黃孫權
本文在「漢雅一百論壇」（二〇一四年一月十七日，香港藝術中心）講稿基礎上修訂而成。先收錄於《人間思想02》十月，台北/杭州 人間出版社刊，後於香港漢雅軒出版的《三個藝術世界：中國現代史中的一百個藝術》有中英文版。pp358-363。
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文/ 黃孫權1
〈漢雅一百：偏好〉，匯聚了中港台三地一百件作品，既是影響華人藝術圈至深的漢雅軒畫廊三十週年收藏生日展，也是策展人張頌仁與高士明有意識地以文人的、社會主義與當代藝術三個世界概念建構華人藝術歷史之索引。展覽無疑地提出了些好問題：私人典藏的偏好作品如何建立歷史敘事？能否以三個世界分斷疊合來重寫華人藝術史？其富於野心的三個世界結構是否被依其作品主題分類的展示方法而弄擰了意義？更甚，三個世界是否如兩岸三地（兩岸何止三地？）此種牢固卻過時的分斷概念，再次凝固歷史而非解放歷史？我想以一個非常個人的角度重新看待華人（如果這個概念仍適用來描述籠統的區域與經濟過程）的認同政治關係。
祖國
展覽是政治與詩意(敘事)的，越是政治的展覽就越得表現像僅是詩意的，展覽需要妥順的敘事邏輯就如同歷史學家要掌握有頭有尾的線索一樣，讓故事可以說通，說得動人，有可信的起源以及富有寓意開展性的結尾，政治便可以隱藏其中。展覽的主題之一「分斷與離散」，逼使我們更應該面對歧異的歷史(展覽的形式展現成的詩意敘事)和政治的關聯。分斷自是成王敗寇的政治學，人民與土地是無法分斷的，歷史連續，而政治分斷，國家只是政治的後果，不是歷史的必然，而愛國主義只是奮戰過程中的副產品。十七世紀後新興國族國家(nation state)的打造，就是血緣與地緣政治如何自然化歷史之鬥爭。
因此，讓我們先來問一個起源的問題：國家（country）是什麼性別？德國人稱父國（fatherland），印度與其他許多國家則稱為母國（motherland），中國人稱祖國，先人之國謂祖國（ancestor’s land）。字面上看來，祖國就是祖先住過的地方，然而人都是暫居於世界，家國相對於恆久都是中繼居所而已。以色列和巴勒斯坦的衝突告訴我們，無論住多久，住過與否，都不代表所有權，民族國家只是政治的結果，和血緣與祖先住多久無關。台灣在二戰結束，日本從台灣撤離二十萬人，從「祖國」遷進了二百萬人。祖國出現在我孩提時教科書上狀似秋海棠，長大後我才知道蒙古國（教科書上的外蒙）是在蔣介石在抗日成功後才讓給蘇聯，秋海棠變成老母雞。孔夫子說：「始作俑者，其無後乎？」蔣介石在台灣塑造自己是民族救星時，時任監察院院長的書法大家于右任先生常常大筆一揮寫下「民族救星」，台灣至今仍四處可見這四字，被台灣太陽花學潮撤下的「立法院」招牌，也是于右任先生的筆墨。從祖國父兄們逃出的祖國，則另有一位民族救星毛澤東，在網上搜尋，兩位民族救星總是並肩出現。此展的開頭便是于右任先生的字與梁思成先生設計的人民英雄紀念碑藍圖，他們二人後來各有祖國，祖國一分為二，或者說，祖國被兩地的政治決然任意地的取用。
不同的國家有不同的藝術傳統，例如，西方風景畫（landscape painting)由可以入畫的風景所框，美景是適合入畫的，是擬畫的（pictureseque）的方稱自然。中國文人畫則由人寓居於中，由個人經驗體會畫中美景意境，而非畫的主題與形式。文人畫是傳統中 國文人世界的再現似乎毫無疑問，然而，臺灣農村 不是西方風景畫，也非中國文人畫，而是發展中國 家普遍的生產型農村，客廳即工廠，全島都是加 工廠(如陳界仁作品)。八〇年代之後，李登輝主導 的「農地開放買賣」讓農地碎裂化地捲入都市過程， 從此沒有自然沒有農村，沒有古典主義意義下的 農村與社會關係，臺灣的農村不入藝術，不入畫 框。如英國文化研究學者雷蒙 · 威廉斯(Raymond Williams)所說的:「A working country is hardly ever a landscape」(勞動的鄉村從來都不是風景)。
但臺灣還是有小鎮景致的。陳澄波的畫裡有， 但畫中無人，有人也只是裝飾。陳澄波於東京美術學院完成研究所學業後，受聘至中國上海新華藝專與昌明藝苑任教，並獲選為中國十二位代表畫家。 一九二九年六月，以畫作「清流」受推薦代表中華 民國參加芝加哥博覽會。(圖3及圖4)在「二二八事 件」爆發後，於一九四七年三月二十五日被國民黨 槍殺於嘉義火車站，離他入選一九二六年第七屆日本帝國美展的畫作「嘉義街外」不遠之處。 兩年後，我母親生於臺中梧棲的小漁港。
父國
