Family and Home in Chi Ta-wei’s Fiction

The Chinese word 家 jia can mean both “home” and “family,” and is an important preoccupation for Taiwanese tongzhi and ku’er authors such as Chi.

Frequently Chi’s works contain a critique of traditional concepts of home and family and present a vision of a freer, more open world in which people are not tied down by blood relationships but are able to make informed choices about the people with whom they want to form kinship relations. As Chi notes in his Prefatory Material to Membranes, “in the web of our android-like lives, even kinship can be virtual (this is already an established fact, even though we are never willing to admit it outright).

46

Blood may be thicker than water, but information is thicker still than blood.”²⁴ This freedom to choose our own partners and families based on the information both of our senses and our mechanical aids such as they Internet makes possible what Fran Martin has referred to as “nontraditional modes of extrafamilial

intimacy—encompassing modes of collective sociality based on tongzhi identification as well as same-sex relationships…”²⁵ These extrafamilial relationships are often in conflict with traditional Taiwanese notions of home and family, and the ways in which characters succeed or fail at resolving this conflict is an issue at the heart of many of Chi’s works, including those translated here.

Family and Home in Membranes

Membranes challenges the traditional notions of home and family right from the beginning by presenting the reader with a lesbian family and their transgender child.

As previously noted, Membranes contains no straight human characters, so the

“nontraditional” families of homosexuals are presented as normative in a society in which sexual freedom has opened up new possibilities for people wishing to escape the more traditional patriarchal families of Taiwanese society. Interestingly, however, the lesbian characters in the novella (Momo’s mother, Tomie, and possibly also Draupadi) choose to express their understandings of family and intimacy in terms of the most traditional of their cultures’ stories: the tale of Mi Zixia (originally from the pre-Christian era Chinese work Han Feizi), the legend of Momo Taro, and the Mahabharata. The cultural industry in Membranes allows societies such as New Taiwan to bind themselves more closely to their histories even as they shed some of their most ancient patriarchal values, allowing them to establish a virtual kinship to their forebears even as they found families with people who share their sexual orientations and preferences. Yet traditional family values are not absent from

Membranes, either: Momo’s mother is accidentally given a boy as her test-tube baby, showing the often unconscious but still powerful preference for male heirs in

Taiwanese society; Momo herself is sick with the LOGO virus from birth, a sign of the increasing commercialization that infected Taiwanese society with especial virulence in the 1990s.²⁶ The homeland of old Taiwan above the protagonist’s heads is blighted, desolate, and home only to machines and the people who operate them; the rest of humanity lives in a “greenhouse-” like structure under the ocean covered by

protective membranes. This is the world of Momo’s mother, whose constant and very

24 Ibid., p. i.

25 Angelwings, pp 11-12.

26 See Chi Ta-Wei de Ku’er Kehuan Gushi, p. 116.

47

traditional devotion to her work alienates her daughter from her; only later do we learn that by resigning herself to a twenty-year separation from Momo will Momo’s mother ever be able to bring her daughter home. Momo, too, literally lives in her workplace, whether it be the undersea skin-care clinic of her imagination or her android body in the factory where she works in the surface in old Taiwan. The pressures to work, provide for a family, and protect one’s homeland are as pervasive in Membranes’ New Taiwan as they were in the Taiwan of the 1990s when Chi Ta-wei wrote; while the commercialization of virtually every aspect of life has only worsened, with disastrous consequences for the Taiwanese people’s traditional “home.” Even the newfound freedom to choose one’s own family has a dark side: Momo’s mother is abandoned by both Tomie, Draupadi, and finally her beloved daughter Momo itself as each of them makes choices to pursue what is most important to her. Even though Momo and her mother do eventually go home together at the end of the novel, the home and the family they return to is worlds away from the one they initially possessed, and the sense of loss is keenly felt by the reader. As the judge Wu Nianzhen said in giving the United Daily News novella prize to Chi Ta-wei for Membranes in 1995, “the real meaning of all this [the rampant commercialization and scientific advances in the novella] is that [the reader is] very likely one of the people who help the real world along to its destruction.”²⁷ And what is the real world if not humanity’s home? By being complicit in traditional family values that repress the individual, we destroy the happiness that only loving families who choose to be with each other can build; but by focusing too much on individual freedom, we risk destroying the very home in which those families must live. Chi’s work is a warning that we must walk a careful middle path between freedom and responsibility if we are to protect the families and homes that are dear to us.

Family and Home in L’Apres-midi d’un Faune

The two main characters of the story escape their families by going to the countryside and initially form a friendship based on their shared passion for the arts.

