If you don't immediately warm to the virtues of corporate capitalism, yet don't really think the state ownership advocated by Karl Marx represents the road to human happiness either, what is most likely to appeal to you is small businesses. This thought-stimulating book takes a look at such enterprises in Taipei, but those run by women. Its subtitle is Life-Worlds of Taipei Women Entrepreneurs.
Such small businesses constitute one of the joys of walking round the city. They're everywhere. Turn down the back alleys in almost any district and there are fruit shops, food stalls, motorcycle repair shops, laundries and chic little clothing boutiques, many of them open until late into the night.
Perhaps the phenomenon is characteristic of the traditional Chinese virtues of hard work and frugality, but it's surely also a product of one of the greatest passions in the human heart, the desire for independence. And it's also enormously satisfying.
Such owner-managers are characterized by the attractive appearance they give their businesses. And the friendliness that invariably goes with them, though undoubtedly good for trade, is also evidence of the personal satisfaction they derive from such endeavors. It's far more fun to run your own DVD rental store than to labor away in a factory.
It may, of course, turn out to be more profitable in the long run as well. But as the author of this book remarks, the essence is that conformity and dependence on others is exchanged for autonomy. The natural thirst for independence lies at the heart of the matter.
This book puts the percentage of Taiwan's population who are self-employed at 20 percent, but the author also points to many who suspected him of being from the tax office and didn't want to reply to questions. Either way, small businesses appear crucially and centrally characteristic of Taiwan.
Scott Simon worked on this project while he was on a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Academia Sinica. But this is no dull thesis paying lip-service to academic fashion and theories currently in vogue. Simon is too much of a democrat and a populist for that.
"These women entrepreneurs would surely be frustrated if I transformed their stories into abstract scholarly discourse for only a few initiates of academic jargon," he writes.
Nevertheless, there is inevitably an element of contemporary politics in it too. This is hardly surprising when the author opts to study women, and he duly acknowledges the feminist anthropologists who, he says, have strongly influenced his work. But the bulk of the book consists of revealing interview material from a wide range of people.
He starts off with two street vendors, a woman who sells soy milk breakfasts from a mobile stall, and a seller of betel nuts and shaved ice. He then moves on to bead makers and a woman who sells Buddhist amulets made from the skulls of deceased Tibetan lamas. There are some theoretical terms, such as the influence on the last worker of Buddhist "narratives," but you quickly learn to recognize these words and subsequently discount them.
Among his most interesting subjects is a Mercedes-Benz-driving exporter of live eels to Japan. She claims Taiwanese such as herself still possess expertise in special areas that's inherited from the Japanese occupation. She also says she won't eat the eels she raises as they've in effect sacrificed their lives for her prosperity, so it wouldn't be proper. They're kindly creatures, she says, and only try to bite her when they're feeling out of sorts.
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