The Burden of Tradition

Journeys to Taiwan

Taking the paints out of the attic; remembering time and task; getting reacquainted with myself. This is the ritual of physical relocation, the death and renewal of self. During the move I have found myself thinking a lot less about Jeju, and much more about Taiwan. Incredible, remembering the past three trips to Taiwan, back to back over these months, and realizing that I have been there more time this year than most although not in the way it seems I should. I have spent much less time at my house and instead, have been out touring other sites of cultural and historical significance. Specifically, the journey in Taiwan, spread out over three different trips has enabled me to survey the traditional loci of the phrase: 1) Foo, 2) Lu, and 3) Mongjiang. In other words, it was a tour of the three earliest Chinese settlements in Taiwan, in order of their founding. The process left me re-enlightened, with old memories brought back to the surface, recalling the many experiences, half-forgotten, of my 20 some odd years on that island; a bittersweet trio of journeys of remembrance and discovery to be discussed in following entries.

Struggle of Relocation

Delicate times indeed, for months living out of suitcases, shuttling between this place and that while meeting the extraordinary demands for time and money; re-establishment and renewal as I grow older and slower, but hopefully more cunning. In tourism jargon there are motivations for travel, categorized as push and pull. And so for the larger enterprises of emigration or intra-national relocation for work and living, the same dichotomy of motivations exists, because we know that there is a certain level of inertia that prevents us from such radical action.

We must be pushed and pulled out of the holes in life we dig for ourselves. Bad experiences or lack of access to lifestyle experiences (real or perceived) build up over time and they are signs that one should have taken action long ago. But a successful move is a reassuring sign that change comes soon enough no matter ones skills at prediction or denial. The promises of good experiences and fine new avenues of discovery and personal and social developments lay on the horizon like a mirage as we weigh the probability of their validity. Ah, the abrupt and profound violence of moving to a new place and the abandonment of the prior. All is rooted up, disconnected, packaged into strangers’ boxes and trucks. Shaggy workers with filthy hands rooting around in the ‘nest’… and then it is all gone and those same cold empty walls not yet forgotten are there again, lifelessly staring back. Promises are made on departing, “oh, I’ll call you. I’ll be back real soon to visit, we’ll keep in touch…” and are inevitably broken.

But somehow the threads of our lives continue unbroken, the precious few dear ones making the transition into the new life. And old ways are adapted and reinterpreted in terms of the new physical and psychic contexts. As the wounds of moving heal over and the blurring fog of new circumstances clear, we meet back up with ourselves as if returning from somewhere, from the outside. All the blemishes and familiarity are there… but different. There is, again, something more – something more complete. All those old obstacles, the hang-ups and murky restlessness of the old ruts have been cleared by the violence and we are granted respite, a chance to make corrections internally rather than socially.

The Burden of Tradition

There are people who spend their whole lives in one place, the place where their fathers and grandfathers spent their whole lives, and they spend their time with concerns about family, and village, and tribe while the ‘self’ remains buried and only half-formed. All transgressions in that case are social or public and the creative act is that of the idiot. On the radio, I hear an artist say, “past life is too regretful for me” and I agree. I think that is right. Pity those living beneath the burden of tradition, deeply embedded in an inherited way of life and environments and rules and norms predetermined for them… and more bizarre to think of these unfortunates as responsible enough or stupid enough to shoulder that burden. Are they not forced to live in their stone houses, abandoned to their mundane lives and spinning wheels and backbreaking labor in the fields, or crushing boredom and idleness of the country’s poverty and seclusion? Do they not yearn for escape to the city, to the urban freedom of the masses, of immediate access, of infinite screens bearing information? Pity the savage life, the rural desert where the tourist goes with his money and his expectations to gaze on the pure (the impoverished), to have his vanities and idle pursuits satisfied for a coin, to recline lazily on a beach where local people sweat for a living. And government officials in their air-conditioned offices worry over the preservation of this heritage, the heritage of the peasant, to ‘hang on to these dying ways’. How it eases the conscience to know that 1/7 of the world’s population live on a few mouthfuls of dirty water a day and 1800 calories of food, if they are lucky. How glad we are to know that some still hang on the ecological ways, trying to forget that the only environmentally sound lifestyle for humans is poverty.

That, my friends, is one perspective. And on the other hand, there is the pride of tradition, the pride of poverty that totally eludes the perspective of the urban bourgeoisie. One has only to experience a lunar new years festival in Asia, in the countryside, or a summer festival, or a harvest festival, to be swept aside in the color and chaos, to be pushed out of the way of the performers of age old rituals, developed only upon what people had, in isolation – that limited array of myth and materials upon which to build a worldview and an ethos.