Yet A Suo is forced to abandon his artistic studies by his family, who disapprove of an artist’s low economic prospects, while K. is forced to abandon his dance studies from a motorcycle accident that killed his closest friend. The two are united by their shared unease with life in the city, where social and familial pressures are constantly bearing down on them, and are brought together at K.’s family house in the countryside (K.’s family has moved abroad for reasons he never discloses). Yet this “home” soon

27 Prefatory Material, p. ix

48

becomes the scene of K.’s murder by A Suo, who returns to the cramped apartment in the city where he studies for school. A Suo is increasingly haunted by the pocket watch K. gives him prior to the murder, to the point where he becomes unable to have normal interactions with his classmates. Unable to bear his increasing lack of a

“normal” life, A Suo eventually takes his own life by smashing the pocket watch and releasing the faun, the ultimate symbol of unrestrained sexual liberty and personal independence, from its perch within the etching on the watch cover. The message seems to be that familial pressures can destroy the happiness of the heart, which alone has the ability to make the things we do meaningful; the people we know, family;

and the places we live, home.

Family and Home in The War Is Over

The War Is Over features temporary families living in temporary homes during a war that keeps them from their true home of Earth. The humans in the story are constantly away either working or fighting (a criticism of Taiwan’s military in particular and work-obsessed society in general), while their “families” consist of domestic replicants who keep their temporary houses for them and provide them with food and sex when they return. The replicants themselves take the place of the human soldiers’

true families on Earth, and are denied any rights or status of their own. Though they are ostensibly “loved” by their human masters, the replicants are part of the house that their humans inhabit (the unspoken 內子 neizi to their human waizi) and can only perform the functions of family: they do not experience the feelings that bind families together except as dictated by their factory programming (another criticism of Taiwanese society, where family members are supposed to love and respect each other based on their blood relationship, irrespective of whatever real feelings they may have for one another). When the two replicants of the story began to find love with each other, they are denounced as “immoral, abnormal, and not fully human,”

and yet their relationship, freely chosen and between members of their own kind, comes the closest to that of a “real” loving family of that of any of the characters in the story. It is perhaps significant that when the replicant Meimei decides to go live with her fellow replicant Lola, she has literally to leave behind her home and her livelihood in order to make a new life, suggesting that traditional family relationships and homes may have to be altered or uprooted if they are to be able to accommodate tongzhi, ku’er, or other sexual and social orientations of their members.

Family and Home in Nuit et brouillard

49

Though family and home per se do not play central roles in this story, it is worth noting that the two main characters are marginalized precisely because they do not obey the rigid schedule of work / school and family time dictated by traditional Taiwanese society. By finding relationships with non-conformist night owls like

themselves (members of their own “kind” or “clan”), they are able to join a much larger extended family of whose existence even they are largely unaware. This “virtual kinship” between the night owls allows them to experience at least some of the solidarity and support denied them by their lonely nocturnal existences.

Family and Home in 11 Songs for Percussion

The characters in this collection of short stories are generally isolated individuals who are united by the virtual kinship of the groups to which they belong rather than by ties of blood. Whether they are members of armed bands or the armed forces,

students, or married men living dissatisfying family lives, all of the characters find some kind of kinship with members of their own kind, whether it be fraternal, sexual, or otherwise. Though each story is a self-contained world, the act of reading

performatively binds all of the characters together into a single “family” in the mind of the reader, giving them a home in the reader’s heart and mind even if their physical home is only hinted at on paper.

Section Summary

Family is both something we are born into and something we choose for

ourselves, something that compels our obedience and something against which we react, something we grow up in and perhaps finally grow out of in our search for new and more fulfilling relationships. Chi’s works invite us to see that even though family will always be with us, home is ultimately where the heart is, and if the two conflict, we can do no better than to follow our hearts. Families can be supportive and give us strength; they can also be restrictive and wear us down. Finding one’s proper home against the backdrop of family and societal pressures is no easy task, but it is an essential one if an individual is to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. Rather than hide from questions of tongzhi identity and sexuality that may be taboo subjects in many Taiwanese families, Chi’s works suggest that we should do our best to be brave and face any potential conflicts head on. If this proves impossible, then it is at least possible for the individual to find other members of his or her own kind with whom to build a family, and this new family can provide much needed support if one’s birth family refuses to provide it. Exactly how to best negotiate the questions raised by

50

tongzhi and individual identity and one’s position in the family is not a matter that can be settled easily, and Chi’s characters, true to life, adopt a variety of solutions

depending on the particular circumstances in which they find themselves.