the old looks of her hometown Taipei
during the time when both she and her friend shared adolescent romantic
longings. Without seeing her friend as planned, You shortens the trip
and flies back to Taipei.
Interestingly, she returns to Taipei to start another trip in her home
city by sheer chance. When she steps out of the airport in Taipei, a local
tourist guide mistakes her for a Japanese. She goes along with this mistake
and joins Japanese tourists in a packaged tour that commemorates colonial
Taipei for nostalgic Japanese. With a tour map of the old Taipei city
in her hand, she discovers another past of Taipei: during the time of
occupation (1895-1945), Japanese imperialists built Taipei as a duplication
of Kyoto to construct another imperial city where the emperor could reside
outside of Japan. The juxtaposition of contemporary Taipei and its colonial
history hrows into sharp relief for her an intolerable fact that the old
city of Taipei as she knows since childhood cannot be reclaimed. The urbanization
accelerated by globalization has transformed Taipei beyond recognition.
It is no surprise that the novella ends at the point where the main character
finds herself lost at home, crying desperately to herself, "Where am I?"
Often labeled as a spokesperson for what can be called pro-China cultural
nationalism, Tzu Tianxing received much critical attention in the recent
literary debates during 1990s when Taiwan starts to challenge vehemently
the dominant hegemony of pro-China ideology and begins to develop a Taiwan-centered
cultural nationalism3. The critical reception of her "Old Capital" is
produced amidst this political turmoil. A reading of her work often means
an interpretation of what the ideology of Great China means culturally
in contemporary Taiwan. As a cultural politics closely associated with
the ideological controls by Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan after 1949, Great
China echoes the concept of Great Germany, and speaks of the supreme national
pride in being a Chinese. Such interpretations of her works often focus
on the cultural significance of Tzu's political stance. A sympathetic
reading of Tzu's works is to urge the readers to suspend their political
judgment against Tzu's supposedly conservative ideology (referring to
her not being politically correct in the trend of localization (pen tu
hua). David Der-wei Wang, for example, argues that it would be premature
to reach the conclusion that Tzu is a cultural conservative since it is
not yet clear in which political direction Taiwan is heading, let alone
determining which political assumption is conservative or progressive
(14). Another reading is to take Tzu's cultural concerns as vocal manifestations
of minority cultures. For one, Chaoyang Liao takes Tzu as a supporter
of multiculturalism, who values cultural heterogeneity as witnessed in
Taiwan: "the dystopian vision [of the ending] . . . points not only to
th fear of historical fossilization but to the fear of the total assimilation
of difference in national and ethnic rigidity." Despite their different
views of Tzu's identity politics, these critics all seem to discuss her
work from within the context of post-Chiang Taiwan. Here I will employ
a comparative and global framework to produce a revisionist reading of
Tzu's literary politics, examining Tzu's "Old Capital" as a case study
of writing history at a time when the sense of history seems to be eliminated
by the forces of globalization.
* Globalization, Autochthony, and Erasure of History in urban Taiwan
To better understand the relationship between nationalistic discourses
in Taiwan and contemporary globalization, it is imperative to turn to
the geopolitics of East Asia in the last quarter of the twentieth century
and concentrate on the upsurge of Taiwanese consciousness in the middle
of the transition from the Cold-War period to a globalized era. Let us
rehearse here a commonly known section of history. During the Cold War,
the cultural and political identity of the Taiwanese are moored on the
concept of Great China4. As Mainland China developed closer relationships
with United States both politically and economically, the halo around
Chiang's political claim of Taiwan as the only orthodox representative
of Great China started to rapidly fade. Such geopolitical change in East
Asian consequently brought about a tremendous ideological crisis in Taiwan.
In the 1980s the nationalistic ideology of Great China, constructed officially
by the KMT, started to be severely challenged5. Without a readily available
scaffolding of credible legitimation, the Taiwanese began to dub themselves
as the Orphan of Asia, a nation without international recognition of its
sovereignty. At this moment, Taiwan is typical of minor states in globalization,
witnessing fast economic development while the state and local culture
are rapidly losing their established authority6. The Taiwanese consciousness
thereby emerged in this set of circumstances7. As Joseph Bosco argues,
the recognition of the uniqueness of Taiwan "began in the mid-1980s when
surreptitious exchange with the PRC began" (quoted in Chang 25). The Taiwanese
consciousness arises also because of a strong desire to on the par with
other developed countries of the world. A-chin Hsiau comments. "a significant
aspect of Taiwanese cultural nationalism emergent in the early 1980s under
KMT rule was the disappointment in the slow progress of the native culture
toward 'full' modernization" (21). Thus, the assertion of Taiwan as the
local thereby surfaces to defend the Taiwanese from being trapped by an
ideological and cultural void created by the arrival of global integration8
and seeks to claim its own participation in the global scene.
While Western countries often defend its cultural identity by a tight
legal regulation of immigration against the inrush of aliens, minor states
are likely to secure itself against an unstable cultural position by the
claim of being rooted to the land. Weller describes where Taiwan stands
now: "The island floats in limbo, not quite a nation and not quite a state,
with no change in sight, but vibrant all the same with its economic success,
its politics, and its people's arguments about who they really are" (477).
The contemporary response to global changes with the Taiwanese consciousness
cannot be adequately explained by the classical account of cultural nationalism,
and a new theoretical vocabulary is in demand to comprehend the discourse
of localization in Taiwan9. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, in their comparative
studies of contemporary African states, provide a provocative theoretical
model, proper for me to appropriate to describe the Taiwanese localization
as a response to globalization. They bring our attention to a curious
phenomenon in Africa, the intensifying and shifting distinction between
the local people and the strangers.
