The Minor Arts of Daily Life is a fascinating collection of essays about modern Taiwanese life aimed at college students. They're by no means all pleasant and up-beat, however. In fact I found the chapters on the popular attitudes to foreign domestic helpers, and another on the methods of US-based direct-sales companies active in Taiwan, quite exceptionally depressing.
Following a general introduction on Taiwan's history, you have chapters on the following: chicken-beheading accompanying oaths, popular images of the horrors of purgatory, gay and lesbian lifestyles, TV political call-in shows, domestic helpers, night markets, Amway's direct-sales techniques, baseball, and yang-sucking she-demons in Chinese-language ghost movies.
The chapter on foreign domestic helpers is shocking. Whereas the English-language newspapers tend to focus on stories of mistreatment and exploitation by their employers, the local media apparently present a very different image. Foreign maids are all too often seen as backward, potential sources of disease and even of crime. This parallels attitudes to migrant workers in other parts of the world, notably Europe, and the author (Academia Sinica's Chin-ju Lin) sees the situation, surely rightly, as an attempt by newly-affluent Taiwanese to establish their
superiority over their less prosperous Asian neighbors. Employers perceive themselves as imitation Americans and try to reinforce this adopted identity by finding groups they can patronize and despise. All too often these are the migrant workers laboring away in their own kitchens (and not infrequently in the master bedroom as well).
The chapter on the Amway direct sales organization is also somber. Writing about employees of this US company, which has been successful in Taiwan, the author claims that while embracing the dream of wealth and freedom, distributors (Amway's term for its sales people) are actually trapped in an endless process of labor. The depiction is in places almost nightmarish. All these characteristics feature Amway as a quasi-religious community -- or simply as a cult, the author writes. This state of affairs is made possible by a society where there the acquisition of wealth is a high priority, she proposes, and the tendency of such organizations to brainwash distributors and unify their vocabularies and behaviors is no effective barrier to this, any more than the derogatory popular perception of such workers as mouse people.
By contrast, the chapter on Taiwan's political talk or call-in shows is much more up-beat. They're enormously popular here, the writer claims, largely because for so long the expression of individual political views was taboo. Today outrageous opinions are positively welcomed, and Taiwan's democratic spirit is given a boost, even though the motives of the TV companies involved are essentially profit-oriented.
Taiwanese baseball is also presented as an adjunct to democratic feeling. It's effectively Taiwan's national game, the author writes, and though American in origin, is nowadays a mark of Taiwan's distinctive identity in Asia. It was introduced over a hundred years ago by the Japanese, but quickly came to show how a colonized people could display their equality with the colonizing power by beating them in a competitive sport. In Taiwan's case, the success continued dramatically with its Little League teams' truly extraordinary feats of winning 10 US Little League World Series between 1969 and 1981, and 16 over the 27-year period 1969 to 1995. This helped keep the island on the map as a distinctive social and political unit, in many American minds, in an era when formal diplomatic attention was moving relentlessly towards Beijing.
Beheading a cockerel at the same time as swearing you're telling the truth is an old tradition, apparently originating in Fujian province. It's probably rare in Taiwan today, but is still recognized by everyone as a gesture of the cross-my-heart-and-swear-to-die variety, reappearing in political cartoons in the confident knowledge that everyone will immediately understand its significance.
As for Taiwan's night markets, the contributor argues that they've become politicized, in so far as such popular phenomena are nowadays claimed as embodying a Taiwanese identity. Though common all over China too, they've been seen as typically Taiwanese in their robust combination of informal eating and the availability of a huge variety of goods, albeit some of dubious origin. However the middle classes may disdain them, they're even in danger of becoming officially adopted as tourist attractions.
Writing on gay and lesbian identity, Scott Simon calls Taiwan "one of the most rational and secular states in the world." The chapter on the 1987 Hong Kong movie, A Chinese Ghost Story, perceives in the film, among many other things, a fear of women as potential bringers of chaos; and images of purgatory are viewed as counterbalances to filial piety.
The book contains fair-minded yet astute introductions to each chapter by the editors, David Jordan, Andrew Morris and Marc Moskowitz. Two of the contributors have written full-length books already reviewed in Taipei Times. Simon was the author of Sweet and Sour, a study of small businesses run by Taiwanese women (reviewed Jan. 4, 2004), while Moskowitz wrote The Haunting Fetus (reviewed Aug. 12, 2001), an interesting book on the propitiation of the ghosts of aborted fetuses in modern Taiwese society.
In many ways this book does all it can to be favorable to Taiwan, but its contributors are honest enough to confront aspects of the society they feel are unpleasant or even disreputable. These uncompromising qualities thus give it great strength, and the book deserves a wider readership that the students it's aimed at.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS