The Old Capital

A Novel of Taipei

T'ien-hsin Chu, Howard Goldblatt

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231511810
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Chu T'ien-hsin's The Old Capital is a brilliant evocation of Taiwan's literature of nostalgia and remembrance. The novel is centered on the question, "Is it possible that none of your memories count?" and explores the reliability of remembrances and the thin line that separates fact from fantasy.

Comprised of four thematically linked stories and a novella, The Old Capital focuses on the cultural and psychological realities of contemporary Taiwan. The stories are narrated by individuals who share an aching nostalgia for a time long past. Strolling through modern Taipei, they return to the lost, imperfect memories called forth by the smells and sensations of their city, and try to reconcile themselves to their rapidly changing world.

The novella is built on the memories and recollections of a woman trying to make sense of herself and her homeland. After a trip to Kyoto to meet with a friend, she returns to Taipei, where, having been mistaken for a Japanese tourist, she revisits the sites of her youth using a Japanese colonial map of the city. Seeing Taipei anew, the narrator confronts the complex nature of her identity, embodied in the contrast between a serene and preserved Kyoto and a thoroughly modernized and chaotic Taipei.

The growing angst of these narrators reflects a deeper anxiety over the legacy of Japan and America in Taiwan. The titles of the stories themselves-"Death in Venice," "Man of La Mancha," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "Hungarian Water"-reveal the strong currents of influence that run throughout the collection and shape the content and texture of the writing. In his meticulous translation, Howard Goldblatt captures the casual, intimate feel of Chu T'ien-hsin's writing while also maintaining its multiple layers of meaning. An intertextual masterpiece, The Old Capital is a moving and highly sensual meditation on the elasticity of memory and its power to shape personal identity.

THE OLD CAPITAL

*I was at St. Mark’s Square, watching the acrobatic flights of angels and the dancing of the Moors, but, without you, my dear, the loneliness was unbearable.

—I. V. Foscarini

Is it possible that none of your memories count?

Back then, the sky was much bluer, so blue it made you feel as if the ocean were close by, drawing you to it, and making the cumulus clouds seem even whiter, like castles sculpted out of snow. The sun shone intensely through clean air that threw up no barriers, but strangely, you didn’t feel its heat. You just stood there foolishly in an unshaded spot, not knowing where to spend the afternoon, yet showing no signs of heatstroke.

Back then, bodily fluids and tears were as fresh and clear as the dew on flowers; people were more willing to let them fall if that was what felt natural.

Back then, people were so simple, so naïve, they were often willing to sacrifice themselves over a belief or a loved one, whatever their party affiliation.

Back then, before commercial real estate had led to an unrestrained opening of new roads, a building boom, and land speculation, trees could survive and grow tall and green, like those in tropical rain forests.

Back then, there were few public places, virtually no cafés, fast-food restaurants, iced tea shops, or KTV, and pubs were virtually unheard of, so young people had only the streets to roam, yet they did not surge through town like white mice.

Back then, on summer nights you could see the Milky Way and shooting stars, and watching them for a long, long time spawned an awareness of the vicissitudes of life and death, of dynasties rising and falling. Especially foolish spectators vowed to do something spectacular so as not to end up wasting their lives.

Back then, your background music, if you had a brother or sister in college, would likely be the Beatles. If it was the beginning of the 1970s, you’d be playing “Candida” nonstop, then in the next year it would be “Knock Three Times” by the same group. If it was late 1969, then you’d have listened to “Aquarius.” Every third song played on the TV show Happy Palace would be by the black group The 5th Dimension. If it was a bit earlier than that, you’d have heard “Can’t Take My Eyes off of You” by The Graduates. People who missed it then could have heard it in the bar scene in The Deer Hunter ten years later.