Thus political liberalization leads, somewhat paradoxically, to an intensification
of the politics of belonging: fierce debates on who belongs where, violent
exclusion of "strangers" (even if this refers to people with the same
nationality who have lived for generations in the area), and a general
affirmation of roots and origins as the basic criteria of citizenship
and belonging (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 423).
The two anthropologists call this contemporary redefinition of citizenship
and belonging "autochthony": with the etymological and mythological meanings
of birth from the earth, this term refers to a latter-day claim of legitimacy
based on whether one has access to land. To be more specific, the issue
of the place of burial, Geschiere and Nyamnjoh note, is of supreme significance
in differentiating so-called local people from outsiders; it is often
asserted that home should be where one's ancestors are buried. Geschiere
and Nyamnjoh allege that the local, central to the concept of autochthony,
can only be "a trope without a substance of its own. It can be used for
defining the Self against the Other on all sorts of levels and in all
sorts of ways" (448). Witnessing the "forceful forms of exclusion" rampant
in Africa and Europe in the millennial capitalism, they construe autochthony,
the incessant and violent distinction between Self and the Other on the
basis of the access to land, as a resistance to the unprecedented mobility
in the era of globalization (449)10. We can borrow their theoretical formulation
of autochthony to allow us to distinguish the localization prompted by
globalization in Taiwan from the 19th-century nationalism resulted from
the uprising of the bourgeois class in the Western Europe. As we might
remember from the classical articulation of cultural nationalism by Ernest
Renan, a shared history rather than geographical boundaries is required
for the rise of nationalism. A nation of people that shares a common past
will strive to work together for a common future. In contrast to Renan's
cultural nationalism, autochthony lays emphasis on access to the physical
place to be the basis of distinction among the people inhabited on the
same piece of land.
The rise of Taiwanese consciousness is the key to understanding Tzu's
"Old Capital." You in the novella experiences this historical change in
Taiwan, known as "localization," in terms of the transition from the cultural
nationalism of Great China to the phenomenon of autochthony in Taiwan.
She yearns for a homogeneous nationalistic culture that has disappeared:
"The people at that time were very nice and innocent, willing to sacrifice
their lives or confront death for a belief or a loved one, no matter to
which political party each of them belonged" (151). You is startled to
find that the exalted sensibility associated with the space in Taipei
can only be traced from her memories of those glorious days11.
Back then, the Milky Way and meteors were crystal clear in the summer
night. A long while of gazing at the night sky often brought out grandiose
contemplation over the survival and demise of generations, and the rise
and fall of dynasties. If you were naïve enough, you would vow on the
spot to achieve something epic so as not to depart this life with nothing
done (152).
It is noteworthy that her lament is not about the collapse of nationalism
per se but the majestic national space where one intimates a harmonious
identification with history, nation and the people. You's chronic moodiness
is in fact a symptom of a dislocated cultural elite, who has adhered to
the ideology of Great China of Chiang Kai-shek's time. Specifically, this
nationalist ideology of Great China is an identity mechanism, created
to persuade people to disregard Chiang's political quagmire, to embrace
the newly constructed myth of nationhood: the Taiwanese people are the
true inheritors of the sublime Chinese culture in contrast to the "illegitimate"
communist sovereignty in Mainland China12. Such nationalist ideology always
gives culture the privileged position as the major medium through which
one relates to his/her everyday life. And You proves herself a true cultural
elite grown up in the time of Chiang, who hardly doubts that culture should
have the paramount power to counteract political chaos and moral crisis.
Chiang's cultural nationalism has permeated her sensual experiences in
her urban space to such an extent that every moment of her childhood and
youth she feels calmly integrated with the august national consciousness.
Now in the heat of political turmoil, as if it were possible to distill
one's sensibility and experiences from their entanglement with the cultural
ideology of Chiang's regime, she wants to keep intact her experiences
of growing up in Taipei. Here one see a typical cultural elite of the
nationalist kind, once immersed in the culturalism of the nationalist
elevation, forever believing that culture, with its uplifting quality,
should survive mundane changes. The melancholy of You, by no means accidental,
a consequence of the fallen nationalism, is doomed to come on once the
utopian ideology of Great China is passe.
If the localization movement in Taiwan has deprived You of her cultural
privileges, she also believes that it questions her identification with
the Taiwan consciousness. For all her life, it never occurs to her that
one day she would be stigmatized as an unwelcome outsider. Her claim of
citizenship and sense of belonging have been questioned by autochthony
in Taiwan, which defines natives as those who have a family history rooted
in the land in question and excludes others by such a distinction. Yet
now You remembers words of a writer of similar cultural background: "'You
come to realize that no place can become one's hometown when there are
no burial grounds of one's family members'" (187). Such a denial of her
citizenship provokes harshly interior debates and You painfully ponders:
[You often hear that if] you don't want to stay here, you had better leave.
Or, get out of here and go back to XX. It sounds like you do have somewhere
else to go back to and somewhere else to stay, and you are still here
simply because you unabashedly outstay your welcome (169).
