2/19 Taipei and Kyoto

by | Feb 16, 2019 | keywords

CHU T’ien-hsin, “The Old Capital”
  1. 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?
  2. p.138 lonely
    • A
    • daughter
  3. p.141 Maruyama Park
    • Yuanshan – you
    • Maruyama – daughter
  4. p.144 kimono cloth and obis
    • And that wasn’t all that had disappeared.
  5. p.148 pine
    • the century-old nightshade trees vs. widening the street
    • “Tadaima, I’m back” vs. eat and run
  6. 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
  7. 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?
  8. 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?
  9. 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”
  1. Kyoto vs. Tokyo
  2. past identity vs. future identity
  3. Chieko vs. her twin sister
Lingchei CHEN, “Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City”
  1. Chinese, Japanese, American
  2. historical discontinuity, cultural displacement
  3. the 1895-1945 Japanese colonial rule
  4. 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
  5. the rapidly growing capitalism since the 1960s
  6. Taiwanese [benshengren] vs. Chinese mainlander [waishengren]
  7. Li Denghui [Lee Teng-hui]
  8. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
  9. what is not there, where the lack is
  10. walk
  11. the aborigines, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French, Japanese
  12. twice decolonized: 1662 Koxinga and 1945 China
  13. 1987 lifting of martial law
  14. the twin sisters/friends/cities
  15. the rapid destruction of Taipei’s natural environment by both the KMT government and native Taiwanese politicians
  16. Kawabata’s Kyoto: symbol of history and antiquity
  17. the bad blood between China and Japan
  18. mother: translator of modern Japanese literature
  19. her (and her sister’s) mentor Hu Lancheng
  20. colonial history: alluring and mystifying, untaught and unexperienced
  21. the lack of a coherent and continuous historical and cultural heritage
  22. the legends on the map, the abstract frame