Since you were fond of Don McLean’s “Vincent” and “American Pie,” we need to move the time forward two years—let me check my data: “Vincent” made it to the pop charts on May 13, 1972, so this makes it the summer of 1972. You turned a deaf ear to “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night, the hottest song at dance parties, and, of course, you ignored “Black & White,” an even bigger hit by the same group, which came out after that summer, because you were engrossed in the Donghua English Dictionary you’d just bought to look up the meanings of words in the lyrics.

Starry starry night…. On the same kind of starry night, you and A were lying on a wooden bed. You still recall how the moon shone through the window and cast its light, along with shadows of wisteria and the window screen, on your bodies. You forget what led up to it, but you recall saying, “I’m not getting married, no matter what.” A laughed in the dark. “That’d be terrible for so-and-so.” So-and-so, a student in the same grade as you at the boys’ school, was bombarding you with letters. A gentle face with a large nose and big eyes floated in front of you. A long silence before A added, “Wonder if it’d be fun to be gay.” You didn’t reply. Maybe you’d had too much fun during the day, and so you fell asleep without exchanging another word, the young bodies of two seventeen-year-olds, like purring cats.

*The first lunar month in the seventh year of the Xianfeng reign, a major snowfall in Tamsui.²⁰

Neither of you ever had a chance to learn if it’d be fun to be gay. You were too busy; in the space of a year or two, the emotions stirred up inside and all those tears that weren’t necessarily shed in sadness constituted a great deal more than the sum total of what you would experience over the next twenty years.

You two left town whenever you felt like it. If you rode the train line that had been completed the first year of the century, instead of taking empty seats, you sat on the stairs by the door and sang songs you’d just memorized into the wind. If it was the summer of the following year, you’d surely be singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” Sometimes you took the bus. Back then, North Gate had yet to be tyrannized by an overpass, so you could walk past it casually, feeling like one of your ancestors heading out of town a century before. You’d walk past the railway office and board the bus at Izumi-machi, I-chome and within a quarter of an hour you’d arrive at Dadu Road, which, fifteen years later, would be famous for motorbike racing.

Traveling sixty miles an hour, the bus would roar through Guandu Temple Pass, where the wide river appeared before you, and each time you would be deeply moved, or you would breathe in the damp river and ocean air before saying to your companion, who was seeing it for the first time, “Doesn’t that look like the Yangtze River?”

When the bus passed Zhuwei in the afternoon, the setting sun would send its rays across the rippling surface from the Guanyin Mountains on the opposite bank. Sandbars overgrown with yellow hibiscuses and mangroves, as well as the small egrets, buffalo herons, and night herons perched on them, would call to mind the lines “Clear streams meander through the Hanyang Woods/Fragrant grasses spread across Parrot Islet.”²¹

You did not go to see A’s male friends every time. They were hard to find, in spite of their large numbers. Some lived, commune-style, in traditional farmhouses, all but tilling the land to grow their own food. One of them lived in Youchekou on the outskirts of town, which gave him a perfect excuse to miss classes, and that made him even more difficult to find. They said he spent most of his time at the Mountain Work Club. When he wasn’t busy, he’d be out sketching terraced rice paddies by Xinghuadian or pencil-drawing old houses along rebuilt streets. Another one lived in town above a pool hall. Sleeping during the day and going out at night, he was incomprehensibly careless about his appearance. Photographs he’d taken filled the walls in his room, mostly faces of weatherworn, unisex-looking old folks. But you saw a photo of A, who bared her shoulders, with only a scarf draped across her chest. You wondered about when she’d had that picture taken, as well as …

It didn’t matter whether you found her friends or not, and eventually you’d end up on Qingshui Street, after passing through the traditional open market that scared you witless. You did not go to Longshan Temple, even though one of A’s boyfriends, an architecture major, took great pleasure in inviting you to eat salty peanuts, boiled in their shells, under the pillars in front of the temple, where he’d tell you all about the temple’s history and architecture. With mixed feelings of curiosity and sympathy, you’d walk past small hotels manned by old pimps and arrive at Qingshuiyan Temple. You never drew inscribed lots, nor were you interested in the faithful, men or women. Instead, you’d walk past the gilt-paper incinerator, which was shrouded in white smoke the year round, and onto the narrow path halfway up the hill. On the right were either stone walls covered with weeds and moss or residential brick walls; on the other side was the spot where the wide river met the ocean. You ignored the single-ridge southern Min–style houses, with their slanted roofs, agreeing that it was a San Francisco sort of view, even though neither of you had ever been there.

