Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan 9780824896508

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mediated Memory, Contested Space
PART I: Onset: Ownership of the Dead
Chapter 1. The Death of Women Workers
Chapter 2. The Significance of Insignificant People
PART II: Ghostscapes
Chapter 3. Filial Daughters, Pious Ghosts
Chapter 4. Subservient Women, Worker Heroines
Chapter 5. Blue-Collar Industrial City, Blue-Color Ocean Capital
Chapter 6. Supernatural Beings, Modernist State
PART III: Afterlife
Chapter 7. Beyond the Memorial
Epilogue: Future Present, Future Past
Notes
References
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Haunted Modernities

Haunted Modernities Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan

Anru Lee

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

​© 2023 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing, 2023 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, Anru, author. Title: Haunted modernities : gender, memory, and placemaking in postindustrial Taiwan / Anru Lee. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005007 (print) | LCCN 2023005008 (ebook) | ISBN 9780824894283 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824895549 (paperback) | ISBN 9780824896508 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824896515 (epub) | ISBN 9780824896522 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb (Kaohsiung City, Taiwan) | Memorial Park for Women Laborers (Kaohsiung City, Taiwan) | Single women—Taiwan—Kaohsiung City—Public opinion. | Women—Employment— Taiwan—Kaohsiung City—Public opinion. | Collective memory—Taiwan— Kaohsiung City. | Public opinion—Taiwan—Kaohsiung City. Classification: LCC DS799.9.K36 L4 2023 (print) | LCC DS799.9.K36 (ebook) | DDC 951.249—dc23/eng/20230215 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005007 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005008 Cover art: 2019 Memorial Park for Women Laborers Spring Memorial Service Poster (Source: Kaohsiung City Government Labor Bureau) University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-­free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

​To my husband, Keith Markus In memory of my f­ ather, Dr. Lee Shu-­jen (1934–1997) and my ­mother, Mrs. Lee Lo Yu-­chiao (1934–2011)

Contents



Acknowl­edgments ​/ ​ix



Introduction: Mediated Memory, Contested Space ​/ ​1

PART I: Onset: Owner­ship of the Dead Chapter 1. The Death of ­Women Workers ​/ ​11 Chapter 2. The Significance of Insignificant ­People ​/ ​30

PART II: Ghostscapes Chapter 3. Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts ​/ ​59 Chapter 4. Subservient ­Women, Worker Heroines ​/ ​83 Chapter 5. Blue-­Collar Industrial City, Blue-­Color Ocean Capital ​/ ​106 Chapter 6. Super­natural Beings, Modernist State ​/ ​126

PART III: Afterlife



Chapter 7. Beyond the Memorial ​/ ​155 Epilogue: ­Future Pre­sent, ­Future Past ​/ ​177 Notes ​ / ​ 185 References ​ / ​ 197 Index ​ / 223

vii

Acknowl­edgments

My first and foremost gratitude goes to friends and colleagues at the Department of Sociology at National Sun Yat-­sen University in Kaohsiung, where I had the honor and plea­sure to be a visiting professor in the fall of 2009 and the winter of 2012. Special thanks go to Chun-­lin Chen, Mei-­hua Chen, Li-­hsuan Cheng, Bo-­hsuan Li, Yi-­chen Lin, Wen-­hui Tang, and Hong-­zen Wang. I trea­sure their hospitality, intellectual inspiration, and the fun that we had together. Professor Wen-­ hui Tang introduced me to the story of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, and subsequently we conducted most of the interviews with the families of the ferry accident victims together. This book would not be pos­si­ble without her support and insight. I also thank Ming-­chun Hsu and Shun-fa Lin, who gave me a tremendous amount of help with their knowledge about the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation and their connections to ­people and resources related to the pro­cess. Like many Taiwanese with whom I share a common cultural heritage, I am fascinated by the super­natural but fearful of their presence and power. It was the encouragement of the following colleagues who steered me to the potential of this proj­ect that eventually helped me to overcome my hesitation over studying ghosts: Chang-­hui Chi, D. J. Hatfield, Laurel Kendall, Wei-­ping Lin, Shih-­chieh Lo, Marco Moscowitz, Stevan Sangren, and Robert Weller. I am indebted to them for their support and the many discussions about the Maiden Ladies Tomb proj­ect with them. At the final stage of writing, I am thankful to the colleagues who read parts or the entirety of my manuscript as well as the vari­ous drafts of my book proposal: Mark Drury, June Hee Kwon, Sondra Leftoff, Anthony Marcus, Janet Ng, Edward Snajdr, Patricia Tovar, and Alisse Waterston. Their invaluable feedback and comments have helped to shape this book into its current form. I also thank Gary Ashwill for his editorial comments. Of course, all errors remain my own.

ix

xAcknowledgments

I often felt that writing acknowl­edgments is akin to—if not harder than—­giving an Oscar ac­cep­tance speech. It is not only that t­here are always more p ­ eople to thank than one can squeeze in within the rationed time (in an Oscar ac­cep­tance speech) or the l­imited space (in an academic publication). Moreover, the nature of scholarly endeavors often renders one obsessed with one’s research. Over the years, the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb was ­either consciously the focus of—or unconsciously and quietly entered—­many of the conversations I had with not only colleagues in the academic community but also friends, f­amily members, acquaintances, or p ­ eople whom I met only by chance. I apologize for not being able to thank each one of them individually h ­ ere, but I owe them all for the intellectual trajectory leading to the completion of Haunted Modernities. Last but not the least, the research on which this book is based was aided by the Chiu Scholarly Exchange Program for Taiwan Studies at Oregon State University, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College, and the PSC-­CUNY Research Award Program. I thank ­these funding agencies for their generous financial support.

Haunted Modernities

Introduction Mediated Memory, Contested Space

­ oesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded ­earlier days caress us as D well? In the voices we hear ­isn’t ­there an echo of now s­ ilent ones? ­Don’t the ­women we court have ­sisters they no longer recognize? If this is so, then ­there is a secret agreement between past generations and the pre­sent one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like ­every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. —­Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”

S

itting on the roadside of the main thoroughfare of the Cijin district of the city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the Twenty-­ Five Maiden Ladies Tomb (旗津二十五淑女墓) was a collective burial of twenty-­five unwed female industrial workers who in 1973 drowned in a ferry accident on their way to work in the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone. Taiwanese patrilineal culture shuns unwed female ghosts who do not have a husband’s ancestral altar in which to rest in peace. This rendered the dead w ­ omen as homeless—­and potentially vengeful—­ghosts, and such an idea made the Maiden Ladies Tomb a slightly sinister seeming place, one Taiwanese tended to avoid. Urban legend had it that no young man should ­ride a motorcycle past the tomb at night without a backseat passenger or e­ lse he might have an unexpected encounter with one of the ghosts, who would be looking for a husband. In 2008, thirty-­five years ­after the tragic ferry accident, at the urging of local feminist communities, the Kaohsiung City government revamped the burial site and renovated the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, renaming it the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers (勞動女性紀念公園). Why ­were the dead buried together in the first place? Why dig them up and overhaul their resting place ­after all ­these years? What impact did their lives and deaths have on ­those around them? How do communities

1

2Introduction

form shared memories of the deceased? And how are t­ hese memories connected with the past, pre­sent, and f­ uture? I first heard about the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb from Wen-­ hui Tang, a professor in the Department of Sociology at National Sun Yat-­Sen University, when I was a visiting scholar at her institution in 2008. Professor Tang is a member of the Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (KAPWR; 高雄市女性權益促進會), the feminist organ­ization deeply involved in the renovation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. She was herself a driving force ­behind the tomb’s destigmatization. My initial curiosity was further piqued when I learned that, before the latest intervention of the state and the KAPWR, the families had already taken the initiative to change how the deceased w ­ omen ­were viewed and thereby improved their lost loved ones’ relationships with the living and ensured the well-­being of the surviving f­ amily members. Driven by regret for not fulfilling the parental responsibility to find their d ­ aughters a husband and feeling pity for their d ­ aughters, whose spirits had nowhere to call home, the parents sought counsel from deities in the Taiwanese popu­lar religion. They w ­ ere informed by the spirit mediums they consulted that their deceased ­daughters ­were serving as maidservants of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. As such, t­ hese ­women w ­ ere no longer homeless ghosts but enlightened beings on their way to divinity. The spirit mediums further advised the parents that they could have a god statue made for each of the ­daughters lost in the ferry accident to reflect their divine status. Then they could welcome the god statues into their ­houses. In this way the families could worship their deceased at home, where they would be venerated deities rather than unwed daughter-­ spirits who had to be kept out. I was fascinated with the path the parents followed to transform the afterlife status of their deceased ­daughters. Previously when I studied the interplay between global cap­i­tal­ist expansion and the Taiwanese patrilineal f­ amily, I was particularly interested in the way w ­ omen as workers, ­ daughters, wives, daughters-­ in-­ law, and m ­ others found agency ­under t­ hese power­ful structural constraints (Anru Lee 2008, 2009). The acts of the parents, in this case, appeared to be an ideal example of how the polyvocal nature of cultural practices enables the subjugated to subvert the system to which they are subjected while still conforming to cultural expectations embedded in the system. Yet this paradoxical concurrence of subversion and submission also became a rallying point for feminist activists. Just as it was the worry over the young ­women’s unmarried status upon death that had motivated their parents to seek alternative

Introduction3

arrangements for their afterlives, it was the popu­lar cultural and religious assumptions associated with the deceased’s maiden identity that became the focus of feminist critique and activism. More to the point, in the pro­ cess of the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation, the feminists’ arguments ­were highlighted, while the families’ concerns ­were downplayed. A binary distinction emerged between the secular civic commemoration of female industrial workers and the popu­lar ritualistic pacification of restless virgin ghosts, with a strong tendency to privilege the former over the latter. In the end, the transformation of the burial site into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers recalls Pierre Nora’s (1989) discussion of lieu de memoire (place of memory), a memorial site that endorses an official history while effacing how local communities approach the past. In the pursuit of modernity, haunted places are constantly exorcised. Haunted Modernities interrogates the nature of public expressions of history, collective sentiments, and memory through investigating the shift in the public narrative about the role of ­women workers in postindustrial Taiwan. It intervenes into the anthropology of religion, spectralities studies and haunting, ­women’s ­labor history, memory and memorialization, and urban studies and placemaking—­all of which tend to be discussed separately from one another—­and focuses on the interrelationships and intersectionality of t­hese previously discrete sets of lit­er­a­ture. At the center of this book is the story of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. I examine how the narrative of the deceased ­women evolved from the time of their deaths in the 1970s, when Taiwan had a manufacturing-­ based economy, to the time when, in the early twenty-­first c­ entury, the site of their collective burial was renovated into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers in postindustrial Taiwan. The title Haunted Modernities conveys the communicative nature of the relationship between the living and the dead in Taiwanese communities where patrilineal kinship and popu­lar religion are taken seriously. Through the vari­ous ways the deceased young ­women are perceived to have the potential to interfere in or “haunt” the living, I illuminate how ­women workers are envisioned, conceptualized, understood, and propagated in a postindustrial setting where factories are no longer a major source of employment. Three parties ­were directly involved in the transformation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb: the families of the deceased ­women, the feminist community in Kaohsiung and elsewhere in Taiwan, and the Kaohsiung City government as the state actor. They each represented a specific conception of the relation between the living and the dead. To purge the spectral connotations associated with their deceased d ­ aughters’ unwed status,

4Introduction

the ­women’s parents sought recourse from Taiwanese popu­lar religion to elevate their d ­ aughters’ afterlife standings from ghosts to goddesses. In contrast, Kaohsiung’s feminist community fought to remove the stigma attached to unwed ghosts by waging public campaigns to promote the deceased w ­ omen as valued members of the industrial workforce vital to national economic development and by pushing the state to revamp the environment of their collective burial in their honor. The specters of the young w ­ omen had to be exorcised to correct the historical wrongs in order to attain a more just society. Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s industrial hub and was, u ­ ntil recently, a world-­class container port. The fortunes of the city changed, following the shifting global economic environment and Taiwan’s new role as an industrial capital exporter. As the focus of Taiwan’s exports has matured and specialized in the twenty-­first ­century, Kaohsiung can no longer rely on the industrial sector for its urban economy. The Kaohsiung City government, therefore, responded to the feminists’ call to memorialize the dead by remaking the site into the visitor-­ friendly Memorial Park as part of the broader postindustrial make­over of the city. The ghosts of the deceased young workers w ­ ere transformed in this context to symbolize the new, progressive, forward-­looking identity of Kaohsiung. The history of capitalism, David Harvey (1978) writes, is punctuated by intense phases of spatial reorganization, where old spaces are constantly devalued and destroyed while new spaces are created. Yet space is also the embodiment of memory. It is a material repre­sen­ta­tion of feelings, images, and thoughts—so much so that a specific locale can become a sculpted and meaningful space. Urban space, and the way it is configured and used, engenders certain po­liti­cal and cultural affects. Any change in the pattern of work, l­abor, or economic production as a form of cap­i­tal­ist accumulation, therefore, is not just about economics. It involves the social production of p ­ eople and communities in transition, alterations of the built environment, and the politics of culture and identity. By advancing their proposals for the collective burial, the involved parties ­were also forging specific accounts of history, and in so d ­ oing, transforming this site of “industrial ruin” into dif­ fer­ ent versions of heritage in Kaohsiung’s postindustrial setting. Yet t­hese versions of heritage w ­ ere not about the past; the past was only a starting point. They ­were about using the past and engaging with acts of remembering—­collectively or individually—to create new ways to understand the pre­sent. In this pro­cess, heritage does more than provide a physical anchor of belonging or a geographic sense of memory. It becomes a cultural tool or a prop that “nations, socie­ties,

Introduction5

communities, and individuals use to express, facilitate, and construct a sense of identity, self, and belonging,” in which the “power of place” is evoked in its repre­sen­ta­tional sense to give material real­ity to ­these sentiments and expressions (Laurajane Smith 2006, 75). In spite of their vari­ous associations with haunting, the involved parties all displayed deep sympathy ­toward the tragic, early deaths of the twenty-­five young ­women. They also capitalized on this sympathy for their goals. To explain why the story ­behind the Maiden Ladies Tomb evoked such strong emotions in the parties enumerated as well as among the general public, I invoke the concept of “industrial structure of feeling,” understood as the sentiments, thoughts, and feelings grounded in daily experience and embodied presence that, in turn, informed and constructed the way of life of industrial workers and their communities (High 2013). Haunted Modernities argues that the employment of neophyte ­women workers ushered in a new way of organ­izing daily routines and a new real­ity of everyday experiences. The loss of working d ­ aughters’ lives, therefore, entails not only financial and emotional tolls but also the shattering of one’s sense of meaning and continuity. Ultimately, “­women workers” can be a crucial signifier with or without a corporeal body to ­labor. The significance of w ­ omen workers, in real life and theoretically, is manifested in two interrelated ways. First, the economic contributions of ­women workers are not always derived from their productive roles but also from the symbolic capital they help to create as icons in postindustrial culture-­led urban economies. Second, this highlights the fact that ­women workers are—or become—­icons not only b ­ ecause of their economic contributions but also ­because, surrounding their productive activities, a way of social life is formed and a structure of feeling and a sense of collective identity are forged.

The Plan of the Book Haunted Modernities brings to the fore the power of kinship and its connections to ­labor and super­natural belief systems in the changing urban and global economies. It engages with the recent debates on the interlocution between haunting and memory and the efficacy of the spectral in inculcating the complex feelings and experience of loss, dispossession, regret, remorse, unfairness, and injustice in memorials, monuments, and the vocabulary of everyday expressions (Blanco and Peeren 2013b; Derrida 1994). The book proceeds through eight chapters, divided into three parts.

6Introduction

Part I, “Onset: Owner­ship of the Dead,” comprises two chapters. Chapter 1, “The Death of ­Women Workers,” begins with a vivid account of the ferry accident that took the lives of twenty-­five young ­women and the aftermath of this tragic event. It establishes the conceptual frameworks for comprehending the politics of memory and the politics of haunting and how the dif­fer­ent players and powers used vari­ous commemorative methods as ways to bolster their own goals, ­whether it was to amend bad deaths, to foster a feminist agenda, or to improve the po­ liti­cal status and economic fortune of Kaohsiung domestically or globally. Chapter 2, “The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople,” introduces the concept of “industrial structure of feeling.” It focuses on how the affect associated with the industrial structure of feeling was mobilized to create subjects and practices commensurable with capital accumulation at the peak of Taiwan’s export industrial economy. Subsequently, it is this structure of feeling that led to the complex emotion of fright and sorrow among both the deceased’s families and the society at large ­toward the twenty-­five ferry accident victims and the urge to do something respectable for them. Part II, “Ghostscapes,” comprises four chapters. It offers ethnographic accounts about how the readings of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb as a memoryscape are bound to scales of commemoration (e.g., the local, the national, or the global) and how mnemonic practices at such a place are contested both within and across scales. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss two distinct approaches to integrate the dead into a greater social collective. Building on the notion of “industrial structure of feeling,” chapter 3, “Filial D ­ aughters, Pious Ghosts,” focuses on the families of the perished w ­ omen, the community they lived in, the propriety they felt compelled to observe, and the affection they held for their deceased ­daughters and ­sisters that did not always align with their obligations ­toward their ancestors and descendants. Their efforts to save the dead w ­ ere motivated by three concerns: dealing with culturally problematic deaths; restoring the emotional and social universe; and reintegrating the unruly dead into a well-­governed community so that they could ­settle in peace. Chapter 4, “Subservient ­Women, Worker Heroines,” addresses the ways feminist activists strategized a public campaign and framed a public discourse. In contrast to the deceased’s families who considered the ferry accident victims primarily as members of their kin groups and the immediate vicinity, the feminists explic­itly linked the ferry accident victims and their homes with the larger society. They skillfully refashioned global discourses of l­ abor rights and gender equality to equate

Introduction7

the lost souls to modernity and Taiwan’s standing in the global ordering of urban civilization. Their intervention indicated a rescaling and substantive transformation of the act of remembrance from the personal and ­family levels to the national and global levels. The ghosts of the deceased ­women ­were no longer to be appeased and reincorporated but to be exorcised and transcended. Chapter  5, “Blue-­Collar Industrial City, Blue-­Color Ocean Capital” examines the role and position of state actors as the arbiter in the Maiden Ladies Tomb transformation. The renovation of the tomb is understood as part of Kaohsiung’s massive repackaging of the past. Memory is or­ga­nized according to “heritage,” which fixes history and potentially limits the interpretative and performative possibilities at historical tourist sites such as the Maiden Ladies Tomb or its reincarnation, the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. In such a pro­cess, the burial site as a vis­ib ­ le remnant of the past is reclaimed as the physical trace of a historical event to support the production of the city (of Kaohsiung)—­ standing in for the nation (of Taiwan)—as an ­imagined community. Chapter 6, “Super­natural Beings, Modernist State,” investigates the contentions, conflicts, and concessions between the state and the deceased’s families. Among the unquieted dead, unwed young ­women are considered to be particularly potentially disruptive and power­ful, for they are multiply dislocated—in both the gender order of social categories and the historical frame of lineage. While the state may carefully arrange, control, and tend to citizen’s lives in the capacity of urban planners and policy makers, ghosts, who are incommensurable with the logic of the modern state, ­will not be subjected to the same treatment by the same authority. Incorporated into the design of the new Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers w ­ ere the final agreements and compromises reached by all parties to appease the dead, the living, and the po­liti­cal powers in the secular world. ­These include an ongoing tradition of maintaining relations with t­ hose in the afterworld by both the surviving relations and the modernist state, as well as the ensuing actions taken by t­ hese actors. Memorialization is a cultural pro­cess that involves constant making and remaking. Part III, “Afterlife,” tracks the evolving repre­sen­ta­tion of the finished Memorial Park and the continuous development of its values and meanings. Chapter 7, “Beyond the Memorial,” focuses on the two national feminist initiatives—­the gender equity education movement and the cultural custom reform. Both indicate the creation of an institutional framework to instigate gender-­and sexuality-­related dialogues and praxes. As a part of the teaching materials of state-­sanctioned gender

8Introduction

equity education and as an example of gender-­biased funeral practices, the Maiden Ladies Tomb and the ­women buried in it have taken on a new afterlife as a part of the ongoing pro­cess of remembrance embedded in the larger w ­ omen’s movement. Memory is never just about the past. The construction of memory is always a forward-­looking pro­cess. The epilogue, “­Future Pre­sent, ­Future Past,” brings together the ­earlier themes in a precise form, with emphasis on ideas that run across all of the chapters. It highlights the spatiality and temporality of memory and memorialization and conceptualizes how haunting in its dif­fer­ent manifestations mediates the relations between the living and the dead in space and time.

PART I

Onset: Owner­ship of the Dead

Fig. 1.1. ​Map of Cijin, Kaohsiung City. Source: Kaohsiung City Government Cijin District Office.

Chapter 1

The Death of ­Women Workers

K

aohsiung is the largest city in southern Taiwan, a world-­ class port, and the hub of Taiwan’s heavy industry. The Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone (EPZ) featured in this book was the first of its kind in the world. Established in the 1960s, the Kaohsiung EPZ—as well as other EPZs established ­later in time—­ was designed to offer incentives and a barrier-­free environment to attract foreign investment for export-­oriented production. ­These EPZs proved crucial to Taiwan’s post–­World War II economic development and subsequently became a global model for developing countries. Cijin was once a peninsula attached to Kaohsiung. It became a tiny island as a result of the expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor in the 1970s (figure 1.1). For many years, p ­ eople had to rely on small, privately owned sampan ferries to travel between Cijin and Kaohsiung. Crucial as t­hese ferries ­were to the lives and livelihood of Cijin residents, they ­were low-­ tech in nature and only loosely regulated by the government. Their operation relied heavi­ly on the experience and skills of t­ hose who worked the boats, and the personnel was usually kept to a minimum on each of the sampan ferries: the captain at the wheel, to ensure the smooth ­running of the engine, and one crew member in charge of tethering the boat to the pier and calling the passengers on board (with only a narrow, one-­ meter-­wide gangplank for ­people to walk on). The crew member also had to arrange where the passengers stood and where their cargo and motorcycles ­were stowed once aboard. A big challenge for the crew was to make sure the sampan remained balanced while still squeezing on as many p ­ eople as pos­si­ble. As a result, the boats constantly rocked from side to side, provoking fright (or thrills) among the passengers. September 3, 1973, began as an ordinary day. The ­waters of the Kaohsiung Harbor w ­ ere calm and quiet. In the early morning, as usual, the sampan ferry at the pier at Chung-­chou Village, Cijin, was overcrowded with passengers on their way to start their workday on the other side of 11

12Onset

the harbor. Street hawkers, petty vendors, office employees, and industrial workers—­with their baskets of fish, piles of merchandise, and bicycles or motorcycles—­crammed the narrow spaces both inside and outside the cabin. Even though the sampan ferry was already jam-­packed, anxious young ­women heading ­toward the Kaohsiung EPZ continued to push their way onto the boat. They could not afford to be late. If they ­were, they would lose the “on-­time bonus” that constituted a large part of their monthly wages. When the engine fi­nally started, the sampan ferry, which officially had a maximum capacity of thirteen passengers, was loaded with more than seventy ­people. Every­thing appeared to be normal at first. However, the ferry captain soon discovered that the boat had sprung a leak and was taking on ­water. He tried to speed up, but the overloaded boat moved cumbersomely and swayed violently. When the sampan ferry was about to reach the pier on the other side, the captain—­the only person working on the boat that day, as it was ­later discovered—­hastily tied the boat to a bollard and gestured to passengers to evacuate. This caused an instant surge of confusion and frenzy. While ­those standing on the deck ­were lucky enough to get off the boat right away, ­those at the back or, worse, inside the cabin, had to thrust their way through many obstacles—­other ­people, goods, personal vehicles—­before they could fi­nally escape the leaking boat. As every­one thronged in the same direction, the sampan tilted, dragging down the bollard with it. As a result, the sampan lost its leverage and quickly capsized. Even though the shore was quite close and Chung-­ chou had been a fishing village, not every­one (and especially not all ­women) knew how to swim. Suddenly the ­water was full of p ­ eople, a sea of panic. Bystanders near the pier of Kaohsiung immediately jumped in to rescue the passengers. Onlookers on the shore of Chung-­chou also noticed the calamity. Some quickly joined the rescue effort, while o ­ thers ran to inform families who might have a member onboard the capsized ferry. Amid the chaotic commotion of police cars, ambulances, first responders, and volunteers w ­ ere the loud cries and desperate pleas of distressed families. It was all over very quickly; the capsized boat sank into deep ­water in just a few short minutes (fig. 3.1). Although the rescue crew was able to fish out most of the floating passengers, they ­were not able to reach ­those confined in the cabin in time to rescue them. When the w ­ ater was calm and quiet again, forty-­six passengers (young, old, male, female, single, and married) had been saved, while twenty-­ five—­ all unmarried young ­women, between the ages of thirteen and thirty—­had perished.

The Death of ­Women Workers13

When I visited the Chung-­chou pier in the winter of 2013 with Wen-­ hui Tang, a sociology professor from nearby National Sun Yat-­sen University, more than forty years had passed since that tragic day. Professor Tang and I ate our lunch at a seafood restaurant by the pier and chatted with its owner, Mr. Chuang Ming, who was in his sixties. He was twenty-­six years old when the sampan ferry accident happened. A fisherman-­turned-­ paint trader at the time, he almost got on the boat that fatal morning but was waved off by the captain ­because it was already too crowded. Chuang told us he was standing on the bank waiting for the next ferry when the one he did not get on capsized. Just like other ­people on the shore, he immediately jumped in and successfully pulled three girls out of the w ­ ater. “The boat went down so fast that ­there was hardly any chance for t­hose trapped inside the cabin to get out,” he said. When we asked w ­ hether he kept contact with the three girls he saved that day, C ­ huang said he no longer did. It had happened so long ago, and life had since carried on. He still saw them walking on the street, passing by his restaurant from time to time. One of the w ­ omen he rescued married a local man and continued to live in the neighborhood where she had lived since her childhood. Chung-­chou is a small village where residents are si­mul­ta­neously neighbors, friends, classmates, and relatives. Accordingly, Chuang was acquainted with most of the families whose d ­ aughters died in the ferry accident, even though he did not personally know all of the ­women who died. Many of the young girls ­were also coworkers in the export pro­cessing zone. Indeed, it is this intricate web of social relations that made the death of the twenty-­ five young w ­ omen such a tragic event, as many p ­ eople in the village w ­ ere affected, ­either directly or indirectly. It was quickly reported by some witnesses that the overturned vessel might have developed a leak before it left the pier in Cijin; and it was soon found that the captain did not have a license to pi­lot a boat. ­There was also no lifesaving equipment on board the ferry. The Cijin-­Kaohsiung sampan ferry ser­vice was supervised by the Port of Kaohsiung (交通部高 雄港務局), a central government agency u ­ nder the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. Given the fact that the boat had passed a safety inspection not long before the accident, it is clear that the Port of Kaohsiung failed in its job of protecting the ferry passengers. B ­ ecause of the many prob­lems exposed in the aftermath of the ferry accident, the Kaohsiung City government intervened and helped to ­settle the pension and compensation issue. The city also helped to find a plot of land big enough to accommodate the graves of all twenty-­five victims ­after their families de­cided to have them buried together. To better accommodate

14Onset

Cijin’s transportation needs, the government built the Kaohsiung Cross-­ Harbor Tunnel, which was opened to public use in 1984. In 1988 the land where the cemetery housing the Maiden Ladies Tomb stood was acquired by the government for yet another expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor, and the tomb was relocated to a new seashore site. In contrast to the original burial ground, which was in a fairly remote corner of ­Cijin that not many outside visitors would usually see, the new location is on a main road. It sits facing the Taiwan Strait, with a scenic view of the ­water and the coastline. Although the bereaved families have continued to mourn their dead, the city seems to have recovered from the loss and has moved on since then—as Chuang indicated in his conversation with us at his seafood restaurant. Over the years, the pier at Chung-­chou Village has served fewer and fewer passengers, as many residents now use the Kaohsiung Cross-­ Harbor Tunnel or the public ferry ser­vice (run by the city, with larger boats) at the other end of Cijin Island, closer to downtown Kaohsiung. As the economy of Taiwan has changed, the number of female workers who need to make the daily commute to the Kaohsiung EPZ has dwindled. Quiet, unobtrusive, and overlooked by visitors, the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb sat for years on the roadside of Cijin, reflecting the brief, ­humble lives of the young w ­ omen resting t­here. Yet the quiet atmosphere of the tomb was not a result of reverence or forgetfulness. Taiwanese culture shuns unwed female ghosts who do not have a husband’s ancestral hall in which to rest in peace. This idea made the Maiden Ladies Tomb a slightly sinister seeming place, one Taiwanese tended to avoid. It is this stigmatized understanding of the Maiden Ladies Tomb that caught local activists’ attention. Beginning in 2004, the Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (KAPWR) waged a public campaign. Their activism is feminist in the sense that it is highly critical of Taiwan’s patriarchal social system and seeks to challenge unequal gender relations.1 Additionally, many of the KAPWR members (including Professor Tang) self-­identify as feminists. In their public campaign, the KAPWR urged the Kaohsiung City government to rename the tomb to remove the stigma attached to unwed female ghosts. They wanted the name of the burial site to reflect the productive economic roles the young ­women had before they died. The KAPWR also requested that the city government revamp the tomb site. The city did not respond to the association’s call right away, but the feminists persisted and eventually prevailed. In 2008, thirty-­five years a­ fter the sampan ferry accident and

The Death of ­Women Workers15

twenty years a­ fter the relocation of the tomb to its second site, the Kaohsiung City government followed the feminists’ advice, cleaned up the burial site, and renovated the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, renaming it the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Furthermore, following the completion of the Memorial Park, the city government has held an annual spring memorial ser­vice to commemorate job-­related deaths and injuries ­every April  28 on International Workers’ Memorial Day. For the first few years, it was attended primarily by the Kaohsiung mayor and her staff, families of the twenty-­five deceased ­women, and representatives of ­labor ­unions and/or feminist activist groups. ­Later, teachers and students from local elementary and ­middle schools w ­ ere invited to play instruments or dance and took part in other assorted activities at the memorial ser­vice. Over time, with ever larger and more diverse crowds of attendees, this annual event seems to have taken on a new face and new meanings. It has become less of an occasion to commemorate the past and more an opportunity to enjoy the park as a public space and to envision the rise of the city as an enlightened, progressive metropolis with l­abor rights and gender equality.

Ghosts, Industrial Ruins, and the Materiality of Memory When I first heard about the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, I had just concluded research on the impact of economic restructuring—­ namely, capital outflow and deindustrialization—on w ­ omen workers in Taiwan’s industrial hinterland and had recently moved my focus to cities as the latest sites of capital accumulation (Anru Lee 2004). At the time, I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Kaohsiung, studying the changes in its built environment as a result of neoliberal economic transformation and concurrent entrepreneurial placemaking strategies. When Professor Tang told me about the KAPWR’s campaign, the story of the Maiden Ladies Tomb immediately intrigued me. The overhaul of the tomb into a public park was no doubt part of Kaohsiung City’s placemaking effort. However, it was not merely another site in need of a facelift but a collective burial of unmarried female factory workers. The dual identity of the deceased as unwed young w ­ omen and as industrial workers rendered the burial a site of interlocution between popu­lar cultural and religious beliefs and modern princi­ples of spatial governance. In his seminal article “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors” anthropologist Arthur Wolf postulates that three dif­fer­ent types of beings exist in the

16Onset

pantheon of Taiwanese popu­lar religion and that, together, they closely reflect the social world: gods, who w ­ ere previously mandarins, representing the emperor and the empire; ancestors, who ­were se­nior members of the patrilineal f­ amily, representing the lineage; and ghosts, who come from a heterogeneous group of strangers and outsiders and are thus dangerous and despised (Arthur P. Wolf 1978; see also Feuchtwang 1974; and Weller 1985). Gender plays an impor­tant role in this universe. A son, by his birthright, is a part of his ­father’s patrilineal line, and he is entitled to a place at his ­father’s ancestral altar. He w ­ ill become an ancestor a­ fter his death. A ­daughter, however, is not given this privilege. From her parents’ perspective, a d ­ aughter is a temporary member and, eventually, an outsider as regards her f­ather’s ­family. Therefore, marriage as a social institution is particularly significant for ­women, for it serves as both a symbol of and a gateway to their ultimate (though subordinate) position in the Taiwanese kinship system (Margery Wolf 1960, 1972). Normatively, it is through marriage that ­women are accepted into their husbands’ families and permanently integrated into the lineage (Francis L. K. Hsu 1971; Wolf and Huang 1980). Correspondingly, if a w ­ oman dies a violent death before marriage, she can become a ghost if she is not properly prayed for (Harrell 1986). Marriage also provides the opportunity for men and w ­ omen to perpetuate the ­family line through childbearing, the failure of which is considered a serious breach of filial piety in Taiwanese culture even ­today. Eco­nom­ically, marriage also grants—­especially to w ­ omen—­some financial support and social security, as men continue to be seen and act as primary breadwinners in con­temporary Taiwanese h ­ ouse­holds. Together, these concerns—­ ­ religious/spiritual and economic/material—­ have made many generations of Taiwanese parents anxious to find their sons and ­daughters suitable spouses. It is a priority for them as parents. Following ­these cultural premises, the Maiden Ladies Tomb as the final resting place of twenty-­five unwed ­women workers was seen as a place populated by ghosts. It was similar, one might argue, to a haunted “industrial ruin”—­a term used by scholars to describe industrial sites abandoned due to changing cap­i­tal­ist geographies (Gordillo 2014; Mah 2012; Stoler 2013). Defunct, derelict, and marginal, industrial ruins are where normative codes that govern such ­things as the physical arrangement of a place, the enforcement of regulations, or the per­for­mance of regulated acts are weakened. ­These are thus spaces wherein “the interpretation of practice of the city becomes liberated from everyday constraints,” which, conversely, lends opportunities “for challenging and reconstructing the imprint of power on the city” (Edensor 2005b, 4).

The Death of ­Women Workers17

Meta­phor­ically, the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb is akin to a site of industrial ruin in a dual sense. Immediately, it was a collective burial of industrial workers in Kaohsiung, a deindustrialized port city in transition, wherein placemaking has been employed as a main strategy for urban economic revival. More significantly, the Maiden Ladies Tomb was a part of the living world but not an active part of it. The tomb was like a ruin b ­ ecause it seemed to have lost its function or meaning in the pre­sent while retaining a suggestive, unstable semantic potential—­thereby the capacity to foster intensive discursive activity (Hell and Schönle 2010, 5). Frequently located on the fringe of a city, a graveyard is attended by groundskeepers and visited by families or accidental visitors. It is by and large bypassed by the city’s daily flow, and exists outside the city’s effective cir­cuits and productive structures (Sola-­Morales 1995, 120). Its buried residents no longer abide by the rules and laws of the secular domain. However, the peace of the secular, mundane world often hinges on the acquiescence of the afterworld. The dead interrupt the living by making appearances, albeit not always in a form that is solid or unequivocally evident. They speak, but do not necessarily talk directly to the living. Their voices are often ­silent or repeatedly iterated by someone ­else, and their messages require decrypting. All ­these facets mark a graveyard as a site of ambiguity. It is also a site of liminality due to its in-­between status—­ between the living and the afterworlds. Renovation of such a place inevitably brings to the fore the question of mediation. It is a pro­cess of contention but also ripe with transgressive and transcendent opportunities. Consequently, the renovation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb presented a perfect opportunity to interrogate how industrial ruins can be used as sites from which to examine and undermine cap­i­tal­ist and state manifestations. The case of the tomb illustrates how industrial ruins can force a reevaluation of conventional strategies for organ­izing space and how industrial ruins can be employed to challenge dominant ways of relating to the past (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013, 3).

Herstory as L ­ abor History The triumph of the feminist campaign to rename the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb and eradicate the eerie, old-­fashioned look of the burial site was an example of how an industrial ruin could force a reevaluation of conventional strategies for organ­izing space. Its successful reframing of the ferry accident victims as productive industrial workers vital to national economic development in the official discourse challenged the

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dominant ways of comprehending the nature of the deceased. More generally, the feminists’ reinterpretation of the story of the twenty-­ five ­women contributes to our understanding of not only how the meaning of industrial ­labor has changed but also why the changing meaning of ­labor ­matters in a postindustrial context. The recent development of Kaohsiung—­and Taiwan in general—­ conforms to the worldwide trend of placemaking as an economic strategy. In a deindustrialized setting, this often involves appropriating and employing ele­ments from the industrial past as attractions to promote tourism and entice capital investment. This is observed in the placemaking experience of many deindustrialized port cities—be it the “festival market” renewal of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the Docklands development in London, or the waterfront redevelopments in Barcelona, Liverpool, Marseille, and New Orleans—­that focused on active uses of port heritage and collective identity (Mah 2014). The increasing commercialization and commodification of the past have generated a new public interest in l­abor history in vari­ous places, particularly in the industrial heartlands of ­England, western Eu­rope, and North Amer­i­ca (Mah 2010; Smith, Shackel, and Campbell 2011; Strangleman 2019; Strangleman, Rhodes, and Linkon 2013; Taska 2003). This seemingly encouraging development has nevertheless also prompted a sense of urgency among ­labor historians and l­abor studies scholars (Klubock and Fontes 2009), as this “nostalgic (re)construction of the past” is rarely reflective; it is, perhaps inevitably, highly selective and generally idealized and sanitized for public consumption (Taska 2009). Critical ­labor studies scholarship is concerned that the redevelopment of industrial heritage sites often leads to what Christine Boyer (2000, 30–35, 51) calls “double erasure.” That is, the first erasure happens when a place loses its primary reason for being—­for example, as a site of industrial production. A second erasure occurs when the creation of museums or other cultural facilities, the restoration of historical spaces, and staged cele­brations or commemorations further remove places and events from the realm of everyday experience and place them instead in the realm of abstraction and repre­sen­ta­tion. As critical as this scholarship can be, much of it nonetheless focuses on working-­class experiences in mines, steel and auto plants, railroads, and shipyards—or, as Sharon Zukin suggests (1991, 59–60), the life force of industrial society—in old industrial core areas (High and Lewis 2007; Linkon and Russo 2002), embodied by the figure of the white, male, skilled manual worker (Rhodes 2013). ­Whether at renovated historical sites or in the lit­er­at­ ure on ­labor

The Death of ­Women Workers19

history, the story has belonged to men. Industrial narratives tend to be characterized by masculine personification. One seldom encounters depictions of ­women as industrial workers or as the hub around which work and community cohere (the experiment in Lowell, Mas­sa­chu­setts, is one of the few exceptions; see Stanton 2006). What is more, the industrial—­and, ­later, postindustrial—­experience beyond large Western economies, especially in the postcolonial world, is much underrepresented in this lit­er­a­ture. ­There are many reasons for deindustrialization, including automation of tasks, declining demand for par­tic­u­lar products, and, most impor­ tant of all, reduction of production costs. Nevertheless, deindustrialization in one place is the beginning of industrialization in another. Driven by the pursuit of tax incentives, cheaper land prices, larger l­abor pools, lower ­labor costs, and other cost-­saving strategies, Western transnational corporations began to relocate part or all of their productions overseas, creating global commodity chains through global assembly lines that employ large numbers of w ­ omen workers. Beginning with the Four Asian Dragons—­Hong Kong, South ­Korea, Singapore, and, Taiwan—in the 1960s, the centers of global industrial production have shifted to East and Southeast Asia. Many of the trends that impacted early industrial countries have repeated in the fast-­growing economies of the Four Asian Dragons. Taiwan’s late-­capitalist economy has, however, also generated historical trajectories, identities, and sociocultural formations that challenge conventional understanding based on the Western experience of industrial capitalism. While it experienced a brief period of import substitution industrialization that emphasized replacing imports with domestic production in the 1950s, Taiwan was quickly incorporated into global industrial production and became a main site of global factories. The female ­labor force, therefore, has always been a crucial part of the country’s export-­oriented industrialization from its onset. Additionally, the Taiwanese industrial system is highly decentralized, with networks of small plants employing anywhere from a few to a few hundred workers, and capital and l­ abor relations tend to be more communal than confrontational. Factory w ­ omen frequently identified themselves—­ and w ­ ere identified—­based on their familial roles (notably, as ­daughters) rather than their status as workers. Accordingly, the fact that many of t­hese workers ­were major economic contributors to their families altered the traditional gender division of l­abor and enhanced young w ­ omen’s status at home, leading to changes in the familial relations and social dynamics

20Onset

within which they w ­ ere embedded. Working w ­ omen as filial ­daughters ­were genuinely appreciated by their parents, who in turn felt further compelled to ensure them good marriages and fulfilled lives. Their incomes also contributed to the seed money for their ­brothers’ entrepreneurial attempts, leading to the burgeoning of small factories and the advancement of the collective fortune of their communities. The Taiwanese feminists’ call to commemorate the deceased at the Maiden Ladies Tomb as industrial workers, therefore, pre­sents a critical opportunity to write a new kind of ­labor history centered on female l­abor. Moreover, the KAPWR’s effort dovetails with global feminist endeavors to (re)write and (re)valorize ­women’s history as a po­liti­cal movement for gender equality (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, 2010; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Narayan 2013). The dominant trope in ­women’s history scholarship has been one of restoring ­women to visibility (Dubrow 2003). Yet the preservation of ­women’s historical sites is not merely for the sake of the historical rec­ord; it also inspires con­temporary feminist activism (Miller 1992, 2003). Specifically, through reclaiming historical sites for w ­ omen, new historical itineraries that treat ­women’s history as an in­de­pen­dent and coherent theme can be developed. Innovative and engaging approaches beyond the conventional means of erecting monuments, tombs, or plaques can also be employed to (re)connect ­women’s history with historically significant places, thus integrating ­women’s history into existing historical narratives. It can also provide a more accurate and complete portrayal of history. This is particularly impor­tant given that neophyte global assembly line workers around the world frequently face strong cultural disapproval and even vio­lence. Rape and violent crimes against factory w ­ omen in Sri Lanka (Lynch 2007), the gang rape and fatal assault of a young w ­ oman in India in 2012 (Belair-­Gagnon, Mishra, and Agur 2014), and the mass murders of maquiladora workers in Mexico in the early 1990s (Livingston 2004; Wright 1999, 2007) come to mind as vivid examples. Given this context, writing w ­ omen’s l­abor history or rewriting ­labor history with a critical gender perspective becomes imperative. It helps to raise new consciousness about what work and ­labor are, thereby creating possibilities for challenging dominant ways of understanding heritage and history.

The Problematic of Memorializing Feminist lit­er­a­ture that tackles the issue of memorialization frequently stresses the dual mission of remembering par­tic­u­lar deaths caused

The Death of ­Women Workers21

by vio­lence while bringing attention to systemic vio­lence against ­women (Luger 2009, 73). Belinda Leach stresses that feminist memorializing has—or should have—­“an activist and forward-­looking intent” that concomitantly seeks to “keep memory alive and change the f­uture” (2011, 191). Yet too often a memorializing practice becomes a technology of “active forgetting” when violent incidents are regarded as individual and psychotic—­and memorializing is viewed as catharsis—­and when the public is reduced to passive spectatorship (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2002, 127–128). It is therefore imperative that feminist memorializing should promote “active remembering” (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2002, 142), transcending individual memory into collective memory. Only when the collective takes responsibility for the systemic nature of gendered vio­lence is social change pos­si­ble. This is not a s­ imple task, however. Often in feminist attempts to transform individual remembrance into collective consciousness, a specific event involving a few par­tic­u­lar deaths is made emblematic. That is, a specific event comes to stand for an array of other acts that are assumed to share certain characteristics, and, consequently, the remembrance of one par­tic­ul­ar event signals the remembrance of all. Emblemization is vital to the dual mission of feminist memorializing, as the very pro­cess of becoming emblematic, of one act standing for all, is what renders a memorial practice significant (Simon and Rosenberg 2005, 69, 70). Yet, paradoxically, emblemization and enclosure are often concurrent processes—­enclosure being the stabilization of a dominant public discourse that prioritizes certain readings of the event being memorialized. As a result, all acts of gendered vio­lence are rendered identical and all ­women victims substitutable. Not only are the complex identity formations and power relations embedded in dif­fer­ent acts of vio­lence erased (Rosenberg 2003, 14–15), but the particularities of the emblematic event and the life stories of ­women who died in it are also minimized. More significantly, the dilemma of emblemization is not just about the terms of substitutability among the dead but also about how the living are positioned, or strug­gle to position themselves, with re­spect to the dead (Simon and Rosenberg 2005, 70–71). An emblematic memorial practice—­ and hence an enclosed memory of the dead—­can be problematic. It might inscribe ­people into a position accepted by some but rejected by ­others b ­ ecause it conflicts with the self-­identifications of the latter vis-­à-­ vis the dead. Consequently (and ironically), a feminist, emblematic repre­ sen­ta­tion of the dead could, like “active forgetting,” make the public passive by relieving p ­ eople of the responsibility of actively reflecting on

22Onset

their relation to the dead and to the violent act that took their lives (Parkins 2014). The transformation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers was a strategic move endorsed by feminist activists. It was an act of feminist memorializing as it sought both to keep alive the memory of the deceased ­women and to change the public perception of them. This memorial act became emblematic ­because the deceased have come to represent all ­women workers whose ­labor helped to build the collective fortunes of post–­World War II Taiwan. Yet, despite the feminists’ original intention of addressing the discriminatory nature of the patrilineal Taiwanese ­family with an emphasis on their productive role, it seems that making the twenty-­ five deceased young ­women emblematic also had the effect of dissociating the two aforementioned ­causes in the public’s mind. ­Women’s industrial l­abor is certainly presented in a positive and celebratory light in the newly renovated park. Nevertheless, the physical transformation of the burial site, from its previous appearance as a tomb to its new incarnation as a sanitized park, also takes away the opportunity for its visitors to recall the immediate fact that ­these w ­ omen ­were shunned ­because they died unwed. It reduces the likelihood that visitors might contemplate their thoughts on this ­matter and encourages them to be complacent. Similarly, emblematizing the deceased as industrial workers also failed to address the tension between the parents’ sorrow for their d ­ aughters’ early deaths and unfulfilled lives and their sense of propriety t­ oward their patrilineal ancestry.