文化大革命那年，我出生。在這個或者那個軍法局（陳界仁作品），兩岸政府都是數學資優生，解決了二二八或者文革時期該被好好計算的數學。父親從十四歲被國民黨抓兵，離開閩北武夷山下的農村，一路打仗撤退到台灣時姐姐剛出生，終生未得謀面。他的父國在祖國，有一家子的親戚，閩北山丘下綿延的農田茶園果園還有據說很精緻典雅的黃家宗祠，身上有著抗日反共的兩個彈孔。他的母國也在祖國，祖母據說是浦城縣的美女，但所有的思念都帶有美化與英雄主義的創造成分。父親過世後許久，兩岸開放探親，我與母親飛到了福州機場，坐了四天四夜的小巴，穿過閩北高高低低的丘陵到了浦城縣忠信鄉黃家村，我看到那片依山的農田，還有被無數家庭分居的黃家宗祠，見到我的親姐姐，家族裡的陌生親戚，突然老了的輩份稱呼，喝了桂花甜茶，陌生的父國才在一碗碗無限期停止的自制米酒中逐漸顯影。我腦袋印象最深的卻是沿路徬山雄偉的閩北建築樓群，以及剛啟蒙的左派意識讓我感到宗祠被無數孤苦家庭瓜分是非常美妙的事。血緣還不如教科書中的中國近。
他的父國在祖國，而我的父國就是他的現下的家，他的遙望思念都在我抬頭可見之處，我的母國就是我媽我外婆我阿姨的家。我寓所在我母親之地。
冷戰時期的美日台關係，使台灣成為中國統一的阻礙。蔣介石在「中」美斷交前，與美國商量好承認兩個中國同時存在未果，從來也沒有過國共不兩立的誓言。我父親以及當初來台的兩百萬父輩姨婆們，為了誓不兩立的謊言拋家棄子，與對岸勢不兩立，化灰燼也恨吧。台美斷交後，美國軍事援助顧問團撤出，但將我的家園慢慢變成「社區」，原本用來規劃補助救濟單位的名稱，取代了歷史稱呼自己家園的名字，家園國家都是被命名的，被召喚的。
母國
我不懂離散，我沒見過祖父母。我母親就是我與土地的所有聯繫，但我從小長在一個不同於此土地的村子。眷村。全台灣近九百個，約三成外省人四十餘萬人住在眷村。藝術家侯淑姿描繪一種分斷的安居，新故鄉。爾後，再度離散。〈鍾文姬與黃克正〉的故事裡，一個本省客家人嫁給了外省軍人，結婚後一家四口都住在四坪大小的房間裡七年，爾後又從台中搬到左營復興新村，再搬到崇實新村。丈夫出外帶兵常常一、兩個月沒回家，全靠鄰里排解寂寞。後來小孩大了，鐘文姬則到南梓加工區上了二十幾年的班，住在左營也快四十年了，幾乎就是她的第二故鄉，眷改條例的兩個選項他們都沒有選，與國防部打了四年官司，也不知未來何去。簡單的文字與八幅作品就照映出眷村的普遍歷史意義。〈尚久菊與陸鐸〉則是兩個來自不同省份的人在台灣相識相遇。〈殷陳城蘭〉以女性敘事，獨照、屋景、樹景、巷弄角落，一如前者，除了以公共空間取代了客廳外，其餘相同。攝影主題的相似，餘韻反覆，完成了地方空間的辨識體系，彰顯了眷村生活的整體性，住過眷村的人都知道什麼是公共生活，就是當你家客廳就是別人家的巷弄之時。眷村的孩子，記錄也見證保質期內的「中國」，是中國的此存在（ça a été）和兩岸空間的指標性關係（indexical relation）。
我與父親的相處，哭訴與請求都是非常陌生的。記憶中，我們的對話不超過二十句吧。你面對的是一個從小五開始就會打還手的孩子，一個國一的小孩在你臨走之時，一人在醫院守著你的屍體（被罩在一個綠色紗籠底下像是被庇護的冰冷菜餚，像小時候的飯桌上的那種）一夜而面對所有家人不落淚的不孝兒；而我面對則是一個孤寂的老人，即使你把我放在腳踏車上從永春街走到823陸軍醫院的遙遠路上，你仍未發一語，彷彿這路是走在你閩北的丘陵上，而腳踏車上是您從未謀面的女兒，我的同父異母的姊姊。既未曾識得謀面，又何來話語？我在你面前，而你無能關愛。我們的關係像是個錯置的愛，總來不及在學會時候用完，或在能使喚的時候找不到對象。你獨自拉胡琴的時候，我在外婆家度過快樂的暑假，在台中梧棲港與外公出海捕魚，剝牡蠣殼，聽著外公說小時候吃兩個月鯊魚肉的故事。我小六你失聲之時，你透過胡琴的話很吵，我更厭倦你那永遠不變的曲調。你的黃昏是我的青春。我很晚才開始認識你黃昏中的風景，你相信也好，不信也罷。我工作地方的報紙網站被中國封鎖而台灣很多人說我們是統派，我認識不少外獨會2的朋友，參加學運，幫民進黨的候選人助選，在八百多戶的眷村投下第一張「叛亂」票，也曾在地下電台主持政論與音樂節目二年多，也為了地下電台被抄抗議而從指揮車上被水柱沖下來，最後又因為十四十五號公園反拆遷運動時與民進黨和學運時期以來相識的同志分手，而至今我沒有一點欣喜，一點點都沒有。而我的生活，總在沒有選擇中前進，我的愛情，簡直像團狗屎，插鮮花都嫌小。至今唯一的狗屁結論是：拒絕比追求的勇氣多，用在政治上，起碼讓我不用與媚俗談戀愛。但是用在愛情上，簡直一敗徒地。我想我們關係中我唯一體會到的是「寡言」，還有寡言後面的某種實在論的生命哲學，絕對不是一個14歲孩子可以學會的事情。而你，一個14歲就被抓去充軍打仗的孩子，可能很早就學會了。
