'Waiting for the Regent': A Dissertation and Epistolary Novel

Abstract

This dual critical/creative thesis examines the impact of martial law on transgenerational memory in post-WWII Taiwan. Through an intense focus on the symptoms of memories as well as their repression, I argue that collective remembrances of Taiwanese people in the post-war period must be studied alongside their collective amnesia, after the end of a regime that coerced its citizens into forgetting. The critical component examines the core issue of amnesia through the lens of two fictional works: Green Island (2016) by Shawna Yang Ryan and The Stolen Bicycle (original: 2015; translated: 2017) by Ming-yi Wu, whose narrators belong to the post-war generation and find themselves unable to understand their parents' traumas. The first section of Chapter One offers a historical overview of the period under discussion. The second distinguishes "post-memory studies" from the field of "memory studies." In reviewing existing notions of post-memory, I re-circumscribe the term with an emphasis on the prefix post. I argue that post-memory in the circumstances of the novels not only refers to indirect memory or any secondary memory that comes after memory proper, but bears an anti-memory characteristic as Taiwanese society under martial law shunned the traumas of WWII and the March Massacre in 1947. Since the pivotal memories of the war generation are traumatic ones, the third section of Chapter One examines the relationship between trauma and representation, which focuses on how traumas manifest in daily lives and are transmitted to the next generation through habitus instead of words. Chapter Two studies the parents' nostalgia for a bygone era, which, due to the political atmosphere, can only be coded in trivial mnemonics and in a language unfamiliar to the novels' narrators, as the country experiences a shift in lingua franca. The last section of the chapter examines the different degrees of silence in the maternal characters as their husbands lost their symbolic capital, which was associated with the regime before WWII. Chapter Three tackles the core questions about the narrators' awakening to their parents' past: 1) How much is lost in "coerced amnesia"? and 2) What has been transmuted during the linguistic shift? The chapter explores the memory lapses in a trans-generational multi-lingual labyrinth and how the narrating selves evolve through their epistemological reconfigurations. The creative component is an epistolary novel that extends the timeline into that of Taiwanese millennials, in which the characters regurgitate the island's tumultuous history of the previous century and confront the dilemmas of their generation. Composed of correspondence among a group of high-school friends in their mid- to late-twenties, the novel spans late 2011 to late 2014, when the country experienced substantial anxieties about potential annexation, which ultimately led to political upheaval. With societal unrest as a backdrop, the novel begins with the characters' private memories. The first two emails signify an attempt to reconnect and an attempt to obtain forgiveness, while the causes of disconnection and the altercation become clear later. It is intended that the incident in their personal past would reflect the history of the land they inhabit; furthermore, it is also intended that the political struggles of the country at present are acutely reflected in the characters' lives, values and career trajectories. The title of the piece, Waiting for the Regent, is a contradictory one, in the sense that the land the characters were born into is, throughout history, often considered to be outside the regular order, her status perpetually undefined. Whereas, as the caption reads in the beginning: In this terra nullius, whoever comes to power can only govern in the form of a regent. Standing for the fallen outcasts on the land, the characters come of age realising that the higher order they waited for as teens turns out to be fundamentally nefarious.