From: Nick Kaldis <nkaldis@gmail.com>
Source: Taiwan Today (3/1/16)
Museum of Innocence
By ROBERT GREEN
The Lost Garden: A Novel. By Li Ang, translated by Sylvia Li-chun Lin with Howard Goldblatt. Columbia University Press, 2015. 236 pages. ISBN 978-0-231-17554-8 (Photo courtesy of Columbia University Press)
A newly translated novel by one of Taiwan’s most celebrated authors explores the emotional complexity of trying to hold on to the past.
What exactly are we preserving when we restore the physical remains of the past? Surely, old buildings can be made sound, walls brightened up with licks of fresh paint, and an illusion created that time is standing still amid the remnants of a bygone era. But gone, in general, is the society that created that material world—a world so divorced from the daily life of subsequent ages that it stands out as worth preserving.
Attempts to preserve the past often reveal more about a contemporary society than about the period in question. And those efforts can also engender a good deal of comedy. When the British archaeologist Arthur Evans attempted in the early 20th century to restore, with questionable accuracy and lots of concrete, the ruins of an ancient Minoan palace on the island of Crete, he was dubbed “the builder of ruins.” Despite the mockery, the project was met with popular approval—a reflection, perhaps, of humans’ gnawing desire to place themselves within a comforting historical narrative.
That desire to reconstruct the past forms the rich imaginative landscape excavated by Li Ang (李昂) in her novel The Lost Garden, the most recent addition to the Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series of translations by Columbia University Press. Li’s power as a novelist and her ability to speak in an internationally appealing idiom are on immediate display in the novel’s opening pages. And one early image encapsulates the work’s central thematic tension between the past and the present.
The novel’s protagonist, Zhu Yinghong, tries to preserve a sprawling classical garden by donating it to the public trust. It is her attempt to preserve her memories of a vanished childhood by restoring the physical backdrop of those recollections. The comic futility of the gesture is captured in a description constructed with the visual acumen of a cinematographer.
On a summer evening dripping with heat, a crowd gathers in front of an electronics shop in Taipei to gape at images of the garden broadcast in news coverage of the donation. The spectators view the restored garden on a wall of TVs, six high and six wide, and bask in the hallucinatory spectacle of a past filtered through the technological medium of television, so much more familiar in contemporary Taiwan than private gardens. “The multiple displays of identical exquisite terraces gave the impression of a continuous, endless row of pavilions, water, and willows,” Li writes, “creating a sense of unmatched prosperity, as though, for thousands of years and over hundreds of generations, the willow tips never stopped touching the water and the terrace and pavilion would go on forever.”
While Zhu has managed to save the garden for posterity, its modern incarnation is distorted beyond all recognition. The TV images, frozen in time, represent the myriad interpretations of an otherworldly vision of the past. The garden has been preserved, but it is no longer the same garden. It is detached from her own memories, and left to the interpretation of each viewer at the shop window and each visitor to the restored garden, emphasizing only the gulf between an unsatisfying present and an idealized past.
The lost garden of the title works as a metaphor on many different levels—from the impersonal to the personal. At its most impersonal, the fate of the garden reflects the momentous economic changes that transformed Taiwan from an agrarian backwater to a modern manufacturing engine in less than a half-century.
Taiwan’s land reform policies of the post-World War II decades were the driver of those economic changes. From the 1950s through the 1970s, public land was transferred to farmers through land-to-tiller programs, and private landowners were forced to disgorge much of their traditional landholdings for cash payments. The net effect was to reduce income inequality, enfranchise small farmers and enrich former landowners with the capital that fueled the rise of small manufacturing. Not surprisingly, these policies also upended social patterns that had been unchanged for centuries.
Li explores the social changes brought about by the new economic policies by reconstructing Zhu’s childhood as the daughter of a genteel family of fading wealth. The Zhu family represents the apex of the agrarian aristocracy in pre-industrial Taiwan. Its patriarch, Zhu Zuyan, much diminished in social standing, spends his days struggling to preserve the family garden, despite dwindling funds. He also attempts to catalog its splendors through his newest hobby—photography.
Zhu Zuyan’s interest in photography mirrors the craze for new technology among Taiwan’s residents that was fueled by growing wealth and a reorientation from an inward-looking society to one increasingly fascinated by the outside world. The elder Zhu is captivated not only by the camera’s ability to freeze his garden in images but also by the devices themselves. “The first one he bought was a Linhof, which he called a first-generation press camera,” Li writes. “It was clunky, only partially made of metal, with an accordion-like folding section.”