Haunting as Method Fundamentally, do the deceased w ­ omen have to be e­ither filial ­daughters (and thus female ghosts) or diligent but exploited workers (and therefore worker heroines)? Can they be both? Alternatively, have they always been both? Directly, the dif­fer­ent interpretations of the deceased’s lives and, subsequently, the diverse expectations about the ­future of the Maiden Ladies Tomb exemplify the unfixed nature of remembrance. At a deeper level, even though popu­ lar ritualistic pacification of unsettled maiden ghosts was considered old-­fashioned and discriminatory against ­women, whereas secular civic commemoration of female industrial workers was endorsed by the feminist activists and practiced by the modernist state, the practices represent two dif­fer­ent knowledge systems. Each denotes an approach to comprehending the cosmological-­cum-­earthly order and offers a way to or­ga­nize social life and guide social practices. More-

The Death of ­Women Workers23

over, the nature of time differs in dif­fer­ent social ­orders (Verdery 1999). Dif­fer­ent temporal conceptions lay implicit in the vari­ous approaches to comprehending the cosmological order a­ dopted by t­hose involved in the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation, and ­ these conceptions not only informed the concerned parties’ actions but also elucidated how ­human agency was understood (Mueggler 1999). ­These divergent actions and understandings w ­ ere, nonetheless, united by the concern of haunting. Haunting was at the heart of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies story. It was a manifestation of desire unfulfilled—­the desire of the living, the desire of the dead (Sangren 2000, 2017).2 Phantom protagonists appeared both meta­phor­ically and existentially (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015). Meta­ phor­ically, the Taiwanese feminists invoked ghosts in the cause of gender equality. This exemplifies the recent “spectral” turn in academic writings, which highlights the possibility that ghosts and haunting can reveal “the insufficiency of the pre­sent moment, as well as the disconsolation and erasures of the past, and a tentative hopefulness for ­ future resolutions” (Blanco and Peeren 2013a, 16). Jacques Derrida (1994) asserts that haunting is historical and belongs to the structure of ­every hegemony. Writing in the wake of communism, Derrida employs the specter as a trope to capture the diffused operations and impact of globalization and to critique the way this pro­cess produces certain precarious living conditions. He uses the meta­phor of haunting to witness troubling, unsettled, and buried histories. Similarly, Avery Gordon (2008, 63) stresses that haunting is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only of itself but also what it represents, which is usually a loss—­sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. Both Derrida and Gordon write of the ghosts of t­ hose who have been disowned, silenced, or victimized, and both invoke the past as a po­liti­cal and moral resource for pre­sent claims (Benjamin 2003). Through specters they bring forth “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Kilroy-­Marac 2014, 257). The appearance of phantoms meddles with taken-­for-­granted realities. It signals epistemological uncertainties that encompass the pos­si­ble emergence of new kinds of historical imagination (Weinstock 2004, 7). Ultimately, “spectropolitics” arises as a site of potential change, wherein the ability to haunt and the willingness to be haunted work to resuscitate the society’s collective ability to acquire a historical understanding that reckons with past vio­lence and suffering (Blanco and Peeren 2013c, 93). A ­future radically departing from practices of exclusion and social erasure can thereby be envisioned. The feminist effort to change the nature of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb can be considered spectropo­liti­cal in that it was most

24Onset

immediately concerned with the politics of historical memory. The Taiwanese feminists called for an acknowl­edgment of the economic role of the deceased young w ­ omen—­a direct result of Taiwan’s incorporation into late global capitalism. They made use of ­these ­women’s ghosts as a trope to fight against the erasure of w ­ omen’s productive l­abor from Taiwan’s history. H ­ ere the dead worked as symbols of historical injustice. The feminist activists’ actions also suggested a temporal imagination that perceived time as a straight line—or our common notion of ­“pro­gress”—­which dovetailed with the Taiwanese government’s continual efforts ­toward national development and economic prosperity. Yet not all invocations of ghosts or haunting have the same meanings or effects even within the same cultural tradition. For Gordon and other scholars of spectrality, phantoms are primarily literary traces whose “absent presence” seizes our attention as their restlessness invokes violent histories. The emphasis is placed on memorializing the dead as a means to address or redress past injustice. The agency for enlightenment, action, and change lies in living h ­ uman beings. By contrast, ghosts in Taiwan—­and the East Asian world in general—­are anything but merely allegorical (Buyandelger 2013; Gustafsson 2009; Seong Nae Kim 1989, 2000; Klima 2002; Mueggler 2001, 2017; Weller 1985). As we w ­ ill see in subsequent chapters, the interactions between the deceased young ­women and their families show us that Taiwanese ghosts claim a more literal and agentive existence than meta­phorical specters. They appear, express sorrow, demonstrate grievances, grant ­favors, and cause misfortune and illness. They confront the living in a direct, nonmediated, and at times menacing manner (Lin 2018; Weller 1985, 2000). ­Here, the temporal conception is informed by a cyclical sense of time, governed by the life-­cycle meta­phor of birth, growth, decay, and death. Haunting occurs not so much to arouse a communal sense of responsibility for the suffering of the dead. Rather, it entails a personal and oftentimes visceral interaction between the living and the dead during which the latter demands specific and immediate redress and appeasement. Essentially, Taiwanese ghosts are social figures who continuously engage in a reciprocal relationship with the living. Like their counter­ parts in the living world, they must be fed, clothed, ­housed, and sheltered. Their spiritual well-being is closely related to the fulfillment of their material needs, first provided by their surviving f­amily members and ­later by their patrilineal descendants, acquaintances, or strangers willing to take on the responsibility. Haunting occurs when the sociality of the living and the dead is interrupted or ­violated or the character of

The Death of ­Women Workers25

the sociality is altered in some way. It is a ghostly intervention in the attempt to restore or correct that sociality (Kwon 2006, 2008). To maintain a good relationship with the dead by safeguarding their welfare was, therefore, a chief motivation b ­ ehind the actions taken by the families of the twenty-­five ferry accident victims. This was first evinced in how the parents acknowledged their dead d ­ aughters’ new godly status and venerated them accordingly soon a­ fter the Cijin ferry accident. It was l­ater shown throughout the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation when, on the one hand, the families voiced their concern over the government’s intention to remove the burial site in its entirety—­and thereby the possibility of making an offering to the dead—­and on the other hand, their wish to transform the site into a t­emple in the popu­lar religious tradition so that their ­daughter deities could be venerated by the general public (detailed in l­ater chapters).

Memoryscape and the Politics of Scale I close this chapter by returning to the issue of space with which I began this anthropological inquiry. To set the stage for a discussion of how the kinds of memories stimulated in haunted places may be used to critically evaluate the dominant ways of producing memory in space, I outline the contours of the politics of scale in the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation. In using the term “politics of scale,” I emphasize the tension between the multiplicity of scales involved in the sociospatial pro­cess of the transformation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb and the many possibilities for contestation across or among scales enabled by the same pro­cess. The timing of Kaohsiung’s postindustrial economic regeneration has coincided with the “glocalization” process—­the parallel and simultaneous movement to the smaller (“local”) and the larger (“global”) scales— in recent political-­economic transformations around the globe, in which cities have emerged to be the main site of global economic competition (Swyngedouw 1997). As cities in both the developed and developing worlds are increasingly entrenched in an unstable economic environment exemplified by highly mobile and speculative transnational capital, many are forced into fierce rivalries and must adopt strategies like placemaking and regulatory undercutting to secure jobs and investments (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 367). Urban development proj­ects to improve city infrastructure, renovate city landscapes, or create cultural facilities and festivities, therefore, are as much an effect of interurban competition as of local enthusiasm or initiative.

26Onset

Concurrently, Neil Smith (1984, 1996) argues that urban spaces witness the most intense po­liti­cal strug­gles ­because the pro­cesses of cap­i­tal­ ist competition and cooperation play out ­there in ways that often have direct and palpable impacts upon dif­fer­ent social groups. “Jumping scale” can be conceptualized as a po­liti­cal strategy of shifting between spaces of engagement which may be broader or narrower than a scale in any par­tic­u­lar instance (Jones 1998). It involves spatially confined groups engaging in tactics, building networks of interaction, or drawing from regional, national, or international discourses to enhance their success in po­liti­cal strug­gles. In effect, ­these localized groups are practicing a strategy of repre­sen­ta­tion. By showing commonalities between their po­liti­cal goals with other more universal po­liti­cal goals, they are linking their ­causes to other ­causes, thus discursively representing their strug­gles across scales that works to their advantage (Jones 1998, 25). The “glocalized” turn in the global economy has yielded a double effect on Taiwan. On the one hand, placemaking efforts are widely observed among Taiwanese cities in their attempt to keep a competitive edge. This is especially so in the case of Taipei (the capital city in the north) and Kaohsiung (the industrial hub and largest city in southern Taiwan). On the other hand, po­liti­cally, Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations and is thus excluded from UN-­related intergovernmental organ­ izations (such as the World Health Organ­ization). Taiwan also constantly ­faces objections or interventions from the Beijing government over its participation in international nongovernmental organ­izations or activities. Consequently, Taiwan as a po­liti­cal polity lacks international recognition. U ­ nder t­hese circumstances, the rescaling of the world economy from one characterized by nationally configured frameworks to one with an increasingly glocalized configuration of global, national, and local interactions in recent de­cades has opened up new possibilities for Taiwan in its pursuit of global membership. The parallel development among major cities around the world, though a result of interurban competition, has not only helped to create a single imagery space, with which urban residents in Taiwan can mea­sure themselves against city dwellers elsewhere. More critically, such a pro­cess has allowed the possibility of scale jumping, in which the capital city of Taipei—or the “southern capital” of Kaohsiung—­stands in for the nation of Taiwan, thus granting the Taiwanese the eagerly sought international visibility that is not available to Taiwan as a po­liti­cal polity. The readings of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb are bound to the scales of commemoration. A close look at the role that the Kaohsiung

The Death of ­Women Workers27

City government played in its transformation reveals the multiscalar operation of state power. First of all, the Maiden Ladies Tomb was located on the main thoroughfare of Cijin, where tourism has become an increasingly impor­tant part of the local economy. Its high visibility was a critical f­actor that influenced the vari­ous positions held by the parties involved in its renovation. The ­future of the tomb, along with its adjacent municipal cemetery, had been on the checklist of city planners long before the burial site renovation took shape. It was part of the official effort to salvage Kaohsiung from its declining industrial past and to remake the city’s image into that of an emerging global metropolis. Second, as the shepherd of city affairs, the Kaohsiung mayor’s office was the final arbiter of the fate of the Maiden Ladies Tomb. It addressed the local feminists’ call for gender equality by publicly commemorating the late young ­women as industrial workers who, collectively, personified a key moment in recent Taiwanese history. Concurrently, as it honored ­women’s manufacturing l­ abor, the mayor’s office also instilled in national geopolitics the crucial role of Kaohsiung in steering Taiwan’s post–­World War II economic development and leading postindustrial Taiwan into a new era with a progressive agenda on l­abor rights and gender equity. The ghosts ­were exorcised in the name of city-­cum-­national heritage, and their uncanniness was transformed into heroism and legitimacy. This is taken to elucidate Taiwan’s moral high ground, which is expected to find an audience beyond the city limits of Kaohsiung and puts Taiwan in the com­pany of the world’s modern civilizations. Furthermore, this reconstructed social memory could have an economic effect. In the era of late capitalism, memory has been described as increasingly externalized, primarily b ­ ecause memorable events, places, and objects are frequently produced and sold as commodities. Even though it was not originally intended for economic reasons, the proj­ect to recontextualize the memory of a local tragic ferry accident as a cultural legacy could in the end have some economic potential given that the heritage industry is a burgeoning global trend. Scale is as critically impor­tant to the strategies of social movements as to ­those of state actors. If institutional po­liti­cal actors (such as the Kaohsiung mayor’s office) serve their po­liti­cal and economic agendas by utilizing multiscalar tactics, social movement activists can also utilize several spatial scales as sites of engagement with some of the structural opportunities that a transforming society and culture pre­sent to them. For the past few de­cades, transnational social movements have shown proficiency at globalizing both their action platforms and the imaginaries

28Onset

on which they draw. This is often done by bypassing conservative, repressive national environments, bringing international pressure to bear on the solution of formerly local issues, or introducing cross-­border campaigns that pull together resources of metropolitan “centers” and “peripheries” (Fitz-­Henry 2011, 326). Feminist activism in Kaohsiung surely exemplifies this possibility of scale jumping. Primarily based in the municipality of Kaohsiung and targeting the Kaohsiung City government, the feminists nonetheless successfully projected a po­liti­cal message beyond the physical scale of their everyday existence. Their effort to refashion the image of the Maiden Ladies Tomb resonates with feminist movements worldwide that aim to rectify w ­ omen’s history by rewriting and valorizing the contribution of ­women. The connection to global feminist movements has assisted in fostering the cooperation of local authorities by lending currency to the po­liti­cal desire to change the image of Kaohsiung in its attempt to replace Taipei as the representative city of Taiwan. Ultimately, the Maiden Ladies Tomb narratives disrupt the frequently automatic scalar affiliation that assumes state actors have the ability to embrace a global frame of reference whereas members of “traditional” communities or specific localities cannot see beyond local horizons or rigid cognitive patterns. ­These narratives go beyond articulating links “between localizing and globalizing pro­cesses to question the ways ­these domains are produced, the bound­aries that separate them, and the naturalizing pro­cesses that seek to make them real” (Briggs 2004, 175). They reveal that pro­cesses of scalemaking are not always as straightforward as they are sometimes portrayed and often cry out for more grounded interrogation. Concrete social relationships are always placed and scaled. If ghostliness is a condition of absent presence, haunting occurs in locations (tombs, cemeteries, or places of massacres and accidents), the appearance of which complicates official visions or normative understandings of the affected landscape. Haunted places are sites where alternative memories can be articulated. Ghosts are often understood as a way to relate to the past. However, the past is only a prelude. What is impor­tant is not what has been remembered or forgotten but how and why certain memories are invested, institutionalized, or transformed with par­tic­u­lar meanings for the regulation and consumption of the public. Accordingly, the same public could unlock ­these same memories for contestation, appropriation, and intervention. Haunted Modernities tells a two-­pronged story about the politics of memory, mourning, and historical justice. On the one hand, it describes

The Death of ­Women Workers29

how mourning and commemoration are mediated through the materiality of space. On the other hand, it elucidates how the meaning of tragedy and loss is not determined solely by the living but rather by the communicative nature of the relationship between the living and the dead. ­People may be deceased, but they are not gone. Spirits are not simply a by-­product of social real­ity or a metaphysical manifestation of past wrongs; instead, they are meaningful players in the arrangement of the living world. They continue to engage in relations with the living. The (re)establishment of peace and order essential to residents of both this world and the afterworld hinges upon mutual understanding and close collaboration between them. The ghost stories presented in subsequent chapters, therefore, are not just ethnographic evidence of a “dif­fer­ent” culture based on spiritual beliefs that exist outside the Western Christian world (Langford 2013). They are indicative of the complex relationship between the constitution of individual subjectivity and the larger social collective. Haunting, in a negative sense, tells us much about ethical formations—­configurations of knowledge and practices through which ­people uphold a critical and formative relationship to themselves (Hatfield 2011, 78). Ghosts are power­ful in Taiwanese cosmology not simply ­because they can disrupt the flow of daily life or even cause punitive harm to living ­people. They are power­ful ­because they frequently incite the construction and transmission of accounts that are imbued with strong affect. As such, before embarking on a discussion of the multiplicity of mnemonic practices in the second part of this book, I explore in the next chapter the industrial structure of feeling in Taiwan’s economic formative years that ­shaped the real­ity ­people came to experience—­not as cold knowledge but as transformative recognition of a new way of living, of making a living, and of creating connections with one’s f­ amily and community.

Chapter 2

The Significance of Insignificant ­People

Please tell me, elder mister tilling farmland in the field, which way to the bustling metropolis of Taipei that every­body is talking about? I am a poor ­daughter who has no one to snuggle. I left my parents at a young age. I have nobody to help me with my ­future. What I know is that I want to be a factory worker in the city. That’s how I can console my sorrow borne out of my ill fate. Please tell me, big ­sister selling cigarettes on the roadside, is that the factory across the street that every­body is talking about? I see a note—­“Employee Wanted”—­that I ­will answer. You are of ­humble origins, you have nobody to help you, like me. What I know is we have to plan our own destinies. That’s how we can live our youth with no regret. Please tell me, elder mister guarding the office door, is this factory hiring new hands? I am young and I ­don’t know much. But have mercy for I am in a land of strangers and I know nobody. I ­will endure even if working for l­ittle money. What I know is I ­labor for my upcoming joy. I have faith one day life ­will be easy and happy. —­Yeh Chun-­lin, “A Lone Girl’s Dream”

F

irst released in 1958, “A Lone Girl’s Dream” (孤女的願望), a Taiwanese-­language pop song written by prominent lyricist Yeh Chun-­lin to the tune of a popu­lar Japa­nese song and sung by a nine-­year-­old singer, Chen Fen-­lan, became an instant hit. The song depicts a young girl, not much older than the singer herself, 30

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople31

who leaves her parents in the countryside to search for a factory job in the big city of Taipei. It tells of the journey of rural-­to-­urban migration, the anguish over lacking economic alternatives other than leaving home, the courage to actually do so, and the despair of dire poverty coupled with the optimism and self-­determination to triumph over it. All of t­hese captured the ethos of a society that was experiencing rapid industrialization and socioeconomic transformation (Chang Meng-­rui 2001). De­cades l­ater, the song continues to conjure strong emotions, especially among ­people who lived through that initial period of Taiwan’s economic takeoff. At a 2008 conference on Yeh Chun-­lin, the historian Li Hsiao-­feng told a story. He said once he was giving a lecture on the socioeconomic transformation of Taiwan in the 1960s on a college campus in Taipei, in which he employed “A Lone Girl’s Dream” as a part of his material: Professor Chao Ching-he [a historian who l­ater became the dean of the College of the Humanities at National Taiwan University of Arts] walked by the lecture hall amid my account of the historical background of “A Lone Girl’s Dream.” He immediately came in, sat down, and joined the audience for my lecture. Before my talk was over, Professor Chao began weeping. He said the song was the story of his big s­ ister, who sacrificed her own youth working in a factory and whose only wish was that her younger ­brother [Professor Chao himself] could devote himself to schoolwork without any worries. At the end of each working day, his ­sister would hum “A Lone Girl’s Dream” while dragging her worn-­out body home. Professor Chao said, “My big s­ ister, my third ­brother, and ­every Taiwanese who grew up u ­ nder the same [socioeconomic] circumstance all had the same experience. “A Lone Girl’s Dream” speaks to our collective memory. ­Every time I hear the song I am reminded of the tough life of my big ­sister, and I cannot help myself but burst into tears.” (Quoted in Kuo Shi-­cheng 2008)

The story relayed by Professor Li apparently struck a chord with fellow scholars at the conference. Professor Lü Hsing-­chung of National Cheng Kung University said that he had a similar story to share. Born into a poor farming f­ amily, he performed well in school. To support his education, his younger ­sister quit school herself and took on a factory job. He explained, “Listening to ‘A Lone Girl’s Dream’ always makes me think of my ­little ­sister, and it always makes me cry. Young ­people [who grow up in the affluence of con­temporary Taiwanese society] ­won’t understand

32Onset

the kind of caring, mutual support and sacrifice among siblings in t­ hose [impoverished] days” (quoted in Kuo Shi-­cheng 2008). I pre­sent t­ hese vignettes with three points in mind. First, if the transformation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb to the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers signaled the attempt to establish a historical legacy for the deceased ­women workers, that legacy could not be established by feminist activists or state actors alone. It had to engage ­others in a “community of memory” wherein practices of remembrance are contested, fashioned, and strengthened by ideas about the shared meaning of what has happened (Simon and Eppert 1997, 186). In this case the community of memory includes not only the families of the deceased but also the Taiwanese society at large. The story of the twenty-­five ­women—­their ­humble origins and their ethic of hard work—­resonated with the stories of many Taiwanese d ­ aughters and s­ isters who came of age in the early days of the country’s post–­World War II industrialization. Their premature deaths epitomized the ultimate sacrifice young Taiwanese w ­ omen could make for their families. Second, the vignettes show that the story of female factory workers was also inherently the story of their parents, ­brothers, and other (younger) ­sisters. However exploitative it was, factory work meant a lot to the workers and their families, as it contributed not only to the families’ material and financial well-­being but also to their everyday experience. Industrial systems are more than just systems of economic production. They are also systems of social production and reproduction. As Cindi Katz (1993, 94) explains, “The work of reproduction, which includes the production, provision and preparation of the means of existence; the production, sustenance and socialization of c­ hildren; and the production and exchange of social knowledge, is tied inextricably to the work of production and the social relations of production and reproduction that underlie it.” In essence, industrialism is “a way of life, a way of ­doing ­things” (Byrne 2002, 280). Third, industrialism is also a way of feeling the world, of understanding the possibilities of the pre­sent and the promise of the f­ uture. It is as much about affective as about social configurations. The materialities of factory experiences, the spatiotemporal imperatives of the working life, and the corresponding routines, procedures, and embodied habits of everyday existence are all impetus for an “industrial structure of feeling”— an elusive, impalpable form of social consciousness that gives notice to “the texture and skin of the this, ­here, now, alive, active contemporaneity” of workers’ lives (Gordon 2008, 198, 199; emphasis in the original)—­

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople33

which, in turn, shapes both workers’ personal and collective identities (Byrne 2002, 286). Yet strong emotions do not necessarily lead to equal relations. It is no accident that, in the vignettes, the professors profoundly moved by the “Lone Girl’s Dream” story ­were all male, while the siblings who labored to help them attaining their success w ­ ere mostly female. Webs of power relations are always implicated in the social constellations where the work of production and reproduction is carried out (Marston 2000, 234). Revealed in ­these vignettes is, therefore, a par­tic­u­lar division of l­abor between men and ­women in carry­ing out the work in the Taiwanese ­house­hold. It is part of the social contract, supported as much by the heartfelt gratitude of the male professors t­ oward their ­sisters as by the deep sorrows the parents bore for their ­daughters who died in Kaohsiung’s tragic ferry accident. Reciprocally, however, it is also t­ hese strong emotions that foreground p ­ eople’s attempts to patch up a broken social contract, as exemplified in the case of the twenty-­five ­women who never got a chance to marry, bear c­ hildren, grow old, and lead fulfilling lives. Building on the points highlighted above, this chapter aims to establish the significance of w ­ omen workers as an ethnographic focus and theoretical subject. It also aims to establish a context for the assorted memory works backed by the vari­ous stakeholders examined in the subsequent chapters. To ­these ends, I start with a discussion of how Taiwan has contributed to the lit­er­a­ture of global industrialism and how it continues to be impor­tant in the conversation about t­oday’s postindustrial environment. This is followed by an account of post–­World War II national (Taiwan), regional (Kaohsiung), and local (Cijin) socioeconomic development, outlining the circumstances ­under which ­women’s industrial ­labor became indispensable. The last two sections offer an ethnographic account of the everyday routines of young ­women workers at the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone (EPZ) and their families at home. Together they depict an industrial structure of feeling with which one can begin to understand what happened in the aftermath of the ferry accident in the early 1970s and what was happening—­and continues to happen—in postindustrial Taiwan half a c­ entury ­after the tragic accident.

Gender, Global Industrialization, and Taiwan Gender and global cap­i­tal­ist expansion is a well-­established area of academic interest and policy concern, and Taiwan has been at the forefront of the lit­er­a­ture. As one of the Four Asian Dragons, Taiwan had been a global manufacturing power­house. The manufacturing jobs created by

34Onset

the factories inside EPZs and elsewhere in Taiwan have not only contributed to the success of its export-­oriented economy but have also helped to bring employment opportunities to many families, especially t­hose with young ­daughters (Arrigo 1980; Diamond 1979; Kung 1994). The recruitment of young ­women into factory work was a welcome new development for farming families ­because their d ­ aughters ceased to be economic liabilities as they began to bring much needed cash income into the ­family. This is not to say that t­here w ­ ere no concerns about their personal safety or questions about the moral integrity of neophyte factory w ­ omen in their new working—­and social—­environment. Nevertheless, the skepticism and suspicion rarely mounted to the level of anxiety and vio­lence against working ­women that one witnessed elsewhere in the world. Quite the contrary, female industrial employment was quickly accepted in Taiwan, subsumed ­under the idea of working ­daughters as filial d ­ aughters. The incorporation of young ­women into Taiwan’s industrial workforce was not unique but part of a broader phenomenon of global industrialization, which has been shown to be a gendered pro­cess (Mills 2003). Ubiquitous in many parts of the world has been the employment of young ­women in the assembly line. However, the experiences of ­women workers around the globe do not appear to be monolithic. Ethnographic studies from dif­fer­ent regions indicate that global industrialization is also a pro­ cess of flexible accumulation that employs increasingly heterogeneous workforces and utilizes multiple modes of production (Harvey 1989). The variety of industrial situations linked to flexible accumulation have raised anew questions about workers’ relations with, and their responses to, cap­ i­tal­ist transformation (Cairoli 2012; Ching Kwan Lee 1998; Pun 2005; Salzinger 2003). Specifically, as ­women emerged to be the major ­labor force in global factories, models of regulation based on gender ideologies ­were developed to control ­labor. ­These ranged from direct despotic ­labor management in large firms (Fernandez-­ Kelly 1983; Seung-­ kyung Kim 1997; Ong 1987) to paternalistic control in small-­scale, family-­centered factories (Salaff 1995). Taiwan is a classic example of the latter, which is closely related to the country’s distinctive industrial structure. One of the core features of Taiwan’s export-­oriented economy is its dominance by small and medium enterprises (SMEs).1 In contrast to the centralized industrial structure in South K ­ orea—­a fellow Asian Dragon with a similar path of postwar politico-­economic development, but where factories often employ tens of thousands of workers in one establishment—­ the industrial system in Taiwan is highly decentralized, with networks of factories employing a few to a few hundred workers. At the peak of

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople35

Taiwan’s export industrialization, the system was dominated by domestic trading companies and principal plants, which directly traded with or received o ­ rders from foreign customers. Beneath the trading companies and principal plants ­were layers of subcontracting firms in vari­ous sizes and of dif­fer­ent technological levels, which produced dif­fer­ent components for specific products. Among subcontracting firms ­there ­were also vertical and horizontal relations of cooperation. A principal plant usually established relations with several subcontracting firms, and vice versa. ­There w ­ ere rarely permanent l­egal connections between principal plants and subcontracting firms; their relationship ceased whenever one side de­cided to terminate it. This system has proven effective in enabling Taiwanese manufacturers to be efficient, flexible, and globally competitive (Gereffi and Pan 1994). The vast number of subcontracting firms and their multilayered interdependence have sustained the stability of this industrial system. Known as “network capitalism” (Hefner 1998), this economic system is characterized by a preference for d ­ oing business based on personal relationships and trust, facilitated by an intricate web of social connections. It also entails a kind of labor-­management relationship that is more communal than confrontational. SMEs in Taiwan are often f­ amily oriented. Past lit­er­a­ture has pointed out that the ­family as a corporate unit to which ­family members contribute their l­abor and income, ­under the authority of the eldest male ­house­hold member, has been a key feature of the country’s dominant ideology. This was especially so in the heyday of Taiwan’s rural industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s (Cohen 1976; Harrell 1985; Niehoff 1987; Stites 1982, 1985). Accordingly, the role of young ­women within the f­amily made them an ideal source of l­abor in factories where ­family members constituted the backbone of the ­labor force (Gallin 1984; Greenhalgh 1994). They w ­ ere cheap b ­ ecause they ­were not paid or w ­ ere paid at a rate that was below market rates. They could be asked by their se­niors to work overtime when the factory was busy or to cut back on hours or not work at all when production was slow, thereby providing a highly flexible workforce beneficial to global competition. Even when young ­women ­were not working for their own families but employed by o ­ thers, their employers regularly called on localist loyalties—­ grounded on real or fictive “native place” or neighborhood connections—to entice their cooperation. In essence, kin obligations and place-­ based solidarities ­were drawn on to recruit and retain ­labor, control and discipline workers, resolve shop floor disputes and grievances, and quell potential l­abor conflicts and protests.

36Onset

The impact of Taiwan’s decentralized production system goes beyond economic efficiency, however. Also nurtured, if not engendered, in this production system was a sense of optimism and understanding of real­ity that both young Taiwanese men and w ­ omen possessed while pursuing upward social mobility. The phrase “black-­hand becoming boss” (hei shou bian tou jia 黑手變頭家) evokes an image familiar to the Taiwanese of a mechanic, his hands dirty and greasy from manual ­labor, who worked his way up to own a factory and become a boss himself (Shieh 1993). Although referring to a male subject, the phrase speaks to the widely shared belief that, in spite of one’s h ­ umble origin, as long as one worked hard and per­sis­tently, one would eventually achieve the dream of success. This dream was in the past substantiated by the rapid expansion of Taiwan’s export-­oriented industries, but it has become increasingly difficult to realize ­under current economic conditions (Anru Lee 2004, 23). Comparisons are frequently made between South ­Korea’s strong ­labor movement and its weak Taiwanese counterpart. While the centralized industrial structure with localized concentrations of workers is understood to be instrumental to the effective l­abor mobilizing and radical ­labor militancy in South ­Korea (Minns 2001), the decentralized industrial system is considered to have hindered the growth of the l­abor movement in Taiwan (Minns and Tierney 2003). Logistically, Taiwanese ­labor activists faced the immediate challenge of organ­izing workers in a large number of geo­graph­i­cally scattered small enterprises (Hwa-­Jen Liu 2015). They also had to overcome the ideology of upward social mobility associated with the black-­hand boss phenomenon and a l­abor regime deeply embedded in kin-­and community-­based social relations. Ultimately, ­labor activists in Taiwan w ­ ere confronted with an environment of muted class consciousness (Gallin 1990), wherein skilled and non-­skilled workers expected their manufacturing employment to be only a temporal and youthful stage in their life trajectories—­“part-­time proletariat,” as Gates (1979) called them—­and wherein young factory ­women’s gendered identity based on their familial roles took pre­ce­dence over their l­abor identity. This is by no means to suggest that Taiwanese factory ­women meekly complied with their f­amily obligations. The familial ideology employed to legitimize the subordination of ­women was also drawn upon by ­women themselves as a strategy to subvert their subordination (Anru Lee 2008, 2009). In addition, the agency of young Taiwanese ­women was articulated in their awareness of their own situation, even though some decisions they made might appear to be in accordance with the normative cultural ideology and against their personal interests.

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople37

In the case of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, the pre­ce­dence of gender over l­abor is revealed in the way the families of the deceased remember their female f­ amily members who died young (chapter 3). It is also shown in the fact that, despite the feminists’ efforts to stress the deceased’s work identity, it continues to be the gender and familial aspects of their life stories that touch a chord with the public (chapter 6). This, in turn, has affected how state actors planned policy agendas as well as strategized their implementations (chapter 5). Correspondingly, compared to the l­abor movement, the w ­ omen’s movement in Taiwan seems to have made greater headway both legally and po­liti­cally in recent years (chapter 4).2 Likewise, feminist c­ auses seem to have won wide support from the larger society (chapter 7).

Cijin, Kaohsiung: The Local Context Once I took a taxi heading from Chung-­chou to meet a friend near the Kaohsiung EPZ. While driving through the Kaohsiung Cross-­Harbor Tunnel, my driver, a Cijin local, asked me what brought me to the island. ­After I told her that I was ­doing research on recent changes in Cijin, she said, “We used to be the head of a dragon [referring to the days when Cijin was a peninsula connected to Kaohsiung]. But the neck was cut off. Now the head is severed from the rest of the body and it is lifeless.” The development of Cijin is closely connected to the development of Kaohsiung as a key port u ­ nder a succession of po­liti­cal regimes. It is a story of how space is constructed as a part of capital accumulation by state policy (colonial or other­wise). Situated on the west coast of Taiwan and facing mainland China across the Taiwan Strait, Cijin was the first part of the Kaohsiung area settled by Han Chinese. The lagoon between the peninsula of Cijin and the main island of Taiwan formed a natu­ral harbor. As such, the Qing imperial court set up a fort and military station to take advantage of this strategic location. This was followed by civilian settlements, and city street life gradually emerged in Cijin (Huang Chi-­cheng 2007, 1). In 1858 the Qing dynasty lost the Second Opium War to the British and French co­ali­tion and signed the Treaties of Tianjin, ­under which the Qing government was asked to open five Chinese ports for foreign trade. Kaohsiung (then Takao, 打狗) was one of the five treaty ports and was officially opened to Western traders in 1864. To facilitate trade, the Qing government established a custom­house branch in Cijin; merchants also instituted trading offices. U ­ nder t­ hese circumstances, Cijin was formally incorporated into the global trading system. It was

38Onset

quickly transformed from a small fishing village into a fishing-­military-­ commercial hub, and downtown Cijin became the central business district of Kaohsiung in the late Qing period (Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 6). Nevertheless, fishing remained to be the principal means of living outside downtown Cijin, especially on the southern tip of the peninsula where Chung-­chou Village is located (Huang Chi-­cheng 2007, 1). The fate of Cijin took a dramatic turn when the Qing government ceded Taiwan to the Japa­nese in 1895 ­after losing the First Sino-­Japanese War. Taiwan was a colony of high economic and military value in the expanding Japa­nese empire. Starting in the early Japa­nese era, the colonial government began to undertake large infrastructure proj­ects to develop Kaohsiung into a modern harbor. This was to support the export of sugar—­the most impor­tant cash crop—­and other agricultural products from southern Taiwan to the metropole of Japan. ­Later, Kaohsiung was also to be an impor­tant military base for the Japa­nese Imperial Army’s southward advancement, especially ­after the onset of the Pacific War in 1941. To accomplish t­ hese goals, the Japa­nese colonial government dredged the Kaohsiung Port (1904–1907) and built the Kaohsiung Harbor in three stages (1908–1912, 1912–1937, and 1937–1945). Concurrently, the Japa­nese worked out detailed urban plans to transform Kaohsiung into a modern city. They constructed roads and railways to connect Kaohsiung with the surrounding regions and the rest of Taiwan, set up modern amenities such as electricity and ­running ­water, and established the gridiron of streets. By the early 1930s the Japa­nese also built up industrial infrastructure, including steel plants and oil refineries around the port area. ­These changes w ­ ere mixed blessings for Cijin. On the one hand, Cijin had the highest population growth rate between 1904 and 1912 in the region due to the influx of a large number of laborers working on the construction of the Kaohsiung Harbor. On the other hand, the city center also began to shift eastward from Cijin to Yanchengpu on the mainland side of the Kaohsiung Harbor to accommodate the ­people and activities brought in by the newer and larger port (Tu 2018, 102–103). As a consequence of t­ hese developments, Cijin was no longer geo­graph­ i­cally centrally positioned. It lost its significance as a commercial center and began to rely heavi­ly on fishing for its local economy, particularly at the southern part of the peninsula. The effort to transform Kaohsiung into an industrial hub continued ­after World War II, when the defeated Japa­nese turned over Taiwan to victorious China, at the time represented by Chiang Kai-­shek’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT). Taiwan’s postwar economic growth

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople39

was driven primarily by the expansion of manufacturing exports a­ fter 1960, and is commonly divided into three stages: the import-­substitution industrialization of the 1960s; the export-­oriented industrialization of the 1970s; and the development of high-­tech industries in the 1980s (Hsu and Cheng 2002, 898). Equipped with port facilities and other infrastructure from the Japa­nese period, Kaohsiung quickly developed into a manufacturing center in the postwar era, and its status r­ ose along with Taiwan’s rapid industrialization. Up to the 1990s Taiwan’s central government launched six major Kaohsiung Harbor–­related proj­ects, including the Second Port (1967–1975), which made Cijin an inshore subsidiary island severed from the rest of Kaohsiung, and the Kaohsiung Cross-­Harbor Tunnel (1981–1984), which reestablished land transportation (especially for container trucks) between Cijin and other parts of the city. The petrochemical industry is representative of Taiwan’s postwar industrialization, and it took off in the 1970s in Kaohsiung (Hsu and Cheng 2002, 902–903). Based on the industrial infrastructure founded by the Japa­nese, the Taiwanese government built the country’s first naphtha cracking plant in the Kaohsiung Harbor area in 1968, followed by a second plant in 1971. ­After the 1973 oil crisis the central government introduced the Ten Major Construction Proj­ects to upgrade Taiwan’s industrial capacity. Three of ­these ten proj­ects—­the China Steel Corporation, the China Shipbuilding Corporation’s large shipyard, and the China Petroleum Corporation’s third naphtha cracking plant and oil refinery (all Taiwan-­state-­owned enterprises at the time)—­were located in Kaohsiung. Concurrently, to h ­ ouse the huge number of factories in the rapidly expanding downstream export sector, the government designated vari­ous plots of land on the fringe of metropolitan Kaohsiung to be used as industrial zones. ­These included the Jen-wu Ta-­she industrial park in the northeast of Kaohsiung City, the Tainan scrap metal industrial park in the north, the Lin-­yuan petrochemical industrial park in the south, and the Niao-song industrial park (with a concentration of leather-­tanning factories) in the east. In the early 1990s t­ here ­were approximately six thousand registered industrial plants in Kaohsiung, with an average of sixty to eighty firms per square kilo­meter. This number was far higher than the average of five to ten factories per square kilo­meter found in other parts of Taiwan. Ultimately, Kaohsiung became a base for container logistic centers, steel plants, shipyards, shipbreaking facilities, scrap metal plants, cement mining and pro­cessing plants, and petrochemical plants. Most of ­these industries create a g­ reat deal of pollution and have had significant environmental impact on Kaohsiung City, including Cijin (Lü 2009).3

40Onset

In addition to the aforementioned heavy industries, the Kaohsiung EPZ was established in 1966  in the Cianjhen District (geo­graph­i­cally close to the southern part of Cijin) to attract direct foreign investment in labor-­intensive light industries. The first of its kind in the world, the Kaohsiung EPZ provided the basic infrastructure, facilities, and amenities of an industrial zone while offering the benefits of a f­ ree trade zone, including incentives such as tax and business regulation exemptions. At that time Taiwan was facing the challenges of government financial difficulties, foreign reserves shortages, an increasing population, and a high unemployment rate. The primary objective of the EPZ was, therefore, to channel idle or underutilized l­abor from the surrounding agricultural areas into export-­oriented industrial activities. It appeared to be a huge success. In less than three years, the Kaohsiung EPZ had reached its capacity, and the Taiwanese government quickly established two more EPZs (the Nanzih EPZ in northern Kaohsiung in 1969 and the Tanzi EPZ in central Taiwan in 1970) to accommodate more foreign companies. The ample supply of quality low-­wage ­labor (with universal basic education) was a major ­factor in this success. According to government statistics for 1968, 65.6 ­percent of the EPZ workers made between 600 and 900 Taiwanese dollars per month (the minimum monthly wage in Taiwan was 600 dollars)—­roughly one-­third of the wage for comparable work in Japan and one-­fourteenth of the wage in the United States. Given that Taiwanese workers had longer working days, the hourly wage was actually lower: one-­fourth of the wage in Japan and one twenty-­second of the wage in the United States (Liu Ching-­ching 1992).4 Indeed, an article published in the Wall Street Journal in 1969 reported that, for American industrial manufacturers seeking to avoid high ­labor costs and strict regulations at home, Taiwan’s EPZs ­were emerging as ideal alternative production sites.5 Cijin was neither the direct concern of the Taiwanese state’s harbor enhancement proj­ects nor the target of its industrial policy. Yet both of ­these have had a profound impact on the natu­ral environment of Cijin and the lives of its residents. Spatially, the state policies, especially ­those concerning the expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor over the years, have greatly affected the settlement pattern of Cijin (Tsai 2016; Tu 2018).6 Financially, fishing had been a major source of revenue in the local economy, even though it often produced only a meager and unstable income. Along with fishing came shipbuilding and other economic activities (fishing boats and gear maintenance and repair, provisioning ser­vices, and fish ­handling and transport) essential to the fishing industry. Encouraged

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople41

by the Japa­nese, shipbuilding had been a thriving industry since the colonial period. By the end of World War II, ­there ­were four government-­ owned and fourteen private shipbuilding companies in Cijin that produced small and medium fishing boats, catering to the need of local fishermen (Tu 2018, 113–114). Accordingly, fishing and shipbuilding employed the largest number of (male) laborers in Cijin in the early postwar de­cades. A few local families also engaged in offshore aquaculture, raising clams and/or oysters along the Cijin coast. Fish stocks ­were depleted over time, however—­partly ­because of overfishing but primarily b ­ ecause of the expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor (which greatly reduced the extent of local fishing grounds) and the growth of Kaohsiung’s industrial sector (which polluted the already diminishing fisheries). What is more, since the 1960s the Cijin coast had been the only place in Taiwan that allowed l­egal dumping of industrial waste, notably carbide slag from Formosa Plastics Corporation, a ­giant petrochemical com­pany. Also known as calcium carbide residue, carbide slag is a solid waste generated from the industrial production of ethylene, polyvinyl chloride, and other petrochemical products. It has no value for recovery or recycling and is commonly used for landfill. Cijin is a long, skinny island (figure 1.1) whose coast is lined with natu­ral sandbars. In its attempt to enlarge the size of Cijin while solving the prob­lem of industrial waste, the Kaohsiung City government dumped carbide slag along the island’s shore. However, carbide slag is, chemically, a strong base, and as a result, instead of helping to expand the coast, it caused it to erode. In addition to carbide slag, a recent survey by Kaohsiung-­based environmental groups also discovered, among other ­things, asphalt and discarded tires along the Cijin shore. Industrial waste dumping greatly changed Cijin’s offshore marine ecol­ogy, leading to severe erosion of the coast and the disappearance of offshore fisheries. It also turned Cijin’s soft beach into a gray pit. Access to the beach has been significantly circumscribed b ­ ecause of the large wave-­eliminating blocks stacked along the shore. Moreover, Chung-­chou Village has been the site of the largest sewage treatment plant in metropolitan Kaohsiung since 1987. Offshore fishing—­and aquaculture—­was no longer a v­ iable source of income u ­ nder ­these circumstances. Gone with fishing was the need for fishing boats and, by extension, shipbuilding. Cijin’s shipbuilding industry went into further decline as the thriving China Shipbuilding Corporation took business away from Cijin’s local companies. Consequently, many shipbuilding workers returned to the sea as offshore fishermen or sailors on deep-­sea fishing boats or sought a

42Onset

land-­bound living, particularly in manufacturing on the other side of the Kaohsiung Cross-­Harbor Tunnel. The number of local residents gradually dwindled as a result of outmigration. The population of Cijin began to show negative growth a­ fter 1971, while the overall number of Kaohsiung City residents was increasing (­table 2.1). Relatedly, by the 1970s Cijin had the lowest level of educational attainment among all the administrative districts of Kaohsiung (­tables 2.2 and 2.3; Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 105–106, 148–150). ­There ­were two likely reasons for this. First, out of economic necessity, ­people might have to leave school early—­mostly a­ fter elementary or ju­nior high school—to join the wage ­labor market to help their families financially. Second, ­those who ­were able to attain a higher education degree might choose to move out of Cijin ­because they could not find good jobs locally (Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 104).

Modernity on the Fringe At the time when offshore fishing was the most impor­tant economic activity in Cijin, the ­house­hold division of l­abor was arranged around the daily routine of fishing. Men would go out fishing in the early morning, and ­women would get up around midnight to cook for their husbands and grown-up sons so that they would have something to eat before they ­Table 2.1. ​Population of Cijin, 1946–2006 Year

Population of Cijin

Population of Kaohsiung City

Percentage (Cijin / Kaohsiung City)

1946 1951 1956 1961 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006

11,803 16,497 20,228 25,373 30,100 35,223 37,092 36,136 34,446 34,487 32,023 30,872 30,158

132,166 285,742 371,225 491,602 632,662 871,824 1,019,900 1,227,454 1,320,552 1,396,425 1,433,621 1,494,457 1,514,706

8.93% 5.77% 5.45% 5.16% 4.67% 4.04% 3.64% 2.95% 2.61% 2.47% 2.23% 2.07% 1.99%

Source: Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 97, 144.

