Literary Representations of “Mainlanders” in Taiwan: Becoming Sinophone

173 Pages·2021·9.554 MB·English

by  Phyllis Yu-ting Huang

Literary Representations of
“Mainlanders” in Taiwan
This book examines literary representations of mainlander identity articulated by
Taiwan’s second-generation mainlander writers, who share the common feature
of emotional ambivalence between Taiwan and China.
Closely analyzing literary narratives of Chinese civil war migrants and their
descendants in Taiwan, a group referred to as “mainlanders” (waishengren),
this book demonstrates that these Chinese migrants’ ideas of “China” and
“Chineseness” have adapted through time with their gradual settlement in their
host land. Drawing upon theories of Sinophone studies and memory studies, this
book argues that during the three decades in which Taiwan moved away from the
Kuomintang’s authoritarian rule to a democratic society, mainlander identity was
narrated as a transformation from a diasporic Chinese identity to a more fluid and
elusive Sinophone identity. Characterized by the features of cultural hybridity
and emotional in-betweenness, mainlander identity in the eight works explored
contests the existing Sinocentric discourse of Chineseness.
An important contribution to the current research on Taiwan’s identity politics,
this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Taiwan studies, Sinophone
studies, Chinese migration, and Taiwanese literature, as well as Chinese literature
in general.
Phyllis Yu-ting Huang is a Sessional Lecturer at the University of Melbourne,
Australia.
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Becoming Sinophone
Phyllis Yu-ting Huang
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Literary Representations of
“Mainlanders” in Taiwan
Becoming Sinophone
Phyllis Yu-ting Huang
First published 2021
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: What’s in a name? Second-generation
mainlander writing as a genre 1
1 Constructing the mainlander: Self, other, and
homeland in Chu Tien-hsin’s Everlasting (未了)
and Yuan Chiung-chiung’s This Love, This Life (今生緣) 28
2 Seeking a new identity: Su Wei-chen’s Leaving Tongfang
(離開同方) and Chu Tien-hsin’s “In Remembrance of My
Buddies from the Military Compound” (想我眷村的兄弟們) 59
3 In the quest of the absent mainlander father: Family, history,
and mainlander identity in Hao Yu-hsiang’s The Inn (逆旅)
and Lo Yi-chin’s The Moon Clan (月球姓氏) 83
4 Inventing a Taiwanized juancun: Lai Sheng-chuan and
Wang Wei-chung’s The Village (寶 一村) 104
5 Happily ever after?: Homecoming and mainlander identity in
Chiang Hsiao-yun’s Peach Blossom Well (桃花井) 123
Conclusion and epilogue: “Mainlander” as an identity of
in-betweenness 147
Index 159
Acknowledgments
In the years of conceptualizing and writing this book, I have received invalu-
able support from many people and institutions that I would like to express my
appreciation.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Gloria Davies, who
guided me through the long process of research. She was always supportive and
extremely knowledgeable in Chinese studies. She is both my academic advisor
and life mentor who has inspired me throughout. I am also grateful to Associate
Professor Christiane Weller, who provided insightful comments on theories of
memory studies.
I would like to thank academics in both Monash University and the University
of Melbourne: Professor Carolyn Stevens, Dr. Du Liping, Associate Professor
Fran Martin, Dr. Lewis Mayo, and Dr. Justin Tighe. They provided me with
opportunities to explore broader cultural issues in Asian studies that enrich my
own research project. Thanks go to Professor David Der-wei Wang and Professor
Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang for their kind encouragement and valuable comment.
Thanks go to Monash University, which generously provided me with a Monash
Graduate Scholarship and the Faculty of Arts Top-up Award from 2012 to 2017.
Thanks also go to Taiwan Fellowship for supporting my research trip to Taiwan
in 2020.
I would like to thank my friends: Dr. Li-hsuan Chang (張俐璇), Dr. Shih-wen
Sue Chen, Dr. Xiaoqing Huang, Dr. Francis Chia-Hui Lin, Ms. Philippa Riley,
Mr. Paul Steed, Dr. Wang Yu-ting (王鈺婷), and Dr. Shu-yu Yang for their valu-
able input on my research.