Obsessed with her identity crisis, the major character keeps questioning
the validity of autochthony. As You sees it, what is assumed in autochthony
in Taiwan is an essentialist, unbreakable connection between the Self
and the land, mistaken for the basis of the politics of exclusion. You
experiences this dramatic transformation as a fall from a pedestal of
grandeur into a pit of abjection. It is not until the city she knows disappeared
that she comes to realize how much she takes for granted her strong sense
of belonging to the old Taipei. Strangely, the political and cultural
changes in her urban space seem to become internalized: You begins to
notice changes taking place in her own body. She starts to excrete a briny
odor, as smelly as bodily fluids and sweat, hard to be suppressed and
impossible to be eliminated (168). Symbolizing the invisible and ever-widening
distance between her and the once familiar urban space, now a foreign
land for a wai-sheng-ren (a mainlander) like her, the salty stench coming
from her body allegorizes You's bewilderment over the new politics that
seems to have changed her relationship to the everyday space overnight.
You accuses the current urban development in Taipei of erasing local spatial
history in the name of autochthony. She laments the fact that Taipei has
become a city without history: "Perhaps whatever you were familiar with
or remembered in the city has passed away before you do" (195). Indeed,
Taipei for You has become a generic city as Frank Lloyd Wright describes:
"'A city, where skyscrapers grow like weeds, is the seedbed of prostitutes
and banks' " (quoted in "The Old Capital" 190, 229, 230)13. As profit-oriented
commercialism dominates the growth of the city, like many other metropolis
in the era of globalization, You finds her hometown expanding and shifting
chaotically: for all their trendy looks, the newly opened shops and just
expanded roads nonchalantly wipe out old spatial arrangements. From the
eyes of a pedestrian, You observes how she is isolated from the river,
the sky and the sea by high-priced apartment complexes, elevated highways
and kitsch shops. Once she took her fiancé right before their wedding
to her childhood "secret garden" only to see an eight-lane highway in
front of them, she recollects how she responded:
For one moment, you couldn't remember what it had been here. It felt like
witnessing a murdered body. Yet after calling the police you returned
to the scene to find that there was no body at all, no traces of blood,
as if nothing had ever happened. (200-01)
To her, the mushrooming commercial projects in Taipei deal one blow after
another to terminate for good the organic connection between the city
and the nature.
Contemplating at the sight of a strip of old houses, built at the time
of the Japanese rule. You envisions that these beautiful historical buildings
are about to "be confiscated efficientlly" only to be rebuilt into [functional]
apartments for postal office clerks, customs officials, university staff,
and government officials (187).
When there is no longer anything irreplaceable on this land to draw people
together, the latter cannot do anything but stay here with great reluctance.
The new rulers must have been aware of this point, so they propagate with
great frenzy the slogan of communalism, hoping that people will ignore
the accountability of whoever is in power and just set their mind on their
dear land and their fellow people. Who dares to challenge the legitimacy
of the latter! Do you ever see the opposition party, who has bashed everything,
dares to say anything against the cause of the land and the people? (199)
You raises a strong political criticism of autochthony in her paranoid
vision of the impending catastrophe: urban development in the name of
localization means erasure of history to her.
The author appropriates a canonical reference of utopia in classical Chinese
literature, "Plum Blossom Spring" (Tao Hua Yuan Ji), to describe You's
despair at the seemingly no-turning-back spatial changes in Taipei. In
this classical work, a fisherman wanders into a village whose inhabitants
live independently of the outside. The utopian village denotes a zone
free of the trauma of drastic political and historical changes. The author
Tzu reverses this utopian meaning and satirizes autochthony as a self-enclosing
attempt. It seems that autochthony promises Taipei a new utopian era,
but instead, alienated from the traces of its immediate past, You finds
Taipei no more than a city of concrete. Her walks in the city are thus
repeated experiences of the clashes between the old spatial practices
of nationalism and that of autochthony. The past she remembers is a life
in an unbounded imaginary, a space open enough to accommodate the personal
histories of all inhabitants past and present. Now You only finds frantic
efforts to abuse urban spaces for profit and to deny so-call the "non-Taiwanese"
the right to the identification with Taiwan, again all in the holy name
of localization.
It is interesting to note that You possesses a double vision of the urban
space after she finds all the buttresses of cultural nationalism gone:
Her ghost-like vision is the remains of cultural nationalism in the wake
of globalization.
There was nobody on the beach around this time in autumn. Files and files
of ghosts passed by and you saw none of them, neither the winter swimmer
who had been swallowed up by a shark one or two years ago, nor the one
who would die from his attempt to save others from be drowned years later,
not even the ghost of yourself (163).
Like a ghost cast out from the realm of the alive, You becomes the excluded
in history and starts to see what she cannot see before. The capacity
to see the dead is a transfigured ability of a dislodged national elite.
A national elite like Jules Michelet writes "on behalf of the dead" (Anderson
197). Furthermore, the violence of death must be forgotten to be remembered
as glorious sacrifice for the nation (Renan 11; Anderson 204-7). Here
You sees the violence of death, and finds glaringly obstruding fragments
of the past deeply buried from the sight of her fellow urbanites.
* The Seduction by Globalization
If You finds no history in Taipei, she seeks to reclaim the lost home
in a foreign city, Kyoto. The crux of her nostalgic journey lies in the
fact that her desire, a nationalist longing for reconnecting with the
lost past, colludes with the overwhelming power of globalization in manipulating
time and space. You's doomed quest for her own past in the novella thus
poses an irony, since what enables her melancholy gaze at the history
of Taipei, the forces of cultural globalization (such as time-space compression
and the logic of differential space), are exactly the powers that erase
the past of her own city. You visits Kyoto in the hope of meeting her
best friend from college and thus reliving the memory of their good days
together in Taipei. During her stay in Kyoto, she tries to remember what
it was like to have a sense of belonging. The symbol of historical Japan
allows her to cast a melancholy gaze at her own past in Taipei, which
she believes to be reshaped into a new city without a history.
