Recognition in Chi Ta-wei’s Fiction

“Recognition” was a key ideal for Taiwanese tongzhi and ku’er communities in the 1990s. On the one hand it meant social, political, and sexual equality with their heterosexual peers, recognition in the sense of “acceptance” and “acknowledgement.”

In line with this concern was the pressing need by tongzhi communities to increase their own visibility and so enable them to counteract the prevailing social trends to marginalize and discriminate against them. On another level, “recognition” refers to the “self-recognition” of the individual, a person’s understanding of herself both within her respective community and in society at large. Self-recognition also implies a knowledge of and acceptance of one’s own abilities and limitations. Recognition is an important concern in Chi Ta-wei’s fiction of the 1990s and will be briefly discussed below.

Recognition in Membranes

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The characters in Membranes are not encumbered by the hostile forces of an aggressively straight, patriarchal society, so they are much more visible than the often marginalized tongzhi communities in the Taiwan in which Chi Ta-wei wrote. Indeed, some characters, such as Momo’s lesbian mother, are so visible that they are virtually omnipresent, appearing in advertisements in nearly every electronic medium of the day. Momo’s mother is acutely aware of the importance of her role in the cultural world and of her need as a mother to provide for her daughter, but her visibility to the reader is obscured through the membrane of her daughter’s false understanding until almost the end of the novella. Momo herself is an exile on the desolate surface of the world, a member of a group too marginalized to be noticed by the vast majority of society. At the same time, Momo is only a human brain in an android body and so lacks the capacity for true self-recognition or self-realization. Her fabricated memories also serve to obscure the true nature of the Earth’s desolation to the reader,

diminishing the visibility of the planet itself with the exception of those moments when Momo dreams or reads discbooks about it. Then there are the android characters, particularly the male “Andy,” who recognize the unfairness and brevity of their own existence and ultimately resign themselves to being able to “become a part of” the humans who created them. The androids receive no such recognition from their human masters, who treat them as chattel (with the notable exception of Momo, whose female “Andy” remains the greatest friend of her life and for whom she constantly pines). The resignation by and lack of recognition for the android

characters in many ways mirrors the plight of tongzhi in post-martial law Taiwan as they struggle both to receive a better place in society and to define their roles as individuals both within and without it. Recognition and visibility are not always easy to deal with, and often lead the recipient, like Momo, to confront the terrifying abyss in which central questions of their own selfhood await them. Fighting for recognition and being willing to accept the revelations of self-recognition takes great courage, and Chi does not sugarcoat either the benefits or the costs of this struggle.

Recognition in L’Apres-midi d’un Faune

The failure by the two male characters in the story to recognize their mutual affection ultimately leads to their deaths, while their failure to confront their desires to express themselves artistically confines them to a space in which the only recognition they receive is from each other, and that in a field in the middle of nowhere. The characters do not have great social visibility; but the absence of other members of society does serve to heighten their visibility to the reader. Ultimately, it is their

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unspoken passions, in the form of the monstrous faun who escapes at the end of the story, that clamor for recognition. Finally, the mention of A Suo’s sketch of K. tucked safely under his bed at the end of the story pays subtle recognition to the happier possibilities that might have come to fruition if their passions had not been so coldly repressed by their society, home, and family.

Recognition in The War Is Over

All of the characters in the story suffer from a peculiar lack of visibility due to the author’s decision not to give any of them definite genders. The plight of the

non-human replicants is further underscored by the use of the character 它 ta, usually reserved for things, to refer to them: they are not recognized as individuals in their own right. Yet when the replicant Meimei meets fellow replicant Lola, the two of them form a bond based on their shared experiences as domestic servants, and they begin to recognize and treat each other as equals. Lola even encourages Meimei to learn to cook, recognizing Meimei’s latent talent and helping her to grow as an individual. It is Lola, too, who dreams of a world where replicants have a home for themselves without human masters, a place where they possess both the visibility and the recognition to live in peace with members of their own kind. Yet it is Meimei who boldly defies her programming and decides to make Lola’s dream of a home for replicants a reality by moving in with her. In so doing she stands up to the prejudices and demands of human society and her human “family,” using the self-recognition she has gained to demand recognition for herself and Lola, no matter how fleeting this recognition may be.

Recognition in Nuit et brouillard

Of all the stories translated here, visibility is of the highest importance to Nuit et brouillard. Its characters are “not seen” because they refuse to conform to the social and sexual schedules set out by Taiwanese society. Nevertheless, the narrator

recognizes that such marginalized people are all around us, if only we care to look for them. Even more importantly, by finding and recognizing another night owl like

himself as a “member of his own kind,” the narrator experiences a kind of intimacy and connectedness he has never felt before, and becomes surer of his own existence through the increasing sensitivity of his senses. Intimacy requires mutual recognition, and it is open to all people, provided they are willing to both recognize their own potential and to give the same recognition to members of their own kind. The story thus suggests that increased visibility means not only visibility within larger Taiwanese

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society, but visibility within and among the various tongzhi and ku’er communities who make up such a vibrant part of it.

Recognition in 11 Songs for Percussion

The characters in this story collection often achieve self-recognition in the face of their own loneliness, when faced with their impending deaths, or through

reminiscences about the past. In achieving this recognition, they are able to give expression to their sexuality, no matter how brief or solitary such expression may be.

The visibility of the characters is limited by the short length of each of the stories in the collection; yet this very brevity makes them all the more visible to the reader. The multiplicity of the characters’ experiences also increases the likelihood that the reader will recognize some part of them in herself, moving the struggle for acceptance and understanding by tongzhi communities one step closer to its goal.

Section Summary

Recognition makes it possible for readers to see in Chi’s characters those aspects of themselves that they might otherwise have ignored or of which they might have been unaware. At the same time, the struggle for recognition on the part of Chi’s characters leads the reader on a similar journey of self-discovery, opening up ways of thinking and ideas that may have been inconceivable before. A central concern with respect to recognition is visibility, which enables the thing recognized to stay in the reader’s mind and be appreciate it, just as the characters in Chi’s works themselves become more fully-fleshed out and realistic as they become more visible to

themselves and others. When made visible and recognized, those aspects of Chi’s worlds that may seem unfamiliar or strange at first, including his tongzhi characters, become points of entry for the reader to empathize with what had previously seemed foreign and thus to gain a broader understanding of both himself or herself and the everyday world in which the reader lives.