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople43

­Table 2.2. ​Educational Attainment in Cijin, 1947–1971

Year

Population of Cijin

College and Above No. (%)

1946 1951 1956 1961 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006

12,841 16,497 20,228 25,373 30,100 35,223 37,092 36,136 34,446 34,487 32,023 30,872 30,158

28 (0.22%) 86 (0.52%) 87 (0.43%) 105 (0.41%) 161 (0.53%) 328 (0.93%) 489 (1.32%) 703 (1.95%) 339 (2.88%) 1,589 (4.61%) 1,244 (3.88%) 2,811 (9.11%) 4,448 (14.75%)

High School No. (%)

Elementary School No. (%)

Less than Elementary School No. (%)

364 (2.83%) 809 (4.90%) 916 (4.53%) 1,477 (5.82%) 2,196 (7.30%) 3,472 (9.86%) 7,544 (20.34%) 9,782 (27.07%) 11,821 (34.32%) 14,511 (42.08%) 14,330 (44.73%) 12,985 (42.06%) 13,226 (43.86%)

3,915 (30.49%) 4,353 (26.39%) 5,977 (29.55%) 6,781 (26.73%) 9,489 (31.52%) 9,975 (28.32%) 16,861 (45.46%) 15,064 (41.69%) 14,691 (42.65%) 12,830 (37.20%) 11,830 (36.93%) 8,126 (26.32%) 6,701 (22.22%)

5,762 (44.87%) 7,337 (44.47%) 7,510 (37.13%) 4,556 (17.96%) 4,464 (14.83%) 4,212 (11.96%) 4,063 (10.95%) 3,238 (8.96%) 2,760 (8.01%) 2,264 (6.56%) 1,876 (5.86%) 1,389 (4.5%) 973 (3.23%)

Source: Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 105–106, 148–150.

started out, as well as something to take with them to eat when out at the sea. Fishermen usually came home in the after­noon, and their on-­land time was occupied with tasks such as cleaning up the catches, maintaining their boats and repairing their fishing nets, and selling their fish on the market. In conjunction with the economic activity of fishing was the increasing need for fishing boats, which led to the development of the shipbuilding industry. Shipbuilding was the most impor­tant source of employment outside the primary economic sector in Cijin both ­under Japa­nese rule and throughout the post–­World War II period ­until the 1990s. Local men choosing not to fish would likely choose work in a shipbuilding factory (Huang Chi-­cheng 2007). ­Women, on the other hand, spent most of their time cooking, ­doing domestic chores, ­running errands, and taking care of c­ hildren (Tu 2015, 42). Some of them w ­ ere also involved in local aquaculture, harvesting clams or oysters for ­others for pay and for their own families. ­There was not much ­else for ­women to do outside their h ­ ouse­holds, even though many of them might have wanted to take on paid work to supplement f­ amily incomes. Indeed, the lack of alternative economic prospects was not an isolated phenomenon in Cijin but a general situation affecting most of Taiwan outside the urban areas in the 1960s. In the countryside, where

57,188 (31.13%)

117,459 (32.82%)

46,542 (28.02%)

8,429 (28.64%)

11,513 (37.97%)

22,710 (39.111%)

68,857 (36.26%)

55,340 (27.58%)

35,803 (23.83%)

30,158

183,705

357,862

166,101

29,426

30,325

58,067

189,820

200,660

150,223

Cijin (旗津) Zuoying (左營) Sanmin (三民) Nanzih (楠梓) Yancheng (鹽埕) Cianjin (前金) Sinsing (新興) Lingya (苓雅) Cianjhen (前鎮) Siaogang (小港)

Source: Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 150.

4,448 (14.75%)

Population

District

College and Above No. (%)

63,184 (42.06%)

79,479 (39.61%)

69,232 (36.47%)

21,120 (36.37%)

11,095 (36.59%)

11,867 (40.33%)

65,739 (39.58%)

134,290 (37.53%)

67,007 (36.48%)

13,226 (43.86%)

High School No. (%)

­Table 2.3. ​Educational Attainment by District in Kaohsiung City, 2006

18,868 (12.56%)

28,422 (14.16%)

20,834 (10.98%)

5,519 (9.50%)

3,515 (11.59%)

4,234 (14.39%)

17,768 (10.70%)

39,546 (11.05%)

18,241 (9.93%)

6,701 (22.22%)

Elementary School No. (%)

4,209 (2.80%)

3,440 (1.71%)

2,500 (1.32%)

543 (0.94%)

437 (1.44%)

468 (1.59%)

2,622 (1.58%)

2,135 (0.60%)

2,134 (1.16%)

973 (3.23%)

Less than Elementary School No. (%)

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople45

farming was the mainstay of ­house­hold economies, girls who stayed home could only help out with domestic or agricultural chores. ­There was much work to be done, but ­there was l­ittle cash in return. Even in urban areas t­here ­were l­imited employment opportunities. Due to the fact that young rural ­women often had only the six years of compulsory education, and sometimes less, ­those seeking paid work in cities frequently found jobs in the lower echelon of the ­labor market, such as in domestic ser­vice, making a few hundred Taiwanese dollars per month. Some lucky ones, usually with a higher level of education and/or pretty ­faces, worked as retail store salesclerks or bus and train conductors—­ tertiary sector occupations seen as “modern, progressive and fash­ion­ able” in a slowly emerging consumer society. Another popu­lar option was to “learn a skill”—in par­tic­u­lar, dressmaking. At a time when garment factories ­were rare, knowing how to sew, embroider, or mend appeared to be an appealing choice for moneymaking. Even in a garment factory, where the division of ­labor was not as elaborate as on con­ temporary shop floors, workers needed to have some tailoring skills in order to be qualified for the jobs (Yang Qing-­chu 1978). Young girls often acquired the skill of dressmaking through a few years of apprenticeship, a period of hard ­labor and meager pay. It was a time of endurance, and not every­body succeeded in overcoming the hardships. Although the spatial transformation engendered by Kaohsiung’s rapid industrial development devastated Cijin’s marine ecol­ogy and economy, it also—­ironically—­opened up new employment opportunities for local residents. Specifically, young ­women ­were finding jobs in the Kaohsiung EPZ on the other side of the expanded Kaohsiung Harbor (­table 2.4). At the national level, the establishment of the Kaohsiung EPZ indicated a turning point in Taiwan’s ­labor force participation. In the short ten years ­after their establishment, the three earliest EPZs (Kaohsiung, Nanzih, and Tanzi) employed nearly seventy thousand workers. Eighty-­five ­percent of t­hese workers w ­ ere female, and the majority of them between the ages of fifteen and twenty-­four. By the late 1960s Taiwan was no longer an agricultural society; its economy was now based in manufacturing. From 1966 to 1981, the portion of ­people working in the primary sector dropped from 44.53 ­percent to 18.4 ­percent, whereas ­those involved in the secondary sector increased from 24.7 ­percent to 44 ­percent. The percentage of w ­ omen was rising faster than that of men, and the Kaohsiung EPZ, characterized by mass production and cheap ­labor, embodied this structural transformation. From the onset of Taiwan’s postwar industrialization, w ­ omen’s l­abor was never complementary but a

M F M F M F M F M F M F M F

1947

Source: Lai 2010, 50.

1975

1971

1966

1961

1956

1951

Sex

Year

252 25 406 1 3 2 14 26 36 89 4 0 0 0

No. of ­ eople in P Agriculture

750 0 895 28 980 51 1,024 37 987 20

No. of ­People in Fishing 686 8 648 1 667 6 879 13 1,074 30 1,094 407 1,169 665

No. of ­ People in Manufacturing

­Table 2.4. ​Types of Occupation by Gender in Cijin, 1947–1975

200 19 271 15 221 15 225 17 231 14 209 179 223 227

No. of ­ People in Commerce 109 0 403 2 381 6 333 10 318 11 280 4 547 55

No. of ­ People in Transportation

5 2,185 9 2,492 2 2,361

No. of ­ People in Home Management

1042 2206 1419 2595 449 655 699 728 975 1225

No. of ­ People Unemployed

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople47

stable and indispensable part of the workforce. ­People reminiscing about ­those early years always mention how each morning the wide boulevard leading to the front gate of the Kaohsiung EPZ was always jammed with the bicycles—­and, ­later, motorcycles—of p ­ eople rushing to work. As one former worker remembered, “It was so densely packed, like an invasion of locusts. What one could see was only the back of the head of the person right in front of you” (quoted in Ke 2006). The rapidly expanding EPZs soon exhausted the l­abor supply in Kaohsiung, and the need for workers quickly led to the launching of mass recruitment campaigns in rural towns and counties around Kaohsiung City. In the early stages of EPZ operation, tour buses w ­ ere sent out into the countryside, offering ­free transportation for workers to commute to and from the EPZs. ­These campaigns w ­ ere quickly replaced by the technique of recruiting workers directly from ju­nior high schools. In this pro­ cess, school officials w ­ ere often paid off to “recommend” students to factory employers. L ­ ater, girls from some ju­nior high schools w ­ ere graduated months ahead of time so that they could meet the ­labor demand of companies inside the EPZs and nearby factories (Fitting 1982, 737–738). The tender age of ­these neophyte workers made them susceptible to a ­labor regime based on traditional social hierarchies and gender roles in the workplace. The factory management often assumed both the position of authority regarding discipline, as if managing student conduct, and of guardian, to intervene as if instilling familial moral values. The impact of this new wave of employment was far reaching. The monthly wages that ­these young ­women (and men) brought home from their manufacturing jobs quickly became a regular and reliable income for their families. Along with the regular income was an improvement of material life, repayment of debt owed from previous poor fishing or farming seasons, and ultimately a surplus for savings. ­Women’s industrial wages as a new kind of revenue had a breakthrough effect on the consumer markets. On the one hand, young ­women spent a small part of their incomes to cover their everyday essentials (food and lodging) and other items (clothing, cosmetics, and leisure expenses). On the other hand, the majority of their earnings went to their parents, immediately enhancing their families’ ability to consume and stimulating the market for ­house­hold appliances, food, entertainment, and other products. Past lit­er­a­ture has also pointed out the impor­tant contribution of private domestic savings to Taiwan’s postwar economic development, which financed most of the industrial investment in the private sector nationwide (Samuel P. S. Ho 1978). At the ­house­hold level, the surplus was used to

48Onset

fund the education of b ­ rothers or younger siblings, both male and female. It was also the savings collected from young workers’ wages over time that became the primary asset when a ­family’s sons ­were ready to start ­careers or their own businesses. In effect, EPZs played a crucial role in employment and cash income generation in this early stage of Taiwan’s economic growth, and this paved the way for the building of technological know-­how and the accumulation of venture capital essential to the development of SMEs in l­ater years. While studying the impact of urban industrial employment on young ­women mi­grants from the countryside of Thailand, Mary Beth Mills (1999, 39) highlights the clear yet often overlooked fact that, in spite of low wages, harsh l­abor discipline, and unhealthy working conditions, young ­women around the globe enter and stay in new types of employment not solely for the money earned but also to achieve more complex social goals. They use the enhanced autonomy given by wage earning to attain standards of modernity in their own right, often through participation in new patterns of consumption that transform them from ­simple industrial workers into modern, sophisticated consumers (Mills 2003, 49). Similarly, in Taiwan the EPZs ­were not just about economic gains but also represented a pathway to a dif­fer­ent life course by moving young ­women out of traditional unpaid ­house­work into paid industrial ­labor. Such a pathway implied a departure from the traditional agricultural (or fishing) way of life characterized by immutable routines, entrenched habits, and ­limited ­future prospects. That the Kaohsiung EPZ was an epitome of modernity was captured in the words of two former workers featured in Ke Wan-­ching’s (2006) documentary Tamen de gushi: Shengchanxianshang de rongyan (The lost youth: ­Women and industrial work in Taiwan). Ms. Wang and Ms. Lin both grew up in the countryside outside Kaohsiung City. Both of them came to work at the Kaohsiung EPZ, for dif­fer­ent companies, when they ­were young and single. They got married, stayed on, and bought ­houses near the EPZ to raise their families. They are now neighbors. In the documentary Ms. Wang speaks enthusiastically about how her elder b ­ rother took her and her s­ ister to plead with the man­ag­er of an EPZ com­pany for employment, to which Ms. Lin responds readily, commenting on Ms. Wang’s hard-­won, poorly paid job: Ms. Lin: At that time every­body tilled the land for a living. It was a huge excitement if one got a job [outside agriculture]. Shang-­ban [上班, ­going to work]. That’s what we called it. It was a phrase that brought g­ reat joy!

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople49

Ms. Wang: Totally! ­Going to work was such a glorious ­thing. Ms. Lin: How true! P ­ eople always said to my mom, “Did you say your ­daughter worked at the EPZ?” with won­der and a pinch of jealousy. (Quoted in Ke 2006)

The positive sentiment ­toward the Kaohsiung EPZ uttered by Ms. Wang and Ms. Lin was not only found among young ­women of a ­humble rural upbringing but also among t­ hose of other social strata in urban ­areas. Ms. Chang expressed as much in her life story, as narrated in Hsiao I-­ling’s (2014) Jinchaiji: Cianjhen jiagongqu nüxing laogong de koushu jiyi (Biographies of beautiful ­women: Oral histories of Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone female workers). The experience of Ms. Chang was distinctive but not unique. She came from a middle-­class ­family background. Her f­ather was a military physician, and she had a high school diploma. She makes it clear at the onset of her story that she did not work at the EPZ b ­ ecause her f­amily needed the money but ­because of the attraction she had for the EPZ itself: When asked about where they worked, many of my neighbors began to glow immediately ­because they worked at the EPZ. . . . ​Students [gradu­ates] used to have nothing to do but sit around at home all day. But, one by one, they started working at the EPZ. All of a sudden, my playmates ­were nowhere to be seen. “What is ­going on?” I was thinking, “What is this EPZ that it is such a big attraction?” I started developing a yearning for the place. ­Later I came to know someone who worked at the EPZ. She suggested that I give it a try. At the time, I was picturing that the EPZ was like a ­house or a [single] factory. But the person said, oh no, t­ here ­were tens—if not hundreds—of factories at the EPZ and they ­were all for dif­fer­ent ­things. I still had a hard time imagining what it could look like. Only when a neighbor gave me a tour on his motorcycle did I realize how big the place was. Oh gosh, what an innocent girl I was. (Quoted in Hsiao 2014, 105)

Young w ­ omen who left home for the first time to join the wage l­abor market ­were constantly awed by the g­ rand scale of the Kaohsiung EPZ. They ­were also attracted by the sound management system of EPZ firms, even though the jobs might not pay as much as t­hose (industrial or other­ wise) outside the EPZ. This usually referred to a relative transparency in

50Onset

firm structure, a division of ­labor and authority, and expectations for workers and rewards for meeting t­hose expectations. It also referred to a firm’s obligations ­toward its workers, especially when compared to private, family-­owned businesses outside the EPZ where the boss and his or her f­amily called the shots about how their com­pany should be run and how their employees should be treated (and hired or fired). Also frequently mentioned by workers ­were the EPZ’s air-­conditioned shop floors and immaculate work environment. In addition, the Export Pro­cessing Zone Administration—­the government agency that oversees the day-­to-­day operation of Taiwan’s industrial parks—­has since the establishment of the Kaohsiung EPZ run a series of employee benefit programs that provide health care, food, housing, entertainment, and other ser­vices to shop floor workers. Specifically, two dormitories w ­ ere completed in 1975 that could accommodate more than two thousand female workers. Si­mul­ta­neously, one large canteen was built that allowed five hundred p ­ eople to dine at the same time. (Over the years the EPZ added more canteens, and each of the firms also had its own cafeteria to serve its employees.) Additionally, the Export Pro­ cessing Zone Administration and individual companies hosted leisure activities such as sightseeing or mountaineering trips. They also sponsored recreational events including fun fairs, movie nights, traditional opera per­for­mances, sports games, and assorted competitions (current event trivia quizzes, bridge games, photography and creative writing contests, and the like; see Shen Mei-­tzi 1980). ­These ser­vices and facilities ­were not offered simply to benefit workers, however. Dormitories for single ­women met the need for living arrangements among the large number of factory workers who came from out of town. Having dormitory facilities in the industrial park helped to attract ­people from farther away, thus expanding the EPZ’s l­abor pool. Moreover, according to the Factory Act at the time, female workers could not be asked to work overtime into the night u ­ nless dormitories w ­ ere provided. The existence of w ­ omen’s dormitories, therefore, enabled the extension of their working hours, which was crucial to both employers and Taiwan’s developmental state (Chen Ting-­chien 2016). The rules and routines of the dormitory also helped to discipline workers beyond the shop floor, and the vari­ous EPZ-­ sponsored activities helped to occupy their time a­ fter work. Happy and healthy workers w ­ ere also workers capable of high productivity. Overtime work—­often lasting as long as a w ­ hole second shift—­was a constant in ­those years. It was hard and physically debilitating, and workers knew it and they suffered through it. But they did not object. In

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople51

a time of general poverty, the more work you did, the more money you made. Likewise, the fact that the Export Pro­cessing Zone Administration (or individual firms inside the EPZ) built the dormitories and other related facilities for not entirely selfless purposes did not make ­these ser­ vices less significant to workers. The dormitories provided an inexpensive, safe, and clean living arrangement for young factory ­women who ­were away from home. It also created an environment wherein young workers could socialize and support each other. Equally, the huge canteen was a novelty. Pearl, a former industrial worker, reminisced about her experience at the EPZ: The most fun part of shang-­ban [­going to work] was that you got to stand in line at the dining hall and choose what­ever dishes you wanted to eat for lunch. . . . ​The EPZ was filled with factory buildings lined up side by side; in between them w ­ ere the cafeterias. But, gee, they w ­ ere so far apart that it took a long walk just for us to get from one building to another. You know, we came from somewhere that had nothing. The EPZ was so big, and it was full of new ­things [that I ­didn’t know before]. (Quoted in Hung 2010, 60)

The work at the Kaohsiung EPZ had allowed workers to eat well as regards both the quantity of food and the variety of dishes. It was a ­great improvement from their lives at home, where meals ­were hard to come by and served irregularly. This was another reason why ­women workers born to poor farming or fishing families often spoke favorably about their jobs at the EPZ.

It Is All for the F ­ amily For Taiwan’s first-­generation industrial workers, EPZs offered them a stable job opportunity. The scale of EPZs and the working (and living) environment inside an EPZ represented a modern lifestyle that differed greatly from their rural way of living. To a certain degree, EPZ employment also gave them the freedom and autonomy to lead lives of their own. Yet we should not rush to characterize t­ hese gains as personal liberation. Even though such changes often had the result of engendering a new sense of self and community for the workers, they did not bear the effect of challenging the capital’s hegemony but indicated a shift in ­women workers’ role from productive laborers to consumers. More critically, too often the issue of liberalization is depicted as an issue of individual workers

52Onset

versus their patriarchal families. The families’ gains from young ­women’s industrial wages are considered as young ­women’s losses, and the changes in the ­women’s lives are seen as against the families’ interests. Implied ­here is a dichotomous public/private analytical framework, which assumes that young w ­ omen’s wage l­abor participation outside the home gives them the currency to assert an agency that is unlikely to be attained in the home environment or h ­ ouse­hold economy. Yet, time and again, former EPZ workers explained that participating in the industrial wage ­labor market has nothing to do with individual freedom, and that personal achievements do not have to conflict with ­family priorities. They also constantly remind us that to characterize their individual undertakings as a m ­ atter of personal choice—or the lack thereof—is not necessarily wrong but certainly insufficient. The complex feelings many had t­ oward their own situations often came to the fore when I asked former workers—or the families of deceased workers—­why they had chosen to work at the Kaohsiung EPZ. Regularly, p ­ eople politely explained to me that it was due to economic necessity: “If I work, I have money. If I d ­ on’t work, I ­don’t have money. It’s as s­ imple as that.” From time to time, however, I would get an answer like, “Duh! What ­else do you want to do? Sit on your butt at home all day ­every day?” In short, choice or not, one did what one had to do. Young w ­ omen opted to work at the EPZ ­because their families needed money to make ends meet. Likewise, many of them made the decision not to continue their education for the reason that their families could not afford to keep them in school. (It is impor­tant to note, however, that many workers went to night school and continued their education l­ater in life. They paid for their own tuitions using their wages from working full-­time at the EPZ.) Ms. Chu, featured in the documentary Tamen de gushi, told a typical story. Her f­amily lived on the periphery of Kaohsiung City. They did not own any land. Her f­ ather was chronically ill with tuberculosis and could not take on too much work. Her m ­ other was the only one who made money to support the ­family. To explain why she de­cided to stop schooling at an early age, Ms. Chu explained, I often think of my m ­ other, who has had the toughest life. She was toiling all the time, day and night. [To find paid work,] my m ­ other had to go to the countryside, helping farmers harvesting rice and growing beans. I am the eldest child and I have four younger siblings. In t­hose days, ­people d ­ idn’t have much of a choice for food but to eat a lot of rice. [With many mouths to feed,] we ran out rice quickly. [­After elementary

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople53

school,] I told my m ­ other that I wanted to make money; I d ­ idn’t want to go to ju­nior high. I was very young then, but I always had my f­ amily’s needs in my mind. (Quoted in Ke 2006)

Much of the lit­er­at­ ure on gender and global industrialization in Chinese socie­ties, including my own, interrogates the “­family question”—­ that is, how patrilineal ideology has worked in sync with cap­i­tal­ist logic to ensure the smooth operation of capital accumulation while preserving the collective well-­being of the f­amily. In spite of the gender in­ equality—­notably, the disparity in resource distribution—­I would continue to argue that the ­family is imperative ­because it puts one’s efforts into context and gives meaning and significance to one’s accomplishments. To answer the rhetorical question with which Stevan Harrell titles his article, “Why Do Chinese Work So Hard?” (1985), which based on his research in Taiwan: they work hard for the security and prosperity of their families. In Cijin, which had widespread poverty, the bond between a ­daughter and her f­amily was most often manifested in the devotion of the former to the economic well-­being of the latter. For neophyte factory ­women and their families, the Kaohsiung EPZ represented more than a job opportunity; it embodied their longing for a better and more abundant life. Kao Mao, whose eldest s­ ister Kao Ah-yu died in the ferry accident, called the EPZ “our jumping board.” He explained that young ­people in Cijin looking for an alternative life would have to go to Kaohsiung, and their first stop was usually the EPZ. “­There you learned how to deal with the city. As soon as you knew the city, you moved on!” (quoted in Tu 2015, 51). Yet moving on was rarely merely an individual act. It carried the hopes and aspirations of the w ­ hole ­family. Time ­after time, parents of ­those who died in the ferry accident described to me how considerate their ­daughters w ­ ere and how filial they had been. Mr. and Mrs. Yeh sobbed ­every single time I talked to them about their deceased eldest d ­ aughter. Ah-­hsiang had graduated from elementary school in 1968, the year the Taiwanese government extended public education from six years (elementary school) to nine years (ju­nior high school). Mr. Yeh had encouraged his ­daughter to continue her education ­after elementary school, but Ah-­hsiang had told him that she wanted to make money. “We borrowed money to build this ­house, which had just been completed then,” Mr. Yeh explained, “She said she was ­going to work at the EPZ, so that she could help us pay back the borrowed money.” Ah-­hsiang turned over all her income to her parents. In return,

54Onset

Mrs. Yeh gave her some pocket money to cover her daily expenses. “When I asked her w ­ hether she had money to spend, she always said, ‘Yes, yes, I still have what you gave me last time,’ ” Mrs. Yeh recalled. “If I gave her two dimes, she would always return one dime to me.” Ah-­hsiang’s com­pany gave coupons to employees working overtime for them to eat dinner at the com­pany cafeteria. Yet, Mrs.  Yeh explained, “She rarely used the coupon on herself. She would redeem the coupon for biscuits to bring home for her b ­ rothers and s­ isters or give the coupon for me to use. Or she would eat some plain bread and save the com­pany’s meal to bring it home for us to eat. She was a good girl.” Mrs. Yeh wiped her tears. She added that Ah-­hsiang always helped take care of her younger siblings ­after she came home from a day of work. Even ­after the fatal ferry accident Ah-­hsiang still came home from time to time. She came into Mrs. Yeh’s dream, lay next to her ­mother in bed, and apologized to her ­mother for not being able to clean the h ­ ouse, mop the floor, and help out with other chores in the h ­ ouse­hold. Indeed, working ­daughters in Cijin, like everywhere in Taiwan, continued to do a substantial number of domestic chores before and ­after they went to work. As Kao Mao recalled, My big s­ ister started working at the EPZ right a­ fter she graduated from elementary school. My parents d ­ idn’t have the money to send her to ju­nior high. I still remember, my big s­ ister, she was quiet and virtuous. She looked like a [well-­bred] lady! She went to work during the day, and she had to wash our clothes ­after coming home from work. My parents and our six siblings—­there ­were eight of us. She helped us [the younger siblings] bathe, and then she washed the clothes for all eight of us. We ­didn’t have tap ­water but used a well for that purpose. To do the clothes, my big ­sister had to carry all of them to the well. It was a chore that always lasted u ­ ntil midnight. . . . ​She was only fourteen years old, but she was not a child anymore. (Quoted in Tu 2015, 50)

­There is, of course, always the possibility that only good ­things are said about the departed, and no ill words are uttered against the dead. The families of the deceased w ­ omen could have chosen to remember only the virtues of their d ­ aughters and s­ isters who had died such early deaths. Nevertheless, the sorrow was real, and the appreciation was genuine. ­Chuang Kok was a member of the coordinating committee in the aftermath of the ferry accident (see chapter 3). Like Mr. Yeh, he always had to hold back his tears when we conversed about his ­daughter. Chuang

The Significance of Insignificant P ­ eople55

Kok had two sons and one ­daughter. He told us that his ­daughter Ting-­ ting was not that good at schoolwork. She did not pass the (public) ju­ nior high school entrance exam. (Prior to the 1968 extension of public education, students had to take an entrance exam in order to be admitted to a public ju­nior high school.) “She told me she r­ eally wanted to continue her schooling and asked me ­whether she could go to a private school,” Chuang Kok recalled. “I told her we ­didn’t have the money to pay for private school tuitions.” His ­daughter only worked at the EPZ for a year before the ferry accident took her life. “She had just been asking me ­whether she could go to a night school. I said, sure, if you want to. Who would have known she would die so soon, so tragically?” Even though the ferry accident had happened long before, Chuang Kok still appeared saddened when he mentioned that quite a few of the deceased ­were their parents’ only d ­ aughters. He placed most of the blame on the ferry com­ pany, whose greed and negligence, he believed, had cost the lives of his ­daughter and the ­daughters of other parents. The ferry accident could easily have been prevented. He hoped that the government had learned its lesson and would take its supervisory responsibility seriously so that ­there would be no more lives lost in the f­ uture.

Questions from an Unfulfilled Life In essence, the f­amily is impor­tant, but the social relations inside the ­family are not equal. On the one hand, young ­women ­were “insignificant” ­because they w ­ ere considered secondary to men in the patrilineal kinship system. They ­were “temporary” members in their ­fathers’ families, which, in turn, rendered them temporary workers in Taiwan’s industrial l­abor market ­until the day they got married. On the other hand, however, young w ­ omen ­were indispensable b ­ ecause they w ­ ere the preferred l­ abor force due to their allegedly temporary status, for which they became primary wage earners in their parents’ ­house­holds. Young w ­ omen ­were significant in both Taiwanese families and Taiwan’s export-­oriented economy precisely ­because they ­were deemed insignificant in Taiwanese patrilineality and the ensuing industrial wage ­labor market. This does not mean that the parents did not love their d ­ aughters. ­Women’s industrial l­ abor was cheap and disposable mainly b ­ ecause young ­women ­were regarded as temporary workers. It was assumed that they would quit their jobs upon marriage. Accordingly, they could be paid less than ­family wages ­because their income was supposed to be only supplementary. Their jobs ­were dead ends, for they ­were not considered to

56Onset

be pursuing a c­ areer but rather primarily working for a brief time to repay their parents for bringing them up. Once a ­woman was married, her primary responsibility was to bear a son for her husband’s ­family, which is where responsibility for her welfare, dead or alive, would then lie. In other words, for the Taiwanese patrilineal ­family, the role of ­women changed from productive to reproductive upon marriage. One might say that in this type of f­ amily system t­ here is a progression of rights and obligations throughout the life cycle, as well as belated gratification for ­women. That is, just as a w ­ oman’s male patrilineal kin and their spouses enjoyed the fruits of her l­abor ­after marriage, she would also enjoy the fruits of her husband’s ­sisters’ ­labor. The cultural premise ­behind this economic design was the smooth transition of a w ­ oman through the dif­fer­ ent stages of her life. At each of t­hese stages she would have a dif­fer­ent role, enjoy a dif­fer­ent array of rights, and perform a dif­fer­ent set of duties. Calling it a moral obligation in return for their d ­ aughter’s devotion— or recognition of their ­daughter’s piety—­one of the parents’ chief responsibilities was to find their ­daughter a suitable husband with whom she could live the rest of her life and live up to her destiny. The premature passing of the young ­women in the ferry accident, however, brought to the fore the issue of interruption. What would happen if a ­woman died unwed or before she had a chance to get married? How would the ­family deal with its social and emotional loss? How could a bereaved community repair itself and restore the pro­cess of social reproduction? I w ­ ill address t­ hese questions in chapter 3.

PART II

Ghostscapes

Fig. 3.1. ​Gaozhong No. 6 sampan, ­after being pulled out of Kaohsiung Harbor on September 4, 1973. Source: Central Daily News.

Chapter 3

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts

I

f ­there was anything that we learned immediately from MC. Kuo, the s­ ister of three w ­ omen who died in the ferry accident, it was this: Ghosts are real; they are as alive as living ­human beings. Ms. Kuo was hard to find. She had been avoiding me and Professor Wen-­hui Tang, as she knew we wanted to talk to her. Twice we looked for her at Chuang Ming’s seafood restaurant near the Chung-­chou pier (see chapter 1), where she worked as a kitchen hand. Twice she told her boss that she had to leave early for some errands and ducked out the restaurant’s back door as soon as she learned we ­were coming to see her. ­After much help from p ­ eople who knew us all, she fi­nally agreed to meet with us. Ms. Kuo had been the second eldest among her siblings, but she assumed the role of big ­sister ­after her elder ­sister died at the age of thirteen. She had four younger s­ isters, followed by a ­brother, the youn­gest child and the only son in the ­family. She was already married and had had her first child when the ferry accident happened in 1973. All four of her younger s­ isters ­were on the capsized sampan ferry, and three of them perished on that fatal morning. We visited Ms. Kuo at her home on an after­noon when she was off from work. Sitting on the couch in her tiny living room, she busily folded her laundry as she talked. Ms. Kuo told us that whenever she can she visits her ­sisters and brings flowers to decorate their altar at the ­family ­house her ­brother inherited ­after the death of their parents. Before they passed away, her parents had told her to take care of her s­ isters. She would love to visit more often, she explained, but her b ­ rother did not want her to come around more than she already did: I went yesterday, but the h ­ ouse was locked. Nobody was at home. It was dark inside. ­There was no light at the altar ­table . . . ​my ­brother ­doesn’t take care of the altar. He is frequently not home. I told him 59

60Ghostscapes

I could take over the [­sisters’] tablets if he was too busy to care for them. But my ­brother refused it. I love my ­little ­sister. We ­were the closest among our siblings. . . . ​ For a few times she followed me a­ fter I visited them at my ­brother’s ­house. ­Don’t ever insist that you ­don’t believe in spirits—­they do exist! I see my [deceased] ­sisters—­I know my l­ittle ­sister wants to come with me. But the Wang Yeh [王爺, Lord] whom my husband’s f­ amily worships ­stopped her at the doorstep. He d ­ oesn’t think she has a right to be h ­ ere [at Ms. Kuo’s home] ­because she is not one of [my husband’s] ­family. I watched my l­ittle s­ ister standing by the win­dow, looking yearningly. I know she longed to come in.

At this point Ms. Kuo became quiet and looked sad. For a moment, she seemed to have gone back to that fatal morning when the lives of her three s­ isters w ­ ere taken. Yet, life carried on. Forty years a­ fter the ferry accident, Ms. Kuo was now a grand­mother herself. All of her c­ hildren ­were now married and had their own families. Although only one son and his f­ amily ­were currently living with her and her husband, all of her other ­children visited them regularly. Ms. Kuo liked to talk about her grand­son, whom we met on the day of our visit. He was, according to his grand­ mother, a good and clever boy. She also talked about her daughter-­in-­law—­the wife of the son who lives with her—­who helped to perm her hair. We also learned how Ms. Kuo’s daughter-­in-­law had done her best to look a­ fter Ms. Kuo’s husband when he had been hospitalized a few years e­ arlier. Ms. Kuo cared deeply about the ­family she created with her husband, her c­ hildren and grandchildren. Nonetheless, Ms. Kuo also thought of her three deceased s­ isters. If the vignette above seems confusing, that is ­because Ms. Kuo often talked to her departed s­ isters and talked about them as if they ­were still alive; they continued to have a presence in her life. She called them grandaunts, as they would be the grandaunts of her grandchildren. In fact, Ms. Kuo was not the only one who addressed the deceased as grandaunts, even though they ­were only teen­agers or young ­women at the time of their death. In the course of my research, I often heard families regarding the deceased as aunts, following the fact that, as time went by, the deceased aged and w ­ ere no longer young w ­ omen, just as their living siblings had grown old and w ­ ere now middle-­aged parents. Sometimes, a­ fter calling them aunts, f­ amily members would correct themselves and say, “Oh, no, they are not aunts anymore; they are grandaunts,” as the deceased’s nephews and nieces had also become parents.

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts61

The deceased may be dead, but they are not gone. They remain members of the social collectivity a­ fter death. This chapter focuses on the actions and reactions of the deceased ­women and their families in the aftermath of the ferry accident, especially on the families’ attempts to save the deceased from the fate of eternal homelessness. Highlighted by their conduct—as well as that of local authorities—­was a concern to neutralize the danger invoked by problematic deaths, restore a properly ordered social universe, and reassimilate the dead into a well-­governed community. Widely circulated in Asia is the idea that each h ­ uman, alive or dead, is “a microcosmic emanation of the ­whole universe,” duplicating on a small scale the universe’s basic ele­ ments and ruling princi­ples (Formoso 2014, 92). A good death is one in which a person dies at the right time, in the right place, and u ­ nder natu­ ral circumstances—­such as in the com­pany of f­ amily, and a­ fter a fulfilled life. ­Those d ­ ying a good death ­will be reintegrated into the social order as ancestors. Bad deaths, by contrast, are deaths out of time, without ­children, by vio­lence, or in an inappropriate place (such as far from home). Ghosts are the victims of bad deaths. They are caught between life and death, excluded and unwanted and, subsequently, frightening and haunting (Feuchtwang 2010, 168–169). They are unruly (Weller 1985, 1994b). Bad deaths, therefore, have to be corrected, and ghosts have to be pacified. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1982) correctly recognize that death rituals in e­ very civilization convey a conception of “good death” and are intended to make formal reparations for bad, or less good, deaths. This is certainly true in Taiwan (Feuchtwang 1992; Jordan 1972), and was evident in my field interviews and ethnographic observation. Yet against the grain of this normative understanding of ghosts, I would also like to make the all-­too-­obvious point that t­here are gender and ideological differences in the repre­sen­ta­tion of life and death (Martin 1988). As I have noted in previous chapters, what happened in the aftermath of the ferry accident had as much to do with obligations to the entirety of the social collectivity as it did with the desire to meet ­those obligations within a system that treats ­people differentially and hierarchically.

Establishing the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb The fact that the individuals who died in the ferry accident w ­ ere all unwed young w ­ omen quickly attracted the public’s attention. It was a puzzle that demanded not only an explanation but also a solution. In the years a­ fter the ferry accident, vari­ous explanations ­were offered. Some

62Ghostscapes

­ eople called it merely a random accident. Some cited Taiwan’s indusp trial wage structure and pointed out that t­hese ­women did not want to be late for work and thus lose part of their pay. They usually arrived at the pier early and ­were among the first to board a ferry. As a result, they ­were pushed farther and farther into the cabin when ­later passengers came aboard, and they w ­ ere trapped and unable to get off the ferry before it sank. It has been suggested that young ­women in general might prefer to stay inside the cabin as opposed to standing on the open deck of a rocking boat, and it was also pointed out that many ­women in Chung-­chou did not know how to swim and would be unable to save themselves if they fell into the ­water, despite the fact that they lived in a fishing village. However reasonable t­ hese explanations might sound, they did not fully convince the local ­people of Cijin, who continued to perceive the ferry accident as an event with super­natural significance. A widespread account supporting this ghostly interpretation of the fatal event tells that one of the drowned young w ­ omen was actually rescued and sent to the hospital for treatment. Just when every­body thought she would survive, she suddenly turned to her m ­ other waiting at her bedside and said, “I am ­going to be late. Many ­people are waiting for me. I have to go now.” She then died suddenly, becoming the final casualty of the sampan ferry accident. Meanwhile, to further support the otherworldly interpretation, a married ­woman from the boat who had initially been pronounced dead miraculously came back to life. ­Later it was discovered that six of the deceased w ­ omen ­were ­under the age of sixteen, younger than allowed by Taiwan’s ­labor regulations. According to Taiwan’s Factory Act at the time, individuals u ­ nder the age of fourteen should not be employed in factories, and p ­ eople between the ages of fourteen and sixteen ­were considered child laborers and could only be given light work.1 ­These young girls obviously lied about their ages while applying for jobs in the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone—­ most likely by borrowing national ID cards of elder siblings—­and the companies where they w ­ ere hired prob­ably turned a blind eye to the falsehoods in their applications. (The companies where ­ these underaged workers w ­ ere employed did ask t­ hese ­women to sign affidavits that they ­were as old as they claimed to be.) Using a false ID card to get a job was not unusual when ­children from many Taiwanese farming or fishing families without steady incomes desperately sought stable employment in the booming manufacturing sector. And even though it was unlawful, it was also not unusual for factories that w ­ ere short on l­ abor to hire under­ aged workers. The enforcement of ­labor regulations was slack u ­ nder the

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts63

developmental state of Taiwan at the time. Yet as a result of this ­labor violation, the families of the underaged workers who drowned did not get the pensions entitled to deceased employees’ families ­because their ­daughters w ­ ere working illegally for the companies. Individually, employers of the deceased w ­ omen did offer each of the families some “consolation money” (慰問金). The amount varied depending on the length of employment. Nevertheless, the offer was u ­ nder 50,000 New Taiwan (NT) dollars (roughly US$1,250 at the time) for e­ very ­family. To ­settle compensation and other m ­ atters, five ­fathers ­were selected to form a coordinating committee that represented the families. Among the five f­ athers ­were Chuang Chin-­chun, Chuang Kok, Kao Ah-­you, Kuo He, and one other member.2 ­Because of the many aberrations exposed in the aftermath of the ferry accident, the Kaohsiung City government intervened and worked with the five-­member committee to ­settle the pension and compensation issue. ­After much negotiation, the families received NT$90,000 (US$2,250) from the ferry com­pany for each of the lives lost in the accident. (The monthly wage of female factory workers at the time was a few hundred New Taiwan dollars.) As several parents bemoaned in the interviews I conducted with Wen-­hui Tang in the early 2010s, “[The amount was] so l­ittle that it w ­ asn’t even enough for us to bury our ­daughter.”3 Originally the bereaved families w ­ ere ­going to bury their ­daughters separately. L ­ ater, through the efforts of Chuang Chin-­chun of the coordinating committee, the families came to the agreement that they should be buried together. However, the public cemetery in Chung-­chou did not have enough space to accommodate twenty-­five contiguous graves. With the help of the Kaohsiung City government, the families settled on purchasing a plot of private land adjacent to the public cemetery; it was slightly larger than six hundred pings (roughly two thousand square meters) and cost NT$300,000 (NT$500 per ping). In the end, the families spent all the compensation money on the land purchase. The sampan ferry com­pany and the Kaohsiung City government also chipped in to help the families with other funeral-­related expenses. Chuang Chin-­chun had worked for international fishing and shipping companies for many years before retiring. Other families, as well as Kaohsiung City government workers, often described him as someone who had seen the world. Confident, boisterous, and often orating in a bright voice, Chuang Chin-­chun felt strongly that the sampan shipwreck was a major tragedy. Like most of the affected families, as well as many of the Cijin residents Tang and I came into contact with during our research, he placed most of the blame on the owner of the sampan ferry

64Ghostscapes

com­pany, whose “greed to make money caused all the lives lost in the accident!” He also spoke strongly about how the city government should not have contracted out the ferry ser­vice to a private com­pany. Implied in his words was the accusation that the accident was a result of collusion between business and the government, and he was convinced that ­there should be some moral lesson to be learned from the loss of lives. He asserted that the memory of the tragic event should be kept alive, to serve as a reminder of the importance of transportation safety. For the local communities, the ferry accident was also a vivid reminder of how Chung-­chou residents on the geo­graph­i­cally severed Cijin Island ­were inadequately served by existing transportation. Indeed, transportation has continued to be a major perspective from which local p ­ eople talk about the ferry accident. De­cades a­fter the accident, when asked about how the accident has impacted Cijin, the most frequent answer we got from local residents including the deceased’s families was that the sacrifice the twenty-­five young w ­ omen made with their lives had brought long-­awaited transportation infrastructure to the local communities in the form of the Cross-­Harbor Tunnel and the government-­run ferry ser­vice (which is f­ ree to ­people whose h ­ ouse­hold registration is in Cijin). As a commemoration of the tragic event, Chuang Chin-­chun recommended to then Kaohsiung City mayor Wang Yu-­yun the wreckage of the vessel that caused the fatal accident should be kept near the pier where it sank. The mayor rejected this idea, however, and preferred to have the memorial—if ­there was one—be a private cenotaph at the burial site of ­these w ­ omen. The mayor reasoned that the families of the deceased would be deeply affected and forced constantly to remember the tragedy if a monumental relic w ­ ere erected at the pier. Chuang Chin-­chun accepted the mayor’s argument and sought to establish a burial site for the deceased as an alternative (Wang Hsiu-­yun 2006). He asserted that a collective burial site would help to draw attention to the sampan ferry accident, and also insisted that the government stop outsourcing the ferry ser­vice and that it be run by the city instead. Not all of the families shared Chuang Chin-­chun’s sentiments about keeping alive the memory of the sampan ferry accident, but they went along with his plan b ­ ecause, among other t­hings, they welcomed the opportunity to save money by having someone ­ else take care of their daughters’ burial arrangements. Super­ ­ natural beliefs might have also helped to sway some of the families. To purge the pollution attached to the unnatural deaths of the twenty-­five young w ­ omen and to help them

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts65

cross over to the afterworld peacefully, the families burned a King Boat in their collective mortuary ceremony at a local ­temple. Commonly, King Boat burning is a part of communal plague expulsion rites that engage the entire population of a locality, the most famous con­temporary example of which is the Yingwang (迎王), or Welcoming the Lords, festival in Donggang Township in southern Taiwan (Paul R. Katz 1995a). Welcoming the Lords is an eight-­day festival, encompassing a series of activities including the opening ritual of Qingwang (請王), Inviting the Lords, the deities who specialize in preventing outbreaks of epidemics or exorcizing pestilent forces if epidemics are in pro­gress; daily pro­cessions of the Lords, which pass through nearly e­ very road and backstreet of Donggang; the Ceremonies of the Lords’ Boat (Wangchuan, 王船, or King Boat), which is the size of a coastal fishing boat (over forty feet in length), adorned with auspicious paintings of dragons, sea creatures, historical tales, and the Eight Immortals; and the rituals of the Plague Offering, culminating in Songwang (送王), Sending off the Lords, when the King Boat—­along with the plague spirits onboard—is burned on a nearby beach (Paul  R. Katz 1995b). In the case of the ferry victims, the boat burning was a private event that involved only a few families, and the burned King Boat was a miniature, though it still served a similar purging purpose. According to the eldest ­sister of Chuang Yue-­kui, the oldest among the deceased ­women (whose story I w ­ ill return to l­ater), the ashes behaved strangely while the King Boat burned. They did not fly in all directions, like ashes normally do, but instead ­rose straight into the sky and then drifted off to the west, the direction of heaven. ­After consulting a local god, the families learned that this was an omen that indicated that the twenty-­five ­women should not be buried under­ground: the ashes brought them as a group to heaven.4 Obstacles remained a­ fter the families agreed to have a collective burial, however. Taiwanese customs emphasize the importance of the Eight Characters of Birth Time (生辰八字)—­that is, year, month, date, and hour, each of which has two Chinese characters—in death rituals, as it is believed that their articulation ­will affect not only the afterlife of the deceased but also the pre­sent fortune and f­ uture prosperity of the deceased’s ­family (Ahern 1973). As a result, finding an entombment plan that could accommodate the needs of the twenty-­five drowned young w ­ omen and the demands of their twenty-­one grieving families was a daunting task. (In addition to Ms. Kuo, who lost three ­sisters, two other families also lost two ­daughters each.) In our conversation with him in 2009, Chuang Chin-­chun recalled the challenge he faced:

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Fig. 3.2. ​The Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. Source: courtesy of Wen-­hui Tang and Yu-­ming Chen.