When you reached the end of the path, you’d have to pass through someone’s kitchen to return to Chongjian Street, the oldest street in town, the one you couldn’t wait to get away from. Resigned to a return to reality, you’d walk past fresh fish stalls, pork sellers, giant cauldrons that fried fish the year round, and Fuyou Temple, built during the reign of the Yongzhen Emperor, before coming to narrow Zhongzheng Road, where you’d take care not to be hit by a bus. Before long, you would be following familiar steps up the narrow alley facing the ferry landing, where lush green seasonal weeds forever peeked out through the cracks. It was as if you were going home, except for the part about calling out to the folks at #2 and #4, “Tadaima”—I’m back.

The wrought-iron gate on the wall around Red Mansion was locked sometimes, but you could always get in. You two would sit on the low wall facing the river, and neither the chinaberry nor the flame tree, not even the grove of unruly bamboo, could block out the sun or the ocean winds. Sometimes, when a sea of fiery red flowers covered the flame tree, you felt as if you were in Spain or some small Mediterranean town.

Red Tower, beige in the colonial style, had been a shipping tycoon’s mansion at the end of the previous century, and his descendants did not know what to do with the place. It was currently the lair, à la the People’s Commune, of a bunch of boys, all students from the nearby university and vocational college. Some of them skipped class and stayed in bed until the afternoon, then stood bare-chested on the balcony, staring down at you like idiots. Others, who had just awakened from erotic dreams, whistled or shouted menacingly, “Hey, didn’t you see the NO TRESPASSING sign on the gate?”

You’d look up at them nonchalantly. Their underwear would be drying on the balcony, flapping in the wind like banners.

From where you sat, on the short wall, as if on a ship about to set sail, you could almost see the captain enter in his log: “6:30 AM, N34°26´ E17°28´, a 20-knot western wind, heading 330….”

A, who shared your feelings, gestured a lot when she talked. You wished you had her body, all 5’6” of it, with the square shoulders of a swimmer and long, lanky limbs. She had breasts too, but they were more like an athlete’s muscled chest. You hated your body, with its narrow waist, full breasts it was impossible to hide, and girlish hands and feet. Paradoxically, you sometimes wished you were more like Song, A’s best friend in junior high, whom she talked about all the time. Which book, which teacher, which movie Song liked the best, what kind of food she hated, and what kinds of boys disgusted her. Song was an only child. She and A agreed that they just had to get into the same senior high, but Song was sick during the month before the entrance exams and only made it into a girls’ high school on the city’s south side…. You hadn’t met Song, but no one ever existed in this world as clearly and unambiguously as she.

One time you and A skipped class to see a double feature at Qingkang for 20 NT, because one of them starred George Chakiris, A’s current obsession. When the movie ended, you heard someone call A’s name. It was a tiny yet clear voice, and you knew instinctively it must be Song. You were right. Dressed in a lime yellow school uniform, Song was so tiny that A reached out and, in dramatic fashion, picked her up and spun her twice in the air. When A made the introductions, you were attentive to Song’s eyes on you—very big, very dark, and very empty.

Without the least hesitation, A walked with Song to the bus stop and saw her home.

Refusing to walk alone across the quiet, gray baseball field, now that there was no game, fearful of being reminded that those ballplayers, who were about your age, were also getting old, you crossed to the other side of the street, which, to your surprise, was overgrown with weeds. Five years later a giant billboard would be erected on that spot, outlandishly claiming it as the future site of the largest hotel and shopping mall in all of Southeast Asia.²² Another five years would pass and the hotel complex would be completed, and then even later you would actually be married in one of the banquet rooms of the “outlandish” five-star hotel.