離散是猶太人的專利但非專屬，從羅馬時代就必須身繫黃色絲巾出門標示身分，只能從商，流離飄泊，受不同族群國家的欺壓，乃至建國後，也使別人重複他們的歷史。台灣一直是他者的家園，以前是，現在是，未來也是。台灣現在有四十二萬的外勞，三十八萬四千多的外籍新娘（台灣原住民人口約四十八萬），中國籍的配偶則佔其中的百分之六十五以上。侯淑姿的〈望向彼方─亞洲新娘之歌〉說出了台灣成為外籍新娘下一個故鄉的夢想與痛苦之地，她們從父家到夫家，作為生殖與生產的工具，身體用來換在父家的新房，愛情與幸福則是可遇不可求。在高雄旗津的小學，班上六個孩童有一個就是「混血」兒，台灣正邁向新的多元文化與血緣的未來。母國是我的，與台灣此存在的政治、歷史情境，是生育的，女性的，夢想的，移民的，祖國父國的「例外之地」。如果中國對台灣的情感，不是政治的，那請告訴我，中國作為華人的「祖國」，靠什麼來召喚？中國何時可以成為他者的家園？
我們總是崇仰強者的價值，輕視弱者的價值，讚揚獅子的歷史，忘記獵物的歷史。屬地主義式的情感，自然化了歷史，讓我們誤以為寄居之地就是起源之地，忘了這只不過是土地與私有財產連結產生的巨大情愫而已，我們愛鄉愛國是因為我們（曾）擁有它，若非如此，我們有什麼依據將政治瓜分後召喚成家園的土地變成一生依戀的寓所？有什麼推進歷史展覽的方式，不是用時間的而是用空間的敘事讓政治現身，讓政治成為多重選擇之一的意志而非統攝歷史的方式？
這個展覽中，讓我感動與憂心的是同一個部分，這些作品安穩地在三個世界以及特定分類中被安置，而不是擾動，動容之處恰是麻醉我之處，詩意隱藏了政治，而最終也讓歷史自然化了。讓我引用Edward Said在《文化與帝國主義》書中的句子作為結，他引用一個十四世紀印度學者說的話：
「作一個初學者，他熱愛自己的家鄉。作一個強者，他愛全世界。作一個完人，他什麼都不愛。因為一個初學者，他會把他的愛全付出在一個地方；一個強者，他會把愛推及全世界；可是一個完人則對這世界止息了愛。」3
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English Version
Huang SunQuan4
The ‘ Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ exhibition, which presented 100 artworks from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, was in effect an ideological index of curators Chang Tsong-Zung and Gao Shiming’s concept of a ‘ three artworlds’ framework of literati, Socialist and contemporary art as a means of structuring Chinese art history.1 The exhibition was also a celebration of Hanart’s thirty-year history, and in those years the gallery without doubt has deeply impacted Chinese art circles. Given that the artworks in the show were intentionally and carefully drawn from the gallery’s private collection, the exhibition brings out several interesting questions, as for example: How do the particular interests and inclinations of a private collector influence the establishment of a historical narrative ? Can Chinese art history be rewritten via the divisions and re-integrations implicit in the three artworlds framework? Was the significance of this very ambitious framework to some degree distorted by the thematic division of the artworks in the exhibition ? And finally, by its use of the solidly rooted and perhaps even outdated paradigm of the China-Hong Kong-Taiwan triumvirate, might the three artworlds theory serve only to reinforce a stagnant history rather than liberating history from its stagnant state?