You's trip to the ancient capital of Japan embodies nostalgic tourism
in the age of globalization as a convenient vehicle to attach to a history,
more often than not a fragmentary one. For one thing, advanced technology
in transportation and communications shrinks the globe into a small world,
the prominent time-space compression phenomena as described by Anthony
Giddens and David Harvey14. At the same time, as Henri Lefebvre contends,
such a global space tends to be reduced into myriad images for visual
consumption: "The symbol of this constitutive repression is an object
offered up to the gaze yet barred from any possible use, whether this
occurs in a museum or in a shop window" (POS 319). As seen in the novella,
the trip by itself defines how You, seduced by the seemingly undiminished
historical image of Kyoto in the fast changing global era, mystifies the
contemporary mode of nostalgic tourism as a time travel machine that brings
one back to the bygone past.
The
operation of time-space compression, masking the physical distance between
Kyoto and Taipei, allures You to embark on a nostalgic voyage. Propelled
by a fax from her best friend (another one of the modern communications
tools), she acts on impulse, leaving her family behind to hurry to Kyoto.
The magic of another modern technology, a jumbo jet, takes You to her
destination in less than three hours. Kyoto seems to be within an easy
reach, and so should the past, which will be evoked and shared as soon
as she meets her friend. She comes to realize her own assumption of being
able to de-compress time, and go back to a primeval past during this trip:
For the first time, you realized how strangely this appointment was made,
in a style that can be found only in an agrarian era or in the time of
Wei Sheng15. To begin with, you knew nothing at all about her flight number
and you came only with the information in the fax. A did not ask you how
you were going to get to the hotel from the Kansai International Airport,
only leaving you the address of the hotel. Perhaps she [A] imagined here
to be a tiny old city, and indeed she can be right: this place is nothing
like the metropolitan cities she visited and not much larger than the
towns you two frequented when young. (202)
The contradiction presented in the passage is apparent. You understands
the logistics involved in travelling to a foreign country such as arrival
information, transportation and accommodation. However, her desire to
link up with the past is so strong that she unwittingly buys into the
convenience of time-space compression in the form of the seemingly effortless
cross-ocean travel, suggested in A's fax. You imagines she can make the
trip as easily as they could together at 17, always ready to explore the
world without worrying about any potential trouble that might come along
the way. In contrast, such a carefree transnational trip is made possible
in a seemingly uninhibited space. What she downplays in the trip to Kyoto
is not only the geographical distance but also the fastidious details
on the road: having left Taipei at noon, she is already walking on the
streets of Kyoto in the early evening (173). To You, the global space
seems to be as open as the bygone national space to which she once belonged.
The attractive openness and mobility provided by the modern technology
of the global age transform the transnational space into a mirage of the
only open space she knows about, the national space in Taipei.
As the story unfolds, You's desire to return to the past by meeting an
old friend is deferred, because her friend A never comes as promised.
Consequently, the ungratified longing is then further projected onto their
meeting place, Kyoto. In other words, her tourist gaze and walk in Kyoto
can be seen as a personal attempt to map out a city that can protect her
from the overwhelming sense of loss brought about by urban spatial change
that globalization brings to Taipei. Walking in Kyoto while lingering
on the memories of her previous visits with her little daughter, You unwittingly
turns herself into a lonely tourist. Those early trips to Kyoto with her
daughter, vicariously establish the intimacy between You and the ancient
city. In fact, You repeatedly brings her daughter to Kyoto to show the
little girl what she has missed in Taipei, i.e., a timeless utopian space
unaffected by localization and globalization:
You cannot help swearing, every time you see this fir woods, that if there
were tiny fir woods nearby your house that would stay the same for fifty
years, you would be more than happy to see your daughter loitering in
the woods, neither studying nor working for the rest of her life (193).
Such a utopian longing results from her endorsement of the common image
of Kyoto, an ancient capital that remains timeless in the maelstrom of
urban changes. Needless to say, such a transfixed image of Kyoto as a
city of history has been officially promoted since the 1950s. At that
time, the Kyoto city government enacted "the Kyoto International, Cultural,
and Tourist City Construction Law" to "make Kyoto an international city
of culture and tourism by maintaining and developing its superb historical,
cultural, and artistic resources and developing cultural and tourist facilities"
(Callies 150). The decades that followed witnessed the new capital of
Japan Tokyo's metamorphosis into a global city; meanwhile, the old capital
Kyoto acquires the significance of representing the authentic Japanese
spirit, that survives rapid changes. As the Japanese set their eyes on
the future, they are assured at the same time that there is always a past
to cling to. In this sense, the image of Kyoto as an intact city of history
serves as a safety valve for Japan's process of globalization. Indeed,
Kyoto exemplifies what Lefebvres calls a differential space. Lefebvre
argues that global spaces are likely to be reduced to images and signs,
whose meanings are defined in relation to other images of spaces. Here,
Kyoto, in sharp contrast to Tokyo, epitomizes the image of historical
Japan. As John Clammer fittingly describes:
If pilgrimage was often a form of tourism, contemporary tourism from the
cities is itself a form of pilgrimage, the religion in question being
'Japan' and the underlying motives being not just consumption as such,
but also the construction of a postmodern self, one situated in relation
to Japanese history and concerns with ethnicity while simultaneously turning
towards an increasingly globalized world in which the actual content of
everyday life is the consumer society, a distinctive form of late capitalism
that intrudes on every area of the psyche and society. (151)
This "pilgrimage to Japan," boltered by tourism, is the condition that
allows You to dream that walking in Kyoto can experience the transhistorical
capacity of culture. Falling prey to the trick of differential space and
time-space compression and thus subscribing to the stereotype of Kyoto,
You is quick to imagine this city as the utopian space suitable for her
daughter and herself to call home.