[­Because the Eight Characters varied from one individual to another,] some families wanted to bury their ­daughters on the east side or north side [of the tomb site], and some o ­ thers wanted their graves in the north or south direction. The order of the individual graves was another big issue. P ­ eople had a lot of opinions about who should be buried in the center, in the front, or wherever. . . . ​Before the idea of having a collective burial fell apart, I said, “How can we have so many dif­fer­ent, individual opinions if we are ­going to bury all t­ hese girls together? The most impor­ tant ­thing we want to accomplish ­here is to have a collective memorial site so that t­hese young w ­ omen can be remembered forever.” Of course, some families continued to have a lot of concerns. But then I said, “Let’s do this! I w ­ ill be the one upon whom all the heavenly blames and punishments should fall. I am ready for what­ever responsibilities ­there may be.” ­After I made that weighty pledge, all the families w ­ ere on board.

Eventually the twenty-­five individual graves ­were lined up side by side in three rows (figure 3.2). They ­were arranged according to the birth-

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts67

dates of the deceased. That is, the grave of the oldest among them was placed in the ­middle of the back row, followed by t­ hose of the next two oldest on e­ ither side of her, and so on. The grave of the youn­gest thus sat at the end of the front row. Each tombstone was also decorated with a photo of the person buried beneath it. The interment was truly a collective effort, which required the participation of at least one member of each of the twenty-­one families. The timing of the burial was also carefully calculated, taking into consideration the geomantic needs of all of the deceased and their families. To show its support, the Kaohsiung City government placed a stele b ­ ehind the twenty-­five graves, with an inscription noting that the collective burial was intended to keep alive the memory of twenty-­five young ­women who died unmarried in a sampan ferry accident caused by mechanical malfunctions. A small memorial archway, engraved with the title “The Twenty-­ Five Maiden Ladies Tomb,” was also erected to indicate the presence of the burial. The families chose the term “maiden ladies” to commemorate their deceased ­daughters b ­ ecause “maiden lady” (淑女) signals a ­woman waiting to be married who is beautiful, virtuous, kind, and cultivated—­ all feminine charms in line with traditional Chinese ethics. Yet this understanding was not shared by feminist activists, who took “maiden ladies” as a derogatory term showing the families’ discriminatory attitudes against the deceased, an issue I ­will return to ­later. It is also impor­tant to note that the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb is not a maiden t­emple where the tablets of homeless, displaced maiden spirits are accommodated and their ashes or bones disposed of by their natal families (Arthur P. Wolf 1978). In this case, the bone urns of the ferry accident victims ­were buried at the tomb, whereas their spirit tablets w ­ ere placed in dif­fer­ent places based on the decisions of their individual families.5 ­Because the land of the Chung-­chou village cemetery and the adjacent Maiden Ladies Tomb was acquired by the government for the further expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor, the collective burial and other graves in the cemetery w ­ ere relocated to a new site in 1988. Pressured by the Kaohsiung mayor’s office, the Port of Kaohsiung—­the port authority whose negligence was the indirect cause of the sampan shipwreck in 1973—­contributed NT$10 million to this relocation proj­ect. This was primarily b ­ ecause the families of the deceased had paid for the land where the original tomb was located. As such, the port authority was required to compensate for the plot requisitioned for the harbor expansion. At first, the Port of Kaohsiung proposed leaving the Maiden Ladies Tomb at its original site (which would be inside the expanded port area) and

68Ghostscapes

grant the families special permits to access the tomb. This proposal was subsequently abandoned due to the complex regulations involving the operation of an international container port. While the negotiation for compensation was stalled, a story began to circulate in the local community. It was rumored that the twenty-­five ­women—­all dressed in white, and led by the oldest among them—­had appeared, even in the bright daylight, to fight for their rights and interests. True or not, this super­natural account might have exerted some moral pressure that compelled the local authority to intervene on behalf of the deceased and their families. In the end, the money from the Port of Kaohsiung was used to pay for the land where the second Maiden Ladies Tomb would be placed, the rituals and other expenses involved for the relocation, landscape design and maintenance, and other facilities (including an office, a gazebo, and a public rest­room) on the site. The money was also used to help establish a collective fund for the ongoing upkeep of the tomb. (That fund was quickly depleted, however.) The original stele was moved from the first burial site in Chung-­chou and reinstalled ­behind the twenty-­five individual graves. The city government also helped erect a much larger and more eye-­ catching memorial archway, inscribed “The Twenty-­ Five Maiden Ladies Tomb,” at the entrance of the new site (figure 3.3). While a detailed discussion about the role of state actors w ­ ill be found in chapters 5 and 6, it is impor­tant to note that the Kaohsiung City government had continued to play the part of mediator from the original burials in 1973 to the 1988 relocation due to the Kaohsiung Harbor expansion. Nevertheless, both the circumstances and the objective seemed to have changed over time. In the immediate aftermath of the ferry accident, at a time when Taiwan was u ­ nder the Kuomintang’s one-­party authoritarian rule and its economy was about to kick off, the public discourse focused mainly on the tragic nature of the accident. The primary goal of the Kaohsiung City government was to placate the local community by holding the ferry com­pany accountable and by assisting the families to quickly bury their dead. In contrast, the second burial—­the relocation of the tomb to the current site—­occurred in 1988, two years a­ fter the establishment of the opposition Demo­cratic Progressive Party (DPP) and one year ­after the lifting of martial law (which had been in place for nearly four de­cades, since the end of World War II). The competition for voters’ support between po­liti­cal parties to control the Kaohsiung City Council as well as the Legislative Yuan in Taipei was increasingly fierce as a result.6 This changing po­liti­cal atmosphere might have propelled the Kaohsiung mayor’s office to be more responsive—or even proactive—­regarding the need

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts69

Fig. 3.3. ​The Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Memorial Archway. Source: courtesy of Wen-­hui Tang and Yu-­ming Chen.

of its denizens, especially when dealing with a major local accident like the ferry shipwreck that took twenty-­five lives.7 The dif­fer­ent tactics evident in the mediation role of the mayor’s office closely reflect the changing spatial scale of the target over time from the local vicinity to the city and nation. Likewise, the third burial—­the transformation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb into the current park form—­involved yet another set of spatial tactics. Compared to the original burial ground, which was in a fairly remote corner of Cijin Island where not many outsiders would visit, the new location is on the main road. It sits facing the Taiwan Strait, enjoying a scenic view of the ­water and the coastline. The public land across the road from the Maiden Ladies Tomb has been a part of the seashore park since the early 2000s. The tomb renovation, therefore, reveals placemaking as a target objective in Kaohsiung’s postindustrial economy.

Kinship, Lineage, and Gender As far as the local authorities ­were concerned, the ferry accident had come to a relatively satisfactory conclusion when the ­legal and po­liti­cal

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responsibilities of the ferry owner, the ferry captain, and other concerned parties ­were settled, when the bereaved families w ­ ere financially compensated, and when the twenty-­five victims ­were buried. For the families grieving for their lost d ­ aughters, however, t­ here was still unfinished business. Specifically, where and how to place the spirits of t­hose who died unmarried presented a g­ reat challenge to the families. This concern was closely related to Taiwanese popu­lar religion’s tripartite god-­ancestor-­ ghost cosmic order introduced in chapter  1, in which gender plays a crucial role. To put it succinctly, a son by his birth is a part of his f­ ather’s patrilineal line, and he is entitled to a place at his f­ ather’s ancestral altar. He ­will become an ancestor ­after his death. A ­daughter, however, is not given this privilege. She is considered a temporary member of her ­father’s ­family. It is through marriage that a ­woman can join her husband’s ­family and become permanently integrated into his patrilineage. How does this general depiction of Taiwanese kinship apply to the situation in Cijin? To begin with, t­here are a few common surnames—­ Chen, Sun, and Tsai in Chung-­chou; Chuang, Kuo, and Yeh in nearby Hsia-­chi-­chu Village; and Chi, Hong, and Huang settling across the area—­ that reflect the migration history from southern China to Taiwan starting in the late Ming period (1368–1644) and throughout the Qing period (1644–1911). While Chung-­chou is a village with many surnames, ­people sharing a surname and descending from a common male ancestor tend to live in the same neighborhood, unified by a common ancestral hall. The presence of ancestral halls has played a major role in ensuring f­amily cohesion by consolidating patrilineal authority (Huang Shi-yu 2006, 2–16). Tu Yi-­wen and Tang Wen-­hui’s research (2016) focusing on one Kao ­family in Chung-­chou Village, whose eldest d ­ aughter Ah-yu died in the sampan ferry accident, helps to shed light on the influence of patrilineage. Ah-­yu’s ­father, Kao Ah-­you, served on the five-­member coordinating committee in the aftermath of the ferry accident. He and his wife bore six ­children: four ­daughters and two sons, all of whom are presently married except for Ah-yu, who died young, and the younger son, who has a ­mental disability. The three surviving, married ­daughters practice patrilocality and live with their husbands and ­children. They all live in other districts of Kaohsiung City and come back to Cijin frequently to help taking care of their aging parents. Currently living with the Kao parents ­under one roof are the two sons and the married son’s wife and c­ hildren. For the Kao parents and their sons, the basic social unit has never been ­family but lineage, comprising all male Kao members and their rela-

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts71

tions in the immediate vicinity. According to Kao Ah-­you, the Kaos had been living in Chung-­chou since his great-­grandfather’s generation. Over time, the number of descendants grew and the lineage expanded; they ­were, he noted, “one large f­amily that lives on the sea.” The spatial arrangement of the neighborhood closely reflected this tight-­knit community. Ah-­you’s ­father had six male siblings, and Ah-­you himself was born with four ­brothers, the youn­gest of whom passed away in his twenties. The remaining b ­ rothers, including Kao Ah-­you, have been living in the same ­houses for their ­whole lives. Pointing to his ­house, Kao Ah-­you explained, “This entire row of h ­ ouses belongs to our relatives. This plot of land h ­ ere and that one in the front, they are owned by me and my ­brothers. Our parents lived next door to us before they passed away” (quoted in Tu 2015, 43). In the center of the Kao settlement is the Kao ancestral hall. Built in the traditional courtyard ­house style, this is where the collective ancestor worship of the Kao lineage is regularly practiced. It is also where the offspring go to report to ancestors whenever impor­tant events such as weddings and funerals are to take place. Younger generations—­like the younger b ­ rother of deceased worker Kao Ah-­yu—­continue to observe ­these customs to this day (Tu and Tang 2016, 17). Ah-­yu’s ­brother, Kao Mao, elaborated, The ancestral hall is where we h ­ ouse our deceased f­ amily members. We ­don’t have a separate ancestral tablet at home. If we want to worship our ancestors, we go to the ancestral hall. We also hold funeral ser­vices ­there. This applies to weddings as well. Parents of a bride ­will report to the ancestors, “Our d ­ aughter is about to marry out,” on the day of wedding. The bride w ­ ill go to say goodbye to the ancestors before she is led away by her groom. The night I got married, I paid re­spect to our ancestors as well as the Jade Emperor. At that time, my parents even hired a hand puppet troupe to entertain the gods and ancestors [and celebrate the successful extension of our line]. We worship our ancestors on [Chinese] New Year and impor­tant holidays. On other days, we take turns to care for the ancestral hall. Each h ­ ouse­hold [headed by a male Kao member] is usually responsible for a month of this chore. When your h ­ ouse­hold is on duty, you go daily—­cleaning the place, sweeping floors, burning incense, and so forth. You are also responsible for ritual supplies if a worship ser­vice is to take place in your month. Our lineage has grown so large that ­there are more and more p ­ eople pre­sent on days of major ceremonies. It’s becoming

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increasingly crowded and physically uncomfortable. (Quoted in Tu and Tang 2016, 17–18)

To worship collectively means to follow a fixed schedule. Sometimes Kao Mao wondered w ­ hether it would work better and offer more flexibility if they had an individual ancestral tablet at home. “That way, you have the freedom to decide what day you want to worship the ancestors,” he explained. “We do have a shrine in our ­house where we worship gods and bo­dhi­sat­tvas. I thought it would be acceptable to revere our ancestors along with them. But my f­ ather ­didn’t agree with the idea” (quoted in Tu and Tang 2016, 17–18). As a result, Kao Mao and his parents continue to join their Kao relatives to observe the ritual of ancestor worship at the ancestral hall. A token of the Goddess of Mercy and the god statue of his eldest ­sister who died at the sampan ferry accident are both worshipped at their home shrine (Tu and Tang 2016, 18), a point that I w ­ ill come back to l­ater in this chapter. The existence of a communal ancestral hall further suggests that one’s destiny is intertwined with ­those descendants from (or relating to) the same patrilineal line. One’s own business, therefore, is never simply one’s own business; it may have serious implications for the collective fortunes of the lineage, as well as for the prospects of individual lineage members. To live near one’s kin also indicates that one is constantly ­under watch and scrutinized.8 The gaze of the kin—as well as the consequent pressure to do what they consider the right ­thing—­affects not only the lives of the living but also the treatment of the dead. Consequently, decisions about the spiritual destiny of the twenty-­five deceased w ­ omen ­were not solely their parents’ to make but frequently subject to the intervention of other (particularly el­derly) patrilineal relatives.

The Birth of Celestial Beings The patrilineal preoccupation that privileges male over female descendants had dominated—­and continues to dominate—­social life in Cijin. Accordingly, the quandary faced by the parents of the twenty-­five deceased w ­ omen was how to ensure a final resting place for their unwed ­daughters—­who died an untimely, violent death—­while acknowledging that t­hese ­daughters ­were essentially outsiders, strangers, and thereby ghosts to their natal families. Propriety aside, parents who lost their ­daughters in the ferry accident did not doubt that their girls w ­ ere good d ­ aughters. During our research,

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts73

quite a few parents had tears in their eyes while telling us how considerate their ­daughters w ­ ere, how they understood the hardships borne by their parents to support a big ­family. They told us that t­hese girls selflessly shared their parents’ burdens, took care of their younger siblings, and always put their desires secondary to the needs of the f­amily. Some of them also mentioned that their deceased d ­ aughters had been seen, dressed in white, coming back to visit and make sure every­thing was all right with their families. Chuang Chin-­chun, who helped to make the collective burial a real­ity, became angry in our interview as he recalled the moment at the funeral when, according to Taiwanese custom, parents ­were called upon to whip the coffins of their d ­ aughters, who w ­ ere considered unfilial for d ­ ying before their aging parents: “That was just pure nonsense! How could anybody bear to think ­these girls ­were unfilial? They ­were ­humble, wonderful ­daughters. ­After their bodies ­were pulled out from the w ­ ater, some of the girls ­were found to have cooked rice in their mouths. . . . ​They ­were always in such a hurry to catch an early ferry that they constantly swallowed their breakfast without chewing it properly. And all this food came out when they became nauseous ­after desperately trying to hold their breath in the w ­ ater . . . ​If anything, how could anyone think of blaming them?” At the funeral, Chuang Chin-­chun ­stopped some parents from whipping their d ­ aughters’ coffins. Yet he also had a definite opinion about the spiritual tablet placement of ­women who died unmarried: “It has been like this since the beginning of history: no parents worship their dead c­hildren, [and unmarried] ­daughters’ tablets s­ houldn’t come back home.” The parents w ­ ere thus caught in a dilemma between their lasting worries for the eternal well-­being of their d ­ aughters, on the one hand, and the normative value that dictates against incorporating the spirit of a female descendant into her patrilineal ancestral shrine, on the other. Traditionally, spirit marriage would be one solution to the concerns of ­these families. This would normally be arranged upon the dead ­women’s request (Jordan 1972). Professor Wen-­hui Tang and I learned, however, that only one among the twenty-­five young w ­ omen came back to express her desire for marriage. The story we w ­ ere told involved a man in a nearby town who sent a letter to the Cijin District Office inquiring about the address of one of the twenty-­five deceased. This man indicated that he was told by a third person in his dream that this ­woman was looking for a husband. Through the help of the Cijin District Office, he indeed found the f­amily, to whom he expressed his willingness to be wed in a (ghost) marriage. The f­ather, however, rejected the marriage proposal for reasons not told to us. The

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deceased w ­ oman did not press the ­matter when her ­family failed to find her a proper suitor. Instead, her f­amily, along with most of the other families, found an alternative option to care for their d ­ aughters. A few years ­after the ferry accident, ­after the collective burial was completed, a few of the grieving families began to report paranormal incidents. For example, Ms. Kuo, with whom I opened this chapter, told us that for a while her ­father had difficulties swallowing food: “He felt like he had something stuck in the throat. But his doctor c­ ouldn’t find anything wrong.” Similarly, the wife of Mr. Kao Ah-­you recalled that her husband constantly had a headache, “as if somebody was sitting on the top of his head.” As medical doctors failed to find probable c­ auses for t­ hese symptoms, the families turned to local deities—­via their entrusted tâng-­ kis (spirit mediums)—­for answers. Chuang Kok, also a member of the coordinating committee, explained to us the nature of t­ hese consultations: I heard this from my wife. . . . ​[It all started with] that m ­ other down the block. She went to consult a tâng-­ki in our village about ailments of unknown ­causes in her ­family. The tâng-­ki told her that the incidents ­were a sign from her d ­ aughter. But she d ­ idn’t need to worry, b ­ ecause her ­daughter was now learning to become an “enlightened being” on the side of Kuan Yin [the Goddess of Mercy]. The tâng-­ki also suggested to the ­mother that she could have a god statue [金身] made for her ­daughter and place the god statue at home.

David Jordan (1972, 85) describes the function of tâng-­kis as “prime religious arbiters” in Taiwanese villages. It is tâng-­kis who diagnose a given case of familial or village disharmony as caused by ghosts. It is also tâng-­kis who explore the ­family tree or the village’s history. Tâng-­kis perform exorcisms, and they represent the august presence of the divine performed in their name. The idea b ­ ehind the tâng-­ki’s advice to this bereaved m ­ other was that, as her ­daughter had become an attendant of Kuan Yin, she was no longer an unwed daughter-­spirit excluded from the ancestral shrine but a soon-­to-be deity who could be revered by faithful believers, including her previous ­family. The tâng-­ki’s account offered the ­mother a culturally sanctioned way to provide a permanent—­ and respectable—­residing place for her deceased and unmarried d ­ aughter. Shortly thereafter, many families told similar stories. Sometimes the stories did not involve a health condition but an ill-­fated incident like a car accident, the loss of a job, or the loss of some fortune. Sometimes it was about an uncanny phenomenon, such as residual incense in a home

Filial ­Daughters, Pious Ghosts75

incense burner starting to burn on its own for no obvious reason. The deceased w ­ omen themselves also frequently appeared in their parents’ dreams (or the dreams of other f­amily members) to make explicit demands. Before long, ­whether by a direct request or through a tâng-­ki’s mediation, twenty-­two out of the twenty-­five ­women received their god statues. (Some ­people well acquainted with the story of the ­women suggested that deification might be the reason the deceased did not come back to ask for marriage, ­because “gods d ­ on’t get married.”) When we inquired why the remaining three did not have a god statue, we w ­ ere told that they did not come back to ask for it. Yet the ­father of one of t­ hese three w ­ omen also made it explicit that, even if he had a god statue made for his ­daughter, god or not, she would still be homeless if nobody took care of the god statue ­ after he and his wife passed away. So he de­ cided to place his ­daughter’s spiritual tablet permanently at a Buddhist t­emple in Kaohsiung County (now part of Kaohsiung City). He considered this a good solution ­because t­emple staff would light incense and take care of the tablet daily. He paid a one-­time fee of over NT$10,000 for the upkeep. One story involved more than s­ imple deification. Chuang Yue-­kui, the oldest among the deceased w ­ omen, returned and disclosed herself as Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva (一妙菩薩), a title said to be granted by the Jade Emperor at the Heavenly Court. She had also chosen her eldest s­ ister to be her spirit medium. On the command of the Jade Emperor, her s­ ister was stationed at Miao-­feng Gong (Miao-­feng ­Temple), where she would bless anyone who came for help. Chuang Yue-­kui stood out from the rest of the deceased not simply b ­ ecause she was the oldest among them but also ­because she was the most educated. While most of the deceased had only an elementary school education, Chuang Yue-­kui had earned a high school diploma. (As was explained in chapter 2, overall educational attainment in Cijin was lagging ­behind other districts of Kaohsiung City at the time.) Like many ­women of the same educational background in her cohort, Chuang Yue-­kui worked as a dressmaker upon leaving school. ­Later she thought dressmaking was too toilsome and de­cided to seek an accounting job at the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone (unlike the rest of the deceased, who ­were employed as assembly line workers). She was also engaged, and had her wedding day set in the month that was to follow the ferry accident. The day of the ferry accident was her first day on the new job. The elevation of Chuang Yue-­kui to Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva, including the drafting of her eldest s­ister to be her spirit medium, is a classic story of the deification of ghosts (Jordan 1972). Spirit mediums of deified ghosts largely work from a private altar at home. Most of the

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requests made to ghost deities are of an individualistic and utilitarian nature, such as curing someone who is sick, finding lost objects, or seeking the path to a successful business venture. Ghost deities do not attend to communal interests, as do the gods of major ­temples. Correspondingly, and resonating with the situation of ghosts who are not integrated into the normative universe, followers of ghost deities tend to come from outside the usual bound­aries of the neighborhood (Weller 1994a, 149–150). All of ­these characteristics are apparent in the story of Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva. Chuang Yue-­kui was not the first one who came back to ask for a god statue, but she was the only one who chose a spirit medium through whom to manifest her power. “My s­ ister appeared in my dream on the eve of her hundredth day,” said Chuang Yue-­kui’s ­sister (and Yi-­miao Bo­ dhi­sat­tva’s spirit medium).9 She explained, She dressed in such a splendid way that she looked like one of ­those officials in [traditional] operas. She pointed to a hsian-­tao [仙桃, immortal peach] that appeared on the wall and said, “It’s gorgeous, i­sn’t it?” I said she could have it, but she replied that ­there ­were plenty of t­hese immortal peaches where she was now. ­After that night, she visited me nearly e­ very day. She also appeared in our niece’s dreams, and my ­father’s as well. But never in my m ­ other’s dream, b ­ ecause she knew her presence would make our m ­ other too distraught. My mom fi­nally consulted a tâng-­ki about all ­these dreams. The tâng-­ki told her that my s­ ister was asking for a god statue. But I told my ­mother not to believe what the tâng-­ki said ­because that ­couldn’t be true. How could my s­ ister become a god just for being dead? We ­couldn’t be that lucky. I was punished as soon as t­hose words came out of my mouth. Oh, how I suffered! She [the ­sister] tormented me. She came to visit me ­every day. I c­ ouldn’t stand up a­ fter sitting down. I ­couldn’t walk a­ fter standing up. Sometimes, I froze and ­couldn’t move at all for ten minutes. For more than two years I was feeling pain all over my body.

When I asked her if she had ever considered seeing a doctor, she answered, “Nah. I was okay while d ­ oing work.” When I asked her if she ever suspected that her s­ ister was causing it, she told me, Nope—­not ­until my husband also began to experience physical discomfort, to the extent that he ­couldn’t go fishing on the sea. Our neighbors

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also noticed that something was wrong. The chief of our village asked us why my husband s­ topped g­ oing out to the sea, and his wife advised [my husband] to see a doctor. In the end, we consulted deities. We went to three dif­fer­ent deities! We only got well a­ fter our b ­ rothers and s­ isters put together the money to have a god statue made for her. She was invited back and worshipped at [my parents’] home.

It was another year or so before Chuang Yue-­kui pronounced that she was now Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva, ready to save the world. Her eldest ­sister explained that this was ­because studying the way of enlightenment required time and it came in stages. (Indeed, Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva continued to advance to higher ranks in subsequent years and acquired a new official title as well as changed the name of her altar/shrine/temple each time she was promoted.) This time Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva also commanded that her eldest ­sister be her spirit medium. Her ­sister resisted at first—­ typical of one destined to be a tâng-­ki—­for which she suffered physical pain once more. Only when her son was cured of high fever by drinking ­water mixed with the ashes of Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva’s amulet and he was warned of a snake attack and an electrical shock accident while ­doing military ser­vice was she convinced of her ­sister’s power. She was further persuaded when Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva explained to her that it was for the sake of their ­mother that she was ­doing this. The eldest ­sister added, “Our ­mother told [Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva] that she managed to raise her into adulthood. She was not willing to accept the fact that her ­daughter was taken in such a tragic way ­unless it was for a higher purpose. [My ­sister] had to make a plea to the Jade Emperor for permission to descend down from heaven to save the world.” ­After that, the eldest s­ ister began to serve as her ­sister’s spirit medium. In the s­ ister’s account, Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva has used her power to help ­people over the years. Some of her most memorable marvels include curing an el­derly lady of a chronic illness and helping the lady’s son to make money (her first miracle performed outside her immediate f­ amily), assisting a w ­ oman to recover her lost gold necklace at a local h ­ otel, and rescuing a man who was deeply in debt by helping him to rebuild his business. Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva also helped to sanctify a number of her fellow “­sisters” (ten to twelve, according to the eldest ­sister). Through the revelation of Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva, ­these ­women ­were understood to be practicing religious virtues at the heavenly court. Subsequently, their families made god statues for them.

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Faith, Reservation, and Ambivalence Ghosts intervene. They act and interact. They express their discontent. However, they cannot fix the prob­lems that caused their discontent but have to rely on the living to intervene on their behalf. I take the paranormal phenomena witnessed by the deceased’s families as acts of the deceased w ­ omen’s agency—or the families’ belief in t­hese ­women’s agency—­born out of their desire to seek recognition from a patrilineal social system that expected their cooperation but underplayed its significance. Equally, the transformation of the deceased w ­ omen from maiden ghosts who could not be incorporated into their patrilineal ancestral shrines into divine beings who might be welcomed to join the pantheon worshipped at the altars of their ­fathers’ ­houses provided their parents with a culturally accepted and reputable solution to the prob­lem of their ­daughters’ afterlives. It also offered an answer to their desire to recompense their d ­ aughters for what they w ­ ere but not what they structurally stood for. Many of t­hese god statues w ­ ere invited into their ­fathers’ ­houses. Most of them, however, ­were not placed in the ­family ancestral altar along with their patrilineal ancestors and other gods, which is an orthodox and respectable location for celestial beings in a private ­house­hold. Rather, they ­were placed in a separate altar of their own, on a dif­fer­ent floor of the ­house. Some of the ­women ­were inducted into divinity by the deities at Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple—or San-ma Gong, as the ­temple was known by the local residents. Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple was originally a private Kuan Yin ­temple established and worshiped by the Kuo lineage in Chung-­chou. It has grown into a popu­lar ­temple over time, attended by residents in nearby neighborhoods due to its efficacious deities. ­Those who had their ­daughters inducted at Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple left ­these w ­ omen’s god statues to the care of the management committee at the ­temple. Likewise, ­those sanctified by Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­ tva joined her at her altar in Miao-­feng ­Temple, at least initially. ­There ­were also o ­ thers who left the god statues at other t­ emples or shrines where the gods (via spirit mediums) confirmed the deification of their d ­ aughters.10 The varying placements of t­ hese w ­ omen’s god statues exemplify the ambivalence that many parents of the deceased felt about their d ­ aughters’ elevated religious position. Taiwanese popu­lar religion has always been “flexible and individualistic in the sense that t­here is no one authority, church, or theocratic state [that] establishes dogma and determines belief” (Harrell 1974, 203–204). Therefore, hypothetically, any spirit can become a god or attain some godly or god-­like standing. Yet, practically, a spirit’s ability to convince p ­ eople about its godly status is closely related

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to its spiritual power or efficacy, that is, ­whether the spirit can answer requests or grant f­ avors (Harrell 1974, 204). Having a god statue erected for a spirit is a major undertaking. Before the erection of the statue, the spirit should have already performed miracles to benefit ­people; and, ­after the statue is created, the relationship between the spirit—or the deity—­ and the ­people who made the statue is stabilized and the bonds of mutual obligation between them are established (Lin 2008, 2015). Private god statues may be set up in domestic altars. ­Whether ­these gods can attract worshippers beyond the private ­house­holds, and extend their power and develop themselves into deities of a neighborhood, a village, or even a bigger locality, however, depends on their ability to perform marvels (Feuchtwang 1992). Efficacy was evidently an issue in the minds of the families when their deceased ­daughters requested god statues. The young age of ­these ­women at the time of their requests made it even more difficult for ­people to be convinced of their supposed elevated status. This was particularly evident in h ­ ouse­holds where the grand­fathers rather than the f­ athers of the deceased w ­ omen ­were in charge. As an example, when Kao Ah-­you discovered that his d ­ aughter who was learning to become a deity was causing his headaches, he was inclined to grant his d ­ aughter her wish. However, Grandpa Kao refused. “That child, how old is she now? She ­hasn’t done anything splendid, what a load of nonsense to make her a god statue!” Only when Grandpa Kao was cured of his cold by asking for his grand­daughter’s help did he consent to have a god statue made for her. The Kaos w ­ ere the third f­ amily to fulfill their d ­ aughter’s request. The deity San-ma at Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple, which sits across the street from the Kao ­house, authenticated the claim of the Kao ­daughter. ­After that, Kao Ah-­you no longer suffered from chronic headaches. In some cases, the objection of the grandparents was so strong that the parents had to wait ­until the passing (or retirement) of the elder generation before anything could be done. In this kind of situation, the parents could only begin to take up their ­daughter’s cause seriously a­ fter they w ­ ere in charge of the ­house­hold themselves. Chuang Kok told a similar story. He was skeptical when his wife came home and told him what she had learned from the ­mother down the block. Chuang Kok was not immediately convinced that this was an appropriate t­ hing to do in his ­daughter’s case. He explained that it was his wife who wanted to make their d ­ aughter a god statue: “[My wife] came home and told me about the story. Then she went to seek advice from the same tâng-­ki. The tâng-­ki told her our d ­ aughter has also become a maid

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of Kuan Yin. ­After that, [my wife] asked me, begged me, and cried quite a few times to get me to agree to make our d ­ aughter a god statue.” Chuang Kok did not give in right away. L ­ ater, like Kao Ah-­you, he was both­ered by constant headaches for which his doctor could not find a cause. P ­ eople told him it was an omen from his ­daughter, who was asking him for a god statue. However, Chuang Kok still did not think t­ here was anything that supported his ­daughter’s request. Only when he was cured of a cold a­ fter drinking a glass of w ­ ater obtained from the Maiden Ladies Tomb did he agree that his ­daughter had shown the efficacy that warranted a god statue. He was further convinced when the m ­ other of another deceased ­woman told him that a husband and wife had been seen paying re­spects to the tomb on the first and the fifteenth day of ­every lunar month, b ­ ecause the twenty-­five ladies had saved the husband’s life in a shipwreck by directing him to the nearest shore. The bedroom previously occupied by Chuang Kok’s d ­ aughter was also seen to emanate red light as if it w ­ ere burning. ­After consulting a tâng-­ki, Chuang Kok learned that this was yet another omen sent by his ­daughter. Soon thereafter, Chuang Kok had a god statue made for her. An ailment of unknown c­ auses, first inflicted upon a ­family member by a deceased d ­ aughter but ­later also cured by her, is cited by many of the families as proof of efficacy. Yet skeptics remained. The aforementioned Chuang Chin-­chun commented on how inappropriate it was for some parents to leave their d ­ aughters’ god statues at Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple on the assumption that the young ­women had now become a part of the entourage of the Goddess of Mercy. He did not think that the deceased had proven themselves holy enough to be worshipped by the general public at a village t­ emple. Chuang Chin-­chun also had his d ­ aughter’s god statue made. It was a sore point between him and his wife, however. Mrs. Chuang had wanted to have a god statue made for their d ­ aughter as soon as she heard about the option, but Chuang Chin-­chun insisted that it was out of the question ­because his ­daughter did not deserve it. In the end, Chuang Chin-­chun gave in for the sake of ­family peace. He had his ­daughter’s god statue placed at home, though not at the ­family shrine with the Chuang ancestors and other deities but on a separate altar on another floor of the h ­ ouse. “It ­doesn’t make sense for parents to worship their ­children who died before them,” Chuang Chin-­chun explained. Likewise, nearly all the believers seeking help from Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva came from out of town. When we asked the eldest Chuang s­ister why this was the case, she said bitterly that local ­people in Chung-­chou tended to disregard the deceased ­women as “ugh, ­those twenty-­five. . . .” She

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called ­these local residents “unenlightened nonbelievers” who made disparaging remarks such as “What’s wrong with t­ hese ­people who visited Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva for their trou­bles? If they are ­really in a jam, why ­don’t they seek help from big t­emples like Kuang Chi Gong instead of ­these twenty-­five what­ever?” Kuang Chi Gong—­nicknamed the Big ­Temple—is the unequivocally official, and largest, village ­temple in Chung-­chou, where Matsu (the Heavenly Empress) and Kuan Yin—­two of the most impor­tant gods in the Taiwanese religious pantheon—­are consecrated (Zhuang 2013, 35). In addition, Kuang Chi Gong also ­houses the main deities of neighboring villages whose ­temples ­were destroyed due to the expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor between 1975 and 1987 (Zhuang 2013, 38–40, 174–175). It is the local center of worship. Consequently, when ­people in Chung-­chou make a comparison between big ­temples with broad community support, like Kuang Chi Gong, and small, privately managed shrines like Miao-­feng ­Temple, they are essentially questioning the credibility of ­those ghosts who forced their way into the celestial order with apparently ­little attention to orthodoxy or legitimacy.11 Ultimately, it appears that the larger community of Chung-­chou has not been convinced by the miraculous stories of t­ hese ­women.

Primary versus Secondary Haunting Haunting is at the heart of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies story. On the one hand, the Taiwanese have long taken ghosts and other spiritual beings seriously, and they believe that ghosts can have impor­tant physical and social effects in and on the ­human world and behavioral environment. The urgency of the families’ desire to appease their deceased ­daughters evidenced in this chapter attests to the entangled peace and fortune between the living and the dead. On the other hand, the Taiwanese feminists invoked ghosts as a po­liti­cal and moral resource for the cause of gender equality. Their effort exemplifies the recent “spectral” turn, which highlights the possibility that ghosts and haunting can resuscitate the society’s collective ability to acquire a historical understanding that reckons with past vio­lence and suffering. ­These two parties each signify one of the two kinds of haunting identified by Martha and Bruce Lincoln (2015): the primary haunting by ­actual ghosts and the meta­ phorical kind that is referred to as secondary haunting. The distinction between dif­fer­ent kinds of haunting is impor­tant b ­ ecause it helps us answer one of the most fundamental questions raised by the hauntology lit­er­a­ture—­namely, who is haunted by whom, ­under what circumstances,

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and for what reasons? (Hollan 2020). ­These dif­fer­ent associations with the spectral examined in this book illustrate that the apparition of ghosts and haunting, ­whether primary or secondary, always occurs with par­tic­ u­lar p ­ eople ­under par­tic­u­lar circumstances, and each of the associations holds dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal and moral consequences and implications. I s­ hall turn to the secondary haunting represented by the Taiwanese feminists in chapter 4.

Chapter 4

Subservient ­Women, Worker Heroines

I

f the families of the deceased continued to show hesitation about their d ­ aughters’ god status, the larger community was even less convinced. The indifference that local ­people in Cijin displayed t­ oward Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva and her entourage, as told by her eldest ­sister and spirit medium in chapter 3, is a good example. A widely circulated story I heard during my research in Kaohsiung attests to a similar attitude ­there. Late on a frigid winter night, a taxi driver picked up a young ­woman near the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb in Cijin. ­After the passenger got into the cab, she explained to the driver that she was getting married the next morning. She was afraid that she would not have enough time to get ready before the groom came to collect her and had de­cided to go to Kaohsiung to have her hair done early. The driver followed her instructions and ­stopped the cab at a dark alley near the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone. An hour ­later, at the request of the young lady, the driver came back to take her home. The young ­woman looked splendid a­ fter having her hair done. To keep himself awake, the taxi driver started chatting with his passenger and learned that she had lived a harsh life. She came from a poor f­ amily, so she quit school and became a factory worker in the Export Pro­cessing Zone at a young age. Her income supported her ­family and helped to pay for her ­brothers’ educations. Now, a­ fter many years of laboring, she had fi­nally found a fine man to marry. Her only wish was to lead a good life with her new husband. The taxi driver was getting increasingly tired and drowsy ­after a long day’s work, and the conversation faltered. They ­were quiet for a while. As the car approached the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb where the young ­woman had first gotten into the cab, the driver dutifully congratulated his passenger on her upcoming nuptials and asked where he should drop her off. However, ­there was only dead silence in the pitch black. When he looked into his rearview mirror, he saw no one. He could 83

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not believe his own eyes and began to fear that he had met a ghost. In a cold sweat, he turned and drove home immediately. When he woke up the next morning, he was terrified to find that the bills he had received from his mysterious passenger the night before w ­ ere spirit money, the currency that the Taiwanese burn for the deceased to use in the afterlife. Sometimes the story is told differently. As opposed to a taxi driver, it might be a motorcycle rider who picks up the girl. Sometimes the young ­woman in the backseat just vanishes without a trace, or t­here might be no ­woman, but the motorcycle experiences a flameout, or the motorcycle rider suddenly loses his balance without any logical explanation. Regardless of what vehicle the man uses, where or how this encounter happens, or how the young w ­ oman dis­ appears, students of Taiwanese culture can easily recognize the motif and empathize with the unfortunate man for the predicament he ­faces. Young men encountering beautiful young w ­ omen who turn out to be ghosts is a common theme in Chinese lit­er­a­ture, folklore (classic and con­temporary), and popu­lar culture (Bosco 2007; Moskowitz 2004). Often t­ hese w ­ omen are said to be waiting to find a husband, especially if they died unmarried. Although coming across a phantom is rarely a welcome event to the Taiwanese—­and many p ­ eople would actively try to avoid such an experience—­something is exhilarating about meeting a beautiful female ghost. A survey conducted at nearby National Sun Yat-­sen University shows that the Maiden Ladies Tomb is a popu­lar topic of banter among students (Tang 2013). Male students would jokingly remind one another that they should have a female friend occupy the backseat before they r­ ide a motorcycle past the tomb site lest they have an unexpected “love encounter” with one of the ladies. It is precisely this mixture of emotions and responses—­fear, avoidance, teasing, and excitement—­provoked by the “maiden” status of ­these deceased young w ­ omen that propelled members of the Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (KAPWR) to voice their disapproval of the way ­these w ­ omen w ­ ere treated, both when they ­were alive and a­ fter they died, and to demand that the Kaohsiung City government help rectify the wrongs done to them. This chapter traces the contour of the KAPWR activism that championed ­women’s public roles—or, the public functions of ­women’s presumably private roles. It explores how Taiwanese feminists are translators who refashion global discourses and practices and work at vari­ous levels to negotiate between dif­fer­ent scales (local, regional, national, or global) of a system of meaning (Merry 2006, 39; Merry and Stern 2005, 387–388). Feminist activists at the KAPWR have had a dif­fer­ent relation-

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ship with the deceased young ­women from that of the deceased’s families. If, for the latter, ghosts haunt for personal redress and the act of haunting is ontological, for KAPWR feminists haunting is metaphysical. It brings to the fore past social injustices that require attention. Subsequently, the KAPWR had hardly any contact with the deceased’s families throughout the pro­cess of the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation. Their primary objects of interlocution w ­ ere state actors. Likewise, the KAPWR’s activism exemplifies “jumping scales” as a po­liti­cal strategy, conceptualized as engaging in a politics of repre­sen­ta­ tion, with locally situated residents drawing from regional, national, or global discourses to enhance their success in po­liti­cal strug­gles (Jones 1998). Being excluded from the United Nations (UN), Taiwan is not officially engaged in the UN agenda of gender equality. The establishment of the ­women’s policy agenda in Taiwan, therefore, has more to do with the development of the domestic ­women’s movement than with the advancement of the UN agenda (Chang-­ling Huang 2017, 260). Nevertheless, Taiwan’s ­women’s movement is fundamentally transnational in orientation and advocacy, as its goals and intellectual content are envisaged in global terms. Strategically, Taiwanese feminists have closely followed UN agendas, utilized global protocols, participated in international forums, and or­ga­nized multinational conferences to advance their campaigns at home. They mea­sure Taiwan’s gender-­related policies according to international standards. Their transnational approach appears to be po­liti­cally useful, as anything that could enhance Taiwan’s visibility on the world stage is welcomed by the state due to the country’s lack of formal repre­sen­ta­tion in international organ­izations. This is evident in how the KAPWR framed its discourse on the Maiden Ladies Tomb by equating gender equality to modernity and Kaohsiung’s standing in the global ordering of urban civilization. The course of KAPWR activism also reveals that w ­ omen’s movements worldwide are essentially as much a product of global as of local influence. It illustrates the fact that specific feminist praxis is dependent on the sociocultural and politico-­economic attributes of the socie­ties within which feminist groups are embedded (Mohanty 1991; Narayan 2013). The KAPWR’s effort to refashion the image of the Maiden Ladies Tomb is more than a posthumous recognition of the deceased ­women. It is a critique of a core feature of the Taiwanese patriliny, which trea­sures sons as true and permanent members but regards ­daughters as outsiders and temporary associates of their f­ athers’ families. This symbolic differentiation between sons and d ­ aughters has provided a framework on

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which many gender-­based practices, including the preference of young ­women for industrial work, are constituted and justified. The KAPWR activism was therefore a strategic choice borne out of the par­tic­u­lar patrilineal familial context of Taiwan that, in turn, created the potential to question patrilineal cultural practices.