I would like to use a very personal perspective to re-examine the relations of identity politics among the ‘Chinese’ (if such a concept can even be used to refer to such a broad and ineffable regional and economic process).
Ancestral Land
An exhibition is (a) political and poetic (narrative); and the more political an exhibition is, the more poetically expressive it must be. An exhibition should follow a similar narrative logic to that used by the historian: the narrative must hold together, it must be persuasive, it must be moving, it should have a convincing opening, and an inspiring conclusion that opens up new trajectories: in this way, politics can be conveniently concealed within. One of the themes within this exhibition, division and diaspora, urges us to confront the divergences of history. The concept of division in fact derives from a politics of ‘victor’s justice’, but people cannot really be divided from the land. History is continuous: both political division and nationhood are historical consequences, not historical inevitabilities. As for patriotism, it is only a by-product of war. The rise of the new nation- state after the seventeenth century was simply the means by which kinship politics and geopolitics naturalised historical conflicts.
But let’s pose a question that cuts to the chase. What gender is a country? Germans call Germany their ‘ fatherland’, and Indians call India their ‘motherland’, but Chinese refer to China as their ‘ancestral land’ (zuguo). Zuguo simply means the place where our ancestors once lived. Human life is brief and transitory, and there is no such thing as ‘permanent residency’ on this planet. The Israel-Palestine conflict teaches us that no matter how long people have lived in a place, or not lived in a place, hereditary property rights are irrelevant, because contemporary nation- states are political entities, and have nothing to do with blood ties or shared ancestry.
