Notes on Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan

Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation. Lexington Books, 2017.

A while back (OK, it was over three years ago--how the time flies!), I was asking some questions about sajiao (撒嬌) and Taike (台客) in response to an article on Taiwanese communication modes by Todd Sandel. This book by Hsin-i Sydney Yueh goes a long way towards answering those questions (and questions I didn't even know I had) about the these two Taiwanese concepts. As usual, here I'm not so much giving a formal review of the book as I am noting down some thoughts and questions that I have after reading it. (I'll link to some reviews below.)

Here are the two questions I had: 

Is sajiao, which Sandel characterizes as a practice "associated with 'Mainlanders,'" not practiced as much by non-Mainlander Taiwanese? Is it practiced much in China? 

Have the concepts of hen Tai (很台) and Taike (台客) become points of pride for Taiwanese? 

From what I got from Yueh's book, sajiao, which she describes as "embod[ying] a set of communicative acts that express the vulnerability and helplessness of the actor through imitating a child's immature behavior" (2), is not so much a Mainlander-vs.-Taiwanese (or waishengren vs. benshengren) phenomenon as it is a Northern Taiwan (specifically Taipei) vs. Southern Taiwan (south of Taipei, I guess) phenomenon. That is to say, sajiao seems to be most successfully performed by Taipei residents and appears to be connected to what Yueh characterizes as "Taipei Chic." Taipei Chic represents a form of cultural capital characteristic of how people in Taipei are represented in the media (especially talk shows)--as "urban, fashionable, and middle-class" people with "standard" Mandarin accents (144-145). This is placed in opposition to Taike and Taimei, which present a "local, rural, and working-class ... image" (144). Taike and Taimei (Yueh focuses on Taimei because she's interested in Taipei Chic vs. Taimei when it comes to women performing sajiao) appear to be from southern Taiwan and usually speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent. According to the media representations of Northerners and Southerners that Yueh cites, being able to sajiao is not part of Southern Taiwanese women's repertoire. 

It should be noted, as Yueh points out, that not all people who embody "Taipei Chic" are originally from Taipei, but that it's more of a style of behavior and speaking that one has to learn in order to "pass" as a Taipei person. It should also be noted that not all Taipei people (women) can be "Taipei Chic." as Yueh puts it, 

The Taipei Chic female's uniqueness lies in a constructed scarcity, in comparison to other Taiwanese (such as taike, and taimei). According to these talk shows, people who live in Taipei are not automatically Taipei Chic. In other words, the geographic location is not sufficient to fulfill the Taipei Chic image. The Taipei Chic identity is a collective standard, aiming to discern the non-Taipei Chic and expel any such people from the group. Many people who have not obtained the ticket ot enter the group strive to become more similar to Taipei Chic. (155)

In answer to my second question, Yueh's book suggests that while the idea of identifying as Taike can be a point of pride for men, women identified as Taimei--at least ones who show up on talk shows--don't necessarily appreciate that appellation, though this appears to be true mainly in contexts where the concept or term is used by Taipei people to judge people from the south. 

Something that Yueh doesn't mention (at least not that I remember) is that, as I understand it, Taipei's population is more "mainlander-dense" than the southern parts of Taiwan. In that sense, it seems to me that the adulation of Taipei Chic and the deprecation of Taike and Taimei might have some of its roots in the historical waishengren perspective on benshengren that the martial law government encouraged (or perhaps instigated). Sandel suggests this in the article I mentioned above, when he associates sajiao with Mainlanders. (At some point I need to read this review of Yueh's book by 莊佳穎, who brings up the Taiwanese concept of sai-nai [司奶] and compares it to Yueh's discussion of sajiao--h/t to Shao-wei Huang for sending me a copy of that article!)

Another point that interested me about Yueh's book was her last chapter, which moves the discussion of sajiao, Taipei Chic, and Taimei from a more interpersonal and mediatized domestic context to the larger context of what these phenomena have to say about Taiwanese identity in relation to Asia. She extends the interpersonal to the political, arguing that elements of sajiao practice have become part of domestic democratic politics in Taiwan. For instance, "Taiwan's political campaigns are full of cute marketing" (173). We see examples of this now, with vice-presidential candidate Hsiao Bi-khim calling herself a "cat warrior" and arguably even former presidential candidate Terry Gou using a "cute" English slogan "Good Timeing," which sounds similar to his Chinese name, Guo Taiming 郭台銘, (not sure why he kept the "e" in "Timeing"--maybe that makes it cuter?). 

Yueh also casts Taiwan's role in world politics in terms of a sajiao position, suggesting that Taiwan's relative weakness in comparison to China could lead to a a re-situating of Taiwan "as a small entity in terms of the global civic society" rather than a part of a "cultural China framework" (174). She suggests that Taiwan could be treated and studied in a transnational Asian context, which would remove the historical burden that Taiwan had during the Cold War to represent "Chinese culture" to the world. 

There's a lot more going on in this book than my notes here might suggest, so I'd of course recommend reading it to see what I've missed!

