CHU T’ien-hsin, “The Old Capital”
- p.135 the bridge at Shijo where he had first met “Chieko’s Naeko” or “Naeko’s Chieko”
- lovers who seemed to never leave
- You told your daughter that southern China was just like that. When had you ever been in southern China?
- p.138 lonely
- p.141 Maruyama Park
- Yuanshan – you
- Maruyama – daughter
- p.144 kimono cloth and obis
- And that wasn’t all that had disappeared.
- p.148 pine
- the century-old nightshade trees vs. widening the street
- “Tadaima, I’m back” vs. eat and run
- p.157 Daimon-ji bonfires
- you could watch the bonfire on Daimon-ji
- you never brought up the past, for that was too much like the nightshade and sweet gum trees, which had been either transplanted or taken down
- p.162 The small shrine, however, had not changed. It was even described even in the Tale of Genji.
- If a little time and a little memory remained before you died and you could choose where to go, like so many people who are anxious to leave a hospital and return to a familiar place, usually their home, you’d likely choose this place.
- Why wasn’t it the city you came from?
- p.179 The parents I have now love me very much. I don’t have any desire to look for my real mother and father.
- why would you be willing to sit at the Seirō-ji for a whole afternoon doing nothing, while you couldn’t wait to flee the Temple of Benevolence, which you had to walk by every day?
- p.186 Chieko watched as her twin sister Naeko walked way. Naeko did not look back.
- The plan would depart at ten in the morning.
CHUA and YAMAMOTO, “Review - The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata”
- Kyoto vs. Tokyo
- past identity vs. future identity
- Chieko vs. her twin sister
Lingchei CHEN, “Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City”
- Chinese, Japanese, American
- historical discontinuity, cultural displacement
- the 1895-1945 Japanese colonial rule
- the 1949 exodus from China to Taiwan, internal colonization of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Guomindang/Kuomintang or KMT) government, the total erasure of Taiwan’s history, the pan-Chinese identity
- the rapidly growing capitalism since the 1960s
- Taiwanese [benshengren] vs. Chinese mainlander [waishengren]
- Li Denghui [Lee Teng-hui]
- Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
- what is not there, where the lack is
- walk
- the aborigines, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French, Japanese
- twice decolonized: 1662 Koxinga and 1945 China
- 1987 lifting of martial law
- the twin sisters/friends/cities
- the rapid destruction of Taipei’s natural environment by both the KMT government and native Taiwanese politicians
- Kawabata’s Kyoto: symbol of history and antiquity
- the bad blood between China and Japan
- mother: translator of modern Japanese literature
- her (and her sister’s) mentor Hu Lancheng
- colonial history: alluring and mystifying, untaught and unexperienced
- the lack of a coherent and continuous historical and cultural heritage
- the legends on the map, the abstract frame
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