I would like to acknowledge two journals Archiv Orientálni and Quarterly
Journal of Chinese Studies, which kindly granted permission for me to use
excerpts of my published articles in this book. Thanks go to Taiwan series editor
Dr. Dafydd Fell and my editor Ms. Stephanie Rogers of Routledge, who have
been extremely helpful during the process of publication.
Finally, I would like to thank my husband Scott Chen, who has supported and
encouraged me throughout. Thanks to my adorable daughter Iris. Thanks go as
well to my family in Taiwan for their constant support and trust. The writing and
publication of the book would have been impossible without them.
Introduction
What’s in a name? Second-generation mainlander
writing as a genre1
The concept of “the second-generation mainlander” (外省人第二代) is unique
to Taiwan. These people are children of the Chinese civil war émigrés who fled
Mainland China for Taiwan from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Sociologist
A-chin Hsiau sees “the phenomenon of second-generation mainlanders” as
involving “not only an objective question of family background (身份), but more
importantly a subjective question of identification (認同)” (2011, p. 88). In other
words, people who identify as “second-generation mainlanders” are likely to have
a strong emotional attachment to the term, because it is generally a self-chosen
identity, and to the meanings that have come to be attached to the idea of “main-
lander” in the context of Taiwan.
“Mainlander” is an evolving identity. Literary works produced by self-declared
second-generation mainlander writers have played a large part in keeping alive
the idea of what it means to be a mainlander in Taiwan and in representing “first-
and second-generation mainlanders” as meaningful subject positions in public
discourses in Taiwan and, by extension, in the Chinese-speaking world. As the
Taiwan-born American literary critic David Der-wei Wang notes, the second-
generation mainlanders’ literary works show the first and second generations’
feelings of loss and helplessness in the face of rapidly developing Taiwan-centric
discourses in the twentieth century (2004, pp. 12–13). Mainland Chinese critic
Chen Meixia, on the other hand, sees second-generation mainlander writers’
works as “inseparable from the cross-Strait perspectives (兩岸視野) and concern
for Mainland China (大陸關懷)” (2011, p. 77). These divergent perspectives by
Wang and Chen reflect the different interest and focus of Taiwanese and Mainland
Chinese readers in interpreting the “mainlander” identity articulated in the works.
This monograph concerns eight literary works published from 1982 to 2011 by
second-generation mainlander writers, most of whom are based in Taiwan. The
works are Yuan Chiung-chiung’s (袁瓊瓊) This Love, This Life 今生緣 (1988),
Chu Tien-hsin’s (朱天心) Everlasting 未了 (1982/2001) and “In Remembrance
of My Buddies from the Military Compounds” 想我眷村的兄弟們 (1992/2003),
Su Wei-chen’s (蘇偉貞) Leaving Tongfang 離開同方 (1990/2002), Lo Yi-chin’s
(駱以軍) The Moon Clan 月球姓氏 (2000), Hao Yu-hsiang’s (郝譽翔) The Inn
逆旅 (2000), Lai Sheng-chuan (賴聲川) and Wang Wei-chung’s (王偉忠) The
2 Introduction
Village 寶 一村 (theatre 2008, play 2011), and Chiang Hsiao-yun’s (蔣曉雲)
Peach Blossom Well 桃花井 (2011).2 The selection of these eight works is pri-
marily based on their perceived importance, impact, and influence on literary cul-
ture in Taiwan. Some of these works have received attention in Mainland China.3
The authors of the eight works are well-known for their engagement with issues
concerning mainlander culture and identity. They are often regarded by literary
critics as representative second-generation mainlanders’ works. These works are
also chosen as texts in this monograph because they demonstrate how “main-
lander” identity had been influenced and thus evolved in the rapidly Taiwanized
society during the three decades.
The eight works offer narratives of the lives of the civil war migrants and their
children in Taiwan. While these writers have lived for most, if not all, of their
lives in Taiwan, “China” has arguably been the most important theme in their
writings. Cultural ambivalence and the enactment of an acute sense of identity
crisis are key features of these works, in which characters display their compli-
cated relationships with both their country of ancestral origin and their place of
settlement.
