Old Stories Retold by Stuckey Andrew G.;

Author:Stuckey, Andrew G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Tradition in Exile: Allusion and Quotation in Bai Xianyong’s Taipei People

—One evening when I was on night patrol, I discovered an old soldier sitting alone on a boulder on the beach outside the base playing an erhu. That night the moon was clear and bright, there was no breeze off the ocean. I couldn’t tell if it was his slumped, brooding posture or that terribly sad sound of the erhu, but suddenly I realized the misery and worry he felt over his lost home must be as deep and as far away as that felt by frontier guards in ancient times.

Bai Xianyong, “A Sea of Blood Red Azaleas,” from Taipei People

In Chapter Four, I discussed “The Eternal Yin Xueyan,” one of the stories collected in Bai Xianyong’s short story collection Taibei ren (Taipei People, 1971). There I focused on the “China trope” and the ways the characters populating the narrative close off communication between past and present, choosing to live, for all intents and purposes, in the past. In this chapter, I look specifically at two other stories from Taipei People, “Liang fu yin” (The Song of Liang Fu, 1967) and “Youyuan jingmeng” (Wandering the Garden, Waking from Dream, 1966), but in my analysis, I show that they produce slightly different effects. While from a certain point of view the characters in these two stories are equally blinkered to the present, instead focusing all their attention on the past, the narratives also allow for certain lines of communication to open between past and present, allowing the past to powerfully, and in the case of “Wandering the Garden, Waking from Dream” viscerally, affect the present.

The stories in Taipei People depict a wide range of characters from all social classes and from various different Chinese provinces, and each story needs to be considered individually as well as part of a collection. Still, in aggregate the stories of Taipei People describe the lives of mainlanders who have retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalist regime. Already a decade or more has passed since they arrived in Taiwan, as they originally thought only temporarily, and they have settled into routines, accumulated petty grievances, made new acquaintances and so on. But though their lives may be located in Taipei, they are not and can never be Taipei people—their hearts and minds reside elsewhere: in Sichuan, in Guilin, in Jiangnan.

These other locales and the histories attached to them make their ghostly return in the memories of these exiles. Already, though they would not dare to consciously acknowledge the fact, they realize there will be no triumphant military conquest or spectacular resumption of their former lives. Still, the phantasmal and fantastic image of China—which stands for so many different things for different people, but mostly indicates home—flashes brilliantly in their imaginations. And they cling to any fragment—a snippet of song or poetry, scars, food, mahjong—that can help them stoke those memories, no matter how much pain those same memories may bring them.

Individually, the stories which comprise Taipei People describe different types of mainlander exiles.

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