At the end of World War II, the Japanese evacuated 200,000 people from Taiwan, and 200,000 people moved into Taiwan from the ‘ancestral land’. In the schoolbooks I used as a child, the map of China was shaped like a begonia: it was only after I grew up that I learned that Mongolia (referred to as Outer Mongolia in my textbooks) had been handed over to the Soviet Union after Chiang Kai-shek won the War of Resistance against Japan; and that as a result, China’s begonia shape had now changed into a chicken shape. Confucius said: ‘The man who first buried wooden images with the dead – was he himself without any offspring?’ When Chiang Kai-shek was modeling himself as the ‘Saviour of the Nation’ in Taiwan, Yu Youren (1879-1964), then president of the Control Yuan and a great calligrapher, wrote an inscription dedicated to Chiang, comprised of four characters: min zu jiu xing – meaning precisely, ‘Saviour of the Nation’. Today you can still these four characters everywhere in Taiwan. Recently, when the activist students of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement occupied the site of the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, they pulled down a plaque bearing the words ‘Legislative Yuan’ (lifa yuan) written in an elegant calligraphic hand – also the work of Yu Youren.
The ancestral land that our fathers fled also had a ‘Saviour of the Nation’ – Mao Zedong. If you search up Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong on the Internet, these two ‘Saviours of the Nation’ are always mentioned in tandem. The first two exhibits in the ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ show were a calligraphy scroll by Yu Youren and the design drawings for the Monument to the People’s Heroes commissioned by Liang Sicheng. You could say that Yu and Liang each had their respective ancestral land, since the original had now become divided in two; or to put it another way, the term ‘ancestral land’ was being arbitrarily bandied about by the political regimes on each side of the Taiwan Strait.
Each culture has its own artistic traditions. For example, in Western landscape painting, any beautiful landscape can be contained within the frame, for the picturesque is seen as being equal to nature. In Chinese literati painting, one lives inside the landscape, and the appreciation of the poetic realm embodied therein comes through direct individual experience.
Taiwan’s farming villages today are not the stuff of Western landscape painting, nor are they suited to Chinese literati painting. Rather, they are part of a rural landscape devoted to agricultural production, just like that of any other developing country. Over time, living rooms and factories, in fact, the entire island, have been transformed into one huge assembly line; as is reflected, for instance, in the work of the artist Chen Chieh-Jen ( figs 1 and 2). After 1980, the policy introducing the open purchase of farmland under then-President Lee Teng-hui resulted in the fragmentation of farmland and its gradual incorporation into the urban landscape. From this point on, the classical relationship between the agricultural landscape and the larger society disappeared from view. Taiwan’s rural landscape has no place in art; it no longer fits into any frame. To quote Raymond Williams: ‘A working country is hardly ever a landscape.’ 5
But pastoral scenes do exist in Taiwan: they can be found, for example, in the paintings of Taiwanese artist Chen Chengbo (1895-1947). Chen’s landscapes are usually devoid of human figures, and if they are present it is only as a decorative element. Born in Taiwan in the small city of Chiayi, Chen went abroad for graduate study. After completing his studies at Tokyo Art University, he taught in Shanghai at the Xinhua Academy of Fine Arts and the Changming Art Training School, and was named as one of the twelve leading artists in China. In June 1929, his painting Clear Stream (fig. 3) was selected to represent the Republic of China at a major exhibition in Chicago. Chen returned to Taiwan in 1933. In 1947, in the wake of the February 28th Incident, Chen was assassinated by the Kuomintang at the Chiayi train station on March 25th, not far from the subject of his painting, The Street of Chiayi (1) (fig. 4), which was the first painting by a Chinese artist to be exhibited at an Imperial Arts Exhibition in Tokyo (the seventh edition in 1926). 6 My mother was born two years later in what was then the modest fishing port of Wuqi in Taichung.
Fatherland
I was born while the Cultural Revolution was taking place in China. In the military courts of both Taiwan and the PRC (again, one thinks of the works of Chen Chieh-Jen), the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait became mathematical prodigies, solving the tricky calculations posed by the February 28th Incident and the Cultural Revolution.