This book contests the presumption that all Chinese migrant communi-
ties, whom many scholars call the “Chinese diaspora” (e.g., Tsu 2010), retain
strong positive ties to their original country. It argues that, as this genre of works
developed from the 1980s onwards, there was initially a widely shared form of
diasporic yearning for China (presented as both a geographical destination and a
cultural concept). Over the next 30 years, this yearning evolved into a far more
complex range of attitudes. The constant feature of these works is that “China”
remained the central literary theme. Over time, what these works dramatize is
the increasing cultural and emotional distance of second-generation mainlanders
from their parents’ homeland.
The book argues that “China” in these second-generation mainlander writ-
ings is best understood as a source of subjective interrogation. The narratives of
the eight works revolve significantly around the reactions of the main characters
to “what China means” to them, with a focus on the emotional complexity (of
pride and shame) resulting from seeing oneself as a mainlander. This book reads
mainlander cultural identity as a literary construct developed out of the authors’
characterizations of “China” and “Chineseness”, based on their own lived expe-
riences in Taiwan. In other words, “second-generation mainlander literature” is
constitutively hybrid and “in-between” to use Ien Ang’s term (2005, p. 35). It is
both “Taiwanese” and “Chinese”, or more accurately, a Taiwanese-based sense
of Chineseness.
Stuart Hall’s idea of cultural identity provides this book with a starting point.
According to Hall, cultural identity is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as being”,
and thus it keeps changing and evolving: “cultural identities come from some-
where, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo
constant transformation” (1990, p. 225). Since identities are “constituted within,
not outside representation” and “they arise from the narrativisation of the self”
Introduction 3
(1996a, p. 4), literary works, as a type of narrative and representation of the
authors’ understanding of the world they see, are excellent materials for exploring
the evolution of mainlander identities in Taiwan.
There are strong feelings among the people of Taiwan about the future of their
country vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC), which has
resulted in the proliferation of research on cross-Strait issues and matters of dias-
pora and identity that are bound up with the cultural politics of being “Taiwanese”
or “Chinese”. Taking account of mainlanders as migrants in Taiwan, this book
positions second-generation mainlander writings in the genre of Sinophone lit-
erature, considering the “second-generational” issues (or “the phenomenon of
second-generation mainlanders” in A-chin Hsiau’s term) as represented in key
literary works. It seeks, in particular, to examine how “Chineseness” is articulated
and problematized by these second-generation mainlander writers.
Mainlanders and mainlander literature in Taiwan
“Mainlanders” is an inaccurate translation of waishengren (外省人) which liter-
ally means people from other provinces. The use of waishengren to refer to the
Chinese civil war migrants who fled to Taiwan marks them as outsiders. Among
these migrants were approximately 600,000 soldiers and a comparable number of
civilians, including soldiers’ families (Yang 2010, pp. 536–543). From 1949 to
1987, political tensions between the Kuomintang (hereafter KMT) in Taiwan and
the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) in Mainland China prevented fam-
ilies who were separated by the Taiwan Strait from having any form of contact
with each other. In this roughly 40-year period, the second generation of main-
landers who were born and brought up in Taiwan shared experiences of living
with parents who lamented their physical separation from loved ones in China.
They also lived under the strict censorship system that operated in Taiwan during
the martial law period (1949–1987). Accordingly, the “China” that their parents
experienced and remembered became the received version of “a homeland” they
were taught.
From the 1950s onwards, the KMT strategically promoted Taiwan to the world
as the protector of traditional Chinese culture and presented itself as the only
legitimate government of China during the cold war (from the 1950s to 1970s).
As Gary D. Rawnsley states, “The Kuomintang (KMT) had galvanized its power
on Taiwan through its pursuit of political tutelage, a strong state to protect the
island from the Communist menace and the eventual recovery of the mainland on
its own terms” (1999, p. 83). As an authoritarian party-state raising the banner of
reviving traditional Chinese culture, in many aspects it placed the exiled main-
landers in a superior position to the Taiwanese, whose dialects and local ways the
KMT viewed as inferior. It implemented the policy of Sinicization and Mandarin
as the national language (國語). Japanese, the previous official language, was
banned. Hoklo, Hakka, and indigenous languages were not allowed to be spo-
ken in schools and workplaces, or during prime time broadcasts in the media, in