A Genealogy of the ­Women’s Movement The autonomous ­women’s movement in Taiwan has a short history, and its evolution has been closely related to the country’s po­liti­cal development.1 Gender equality was guaranteed by the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China. Yet ­after its exodus to Taiwan upon losing the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT) imposed martial law on the island in May 1949. For the next thirty-­eight years, ­until July 1987, Taiwan was ­under military rule, during which many of the rights decreed in the constitution—­including the freedom of assembly and association—­were outlawed or truncated (Yenlin Ku 1989, 12–13). A war­time nongovernmental organ­ization law restricted the formation of new nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs), and, as a result, major w ­ omen’s groups ­were e­ ither attached to the KMT, associated with churches, or w ­ ere chapters of international organ­izations such as the YWCA (Yenlin Ku 1988, 180). Concurrently, to c­ ounter the drastic social and po­liti­cal changes on the Communist-­controlled mainland, the KMT took on the role of defender of traditional Chinese culture. As a part of this larger operation, elite members of KMT-­affiliated ­women’s organ­izations waged campaigns and mobilized w ­ omen to support the KMT party-­state’s anticommunism policies (Doris T. Chang 2009). ­Under ­these campaigns, w ­ omen in Taiwan ­were encouraged to play supportive and subservient roles both at home and in society. ­There was no serious discussion about ­women’s issues or their situations. Given t­ hese repressive conditions, ­women activists outside the KMT used po­liti­cally safe strategies—­such as forming publishing ­houses, social ser­vice organ­izations, or charity foundations—to or­ga­nize themselves (Fan 2003, 159). Specifically, magazine publishing presented a means to propagate ideas, while publishing ­houses provided legitimate bases for ­people—­publishers, writers, staff members, and the like—to get together. In consequence, with the inauguration of Pioneer Press, which published books on ­women’s issues, an autonomous ­women’s movement that retained a high degree of orga­nizational in­de­pen­dence from the state began to emerge in the early 1970s. ­After Pioneer Press was closed in 1977,

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a group of its associates continued to meet informally to discuss ­women’s issues ­until 1982, when they started the monthly Awakening magazine in Taipei. In 1988, a year a­ fter the lifting of martial law, Awakening was restructured into the Awakening Foundation (Yenlin Ku 2008, 178). The Awakening Foundation is now one of the most prominent w ­ omen’s organ­ izations in Taiwan. The restructuring of Awakening magazine into the Awakening Foundation indicated a new era of the w ­ omen’s movement. Resonating with the general trend of social movements in Taiwan, the w ­ omen’s movement started to make more concerted organ­izing efforts ­after martial law ended. A diversification of feminist activisms began ­after that time (Doris T. Chang 2009; Lu 2004). (By using the word “feminist” rather than “­women,” I aim to highlight the fact that participants of ­these burgeoning activisms are not only concerned with helping out ­women’s day-­to-­day strug­gles but are also actively seeking ways to change Taiwan’s patriarchal social structure.) Also, early ­women’s advocacy work was all based in the capital city of Taipei and focused on general issues that affected the country’s entire female population. At this point, however, nationally based organ­izations such as the Awakening Foundation began to establish offices in cities outside Taipei, while regionally based ­women’s groups (like KAPWR and the Taipei Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights) ­were formed to work on issues of interest for par­tic­ul­ar localities. Similar to other kinds of social movements (Ming-­sho Ho 2003, 2005, 2006), Taiwan’s ­women’s movement made ­great advances in the two de­cades following the 1980s. By connecting gender equality to democracy, citizenship, and national identity, feminist activists successfully staged the claim of institutionalizing ­women’s rights. Socially, they pushed for Taiwan to adopt social welfare and gender-­related policies inspired by the Nordic models (Tang and Teng 2016, 96). Legally, patrilineal-­ leaning, patriarchal f­amily laws—­such as a wife should live where her husband lives, a wife should change her surname to her husband’s, and a husband possesses his right to manage the joint property—­were amended. Likewise, several pieces of major pro-­women legislation became law. ­These included the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution—­ Elimination of Sex Discrimination and Promotion of Substantive Equality between Both Sexes (1994); the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution Law (1995); the Sexual Assault Crime Prevention Act (1997); the Domestic Vio­lence Prevention Act (1998); the Criminal Code on Rape (1999); the Articles on C ­ ouples’ Properties in the Civil Code (2002); the

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Gender Equality in Employment Law (2002); and the ­Children and Juvenile Welfare Law (2003). Two related l­egal codes, the F ­ amily Section of the Civil Law and the Sexual Assault Crime Prevention Act, ­were also revised in 1996 and 2002, respectively (Doris T. Chang 2009, 118–155; Lo and Fan 2010, 177). In the area of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion, po­liti­cal parties in Taiwan have been implementing policies to increase the percentage of female candidates during electoral campaigns since the late 1990s. As a result, w ­ omen now make up 38 ­percent of Taiwan’s national congress, a percentage not only higher than Taiwan’s demo­cratic Asian neighbors Japan (10.2 ­percent) and South ­Korea (17.1 ­percent) but also other long-­existing democracies such as the United Kingdom (32 ­percent) and the United States (23.5 ­percent).2 In addition to t­ hese successes, the state also institutionalized w ­ omen’s participation in policy making (Chang-­ling Huang 2017, 262). By the mid-1990s, leaders from w ­ omen’s NGOs w ­ ere periodically invited by the Taipei mayor’s office to advise on gender-­sensitive policies. This was quickly followed by Taiwan’s central government, which established the Committee for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (CPWR) to counsel the prime minister and other officials from central government agencies responsible for formulating and implementing ­women’s policies (Doris T. Chang 2018a, 346–347). Concomitantly, CPWRs w ­ ere also formed ­under the Taipei City government and the Kaohsiung City government. Representatives of ­women’s organ­izations and experts and scholars on ­women’s issues have been invited to serve on t­ hese government advisory task forces (Doris T. Chang 2009, 153). The shift of w ­ omen’s NGOs from being outside critics to government advisers coincided with the timing of the UN Fourth World Conference on ­Women in 1995 in Beijing, for which Taiwan was denied official participation. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action called for gender mainstreaming in each nation’s formulations of laws and policies. Despite Taiwan’s exclusion from the UN—or precisely b ­ ecause of this exclusion and the subsequent effort to break through the country’s marginal status in the international community—­Taiwan’s central government belatedly a­ dopted gender mainstreaming in the early 2000s. In practice, “gender mainstreaming” as a buzzword among Taiwanese government officials refers to the pro­cess that requires gender equity considerations to be incorporated into the operation of e­ very single government agency (Peng 2008). Subsequently, feminist activists are formally incorporated into government operations. ­Those who join the government (on a term system) are strategically positioned to contribute to policy

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formation that integrates feminist perspectives (Doris T. Chang 2018a, 344). Furthermore, the creation of the Gender Equality Committee of the Executive Yuan marked the first step t­oward the recruitment, training, and professionalization of government workers to equip them with knowledge and expertise on gender mainstreaming within the bureaucratic system (Doris T. Chang 2018a, 354). Closely related to the implementation of gender mainstreaming was the enactment of gender equity education, which has had a notable impact on the KAPWR’s work. The Legislative Yuan passed the Gender Equity Education Act in 2004. The law specifies that a gender-­friendly environment is essential in education. It stipulates that a gender equity curriculum be incorporated into learning from elementary school through college. It also requires that gender studies courses be offered at the university level. A Gender Equity Education Committee was created ­under the Ministry of Education at the central government, in e­ very city and county government, and at ­every school and university in Taiwan. At least half of the members of each committee must be ­women. In schools, and at the level of local government, the Gender Equity Education Committee is in charge of implementing gender equity policies, preventing sexual assaults and harassment, and coordinating gender equity curricula (Doris T. Chang 2018a, 349–350). The law also demands that teachers and administrators re­spect students’ sexual orientation. This paved the way for gay and lesbian organ­izations to go into schools and educate students on LGBTQ rights (Huang Chang-­ling 2017, 262). Unlike in the West, the autonomy of Taiwanese w ­ omen’s organ­ izations derived less from their being shunned, marginalized, or oppressed by state structures than from the par­tic­u­lar life circumstances of the activists (Shu-­Ching Lee 2011, 50). One key characteristic of Taiwan’s ­women’s movement is its lack of grassroots mobilization, particularly in contrast to the l­abor and environmental movements (Weng and Fell 2006). As opposed to mass mobilization techniques, Taiwanese feminists are inclined to employ public education, lobbying for legislative reform, and collaborating with state actors as their principal strategies (Hwang and Wu 2016; Yenlin Ku 2008). Taiwanese sociologist Fan Yun (2003), herself a feminist activist, suggests that this may have to do with the feminists’ overall better class position and higher educational attainments when compared to their counter­parts in other social movements. Many of the feminist activists are l­awyers or college professors, and a substantial number of them obtained their postgraduate degrees from Western universities. They naturally employ their cultural and social capital and

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access to institutional spaces as their main movement assets (Chong-su Kim 2018, 349). The strategies they choose reflect their own life experiences and professional expertise. Consequently, their two major challenges have been how to broaden their mass base beyond the ­middle class and how to best collaborate with the government while retaining their autonomy (Fan 2003; Tu and Peng 2008). Some scholar-­activists have voiced concerns about the turn to “state feminism”—­that is, the institutionalization, propagation, and execution of feminist goals by the state (Yang Wan-­ying 2004). Critics also question w ­ hether this has led to po­liti­cal influence and repre­sen­ta­tion for feminist organ­izations without a mass base or the incentive to seek one (Ming-­sho Ho 2006).3

Feminists Framing the Discourse The biographical backgrounds of KAPWR core members follow the larger trends in the w ­ omen’s movement identified above. Many of them are college professors in southern Taiwan. The strategies they ­adopted in their attempt to change the public image of the Maiden Ladies Tomb resonated with ­those employed by their counter­parts at national organ­ izations in Taipei. By the same token, they have also faced criticism for lacking class consciousness or a working-­class sensibility from some ­labor organ­izations. Professor Wen-­hui Tang, a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at National Sun Yat-­sen University and former KAPWR secretary, reminisced about why her Kaohsiung-­based feminist group a­ dopted the cause of the ­women buried at the Maiden Ladies Tomb. It happened not long ­after she moved to Kaohsiung, when she was still feeling her way around: “One day I was driving through Cijin Road and glimpsed the memorial archway with the words ‘Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies’ inscribed on it. Maiden Ladies? What the heck was that? My first thought was that it sounded derogatory. Why the heck would t­here be a tomb with such a name? Who is buried in it?” Professor Tang’s initial curiosity quickly developed into full-­fledged activism. In as early as 2003, the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb was regularly on the agenda of KAPWR’s executive board meetings. KAPWR members also made frequent site visits, sometimes in groups and sometimes individually. The negligence that KAPWR feminists observed at the burial site seemed to further attest to the pitiful state of the deceased young ­women. The dumping of carbide slag over the years (see chapter 2) created one-­story-­ high mounds on two sides of the tomb. The corrosive nature of carbide

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slag made the place a harsh environment for vegetation, and this made an already desolate landscape look even more forsaken. ­There was also someone ­running an open-­air karaoke business in front of the graves during the day. Some KAPWR members felt that, out of reverence for the dead, a cemetery should be quiet and peaceful. It was therefore sacrilege to hear such loud blasts of ­music and singing for the sake of mere entertainment so near the burial site. KAPWR members ­were most infuriated by the fact that the Maiden Ladies Tomb, like other places occupied by ­people who had died bad deaths, was treated by gamblers in illegal lotteries as a place to pick winning numbers. In Taiwanese popu­lar religion, both gods and ghosts grant wishes. Most ­people, however, prefer to make their requests to gods, ­because they are more power­ful than ghosts. Yet gods are generally honorable and moral beings, most of whom w ­ ill not help p ­ eople with illegitimate demands. Ghosts, on the other hand, are desperate b ­ ecause they do not have regular worshippers. They ­will likely grant any request, including winning lottery numbers for gamblers (Weller 1994a, 143–144). The feminists learned that gamblers who won the lottery with numbers obtained at the Maiden Ladies Tomb would offer the “ladies” combs, cosmetics, or other objects favored by young ­women as a gesture of appreciation. Occasionally winning gamblers expressed their gratitude by hiring a hand puppet troupe to perform and entertain the ladies. By the same token, when the gamblers lost their bets ­because of the “wrong” numbers presumably given by the spirits, they took their anger out on the spirits (Hu 1986). In this case, the anger had led to the vandalism of the graves, the destruction of the photos of the ­women affixed to their headstones, and the smearing of paint on the headstones. In addition to gamblers, the Maiden Ladies Tomb also attracted drug addicts, who liked to hide in the area ­behind the burial site where no one would ordinarily go ­after dark. KAPWR members at times found used n ­ eedles and other rubbish in that space on their site trips. The lack of official oversight that had allowed ­these occurrences signified for the KAPWR feminists the city’s problematic discounting of gender issues. ­After nearly a year of preparation and strategizing, the KAPWR was ready for action. On April 2, 2004, three days before Ching-­ming Day, the traditional tomb-­sweeping day in Taiwanese society, the KAPWR called a press conference, in which members rallied for “reconstructing the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb.” In its press release the KAPWR drew on the recent transformation in Kaohsiung’s cityscape and congratulated the city on the beautification of its urban environment and the g­ reat

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improvements Kaohsiung had made in its urban culture (see chapter 5). The KAPWR equated the reconstruction of the Maiden Ladies Tomb with gender equality and with Kaohsiung’s status as a progressive city, and it emphasized the importance of the tomb renovation in Kaohsiung’s ongoing pursuit of global status. Two days ­later, on April 4, then KAPWR secretary Wen-­hui Tang published a newspaper op-ed piece, “Huibuliaojia de nüren” (­Women who cannot go home) in China Times, a major newspaper in Taiwan. Tang asserted a connection between “urban civilization” and “gender equality” and reiterated how changing the Maiden Ladies Tomb was vital to the city’s quest for this two-­pronged modernity. She commented on the custom that Taiwanese married ­women could only be commemorated alongside the ancestors of their husbands but not among t­ hose of their natal families. The article also highlighted the predicament of unwed Taiwanese ­women, like ­those buried at the tomb, who not only had hard lives while alive but also lacked anyone to venerate them a­ fter their deaths. ­These ­women’s absence from an ancestral shrine denotes an exclusion from the social order, which extends beyond life into the social realm of the dead. The timing of Tang’s op-ed piece was carefully chosen. It was published just as many p ­ eople in Taiwan ­were returning home, reuniting with their families, and getting ready to observe the most impor­tant duty required of offspring in Taiwanese culture. Therefore, it was a keen reminder of a fundamental in­equality between men and w ­ omen in Taiwanese society. Tang concluded her article with a mission statement: “The collective memory of the city and the city’s cultural sensibility can only be transformed—­and the ideal of gender equality can only be realized—­ through the re-­presentation of history. Therefore, we advocate that the Kaohsiung City government make efforts to improve the urban image of Cijin to build an urban culture of gender equality.” To further their cause, Professor Tang and her KAPWR colleagues called for combating the cultural bias against the deceased unwed ­women by emphasizing their other role as manufacturing workers who helped to craft Taiwan’s economic miracle. The KAPWR activists also highlighted the fact that t­ hese ­women died on their way to work, thereby making their deaths job-­related casualties. The activists maintained that a focus on the deceased ­women’s work role, as opposed to their unmarried status, would also aid in advancing the public’s awareness about the contributions Taiwanese ­women have made to the economic growth of the country. To accomplish t­hese goals, the KAPWR recommended that: (1) the Kaohsiung City Bureau of Cultural Affairs should commission experts to research

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the history of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, to recognize the sacrifice and contribution ­these ­women made to Taiwan’s economic development; (2) the Kaohsiung City Education Bureau should invite scholars to write about the ferry accident and the context around it as teaching materials for local studies and school education for gender equity (more broadly, this would also provide Kaohsiung City residents with an opportunity to understand the gender and social implications of the urban landscape of their city); and (3) the government at both the central and municipal levels should help publicize ­these ­women’s economic contributions, and the issue of gender (in)equality intertwined with their stories, so that the ­women could gain the re­spect they should have had while alive and the reverence their spirits should command at pre­sent. ­These recommendations closely reflected the fact that many of the KAPWR members w ­ ere educators deeply involved in the gender equity education movement discussed above.

Of Folk Custom Reforms and Cultural Landmarks The KAPWR’s effort to transform the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb began as locally embedded activism, but it was closely related to the national ­women’s movement and its impact has grown beyond the confines of the Kaohsiung area. Specifically, KAPWR’s activism exemplifies two national feminist campaigns: the push to reform the culture and rites of ancestor worship and the promotion of landmarks of ­women’s culture as public herstory. The former is a homegrown strug­gle, and the latter is a globally inspired endeavor. Both campaigns are ongoing and have gained currency u ­ nder the Taiwanese government’s gender mainstreaming mandate.

The Reform of the Culture and Rites of Ancestor Worship In 2001 the Executive Yuan’s Committee for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights passed its ­Women’s Policy Platform, one of the guiding princi­ples of which was the necessity of reforming or eradicating ­those aspects of folk culture that discriminate against ­women. Since then, rites and practices of ancestor worship based on patrilineality have become a major focus of Taiwanese feminists. In 2003, around the same time when the KAPWR was preparing its Maiden Ladies Tomb campaign, the Awakening Foundation held a press conference titled “From Maiden ­Temples to the Gender Politics of Ancestor Worship” on Ching-­ming Day, in which

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the foundation underscored the fact that only married w ­ omen could be incorporated into (their husbands’) ancestral tablets (and thus acquire eternal life), leaving all other kinds of w ­ omen (unwed, divorced, or lesbian) forever uncared for. It was highlighted in the press conference that this cultural practice had the oppressive effect of endorsing (heterosexual) marriage as the single most impor­tant accomplishment in a w ­ oman’s life and excluding other life course alternatives. In subsequent years, the Awakening Foundation continued to push for its reform agenda. In 2006 the foundation joined forces with the Ministry of Education to cosponsor a conference, “Interrogating the Gender Notions b ­ ehind Wedding and Funeral Rites.” This conference was primarily aimed at government workers and educators in both K–12 schools and community-­extended education. Its main objective was to raise gender consciousness in the participants’ minds and to provide them with teaching materials or ideas for gender-­mainstreaming activities mandated by the government. In 2009 the Awakening Foundation called another press conference. The long title of this press conference, “Excluded from Worshipping [One’s Parents] ­After Marrying Out, Unable to Go Back [to One’s Parents’] Home ­After ­Dying Unmarried,” clearly illustrated Awakening’s objective to change gender-­biased cultural customs, especially ­those of wedding and funeral rites and practices. This time, the foundation’s feminists also demanded institutional reform. Specifically, they called for a close look at the gender bias in the government’s mortician certification exam. The passing of a ­family member is a moment of grief and confusion, and ­people often rely on their mortician to guide them through this emotionally difficult time and to answer the many practical questions they have about the funeral. Morticians are therefore strategically positioned to instill a new kind of ancestor worship culture if they can take into consideration the diverse situations of dif­fer­ent families as opposed to simply sticking to the patrilineal requirement dictated by the traditional culture. The Taiwanese government responded in kind and began to develop a mortician test bank that incorporates values of gender equity and sexual and gender diversity (Executive Yuan 2013). To that end, the Ministry of the Interior sponsored a series of seminars, leading to the publication of Pingdeng zizhu, shenzhong zhuiyuan: Xiandai guomin sangli (Equity, autonomy, and prudence: Modern civil funerals) in 2012. Although it is not a textbook, it has quickly taken on the status of policy declaration and become something like a handbook for morticians. Some of the highlights in the book include (1) unmarried or divorced female kin should be allowed to have a place in the ancestral tablet of their natal

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families upon their deaths (while, customarily, only married w ­ omen have the right to be incorporated into the ancestral tablets of their husbands’ families); (2) both men and ­women should be able to preside or perform key death rituals (whereas, normally, only men can take on such a critical role) and, likewise, some traditional customs exclusively performed by w ­ omen should be abolished b ­ ecause they are based on gender-­ 4 biased assumptions; and (3) ritual decisions that prioritize the spiritual and material well-­being of male descendants (determined by one’s Eight Characters), such as the choice of funeral date, should take into consideration the well-­being of both male and female descendants. Similarly, mortuary ­matters that privilege male over female descendants, like the arrangement of names in obituary notices or on tombstones, should be determined based on birth order, not gender (Taiwan Ministry of the Interior 2012). Ultimately, the Ministry of the Interior is propagating a modern mortuary practice that is not based on traditional patrilineal gender norms but rather re­spects the wishes and w ­ ill of the dead and their gender and sexual identities. The Ministry of Education also began to integrate this new notion of funeral ceremonies into social studies curricula. Another example of feminist efforts along this line was the publication of Danian chuyi hui niangjia: Xisu wenhua yu xingbie jiaoyü (­Going back to my ­mother’s h ­ ouse on New Year’s Day: Culture, customs, and gender equity education; Su and Hsiao 2005), a collected volume of essays examining vari­ous gender-­based customs written by affiliates of the Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association (TGEEA). A few KAPWR members are TGEEA associates and contributors to this collected volume. The title of this book is meant to be a strong critique of the cultural practice that dictates a married w ­ oman eat Reunion Dinner on Chinese New Year’s Eve with her husband and her own ­family, including any married sons and their wives and c­ hildren and any unmarried d ­ aughters, her husband’s parents, her husband’s married b ­ rothers and their wives and c­ hildren, and any unmarried s­ isters of her husband— in a nutshell, male descendants who have the right to inherit f­ amily property and their unwed d ­ aughters or ­sisters. (It is impor­tant to note that, by law, sons and d ­ aughters have equal inheritance rights regardless of their marital status.) According to the custom, a married w ­ oman can only visit her natal ­family on the second day of the New Year. It is said that she w ­ ill bring bad luck with her if she stays with them on New Year’s Eve. Likewise, as an outsider to her natal ­family, she ­will damage her ­brothers’ fortunes or their chances of accumulating one if she visits her ­mother, who presumably lives with her ­brothers, on Chinese New Year’s

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Day. Nevertheless, it is also said that this possibility of pending doom may be evaded if the d ­ aughter takes with her a ­bottle of cooking oil as a gift, which is referred to as thàn kah iû-­sé-­sé (賺呷油洗洗) in the Hokkien (Minnan) dialect, using “cooking oil” to symbolize “making big money” (Chang Wenting 2014, 53–54). ­There is likely a practical reason b ­ ehind ­these folk beliefs, however. As many Taiwanese choose to visit their (extended) families, friends, and business associates at the first opportunity in a new year, a daughter-­in-­law is often expected to work with her mother-­in-­law to offer their ­family guests the utmost hospitality.5 Correspondingly, d ­ aughters’ names are normatively excluded from f­ amily genealogy rec­ords, whereas ­women who have married into the ­family have only their maiden names but not their given names listed in their husbands’ ­family rec­ords. In 2007, then TGEEA director Hsiao Jau-­jiun, a faculty member in the Department of Education at National Dong Hwa University and coeditor of the aforementioned Danian chuyi hui niangjia, made history by becoming the first female officiant ever at the Hsiao lineage annual ancestor worship ceremony. January 12 on the lunar calendar is a big day for the Hsiao lineage in central Taiwan, and ­every year more than one hundred p ­ eople show up for the annual ancestor worship ser­vice. A married-­ out ­daughter, Professor Hsiao recalled that, on her visit to her parents in 2006, she learned that only her f­ ather received an invitation to this annual ceremony whereas her m ­ other was excluded. She wondered why that was the case and de­cided to go to the annual ser­vice with her ­father that year, only to discover that all pre­sent ­were male. Out of this surprise she developed the idea of becoming an officiant herself, and she asked her ­father to talk to the chairman of their lineage association about it. It turned out that this was not the first time Professor Hsiao’s f­ ather had asked to have his d ­ aughter serve as an officiant for ancestor worship. In 1990, ­after Hsiao received her doctorate in education from Indiana University—­the first doctoral degree in the history of the Hsiao lineage—­ her joyous f­ather rushed to ask the chairman at the time w ­ hether his ­daughter, who had surely made the ancestors proud, could be an officiant. The chairman responded, “A doctoral degree holder is surely qualified to do it—­but not when she is a ­woman.” However, on this second attempt in 2007, a new chairman readily said yes, adding, “The times have changed. We even have a female vice president [of Taiwan] now. ­People in the past ­were old-­fashioned. But I believe in the princi­ple of democracy” (Chen Yi-­ shan 2007).6 Nonetheless, ­there was no lack of opposition. Some p ­ eople in the Hsiao lineage simply voiced their dissent by saying, “This is not the

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tradition!” O ­ thers asked, “­Isn’t t­here any man of worth in the Hsiao lineage [who can be the officiant]?” ­There ­were still o ­ thers who used the ancestors to emphasize the gravity of the situation: “What if the ancestors are displeased and cause the lineage misfortune or distress as a result?” (Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association 2009). In the end, Professor Hsiao prevailed, and the story of her strug­gle was made into a documentary titled Nüsheng zhengbuzou: Qianshou cuisheng nüzhuji (­Women’s light shines on) in 2009.7 To become an ancestor worship officiant was only the first step, however. As Hsiao herself commented at the end of the ancestor worship ceremony, “Equality is a universal value. We ­can’t follow something unjust simply ­because it is a centuries-­old tradition. Every­body should recognize the contribution of their female ancestors. All ­women should be able to worship their paternal ancestors, and they should all have the right to be incorporated into their [natal] families’ genealogies” (quoted in Chen Yi-­shan 2007). Professor Hsiao also put her words into action. It is the convention that each officiant ­will bequeath a plaque ­after their ser­vice to be hung in the Hsiao ancestral hall. Inscribed on Professor Hsiao’s plaque is “Everlasting ­Women’s Light” (女光永續), along with her name, her f­ ather’s name, and the (full) name of her ­mother as an eighteenth-­generation daughter-­in-­ law of the Hsiao lineage. This was the first time in the lineage’s one-­ hundred-­year history that a w ­ oman’s name appeared permanently on the wall of the Hsiao ancestral hall. Professor Hsiao recalled that she was invigorated ­after the premiere of the documentary when three old gentlemen who served as the chairmen and executive secretary of their lineage association thanked her for her unpre­ce­dented act. They told her it was her “chivalrous deed” that gave them the confidence and sense of righ­teousness to advocate for incorporating the spirit of a highly accomplished maiden aunt into the lineage’s ancestral tablet for worship. Hearing this, Professor Hsiao vowed that she would forever continue her feminist work, even in the afterworld (Chen Hsin-yi 2010). Since its release, the film has been shown widely in schools and college campuses and has become an impor­tant visual teaching aid in gender equity education.

Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture as Public Herstory In addition to the national campaign of the reform of cultural customs, the KAPWR’s position that the built environment is integral to the production of meaning dovetailed with the Landmarks of ­Women’s

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Culture proj­ect initiated by the National Cultural Association, a semiofficial, nonprofit organ­ ization advocating the promotion of culture, 8 broadly defined. The Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ect was conceptualized ­after a series of planning sessions involving female experts in related fields in 2005, u ­ nder the leadership of Chen Hsiu-­hui, who was then deputy secretary-­ general of the National Cultural Association. Chen, a veteran of Awakening magazine, has been involved in Taiwan’s ­women’s movement since the 1970s. On a 1988 trip to the United States, she visited Seneca Falls in upstate New York, where she saw how the square where American w ­ omen once assembled to fight for voting rights had been established as a historical landmark to commemorate the suffrage movement. It deeply touched her. On a dif­fer­ent occasion, she was inspired by the fact that the mayor of Paris named a bridge crossing the Seine River a­ fter French feminist Simone de Beauvoir on International ­Women’s Day in 2005. ­These monuments gave her the idea of establishing ­women’s cultural landmarks in Taiwan (Chen Yong 2010). In one of her public interviews, Chen indicated that history should not be just “history,” but it should also be “herstory”: “Only when the female life course along the temporal axis comes together with the female imagery imprinted on the spatial axis, can we truly appreciate female existence in full light” (Ling Mei-­hsueh 2006). Similar to the KAPWR feminists who sought Kaohsiung City’s cooperation by equating gender equality to urban civilization, Chen evoked Taiwan’s positive sentiment t­ oward its recent po­ liti­cal liberalization for her own ends. She made an analogy between acknowledging w ­ omen’s herstory and deepening Taiwan’s democracy—­and, by extension, enhancing Taiwan’s global reputation—to entice government support for her initiative. ­After more than a year of deliberation, twenty landmarks ­were identified in the first phase of the Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ect. They ­were chosen b ­ ecause the w ­ omen involved w ­ ere pioneers in Taiwan’s history or their stories reflected memorable life experiences in their times. A designated landmark could also be a physical location, a public space that helped to advance w ­ omen’s status at a par­tic­ul­ ar historical juncture. The National Cultural Association also invited w ­ omen artists, landscape architects, and designers to create a visual art installation at each of t­ hese landmarks. The first landmark, Tamshui’s First Girls’ School, was designated on March 8, 2006; Chen Shui-­bian, Taiwan’s president at the time, attended the inauguration ceremony. Eleven more landmarks w ­ ere established by September 3, 2008, and t­ oday they collectively make up what is known as the Cultural Map of Taiwan’s ­Women. In conjunction, in

Subservient W ­ omen, Worker Heroines99

2006 the National Cultural Association sponsored the publication of the first volume of Nüren de jihen: Taiwan nüxing wenhuo dibiao (The marks of ­women’s clogs: Cultural landmarks of ­women in Taiwan), a book about cultural landmarks—­both tangible and intangible—­that are impor­ tant to ­women’s ­causes in dif­fer­ent parts of Taiwan. The Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb / Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers in Cijin is one of the cultural landmarks included in this book. A second volume of the book was published in 2008, and a third volume in 2019. Similar to the TGEEA’s effort to reform patrilineal cultural customs, the continual development of the Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ ect is closely related to the Taiwanese government’s gender mainstreaming policy. In the years following the installations of the first twelve cultural landmarks, the National Cultural Association collaborated with vari­ous ­women’s groups as well as county and city governments to or­ga­ nize a series of Taiwan’s Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture exhibitions. Experts participating in the Landmarks proj­ect ­were also invited by local governments to participate in seminars titled “Gender Mainstreaming through Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture.” Both the exhibitions and the seminars w ­ ere open to the general public. Their primary targets, however, ­were government workers, NGO staff, and citizen volunteers of government agencies and private social ser­vice organ­izations. The idea was to use the exhibitions and seminars to train ­these groups of ­people to be more gender-­conscious so that they could better carry out the government mandate of gender mainstreaming, a subject that I w ­ ill return to in chapter 7.

When Feminists Meet the State In sync with the broader w ­ omen’s movement in Taiwan, the KAPWR continued to push for the Kaohsiung City government to reconstruct the Maiden Ladies Tomb and its surrounding environment as well as to change its name. On Ching-­ming Day 2005, the KAPWR held a memorial ser­vice at the Maiden Ladies Tomb that was attended by KAPWR members and the deceased ­women’s families. Another press conference was held on Ching-­ming Day 2007. Individual KAPWR members also wrote academic articles, newspaper essays, and commentaries on the topic. Many of ­those who ­were college professors also incorporated the Maiden Ladies Tomb into their classroom discussions (Tang 2013). The initial response from the Kaohsiung City government came swiftly. Less than a month a­ fter the KAPWR’s first press conference, the

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Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau issued a press release in which ­labor safety was underscored as the core prob­lem regarding the Maiden Ladies Tomb. Correspondingly, the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau kicked off a Name Change Movement at the Maiden Ladies Tomb on April 28, the International Workers’ Memorial Day, on which occasion the twenty-­five deceased w ­ omen w ­ ere saluted as “young female heroines who fought for Taiwan’s strug­gle for economic development in the 1970s” (六十年代為台 灣經濟建設奮鬥的少女英雄). The L ­ abor Affairs Bureau also proposed to convert the Maiden Ladies Tomb into a Workers’ Memorial Park. In spite of its emphasis on ­labor, this name change proposal did not win much admiration from KAPWR members, who pointed out that the city still addressed t­ hese twenty-­five ­women as “young girls” in its public statement. Additionally, the fact that the proposed new park would be a park dedicated to all laborers but not specifically to female workers seemed to indicate the city’s indifference to gender issues. The KAPWR members’ frustration was well captured in the words of Professor Tang, who commented, “The L ­ abor Affairs Bureau kept insisting on the word ‘­labor.’ They seemed to have some sort of re­sis­tance against using ‘gender’ explic­itly. ­There was simply no way to reason with them! Also, what was this [silly] idea of characterizing the ferry incident a ‘gong-­shang’ [工殤; workers’ memorial] event? Nobody in Cijin understood what that was. Every­body thought it was ‘gong-­shang’ [工商; industry and commerce].” The KAPWR also preferred not to revamp the burial site entirely but to preserve some part of it. For example, it would be fine, the group agreed, if the graves ­were kept where they ­were. If the city insisted on a complete overhaul of the site, they recommended that a model of the original tomb be made so that t­ here could be a historical rec­ord. They further suggested that the model could also be displayed at the reconstructed park to educate the public about the site’s history. They did not, however, receive any response from the city on t­ hese recommendations. ­After this first exchange, nothing further happened for a long time. In spite of the KAPWR’s continued efforts, the city government was slow to respond and pro­gress was hard to come by. With her self-­deprecating sense of humor, Professor You Mei-­hui, a faculty member at National Kaohsiung Normal University and an active KAPWR member, told me about one of their press conferences, at which no reporter was pre­sent: “Nobody showed up! [Laughter.] In the end, we did what we planned on ­doing, with ourselves as the audience. And my assistant and I had to send the press release to the media by ourselves.” When I asked why she thought no one came, Professor You answered, “I guess what we had to

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­Table 4.1. ​Mayors of Kaohsiung, 1998–­Pre­sent Status

Name

Directly elected Interim

Frank Hsieh Chang-­ting 謝長廷 (male)a Chen Chi-­mai 陳其邁 (male)b Yeh Chu-­lan 葉菊蘭 (female)c Chen Chu 陳菊 (female)d

Interim Directly elected Interim Directly elected Interim Directly elected

Hsu Li-­ming 許立明 (male) Han Kuo-yu 韓國瑜 (male)e Yang Ming-­jou 楊明州 (male) Chen Chi-­mai 陳其邁 (male)

Po­liti­cal Party Affiliation Demo­cratic Progressive Party Demo­cratic Progressive Party Demo­cratic Progressive Party Demo­cratic Progressive Party Demo­cratic Progressive Party Kuomintang In­de­pen­dent Demo­cratic Progressive Party

Term of Office December 25, 1998– ­February 1, 2005 February 1, 2005–­ December 20, 2005 December 20, 2005–­ December 25, 2006 December 25, 2006–­ April 20, 2018 April 20, 2018– ­December 25, 2018 December 25, 2018–­ June 13, 2020 June 13, 2020–­August 22, 2020 August 24 2020 (incumbent)

Notes: a Frank Hsieh Chang-­ting left the Kaohsiung mayorship to become the prime minister of Taiwan. His deputy mayor, Chen Chi-­mai, succeeded him as interim mayor. b Chen Chi-­mai resigned a­ fter scandals involving his f­ ather came to light following the Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit Thai Workers Riot in 2005. c Yeh Chu-­lan was the first female mayor of a special municipality. d Chen Chu was the first directly elected female mayor of a special municipality. e Han Kuo-yu was recalled on June 6, 2020, and officially stepped down on June 12, 2020.

say was not headline material, and ­there was not much pro­gress ­after our first press conference in 2003 [for which reporters did show up]. When I asked Professor You w ­ hether they could have done more or something dif­fer­ent to advance their cause, she explained that it was not easy. Partly this was ­because Kaohsiung City was in a state of po­liti­ cal turmoil in the early 2000s. In the short span of twenty-­three months, Kaohsiung had experienced four mayors (­table 4.1). A more impor­tant reason was the lack of institutional channels through which the feminists could influence policy making. Although the Kaohsiung City ­Women’s Rights Promotion Committee had already been in place since 1997, only in 2009 was the first KAPWR representative invited to sit on the committee, although, individually, a few KAPWR members (including Professor Tang and Professor You) ­were invited to serve in their capacity as

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experts and scholars. As a result, ­there was ­little opportunity for the KAPWR to interfere formally with the course of the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation, as it did not have much leverage with the city government. As Professor You explained, “Mostly, we could only propose something and wait for the city government to respond. Then we could make our next move.” Professor Tang echoed this sentiment. The po­liti­cal turmoil turned out to be a mixed blessing, however. While it is not fair to essentialize one’s be­hav­ior based on her gender, it is nonetheless true that Mayor Yeh Chu-­lan and Mayor Chen Chu—­both ­women—­seemed to have shown more sympathy t­oward the KAPWR’s cause. The fact that some KAPWR members and the two female mayors are personal friends and po­liti­cal allies (in the Demo­cratic Progressive Party) might have also facilitated the mayors’ ac­cep­tance of the KAPWR’s goal. Consequently, it was u ­ nder the administrations of t­ hese two female mayors that one began to see vis­i­ble gender-­sensitive development. In 2006, ­under Mayor Yeh and with Tang as a ­Women’s Rights Promotion Committee member, the city government a­ dopted the KAPWR’s recommendation to change the Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. While the Kaohsiung City government was slow to transform the appearance of the Maiden Ladies Tomb, individual city agencies—­notably, the Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau—­did respond to the KAPWR’s request in vari­ous other ways. For example, following the decision to reconstruct the burial site into the new Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, the ­Labor Affairs Bureau commissioned the Awakening Association of Kaohsiung to conduct a “Twenty-Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Landscape Construction and Naming” field study, which focused on the views of the deceased’s families about the proposed new park. Like the KAPWR, Awakening Kaohsiung is a major feminist organ­ization in Kaohsiung critical of Taiwan’s patriarchal social structure.9 Many of the core members of the KAPWR and Awakening Kaohsiung are professional colleagues and personal friends. They are close allies who share much common ideological ground, hold similar ideas about movement strategies, and assist one another, collaborating on many proj­ects. Awakening Kaohsiung was given only three months by the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau to complete the study, and within this short time, Awakening Kaohsiung associates managed to visit most of the families. They talked to at least one member of each of t­hese families about how they would like to see the tomb changed and then compiled a final report at the end of the study (Wang Hsiu-­yun 2006). Although Awakening Kaohsiung’s contact with ­these families was nominal,

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the report does suggest the families’ general ac­cep­tance of the city’s renovation proposal, which I ­will investigate more closely in chapter 6. Concurrently, the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau contracted in­de­pen­dent film director Ke Wan-­ching to make a documentary about the life stories of the twenty-­five ­women and the tragic ferry accident that took their lives. Director Ke did more than that. Before she was commissioned to do the documentary, Ke had been engaged, on her own initiative, in a series of ­labor image and oral history proj­ects in the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone since 2003. She was conducting interviews with w ­ omen who joined the industrial workforce in the late 1960s and had accumulated more than thirty years of experience by the 2000s. ­These ­women ­were the first generation of female industrial workers in Taiwan’s history. Ke was particularly interested in their ­family background, their work experience, their social life (and friendships) in and outside the factory, and the meaning of work as they saw it. At the center of her inquiry was the issue of the self-­identity of her interviewees as both ­women and workers. She worked with l­ imited resources before obtaining funding from Kaohsiung City in 2006 and from the National Culture and Arts Foundation in 2007 (Union of Bank SinoPac 2019). A commission from the Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau expanded the scope of Ke’s work, which took her to Chung-­chou Village (Ke 2008). ­After more than two years of filming, her documentary Tamen de gushi: Shengchanxianshang de rongyan (The lost youth: ­Women and industrial work in Taiwan) fi­nally premiered at the Kaohsiung Film Archive in October 2008, a month a­ fter the g­ rand opening of the newly minted Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Ke’s (2008b) documentary is not just about the twenty-­five deceased ­women; it also portrays the ­labor history of the Kaohsiung Export Pro­ cessing Zone. The film takes the audience through the days when young girls, fresh out of elementary school, joined the factory workforce and labored for the livelihood of their families and the collective fortune of Taiwanese society, thus giving the life stories of the twenty-­five ­women some much-­needed context. On December 3, 1966, the world’s first export pro­cessing zone was established in the Qianzhen District of Kaohsiung. ­After that day the lives of hundreds of thousands of young ­women ­were changed forever. The 1960s might seem like the distant past, its memory mottled and peeling. For many, however, it was a time of hard work mixed with blood, tears, and youthful laughter. It was, unfortunately, also an era when poverty prevailed, jobs ­were scarce, and ­labor protections w ­ ere lacking. We w ­ ere told that Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu, herself a single w ­ oman in her late fifties at the time, commented a­ fter

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watching the film at the premiere, “The story of Taiwanese female workers is the history of Taiwan. [Our] society should give [all ­women workers] the long-­awaited recognition that they deserve.” Tamen de gushi was ­later shown on many occasions, to the general public and on college campuses as well as at subsequent Kaohsiung film festivals.

Space, Scale, and Feminist Activism Professor Wen-­hui Tang once commented, “Social movements are cultural wars.” For the KAPWR activists, female ghosts are not a part of the social world that needs to be appeased or pacified but the incarnation of former injustices that should be resurrected, exorcised, and transcended. Their principal approach to right the wrongs done to the w ­ omen buried at the Maiden Ladies Tomb—­and ­others with similar histories—­ was repre­sen­ta­tional. It primarily involved reframing the popu­lar discourse on ­women’s industrial l­abor, discovering hidden w ­ omen’s stories, and enhancing ­women’s visibility. All of ­these strategies signal the emphasis in global ­women’s movements on instilling the significance of ­women and w ­ omen’s history into the public consciousness. The KAPWR’s actions ­were highly spatialized. The Maiden Ladies Tomb was their immediate cause, but it was also the material manifestation of their deeds. The pro­cess of transforming the tomb illustrated the Taiwanese feminists’ goal of promoting a gendered perspective in history. The existing burial as a par­tic­ul­ar way of understanding w ­ omen’s place in Taiwanese society was discursively reinterpreted and would be physically made over to provide a dif­fer­ent—­and more thorough—­account of the role w ­ omen had played in post–­World War II Taiwanese history. While much of the detail about the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction was still to be determined—­and was often beyond the feminists’ control (see chapter 5)—­the proposed Memorial Park for ­Women’s Laborers offered the KAPWR an opportunity to develop w ­ omen’s history as an in­de­pen­ dent and coherent theme. Furthermore, a reincarnated new park as a memorial site allowed for innovative approaches to the public pre­sen­ta­tion of ­women’s history that went beyond the convention of installing statues or plaques (see chapter 7). In this case, similar to the nationwide Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ect, public art designed by a w ­ oman artist was deployed to connect the site with the twenty-­five deceased ­women as well as to make their story visual and memorable. More pointedly, the KAPWR’s intervention indicated a rescaling of the act of remembrance from the personal and community levels to the

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levels of the urban, national, and global. Its actions exemplify the effectiveness of “jumping scales” as a po­liti­cal strategy. The fact that Taiwan is not a member of the UN and thus lacks formal repre­sen­ta­tion in many world organ­izations propels the Taiwanese state to seek international recognition by alternative means, especially through the work of NGOs. ­Women’s organ­izations at the national level have effectively turned this predicament to their advantage and employ gender equality agendas supported by the United Nations or other global forums to push for equivalent legislation and policies at home. Similar strategies are deployed by regional or city-­based organ­izations such as the KAPWR. Specifically, KAPWR feminists actively ­shaped their strug­gle to destigmatize female ghosts to show its commonalities with the worldwide campaign for gender equality and the advancement of Kaohsiung City’s global image. In essence, the KAPWR was practicing a repre­sen­ta­tional strategy to render its po­liti­cal strug­gle across scales. In ­doing so, it showed that a “local” strug­gle might be characterized as a global strug­gle. KAPWR also discursively linked its cause to the ­causes of the city and of the nation in ways that worked to its advantage.

Chapter 5

Blue-­Collar Industrial City, Blue-­Color Ocean Capital

Being in the ocean, we dialogue with the world. —­Kaohsiung Pictorial, “Zai haiyang, yü shijie duihua”

Once upon a time, Kaohsiung gave the impression that it was an impor­tant container port, an industrial city adorned with gray clouds. ­People ­were kept far away from the ­water. They shuttled through the city, and they could only occasionally smell the breeze from the sea. When they missed the ocean’s touch, they could only take a Valentine’s Seat in Sizihwan or ­ride a boat to Cijin to respond to the sound of the ocean! But no more. Visitors to Kaohsiung can easily sense the breath of the sea while strolling the city streets and enjoying the magnificent piers and scenic spots along the coastline surrounding the harbor. It is not only to fulfill the ­people’s desire to be close to the ocean but also the city’s need to fashion recreational spaces. This is imperative for the successful remaking of Kaohsiung into a cosmopolitan ocean metropolis with distinctive port city characteristics. —­Kaohsiung Pictorial, “Gangwan chengshi xinshiji”

The revitalization strategy of positioning Kaohsiung as an ocean city is a correct one. It captures the historical logic of Kaohsiung’s development and confronts head-on the global [economic] environment and its challenges, with the purpose of establishing an autonomous lifeline for the city. Therefore, using the phrase “the ocean city” denotes a call to carry forward the city’s fearless spirit. The ­people in Kaohsiung ­shall create a cosmopolitan urban environment of the twenty-­first ­century by embracing new visions and new responsibilities. When Kaohsiung is no longer a city based on industrial manufacturing, its mountain, river, ocean, and harbor ­shall become impor­tant ele­ments actively incorporated into the city residents’ daily

106

Blue-­Collar Industrial City, Blue-­Color Ocean Capital107

lives. They [the mountain, river, ocean, and harbor] represent Kaohsiung’s unique and irreplaceable urban features. This holds for the city’s industrial ruins as well. —­Tseng Tse-­fong, “Yige zhengzai gaibian de chengshi”

I

n 2008 the Kaohsiung City government held a series of activities to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the city’s elevation to a modern metropolis. It was in 1908 that the Japa­nese colonial administration launched the first phase of its Kaohsiung Harbor enhancement proj­ect, and the urban plan to modernize downtown Kaohsiung was concurrently executed that year. It was also in 1908 that the terminal station of Taiwan’s West Coast Railway in Hamasen (哈瑪星), near ­today’s ferry pier to Cijin on the Kaohsiung side, was finished. This marked the completion of the West Coast Railway, which was crucial for the transportation of Taiwan’s agricultural products to the metropole of Japan via the modernized port of Kaohsiung. Indeed, the name Hamasen is derived from the Japa­nese word はません that means “coastline” (濱線). Locally, Hamasen refers to the reclaimed landfill atop mud obtained from dredging Kaohsiung Harbor, and it got its name b ­ ecause two rail lines that led to the Port of Kaohsiung’s commercial piers, fishing piers, and fish market traveled through the area. Together, the implementation of t­ hese major infrastructure proj­ects quickly transformed Kaohsiung from a small fishing village into a port of vast strategic importance in the Japa­nese Empire. The significance of Kaohsiung continued to grow throughout most of the twentieth ­century, and by 2000 it had become the largest city in southern Taiwan—­and the second-­largest city in the country ­after Taipei, the capital. It was a world-­ class container port, and it was also the hub of Taiwan’s heavy industries, housing major global suppliers of petrochemical products. Kaohsiung has had a dif­fer­ent kind of global connection in the twenty-­first ­century, however. ­After de­cades of a successful export economy, by the late 1980s Taiwan was experiencing a rapid economic restructuring—­ namely, capital outflow and deindustrialization. The changing demographic profile (with a low national birth rate), rising l­ abor costs, and increasingly stringent environmental codes and l­abor regulations, together with intensified global competition, forced Taiwanese manufacturers in the traditional light and petrochemical industries to seek alternative strategies. Many of them closed down their factories and moved production to China and Southeast Asia. Taiwan was no longer simply a base of global assembly lines. It was quickly changing from a

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receiver of direct foreign investments to an exporter of industrial capital. Concomitantly, in its attempt to upgrade the country’s industrial capacity, the central government of Taiwan began to support the high-­tech semiconductor industry. By 2000, more than 85 ­percent of Taiwan’s semiconductor companies ­were concentrated in Hsinchu Science Park in northern Taiwan, and almost all of the impor­tant firms—­including the ten top design ­houses and all of the fabrication and mask factories—­were located in the Hsinchu-­Taipei Corridor, a region sixty miles wide (Hsu and Cheng 2002, 903).1 The industrial center of Taiwan was shifting from the south to the north, and all of ­these changes had a ­great impact on Kaohsiung. Much of the city’s economic policy in the twenty-­first ­century, therefore, has focused on revitalizing Kaohsiung’s links with the global economy. This has been done primarily by spatially changing the city’s old industrial landscape into a setting that is friendlier to commerce, recreation and tourism, and real estate development. As exemplified in the epigraphs for this chapter, the port and ocean continue to be indispensable to Kaohsiung City, but they are no longer primarily sites of manufacturing and production but rather of cultural consumption. The conversion of Cijin’s Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb and its surrounding area into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers was a small but critical part of this pro­cess. Landscapes of industrial ruination constantly move through cycles of decay, reuse, de­mo­li­tion, and redevelopment (Mah 2012, 129). The renovation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb, however, highlights that t­ hese cycles involve more than overhauling built environments. John Urry and Jonas Larsen theorize that the rising significance of the global tourist industry presupposes the growth of “tourism reflexivity”—­that is, “sets of systematic, regularized, and evaluative procedures that enable each ‘place’ to monitor, modify and maximize their location within the turbulent global order” (2011, 24). It is about identifying the a­ ctual and potential material and semiotic resources of a par­tic­u­lar place and, ultimately, using t­ hese resources to invent, produce, market, and circulate “new or dif­fer­ent or repackaged or niche-­dependent places and their corresponding visual images” as spectacles for the tourist gaze (Urry and Larsen 2011, 24). Within this context, Cijin’s refurbished Memorial Park as a vis­i­ble remnant of Kaohsiung’s industrial past is reclaimed as the physical trace of a historical event that supported the production of a (re)­imagined community—or “industrial nostalgia”—­for tourist consumption (Edensor 2005b, 13). This chapter details the circumstance ­under which the Kaohsiung City government de­cided to remake the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb

Blue-­Collar Industrial City, Blue-­Color Ocean Capital109

into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. The first two sections contextualize the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation by focusing on Kaohsiung’s recent economic change, whereas the third and final section concentrates on the ­actual decision-­making pro­cess. As the fate of Cijin is closely related to the fate of the Kaohsiung Harbor, I start with the postindustrial turn in Kaohsiung’s economy and the city’s corresponding strategies of urban revitalization focusing on waterfront overhaul. This is followed by an account of the recent changes in Cijin’s built environment, especially for tourist development. Against the larger background of urban redevelopment, the last section delineates the Kaohsiung City government’s resolution to revamp the site of the Maiden Ladies Tomb. Part of the story lies in the fact that dif­fer­ent entities in the bureaucratic system held dif­fer­ent views on how to manage the situation. How the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau—­but not any other agencies—­came to be steering the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation and the significance of this arrangement are the foci of the last section.

Kaohsiung’s Postindustrial Turn Similar to many postindustrial port cities, Kaohsiung was increasingly characterized by an economic recession, fiscal prob­lems, unemployment, and depopulation as a consequence of Taiwan’s economic restructuring. The number of ­people employed in the secondary and tertiary sectors was about the same in Kaohsiung in the early 1980s, but t­here was a much smaller number of industrial workers due to the closure or departure of factories by the end of that de­cade. Likewise, from 1993 to 2000 Kaohsiung was among the three busiest ports in the world, due to its good ser­vice and locational advantage. In 2014, however, the global ranking of the Port of Kaohsiung fell to thirteenth. It now trailed other Asian ports, such as Busan in South ­Korea and Ningbo and Shenzhen in China due to the shrinkage of Taiwan’s manufacturing sector, the emergence of China as the world’s chief base of industrial production, and concurrent changes in global container transportation routes. The latest debt data from the Taiwan Ministry of Finance show that Kaohsiung has a per capita debt of 78,400 New Taiwan (NT) dollars (US$2,492), the highest of all cities in Taiwan (Yu 2019). Furthermore, Kaohsiung was the only city among Taiwan’s five major municipalities that saw a decline in population in 2014 due to its close-­to-­zero population growth rate. Kaohsiung is no longer the second largest city in Taiwan. It is now in third place, trailing New Taipei City and Taichung.2

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Kaohsiung’s population is also aging. Official statistics show that the number of ­people between the ages of twenty-­five and thirty-­four decreased by 82,000 while the number of ­those between ages sixty and sixty-­nine increased by 115,000 between 2000 and 2016 (Yu 2019). ­These drastic demographic changes seemed to embody the difficulties, uncertainty, and anxiety experienced by the city’s denizens, to the extent that one of the candidates in the 2018 mayoral election (who subsequently won) vowed to increase Kaohsiung’s population from its current 2.7 million to five million by 2028. ­Under ­these trying circumstances, Kaohsiung’s primary challenge is how to revitalize the city’s deindustrialized economy in postindustrial Taiwan. In the 1990s, in concert with the Taiwanese state’s Asia-­Pacific Regional Operations Center economic plan, the Kaohsiung City government proposed to develop the Multifunctional Commerce and Trade Park. The concept ­behind developing Taiwan into an operations center was to create a “highly liberalized and internationalized economic environment to facilitate the ­free movement of goods, ser­vices, persons, and funds for attracting multinational enterprises and encouraging local businesses to make Taiwan their base for investment and other operations in East Asia” (Taiwan Asia-­Pacific Regional Operations Center, n.d.). Accordingly, the Multifunctional Commerce and Trade Park was a comprehensive urban renewal master plan, the main idea of which was to reappropriate underused land in export pro­cessing zones, industrial parks, and around the port area for three dif­fer­ent economic pursuits. ­These included leisure and recreational activities based on creative industries, special ser­vices catering to the financial and information technology industries, and ware­houses and cargo transfer centers for value-­adding remanufacturing before reexporting. However, the overall pro­gress of the plan was slow ­after its approval in 1999 due to land disputes (Hsieh 2010, 53–57). Even though a large tract of the land identified for trade park use belonged to state-­owned enterprises, t­ hese enterprises ­were not willing to sell their land to the Kaohsiung City government at below-­market prices even though it was a fellow government entity. Similarly, some privately held plants still needed to be relocated, but the o ­ wners of ­these plants declined to do so due to insufficient incentives. In addition, much of the successfully acquired land was highly contaminated, which required cleaning up and environmental remediation before it could be reused. In the end, the Multifunctional Commerce and Trade Park master plan was dismissed in 2000 in light of an unstable international trading environment and changing domestic po­liti­cal realities.

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­Table 5.1. ​Po­liti­cal Affiliation of Presidents of Taiwan, Taipei City Mayors, and Kaohsiung City Mayors, 1988–­Pre­sent Taipei City Mayor

President of Taiwan

Kaohsiung City Mayor

Chen Shui-­bian 陳水扁 (Demo­cratic Progressive Party) 1994–1998 Ma Ying-­jeou 馬英九 (Kuomintang) 1998–2006

Lee Teng-­hui 李登輝 (Kuomintang) 1988–2000

Wu Den-­yih 吳敦義 (Kuomintang) 1994–1998

Chen Shui-­bian 陳水扁 (Demo­cratic ­Progressive Party) 2000–2008

Frank Hsieh Chang-­ting 謝長廷 (Demo­cratic Progressive Party) 1998–2005

Hau Lung-­pin 郝龍斌 (Kuomintang) 2006–2014 Ko Wen-je 柯文哲 (In­de­pen­dent; Taiwan ­People’s Party) 2014–2022a

Ma Ying-­jeou 馬英九 (Kuomintang) 2008–2016 Tsai Ing-­wen 蔡英文 (Demo­cratic ­Progressive Party) 2016–­pre­sent

Chen Chi-­mai 陳其邁 (Demo­cratic Progressive Party) 2005 Yeh Chu-­lan 葉菊蘭 (Demo­cratic Progressive Party) 2005–2006 Chen Chu 陳菊 (Demo­cratic Progressive Party) 2006–2018 Han Kuo-yu 韓國瑜 (Kuomintang) 2018–2020 Chen Chi-­mai 陳其邁 (Demo­cratic Progressive Party) 2020–­pre­sent

Note: a Ko Wen-je started his po­liti­cal c­ areer as an in­de­pen­dent and remained so throughout his first term in office, but he formed the Taiwan P ­ eople’s Party when he was r­ unning for reelection in 2019.

Taiwan’s po­liti­cal economy reached a turning point at the end of the twentieth ­century. In 1994 Chen Shui-­bian of the then opposition Demo­cratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the first general Taipei mayoral election ­after it became a special municipality in 1967. In 1998 Frank Hsieh Chang-­ting, also of the DPP, defeated his opponent and became the mayor of Kaohsiung, while Chen Shui-­bian lost his reelection bid to his Kuomintang (KMT) opponent in the Taipei mayoral race. However, two years ­later Chen Shui-­bian won the presidential election and ended the KMT’s rule of more than fifty years in Taiwan. The po­liti­cal successes of Chen and Hsieh redrew Taiwan’s po­liti­cal landscape (­table 5.1). Their

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victories enabled a new kind of alliance between Taiwan’s central government and Kaohsiung City, making it pos­si­ble for Kaohsiung to compete with Taipei for the status of Taiwan’s primary city. Working with the central government, Hsieh and his team placed their focus on rebranding Kaohsiung as an “Ocean Capital.” Their primary objective was to create a “New Kaohsiung” discourse for city marketing through placemaking strategies such as festivals and spatial transformations of the city’s landscape (Yeh Szu-­yin 2011). Indeed, Kaohsiung is not the only city that utilizes placemaking strategies for urban (re)development. Taiwanese politicians have been paying close attention to the issue of urban imagery in recent years. Nevertheless, t­here is no doubt that Mayor Hsieh and his team w ­ ere trendsetters in this regard. Ko Chih-­chang, Liang Hui-chi, and Lai Mei-juan (2008, 53–54) have identified four interconnected f­ actors that drove this placemaking turn in Kaohsiung: (1) the influence of urban development models in the cap­i­tal­ist Western world, which made them subjects of emulation; (2) the emerging importance of the creative industry, which is taken to be a driving force of con­temporary urban economies; (3) the rise of civil society and civic awareness in Taiwan, which gives prominence to local culture, history, and identity; and (4) the display of Kaohsiung’s po­liti­cal power within the context of Taiwan’s interurban competition, particularly ­after the aforementioned party rotations. As the second-­largest city u ­ ntil recently, Kaohsiung has long competed with Taipei for economic power and po­liti­cal influence. Yet Kaohsiung and Taipei ­were assigned dif­fer­ent functions in Taiwan’s post–­World War II economic development ­under the KMT regime. While Kaohsiung became an industrial base, Taipei was the site of corporate headquarters and Taiwan’s financial and marketing center. ­Under Taiwan’s tax structure, profits earned by companies involved in industrial operations ­were taxed by the local governments where the companies’ headquarters w ­ ere located but not by the local governments where production took place. Subsequently, it was the Taipei City government and the residents of Taipei who enjoyed the fruits of Kaohsiung’s industrial endeavors, while the Kaohsiung City government and the p ­ eople of Kaohsiung had to suffer environmental and health degradation and lacked city funds for public investment and social development. As the capital city, Taipei was treated as the jewel of the central government and given a lion’s share of resources. Over time, Kaohsiung City residents grew to feel that they w ­ ere treated as secondary citizens and that their welfare was being overlooked by the central government.

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The regime change ­after the 1998 Kaohsiung mayoral election and the 2000 presidential election presented a rare opportunity for Kaohsiung to be rid of its KMT past and initiate a new beginning. Mayor Hsieh and his administration quickly launched a series of media campaigns to fashion a “New Kaohsiung” narrative and pop­u­lar­ize the ideas of the “Ocean Capital” and “Southern Subjectivity.” With the po­liti­cal and financial support of the DPP-­controlled central government, the city also commenced an array of urban renewal proj­ects, the most notable among which was the construction of the Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) System on the heels of the completion of a similar system in Taipei (Anru Lee 2015). Sidewalks ­were widened and lined with trees, parks w ­ ere created, and street furniture was installed near MRT stations as a part of the effort to green the city (Lin Chin-­rong Charles 2006). The city also reached an agreement with the Port of Kaohsiung (the central government agency overseeing the operations of the Kaohsiung Harbor) to use the harbor land through leasing or joint development.3 The fence that had long encircled the Kaohsiung Harbor was dismantled, thus creating a visual spectacle that embodied the “City-­Harbor Merger” (Kaohsiung City Information Bureau 2001). The three DPP mayors who came ­after Frank Hsieh (see t­ able 4.1 in chapter 4) by and large followed his direction of urban redevelopment. Over time, the Kaohsiung Harbor was redeveloped into a pedestrian-­ friendly waterfront (Yeh Szu-­yin 2011, 71–96). Vacant port facilities ­were converted into exhibition spaces and art studios. Several fishing and commercial piers w ­ ere redirected to leisure and recreational uses. Correspondingly, the Ai River (literally, the Love River)—­which flows through the heart of Kaohsiung and was once considered by many as the soul of the city but had turned into a huge open sewer as a result of wastewater dumped by factories and private households—­was cleaned up (Lin Chin-­ rong Charles 2006, 206–303). Concomitant to the effort to clean the river was an endeavor to improve the landscape along the riverbanks. ­Today, sightseeing cruises sail along much of the Ai River. One can also take a stroll along the riverside promenade, spend time at the Kaohsiung Museum of History, listen to m ­ usic at the Concert Hall and its plaza, watch a movie at the Kaohsiung Film Archive, or simply sit down, have a cup of coffee, and “enjoy the exotic, romantic ambiance of the Love River, day and night, as if sitting on the Seine riverbank in Paris” (Lindy Yeh 2004). Moreover, the idea of the Multifunctional Commerce and Trade Park was resuscitated and reconceptualized into an Asia New Bay Area megaproject plan ­under Mayor Chen Chu (Wang and Wu 2012). In 2012, the Kaohsiung City government invested NT$271.3 million (US$8.7 million)

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on five flagship architecture/infrastructure proj­ects: the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center, the Kaohsiung Light Railway, the Kaohsiung Port Terminal, the Kaohsiung Public Library, and the Maritime Cultural and Popu­lar ­Music Center. The completion of t­ hese proj­ects signified the further transformation of the waterfront into a “complex performative arena” (Yu 2019). Through ­these efforts, the Kaohsiung City government is attempting to create a renewed civic identity and to announce to the country—­and the world—­that Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s southern capital, a better alternative to Taipei. Cijin’s Spatial Reconstruction When visiting Kaohsiung, it’s okay if you speak no French or d ­ on’t understand chanson. But do remember, you have to sit down for a cup of coffee. —­Kaohsiung Pictorial (2004a)

The fate of Cijin is closely linked to the destiny of the Kaohsiung Harbor. Akin to the fact that the Kaohsiung Harbor was not ­under the authority of the Kaohsiung City government but of multiple central government entities, a large expanse of land in Cijin—­particularly in the southern part where Cijin used to be physically connected to Kaohsiung—­ was owned by t­hese same agencies but not by Kaohsiung City. Only ­after the passage of the Cijin Tourist Development Self-­Governance Articles in 1999 did the Kaohsiung City government take over control of Cijin from the central government (Tu 2018, 119). In the following years, Cijin has played an increasingly impor­tant role in the city’s pursuit of tourism as a chief strategy of economic development. In Kaohsiung’s postindustrial imagination, the deindustrialized waterfront becomes the spectacular Asia New Bay Area. The Ai River is a charming and glamorous equivalent of the Seine in Paris, and Cijin is an analog of Okinawa, Hawaii, or Singapore’s Sentosa.4 Major reconstruction proj­ects since 2000 have sought to spatially convert Cijin into a favorable tourist destination. The reconstruction started at the northern tip of the island, where the ferry terminal to Hamasen (and downtown Kaohsiung) is located and where most of the commercial activities take place. In the first phase of the spatial restoration, the square in front of the ferry terminal was made over. The marketplace in front of the nearby Matsu ­Temple—­one of the most impor­ tant ­temples in Cijin—­was reor­ga­nized. Stores and restaurants in the

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Fig. 5.1. ​The front of the Let’s Sightsee the Beauty of Kaohsiung-­Cijin map. Source: Kaohsiung City Government Tourism Bureau.

marketplace w ­ ere advised to get facelifts, and open-­air food stands and street vendors w ­ ere relocated into an indoor municipality-­run fa­cil­i­ty to give visitors a clean, orderly, and sleek impression (Liu Chun-­nan 2008, 211). Yet even though the city successfully implemented ­these plans, they ­were not always well received by the commercial establishments around the Matsu ­Temple. ­There was much re­sis­tance, particularly from open-­ air business ­owners who complained that, by forcing them to move indoors, the city was taking away the fun, lively, and bustling ambiance only an outdoor market could offer (Kuo Shu-­wei 2015). Afterward, the city focused its attention on the coast facing the Taiwan Strait and initiated the Cijin Seaside Park plan that included a series of seashore landscape restoration proj­ects. They started from the shore in the north, and gradually worked their way to the central part of the island (figure 5.1). To prevent the further withdrawal of the coastline, the Kaohsiung City Public Works Bureau installed two artificial reefs and eleven concrete blocks (Tu 2018, 120–123). ­After the removal of carbide slag and the implementation of artificial nourishment and a protection

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plan, the Cijin Beach was returned to its original shape and ready for public enjoyment once more. A walking trail along the shore was put in place, leading to the Wind Turbine Park, a recreational wind farm that features a viewing platform and an amphitheater, on the south side of the Seaside Park. The city also laid out the Round-­Island Bike Path, which contains five main cir­cuits that cover most areas of Cijin and take ­people to the majority of the island’s sightseeing attractions. In addition to building infrastructure, the Kaohsiung City government has also held festive events to promote tourism in Cijin—­most iconically, the annual Cijin Black Sand Festival. Kicked off in July 2016 and named a­ fter the color of Cijin’s beach sands, the Black Sand Festival usually lasts for weeks and incorporates vari­ous activities such as summer night rock concerts, night ­running, beach volleyball games, black sand photography competitions, and sand sculpture competitions. The reconstruction would l­ater cover not only the immediate seashore tourist areas but also extend to more traditional neighborhoods away from the Taiwan Strait coast. Specifically, a stretch of land across Cijin’s main boulevard from the Wind Turbine Park was marked for redevelopment. This land was the seat of the Cijin Municipal Cemetery, which was adjacent to the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb (and this is prob­ably why the place was chosen for the Maiden Ladies Tomb in its 1988 relocation). It was designated to be the new site of the Kaohsiung City government’s Cijin District Office and the Cijin Municipal Hospital, both of which ­were located not far from the marketplace near the Matsu ­Temple. In recent de­cades, similar to many land-­scarce Asian cities, local governments and urban planning agencies in Taiwan have been seeking to reduce space for the dead to release land for the living, primarily by encouraging conversion from ground burial to cremation and from graves to columbaria. In the case of Cijin, the idea went beyond land conversion. By moving t­hese two government entities from their original site, located on prime real estate, to a much less favored location in a former cemetery, room was cleared for casinos, large h ­ otels, and other tourist facilities envisioned for the impending Kaohsiung Sentosa proposal. The ultimate goal was to transform Cijin into an island resort of international caliber. As planned, graves w ­ ere ­either relocated or removed from the Cijin Municipal Cemetery in 2013; a columbarium, the Cijin Life Memorial, was built to accommodate the bones collected from the graves; and the Cijin District Office and Municipal Hospital w ­ ere moved into the vacated land.

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Culture Is Good for Business Within this context of relocation and renewal, it should not come as a surprise that Taiwanese feminists ­were neither the first nor the only ones who raised alternative ideas about the Maiden Ladies Tomb and the land it occupied. The Kaohsiung City government responded swiftly to the KAPWR’s first appeals, particularly then-­Secretary Wen-­hui Tang’s “Huibuliaojia de nüren” (­Women who cannot go home) op-ed news­ paper article. The piece was published on Ching-­ming Day, April 4 (Tang 2004); the Kaohsiung City L ­ abor Affairs Bureau released an official statement on April 15 and kicked off a name change campaign on April 28, International Workers’ Memorial Day. More than a direct result of feminist activism, however, the city’s quick action was compelled by several other f­ actors that reflected the rise of civic influences in Taiwan’s liberalized po­liti­cal economy. The election victory of Frank Hsieh was a welcome sign of a changing po­ liti­ cal environment to progressive forces in southern Taiwan—­ mainly social movement groups and community-­based organ­izations. As an act of reciprocity, Mayor Hsieh recruited social activists into his administration, a practice continued by his immediate successors. Specifically, ­union organizers and l­abor activists w ­ ere recruited to head the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau. Coming from a background outside the traditional bureaucratic system, they brought in new and unconventional ways of publicizing the bureau’s mission and promoting its work. On a dif­fer­ent front, not long a­ fter the election victory of Mayor Hsieh, local environmental groups once again raised the long-­standing prob­lem of carbide slag dumping and pressured the new municipal administration to find a solution. In response to their inquiry, ­people at the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau made an on-­site investigation. “We discovered that near the mountain-­high piles of carbide slag was a Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb,” Mr. Shi, a city official, told me. “We w ­ ere fascinated by the story—­and kind of laughing at the urban legend—­behind it. But we also thought, wow, ­isn’t this an example of workers killed on their jobs? This is a good place to hold a workers’ memorial observance.” Mr. Shi had been a ­labor or­ga­nizer before he became a chief secretary to the director-­general of the ­Labor Affairs Bureau u ­ nder Mayor Hsieh. What he learned from this field inspection paved the way for the city’s campaign to redefine the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb as a workers’ memorial park, which was considered a rather creative solution that concomitantly advanced an impor­tant ­labor cause, addressed the calls of feminists, and solved the prob­lem of carbide slag contamination.

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The state bureaucracy comprises many dif­fer­ent agencies, each of which is delegated its own distinct authority and responsibility. According to Taiwan’s local government administrative structure, the Maiden Ladies Tomb as a burial site was ­under the jurisdiction of the Mortuary Ser­vices Office, which is a part of the Civil Affairs Bureau. Even t­oday, the renovated Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers is still ­under the supervision of the Mortuary Ser­vices Office ­because of the urns kept at the base of the lotus statue at the memorial (see chapter 6). The fact that the ­Labor Affairs Bureau—­but not its Civil Affairs or Environmental Protection counter­parts—­was leading the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction proj­ect thus indicates more than a s­ imple association between l­abor and its municipal governing body or the unconventional and ingenious practices former u ­ nion organizers brought into the city bureaucratic system. Rather, it signals the redirection of Taiwan’s l­abor movement from “a class strug­gle focusing on material and economic issues to a cultural war over meanings” (Shen Chang-­chen 2004, 72). However, it also signals the cultural turn ­toward urban governance that, ironically, has had the concurrent effect of providing a receptive environment to l­abor’s cultural strug­gle while assimilating the fruits of this strug­gle into the city’s production of urban culture.

­ abor Strug­gle as Cultural Strug­gle L Similar to the w ­ omen’s movement, the l­abor movement in Taiwan took flight a­ fter the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s. It went through several stages in a short time, corresponding to Taiwan’s rapid economic transformation. The L ­ abor Standards Act, the most impor­tant labor-­ related statute that regulates the minimum terms and conditions of employment, fi­nally went into effect in 1984. However, employers in most manufacturing industries continued to dodge payment of overtime rates, year-­end bonuses, and other employee entitlements. Such evasions constituted one of the major ­causes of ­labor disputes and sympathy strikes in the second half of the 1980s, which subsequently led to a sudden and rapid emergence of in­de­pen­dent ­unionism (Minns and Tierney 2003, 114).5 The l­abor movement faced a dif­fer­ent—­and tougher—­challenge in the 1990s, however. By the late 1980s, concurrent with po­liti­cal liberalization, Taiwan was experiencing a rapid economic restructuring coupled with intensified global competition, and this pushed Taiwanese manufacturers to seek alternative strategies. Many of them closed down their factories and turned to the then booming real estate or retail busi-

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nesses, or they sought other production sites by relocating their factories to China or Southeast Asia. In this pro­cess a substantial number of workers—­predominantly w ­ omen in labor-­intensive industries—­were laid off illegally or let go without proper compensation. The changing economic environment changed the focus of the l­abor movement. Many of the ­labor protests that started in the late 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s focused on severance and retirement payments owed by employers who had closed their factories (Bo 1993; Ho Yang-­tang 1992; Lin Wen-­ting 1998; Shin-­Kong Guanchang Kangzheng Zhanyoutuan 2003). Yet, unlike the ­labor disputes over overtime pay and year-­end bonuses in the 1980s that frequently ended in victories for workers, several of the crucial l­abor strug­gles in the early 1990s failed (Minns and Tierney 2003, 115). The larger trends of capital outflow and factory closure left workers with l­imited leverage to fight for their rights.6 ­Under ­these circumstances, l­abor activists w ­ ere anxious to open new fronts of strug­gle to keep their movement alive. The renewed interest in local history and culture and the increasing presence of former industrial spaces in metropolitan areas had together provided an opportunity for the regeneration of the ­labor movement. “­Labor culture” became a new frontier for l­abor activism. From labor-­themed cultural festivals, art displays, concerts, and per­for­mances to ­labor oral history research proj­ects and the reappropriation of vacant industrial sites into labor-­centered cultural or exhibition spaces, ­labor culture has helped to spark the imagination and create new fields for l­abor strug­gle. It is not just about work culture or culture in the workplace, but also about workers’ lives outside the workplace: how they spend their time before and ­after work, how they conduct their daily lives and seek companionship, and what they do to entertain themselves and their friends and families. L ­ abor culture is also about the ways in which workers mea­sure their lives and the world around them: how fulfilling they find their lives, how they see their position in the social universe, and how they pro­cess and share their disappointments and despair, as well as their hopes for the ­future. In essence, by emphasizing l­abor culture, l­abor activists can broaden their concerns to cover the ­whole way of life and identity formation of workers. The cultural turn of Taiwan’s l­abor movement echoed the new urban social movement that centered on the making of historical memory and cultural identity in postindustrial Eu­rope in the 1970s (Cheng Yi-­ wen 2018, 121). L ­ abor organ­izations played a crucial role in that movement, particularly at the forefront of industrial heritage preservation. One of their main efforts was to build ­labor museums. Specifically, they would

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seek to conserve a nonoperational industrial structure and convert it into a ­labor museum, a base for safeguarding working-­class culture and values. Trade u ­ nions and l­abor organ­izations also used ­these spaces for ongoing ­labor education. Similar to their Eu­ro­pean counter­parts, ­labor activists in Taiwan have also been actively involved in working to rescue urban industrial ruins. Their goal goes beyond historical preservation, however. As a staff member of the Confederation of Taipei Trade Unions once commented on his organ­ization’s effort to save vacant industrial spaces in downtown Taipei from the fate of de­mo­li­tion, “To be clear, we are a l­abor movement organ­ization but not a cultural conservation association. Cultural preservation is only a means to the end of the ­labor strug­gle. What we are aiming for is not the [defunct industrial] building itself, but the right to interpretation. ­Whether it is to salvage a chimney [in an abandoned factory] or to redevelop [vacant industrial land into] a park, this is our battlefield. It is a fight for a platform in the city where workers can speak” (quoted in Shen Chang-­chen 2004, 71). Kaohsiung seemed to be a natu­ral location for ­labor activists to expand their work into the area of ­labor culture or industrial heritage. With its century-­long industrial history and with workers accounting for a large number of its residents, industrialism is a way of life in Kaohsiung. As such, Mr.  Shi told me that he and his comrades at the ­Labor Affairs Bureau had already had their eyes on the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb before KAPWR secretary Tang’s article made it famous among the city’s workers: In the past, the l­abor movement focused mainly on hardcore issues of working conditions and l­abor policy. We had been thinking about ­whether we could develop something dif­fer­ent—­for example, along the lines of ­labor culture. At that time, a group of ­labor activists in Taipei was pushing for l­ abor protection legislation by highlighting major incidents related to occupational h ­ azards [in northern Taiwan].7 To be in sync with them, we had been brainstorming how we could call attention to the issue using an approach dif­fer­ent from our traditional focus on policy. Something tender, so to speak. Something like the Twenty-­ Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, which has a story of its own but also exemplifies occupational deaths.

As it happened, the Council of L ­ abor Affairs (now the Ministry of ­Labor)—­a central government agency—­had a dif­fer­ent idea. ­After years of pressure from Taipei-­based l­abor organ­izations, the Protection for

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Workers Incurring Occupational Accidents Act was passed in 2002. In addition to enforcement rules directly related to work accidents, the act also stipulates that the Taiwanese government should establish a National Monument for the Victims of Occupational Injuries and declare April 28 to be Taiwan’s Workers’ Memorial Day. Taiwan became the fifth country in the world to institute a national memorial day honoring workers. Both as an acknowl­edgment of Kaohsiung’s status as Taiwan’s industrial hub and as an attempt to elevate Kaohsiung’s standing, the Council of ­Labor Affairs chose the well-­known ­Labor Park in downtown Kaohsiung to be the site of the National Monument for the Victims of Occupational Injuries, which was inaugurated in 2003, coinciding with Kaohsiung City’s Workers’ Memorial Day observance. Nonetheless, in spite of the good intention b ­ ehind the monument, Mr. Shi recalled how residents in nearby neighborhoods disliked it: “Gosh, they moaned and complained. The monument is s­ haped like a mound in the m ­ iddle of the L ­ abor Park. They said it looks like a tomb. . . . ​But Heaven knows we had no control over the design. It had to go through a [public art] review pro­cess, and it was the members of the review committee who made the final decision.” ­After the 2003 workers’ memorial commemoration, Mr. Shi and his colleagues shifted their focus to more urgent m ­ atters. It was a year l­ater, not long before the National Workers’ Memorial Day, that their attention came back to the Maiden Ladies Tomb once more. “It was time for the annual workers’ memorial observance, and the city had to come up with some idea about ­doing it. It just so happened that Tang’s article was published right around the same time,” Ms. Hsu informed us. Ms. Hsu was a staff member at the Kaohsiung ­Labor Museum Preparatory Office (now the Kaohsiung Museum of ­Labor) who was also a host at the city’s ­labor radio station and part of the Awakening Kaohsiung team that conducted the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Landscape Construction and Naming proj­ect. According to Ms. Hsu, the possibility of holding the 2004 workers’ memorial observance at the Maiden Ladies Tomb was discussed, but it was not clear w ­ hether ­dying on one’s way to work could be considered an occupational death. The prob­lem was solved only when the Protection for Workers Incurring Occupational Accidents Act was amended to cover commuting-­related deaths and injuries. ­After that, with the blessing of Mayor Hsieh, the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau released an official statement on April 15 in which it was avowed that “the w ­ omen buried at Cijin’s Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb ­will no more be narrowly described as ‘fledgling unwed virgins who tragically perished in a shipwreck’ (雲英未嫁卻慘遭滅頂的船難亡魂) but ­will be repositioned as ‘young

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female heroines who fought for Taiwan’s strug­gle for economic development in the 1970s’ (六十年代為台灣經濟建設奮鬥的少女英雄).” Furthermore, the official statement read, Mayor Hsieh deems that the Maiden Ladies Tomb should not be treated as a maiden ­temple. It should be commemorated as a workers’ memorial. ­These young girls of budding beauty died not long a­ fter the establishment of the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone, but ­there was no proper compensation due to the lack of a ­labor standards law. Therefore, Mayor Hsieh has instructed the ­Labor Affairs Bureau to commemorate ­these hard workers who sacrificed their lives for national economic development in the 1970s from a labor-­centered perspective. To accomplish this mission, the ­Labor Affairs Bureau ­shall cooperate with the families of the deceased, community leaders, and cultural-­historical and social movement experts to develop a new narrative about the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, so that we can positively honor them. The city government seeks to remove the super­natural connotations of the Maiden Ladies Tomb and incorporate it into Cijin’s tourism development plan (Hsu Wen-­yuan 2004).

Two weeks ­later, on April 28, the ­Labor Affairs Bureau held the annual workers’ memorial commemoration at the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb and announced the city’s plan to renovate the tomb and rename it the Workers’ Memorial Park. (Ms. Hsu pointed out to me that the city government used the term “name change”—­a neutral expression—at this stage, but not “name rectification,” a term with more po­liti­cal implications used by the feminists and ­adopted by the city ­later in the pro­cess.) Chuang Chin-­chun, who led the effort to bury the twenty-­five deceased ­women together, was among the guests. The highlight of the day was when the director-­general of the L ­ abor Affairs Bureau joined local u ­ nion leaders to put together a ­giant jigsaw puzzle designed by his staff. The puzzle was divided into twenty-­five pieces, representing the twenty-­five lives lost at the ferry accident. Each of the pieces also featured one workers’ rights or ­labor protection issue, printed on the puzzle piece. The background of the jigsaw puzzle was a photo of the original Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. Upon completion, this background would be covered with the puzzle pieces. Together, the finished jigsaw puzzle signified the Kaohsiung City government’s determination to defend l­abor rights. Mr. Shi and his colleagues with trade ­union backgrounds had a bigger plan. Although they had to comply with the Council of L ­ abor Affairs

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and had inaugurated the National Monument for Occupational Injuries at the L ­ abor Park the year before, they did not give up their idea of creating new fronts of activism through industrial heritage. Rather, as Mr. Shi reflected, “­There can be more than one l­abor landmark, right? The National Monument at the ­Labor Park, the Maiden Ladies Tomb, and the ­future ­Labor Museum. . . . ​All of ­these are a part of the cultural approach! The task is how we can find a way to make them work together.” Unfortunately, this effort was cut short when his superior, the director-­general of the ­Labor Affairs Bureau, was forced to resign a­ fter becoming the subject of a corruption investigation. Nevertheless, the plan to alter the Maiden Ladies Tomb burial site lived on and was inherited by succeeding mayors as a vital piece of the city’s urban revitalization attempt. Likewise, the ­Labor Affairs Bureau has continued to lead the Maiden Ladies Tomb / Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers renovation and commemoration endeavor.

Cultural Renewal as Urban Renewal ­Whether or not local elected officials truly believe in the cause of ­labor, they can potentially benefit from supporting a labor-­friendly agenda, especially when this agenda does not involve power strug­gles, profit creation, or resource distribution. In Taiwan’s liberal po­liti­cal atmosphere, local government heads can enhance their po­liti­cal reputation by appearing to be caring for the weak and promoting a multicultural environment (Shen Chang-­chen 2004, 69). Po­liti­cal gains aside, along with Taiwan’s democ­ratization came an escalating international competition between cities (Jou, Hansen, and Wu 2011; Jou, Clark, and Chen 2016). Facing this new form of global economic challenge, municipal administrations in Taiwan often support, cooperate with, or comply with community organ­izations not ­because it is the right ­thing to do but ­because “culture” has become a valuable commodity (Wang Chih-­hung 2010). At all levels, Taiwan’s government has been repurposing historical buildings and other cultural (not necessarily labor-­affiliated) assets to boost the local economy and revitalize declining neighborhoods. Subsequently, the goals of urban social movements—­the ­labor movement included—­often coincide with t­ hose of the government’s placemaking efforts to the extent that cultural production of space for economic purposes constantly takes pre­ce­dence over civic concerns and citizens’ public engagement (Anru Lee 2018; Lin We-­i 2015). This conflation was clear in the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction case right from the start, as

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was evident in the Kaohsiung City government’s initial press release on April 15, 2004, and subsequent public announcements. The ­Labor Affairs Bureau’s proposal to change the tomb site into the Workers’ Memorial Park did not win approval from KAPWR members, for the reasons explained in chapter 4. The KAPWR continued to pressure the city government to be more up front about the gender implications of the Maiden Ladies Tomb. Only in 2006, when Yeh Chu-­lan was mayor and Professor Tang a member of the city’s ­Women’s Rights Promotion Committee, did the Kaohsiung City government announce its plan to transform the Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Nevertheless, Mayor Yeh’s administration a­ dopted a two-­pronged approach ­toward the tomb and park renovation. While Mayor Yeh and her staff heeded the KAPWR’s advice and redefined the orientation of the new park, they also followed former mayor Hsieh’s view of the Maiden Ladies Tomb as vital to the overall development of Cijin’s tourism. At a municipal press conference in March 2006, the then deputy mayor of Kaohsiung unveiled a “Cijin: An Island of Tourism” plan that introduced many of the proj­ects (including the Maiden Ladies Tomb redevelopment) described e­ arlier in this chapter (Wang Shu-­feng 2006). Indeed, the “Island of Tourism” plan has served as a blueprint for Cijin’s spatial reconstruction in l­ater years. One of the last ­things that Mayor Yeh did before she left her one-­ year interim mayorship was to commission Awakening Kaohsiung to carry out a “Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Landscape Construction and Naming” field study. Based on the study results, the ­Labor Affairs Bureau contracted an architectural firm to design the new park, thereby kicking off the renovation pro­cess. However, it was ­under a new mayor, Chen Chu, that the groundbreaking ceremony of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers fi­nally took place. While this indicated that a consensus about the orientation of the new park had been reached between the KAPWR and the Kaohsiung City government, a new ­battle with the deceased ­women’s families was awaiting the city government. Despite the dif­fer­ent standpoints that the KAPWR feminists and the former u ­ nion organizers at the Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau had on the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction, they shared much in common in their approaches and their modernist imagination. ­Whether it was the gender ideology that ­shaped the circumstances of the deceased workers or the occupational deaths that took their lives, activists in both groups focused on the issue they deemed fundamental to their advocacy.

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Both groups worked hard to correct historical wrongs to realize their ­visions of a better pre­sent and a more just f­ uture. They each concentrated on a collective attribute of the twenty-­five w ­ omen and accentuated this collectivity in their activism. In ­doing so, they exorcized the ghosts of ­these w ­ omen. ­These w ­ omen’s lives w ­ ere embraced within one universal social cause. Their individual stories became one story. Nonetheless, revealed in the course of the a­ ctual reconstruction was the continual existence of the ghosts in the religious and emotional worlds of the living. Even though it was the power of the state—­represented by the mayor’s office, in this case—­that determined the ultimate fate of the Maiden Ladies Tomb, the needs and wants of the w ­ omen residing at the tomb w ­ ere part of the decision-­making pro­cess. The individuality of the deceased was brought back through the advocacy of their parents (and, increasingly, male siblings). I investigate the contentions, negotiations, and concessions between the deceased’s families and the state actors in following chapter.

Chapter 6

Super­natural Beings, Modernist State

A

s a staff member of the Kaohsiung ­Labor Museum Preparatory Office, Ms. Hsu (introduced in chapter 5) participated in the Awakening Kaohsiung study and helped with video r­ ecording while other ­people on the team interviewed the deceased’s families about their attitudes t­oward the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation in 2006. A few years a­ fter the completion of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, I asked her w ­ hether the finished park reflected what her research team had envisioned. She answered, “Yes and no. In the design based on our recommendation, the individual graves would be removed, and the memorial gate would be gone. And the space on the two sides of where the graves sat would be changed into a park. [All of ­these ­were realized in the ­actual renovation.] But what’s the deal with that lotus? We all looked at it, wondering where the heck it came from! It was nowhere in our design.” Ms. Hsu was amused by the presence of the lotus statue where the graves used to be. She was surprised when I told her that the bones collected from the graves in the pro­cess of their removal had been put in urns and placed in a chamber u ­ nder the lotus statue. This indicates that the lotus statue has now replaced the graves as the focus of memorial ser­vices for the dead—­and thus continues to carry the meaning and function that the renovation sought to erase. Ms. Hsu shrugged and commented with resignation, “Oh well, a­ fter all, what we did was a design on paper. Only when you execute it do you begin to discover that the design makes no sense!” This chapter offers an ethnographic account of the ­actual execution of the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction, centering on the contention, negotiation, and conciliation between the Kaohsiung City government and the deceased’s families. Before this moment, at the planning stage, the contestation was primarily between KAPWR feminists and former ­union organizers at the Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau, with 126

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the chief difference being over the name of the new park—­a strug­gle over the right of interpretation. At heart, however, they shared much in common. Both groups sought to establish a new narrative of private mourning in the public sphere. They both believed that a personal tragedy merited more than a personal response—it presented an opportunity to address a historical wrong. Their praxes have also led to the rescaling of remembrance from the level of the personal to the national and global. In contrast, the contention between the Kaohsiung City government and the deceased’s families over the Maiden Ladies Tomb’s reconstruction represented a clash between a secular, rational design for a public park and the aspiration for a holy, enchanted place of worship open to benefit the lay masses. It exemplified the entanglement of two visions of the cosmological underpinning of the world and the social relations that constituted one’s community. Historical and religious relevance aside, the reconstruction of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb has also to be understood as part of the modern state’s prerogative of spatial governance, especially regarding the management of burial grounds against other competing interests such as urbanization and real estate development. Like other components of the built environment, the site, location, and morphology of cemeteries reflect differing priorities according to dif­fer­ent types of land use. In many Asian cities, and particularly ­those that confront increasing land scarcity, burial practices have changed over the past few de­cades to release land from the dead for the use of the living (Aveline-­Dubach 2012). Taiwan is no exception to this trend. The central government of Taiwan forcibly implemented public cemetery beautification proj­ects from 1976 to 1985, with the primary objective of changing the notorious image of traditional cemeteries. The government was hoping that parklike public cemeteries would “improve the overall environmental quality, provide a dignified environment for worship, and offer pleasing outdoor spaces for recreational use” (Taiwan Ministry of the Interior, quoted in Shu-­Chun Lucy Huang 2007, 208). A survey conducted in Taipei, however, showed that while ­people genuinely welcomed the beautification of traditional cemeteries, they continued to see cemeteries as a place where p ­ eople partake in burial-­related activities. Their willingness to spend time in cemeteries for other (e.g., recreational) purposes was minimal (Shu-­Chun Lucy Huang 2007). A more successful campaign was the replacement of the traditional custom of ground burial with cremation and the use of columbaria—­a phenomenon also observed in other polities, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South K ­ orea. Indeed, cremation and

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the use of columbaria have overtaken traditional ground burials as the main method of disposition of the dead in Taiwan. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, cremation reached 96.3 ­percent of all practices of body disposal in 2017, the second-­highest rate in the world, trailing only Japan (Chang Li-­kuo 2019).1 Lands once occupied by public cemeteries w ­ ere subsequently redeveloped for commercial, residential, recreational, and other uses. The reappropriation of the landscapes of death (burial grounds, cemeteries, columbaria, and crematoria) in con­temporary Taiwan is, therefore, an accomplishment of the modern state, which seeks to intervene in and regulate the workings of daily life while increasingly implicating itself in the market pro­cess that continually opens up new territories for capital accumulation (Tremlett 2007). State interventions aimed at reforming death practices have been deeply consequential in Taiwan. However, the politics of the living is not always so effective in controlling the politics of the dead. To the Taiwanese, death is inevitable but not final. It is a point of transition, but it by no means marks the end of deceased persons’ involvement with their families. As is evident in the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction, the state may use the strong sentiments invested in the landscapes of death to advance its agenda, but the reinsertion of the dead into the realm of the living likewise provides an opportunity to challenge the state. The super­natural lies beyond the state’s control. The ethnographic account provided in this chapter illustrates the complex pro­cess of conflict and compromise that puts on display both the attempts of the state to assert its authority over spatial governance and the efforts of the population—­both the living and the dead—to contest the hegemony of the state. If the story depicted herein reads like a tug-­of-­war, it is ­because it was a tug-­of-­war in real­ity. Accordingly, the following sections are or­ga­nized to resemble this sport, which pits two teams against each other in a test of strength. My purpose is twofold. Directly, I aim to pre­sent the pro­cess of reconstruction in rounds to capture the back-­and-­forth dynamics between the two involved parties (teams) as they pull on the opposite ends of a rope, with the objective of bringing the rope closer to their end against the opposing team’s pull. On a deeper level, I am also attempting to convey that a tug-­of-­war is about both demonstrating one’s own strength and feeling the opponent’s force so that one can exert one’s strength accordingly and realistically. In the current case of spatial transformation, it was through the ongoing practices of interaction, negotiation, and reconciliation that the assertations of the two concerned parties—­the state, on the one hand, and the ferry

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accident victims and their families, on the other—­were initially stated, mutually adjusted, gradually took shape, and eventually materialized in the final and pre­sent form of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers.