I didn't find many reviews of the book, but here are a couple of links in addition to the review I mentioned above:

• Thoughts on Sajiao (by Kerim Friedman)
• A review in the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (by Amélie Keyser-Verreault) (will download directly)

Summer writing project (Day Forty-Five): Current events and my project

Since yesterday, there's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about one particular "idiom" (chengyu) in Xi Jinping's speech on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party--the line where he says that the enemies of China will find themselves crashing into a steel wall formed by the bodies of 1.4 billion Chinese; he uses the phrase 头破血流, which literally means "head break blood flow." The question in the tweets I've been reading, though, is whether this phrase is supposed to be taken literally (someone, whose tweet I unfortunately can't find now, compared it to idioms like "raining cats and dogs"). Frankie Huang suggests we should take it in the spirit of the famous ST:TNG episode where Picard tries to figure out the allegorical language of the Tamarian ship captain; that is, the broken and bleeding heads are not meant to be taken literally. She goes on, in fact, to suggest that taking the phrase literally is actually a purposeful act of misunderstanding driven by a bias against Xi or, more generally, China. 

This has made me think again about my reaction to some of the postwar Taiwan elementary textbook passages I've been reading, and whether I'm reading too much into them. I mentioned the "urban warfare" lesson in a 1946 fourth-grade reader that struck me (and my wife) as pretty violent, and this all started with a lesson from 1956 that I translated years ago about Yan Haiwen, a Chinese pilot who kills himself rather than being taken by the enemy soldiers. But I'm starting to rethink my response what I'd consider the graphic violence of these stories. Going back to 头破血流, a thread by Chenchen Zhang arguing that the emotional valence (if I'm using that term correctly) of the language of Xi's speech and, I guess, Chinese nationalistic discourse in general, is more important to think about than one four-character chengyu. 

I think with Yan Haiwen, I understood this on a certain level when I wrote about it in my dissertation (and in this paper, if I ever finish it)--I thought about this story in terms of Suzanne Keen's theory of strategic empathizing, where student readers were taught to admire and identify with the feelings and motivations of people like Yan Haiwen. In this case (and perhaps in the case of the urban warfare story), it's perhaps important to turn away from the horror I feel reading about the violence and to the feelings that the writers are trying to evoke from readers. 

That all said, however, I'm resisting the idea that there's one "right" way to read these stories (or the chengyu in question in Xi's speech). Different readers will interpret these texts differently, depending on their positionality. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, for instance, might be properly accused of reading 头破血流 too literally, and it might be said that since I'm not the primary audience for this speech, I don't have the right to interpret it. On the other hand, in our globalized world of instantaneous worldwide communication and immediate translation, it seems to me a bit naïve to think that there's only one audience for any big speech like this. After all, this part of the speech is also serving as a warning to the enemy, so in that sense it's at least partly addressing that potential enemy.* And as Bessie tweeted in response to Frankie Huang's post, for a Taiwanese person, it's hard to assume "good faith" on the part of the speaker when Taiwan is under constant threat of violent annexation by that same speaker. So interpretation also has a lot to do with how you see yourself in relation to the speaker. (I'm sure I'm not saying anything new here.) Even in postwar Taiwan, stories like those of Yan Haiwen might be read differently by Taiwanese students as opposed to Mainlander students. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I would be able to test this at this point. One thing I'm constantly looking for is stories of people's experiences of schooling at that time.)

Anyway, this is what looking through Twitter got me thinking about today. It's useful to think about this, and it gives me another perspective on what I've been working on, but it also reminds me of my own place or position in this project I'm working on (and possibly why it's taking me so long to finish it!). 

*Then again, when my son is playing dangerously on the stairs, I sometimes tell him to be careful or he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. That's pretty graphic...

Todd L. Sandel, "Communication Modes, Taiwanese"

Number two in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Sandel, T. L. (2017). Communication modes, Taiwanese. In Y. Y. Kim (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (pp. 1-5). John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781118783665.ieicc0149

Sandel's short chapter covers a broad but somewhat idiosyncratic set of language practices and cultural attitudes in Taiwan, from the differences between "Standard [Mandarin] Chinese" and Taiwan Guoyu (台灣國語), to a comparison between language practices/identity in southern and northern Taiwan, to the gendered language practice of sajiao (撒嬌), to the discourse of multiculturalism in Taiwan, to Taiwanese admiration of Japan. In a four-page chapter (the last page consists of cross-references and a reference list), it's a somewhat dizzying trip through Taiwanese culture, but it gives me a sense of the difficulty one might have if tasked with the job of describing in a limited space the "communication modes" of contemporary Taiwan--what to include? What to leave out? 

