Taipei, a city speeding down the road of modernization, becomes a metropolis that would mercilessly leave all those unsuitable for competition behind. Mathi believes Taipei elicits a longing for humanity, itself lacking elastic, motivating energy. One only needs to follow the rules, let one’s life be filled with regulations, details, and then get disciplined, socialized, institutionalized, mechanized, and then, everything will become simple and neat. One afternoon on her way home, Mathi happens to see on a street corner a high school student violently punching the button of a video game machine.
The fury of this student is a portrait of suffering and pain. However, Mathi cannot be sure whether the boy’s anguish is released as he leaves with a hand swollen by twenty-one continuous heavy punches on the machine (Chu 82). It is the day before the Joint College Entrance Examination. It is not the virtual monsters on the screen but the pressure of the JCEE that the boy is desperately fighting. Mathi’s step-brother, Ma-nan, who is of the same age as the high school student, when asked by Mathi what major he would like to
choose after the JCEE, expresses in quite a different way his distress and agony towards the system and the competition. Ma-nan sullenly replies with a kind of premature insolence: “I want to enter law school. . . . becoming a lawyer is the fastest way to climb up the social ladder. . . . One is to be judged by the wealth he possesses in this society. . . . You cannot beat the system . . . ” (Chu 87). As Donatella Mazzoleni precisely points out,
“Metropolises are no longer ‘places’, because their dimensions exceed by far the dimensions of the perceptive apparatus of their inhabitants . . . the metropolis is a habitat without a ‘somewhere else’. It is, therefore, a total interior” (297-298). Living in Taipei, in this total interior, not being able to see any farther, people can only become blind, as all Mathi’s office colleagues do (and Ma-nan, or perhaps, the high school student, would one day become one of them), and the goal of life is a fight for saving money: just as the daily sardine bus makes everyone dumb and dull, standing together with the crowd, you cannot escape nor resist the mesmerization of this group identity, and you become part of the great huge dullness.
The highly modernized urbanity Taipei represents only evokes more sadness and lethargy from its inhabitants. A humdrum life is nothing to be afraid of, but the meaningless yet cutthroat competition and the bloody thirst for eliminating all enemies so as to climb up the social ladder and save up a small fortune are not far away from de-humanization. In a modern metropolis, as David Harvey explains, “the very existence of money as a mediator of commodity exchange radically transforms and fixes the meanings of space and time in social life and defines limits and imposes necessities upon the shape and form of urbanization” (165). In a modern urban society, the commands over money, space, and time “form independent but interlocking sources of social power, the repressive qualities of which spark innumerable movements of revulsion and revolt” (166). Similar kinds of social power plays
and those repressive qualities, in Mathi’s eyes, also intoxicate the social space of the Taipei city.
Seeking out her own identity and begging for the approbation of her behavior and life are two things that trouble Mathi. She is trapped by the value judgments and concepts of the world outside, and is still the child that was locked up by her mother in the dark room. She was forced away and rejected, first by her mother, then, by the distorted self that reflects too much her mother’s image. The habitat, the place that she is trapped in, could only become a mirrored place of the primeval scene. She tries to escape from the haunted, suffocating darkness of the small rented room, which is now transformed into the pressure a modern urban habitat would emit—a sign of the need to survive by making oneself economically independent through monotonous work in a restricted place, regulated by de-humanizing work systems and soaked with tepid work morale.
When looking down from the mountain top with friends from the Sad Coffee Shop one starry night, Mathi cannot but feel sad and powerless. “I see this sea of light as a wok of bubbles,” Mathi says to her companions from the Sad Coffee Shop,
Some [bubbles] climb upwards; some end up slopping down, but all are crowded in the wok and try desperately to spread over the space […]. I don’t want this kind of life, as if we were another doll on a gigantic stage, acting the part out vividly, forgetting that we are just playing, while in fact we cannot control our own fates. Get to work, and work, and make money, and make more money—that is the play. This play is dull, yet everyone fights for the leading role; no one would settle for anything else. Everyone craves to obtain an acceptable identity
and live prosperously, but completely forgets to dream of a possible ideal living. (Chu 136)
Besides occasionally and reluctantly following the trend, she does not know how to deal with her life. Partly because of her uncertainty as to the value of this kind of social identification, and partly because of her doubt of the existence of a possible alternative, she keeps wandering between two poles:
the pressure of cultural identification and the dream of freedom. She abhors the pursuit of this kind of social identity. The suffocation caused by modern society and the confinement of a highly reified identification system of social relations and ideologies keep haunting Mathi’s mind. This stifling atmosphere forms the bondage that ties her body and soul. She could feel it, smell it, and recognize it, for social environment and human relationships are fully immersed in the codes of confinement and restriction.