Round 1: The New Park as ­Women’s Cultural Landmark The decision to name the refurbished park the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers indicated the end of discursive contestation and the beginning of the physical transformation of the former burial site. Following the tug-­of-­war meta­phor, the halfway point of the rope was the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Round 1 was the tryout round. It was for the ombudsperson—­a go-­between appointed by the city government— to lay out the ground rules agreed by dif­fer­ent government agencies so that the planned Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers would replace the former burial site as Kaohsiung’s nationally recognized ­women’s cultural landmark. It was a round of internal alignment, so to speak. Awakening Kaohsiung was given three months (May 1—­July 31) to complete the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Landscape Construction and Naming field survey. According to Ms. Hsu, the chief mandate of the survey team was to find out the families’ preferences about the name and design of the new tomb site. Ms. Hsu recalled the ­Labor Affairs Bureau explaining that the tomb would be renovated into a park, in which a monument would be erected in place of the former gravesites to commemorate the twenty-­five deceased ­women. The idea was that the monument as a centerpiece of the refurbished park would be recognized as a cultural landmark, thus dovetailing with the National Cultural Association’s Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture campaign. “That’s why we went to look for photos [of other memorials] like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial [in the United States],” Ms. Hsu explained to me. “We brought ­these photos with us so that we could show the families some concrete examples during the interviews.” In addition to photos of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Awakening Kaohsiung team also prepared photos of the Three Soldiers monument and the Korean War Veterans Memorial, also in the United States, as other alternatives. Although Awakening Kaohsiung had only a short time to conduct the survey, its members managed to visit most of the families of the twenty-­five deceased w ­ omen and spoke with one or more members in each f­amily. They also interviewed a few ferry accident survivors, first responders, rescue volunteers, and local residents and government handlers who ­were involved in the aftermath of the ferry accident. Based on the

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survey results, a final report was produced for the Kaohsiung City government. The Awakening Kaohsiung report (Wang Hsiu-­yun 2006) indicated that the families interviewed by and large welcomed the recurring attention given to the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. In the new park they wanted the continuous presence of the tomb or an architectural structure of worship where they could place urns and/or hold memorial ser­vices. They also expressed their wish to keep the original memorial archway. The parents of the deceased ­women ­were particularly worried that ­there would be no one making regular offerings to their daughter-­gods a­ fter they themselves passed away, so they hoped to see the site evolve into a holy place with frequent visitors. Essentially, the families ­were envisioning a refurbished tomb, t­ emple, and memorial hall with a redecorated memorial gate, surrounded by the new, welcoming park with flowers and plants. A memorial archway was impor­tant: it would serve as the gateway to the shrine for the twenty-­five enlightened ­women. While waiting for Awakening Kaohsiung to complete its field study, the Kaohsiung City government moved forward with the park renovation. A groundbreaking ritual, attended by both city government officials and the deceased’s families, was held to honor the gods and alert any bad spirits that inhabited the burial site. Ms. Huang, who had taken over the ­Labor Affairs Bureau chief secretary position from Mr. Shi, was summoned to spearhead the pro­cess. Like Mr. Shi (see chapter 5), Ms. Huang had also worked closely with ­unions in southern Taiwan before she joined the Kaohsiung City government. She came into the renovation proj­ect at a moment when the initial planning was done, the publicity campaign was over, and the ­actual construction was about to begin. Her responsibility primarily entailed intercity agency coordination concerning the overall environment. ­There was much that had to be done for the new park to be successful. First and foremost, Chief Secretary Huang had to get the Civil Affairs Bureau on board ­because of its authority over mortuary ­matters, including all municipal burial lands. The cooperation of the Public Works Bureaus was equally crucial. Traffic lights had to be installed, pedestrian crossings had to be painted on the pavement, and the old “Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb” signs had to be replaced with new signs that read “Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers.” The lighting inside the planned park also had to be enhanced, and more streetlights had to be added outside the park. Chief Secretary Huang also needed the Public Works Bureau to change the land zoning from a cemetery to a park. The Kaohsiung City government had neither the right equipment nor employees with the right kind of expertise to re-

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Fig. 6.1. ​ Vessel, the sculpture at the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Source: Anru Lee.

move the mounds of carbide slag on the two sides of the planned park, so Ms. Huang obtained help from the Teamsters Union through personal relationships she and her ­labor activist colleagues had cultivated with its members. She also sought assistance from the local village chief to persuade the se­nior citizens who sang karaoke near the tomb to find an alternative site for their daily plea­sure. “It’s ­really hard to incorporate karaoke into the park design, you know,” Ms. Huang explained. Besides, “who is to keep an eye on the karaoke owner and his customers?” For all that she had to do, Chief Secretary Huang hardly had any contact with the deceased’s families. The only time she talked to them directly was when they ­were invited to comment on the public art design intended to be the focal point—­the w ­ omen’s cultural landmark—of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Ms. Huang collaborated with the Bureau of Cultural Affairs in this endeavor. Together, they invited several female artists to create labor-­themed public artwork. Their final se­ lection was a sculpture titled Vessel, which comprises twenty-­five parts, ­shaped like long, curved pipes. The pipes stand to symbolize the twenty-­ five lives lost in the ferry accident; they are connected in the form of two crisscrossing ellipses (fig. 6.1). The exact time when the accident happened

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(1973.9.3 07:15) is imprinted on some of the pipe parts. The deceased’s families ­were not taken with the design, however. They thought that some parts of the sculpture w ­ ere too sharp and piercing to be good for feng shui (Chinese geomancy).2 They wanted t­hese parts modified into a rounder shape. Although the artist was hesitant to make any changes on the ground of artistic integrity, she eventually accommodated the families’ concerns and altered her design. Even so, in the end the families rejected the revised Vessel for the reason that it was completely unrelated to the afterlife status of their d ­ aughters or ­sisters, an issue I w ­ ill return to ­later. Ms. Huang left her post at the ­Labor Affairs Bureau to pursue another ­career when Chen Chu was elected mayor in 2006. At the time the design blueprint of the Memorial Park was yet to be completed. When I interviewed her in 2013, she indicated that she had not gone back to visit the finished park since her departure from the Kaohsiung City government; nor had she followed developments while the renovation was in pro­cess. She did not know what the finalized Memorial Park looked like or ­whether it was dif­fer­ent from how it had been envisioned when she was in charge. As the state is constituted by ­human agents, its officials often hold dif­fer­ent priorities regarding the “proper” use of space from one another even when they are representing the same government entity. When I asked about her overall thoughts on the proj­ect, Ms. Huang said, When we ­were ­doing it, we aspired to create a park where every­body would feel welcome. Walking the dog, playing with ­children—­somewhere ­people would like to visit. ­Whether we accomplished what we set out to do, I think, is a dif­fer­ent question. Just now you asked me w ­ hether by emphasizing the l­abor identity of the deceased w ­ omen we forfeited their role in the f­ amily. I ­don’t think that ­these two conflict with each other, just like the ­women’s contribution to national economic development does not write off the contribution they made to their families—­and, in the same way, their story is about both ­labor rights and gender equality. That’s why we worked our design around their collective burial, so that we could have a park while preserving their graves.

The decision to remove the memorial archway had been a difficult one for Chief Secretary Huang: “On the one hand, we wanted to keep it to honor the families’ wishes, but on the other hand, we wanted to get rid of it b ­ ecause it looked like a chastity archway [貞節牌坊].3 Its implication

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was antifeminist, and its look was premodern. It just ­wouldn’t fit in the planned park.” Ms. Huang had no idea that the individual graves and the memorial archway w ­ ere both removed from the renovated park. One ­thing that Chief Secretary Huang was unequivocally pleased about was how, ­under her watch, the size of the ­women’s rest­room was designed to be three times as big as that of the men’s, thereby ensuring “potty parity” in the park. She also made sure that the ­women’s rest­room was nicely decorated and that t­ here was no security blind spot. ­These arrangements resonated with Taiwanese feminists’ recent focus on gender equality in public spaces (Bih 2006).

Round 2: When the State Meets the Dead A Chinese proverb says, “The dead are sacrosanct” (死者為大). It means that the dead themselves are the most impor­tant participants of a funeral, and that their needs and wants take pre­ce­dence over anything ­else. Accordingly, a proper burial ground must be provided so that the dead can be laid to rest (入土為安). Each of the steps ­toward the completion of a funeral requires consultation with the dead. Relocation and reburial are, therefore, major undertakings, with stakes as high as the original burial. The restless, unhappy dead disturb the living. In Round 2 of the tug-­of-­war, a secular, purposeful state actor faced off squarely against families seeking to restore their peace of mind by appeasing the super­natural. The renovation took on a fast pace u ­ nder Mayor Chen Chu, who was sworn into office on December 25, 2006. It is also impor­tant to note that Mayor Chen was the first Kaohsiung mayor selected through a general election a­ fter Mayor Frank Hsieh left in the m ­ iddle of his second term to become the premier of Taiwan in February 2005 (see t­able 4.1 in chapter 4). Between Mayor Hsieh and Mayor Chen had been two interim mayors who did not serve a full term of four years. Chen was mayor for nearly twelve years ­until she was appointed to be the secretary-­general to President Tsai Ing-­wen in April 2018. She was a power­ful mayor and an influential figure in the city’s recent history. During her tenure many impor­tant infrastructure proj­ects—­including the famed New Asia Bay Area—­were executed, greatly changing the urban landscape of Kaohsiung. Mayor Chen gave the Civil Affairs Bureau the task of relaying the city government’s intention to the deceased’s families. Specifically, the C ­ ijin District Office worked hard on the day-­to-­day communications with the families about the pro­gress of the renovation. Mr. Lin, the sole member

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of the Cijin District Office Civil Affairs Section’s Mediation Committee, was the designated liaison. The transfer of responsibility from the ­Labor Affairs Bureau to the Civil Affairs Bureau mostly had to do with the fact that bureaucratically the latter is in charge of mortuary ser­vices. This was not the first time—­nor would it be the last—­that the Civil Affairs Bureau had undertaken a grave removal / cemetery relocation task. The sensitive nature of mortuary ­matters calls for delicate ­handling. The former director-­general of the Civil Affairs Bureau, Ms. Su, who was the ranking officer of the renovation proj­ect, explained to Professor Wen-­hui Tan and me, “[Unlike our l­abor colleagues, who tend to hold onto their ideals,] we learned that we have to listen. It’s not entirely our call to make. You have to get the families’ consent. And the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb was a burial. We had to re­spect the spiritual aspect like every­ one in Taiwan does.” Professionally, it was Mr. Lin’s job to know the local social fabric, and he had been keeping tabs on community events and activities. Personally, Mr. Lin was highly interested in religion. To satisfy his intellectual curiosity, he took classes at the China Taoism Institute in Taipei in his spare time. As the Cijin District head said when he introduced us to Mr. Lin, “He is the best choice for the job.” He had the most knowledge about Taiwanese popu­lar religion among the Cijin District Office staff and he was sympathetic to the concerns of the families. Mr. Lin was also tremendously generous to us during our research. He helped us to locate members of the deceased’s families, facilitated our meetings with them, and assisted us in making sense of what our in­for­mants told us by filling in the local context. Initially, many of the deceased’s families simply could not understand why the government wanted to dig up their d ­ aughters once again, and could not forgive what they viewed as an unreasonable intrusion. “They [are fi­nally allowed to] rest in peace! And [individual members of] the ­family are all well and healthy,” one parent lamented, pointing out that the tomb had already been relocated in 1988 due to the expansion of the Kaohsiung Harbor. Mr. Lin came up with a list of five talking points to persuade t­ hese families that the city’s plan would be beneficial to them. First, as it had been more than thirty years since the ferry accident, and the parents of the deceased ­were aging or had already passed away, it remained to be seen ­whether the younger generations in the families (e.g., siblings and siblings-­in-­law, nephews and nieces) would continue to worship and care for their deceased maiden s­isters or aunts. Second, the tomb site was susceptible to vandalism—­and had been damaged—by

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gamblers in illegal lotteries, loiterers, and drug users, and, as a result, the tranquility of the deceased was constantly being disturbed; the site needed better maintenance. Third, the ­great contributions of the deceased to the development of the Taiwanese economy had been con­ve­niently forgotten ­because of the emphasis on the negative image attached to their maiden status and the super­natural stories derived from this image. Fourth, the deceased had transcended themselves to become enlightened individuals and elevated their standing in the heavenly order; they w ­ ere no longer ordinary super­natural beings and thus should be worshipped in a way that reflected their new celestial position. Fifth, and fi­nally, the tomb would look out of place as soon as the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers was finished; it was thus in need of a facelift. This list was significant, in the sense that it was prepared to serve two purposes. It had to touch the hearts of the families (the first, second, and fourth points) while addressing the government’s policy in a way the families could accept (the third and fifth points). The families of the deceased by and large welcomed the renewed attention given to the Maiden Ladies Tomb. For many of them, the top concern was “management.” The urgency of this concern was captured in the words of Kuo He, one of the ­fathers and a member of the original coordinating committee, who said: “No ­matter how good the infrastructure is, it ­will come to nothing if no one manages it.” Over the years he had seen addicts using drugs b ­ ehind the graves and gamblers defacing the photos attached to the individual headstones. He had also witnessed the public lavatory on the burial site turned into a “stolen motorcycle disassembly factory”: “They turned the interior of the toilet into a shop floor. They broke up a motorcycle, took the engine, and threw away the rest of the motorcycle randomly. It was messy everywhere. Outside, the copper bell that we placed by the kiosk was stolen. The two iron trees [sagos, Cycas revoluta] that we planted w ­ ere also uprooted and gone. ­There has to be sufficient lighting. It’s essential. Without sufficient lighting, ­people would hide and do bad t­ hings.” Other ­people also reported that the bulbs of the streetlights on the main boulevard ­were constantly stolen, which made the already dimly lit burial site even darker and gloomier. In the first few years following the relocation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb to the current site, the families tried to use money from the collective fund for continual tomb upkeep, but the money ran out quickly. For a while, the families also took turns cleaning and maintaining the site, but they gave up the effort as the parents became too old or too ill to carry on the task. Police cars did

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patrol the area from time to time, but as one ­father noted, “They c­ an’t be ­there all the time, can they?” Some ­family members suggested that the city government should put up a sign indicating that vandalizing the burial site was a punishable crime. ­Others added that closed-­circuit tele­ vi­sion cameras should be installed for surveillance purposes. Similarly, more and better lighting was urgently needed. Ironically, acts of vandalism continued even ­after the establishment of the Memorial Park, and Kaohsiung City government agencies have added their complaints about the damage. At one of the preparatory meetings for the fortieth anniversary of the ferry accident that I attended in 2013, the coordinator from the ­Labor Affairs Bureau requested the replacement of all the broken or stolen street light bulbs. A representative of the Maintenance Office of the Public Works Bureau grumbled that it was an impossible task. Even if his office w ­ ere to fix all the light bulbs the night before the anniversary, t­here was no guarantee that last-­minute sabotage would not happen on the morning of the commemoration. However implausible this might have sounded, it did have some truth to it. The site continues to be sparsely occupied during the day and deserted at night. ­There is not much that the families or the city authority can do u ­ nless the vandals are caught red-­handed. ­There is also not much they can do to deter wrongdoers short of having someone to keep an eye on the site most—if not all—of the time. Some families did express the wish to have someone stationed permanently at the new park, but the city government never committed itself to this idea. This was prob­ably why, in the Awakening Kaohsiung survey, the deceased’s families did not seem to mind the presence of the karaoke business, although it was highly disapproved by the KAPWR. Some of them seemed to even welcome it b ­ ecause the owner of the karaoke business helped to maintain the individual gravestones. He offered fresh flowers and paid tribute to t­hose buried nearly e­ very day before he opened for business. He also helped to keep an eye on the environment when his business was in operation. His s­ imple karaoke business drew primarily se­nior citizens from the surrounding neighborhoods who had ­limited means but much time to kill. Occasionally, it attracted some manual laborers from nearby construction sites who ­were looking for a few drinks and a quick break in the ­middle of a workday (alongside karaoke, the owner also served cheap food and inexpensive liquor). ­Family members interviewed indicated that the karaoke business and its customers helped to make the place more animated and fuller of life. “It brings in ­people, who entertain our ­daughters,” some of the parents said. The families also

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did not seem to mind having commercial activities near the tomb, though that had been another focus of the KAPWR’s criticism. A few of the families even sold incense, candles, and fruit to grave sweepers at the first burial site in Chung-­chou Village to supplement their incomes. ­Under t­ hese circumstances, the families appeared to be receptive to the city’s proposal. The idea of “cleaning up the environment and making it unsullied and beautiful” seemed to them a step in the right direction. With the help of Mr. Lin, a new six-­member coordinating committee was formed, composed of three ­fathers from the original coordinating committee (Chuang Chin-­chun, Chuang Kok, and Kao Ah-­you) and three new members, all b ­ rothers of victims. Every­thing seemed to be g­ oing well. Difficulties began to emerge, however, when Mr. Lin started requesting that the families sign a consent form for the tomb renovation. To sign a consent form on behalf of a dead person is not a purely secular ­matter. It requires the permission of the dead. The twenty-­one families of the twenty-­five deceased ­women would not agree to make any decision or grant any consent ­unless they got a positive answer from their (deceased) ­daughters or s­ isters. To consult the deceased, the families cast wooden divination blocks.4 However, the young ­women did not always answer positively to the vari­ous requests of the city government or their own families. Often it took many tries before the spirits responded; and when they fi­nally did respond, they did not always agree to the request. ­There ­were also times when the deceased w ­ omen simply did not respond at all. Not getting a response from a spirit is an indication that the spirit is e­ ither unwilling to commit itself to—or is displeased with—­a given question or request. In this case, when the families did not get a response from their ­daughters, they took it to mean that the deceased w ­ ere not keen on the idea of having their resting place disturbed. The pro­cess to obtain consent came to seem like a roller coaster r­ ide for Mr. Lin. Before he started, some families such as t­hose on the coordinating committee had already begun to consult the dead on their own. Yet they did not get straight answers right away. Kao Ah-­you told Mr. Lin that he had tried and tried, for at least thirty minutes, without getting a positive response from his deceased d ­ aughter. In the end, he said to his ­daughter that the city government was d ­ oing the proj­ect. If she had any request or discontent, she should take it to the one in charge at the Cijin District Office—­that is, Mr. Lin. ­After he said that, his ­daughter immediately granted him her approval. The pro­cess went smoothly a­ fter this first hurdle. Assisted by Kao Ah-­you and ­others on the coordinating committee, Mr. Lin quickly obtained consent from more than ten families. ­After

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that, the pro­cess slowed down once again. “What did you do then?” I asked Mr. Lin. He told me he would go to the Tianhou ­Temple or to Kuang Chi Gong—­two major public ­temples of community gods in Chung-­chou—to surround himself with gods and sit for a moment while gathering his thoughts about how to proceed further. This was not the first time Mr. Lin had faced prob­lems with the super­natural on his job. Once he spent three hours casting divination blocks at the Longshan ­Temple, in the town where he was stationed at the time, to obtain an answer from the Goddess of Mercy. He told me that one could not rush ­things when engaging super­natural beings. Eventually Mr. Lin successfully attained consent from twenty families. Ms. Kuo, whose three younger ­sisters died in the ferry accident, was the remaining person yet to give her consent. Twice Ms. Kuo had left early from the seafood restaurant where she worked, knowing that we ­were coming to interview her (see chapter 3), and, similarly, she slipped out the back door of the restaurant when she learned that Mr. Lin was coming to see her. To locate Ms. Kuo, Mr. Lin had to seek help from se­nior members of the new coordinating committee (especially Kao Ah-­you), se­ nior relatives of Ms. Kuo, and the chief of the village where she was living—­essentially, anybody who could exercise some sort of authority or influence over Ms. Kuo. Accompanied by t­hese ­people, Mr. Lin visited Ms. Kuo nearly e­ very day. Gradually she softened her attitude t­ oward Mr. Lin, but she still would not sign the consent form b ­ ecause, she explained, she had not gotten any response from her deceased s­ isters. (I asked Mr. Lin w ­ hether he believed Ms. Kuo was telling the truth. He said yes.) Mr. Lin volunteered to cast the divination blocks and talk to the dead directly. However, he also did not get a good response, even a­ fter multiple attempts. “­After a while, I had to consult a religious practitioner at a local ­temple and learn to phrase my plea in a hard-­to-­refuse way,” Lin explained. “If you get a laughing answer, you know that you are getting closer. What you need to do is to modify your next question so that it ­will continue to take the answer in the right direction. And you repeat it, and again, and again, u ­ ntil you get a definite, desired answer.” Even so, an unequivocal “yes” was still hard to come by. Mr. Lin begged and begged, and even promised to bring fruits as offerings to the deceased e­ very month in the ­future. “I pretty much exhausted ­every pos­ si­ble means I could think of [to convince the ­sisters],” he said. “In the end, I told them I was only a minor employee who took ­orders from some big boss [i.e., the mayor] and pleaded with them to understand my quandary. As soon as I said that, they granted me a divine answer. [­These

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­ omen] certainly know the difficulties of being someone’s subordinate!” w ­After that, Ms. Kuo signed the consent form. A month had elapsed between the previous twenty agreements and this last consent.

Round 3: Burial Reclamation as City Directive Round 3 is about state power. It illustrates the modern state’s prerogative of spatial governance, especially regarding the management of burial grounds against other competing interests. ­Under the leadership of the mayor’s office, the Kaohsiung City government asserted a par­tic­ u­lar moral geography that required a hierarchy of land use in the name of the public good. In this way, the transformation of deathscapes was intended as an instrument of governmentality, supporting a new sense of modern citizenry predicated on associations with neighbors or strangers as opposed to one’s own kin or blood relations. Even though the families of the deceased gave their consent to the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation, this did not mean that they agreed with every­thing the city government was d ­ oing or was proposing to do. One concern immediately raised by the families was the fate of the individual graves. Curiously missing from the city’s public announcements before the ­actual construction was where and how the remains of the twenty-­ five ­women would be moved a­ fter the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction. This silence suggests several possibilities. It could have indicated the Kaohsiung City government’s determination to eliminate the tomb or it could simply have indicated its indecision about what to do with the tomb before the ­actual reconstruction. It might also have been the government’s intention to leave enough ambiguity so that it could adjust the plan to accommodate the demands of vari­ous constituencies that might arise during the renovation pro­cess. ­After all, any proj­ect involving the alteration of a tomb or a graveyard is a serious undertaking, as the living’s relationship with the dead and the spirit world weighs heavi­ly on the minds of the Taiwanese. Although Professor Wen-­hui Tang and I did not get the opportunity to interview Mayor Chen, it was clear from our conversations with the city officials working closely with the mayor on the Memorial Park proj­ect that she was determined to clean up the Maiden Ladies Tomb site. According to the head of the Cijin District Office, Mayor Chen regularly asked about pro­gress on the renovation, thereby putting the office ­under much pressure. One L ­ abor Affairs official close to the mayor told us that this might have to do with Chen’s experience when she had been the

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director-­general of the Taipei City Department of Social Welfare in the 1990s. During her four-­year tenure (1994–1998) on that job, she ordered the exhumation of a large number of randomly buried, deserted graves on a hillock near the Taipei City Second Funeral Parlor (whose location used to be on the perimeter of Taipei City but is now near the city center due to urban development). At the groundbreaking ceremony of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, Mayor Chen was heard talking jovially about how, as a result of that effort, a vast span of hillside land was successfully reclaimed and reverted to its original state of green forest and grassland that could be enjoyed by the general public again. Burial ground reclamation was one of Mayor Chen’s major policies. In a biography of Mayor Chen, Hua Ma xinneihua: Chen Chu 4000 tian (Hua Ma’s heartfelt words: Chen Chu’s 4000 days), she is quoted as saying that a prime policy directive of her administration was that the benefits of public land should be shared by all, and burial ground reclamation was a means to that end (Lin Hsing-­fei 2017). One example highlighted in the biography was the removal of the You-­chang Cemetery across the street from the You-­chang Redevelopment Zone in northern Kaohsiung. The land of the You-­chang Cemetery was rezoned to be a park area, but nothing could yet happen b ­ ecause of a delay in the cemetery relocation. This also affected the development of the land directly facing the cemetery on the other side of the road, due to the lack of interest among real estate developers who did not think ­people would want to live or shop near a cemetery. For a long time before Chen Chu became the mayor, the Kaohsiung City government leased the land adjacent to the cemetery to nearby se­nior citizens to plant vegetables. Mayor Chen told the author of her biography that her pre­de­ces­sors in the past all vowed to relocate the graves and remove the You-­chang Cemetery, but none of them put their words into action. Then it was her turn. When she said she wanted to remove the cemetery, every­body who heard her thought she was joking. But she was not. She instructed her Civil Affairs Bureau staff to be per­sis­tent in their communication with the descendants of t­ hose buried in the You-­chang Cemetery. She told them to use what­ever means necessary to attain the latter’s consent, so that “their ancestors can have a better place to live and the offspring can have a space for leisure and recreational activities” (Lin Hsing-­fei 2017). It turned out that cemetery removal was only half the task. Even if the descendants ­were willing to have their ancestors’ tombs relocated, ­there was no guarantee that neighboring residents would be willing to use a park converted from a former graveyard. Inhabitants of nearby

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communities requested that the ground of the proposed park be replaced so that the soil that had held dead bodies would not affect the health of current residents and park users. To comply with this request, the city government undertook a soil replacement proj­ect—at the cost of 40 million New Taiwan dollars—­that involved digging up eighty centimeters of soil from an area of sixty thousand square meters and replacing it with new mud excavated from detention pond proj­ects elsewhere in the city. Only ­after the completion of soil replacement did the Kaohsiung City Public Works Bureau begin to convert the former cemetery into the 170,000-­square-­meter You-­chang Forest Park—­a name chosen by local ­people who had become quite fond of the converted space. Gradually, more and more city cemeteries and columbaria—­big and small—­were removed, rezoned, or converted for commercial, residential, or recreational use. Sometimes this was done by swapping the land of government agencies—­historically located in city or town centers—­with newly claimed former cemetery land, thereby releasing a potentially commercially valuable property for redevelopment (as in the case of the Cijin District Office and the Cijin Municipal Hospital; see chapter 5). Another major burial ground reclamation proj­ect taken on by the Kaohsiung City government ­under Mayor Chen involved the Fu Ding Jin Cemetery, which is located right by an interchange ramp for National Highway No.  1. ­Because of its location, the Fu Ding Jin Cemetery is usually the first impression of Kaohsiung that out-­of-­town visitors get while arriving ­there via the highway. The relocation of the Fu Ding Jing Cemetery, which has a long history, is a major undertaking. According to the original tally of the Civil Affairs Bureau, ­there ­were more than sixteen thousand graves in the cemetery. When the workers hired by the Civil Affairs Bureau started to exhume the graves, they unearthed layer upon layer of graves that reached down three meters into the ground. Some of the graves dated back to the early Qing period in the eigh­teenth ­century. ­After further investigation, it was discovered that more than ten thousand of t­ hese graves contained remains, whereas five thousand ­were empty. The city government kicked off the Fu Ding Jin Cemetery reclamation in 2015 as a multiyear proj­ect divided into five phases. The city’s ultimate plan is to convert the former cemetery land into a green space, connect it with the two lakes on its two sides, and make the entire area an expanded forest park. Compared to t­ hese burial ground reclamation megaprojects, which concerned tens of thousands of ­people, dead and alive, the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation was much smaller in scale and far less complex: it affected only twenty-­five deceased ­women and their twenty-­one families.

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If ­there is anything from the sweeping cemetery cleanups that could shed light on the case of the Maiden Ladies Tomb, it was Mayor Chen’s determination to get it done and her conviction to celebrate public land in a “this-­worldly” way. Of course, the Maiden Ladies Tomb was not simply a collective burial; it also had a story to tell. Nevertheless, the intended audience for the story was not the dead or their living families, but rather the general public. According to Ms. Su, the former director-­ general of the Civil Affairs Bureau, Mayor Chen had always thought that the Maiden Ladies Tomb represented an old-­fashioned way of remembering the deceased young ­women. ­Because it was old-­fashioned, it was alienating and spooky. As a result, many ­people dared not go t­ here, and the place lost its function as a space of commemoration. Now that the ­whole site would be renovated into a park, Mayor Chen thought the Maiden Ladies Tomb should also be changed so that it could blend in with the renewed park environment. She thought it was impor­tant to change the outlook of the tomb so that p ­ eople would be willing to approach it. Only by d ­ oing so would p ­ eople learn about the story of ­these hardworking ­women and the contributions they made to the Taiwanese economy. The mayor then directed that a cenotaph or something of that nature should be installed as an alternative to the Maiden Ladies Tomb.

Round 4: Of Eigh­teen Lords and Twenty-­Five Female Immortals The state’s intervention was intended to produce the discursive effect of transforming the ferry accident victims from members of individual families to citizens of Kaohsiung City, thereby elevating them from the private domain to the public stage. This, however, did not take place exclusively ­under the purview of the state, and the distinction between the public and the private is not a distinction between the secular and the profane. In Taiwanese popu­lar religion, super­natural beings who display efficacy and are thereby able to attract followers can move up the celestial ladder and transform themselves from spirits revered only by private ­house­holds to deities worshipped by entire communities or beyond. In Round 4, making use of the opportunity provided by the Kaohsiung City government, the families of the twenty-­five deceased ­women w ­ ere pushing for public veneration of their daughter-­gods, though with l­ittle effect. The instructions Mr.  Lin received from his office was that the twenty-­five individual graves ­were to be removed from the Memorial

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Park for ­Women Laborers, and that a cenotaph would be established in their place. His task, once again, was to convince the families to sign the consent form. For the families this entailed another round of divination block casting. Mr. Lin received no instruction on how the graves should be removed or where they would be relocated. Some of his colleagues in the city government suggested having the ­women reburied somewhere ­else, but the families ­were not keen on the idea of having them moved far away. They proposed to keep the urns of exhumed bones under­neath the cenotaph but above the ground (due to the concern that a crypt would be too yin [陰]—­earthy, dark, cold, and eerie). ­There was much discussion among the families themselves—­and, by extension, between the families and Mr.  Lin—­before they agreed to the city’s proposal. What many of the families most wanted was to build a ­temple like the Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple in the place of the twenty-­five graves. The Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple is a popu­lar shrine located at the northern tip of Taiwan. A widely circulated story tells that in the mid-­nineteenth ­century a wrecked fishing boat washed ashore. It contained the dead bodies of seventeen men alongside a dog that had somehow remained alive. The local p ­ eople did what they would usually do with dead bodies of unknown identity: they buried them together at a common grave—in this case, on a cliff overlooking the shore. As the story goes, the dog remained by the side of its deceased masters and starved itself to death at the grave. The locals then buried the dog next to the men. Another version of the story entails that the dog insisted on jumping into the grave with the bodies ­until the local p ­ eople fi­nally had to bury it alive. The dog thus became the eigh­teenth of the Eigh­teen Lords b ­ ecause of the perseverance and loyalty that it had demonstrated ­toward its masters. Originally a ­simple ghost shrine of unidentified bones—­one of the many that sit on roadsides unattended and almost unnoticed across Taiwan’s landscape—­the Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple has grown into a major site, acquiring unpre­ce­dented popularity since the 1980s (Weller 1994a, 141). At the peak of its fame, the t­emple attracted thousands of visitors each night, causing traffic congestion on the northern coastal highway. Although local p ­ eople like to emphasize that the visitors include prostitutes, gamblers, and petty criminals, all kinds of ­people come to ask the Eigh­teen Lords for f­ avors, for which they return with proper repayment, such as buying the Lords gold medals, giving money to the t­emple, or sponsoring operas for the Lords’ plea­sure (Weller 2000, 482). The popularity of the Eigh­teen Lords primarily stems from the fact that being ghosts, they ­will grant any request—­particularly ­those normally rejected

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by virtuous community-­based gods—­because they lack descendants to worship them and they are starving in the underworld as a result. Robert Weller (2000, 482–483) calls this “fee-­for-­service religion, something like cutting a deal with a local hoodlum.” The only condition is proper repayment, without which they w ­ ill inflict sharp revenge. When the families of t­hose who died in the ferry accident voiced their preference for transforming the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb into something like the Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple, they ­were not thinking about its fee-­for-­service character. From the perspective of the families, the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb resembled the ­temple in that its ghostly spirit-­residents, like the Eigh­teen Lords, suffered from the lack of a proper place in an ancestral altar, and both w ­ ere involved in a shipwreck accident. For the families, the success of the Eigh­teen Lords in attracting a large number of worshippers, believers, tourists, and visitors appeared to pre­sent the best model for the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. The fact that the deceased ­were no longer simply w ­ omen but female immortals who ­were attaining enlightenment seemed to have further justified their request for a ­temple. It could be a place where the twenty-­five god statues could be placed to receive worshippers, a ­brother of one of the deceased w ­ omen suggested. The ­brother of another of the twenty-­five added that t­ here could be a small shop attached to the t­ emple managed by the families to sell worshippers joss sticks, candles, and paper money to burn for the gods. Some families even took the step of consulting the dead by casting divination blocks in front of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb. However, even a­ fter many tries they failed to procure a positive answer from the deceased about building a ­temple. By contrast, when they asked the ­women’s spirits ­whether they agreed to the city’s proposal to replace their graves with a cenotaph, they immediately got approval. Along with the decision about the individual graves came the question of the fate of the memorial archway. The majority of the families expressed their preference for keeping the archway, citing reasons such as “it is of high commemorative value” or “its size makes it easy to spot from far away.” They also insisted that “The Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb”—or, at least, “Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies” or “Twenty-­Five”—­ should be kept in the name. However, the city government was not keen to preserve any remnant of the archway; the intention was to remove it entirely. The discontent provoked by the dispute between the deceased’s families and the city government was captured in the words of Yeh Pie, who lost two of his younger ­sisters in the ferry accident. His remark high-

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lighted a fundamental difference between the city government and the families about the purpose of the park: “The question to ask is ­whether it is about the twenty-­five. When you name the park Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, you are saying the park is about ­every [working] ­woman in Taiwan. Yet had it not been for ­these twenty-­five, the park would not have even existed in the first place. Of course ­these twenty-­ five should be the central focus of the park.” Once again, to s­ ettle the m ­ atter, the families consulted the dead. This time, the deceased w ­ omen did not approve the government’s proposal to remove the memorial archway. As a compromise, the coordinating committee and Mr. Lin made two proposals to the mayor’s office: ­either (1) preserve the memorial archway as historical architecture, which entailed cleaning up the surrounding environment, retaining the existing archway, and changing the inscription “Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb” to “Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers” or “Memorial Park for Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies”; or (2) remove the existing memorial archway. The mayor’s office de­cided to move forward with the archway removal. In our interview with former director-­general Su, she recalled that moment and said, “[Given how complicated a cemetery relocation pro­ cess can get,] my instinct was to do it one step at a time, and I was glad we ­were able to come this far. . . . ​It ­would’ve been okay with me to keep the archway. But the mayor said no, the archway had to go.” With that order, Mr. Lin was left with the task of getting the families on board with the mayor’s decision. He prepared another list of talking points, this time with an emphasis on how the memorial archway looked out of place now that the adjoining area had been renovated into a modern green park. It would look even more unbecoming ­after the replacement of the individual graves with the cenotaph. The place had now been endowed with the forward-­looking significance of working ­women’s economic contributions and l­abor safety. It had also taken on a sleek, con­temporary look. An old-­fashioned archway would only evoke fear among passersby, Mr. Lin reasoned. It would not convey any impor­ tant meaning. In the end, the families accepted Mr. Lin’s reasoning that it did not make much sense to have the memorial archway standing alone without the presence of the twenty-­five individual graves. They conceded, and the memorial archway was removed. Nevertheless, it was a reluctant concession. Years ­after the ­grand opening of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, a substantial number of the families we interviewed continued to lament the removal of the memorial archway, which, implicitly or explic­itly for them, exemplified

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the loss of their control over the destiny of their ­daughters and ­sisters to the strong w ­ ill of state actors. Some ­fathers explained that it would have been okay with them to keep the existing archway but erase the original “Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb” inscription and replace it with “Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers.” They would even have accepted any other tall, easily noticeable signpost in place of the archway to help ­people locate the park from afar. Likewise, looking back, Mr. Lin developed a dif­fer­ent take on the issue. As a city worker, he did not have a choice but to follow the instructions of his superiors. Yet, in retrospect, he regretted the city’s decision to remove the memorial archway in its entirety ­because “the reason that we cherish a historical relic as an object of historical or memorial value is precisely that it has survived the passage of time. If we keep tearing down old t­hings, ­will we have anything left to help us understand history?”

Round 5: Workers’ Memorial as National Memorial Precisely b ­ ecause landscapes of death are invested with the most fundamental and possibly the most sacrosanct of h ­ uman emotions and beliefs, they are often the repositories of not only personal but also collective memories. As such, they provide an ideal terrain on which to resurrect deeply rooted central values that characterize the p ­ eople of a “nation” (Kong and Yeoh 2003, 51). In Round 5, upon the completion of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, the Kaohsiung City government sought to promote the new park as a symbol of ­labor rights and gender equality—­a progressive city writ large—as a part of the larger placemaking effort. Through this the city was attempting to create a renewed city image and staked out the claim that Kaohsiung was the primary city of Taiwan, representing the soul of the nation and the f­ uture of the country. Step by step, the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers was taking shape. Two guiding princi­ples ­were steering the pro­cess: urban renewal, on the one hand, and expulsion of the occult, on the other. Some staff members close to Chen Chu informed us that the mayor herself eschews anything godly or ghostly. She did not want her administration to be associated with the super­natural world—­anything that would be perceived as superstitious, unmodern, or irrational. Therefore, no trace to remind ­people of the Maiden Ladies Tomb should be left a­ fter the renovation. Consequently, the individual graves and the ghost money burner near the graves ­were removed and the memorial archway was demolished. Even so, the headstone of the God of Earth, who guards the land and protects

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Fig. 6.2. ​The Buddhist lotus sculpture at the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Source: Anru Lee.

the dead, was kept at the families’ insistence. The city government complied with their request but relocated the God of Earth from its original, readily vis­i­ble spot by the tomb side to a less con­spic­u­ous location, almost hidden from the public, on the periphery of the new park. The continuous presence of the God of Earth, however, indicates—­explic­itly to some but implicitly to most—­that the site remains a burial site. At the center of the park, in place of the former graves, is a sculpture of a Buddhist lotus on a pedestal (fig. 6.2). The families rejected the original placement of the Vessel sculpture proposed by the city government; they wanted something that could signify the heavenly status of their ­daughters and ­sisters. The city government followed their wish and moved Vessel to one side of the new park. Mr. Huang, whose younger ­sister died in the ferry accident, proudly told us in our interview that he was the one who came up with the lotus idea. He was too young to be a part of the original coordinating committee in the aftermath of the ferry accident, but he had been gradually taking on the role of intermediary in recent years as p ­ eople in his parents’ generation grew older or passed away. He was one of three victims’ ­brothers on the new coordinating committee. In his personal life, Mr. Huang runs a successful construction business and actively participates in several voluntary organ­izations such as the local chapters of the Rotary Club and Lions Clubs International. Through both his regular job and his volunteer work, he has built

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a wide social network that includes local politicians. He recalled, “When the city’s design was revealed, we w ­ ere like, ‘Goodness, what is this horn-­ like structure?’ I immediately told them I ­didn’t want it. I told them I wanted a lotus made for us.” We asked him why he specifically chose a lotus. The families, he responded, “all burn incense sticks and worship bo­dhi­sat­tvas (燒香拜佛), and the [deceased] w ­ omen have all had their god statues made. We wanted something Buddhist.” Mr. Huang cheerfully added that the lotus is not in full bloom. To indicate the “maiden” status of the deceased, he deliberately requested that it be a budding lotus. He also asked the city to install lights, so that the lotus would be illuminated even at night. The city also honored the families’ wish to store the urns with the w ­ omen’s remains u ­ nder the cenotaph, for which an above­ground chamber was created inside the pedestal and below the lotus sculpture. Inside the chamber, the twenty-­five urns are arranged in the same way as the old graves w ­ ere in the open space. In addition, a low-­profile in-­ground loudspeaker is implanted outside the chamber, playing nonstop the Buddhist name chanting, Namo Amitabha— a practice that helps the dead to be safe and reborn in the Pure Land. The parents of the deceased also expressed their wish to have a door that could be opened from the outside so they could enter the chamber from time to time to take care of the urns. Mayor Chen was against this idea, however. She pointed out that a door would make it pos­si­ble for anybody—­not just the parents—to go in, so the final resting place of ­these ­women would very likely be v­ iolated again, just like vandalism had ­violated it in the past. Subsequently, the chamber was permanently sealed. The epitaph that would go on the pedestal of the lotus statue involved one last round of negotiation. The inscription engraved on the original stele stated that the collective burial was to remember twenty-­ five young ­women who died unmarried in a ferry accident caused by mechanical malfunctions. It summed up who the deceased ­were, how they died, and what caused their deaths. When the families w ­ ere asked to offer their opinions on what should go into the new inscription, they took the task seriously. They used the original inscription as a blueprint and added wording to elaborate further on how the Maiden Ladies Tomb was relocated to the current site due to the Kaohsiung Harbor expansion. They also gave more detail on how the mayor of Kaohsiung City at the time helped to s­ ettle the pension issue and to better Chung-­chou’s inbound and outbound transportation. This revised content was followed by the names and birthdates of the deceased w ­ omen. It concluded with the couplet carved on the soon-­to-­be-­removed memorial archway, which

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told that the improved transportation infrastructure attained through the ultimate sacrifice ­these ­women made with their lives would have a lasting effect and benefit many generations to come. Some families, as well as Mr. Lin, also suggested that a “memorial story wall” be installed, on which a detailed chronology leading to the ferry accident and the life stories of the twenty-­five deceased could be reported. They reckoned that this would give visitors a better understanding of Cijin’s local history and how the tragic event was a significant part of it. Meanwhile, the Kaohsiung City government formally invited the National Cultural Association to draft the content of the epitaph, as the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers would replace the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb as the cultural landmark of ­women in Kaohsiung. The content was also shown to Professor Tang for further consultation. The National Cultural Association version was officially ­adopted as the epitaph for the new park, though it was greatly dif­fer­ent from the language prepared by the families of the deceased. On September 3, 2008, thirty-­five years ­after the fatal ferry accident, the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers was inaugurated. To observe the occasion, Mayor Chen Chu accompanied the families of the deceased on a boat ­ride that repeated the ferry commute t­hese ­women took to work on that fatal morning in 1973. When the boat reached the side of Kaohsiung City where the ferry tragedy happened, the passengers threw chrysanthemums into the w ­ ater as a tribute to the dead. ­Later that day, a memorial ser­vice was held by the Buddhist lotus statue at the newly minted Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Mayor Chen’s words, “Remember our laborer ­sisters, wish for a city of happiness” (懷念勞動姊妹, 祈願幸福城市), w ­ ere engraved on the pedestal of the lotus sculpture, along with the epitaph drafted by the National Cultural Association. The epitaph explains the purpose of the memorial park: Resting in peace ­here are twenty-­five ­women who gave their lives as laborers. . . . ​In 1973, they died while on their way to work. The Kaohsiung City government helped to bury the deceased together at the time and named the collective entombment “The Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb,” as impor­tant documentation of the con­temporary life of Cijin and a witness to the sacrifices working-­class ­people made for Taiwan’s economic development. However, the term “Maiden Lady” denoted ste­reo­typical gender ideologies that ignored both the economic contributions of w ­ omen workers and the urgency of safety issues in the workplace. . . . ​On the recommendation of the Kaohsiung Association

150Ghostscapes

for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights and other groups, the current Kaohsiung City government de­cided to rectify the site as the “Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers” to commemorate the twenty-­five martyrs who died on their jobs. . . . ​We hope that we can work together to build a country for working p ­ eople and a city of happiness so that the sacrifice made by the deceased w ­ omen w ­ ill not be in vain.

The epitaph was followed by the names of the twenty-­five deceased ­women, as suggested by their families, but their birthdates w ­ ere not included in the inscription. Since then the Kaohsiung City government has held an annual spring memorial ceremony around April 28, Workers’ Memorial Day, in front of the lotus statue. In the first few years, only the families of the deceased ­were invited to attend, along with Mayor Chen Chu and her staff. In 2012, the city government began to mobilize local schoolchildren to perform at the ceremony, playing taiko drums and recorders and reading poetry. The city was hoping that, by performing and participating in the memorial ceremony, the c­ hildren would not only learn about the history ­behind the deaths of the twenty-­five ­women but also learn not to fear, but to enjoy, the park. In other words, this was a further attempt of the government to redefine the site as a “recreational space” and not a “home of the dead.” Additionally, the annual spring memorial ser­vice is an occasion that the Kaohsiung City government employs to (re)assert its commitment to workplace safety, including commuting to and from work.

Parallel Paths to Memorialization The Kaohsiung City government followed the request of the families and installed the budding Buddhist lotus statue on the spot of the original burial, relocating the Vessel sculpture to the side. Yet it is still the image of Vessel that appears on the entrance sign of the new Memorial Park. If anything, this seems to emphasize the city’s continual effort to secularize the site. The inscription carved on the lotus sculpture at the refurbished park is also revealing, as it serves multiple discursive purposes, particularly from the official perspective: it highlights the economic contribution of the deceased ­women and recognizes them as a part of the larger history of Taiwan, thereby addressing the concerns of the feminists who brought the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb from the private domain into the public sphere; it also emphasizes the Kaohsiung

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City government’s commitment to both gender equality and workplace safety, which helps to enhance the aura of Kaohsiung as a modern city and its municipal administration a reform-­minded, progressive government. On the emotional level, the portrait of the ­women as noble workers who died on the job also has the (intended or unintended) effect of promoting Kaohsiung’s urban tourism. ­After all, what could be a better symbol than twenty-­five young w ­ omen perishing tragically on their way to work at the Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone to characterize the romance and pathos of Kaohsiung’s past as a blue-­collar, working-­class city? As such, implied in this inscription is the shift of the role of “­women workers” from part of the manufacturing workforce u ­ nder global industrialism to an emerging locus of cultural production and consumption in ­today’s postindustrial world. The new Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers may have lost its old burial ground look, but it has not lost its burial function entirely. For the families, it represents a compromise. Mr. Huang, the mastermind b ­ ehind the lotus design, put it plainly: “Commemoration is commemoration, sweeping tombs is sweeping tombs,” drawing a contrast between two dif­ fer­ent but not necessarily conflicting ­matters. Aside from the city’s annual memorial ser­vice, some of the families have continued to visit their ­daughters and s­ isters at the Buddhist lotus sculpture. They may not be able to burn incense, but they can still bring flowers to show their re­ spect and communicate with their d ­ aughters and s­ isters by joining their palms and praying. If they want to burn paper money for the deceased, they can do so on the roadside outside the park. Elucidated in the ethnographic account presented in this chapter are parallel paths to memorialization. The Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction exhibits the power of the state in shaping the world of death through interventions in the landscapes of the dead. It illustrates the rationalization of the super­natural as a way to modernize the nation from the perspective of the modern state. It also illustrates the state’s appropriation of community memories and sentiments for the greater common good, as perceived by the state. Yet the strong emotions attached to the dead, appropriated though they ­were by the modern state of Taiwan, also became a rallying point for the families. The phenomenon of death is always a radical breach of the social fabric in h ­ uman socie­ties—­more so when it is a bad death. The logic of Taiwanese kinship is to mend this rupture through primarily popu­lar religious means. It seeks the cooperation of the super­natural. Yet ghosts are ephemeral and fleeting; they come

152Ghostscapes

and go, and their appearance is not always predictable. More impor­tant, ghosts have no bodies subject to physical pressure or the discipline of law. Ultimately, while the state may carefully arrange, control, and tend to citizens’ lives in the capacity of urban planners and policy makers, ghosts are not subjected to the same treatment by authorities. They are not governed by the logic of the modern state.