Embodying order in a chaotic world, Kyoto becomes You's sanctuary. This
sense of order, again, a melancholic projection enabled by the differential
image of Kyoto, can be reinforced everywhere in the daily life of Kyoto
from the Cherry Blossom Festival, which symbolizes the harmony between
man and nature, to the same menu and fixed price at the tea shop in the
Takashimaya department store. Year after year, those same shop fronts
and cafes in Kyoto, like the quiet streets and serene temples, welcome
her with familiar hospitality. In contrast to the transgressive spatial
practice which Michel de Certeau describes as the pedestrian's wild footsteps,
You's walking falls into the pattern that can be described as succumbing
to a "suspended symbolic order" that characterizes Kyoto (de Certeau 106).
To You, the order manifested in Kyoto can ultimately function to counteract
the vicissitude of history, figured by the ultimate finality of death.
We might recollect that the preoccupation with writing about death is
inherent in cultural nationalism: with the violence associated with death
forgotten, death is re-evoked as renewal. You's brooding over death can
be read as a melancholic longing of the nationalist writing of death,
in which the survival of popular sensibility contravene the brutal interruption
of death. In this sense, she is a true follower of the de Certeau's tenet,
believing that travel ironically is the way home16. As she contemplates
at the Seiryo Temple, she remembers a prisoner's reflection before his
execution: "He [the prisoner] saw the sunshine outside of the window,
hearing the warden's radio churn out familiar tunes17. He thinks to himself
that as long as everything remains the same tomorrow, his death will not
matter" (195). Another moment of introspection on Seiryo Temple leads
her to an old director's thoughts on death, similar to the prisoner's
in content: "Old people are forced to confront death every day. His wish
is to sit up from his coffin to read the newspaper every ten years, feeling
contented after knowing that the world goes around as before"(201). Such
thoughts on death reveal You's yearning for order to overcome loss as
symbolized in its extreme form, death. Pining for a symbolic order (the
routine world mediated through the means of mass communications such as
the radio and the newspaper) in a confining space of their own (the cell
and the imaginary coffin), the two dying persons speak out You's melancholy
imagination. And Kyoto in this sense plays for her a role similar to the
radio and the newspaper respectively to the prisoner and the director.
Specifically, Seiryo Temple, her personal favorite, registers the site
of this imaginary space18. This temple now becomes a public space for
local people of all ages. She notes the sights and sounds around the temple:
a college boy feeding a stray cat, a middle-age salaryman paying homage
to the lord after work, elementary school students clattering among themselves,
young housewives walking dogs, old timers loitering around (194). This
temple is where You calls home and wishes to die when the time comes:
"If there were any place called home, where one would move back from the
hospital to have the last moment," she thought to herself that "the temple
would be the one" (195). In other words, Kyoto represents to her the symbolic
order defiant against loss. Here we can observe that her melancholy longing
seeks to restore the national space that Benedict Anderson describes as
the homogeneous, empty time in which "'old' and 'new' were understood
synchronically, coexisting" (187) 19.
Despite the fact that Kyoto, a city of culture and history in the globalized
world seems to promise You a symbolic order, the stability and security
implied by the order has always been in crisis. With the image of crisis
resurfacing time and again to disrupt her ideal projection of a symbolic
order, this unceased tension between meaning and loss accounts for You's
melancholy nostalgia for a forgotten past. Not long after she arrives
in Kyoto, she prays that this trip will not be a catastrophe, a sense
of crisis somehow remains inexplicable to her (173). The conflicting anxiety
over meeting A suggests You's sense of crisis during her quest for order
and meaning. Ironically, she worries that A would really come and the
two old friends would surprise each other with how fast they had aged
over the years of separation:
God, you will see A tonight when you go back to the hotel. You wish she
would not behave like those who have been away from home for years and
always bluster in English during conversation... Also, you wish she would
not be as sloppy as many Americans in her dress. You are worried that
you two would sit at different corners of the hotel lobby, side-glancing
at each other for a while and exclaiming silently, "Oh, God, have I become
as hard to recognize as she!" (192)
The stream of consciousness of You is juxtaposed contantly with paragraphs
from Yasunari Kawabata's Old Capital, passages mirroring the anxiety of
You. Kawabata's novel narrates a story in which twin sisters (Chieko and
Naeko), separated at birth, fail to stay together in spite of a fleeting
moment of reunification. Likewise, A and You are also the twins destined
to be apart. The twins of Kawataba is a modern parallel to the pair (You
and A) of Tzu's "Old Capital" in the globalized East Asia. Writing at
the beginning of the Japanese economic boom, Kawabata "wanted to set down
the beauty of the old city, Japan's capital from 794 to 1868, before it
disappeared forever" (Seidensticker, quoted in Brown 378). Here the allusion
to Kawabata's Old Captial, stories of historical beauty before impending
disappearance, imparts the hidden crisis inherent in the symbolic order
represented by Kyoto.
