ABSTRACT
Published in 1997, Zhu Tianxin’s novella “Gudu,” or “The Ancient Capital,” portrays a middle-aged Taiwanese woman’s mounting sense of loss in her solitary trip to Kyoto and a disoriented long stroll in Taipei. 1 In a stream-of-consciousness narrative, the novella juxtaposes major turns of the narrator’s personal life and landmark changes in post-Second World War Taiwan, interrogating the meaning of home and nation within the frame of an island that was once a Japanese colony and somehow has not been recognized as an independent country because of incessant warfare—an inconclusive Chinese Civil War that resulted in not only more than forty years of martial law on the island, but also substantial armed threats from China across the Taiwan Strait, with target missiles and state-of-the-art destructive weapons. To this day, Taiwan and China are simultaneously bound and split by the seemingly identical official language, Mandarin, and variant associated cultural reservoirs that are borne out of centuries of settler histories. The novella can be seen as the narrator trespassing across linguistic, cultural, and imperial terrains intersected at modern East Asia. By quoting the Japanese documentation of Taiwan’s fauna and demography in the colonial period, while also idiosyncratically referencing to Chinese, Japanese, American, and European literary texts to illustrate the many perspectives from which her (postwar baby-boomer) generation has been educated about their home island, the narrator effectively demonstrates how the influences from multiple imperialist forces have kept the mind of the marginalized Taiwanese elites anxiously occupied. Meantime, as much as she positions herself as a product of the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of today’s Taiwan, the narrator cast radical doubts upon absolute identities that have been crafted—and cashed out—by rulers of this island. On the one hand, the narrative exposes an elusive Chinese nationalism installed by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime after its retreat to Taiwan in 1949 as an outdated myth; on the other hand, it also condemns the de-sinicization movement as an essentialist, abusive, intellectually impoverishing, and toxically divisive move. As the narrator reflects on how she matures from a rebellious high school girl to a middle-aged mother and wife, she questions forms of compulsive loyalty generated by the institutions of hetero-marriage, model motherhood, and national pedagogy. In this chapter, I read “The Ancient Capital” as a thought-provocative story of a woman who is not at home with her supposedly correct belongings. 2