Walking alone on the weedy path and looking at the fiery red sunset, in a tiny voice you sang to yourself “When the Sunset Rages in the Sky,” a song your school choir had been practicing. When you got to “My love, my love, let me wish you the best …,” snow flurries filled the air.

*In the disgusting green and slippery damp city, the aging Governor had ancient eyes.—D.H. Lawrence

But this is how the Hundred Flowers Calendar described the lunar seventh month: in the seventh month, the hollyhocks turn crimson, corfu lilies caress the head, crepe myrtles are submerged in the moon, hibiscuses face the sun, knotweeds bloom red, and waternut flowers grow full.

In any case, in order to create a contrast with the Wedgwood blue September sky, all the flowers in the red category bloom: South American purple jasmine, Oriental coral tree, large-blossomed crepe myrtle, red ixora, lady’s slipper, Chinese hibiscus, canna…. In particular, the Chinese hibiscus, known for reaching over walls from under eaves, left a deep impression on the group of young and middle-aged men who arrived in 1949, and the Portuguese and Spaniards who came to save souls and obtain pepper 300 years earlier. The later group, away from their homelands for so long, were driven to the brink of madness as they recalled similar blue skies, white walls, green trees, red flowers, black hair, dark brows and lashes, and love songs like “Let me look at you, girl from Lima, let me tell you about the glory of dreams, dreams that awaken memories of ancient bridges, rivers, and forests….” The name of the song might well have been “Cinnamon Flowers.”

Actually, nonred flowers also bloomed, including Burmese gardenias, which we called egg flowers, with their white petals and yellow pistils (you could, for instance, spot them in the courtyard of the Presbyterian church on Shijō-tō or at No. 2, Lane 3, Tai’an Street). Their subtle sweetness, with a slight medicinal odor, often stirred up a bit of melancholy in mothers who were rushing to work and sending kids to school; about how they could, as in so many Septembers in the past, go to school with new uniforms, new classmates, new classrooms, new teachers. Everything was new and unknown, thus filled with endless possibilities. Even though people set up rules telling you what to do and what not to do, you could be completely free, truly free outside of the rules. Not the sort of freedom you think you have now in choosing between a job at 42,000 or 45,000 a month, and definitely not the sort of freedom to choose between a Montessori or Flubber kindergarten or the American-style Orff school for your kids.

You would take full advantage of that freedom. Twenty years later, politically correct writers, when dealing with this period, would surely have you participating in such activities as demonstrations against the Japanese occupation of Diaoyu Island or the million-hour-contribution movement initiated after Taiwan’s withdrawal from the UN or the Aboriginal Service Club. If not, the writers would arrange for you a father or grandfather who was a victim of the incident of many years before, or have you secretly distribute flyers for Guo Yuxin and Kang Ningxiang. Or you would be a conscientious reader of Free China or Grand Learning Magazine, which would lead to enlightenment. If not that, at least you’d be itching for a fight over the termination of diplomatic relations with Japan, scheduled for the end of that year. Like most people around you, you were ignorant about everything mentioned above. Around 400 A.D., people stopped believing in Zeus; by around 1650 A.D., no one believed in shamans anymore; in 1700, doubts about God’s revelations began to spread. Isn’t everything like that? The glory and suffering of an age always belong only to a few sages, shamans, and sorcerers.

You couldn’t have cared less about school starting. Like fun-loving people of every generation, you could always find ways to skip school, no matter which one you were attending. Your school was located in Bumbu-machi and the first thing you saw when you left the school grounds was the Governor-General’s Office. The building was less than four decades older than you, but it gave the impression of being old and decrepit. Without giving it a second thought, you assumed it had a history going back at least a century or two, but at other times you as...