In last semester's Travel Writing class, I asked students to write about a "souvenir" that they had acquired (or hoped to acquire) in their travels. I asked them to describe the item, to explain where they had acquired it, to discuss its meaning to them, and to consider how the souvenir might be metonymic (based on the article by Morgan and Pritchard that I cite below). I thought I'd share what I wrote in response to that assignment for anyone who might be interested. (It's not likely to be published anywhere else!) We wrote our assignments as letters to each other, which as I explained to them at the beginning of the semester has long been one of the main forms of travel writing.
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Hi everyone,
I acquired this little figurine of the 文昌君 (Wenchang Jun), or “God of Literature and Culture," in a bookstore in Taichung back when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. This god, who is also called by other names like 文昌王 (Wenchang Wang) and 文昌帝君 (Wenchang Dijun), has historically been associated with learning and literacy; he was traditionally called upon by people who were preparing for the Civil Service examinations in Imperial China. Even today, students who are preparing for the university entrance exams or other important tests will go to Wenchang temples (Wenchang Ci, 文昌祠) to ask for the god’s blessing.
Photos of my 文昌君 figurine (公仔) taken by myself (August 22, 2020).
Obviously, the figurine above is the "cute” version of the god. A more “serious” version can be found in temples like the Wenchang Temple in Xinzhuang, New Taipei City (see image below).
Wenchang Dijun (文昌帝君), taken at the Xinzhuang Wenchang Temple (新莊文昌祠), Taiwan. (Photo taken by Pbdragonwang, CC BY-SA 4.0)
One place in Taiwan where the Wenchang Dijun can be found is in academies established to teach children (typically boys) and train scholars to pass the Civil Service examinations during the Qing Dynasty. Back in 2006, my wife and I visited the Huangxi (or Huangsi) Academy (磺溪書院) in Dadu, Central Taiwan, which, according to a sign in front of the school, had been established on the site of a Wenchang temple around 1887. (If you want to know more about the temple and academy, check out this post on Alexander Synaptic's blog.)
Photo of the Huangsi Academy taken by myself (Dec. 29, 2006).
Although I do not worship Wenchang Dijun and never (consciously) asked for his blessing on my dissertation work, I couldn’t resist picking up the figurine when I saw it in the Nobel Bookstore. The name of the bookstore itself calls up several associations--besides sounding a little like Barnes and Noble, it also suggests a promise that customers can become successful scholars like Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲), a Taiwanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986. Even more than Barnes and Noble, Nobel, like many bookstores in Taiwan, devotes much of its space to stationery and test-preparation materials in addition to selling popular and scholarly books, gifts, and manga.
This souvenir isn’t an expensive, hand-crafted art object. It cost me NT$85 (less than US$3) with my Nobel membership card. To me, though, it signifies something important about the place I was in at that time, both literally and figuratively. Sitting in the stationery section of that multi-storey bookstore, it reminds me of the important role examinations play in the lives of Taiwanese and the various methods they might use to do well on those exams (from attending exam prep classes at night to visiting a Wenchang temple to ask the god for help getting into their “first-choice” school). I imagine the meaning of the “100 分" on the paper Wenchang Jun is holding is clear to anyone in this context--you can imagine how having this on your desk as you study might encourage you in the middle of those late night study sessions. That was also a reason that I bought this--to motivate me as I worked on my dissertation, a long drawn-out process that didn’t seem to want to end. Seeing him sitting there, brush in one hand, the promise of a perfect score in the other, gave me a feeling that this was a marathon I would finish.
The figurine also speaks to Morgan and Pritchard’s assertion that “souvenirs are rhetorical, socially incarnated signs, registering a complexity of acquisition and signalling complex social messages” (41). At one point, I had the figurine in my office, and it acted as a “cute” conversation piece that simultaneously indexed my own “authenticity” as someone who understood the meaning and significance of Wenchang Jun. I also probably hoped that it would remind people of my (self-perceived) status as a scholar through its association with the long tradition of Wenchang temples and academies in Chinese culture.
Now the souvenir acts as a touchstone for memories of a previous place in my life--the waning years of my formal studenthood and the culture in which I was trying to immerse myself.
Works Cited
"新莊文昌祠" (Xinzhuang Wenchang Temple). Wikipedia, zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E8%8E%8A%E6%96%87%E6%98%8C%E7%A5%A0. Accessed 22 August 2020.
Morgan, Nigel, and Annette Pritchard. "On Souvenirs and Metonymy: Narratives of Memory, Metaphor, and Materiality." Tourist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 29-53. doi:10.1177/1468797605062714.
