The de-contextualized photographs enforce the discourse that the book tries to form. The only text provided to situate the photographs is “Letter of a Madman,” which is a fictional letter the first disciple of the Master Shih Kai Fong, the founder of the sanctuary, writes to his mother, who takes him to the Master because she feels shamed of having a mad son. From this letter, we can grasp the history of Long Fa Tang Temple developing from a little thatched hut to probably the biggest chicken farm in the world; we see the transformation of the chain from straw rope, nylon rope, iron chain to steel chain; we learn the establishment and performances of the Long Fa Tang Big Band, which helps to propagate the achievement of the asylum.
Before discussing this letter further, it is necessarily to mention “Diary of a Madman,” which is published earlier (in 1999) in Photographer International. This diary is written in a third person narrative with omnipotent viewpoints. Besides describing what the mental patients do in Long Fa Tang Temple (taking care of the chicken farm mainly), we also learn the opinions of the governor of the asylum, of the psychiatrists, of the patients
who run out of the asylum, and of the patients’ family. From this diary, we get a preliminary understanding on this issue from different perspectives.
We see that one of the governors of the asylum, who has no license to treat mental patients, does not think that the mental patients have human rights (Lai and Tedards, “Diary” 16-7). The governors take their chaining the patients as the best way to make the patients’ behaviors stable, and their teaching the patients how to work and how to play instruments as the highest achievement of their “treatment.”
In “Letter of a Madman,” we see the possible positions of the patients’
family, of the governor, and of the patients who run out of the asylum, and get the preliminary understanding of the life in Long Fa Tang Temple from the mental patient’s words only. The first person narrator is easier to raise our identification and compassion than the third person narrator in “Diary of a Madman.” However, we do not see different perspectives; we can only judge the situation from the known addressor. But this addressor does not exist in reality since the mental patients cannot articulate the well-structured language in terms of writing a letter to his mother. Thus, the “I” in this letter is the author Cheryl Lai herself.38 What she tries to do with this fictional
38 Here, I try to respond to Nanjo’s question of this text.
letter is not to guess how the mental patients may think and feel since we can never really understand them. Rather, it seems a possible way helping us readers to think about how we differentiate, exclude, or alienate them and how we understand them. Since it is a letter, there is an addressee: the words are not one’s own murmur but those to be spoken out to be heard.
Although it is with a single perspective, it is sharper than the “Diary of a Madman” with the ironic tone which sometimes shakes the readers.
The letter and the repetition of similar photographs sharpen the de-contextualized photographic images: both of them help to think about what happen out of the photographic frame. The repetition of photographs reminds us that photographs are abstraction and the letter provides us the context to situate the images. The patients are chained and confined within Long Fa Tang Temple; they are not treated as human beings but as animals, or even monsters.39 Their humanity is reduced. The “Chain of
‘Compassion’” in this sense seems to imply their monstrosity: it is applied to control the monstrosity that we cannot deal with. Their performance (Long Fa Tang Big Band in particular) is the “exhibition,” which calls for the social attention on their disciplined monstrosity (disciplined by the chain). The
39 Foucault has carefully discussed the monstrosity of mental patients in the medieval centuries in Europe (Foucault 177-208).
patients then appear as social sinthome,40 that do not completely belong to the symbolic order but an excess of the society. While they are in the asylum, they are neither alive nor dead. If they come out of the asylum, they seem to need to fit into a certain identity, such as that of the singers or players of Long Fa Tang Big Band for people to watch. If they do not have such identities, the society may not know how to face them directly.
Such is exactly the case here: Chang shows us their frontal whole-length portraits, which radically present them clearly for us to watch. Chang does not emphasize these mental patients’ hard life in the asylum but leads us to see directly what we cannot bear. In front of these photographs, the visual shock seems to bring us to a stage that we can hardly tell either we are looking at them or they are looking at us, a stage that we somehow sustain the emotion of being chained and being looked at. It is very likely that we see them with the same countenance as they see us and that we interact with others around us as they do. Under such circumstances, the gaze seems to be near. The gaze is not the eyes that look back but is somewhere around the chain with a lock that impales our view. On the one hand, we are attracted by the beauty of the photographs; on the other hand, we want to run away
40 Žižek explains the notion of sinthome, which has much to do with the meaning of existence (Žižek, Looking 136-40).
since it is too tough to look at directly: it is not because the images are attacking us, but because they seem to chain and freeze us by showing us the chain as fantasy. We somehow become the objects watched by them in the process of reading this book.
The existence of the physical chain is not to connect the relation of the patients and the world but a symbolic resolution to deal with the social sinthome that we do not know how to solve. Chang’s photographs lead us to a stage that we become the objects watched by them. It seems that he tries to tell us that the social sinthome comes from our own monstrosity, our own excess, and our gesture of exclusion towards them. In other words, Chang’s book shows us that the chain is the symbolic resolution to solve illusory problems (the patients’ irrational behaviors, such as playing with fire as
“Letter of a Madman” says) with a real cause (the fear of their pointing out our monstrosity).41