The highly modernized city space brings forth the articulation of a capitalized, commercialized world of de-humanizing, hierarchical identification system of social ladders. That is the reason why everyone in Linda’s wedding ceremony was busy exchanging and studying name cards, demanding more information from others, and re-arranging in mind secretly the scales and ranks of the societal hierarchical system. The symbolic identification and value judgment help form the destitute situation that confines Mathi, not just on the special day Linda married, but every day as long as Mathi remains poor, jobless, and separated from her husband. Mathi knows all too well that everywhere is a social place that has been imbued with arbitrary rules and regulations for everyone inside to obey (Lefebvre 35). A habitat like Taipei will create and force a strong whirlwind into your mind and then, turns and drives you all around whether you feel congenial to the flow or not. In this liminal space, Mathi could not but adopt an indifferent attitude,
and it is because of this sense of indifference and detachment towards her living space that Mathi never allows her body, not to mention her soul, to mix with other bodies in this modern urban heterotopia. She carries no personal authentic subjectivity and identity of her own in it.
Mathi cannot find an identity where a dehumanizing system devours everyone’s conscience and humanity. She resists the possible connection and identification that Taipei as a modern habitat in an epoch of capitalism and globalization is so proud to offer. She has no interest in it. However, it might also be possible that since Mathi detests conforming to the cultural identity highly celebrated in her city, she simultaneously cuts off the connection between herself and society. There is no identity or bondage built between Mathi and her habitat. Mathi takes Madagascar as a sign of salvation, and since there is no close relationship or tie that binds her to Taiwan, she reconnects herself through the imaginary tie to this enlarged mirror image. Mathi lets her soul fly over to Madagascar as if it were a shelter for temporary exile.
However, I would argue that it could only be retained as a fantasy of temporary exile, for Mathi lacks the “love” needed to establish a group identity, a love that both supports and restricts the freedom of those under its power. Moreover, it is even more doubtable whether she could find true freedom at this phase of her life, for everywhere on earth the establishment of a relationship and identification demands love and sacrifice, no matter where she flies, whether around Taiwan or to Madagascar. Because she has a tendency to remain detached from the identity and ideologies a habitat contains, she should find it very difficult to obtain real “freedom” anywhere.
However, after the long expedition to Madagascar, she finally understands.
“Freedom” is never free to enjoy. There is a certain kind of “love” that lies in being bound, Steve Pile lays stress upon this point in interpreting Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the ties between a group and an individual.
And I would like to argue that this kind of “love” also embeds in it a certain kind of bondage that ties up the individual, or, at least, a demand of a certain amount of sacrifice from him:
In other words, there is a “love” between the individual, the group and the leader which both explains and needs to be explained in order to account for the strings that knot the group together. […] it is because of the strength of their feelings that individuals want to identify with groups and it is because they
“express” those feelings that groups seem to provide individuals with “freedom.” (Pile 102)
Mathi cannot find love in her home, and fails to love anyone after Jason left her. The love between her and her husband disappears soon after their marriage. As a symbol for a group and social identity, Taipei is rejected by Mathi, and without the bondage of love, Taipei excludes Mathi from its communitas, an experience of “social interrelatedness.”
All her life Mathi is in pursuit of freedom and of an identity that would enclose her and include her—a place she could call her own. Without these elements, Mathi believes, no true identification process could be constructed.
In a rare situation, she happens to see a photograph of “Jesus,” and she firmly believes that what she sees there is serenity itself. This wandering hippie undergoing a certain self-made enlightenment in Madagascar rekindles her old dream of freedom and Madagascar. She determines to go and travel to Madagascar and find this man. In her fantasy, she faintly believes that if she could find this man, she could learn from him to really obtain that kind of serenity—the sense of freedom to once and for all get rid of all mundane restrictions and ties. But she does not know that the real and true habitat that
she consciously and unconsciously identifies herself with and joins would end up being a place full of light and love—the two elements that Mathi the little girl, Mathi the college student, Mathi the wife, or Mathi the friend to the Sad Coffee Shop always seeks to cherish and treasure, yet is rarely or never given the chance to experience and possess. It will finally turn out that Mathi’s quest in Madagascar is successful because it helps solve a trauma dating back to her childhood.
If the nightmare and pressing image will keep returning to a person as uncanny as Freud describes his chance experience in Italy, “I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time.
Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery” (273), then, Mathi’s nightmare does haunt her often in various ways, and to solve her problem, she needs to make the detour in Madagascar as entering the liminal phase of rites of passage so as to find herself safely and soundly returning “home,” this time not to a dark room but a lighted place full of the bluest color in the sky of