Some things I learned from the article:

• The term Taike (台客) was originally the way Mainland gang members referred to Taiwanese gang members in the 1960s (I'm assuming he's referring to members of Mainland gangs and members of Taiwanese gangs, since I don't think there were many gangs that incorporated both groups back then--someone correct me if I'm wrong since I'm no expert on the history of gangs in Taiwan.)
• Sandel argues that by the 2000s, "foreign brides" from southeast Asia and China "were recognized as Taiwan’s 'fifth ethnic group,' not a threat but a treasure who could help facilitate connections between Taiwan, the nations of Southeast Asia, and China." He gives as evidence the fact that in the 2016 elections, there was no "anti-immigrant" rhetoric used by any political party as part of their campaign.
• Sandel mentions a movie I haven't seen, Wansei Back Home (灣生回家, 2015), which is a documentary about Taiwan-born Japanese citizens who had to leave Taiwan at the end of World War II. (Actually, I have heard of the film in the context of a scandal a few years ago about the producer of the film, who admitted to having lied about being a Taiwan-born Japanese. Evidently, though, the film itself wasn't falsified.)

Some things I have questions about:

• Is sajiao, which Sandel characterizes as a practice "associated with 'Mainlanders,'" not practiced as much by non-Mainlander Taiwanese? Is it practiced much in China?
• How inclusive is the multicultural discourse in Taiwan? How do most Taiwanese people feel about viewing "foreign brides" (外籍新娘) as part of Taiwanese society?
• Have the concepts of hen Tai (很台) and Taike (台客) become points of pride for Taiwanese, as the term "queer" has been co-opted by the LGBTQ+ community? (This also leads me to wonder about the communication modes of the LGBTQ+ community in Taiwan.)

Sumei Wang, "Radio and Urban Rhythms in 1930s Colonial Taiwan"

I'm going to do some blogging about scholarly articles I've found related to communication practices in Taiwan. I thought I'd start with this one because I saw that there's an exhibition on the history of communications technology in Taiwan that has opened in Taipei. 

Wang, Sumei. (2018). Radio and urban rhythms in 1930s colonial Taiwan. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 38(1), 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2017.1285152

Wang's article traces the rise of radio broadcasting in colonial Taiwan, from its beginnings in 1925 through the 1930s, which is her main period of focus. She makes the argument that although some scholars see the mass culture created by media like radio as "an instrument of social control and a vehicle for the promotion of hegemony" (p. 159), the advent of radio in Taiwan was more than that. Along with  phonographs, newspapers, cafés, dance halls, and theaters, radio created a consumer culture in Taiwan among the urban middle class. At the same time, she argues that radio contributed to a shift in the rhythms of Taiwanese culture by bringing a standardized way of telling time from the public sphere and into the home. (Until 1921, "clocks were synchronized according to the sound of a cannon fired daily by the military at 12:00 p.m." [p. 153].) Wang points out that "[a]fter the advent of the radio in Taiwan, every day at 11:59 am and 9:20 PM, immediately before the end of broadcasting, the radio announcer began a count- down: 50, 40, ... 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 s. The audience gradually became used to the temporal order provided by the radio" (p. 154).

Wang also discusses the programming provided on station JFAK, Taipei's first radio station that was established by the Taiwan Hōsō Kyōkai (THK). 

 

JFAK Radio Tower (原台北放送局放送亭), New Park, Taipei

She notes that the station did not only broadcast programs about Japan: 

Because the population of Japanese residents numbered only 270,000 in Taiwan, compared with the five million native Taiwanese, THK acknowledged that, to increase the number of radio subscribers, the programmes had to attract Taiwanese listeners. Therefore, programmes on Taiwanese music, history, entertainment, and business information were introduced. The radio station also invited artists to perform their music in real-time broadcasts, and reviewed newly released pop records (p. 151)

Not only did some THK programs have a Taiwan focus, but  

[o]n 9 September 1934, THK produced the programme ‘Taiwanese Evening’, made available to listeners across all of the Japanese territories, and it later became a regular monthly show. This revealed that Taiwan was not only a passive receiver situated on the fringe of the Japanese Empire; on the contrary, through radio broadcasting, it could transmit its own culture to the mainland, and thus was also an exporter of culture. (p. 151)

Wang's article goes beyond radio, however, and in fact it is sometimes a bit challenging to understand the reason that radio is the focus of the title and abstract--there's also a lot in the article about newspapers, phonographs, and even bus schedules and their contribution to urban life and "structured punctuality" in 1930s Taiwan. At the beginning of the article, Wang proposes to use Lin Huikun's (林煇焜) 1933 serial novel Inviolable Destiny (《爭へぬ運命》, later translated into Chinese as 《命運難違》) as evidence for the common role of radio in urban life in colonial Taiwan. However, many of her examples from the serialized novel have to do with other 

rich depictions of urban life at the time. For example, buses, taxies and bicycles pass through busy cities; viewing movies in theatres was a form of popular entertainment for urban residents; and young females could visit public spaces unaccompanied. All of these examples indicate modern life in metropolitan Taipei. (p. 155)

Overall, though, the article does a good job of depicting urban life in 1930s Taipei. It reminds me of the book 台灣西方文明初體驗 (Taiwan's First Experiences of Western Civilization), by 陳柔縉 (Chen Rouxin). And it has introduced me to a new work of Taiwanese fiction that I would like to read some day. (《命運難違》is available in Chinese translation, though it comes in two volumes. Maybe I'll buy it next time I'm in Taiwan...)