The tension between her desire for a tangible order and her anxiety over
the irrevocable loss of a splendid and comfortable urban space at home
dominates not only her brief stay in Kyoto but also her consequent trip
back home to Taipei. As a typical symptom of a melancholiac, she always
struggles between a vision of a symbolic order and an acute pain over
the loss of it. She is a true melancholiac, who remains in "proximity
to the world, despite loss of world" (Lepenies 127).
Notably, it is the forces of globalization that sustain the emotional
tug-of-war between hope and frustration, if one may say so. As Lefebvre
emphasizes, the drastic spatial changes brought about by contemporary
globalization redraw boundaries of all kinds and signal fast-changing
spaces with images or visual mirages. Meanwhile, spatial changes in the
global era often seduce one to take mobility, fluidity, or openness for
granted and further render concrete spaces invisible. These spaces of
contemporary globalization often present a reservoir of tantalizing possibilities.
You in "The Old Capital" typifies how one is beguiled by the phatasmagoria
produced by global spatial changes. A pertinent example of such mirage
in the global space is the privilege for one to be at home in the world.
Stepping into an elegant café in Kyoto, You mumbles to herself in Japanese,
"I am home (Tadaima)" (183). At one moment she accelerates her pace of
walking in Kyoto: "You hurried up and decided to take a shortcut. As if
you could reach the Café you have in mind before dark, you would see your
daughter at age five, crouching at the rim of the garden pond, feeding
and petting the fish inside" (172). Likewise, the Middle East figures
in her imagination prominently as a magic land where whatever one loses
can be retrieved. During a trip to Cairo, it dawns on her at the sight
of the bazaars on the crowded streets that the long-gone street vendors
around the old amusement park in Taipei found themselves a new home here
(164). She also fantasizes about what travels do to manipulate the imaginary
boundary between home and foreign lands. Her melancholic longing intensified
by the imagination of the exotic lands can be well described by a quote
from Freud in the novella: "There you see a giant Aryan king as tall as
a tree, colorful reliefs of Egyptian motifs, gigantic statues of the king,
and the real statue of the Sphinx. Here is a fantasy land" (quoted in
183). You tends to think that there are chances "out there" to be connected
with the past, and deceptive conditions of globalization make it possible
for her to play out such deep-rooted melancholy longing time and again.
Paradoxically, You's sense of loss has been deferred constantly by her
role as global trotter. It is the chance encounters with the local in
the foreign lands that motivate her to embark on one trip after another.
The sparks of emotions experienced on the road sometimes echo the recollected
familiarity, intimacy, or safety, and for You another trip may bring her
closer to the home she remembers.
Always imagining her trip as a pilgrimage in search of the lost order
at home in Taipei, she would deny to herself her identity as a tourist,
but her self-cast role as a homeward-bound pilgrim never strikes anyone
else as anything other than an ordinary tourist. In other words, the tours,
always ready-packaged, have framed You's trips before she endows them
with the significance of a personal quest. When she leaves Kyoto, no one
sees her off except the hotel manager "and [You] couldn't explain to him
why [You] would not wait till the Cherry Blossom Festival starts and have
canceled the reservation for that week" (210). In short, You's trip to
Kyoto is an attempt to retrieve a typical national space, with "empty,
homogeneous time," in a seemingly similar space, the global space, enabled
by time-space compression. We can conclude for the moment our discussion
on the seduction by the global space with Lefebvre's remark: "Not that
this space [the global space] 'expresses' them in any sense; it is simply
the space assigned them by the grand plan: these classes find what they
seek" (POS 309).
* An Apocalyptic Vision of Globalization:
Reluctantly returning from Kyoto, You can only face Taipei by once again
indulging herself in another trip in this home city. Keenly aware of the
fact that Taipei has transmogrified into an unfamiliar city, she chooses
to assume the persona of a foreigner to see the city (211). If she cannot
do anything about the spatial changes, at least she can take on a different
identity, one that has suffered no shocks of urban changes in Taipei.
She tries to calm herself, "That's fine. You have another week off before
going back to work. The vacation has just started" (211). The next morning,
using a tour map of colonial Taipei that she had bought in Kyoto, she
blends in with other real Japanese tourists to set out on a walking tour
recommended by a guidebook. The moment she decides to accept the role
of a Japanese tourist, mistakenly conferred on her by an eager local travel
guide at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, You once again takes advantage
of her tourist identity to prolong her melancholy longing for her past.
Again, her "tour" of Taipei, like many other tours in our global age,
has been standardized according to the logic of differential space, which
reduces concrete everyday space to mere images and signs. That is, each
tour can be seen as an attempt to compress the locale into a tour map
of points of interest, prescribed "local attractions" predominantly for
visual consumption. Specifically, You's tour draws on the illusion of
time-space compression to compress Kyoto and Taipei back to the moment
when the two cities were not yet wide apart in urban development.
With her deliberate reduction of her vista into a tourist gaze, You makes
the city tour, visiting old buildings constructed in the colonial time
by the Japanese. For all her attempts to see the familiar with a foreign
eye in the manner of the Japanese tourists, You comes to realize, as she
walks, the difficulty of looking at Taipei in the way the map instructs.
