Just in time for Hallowe'en...

For some reason, I didn't notice the overlap between the themes of the two books I wrote about--even though they're right in the titles! It wasn't until I went to hear Kim Liao talk about her book and answer a question about her choice of title that it clicked with me that both of the books are about hauntings. (Hence the title of my blogpost.) Anru Lee's book, Haunted Modernities, involves both the literal and figurative ghostly presence of the 25 "maiden ladies" who died in the 1973 ferry accident in decisions about how to honor them even as Kaohsiung's economy and culture shifted from industrial to post-industrial and to a tourist destination. Kim Liao's book, Where Every Ghost Has a Name, at times describes Thomas Liao's ghostly presence guiding Kim through her journey of learning about him. 

While the first book is an anthropological work and the second a memoir, they both take seriously Taiwanese beliefs about the afterlife. Lee in particular doesn't try to explain away the spiritual aspects but situates it among the cultural and economic changes in Kaohsiung (and at the same time situates the cultural and economic changes among the spiritual aspects of the lives and deaths of the 25 young women).  

One story in Lee's book that exemplifies this involves a Kaohsiung City employee, Mr. Lin, who around 2006 was tasked with the job of getting the family members of the deceased female workers to agree to renovate their tombs. The family members had to ask the deceased young women by casting divination blocks. They got agreement from most of them, but one deceased woman wouldn't respond to her surviving sister. Finally, Mr. Lin agreed to talk to the deceased sister himself.

However, he also did not get a good response, even after multiple attempts. "After a while, I had to consult a religious practitioner at a local temple and learn to phrase my plea in a hard-to-refuse way," Lin explained. ...

Even so, an unequivocal "yes" was still hard to come by. Mr. Lin begged and begged, and even promised to bring fruits as offerings to the deceased every month in the future. ... "In the end, I told them I was only a minor employee who took orders from some big boss [i.e., the mayor] and pleaded with them to understand my quandary. As soon as I said that, they granted me a divine answer. [These women] certainly know the difficulties of being someone's subordinate!" (138-9)

Anru Lee gave a talk today about her book at the University of Washington. In the Q&A period, there was a lot of talk about "haunting as method" in Lee's book:

Two finished books in the former native speaker's library!

I just finished reading Anru Lee's Haunted Modernities, which was a fascinating study of the intersections of memory, feminism, women's lives (and deaths), modernization, industrialization, post-industrialization, and local traditional religious beliefs and practices in Taiwan. I'd love to use it in a class, but I'm not sure that I'm ever going to teach a class in which I can teach it...

Here's a podcast interview with Anru Lee about her book.

I had put Lee's book aside briefly, partly due to work and partly because I wanted to finish Kim Liao's book Where Every Ghost Has a Name before she comes to Northeastern this coming Wednesday. I enjoyed this book, too. It gave me a new perspective on Thomas Liao, an historical figure I've read about mostly through the lens of his correspondence with George H. Kerr. It also ties in to my honors course text, Mira Shimabukuro's Relocating Authority, in interesting ways, particularly in terms of how they're both investigating histories that were suppressed both by unsympathetic governments and by the survivors of past trauma who sometimes just wanted to forget about the past. 

Here's an interview with Kim Liao about her book.