As the elder Zhu’s camera collection grows, it becomes not only a vehicle for preserving the garden, but a part of the garden itself. Cases are installed in an old garden pavilion, and the cameras are reverently placed within, like new shoots in the changing history of the landscape. Yet each purchase of these expensive imported cameras forces Zhu, land rich and cash poor, to sell off a bit of the family’s remaining estate. As he wiles away his time preserving the garden in images, he must also parcel it off as the price of the pleasure, an act that alarms one of the remaining household servants. “What kind of camera costs that much?” the servant asks. “Trading two jia of land for a metal box.” (One jia is equivalent to about 9,700 square meters.)
Capturing the garden through cameras provides Li with a narrative device to describe the road toward the modernity that will eventually imprison the garden in surreal TV images. Even Zhu Yinghong, so wedded to her fixed memories of the garden, finds that the camera can provide some of the permanence that she seeks for the family garden despite the distorting effects. “The scene she saw was reversed, creating a magical effect, a mixed sense of the real and the unreal,” Li writes. “The impression of permanence was in fact created through the multitude of instantaneous changes beyond human control.”
Throughout the novel, Zhu symbolizes a longing for a vanishing Taiwan still palpable on the island. If that vision is of her father’s world, it is another important male figure in her life that makes her grapple with the realities of a much-changed Taiwan. Lin Xigeng, a real estate developer in the overheating Taipei property market, provides a foil for her idealized vision of her father and his life of fading gentility. He is as crass as her father is cultured, and despite her desire to hold on to the past, Zhu is drawn to Lin’s alien world, which combines money, sex and an embrace of the future.
Just as the Zhu family prospered in the past from acquiring farmland, Lin represents the new connection between land and money. Stripped of its social significance, land is a commodity to be bought and sold unsentimentally. Fields are paved over and old buildings torn down, all in the name of creating the new muscular Taiwan that will take its place in the global economy as an equal to Japan and the industrialized West.
Lin exists at the center of capitalism’s creative destruction. And while Zhu works to preserve her family’s garden and Taiwan’s insular past, he is busy creating architectural symbols of Taiwan’s future. In one passage, Lin brings Zhu to see his newest building site, freshly leveled and ready for construction. “I will build a real Taiwanese landmark,” Lin says, “a plaza for the Taiwanese people, like the Arc de Triomph and the Champs Elysees in France, or the Empire State Building and Fifth Avenue in America. But it will have Taiwanese characteristics, fully representative of Taiwan.”
His money is eventually instrumental in supporting the Zhu family garden foundation. But the couple never bridges the gulf between their visions of Taiwan. When Zhu brings Lin to the garden, he, quite literally, gets lost, unable to navigate a past world that she alone knows. Their relationship arrives at an uneasy truce, respectful but devoid of love. So quickly, in fact, does their emotional relationship fizzle out that Zhu decides to abort their child without even telling Lin. It becomes a melancholy symbol of the couple’s inability to create a permanent link between their separate worlds.
If preserving the physical remnants of the past fails to capture the emotional complexity of nostalgia and historical identity, is there, one might ask, a better way to treat the subject? One answer is through fiction. The exploration of a historical reality through made-up stories, it turns out, can provide a better glimpse into the interior life of the past than the preservation of those dusty buildings devoid of meaningful connections with the present.
In treading this ground, Li is in good company. Writers from Marcel Proust to Orhan Pamuk have turned to fiction to recreate the complexity of past worlds lost to time. Pamuk, who attempts to recapture the Istanbul of the 1970s in his novel The Museum of Innocence, argues that it is one of the goals of fiction to portray real worlds through a subjective art form. “This is the contradiction that lies deep at the heart of the novel,” he explained in a 2010 interview with The Guardian. “We novelists want the reader to know that this is a fictional story, but we want to convince them of the authenticity of the experience.”
Pamuk followed up his novel by creating an actual museum, also called The Museum of Innocence, in Istanbul that houses objects from the lives of his fictional characters. It is an entertaining subversion of the emphasis traditionally placed on collecting material artifacts in an attempt to preserve the past. In Pamuk’s museum, objects become the physical legacy of the novel, which in turn seeks to explore a once-real social environment that no longer exists.
Li’s fiction can be read in much the same way. It examines the past through fictional emotional lives while toying with the central plot device of restoring a traditional garden that has lost its relevance to modern Taiwan. The novel’s title in Chinese, in fact, is pregnant with ambiguity. It is a combination of the characters 園 (yuan), which means both garden and a public place, and 迷 (mi), which can mean confusion, a maze, or even an enthusiast for something. The translator, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, renders it as “lost,” thus capturing both the bewilderment of changing times and the inability of the novel’s characters to preserve the past.
Zhu attempts to reconstruct the garden of her childhood into a kind of museum of innocence, even as it is transformed beyond recognition. In her fiction, Li Ang has succeeded not in recapturing a lost past but in describing the psychological struggle of turning fading memories into a meaningful part of contemporary life.
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Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.