"Sight-seeing" in Taipei evokes her memories of all the corners she had
wandered before; her walk to the Shihmenting (The West Gate District )
illustrates the complexity of her tour experience. According to the colonial
map of Taipei and her guide book, the Shihmenting is the "entertainment
district" for the colonial Japanese. But You sees the same space in a
different way: she remembers the last time she came here on a date with
her then boyfriend. They were hassled by pimps. It had already become
a seedy area, no more the "entertainment district" she has seen as a high
school girl. Little does she know that years later she will come back
to see the Shihmenting again, this time as an outsider. Seeing for the
first time after years the degeneration of this district, dirty and smelly,
cheap and sleazy, You cannot bear to continue gazing on the sad look of
this place. Feeling depressed at the sight of the dirty streets, avoidance
is the only way that she can think of to preserve the sweet memories of
the space. Ironically, this fake tourist's engaging look at the Shihmenting
contradicts her intention of seeing the city with an outsider's gaze,
supposedly more detached and unconcerned. The complicated interaction
between a tourist walking on the streets scattered with personal memories
and a conscious play with a fake tourist identity disorients her. She
then tries to shift back to her tourist identity, trying to contain and
confine the clashing fragments of the past back into an image.
Like a tourist who has become exhausted from viewing the bewildering abundance
of new objects and strange customs, you choose to sit down on the bricks
surrounding a roadside tree, and take instead an imaginary journey on
the travel guide. (221)
Toward the end of the tour in colonial Taipei, she loses the newly bought
Japanese hat that gives her the look of a tourist and the map of imperial
Taipei. You's walking in the home city as a foreign tourist finally brings
her to understand the futile efforts to be content with reducing the urban
space of Taipei into images on the colonial map and the travel guide.
More than an ill-fated ending of her nostalgia, You's eventual failure
to excavate the geography of Kyoto in Taipei is also the intolerable outcome
of representing and containing any space in the logics of differential
space. At the time she realizes that Taipei was constructed in the image
of Kyoto as another imperial city, You also finds herself lost in the
city since major spatial reference points with which she used to map Taipei
are no longer there. Here the very different fate of the twin sisters
in Kawabata's Old Capital comes into play with the destinies of Kyoto
and Taipei. For You, both cities are subject to the power of globalization,
but she laments the different development paths of these two metropolises:
Kyoto is preserved as a timeless town whereas Taipei transmogrifies into
a city without history. She chooses to put on the mask of a foreign tourist
to avoid seeing Taipei as it is. Ironically, her early trip to Kyoto and
now the tour in Taipei reveals to her all the more the gap between the
twin cities, Taipei and Kyoto.
In fact, You's trips in the twin cities of Kyoto and Taipei surprisingly
lead her to witness contradictions that contemporary globalization fashions.
Her melancholic journey catches a glimpse at the contemporary development
of Taipei and Kyoto in the globalized world. As David Der-wei Wang shrewdly
observes, the scope of the novella is much more ambitious than the length
of a novella would suggest (28). Taipei and Kyoto are also twins separated
at birth, as suggested in the allusion to the severed twin sisters in
Kawabata's Old Capital, and yet represent different ways of appropriating
tradition into economic development. On the one hand, Kyoto, as a differential
space of the past, represents local as an image of eternal past; meanwhile,
the logic of autochthony galvanizes Taipei to become a curious hybrid
of a local as "a trope without a substance of its own" (Geschiere and
Nyamnjoh 448). Each signals a major paradigm of shaping the local in the
globalized East Asia. You sees the dark side of "reworking tradition":
Instead of a means to facilitate the process globalization, reusing tradition
in the name of the local amounts to nothing much more than ruins and empty
images. In this sense, she witnesses the violence of differential spaces
that are not meant to be seen. A global space, as Lefebvre describes,
is one of "images and signs," which "presents itself as transparent (and
hence pure) world, and as reassuring, on the grounds that it ensures concordance
between mental and social, space and time, outside and inside, and needs
and desire" (POS 389). The hardly-ceased deferral of nostalgic gratification,
sustained by her restless transnational travels, driving her to the point
where she sees the contradiction of urban development between two cities
in the contemporary globalized world, brings her to see, instead of the
"concordance" between the subject and the space, images and signs of two
cities that fail to usher her to the past she remembers. She also let
us see the helplessness of the individual in attempting to close this
widening gap between the two kinds of history-making, as symbolized in
Kyoto and Taipei, to establish a meaningful relationship with a primeval
history in which one finds harmony between urban life and nature.
Where the residents of Taipei see localization and progress, the eyes
of You sees an apocalypse. You comes to a vision of despair at the end
of her many urban walks. Walking to the shore of the Tanshui River, where
she spent many happy days in her youth, she finds herself in close proximity
to the place and the inhabitants, but feels no connection of any kind.
Lifelessness dominates this aftermath of the total destruction of her
past. A stray dog looked at her with no response whatsoever. The daunting
noise in this scene is merely mechanical, the noise that foretells the
fact of a violent death. "A helicopter hovers above, perhaps to find a
floating body in the river; an old gaffer rushes by on a battered motorcycle,
giving out throttling hubbub and dark exhaust, perhaps in a hurry to identify
the body on short notice" (233). Her home city now can only appear in
the form of a prison: "Approaching the base of an elevated highway, she
found the gray concrete mass more and more like towering prison walls.
It was dead quiet, not even a scratching sound was heard. Not a bit. 'Where
am I?' You started to cry out loud" (233).
