Taipei and Kyoto

CHU T’ien-hsin, “The Old Capital”

Lingchei Chen’s article mentions that Chu’s novella quotes it’s namesake by Kawabata nine times throughout the text.  While Chu’s work has its own similarities and differences from Kawabata, it stands to reason that her choice to include these quotes holds special significance.  In class we broke into groups to discuss why each specific quote was used and why the narration that followed was relevant to said quote.

For example, 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.” Is followed by the narrator wondering: “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?”  This shows a parallel between the narrator and Chieko, who have left their birthplace (Taipei and Tokyo, respectively) and grown to enjoy someplace new without a desire to return to the old.

A similar parallel comes with p.186, “Chieko watched as her twin sister Naeko walked way. Naeko did not look back.”  with “The plane would depart at ten in the morning.”  This highlights how even the once sister-like bond of the narrator and A could be worn away with time, and shows that moving forward in life may involve leaving behind something that was once very important to you.

Furthermore, p.162 “The small shrine, however, had not changed. It was even described even in the Tale of Genji.” is countered with the narrator’s “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.” and “Why wasn’t it the city you came from?”  These quotes illustrate the constant change that Taipei was under and the narrator’s desire to have something more permanent in her life, such as something that had been the same for centuries.

CHUA and YAMAMOTA, “Review – The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata”

Kawabata’s Japanese novella “The Old Capital” creates many mirror images such as the city vs the protagonist, the protagonist vs her sister, and Kyoto vs Tokyo; furthermore, it asks the reader if there is such either thing is a “truer” version than the other.  In class we discussed what possible mirror images there could be in Chu’s work and how they align with each other. Though there was some unsureness, the general consensus was this:

Lingchei CHEN, “Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City”

We all have a cultural identity that comes from the groups society places us into and our own perceptions of ourselves. It becomes a part of our individual identity and our identity within the communities who share that culture. Shih laoshi began class with an exercise depicting the impact of the colonial history of Taiwan. We drew things that were important to us and then erased them representing the erasure of culture experienced during the Chinese nationalist rule. We then drew again and had to white-out a strip of our images, symbolizing capitalism and the process of removing history by taking down buildings and pieces of neighborhoods. Cultural identity in Taiwan is complex and can be fractured due to the periods of colonization throughout the countries history. The culture in Taiwan has been interwoven with Chinese, Japanese, and American cultures. The exodus of 1949 paired with periods of colonial rule, like the Japanese colonial rule, created breaks in the knowledge and history that the community accumulated. This repetition of historical discontinuity leads to the separation in culture from its roots. Another culture, like Japanese culture, comes in and imposes itself leading to said cultural displacement and the fracturing of cultural identity. In the mid-1980s, Chinese nationalism loosened and martial law was lifted creating the opening for a shift towards being more open to different ethnicities. A series of debates about national and cultural identity during the rule of the DDP only highlighted the complexities of the Taiwanese identity. Some people defined themselves as “new Taiwanese” and some fought for a new identity that transcended the ethnic categories previously used. Some people struggled with identifying as Chinese versus Taiwanese.

This sense of fractured identity is seen in the juxtaposition of the twin sisters and their cities Tokyo and Kyoto in Kawabata’s “The Old Capital” which is mirrored in the narrator and A and their cities of Kyoto and Taipei in CHU Tien-Hsin’s “The Old Capital”.  This crisis and fracturing of cultural identity can be mended according to Zhu. Those having this crisis must come to terms with the past and that the colonial experiences are part of their identity. Taiwanese identity is one that is woven together with the experiences of even the aborigines and the earliest settlers. A Taiwanese identity comes from a process of decolonizing one’s self and personal identity that was created through a discontinuous history and incoherent cultural heritage. We see these forces acting in Chu’s novella and the ways her personal history and cultural identity are written into the narrator’s story. In class, we discussed how the narrator adopted the Japanese city of Kyoto and how this can be seen in the Japanese influences of Chu’s life. Her mother is Hakka and was a translator of Japanese literature. The narrator’s appreciation for Japanese culture may reflect the influence of Hu Langcheng, Chu’s mentor, on her opinions and experiences. Hu was labeled a traitor for helping the Japanese in WWII against the Chinese. This label of traitor reflects a long history of bad blood between the two countries due to the cruel and violent Japanese invasion and the massacre of Nanjing. In the last section of the novel, the fractured Taiwanese identity and lack of cohesive Taiwanese history are made apparent through the colonial map of Taipei and the postcolonial city the narrator sees. The narrator feels this fracture and has the desire to mend by making a coherent history through remaking the map.