My father was drafted into the KMT army at the age of 14, leaving behind the village near Wuyi Mountain in Fujian province where he had grown up. His daughter, my half-sister, was born on the Mainland just as the KMT army was retreating to Taiwan. My father never had the chance to see her. His fatherland was in his ancestral land, where his relatives lived in a village nestled amidst the rolling hills of northern Fujian province, with farmland, a tea plantation and fruit orchards, and an elegant ancestral hall of the Huang clan which, so he said, was scarred with two bullet holes from a battle between Japanese and Communist forces during the War of Resistance. My father’s motherland was also within his ancestral land. His grandmother was said to have been a great beauty from Pucheng county. But perhaps my father’s memories were coloured by his nostalgic longing, and so all the things of his past appeared more beautiful and more heroic than they really were.
Some time after my father died, the government eased restrictions on travel to the Mainland for people with relatives there. So my mother and I flew to the Fuzhou airport, and travelled on a bus for four days and four nights over the hilly landscape of northern Fuzhou province, until finally we arrived at the Huang ancestral village in Zhongxin township, Pucheng county; and I saw those farmlands spread out at the foot of the mountain, and the Huang ancestral hall that was split into the lines of separated families. I met my half-sister and other relatives formerly unknown to me, and it wasn’t long before we were calling each other by affectionate family names, sitting together and drinking sweet osmanthus tea, and raising cup after cup of strong rice wine. Under the influence of the wine I found my rigid self-control relaxing; and suddenly the fatherland that had always seemed so alien and amorphous to me began to take on a shape. But the memory etched most deeply in my mind is that first ride through the majestic, undulating landscape of northern Fuzhou, glimpsing the clusters of villages with their buildings in the native architectural style nestled in the hills. And then there was the uncanny way that, with my newly awakened leftist awareness, I sensed that our ancestral hall had imploded into the fragments of countless struggling families. Blood ties after all are inferior to textbooks in evoking ‘China’ .
My father’s fatherland (fuguo) is located in his ancestral land, but my own fatherland is my father’s home in Taiwan, as it exists right here, right now. Everything he pined for from afar I can see by just lifting my head. My motherland exists in the homes of my mother, her mother and my aunts. I live on my mother’s land.
During the Cold War, the alliance among the United States, Japan and Taiwan turned Taiwan into an obstacle to Chinese reunification. Before ‘Sino’-American diplomatic relations were severed, Chiang Kai-shek had discussed the idea of two coexisting Chinas with the U.S., but these discussions were inconclusive. Yet there was never an express declaration against the idea of some kind of resolution between the Nationalist and Communist Chinas, no sense that this was a case of completely irreconcilable differences. Yet my father and the tens of thousands of aunts, grandmothers and others who fled to Taiwan at the same time as he, all had abandoned their homes on the Mainland because of the lies the government told about ‘irreconcilable differences’. Before long, this notion of ‘irreconcilable differences’ between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait turned into a deep resentment and even hatred, soon colouring their lives with bitterness.
After the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan, it withdrew all military advisors and financial aid from the island. My neighbourhood gradually became a ‘district,’ and the name used to demarcate the area covered by the local Grant Relief Unit replaced the historical name of my neighbourhood. Thus both the neighbourhood and the country were named and declaimed.
Motherland
I don’t understand diaspora. I never met my paternal grandparents, never paid my respects at their graves, nor do I own any land of my own. My mother is the only real connection I have to the land, but from childhood I grew up in a village that was unconnected to my mother’s land: A military dependents’ village, to be precise. There were almost 900 of these villages all over Taiwan, and thirty per cent of all mainland émigrés, that is over 400,000 people, lived in them. The artist Lulu Shur-tzy Hou has created a series of photographs, some of them overwritten with texts, narrating some of the stories to be found in these settlements born of division, these new hometowns. Hou’s work points out the universal significance of the history of these villages, which are now gradually being demolished.
