2. Literature Review
2.4 The Meaning of Collective Memory and Its Influence in Taiwan
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2.4 The Meaning of Collective Memory and Its Influence in Taiwan
After years, with the different political parties, Presidents and various social movements, Taiwanese have experienced the complex growing experience and shared the similar collective memory. ‘Collective memory’ is a concept proposed by the Maurice Halbwachs, which is differentiated with individual memory. Halbwachs (1992) believed that each individual belongs to numerous groups such as families, neighborhood, political parties, associations and up to nations and form collective self-images and memories. Assmann (1995) defined collective memory as groups of people who conceive themselves through a common image of their past, and also a connective structure of societies to be nostalgic to the past. Collective memory is kept and passed on to people in representational forms of reproducing texts, images and videos. In this digitized generation, history is recorded and reconstructed by amounts of second-hand memories to pass on the memory to offspring. He also proposed ‘transitive memory’
which means people learn and obtain the past memories by another people’s description.
McDowell (2016) also believed that collective memory can be materialized into fixed points, such as text, buildings or monuments, such as Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and 228 Memorial Museum in Taipei. Memorials played the role as buildings or construction to represent people’s collective memories.
On the Happiness Road represented the collective memory of details such as buildings in the setting in different times of Taiwan as well as in the music and the characters’
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behavior. There is also the film review of On the Happiness Road commented that he recalled lots of personal memory from these important historical moments after watching this film. For example, it reminded him the past of his first vote, the perplexed feeling after graduation and the songs often sang by his mother.34
However, different generations have their own life experience. Each generation shares similar childhood memory and growing experience under the same historical background. Thus, in this section, I would like to throw back to serval cultural products affected by the social development from the globe to Taiwan in different times. Because the cultural or the entertaining aspects of different period of Taiwan is also one of the important elements that composed of people’s collective memory to the past.
It can be manifested in different areas such as popular culture, film, music and literature.
Whereas, popular music has commonly been studied as either a vital component of people’s personal memory or a constitutive element in the construction of collective memory and cultural heritage. Musical memories become manifest at the intersections of personal and collective identity. Through embodied affection and cultural embedding, music becomes part of collective memory and by the same means as it gets settled into our personal memories at the same time (Van Dijck, 2006, p.358).
34 艾莫西（2018.01.09）。＜【影涉人生】名為寬容的幸福：《幸福路上》(On Happiness Road)＞。取自「痞客邦」網頁
https://almasylin.pixnet.net/blog/post/43886409
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Cultural products were mostly affected by the political environment at that time. Since 1947 the Cold War started, it created a series of impacts internationally. From 1951 to 1979, there were a massive number of American soldiers stationed in Taiwan for assisting to defend the threat from mainland China. Due to this factor, the American culture began to immerse in daily life among Taiwanese adolescents. Most of the Taiwanese people get to know American pop music from the radio which is the most common media at that time. With the establishment of American Forces Network Taiwan (AFNT) in 1957, it affected other radio broadcasts to play American pop music (Wang, 2010).35
Director Edward Yang presented this phenomenon in his film In Our Time (1982) and A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Edward Yang stated that “at that time, there were three important things. The first one was the popular music billboard. We listen to AFNT, and other music radio broadcast have similar billboard such as Top 20 Countdown.
Then there was the Japanese comics that released a new episode each month. Also, rock music came out with new things every week. The third one is Hong Kong's film, we go to see the movies. These three things are very important things during our growth, especially the impact of rock music on Taipei is very huge.” (Berry, 2005).
The setting of the film A Brighter Summer Day (1991) was in 1960 which referred back to the time that American military stationed in Taiwan because of the Cold War. In the
35 Wang, S. (2010). Domesticating the foreign: How cultural imports are remade in Taiwan, Conference Paper in
Cultural Studies, 1-8.
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film, it also showed that American popular culture had influenced Taiwan under this historical situation. The fashionable and glamorous American pop culture had attracted Taiwanese adolescents and becomes their excuse to escape from the repression under the period of martial law. They started to copy and imitate the behavior of the rock singers. Thus, it strengthened another kind of admiration of Taiwanese young generation to the American culture at that time.
Before the 1970s, western pop music is the mainstream and the most favorite music for Taiwanese teenagers. Due to diplomatic setbacks, it stimulated the Taiwanese youth to have a realization on their own culture and triggered them to stop singing western music.
In addition to campus folk songs were popular, Fong Fei Fei(鳳飛飛) was a renowned singer in that era. She would sing the Mandarin songs on TV programs and local Taiwanese songs as well such as Flower in Rainy Nights (雨夜花) and Moonlit Night Sorrow(月夜愁) in the show.36
Also, television as a new mass communication medium developed in Taiwan in the 1970s. The Five Lights Award (五燈獎) is the most popular and well-known TV program which lasted for 33 years as the longest-running program. Candy Candy (小 甜甜) is adapted by Japanese comics in 1979 and played an important role as the highest view rating cartoon. It also showed that the influence of Japanese comics from the
36 台灣流行音樂維基館（2015.08.04）。＜台灣流行音樂發展史＞。取自「台灣流行音樂維基館」網頁
http://www.tpmw.org.tw/index.php/%E5%8F%B0%E7%81%A3%E6%B5%81%E8%A1%8C%E9%9F%B3%E6%A8%82%E7%99%B C%E5%B1%95%E5%8F%B2
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1960s was still expanding and had started to broaden its impact on television.37 Cultural or entertaining products are the most effective ways for people to recall the emotions of collective memory and nostalgia in the past.
37 中華民國電視學會電視年鑑編纂委員編纂（1998）。《中華民國無線電視年鑑第十輯：民國八十五年至八十六
年》。臺北市：中華民國電視學會。