The novella speaks of the "afterlife" of the nationalism of Great China
in the globalized East Asia. While the space of flexible accumulation
destroys the hegemony Chang Kai-shek's cultural nationalism, the main
character in "The Old Capital" goes along with what time-space compression
hopes to find the homogeneous national space again in the open global
space, an illusory space produced by time-space compression. The apocalyptic
vision gives a radical edge to the otherwise melancholic novella. It provides
a glimpse of the inevitable slippage between the flexible use of tradition
as championed by the discourse of alternative modernity and the unavoidable
outcome of reworked traditions as empty signifers. While adherents of
alternative modernity may see exciting moments in which tradition and
globalization accommodate each other, the melancholic eye of You in Tzu's
"Old Capital" witnesses the relic piles of images of history, scattered
and unnoticed, cast away as traditional practices not fit for the moment.
You wanders around as a romantic adventurer, by means of tourism in the
age of time-space compression, hoping to find a chance to realize the
cultural values (as symbolized in the projected order of Kyoto) spoon-fed
to her. Indeed, one of her blind spots lies in her failure to see that
cultural nationalism of Great China is no less a form of exclusion. An
open space to a member of cultural elite such as herself can mean a prison
cell to some others, such as pro-Taiwanese nationalists. In spite of her
cultural conservatism, the apocalyptic ending of the novella registers
a denial of the local reconstructed in response to globalization as seen
in Taipei and an aesthetic rendition of the violence of globalization,
which erases history and simultaneously produces prolifically mere images
of the local and history.
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Notes
1 The title
of Zhu's novella can also be translated as "The Ancient Capital." I use
The Old Capital instead to be identical with the English translation of
Yasunari Kawabata's work to which Zhu's novella constantly alludes.
2 Selected excerpts will be presented in translation.
3 Tzu used to receive accusation of political conservatism for her political
penchant, eminently manifested since her story collection entitled "I
Remember . . ." (1989).
4 The ruling party, the Kuomingtang (KMT), waging a zero-sum game with
the Communist China in typical Cold-War fashion, attempted to justify
the state in Taiwan as the only true sovereignty that succeeded the imperial
Ch'ing dynasty to represent the true China. The end of the Cold War spelled
the losing game the KMT played with communist China. Mao initiated the
process of rapprochement, and sought a normalizing relationship with the
United States; Deng Xiaoping followed up with the open-door policy in
1978 Please see Mao's China and After by Maurice Meisner for a concise
account.
5 A-chin Hsiau considers the Kaohsiung Incident (1979) the event that
marks the blossoming of Taiwanese cultural nationalism and he says, "Taiwanese
anti-KMT political leader's ideological mobilization has focused on substituting
a new state corresponding with the island territory for the ROC framed
according to Chinese nationalism and the Mainland domain" (181).
6 For a detailed description, please read Robert J. Holton's Globalization
and the Nation-State.
7 Please see the first chapter of Han-pi Chang's Taiwan: Community of
Fate and Cultural Globalization.
8 We can still observe cultural impacts of this geopolitical shift. Interestingly,
after losing the economic monopoly of East Asia, a Japanese called Yoshinori
Kobayashi publishes a political cartoon book On Taiwan that argues the
"genuine" Japan spirit, lost domestically, is only to be found reasserted
in Taiwan. This transnational nostalgia by a Japanese intringuingly provides
a factual counterpart to the fictional character in the novella analyzed
in this chapter, a Taiwanese who projects the lost ideal onto the Japanese
city, Kyoto.
9 Here I want to make a point clearly. Although Taiwanese nationalism
has been seen a major drive in the changes in Taiwan for more than a decade,
I argue that it makes great sense to examine the emerging nationalism
via the strong impact of globalization.
10 Ankie Hoogvelt observes the domestic rivalries begot from the mobility
of finance: "National liberation freed the State; restructuring and liberalization
now freed capital . . . Thus paradoxically, national economic development
that was impelled by the rivalries within the State system now produces
a new component in the market system that in part contradicts the independence
of the State" (216).
11 Examples of this kind abound in the text. Here is another one: "It
was no wonder. You always thought that the sea before your eyes was the
biggest ocean in the world and thus you cherished unbounded imagination
of this open space, like those pirates and adventurers who had been here
several hundred years ago" (162).
12 For example, during the sixties Chiang launched a cultural campaign
called the Movement of Cultural Renaissance to legitimate his political
regime when the Cultural Revolution across the Taiwan Strait destroyed
Chinese culture in an unprecedented manner.
13 I translate this remark by Wright from Tzu's Chinese rendition of it.
14 For Anthony Giddens' account, please see p. 17-23 of The Consequences
of Modernity.
15 Wei Shen, a character in a story by Tzuang Tzu, went under a bridge
to meet his friend, who did not come. Even when a flood went down the
river, he refused to go. He was found dead, with his arms embracing a
column of the bridge, after the flood ebbed.
16 "What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal,
'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby
exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery'
of relics and legends" (de Certeau 106-7).
17 I thank Prof. Chao, Ji-yu for providing the English translation of
the name of this temple.
18 This temple is the burial ground of the head of a feudal lord, Toyotomi
Hideyori (son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), who committed a ritual suicide at
the loss of the battle of Osaka with Tokugawa Ieyasu.
19 Here I would like to suggest in passing that You's understanding of
Kyoto as the symbol of human culture that withstands historical upheavals
is not strikingly different from a commonly held belief about Kyoto when
one hundred and sixty nations of the world gathered (December 1-11, 1997)
in this old capital to draft the Kyoto Protocol to reduce gasoline pollution
worldwide.