Wen-ji Jung and Ke-jeng Huang 01 (2012) tells the story of a Taiwan-born Hakka woman (Jung) who married a solider (Huang) from the Mainland (fig 5). The couple and their two children first lived in a tiny flat in Taichung for seven years, before moving to the military dependents’ village in Zuoying District in southern Taiwan. Huang was away from home for one or two months at a time on military duty, and his wife relied on her neighbours to assuage her loneliness. Once their children were grown up and out of the house, Jung took a job in the Nanzih Industrial Zone in Kaohsiung, where she worked for the next twenty years. The couple lived in the military independents’ village in Zuoying for nearly forty years, and for Jung the place became a second ‘hometown’. When the official policy governing military dependents’ housing changed, Huang and Jung rejected the two choices of new residences they were offered, and after a four-year lawsuit with the Ministry of Defense, were still in a state of limbo. Another work in the series, Shang Jiuju and LuDuo, narrates how two people from different parts of China met in Taiwan and shared their lives. Yin Chen Cheng-lan is a story told from a woman’s point of view (fig. 6). The similarities in the photographs’ subject matter – individual portraits, domestic interiors, shots of trees and corners of tiny alleys and the repetitions of the rituals and customs of daily life complete the recognition system of this particular kind of local space, and reveal the integrity of life in these villages. Anyone who has ever lived in such a village knows what communal life is all about, especially when your own family’s living room is another’s family’s alleyway. Children who grew up in military dependents’ villages remember and bear witness to a ‘China’ which is still within its expiration date. This is China’s ça a été (that-has- been, à la Roland Barthes), reflecting the indexical relationship between the spaces on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
In my relations with my father, crying and whining were rare occurrences. As I recall, we exchanged in total fewer than twenty sentences in our lives. You’re looking at a fifth-grade primary school pupil who wasn’t afraid to strike back when attacked, a first- year middle school student who, as an unfilial son, shed not a single tear as he stood by your dead body all night in the hospital (draped in a green shroud, like the kind of netting that was used to keep flies off cold dishes on the kitchen table when I was young) as family members filed in. What I saw was a lonely old man, even though you had once put me on a bicycle and pushed me the entire distance from Yongchun Street to Number 823 Army Hospital, without saying a word, as if this road were on a hillside in northern Fujian, and the person on the bike was the daughter you never knew, my half-sister by your first wife. Since you wouldn’t have recognised her even if you saw her, what was there to say after all? There I am standing before you, but you show no love for me. Our relationship was one of misplaced affection, but time ran out before you had a chance to learn how to love, and when you could have loved, there was no one there for you to love. While you sat alone, playing intently on your Chinese fiddle, I spent a happy summer at my maternal grandparents’ home in Taichung. I went fishing with Grandpa in the ocean, split open live oysters, and listened to Grandpa tell me how he had to eat shark meat every day for two months when he was a boy. When I was in sixth grade, you lost your voice, and your fiddle playing became louder and fiercer. I hated the way you played the same tune over and over. Whether or not you believe me, it’s taken me a long time to understand your twilight landscape.
When the website of the newspaper I worked at was blocked by the Chinese government, people in Taiwan began to say that we were pro-unificationists. I knew many members of the Overseas Association for Taiwan Independence, I participated in student movements, and I campaigned for electoral candidates from the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party). In a military dependents’ village of 800 households, I was the first to cast a vote advocating ‘rebellion’, and acted as host for debates and music programs on an underground radio station for over two years. When protesting the way an underground radio station had been raided by the police, I was forced off the truck leading the protest with water from a fire hose. And finally, in the aftermath of the No. 14 and No. 15 Parks Anti- demolition Movement,7 I parted ways with the DPP and with comrades I had known since my activist student days. I feel that I lead a joyless existence. My life has progressed without my making any of my own choices, my love is like a heap of dog shit, and even if you stick a few flowers in it, it’s not enough. Here’s my conclusion, worth less than a dog’s fart: dealing with rejection takes more courage than the pursuit, and if I put that courage into politics, at least I won’t waste my time in vulgar flirtations. But if I try it in love, I can only fail. In human relations, the one thing I have learned is to practice reticence, to keep my mouth shut. Behind this reticence is a realistic philosophy of life, something that can hardly be mastered by a 14-year-old child. But you, my father, conscripted to fight a war at the age of 14 – you probably learned all about reticence and keeping your mouth shut very early on.
Diaspora was patented for the Jewish people, although it is not exclusive to them. As early as ancient Roman times, they had to wear yellow armbands identifying themselves as Jews. They were permitted to engage only in commerce, forced to wander from place to place, and were oppressed and treated as outsiders wherever they went. Once they established their own state of Israel, they treated others the way they had been treated throughout history. Taiwan has always served as a home for ‘others’; this is its past, its present and its future. There are now 420,000 foreign workers, and over 384,000 immigrant brides in Taiwan (the indigenous population is about 480,000); and approximately 65 per cent of these brides are married to Chinese nationals. Lulu Shur-tzy Hou’s work Look Toward the Other Side – Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan describes both the dreams and the hardships of these brides who have made Taiwan their second homes, who went from the homes of their fathers to the homes of their husbands, becoming tools for propagation and production. As for whether they also encountered love, that is another question.
At a primary school in the Chichin district of Kaohsiung, six of the students are of mixed blood, a signifier that Taiwan is headed towards a pluralism of both culture and bloodlines. What I have is a motherland: Taiwan and its politics, its historical circumstances; it is a generative, feminine, dreamlike, immigrant land, an exception to the ancestral land, the fatherland. If China’s sentiments towards Taiwan are not political, then tell me, on what basis does China stake its claim to be the ‘ancestral land’ of all ethnic Chinese? When can China become a homeland for ‘others’ ?
We always worship the values of the strong, and underestimate the values of the weak. We praise the history of the lion, but forget the history of its prey.
The sense of jus soli of a naturalized history, causes us to mistake the land on which we are living for the land we came from. We forget that this sense of belonging is just a sentiment born from a temporary confluence of land and private property. The reason we love our hometown or our country is simply because it (once) belonged to us. What historically progressive exhibition doesn’t use a narrative of space rather than of time in order to make the political manifest, in order to show that a particular politics is just one ideological choice among many, and not a way of dictating history?
Something that both moved me and worried me in the ‘Hanart 100’ exhibition was the fact that these artworks, so obediently organized into the three artworlds framework and then the specific thematic categories, didn’t stir things up or challenge their positions. Thus the very thing that I found moving also left me feeling numb: the politics concealed in the poetics, that in the end only resulted in a naturalisation of history. Let me conclude with a quotation from the work of a twelfth-century Saxon theologian, cited by Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism :
‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.’8
(Translated by Don J. Cohn and Valerie C. Doran)
- 本文為作者在「漢雅一百論壇」(2014 年 1 月 17 日，香港藝術中心)講稿基礎上，於 2014 年 4 月在臺北修訂而成。 ↩︎
- 即外省人臺灣獨立促進會，1992 年 8 月 23 日由廖中山、陳師孟等六十多人基於「在臺灣獨立建國的行列裡，外省人不該缺席」的理念發起成立於臺北市。(編注) ↩︎
- 語出神學家休格 (Hugh of Saint Victor，1096-1141) 於 1130 年代晚期的著作《訓解》(Didascalicon ) ，被薩義德引用於他的著作《文化與帝國主義》(Culture and Imperialism)，紐約 Vintage 出版社，1994 年，第 335 頁。 ↩︎
- This essay was written in Taipei in April 2014 and is based on the paper I delivered at a session of the ‘Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies’ symposium on 17 January 2014. ↩︎
- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 120. ↩︎
- After being shown in the Imperial Arts Exhibition in Tokyo, Chen’s Street of Chiayi was presented to the Chiayi municipal government office; but the work disappeared in 1947 after the February 28th Incident. All that now remains is a black-and-white photograph of the work presently in the collection of the Chen Chengbo Cultural Foundation. ↩︎
- The No. 14 and No. 15 Parks Anti-demolition Movement was a 1997 protest movement against the Taipei city government’s decision to demolish squatters’ villages based in these two parks in 1997. The forceful eviction of the squatters erupted into violent clashes and became a contested issue. – ED. ↩︎
- Quotation is from The Didascalicon by Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096 – 11 February 1141), composed in the late 1130s. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Press, 1994) p. 335. ↩︎
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