PART III

Afterlife

Fig. 7.1. ​The entrance to the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Source: Kaohsiung City Government Tourism Bureau.

Chapter 7

Beyond the Memorial

A

fter the completion of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, the Kaohsiung City government kept its promise to the deceased’s families by holding an annual spring memorial ser­vice around the Workers’ Memorial Day, which also became a juncture for the city to reaffirm its commitment to l­abor rights and gender equity. Aside from this commemoration event, the Memorial Park is usually quiet. Meanwhile, Cijin has increasingly become a favorite destination for both Kaohsiung City weekenders and out-­of-­town tourists. The reinvigorated Memorial Park is among the highlights featured on the municipal sightseeing map (see figure 5.1), though a minor one, as it is not considered a good photo-op spot by visitors. Indeed, tourists frequently fail to spot the park ­because of its unassuming appearance. Nevertheless, a survey of online travel websites indicates that the official depiction of the Memorial Park as a place that honors the female industrial workforce seems to have been largely accepted by the public at face value. For example, Easy Travel—­a Taiwanese online travel com­ pany—­publicizes on its website that, however impor­tant the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb was to the ferry accident victims and their families, “the inscription of the tomb nonetheless emphasized the unmarried status of ­these young w ­ omen but not the fact that they died victims of an occupational disaster b ­ ecause commuting safety was not taken seriously. . . . ​[In contrast,] the positive meaning of l­abor safety is embodied in the renovated Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, the physical presence of which serves as a constant reminder so that employers ­will no longer repeat the ­mistake” (Easy Travel, n.d.). Meanwhile, “Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers super­natural” (勞動女性紀念公園 靈異) and “Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb super­natural” (二十五淑女墓 靈異) also appear to be frequently searched keywords on Google, signaling that the story of ill-­fated virgin ghosts continues to provoke fascination.

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The public’s lack of interest in or curiosity about the Memorial Park reminds us of Pierre Nora’s lieu de mémoire (1989), a memorial site wherein memory is frozen and the public are rendered recipients of an officially endorsed history. It seems to indicate an instance of “active forgetting” in which the public as passive spectators are relieved from the responsibility of contemplating their relations to persons who are commemorated, the structural constraints that s­ haped t­ hose persons’ experiences, and the violent acts that took their lives. Conversely, Ann Rigney’s (2008) reflection upon Nora’s notion has offered us a dif­fer­ent perspective to assess the Memorial Park as a memorial site. Rigney emphasizes the “life” of memorial sites. She writes that, although it has proven to be a useful conceptual tool, the phrase “memorial site” can become misleading if it is interpreted to mean that collective remembrance is permanently tied to par­tic­u­lar figures, icons, or monuments. To bring remembrance to a conclusion is to, de facto, already forget. Alternately, Rigney advocates shifting the study of lieu de mémoire from “sites” to “dynamics” by taking into account the performative aspect of the term “remembrance” (Rigney 2008, 346). A site of memory can be seen not as a stable place or object but as a pro­cess of remembrance. This chapter looks to the lasting effect of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb a­ fter the completion of its renovation. Following Rigney’s thinking and distinct from the previous chapters, this chapter does not focus on the physical site of the Maiden Ladies Tomb and, l­ater, the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. Rather, I approach the continuous relevance of the tomb / memorial park through the lens of the Taiwanese government’s gender policy. While the destigmatization of the Maiden Ladies Tomb involved locality-­specific activism, it was also a manifestation of the larger sociocultural change and had benefited from the broader ­women’s movement. Gender mainstreaming as a government directive has provided an institutional framework for Taiwanese feminists to transform the patrilineal f­amily on both the policy and grassroots levels. The gender mainstreaming directive had facilitated the KAPWR’s participation in Kaohsiung’s municipal affairs and, in turn, the city government’s reception of KAPWR’s agenda. In the years following the inauguration of the memorial park, although the popu­lar perception and consumption of the park is still ­under development, the legacy of the Cijin ferry accident victims has continued to register in the feminist conversation. It remains an ele­ment of the feminists’ advocacy for gender equality, albeit with a dif­fer­ent function. The destigmatization of the Maiden Ladies Tomb and the revamping of the burial site w ­ ere never the ultimate end of the KAPWR’s activ-

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ism. They are perhaps better characterized as phased tasks—­a means to the eventual goal of gender equality. Indeed, a memorial, monument, or heritage site is hardly ever established to comprehend the past but to serve purposes relevant to the pre­sent. The KAPWR’s Maiden Ladies Tomb campaign had always been informed by Taiwan’s overall feminist strug­ gle. As the campaign itself had to be understood within the current larger context, its ongoing impact has also to be assessed through the broader ­women’s movement. To interrogate the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers not merely as a memorial site but a pro­cess of remembrance, I build on the previous discussion of Taiwan’s w ­ omen’s movement (in chapter 4) and focus on two government initiatives. The first is the Gender Equity Education Act, ratified in 2004 amid the KAPWR’s Maiden Ladies Tomb campaign, and its lasting effect on school curricula and beyond. The second is a national campaign of funeral reforms, which targets Taiwanese mortuary rituals, including the exclusion of unwed ­daughters from ancestral shrines—­the exact fate originally suffered by the Cijin ferry accident victims. ­These two seemingly unrelated initiatives are closely connected, as both of them ­were developed around the same time, following the gender mainstreaming policy aimed at addressing the gender bias that ­favors men over ­women, ideologically and in everyday practices. They are also connected through the government officials and feminist activists who worked on the planning and implementation of both initiatives. More significantly, they are connected b ­ ecause the faculty involved in both initiatives consider gender equity education a fundamental solution to male-­centered ideologies and practices, including the traditional funeral rites deeply entrenched in Taiwanese culture. Even though the Maiden Ladies Tomb and Memorial Park are not the targets of the two government initiatives investigated in this chapter, they are a part of the repertoire of “movement materials,” so to speak—­that is, resources feminist activists or community advocates can draw on for inspiration or utilize to advance their c­ auses. This is elucidated in the case of the gender equity education movement, discussed in the first half of this chapter. The possibility for educators to incorporate the Maiden Ladies Tomb as a component of gender equity education into their teaching has advanced the prospect of critical remembrance. This provides students an opportunity to critically interrogate not only the life and death of the young accident victims but also the knowledge production of gender-­ based and gender-­biased notions both inside and beyond the classroom. The second half of the chapter focuses on issues related to the government-­led custom reforms, including the reform of mortuary rituals.

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The Maiden Ladies Tomb was not explic­itly registered in the mortuary ritual reform agenda. Yet the cultural idea ­behind the tomb and the ensuing toll imposed on the deceased and their surviving families ­were very much what the custom reform advocates had in mind to eradicate, and this lent legitimacy to the KAPWR’s campaign to transform the Maiden Ladies Tomb. In addition to the mortuary ritual reform at the policy level, I also detail how this government initiative has impacted funeral practices on the ground. If, in effect, gender equity education is steered by educators (and particularly t­ hose based in universities), the mortuary ritual reform, though championed by feminist activists (including university faculty), is primarily mediated through the day-­to-­day operation of funeral industry prac­ti­tion­ers. Funeral industry prac­ti­tion­ers are, by definition, businesspeople who normally h ­ andle their clients in pragmatic manners devoid of par­tic­u­lar ideological advocacy. Nevertheless, many of them have come into contact with mortuary ritual reform when taking gender-­sensitive national mortician certification exams or attending government-­organized professional training sessions. The experiences of the two funeral professionals introduced in the last part of the chapter inform us as to how the custom reform initiative is received by the general public. Their experiences also show us how the patriliny-­ based mortuary practices once deemed sacrosanct that rendered the twenty-­five ferry accident victims maiden ghosts are changing not only ­because of the government-­sponsored reform movement but also b ­ ecause the sociodemographic circumstances supporting t­ hese practices are no longer sustainable.

The Gender Equity Education Movement The promotion of gender equity education has been a central feature of mainstream educational reform efforts in Taiwan since the late 1980s. A broad co­ali­tion of advocates, including w ­ omen’s movement activists and college professors of w ­ omen’s and gender studies, has participated in this wave of gender reforms in education. In 1988 the Awakening Foundation conducted a study and discovered that gender discrimination against ­women was common in primary and secondary school textbooks. For instance, generic male language was commonly used to stand in for the w ­ hole of humanity in the textbooks. Men also appeared more frequently than ­women in both narratives and photo­ graphs. When ­women w ­ ere shown in the textbooks, they w ­ ere usually depicted as followers and subordinates to their domineering male counter­

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parts; ­women’s accomplishments on their own terms w ­ ere largely neglected. The Awakening Foundation concluded that educators needed to revise and replace gender-­biased instructional materials with gender-­ equitable ones (Wei-ni Wang 2007, 141).

Introducing Gender Equity Education Following the publication of its findings, in 1996 the Awakening Foundation petitioned the Committee of Educational Reforms (­under the Ministry of Education) to amend textbooks, train teachers, institute school-­based gender equity committees, increase w ­ omen’s participation in educational decision making, and set up w ­ omen’s studies curricula. The first four demands became the general provisions of the Gender Equity Education Act, established in 2004. Gender educational reforms w ­ ere further strengthened by the passing of the Sexual Harassment Prevention Act at the end of the same year, which prescribes that primary and secondary schools have gender equity education. It is impor­tant to note that ­women’s rights activists in the West connect education to a wide range of economic f­ actors. Conventional wisdom holds that w ­ omen ­will be able to gain access to better employment and greater involvement in social and po­liti­cal activities if provided with an education of comparable quality to that given to their male counter­parts. Yet educational attainment does not guarantee the elimination of the gender gap. Therefore, from the onset Taiwanese activists associated education with a cultural frame of reference (Shu-­Ching Lee 2012, 258). Advocacy of gender equity education as a social movement in Taiwan challenges the discriminatory gender roles based on patriarchal ideologies (Wei-ni Wang 2007, 131). In effect, Taiwan represents an example of comprehensive institutional change in both law and policy implementation. One of the most significant accomplishments of the gender equity education movement has been the legislation of gender equity education. In the course of their campaigns, feminist activists became directly involved in the pro­cess of lawmaking. They drove state-­sponsored educational reform by establishing influence over the pro­cess of conceiving and drafting legislation, thereby highlighting the language and imperative of gender equity (Shu-­ Ching Lee 2012, 258). The ensuing Gender Equity Education Act emphasizes that the reduction of gender inequalities through education relies not only on increasing w ­ omen’s access to education but also on removing gender ste­reo­types from instructional material and the learning environment (Wei-ni Wang 2007, 132). The act stipulates that a

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gender-­friendly environment is essential for students’ right to education. As such, it requires ­every school, from elementary schools to colleges and universities, to establish a gender equity education committee to foster gender equity programs and to put an end to sexual assault and harassment on campuses. The act also requires that educators and school administrators re­spect students’ sexual orientations, which, in subsequent years, opened the door to education about LGBTQ rights in many schools (Chang-­ling Huang 2017, 262). Ultimately, gender equity education in Taiwan is a pedagogical approach that aims to eliminate deep-­rooted gender ste­reo­types and discrimination. This is done by providing nondiscriminatory curricula and learning environments that highlight and value differences, w ­ hether based on biological sex, sexual orientation, gender characteristics, or gender identity. Altogether, the Gender Equity Education Act serves as the l­egal foundation for promoting gender equality through education, consolidating preexisting guidelines concerning teacher hiring and training, developing curricula and learning environments, and creating mechanisms to ­handle sexual harassment, assault, and vio­lence in educational settings (Wei-ni Wang 2007, 138–139).1

We Can Teach Gender This Way! Instructional materials such as textbooks are principal media with which schools can pass on knowledge and social values to students. In 2001, three years before the passing of the Gender Equity Education Act, gender equity education was designated as one of the core components of the then new Grades 1–9 Integrated Curriculum for Elementary and Ju­nior High School Education, into which gender equity issues w ­ ere required to be embedded. The Gender Equity Education Act further mandates four hours of gender-­focused educational activities in grades 1–9 ­every semester, the integration of gender issues into high school and ju­ nior college curricula, and more courses in gender and/or w ­ omen’s studies at the college level (Wei-ni Wang 2007, 141). Nevertheless, renovating instructional materials is an extensive pro­cess, as is the pro­cess of training and hiring educators and administrators with gender awareness to carry out a gender-­sensitive curriculum.2 Hsiao Jau-­jiun, a professor who is best known for her praxis as the first female officiant at the Hsiao lineage ancestor worship ceremony (see chapter 4) and who is the coeditor of Danian chuyi hui niangjia: Xisu wenhua yü xingbie jiaoyü (­Going back to my m ­ other’s ­house on New Year’s Day: Culture, customs, and gender equity education; Su and Hsiao

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2005) reflected on her experience of integrating gender issues into her teaching. Her students at the Department of Education and H ­ uman Development at National Dong Hwa University must complete a capstone proj­ect in their se­nior year before they gradu­ate and move on to become teachers themselves. For a few years, Professor Hsiao had strug­gled with how to empower her students to think critically on the issue of knowledge production. She de­cided that it would be good to start with the students’ own experiences—­that is, something personal, intimate, and, for the most part, taken for granted and thus not intimidating. She asked her students to write their ­mothers’ stories. As she expected, a seemingly ­simple, straightforward assignment frequently turned out to be highly controversial. ­There w ­ ere usually one or two students—­mostly male—­ who questioned the value of writing w ­ omen’s stories. They w ­ ere skeptical that anything significant would come out of studying their ­mothers’ lives, and they would ask Professor Hsiao ­whether they could write their ­fathers’ stories as an alternative. Doubt or hesitation also frequently came from the students’ ­mothers, who sometimes felt awkward and embarrassed to be put in the spotlight. They would instead encourage their ­daughters or sons to ask their ­fathers, whom they believed to have led more impor­tant lives and therefore had meaningful ­things to say. More often than not the biggest obstacle came from none other than the f­ athers. At one of the end-­of-­semester pre­sen­ta­tions, a female student reported that her ­father “had opinions” (you yi jian, 有意見) about her direction of research: First, he said, “Why do you need to take on so much trou­ble? Why c­ an’t you just make it up? Your professor is not g­ oing to know the difference.” Then he insisted [my mom’s life is] the way every­body has lived their lives. It was nothing special, and ­there was nothing worthwhile for me to ask about. When I fi­nally interviewed Mom, my ­father constantly popped up and told my ­mother it was time to cook, or urged her to contact p ­ eople for home repair, or asked her to do something ­else. . . . ​He tried very hard to come up with some plausible reason to discontinue my interview with my m ­ other “on technicalities.” (Hsiao Jau-­jiun 2007, 211)

The student’s story brought much laughter to the class, and struck a chord with many of her classmates who also faced vari­ous degrees of doubt, skepticism, or outright objection from their ­fathers about collecting their ­mothers’ life stories. Yet, funny or annoying, subtle or palpable,

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the ­father’s interruption also became a critical moment that forced students to confront the power relations inside their families. As one female student reflected, “Would the w ­ omen in the f­amily voice disapproval if the one to be interviewed is the ­father?” (Hsiao Jau-­jiun 2007, 211). Professor Hsiao always turned the questions students had about the capstone proj­ect into vital pedagogical opportunities. Given that it was normally the ­ father but not the ­ mother who was a f­amily’s “official spokesperson,” Professor Hsiao was able to demonstrate that “the decision to write one’s m ­ other’s life history is a po­liti­cal act”: It compels the researcher to face up to the gender power relations within his/her/their f­amily. How would one’s m ­ other narrate her marriage? How much of the parents’ marital relationship previously unknown to the researcher would be exposed to—­and scrutinized by—­the researcher and likely also other ­family members? ­Every ­family has its prob­lems that parents keep away from the c­ hildren. A child may not know every­thing between her parents, and [as a result] she may not understand the intricate relationship between her ­mother and ­father in the same way the parents understand it. Yet, the interview one has to conduct to write one’s ­mother’s story oftentimes brings to light t­hese hidden and sensitive issues. As a result, a student may start the capstone proj­ect thinking “how hard can it be to interview one’s ­mother?,” but ends up shattering his/her/their confidence in seemingly stable f­ amily relationships (Hsiao Jau-jiun 2007, 211).

One of the most impor­tant lessons that Professor Hsiao’s students learned from their capstone proj­ect was, therefore, the constructive nature of knowledge production. They w ­ ere forced to confront their previous assumptions about their families and reevaluate their ­family dynamics by taking into consideration their ­mothers’ accounts. Ultimately, ­these ­future teachers learned to acknowledge the existence of multiple subjectivities, recognize the connection between power and knowledge, and identify how a dominant discourse—­about the f­amily or other social ­matters—is established based on power, and that how it is received and understood is closely related to one’s subjectivity and positionality. All of ­these realizations are of fundamental importance, not only challenging students to think critically but also preparing them to teach effectively when they introduce gender equality and social justice issues to their own students ­later on. Over the years, Professor Hsiao and her allies in the gender equity education movement—­ including many involved in the Twenty-­ Five

Beyond the Memorial163

Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation—­have continued to develop instructional materials for both primary and secondary school teachers, as well as the general public, to use.3 KAPWR activist Mei-­hui You, whose faculty position at the Gradu­ate Institute of Gender Education at National Kaohsiung Normal University places her at the forefront of gender equity education, takes the movement a step further by emphasizing the materiality of gendered history. Drawing from her experience of working on the Maiden Ladies Tomb campaign, Professor You highlighted in her interview with me the salience of cultural landscapes as tangible examples of propagating gender equity. For her the concrete existence of a cultural landmark provides students—­future teachers or not—­a field trip opportunity to learn not only through reading but also through seeing, touching, and developing a sense of historical presence and immediacy. It helps to take their learning or the learning of their (­future) students to the next level. Similar to Professor Hsiao, who employs the capstone course to instill gender-­conscious critical thinking in her students, Professor You has used her “Practicum on Gender Education” course as a hands-on opportunity for her students to design a gender equity lesson plan. U ­ nder the Grades 1–9 Integrated Curriculum, teachers are encouraged not to treat a “major issue” (重大議題) such as gender equity as a single-­subject issue (in social studies or history) but rather to interweave it into multiple, related fields (such as social studies, history, and even extracurricular activities). “It’s sort of like ‘placement marketing’,” Professor You explained. Gender equity would be embedded everywhere in the curriculum, just like a product can be placed and featured in a tele­vi­sion program. Pleased with her analogy, Professor You continued, “The most impor­tant ­thing is for an instructor to have gender sensitivity. Once an instructor has it, she ­doesn’t need to have a separate gender equity curriculum—­she can integrate that sensitivity into the teaching of many themes and concepts.”4 The Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers makes an excellent gender equity education example and thus an ideal practicum on gender education class exercise, Professor You emphasized. Depending on the level of school and grade involved, a teacher can easily incorporate dif­ fer­ent aspects of the Memorial Park into vari­ous lesson plans. The richness of the memorial lies in the fact that it stands at the intersection of economy, gender, and cultural customs (Huang Shuan-­ling 2012). Its story touches upon Taiwan’s economic history (the transition from agriculture to industrial manufacturing, as well as the ­labor regime and working conditions inside export pro­cessing zones); po­liti­cal issues (the role of government agencies in public safety and crisis management); and gender issues

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(past and pre­sent distribution of educational resources between male and female c­ hildren, differences in l­abor conditions and pay for equal work between men and ­women, and deep-­seated cultural taboos against deceased single w ­ omen). ­Whether it is for the “local history” or “local customs and festivals” section in the fourth-­grade social studies curriculum or for the “economic development” or “production activities” section in sixth-­grade social studies, teachers can always find something relevant in the Memorial Park case to discuss in their classrooms. The fact that the War and Peace Theme Hall (surrounded by the War and Peace Memorial Park) sits across Cijin Road from the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers has further advanced the educational values of both of t­ hese sites. Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 u ­ ntil Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945. Opened on May 20, 2009, the War and Peace Theme Hall commemorates the history of young Taiwanese conscripts who w ­ ere sent to fight by the Japa­nese during the Pacific War and subsequently caught in the b ­ attle between the nationalists and the communists in the Chinese Civil War. It also covers the histories of other categories of ­people implicated in Japan’s war effort, including Taiwanese military nurses, comfort ­ women, and teenage naval arsenal workers. The exhibitions inside the War and Peace Theme Hall include historical photos, textual information, and vari­ous tools and utensils used at the time. Adorned on the Theme Hall’s outer wall is an image of Taiwanese men wearing the uniforms of the Japa­nese Imperial Army, the Kuomintang’s National Army, and the Chinese Communist P ­ eople’s Liberation Army, illustrating the circumstances of the Taiwanese as colonial subjects at the time (figure 7.2). Cijin was the last place Taiwanese soldiers in the Japa­nese Imperial Army saw before they w ­ ere sent off to the battlefield in the Pacific theater. Similar to the situation of the twenty-­ five female Cijin ferry accident victims, the history and complex identity formation of male Taiwanese Japa­nese Imperial Army soldiers ­were largely absent from the public consciousness ­until recent years (Chang Yun-­hui 2015). Professor You called the War and Peace Theme Hall and the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers “­human rights landscapes.” Both are the physical embodiments of Taiwan’s forgotten history, and their proximity to each other makes it easy to visit them both on a single school field trip. Teachers can not only call students’ attention to the fact that ­people can fall victim to the politico-­economic situations of their times but, more critically, to the distinctive ways in which individuals can be implicated in a state-­or empire-­building pro­cess based on social categories such as gender and class.

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Fig. 7.2. ​The War and Peace Theme Hall. Source: Anru Lee.

The 2005 Gender Mainstreaming Directive, which mandates that gender equity considerations be incorporated into the operation of all government agencies, has further advanced the cause of Professor You and her allies in the gender equity education movement. In addition to serving as an expert con­sul­tant on the Kaohsiung City Committee for Promotion of ­Women’s Rights, Professor You is frequently invited to give talks to or conduct workshops with ­people at vari­ous government offices. ­Whether or not a public-­sector employee is gender sensitive can make a big difference, she explained. For example, the KAPWR’s proposal to transform the Maiden Ladies Tomb might have been ­adopted much faster and more easily if the staff at the Kaohsiung City Public Works Bureau had had more gender equity training. One t­ hing is for sure, however: when the KAPWR launched its Maiden Ladies Tomb campaign in 2004, gender mainstreaming was hardly known as a concept. As soon as it became official policy the following year, gender mainstreaming quickly turned into a catchphrase, and the gender equity agenda was accepted by the public-­sector audience without much controversy. Specifically, the feminist appeal to allow all unmarried female spirits to go home has struck a sympathetic chord among primary and secondary educators who, according to Professor You, are not shy to relay the story of the twenty-­five ferry accident victims and the gendered implications b ­ ehind their collective fate to their students. Professor You further noted that

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traditional customs are cruel not b ­ ecause ­those who follow them do not love their d ­ aughters but ­because they believe they have no choice but to follow them: “Men’s dominance over w ­ omen, the insider-­outsider divide between men and ­women. . . . ​To follow the customs inevitably means to push one’s ­daughter away. Custom reforms are therefore about bringing one’s ­daughter back home, even if she died divorced or unmarried. It touches ­people’s hearts when we phrase our reform movement this way.”5

The National Campaign of Funeral Custom Reform ­Whether or not the Maiden Ladies Tomb is openly called out as a cautionary tale of gender in­equality or enlisted as a positive case of feminist activism, patrilineal cultural values that s­ haped the experiences of the twenty-­five young ­women in life and ­after death have been—­and continue to be—at the center of feminist critiques. The achievement of feminist judicial activism and its success in gender-­related ­legal reforms in the past few de­cades seem to have also highlighted the urgency to eradicate or modernize deep-­seated cultural beliefs, the root cause of gender bias. Professor You’s words indicate both the feminists’ awareness and their audience’s general ac­cep­tance of cultural custom reforms. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese public’s receptiveness has also to be understood within a par­tic­u­lar temporal context. A half c­ entury ago, the emotional toll borne by the deceased’s parents was caused by the conflict between their unwavering piety t­oward patrilineal ancestors and their love for their ­daughters. In contrast, the sympathy Professor You observed in her classroom and public seminars fifty years l­ater is as much a result of a rapidly changing society as it is the result of the feminists’ efforts.

Customs Do Not Need to All Be Like This! The structural and demographic shift in recent years—as a result of steadily declining birth rates and an aging population—­has led the Taiwanese ­people to question the conventional wisdom and continual legitimacy of traditional patrilineal practices. The birth rate in Taiwan in 2020 was 8.4 births per one thousand ­people, one of the lowest in the world. With each f­ amily giving birth to fewer than one child on average, ­people can no longer count on having a son to carry out f­ amily responsibilities, ­whether caring for the living or the dead. Furthermore, both Taiwanese men and ­women have been delaying their age of (first) marriage u ­ ntil their early thirties (thirty-­two for men and nearly thirty for

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­ omen) and, correspondingly, over the past de­cade more than 40 ­percent w of Taiwanese between the ages of twenty and fifty have remained single (Yen-­hsin Alice Cheng forthcoming). The divorce rate has been among the highest in the world (2.31 ­couples per one thousand individuals in 2019). Consequently, a significant number of w ­ omen have died divorced or unmarried in recent years. Their spirits cannot go back to their ­fathers’ homes. The need to find an alternative resting place to h ­ ouse this growing number of divorced and unmarried w ­ omen in their afterlives, compounded with the decreased number of male babies, has made patrilineal customs seem not only emotionally harsh but also increasingly socially unfeasible. ­There is a real, pragmatic need to change traditional cultural practices. All ­these changes and concerns ­were reflected in the relative success of the government-­propagated mortuary reform campaign. As discussed in chapter 4, urged by feminist activists, the Taiwanese government began to actively take on the responsibility of changing customs in the early 2000s. In 2005, the Ministry of the Interior commissioned Liu Chung-­tung and Chen Hwei-­syin to conduct a study, Woguo hunsang yishi xingbie yishi zhi jiantao (A review of the gender consciousness regarding wedding and funeral ceremonies in Taiwan). In 2009 the death of Kung Te-­cheng, a seventy-­seventh-­generation direct male descendant of Confucius who held the esteemed position of Sacrificial Official to Confucius, provided momentum for the feminist activists to move forward with their reform cause. The Sacrificial Official is the person in charge of officiating the modern Confucian ceremony held annually on Confucius’ birthday, which is also celebrated as Teacher’s Day in Taiwan. ­Under unrelenting pressure from the feminists, the government fi­nally broke away from the centuries-­old patrilineal tradition and modified the regulations on the inheritance of the Sacrificial Official to Confucius position. Based on the modified rules of the Points on the Sacrificial Offers and Commemorations of the Greatly Accomplished and Most Sacred Teacher Confucius, the Sacrificial Official to Confucius must still be a person surnamed Kung (Confucius’ surname). The new rule stipulates, however, that if t­here is no male descendant who can take up the position, then a female descendant can take it. Given that Confucianism is often considered as the source of Chinese patriarchal ethics, this change bore ­great symbolic significance. Concurrently, the Act for Ancestor Worship Guild in Taiwan was also revised. An ancestor worship guild is a lineage corporation composed of ­people related to one another through a patrilineal line. It is created to manage land properties established by

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early descendants of the lineage and to provide ser­vices for ancestor worship or other worships based on t­hese land properties. The revised act allows both male and female descendants shares of guild properties and rights and responsibilities to participate in guild activities (Hsiao Jau-­jiun 2017, 83). In 2012 the Ministry of the Interior published Pingdeng zizhu, shenzhong zhuiyuan: Xiandai guomin sangli (Equity, autonomy, and prudence: Modern civil funerals). This was followed by the publication of Pingdeng jiehe, huzhu baorong: Xiandai guomin hunli (Union with equality, mutual assistance, and tolerance: Modern civil weddings) at the end of 2014. Both books are aimed at “critically examining outdated rituals and rituals with gender in­equality in mind, thereby establishing modern interpretations and adjustments,” so that Taiwanese citizens have guidelines to follow for rites of passage such as funerals and weddings (Taiwan Ministry of the Interior, Department of Civil Affairs, n.d.). At the heart of ­these twin publications is not only advocacy for gender equity but also support for cultural diversity and individual autonomy.6 As stated in the preface of Pingdeng zizhu, shenzhong zhuiyuan, for centuries the principal function of funerals has been to serve as the pivot point for the dead to transition from the world of the living to the afterlife (Taiwan Ministry of the Interior, 2012, vi). Yet the way that a funeral is conducted and the rituals involved in a funeral have also been u ­ nder constant modification and adaptation as times have changed. In con­temporary Taiwan, ­factors such as changes in f­ amily structure and social network, a rise in transnational marriages, and heightened awareness of multiculturalism and gender equality all call for new understandings of lives before and ­after death—­and, hence, revised and renewed mortuary practices. Through the official publication of Pingdeng zizhu, shenzhong zhuiyuan, the Taiwanese government is propagating “self-­ determination, gender equality, and re­spect in multicultural diversity” as the core values of funerals in this new era (Taiwan Ministry of the Interior, 2012, v). In practice, this means that a funeral should be conducted according to the ­will of the deceased. When the deceased do not voice their wishes or even if it is their desire to follow traditional mortuary customs, their families should still take into consideration familial power inequalities and allow underprivileged f­ amily members—­namely, w ­ omen and the younger generation—to express their opinions. If the deceased have strong desires for their funerals to be conducted in a par­tic­u­lar way, the families should honor t­ hese wishes and arrange their funerals accordingly, even if to do so is considered a breach of convention. This last point is specifically sig-

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nificant to p ­ eople in the LGBTQ community, whose assigned sexes or genders at birth do not align with traditional social constructions of masculine and feminine identity, expression, and sexuality in a binary gender system, which would affect the way in which their deaths would be treated. The princi­ples of self-­determination and gender equality, therefore, are consistent with the advocacy for recognizing gender and sexual differences in the gender equity education movement. The state’s intervention in gender equity and the reform of customs does not only involve the formulation and revision of national etiquette guidance documents (such as the publication of t­ hese two guides on funerals and weddings) by the Ministry of the Interior or the propagation and development of teaching materials and teacher training by the Ministry of Education. It also involves the revamping of funeral director certification exams by both the Ministry of L ­ abor and the Ministry of the 7 Interior (Su 2014, 16–17). The critical importance of funeral directors was highlighted by Liu and Chen in their 2005 report Woguo hunsang yishi xingbie yishi zhi jiantao. When someone dies, f­ amily members are often too distraught or too distracted to tend to funeral details, and they may also lack knowledge of funeral or burial customs. However, they urgently want to do the right ­thing to ensure the deceased’s well-­being in the afterlife. They are also fretful that ­doing the wrong ­thing, violating taboos, or offending ancestors might jeopardize the fortunes of surviving ­family members or endanger the prosperity of ­future offspring. They rely heavi­ly on the expertise of funeral directors to guide them through the grieving pro­cess. Subsequently, funeral directors play a key role in how traditional mortuary beliefs and practices are repeated and reproduced and how t­ hese beliefs and practices are updated or modified to accommodate the new and vari­ous needs of con­temporary Taiwanese society. A skillful and trusted funeral director can put the deceased’s f­amily at ease by assuring them that a seemingly novel or unconventional mortuary practice—­such as allowing a ­daughter to perform a function traditionally played by a son—is not offensive to ancestors but indeed in agreement with filial piety. As such, with the right attitude, funeral directors are strategically positioned at the forefront of reform b ­ ecause of their ability to instill the notions of multiculturalism and gender equality into critical ritual practices. Given the structural importance of funeral directors, the Taiwanese government began to change the funeral director certification system and directly intervened in the pro­cess of funeral director training through certification tests. To qualify for a funeral director certification, a candidate

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must pass the related skills tests, complete at least twenty course credits, and have at least two years of on-­the-­job experience. In conjunction with this professionalization, a total of sixteen colleges and universities have begun to offer related academic degrees and courses. Questions in the certification test bank with a patrilineal bias—­privileging men over ­women or perceiving male descendants as lineage insiders and female descendants as lineage outsiders—­have been removed or amended to reflect the new, officially endorsed core values of “self-­determination, gender equality, and re­spect in multicultural diversity.” The previous test bank assumed that for some mortuary customs, correct procedure in the absence of a son or grand­son was to find a patrilineal male cousin—­however remotely related this person was to the deceased—­even when the deceased had a d ­ aughter or a grand­daughter. In the revised version, both sons and ­daughters should be considered for performing t­hese once exclusively male functions. Similarly, in the previous test bank, the answer to the true-­ false question “The tablet of a w ­ oman who died unmarried can only be placed in a t­ emple” was “true,” but in the revised test bank it is “false.” The old answer to the question “How should the names of the deceased’s relatives be arranged on the obituary?” was “Males should always come before females.” The revised, correct answer is “It should be based on birth order, not gender” (Tang Chen-yu 2010).

Funeral Reforms in Practice While welcoming t­ hese changes, gender equality advocates wondered how state intervention would affect death rituals or funeral ser­ vices in practice, and w ­ hether this intervention would remain an exercise on paper. To their delight, even though the long-­term effect of ­these changes is yet to be seen, it is evident that the new, state-­sanctioned funeral guidelines have begun to shape the formative training of a new generation of funeral directors. The guidelines have also offered seasoned funeral ser­vice professionals some guidance in meeting new demands from clients and new challenges brought about by a changing society. Mr. Cheng is a funeral director in his early thirties. He holds a bachelor’s degree in thanatology from the Department of Life and Death at Nanhua University, one of the first academic departments in Taiwan to offer death education. When I asked him what he considered to be the essential function of funerals, Mr. Cheng answered, “Shen zhong zhui yuan” (慎終追遠), a well-­known idiom that means “Honor the dead and keep their memorial.” This is epitomized by the last ritual in funerals,

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which takes place on the day of the first anniversary of the death, when the spirit of the dead is officially incorporated into an ancestral tablet. (Before this first anniversary, the deceased is worshipped separately from the rest of the f­ amily ancestors.) This is done by merging the incense ashes taken from the burner of the recently deceased with ­those in the burner at the ancestral altar. Mr. Cheng was adamant about the importance of the incense ashes from the deceased’s burner, which is an indication that the deceased has been dutifully venerated by their descendants since the day of their death. Without ­these dedicated descendants, the deceased w ­ ill not become an ancestor and t­here ­will be no (need for) ancestor worship. For Mr. Cheng, a core function of funerals is to make explicit the continuity of a line of descent, and his job as a funeral director is to make sure that the funeral proceeds in a way that gives both the deceased and the living peace of mind. Nevertheless, as part of the new generation of funeral professionals who have had a formal education in death m ­ atters and memorial ser­ vices, Mr. Cheng also underlines the salience of modifying conventional funeral rituals to solve new challenges. He does not actively promote the government-­propagated campaign of gender equity or multicultural diversity, though he does offer options aligning with t­ hese new ideas when the mourning f­ amily asks him questions or seeks his advice for alternative mortuary practices. He welcomes unusual requests made by his clients, living or dead, and relishes the creative pro­cess of fulfilling his clients’ wishes. Once he was asked to arrange a funeral for someone who enjoyed minor fame in photography. The families and close friends of the deceased had expressed the desire to display the deceased’s photo­graphs at the funeral. “You c­ an’t do that at a [traditional] funeral parlor, where ­there is an established funeral program to follow and t­here is no space to do extra t­hings; and my clients w ­ ere ready for something unconventional,” Mr. Cheng said. In the end, Mr. Cheng found a café whose owner was willing to lend out space for a day. He decorated the café with the deceased’s photo­graphs, brought the w ­ hole funeral party to the café, and commemorated the deceased not according to traditional mortuary customs but instead individualized remembrance. Mr.  Cheng has a fan page on Facebook, which he uses to post funeral-­related news, share his experience on the job, and generate topics for online discussions among his followers in his spare time. Once he featured the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb on his fan page. Facebook is his primary venue for sharing his thoughts and innovative ideas with like-­minded colleagues in the funeral ser­vice industry. (As a ­matter of fact,

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Mr. Cheng offered to use his Facebook fan page for me to solicit stories among his followers about how they handled funerals of ­women not in marriage.) In the main, he does not take the initiative when interacting with his clients. The way he puts it, changes come gradually and one cannot force ideas upon ­people before they are ready. Most of his current clients are individuals born in the 1950s and 1960s, grieving their parents who ­were born in the 1920s and 1930s. Even if ­these clients have begun to ponder the feasibility of traditional mortuary customs, they often continue to adhere to ­these customs out of re­spect for the deceased, who they think might hold old-­fashioned beliefs about death—or, more frequently, they yield to pressure from the elders in the lineage or the extended ­family who are of the deceased’s generation. When it is time for ­those born in the 1970s and 1980s—­people like himself—to conduct funerals for ­those born in the 1950s and 1960s, it ­will be much easier for ­people to accept alternative practices frowned upon or even unthinkable in the old days. When it is the turn of the millennials to be in charge, who knows how much of the tradition w ­ ill still be remembered, let alone performed? That changes come gradually was echoed by Ms. H. Kuo, a funeral reform advocate born in the early 1960s. Like Mr. Cheng, Ms. Kuo holds a master’s degree in thanatology, also from the Department of Life and Death at Nanhua University. However, she is not a funeral director by profession. Her primary role as an advocate and public educator gives her the freedom and authority to promulgate new ideas of gender equality not allowed Mr. Cheng as a funeral ser­vice professional. Ms. Kuo’s involvement in funeral reform started with the government’s twin publications on modern funerals and weddings. She is one of the brains b ­ ehind ­these two books. Since then Ms. Kuo has devoted her time to advancing the cause of gender equality and the reform of customs. She works with local governments, gives public lectures, and provides training sessions to funeral ser­vice providers. She is the editor in chief of the online platform Funeral Information Taiwan. She also runs Death Café Taiwan, which is a grant-­funded public forum focusing on death-­related issues that takes place in public spaces such as neighborhood community centers. Since the beginning of the Death Café in 2004, she has held more than three hundred public seminars and sharing activities with more than ten thousand participants, bringing to the fore the taboo topic of death and helping strangers engage in death-­related conversations openly. One may say that t­ hose who participate in Death Café activities are a group of self-­selected individuals whose confidence in traditional death beliefs

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is already wavering. Nevertheless, the growing presence of public events like Death Café attests to an emerging need in Taiwanese society. While funeral reform has begun to have some effect, Ms. Kuo notes that the change has come slowly. Even if young funeral ser­vice providers are aware of the importance of gender equality, they may not automatically share their awareness with their clients. More often than not they ­will only offer alternative mortuary practices in the absence of a direct male descendant such as a son or grand­son. Change, therefore, has to come from both the professional and grassroots levels. In my interview with her, Ms. Kuo showed me the Time Travel board game that she created and used to enable Death Café participants to critically examine the conventional wisdom on death rituals. (She has another Time Travel board game on wedding customs.) The game consists of four dif­fer­ent categories of cards on fourteen death-­related observances deemed outdated or problematic. Each of ­these observances contains four cards, with one card from each of the four categories. The four categories are designed and or­ga­nized in a sequential order: Why (the origin or reason b ­ ehind a traditional observance); What to do (the age-­old approach to this observance); What has changed (the current condition that has made it impractical or inconceivable to continue the traditional way of observance); and How to adjust (alternatives to the traditional course of action). Ms. Kuo ­adopted the “time travel” meta­phor for her board game ­because, she explained, “traditional customs can have very dif­fer­ent implications a­ fter traveling through time. What was not a prob­lem in the past can become a real prob­lem now.” For example, the patrilineal belief that a w ­ oman’s fortune is with her husband’s f­ amily is b ­ ehind the long-­ standing practice that excludes the spirit of an unmarried w ­ oman from her ­father’s ancestral tablet. Yet this practice is also based on the assertion that (heterosexual) marriage is the final destination of all w ­ omen, a notion that is becoming increasingly unsustainable in con­temporary Taiwan. On the day before we met, Ms. Kuo had hosted a Death Café with a group of se­nior citizens. “­Here, t­here, and everywhere,” she told me, “the grandpas and grandmas at the café all say they know someone whose ­daughter is divorced or not married.” They have all noticed the exponential growth of unmarried w ­ omen as a percentage of the population and foresee an impending crisis of housing their unbonded spirits a­ fter they die. Using her Time Travel board game, Ms. Kuo then invited the café participants to brainstorm solutions for their concerns. “That’s the juncture where you begin to introduce gender-­equal options into the conversation,” she said.

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Still, not every­body is ready to accept new ideas as solutions to new challenges. At Death Café Taiwan, Ms. Kuo frequently observes participants hesitating about unconventional options and their continued attraction to traditional approaches. Even when café participants recognize that an age-­old custom or ritual was out of date, they are often reluctant to change it b ­ ecause “that’s the way every­one has been d ­ oing it.” Ms. Kuo explained, “It’s not that p ­ eople ­don’t understand the urgency of the prob­lems that they have identified. They are just not sure about the consequences they may face if they do something that deviates from the tradition. Even if t­hose who attend Death Café have no prob­lems adopting new practices, who knows how the ancestors would react to ­these new practices? [For this reason] they may continue to feel the heat from ­people around them, especially older relatives who are concerned about potential super­natural repercussions.” To further encourage reluctant Death Café participants to confront discriminatory death beliefs and rituals, Ms. Kuo regularly asks the participants to swap their gender roles. “I hear it so often from our café participants: ‘Oh, men rarely pay attention to ­these ­things. Only w ­ omen care about them.’ Well, as soon as they swap their gender roles, ­people immediately see, crystal clear, how w ­ omen are discriminated against in traditional customs and rituals. No won­der ­women pay more attention to them. And, of course, men d ­ on’t care b ­ ecause they d ­ on’t need to.” If the Time Travel board game encourages Death Café participants to use reason to contemplate the practicality of traditional customs in modern times, swapping gender roles forces p ­ eople to squarely face the gender in­equality embedded in the Taiwanese kinship system. It is also a tactic of “persuasion with emotion.” As Ms. Kuo explained, “What I am advocating is for every­body, dead or alive, to be treated with decency and dignity. Ask ­people how they would feel if they are left homeless for eternity, which is exactly how ­women who die without a marital status are treated. As soon as you ask that question, you ­don’t need to say anything more. P ­ eople get the message right away.”

The Afterlife of W ­ omen Workers Reflecting their dif­fer­ent relations with the funeral ser­vice industry, Mr. Cheng and Ms. Kuo have ­adopted divergent strategies to help ­people they serve cope with the evolving environment surrounding death. They are both familiar with the story ­behind the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, though they did not explic­itly comment on its transformation into

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the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers in my interviews with them. Despite their distinct approaches, Mr. Cheng and Ms. Kuo both voiced the inevitability of funeral custom reforms. In their own ways, they are both steering the direction of change into a ­future that is less discriminatory and more receptive not only to gender equality in the traditional binary sense but also to equality for p ­ eople of all sexual orientations and genders. Borrowing a phrase that Ms. Kuo repeated several times in my interview with her, “Our task is to teach the next generation well!” The determination to look into the ­future is also embedded in the gender equity education movement, which, by definition, is a constant effort to educate new generations. On the face of it, neither gender equity education nor funeral custom reform had much to do with the reincarnation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers. ­After all, both gender equity education and funeral custom reform are ongoing, whereas the establishment of the Memorial Park was a one-­time occurrence. Yet a deep look into root c­ auses reveals that they are part and parcel of a larger sociocultural transformation, aided by the concerted effort of Taiwanese feminists. Furthermore, t­ hese seemingly disparate events have combined to create a synergistic effect that is greater than any one of them could have manifested by itself. The transformation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women stands as a testimony to the urgent need for gender equity and funeral reform, and it supplies a good gender equity education case study. The insertion of the Maiden Ladies Tomb into the funeral reform conversation or the incorporation of the reincarnated Memorial Park into the gender equity education curriculum has helped to lift this memorial from a site of static memory to a site of active knowledge production. This chapter has focused on the continuous importance and evolving significance of the Maiden Ladies Tomb in educational and cultural custom reforms. The voices of feminist scholars and community activists are loud, and their effects are easily recognizable through the framework of government directives. Yet their secular explication of the ferry accident victims is by no means the only interpretation. As elucidated in the parallel memorialization at the physical site of the Memorial Park detailed in chapter 6, the twenty-­five deceased ­women have lived on in the popu­lar religious universe. Their families are not shy to tell their stories, even if the families’ voices are not as readily heard as t­ hose of the feminists for lack of established (and sympathetic) public policy channels. More significantly, the deification of the twenty-­five ­women—at least

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some of them—is also an ongoing pro­cess. This is well known in the case of Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva, the oldest among the deceased ­women, who over the years has moved up within the celestial order and acquired new and more prominent official titles. This is also the case of Yeh Pie’s two younger ­sisters, who not long before our interview with the ­family in 2013 informed their elder siblings/worshippers that they ­were promoted to the (higher) rank of xiangu (仙姑, female immortals) and asked them to perform the necessary ritual following their promotion. The siblings dutifully honored their request. During a visit Wen-­hui Tang and I made to the Yeh h ­ ouse­hold, Mrs.  Yeh eagerly explained that her two sister-­in-­ law xiangus ­were elevated to a higher godly status ­because of their many good deeds (she did not specify what t­ hese good deeds w ­ ere). She urged us to pray to the xiangus ­because they ­were efficacious, and they would grant our wishes with their power. Mrs. Yeh was one of the most vocal advocates for transforming the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb into something like the Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple. Similarly, Mr. Huang, the mastermind ­behind the Buddhist lotus sculpture, told us that his deceased younger s­ister is currently working with other deities to help solve the prob­lems of their worshippers at a private altar adapted from the Huang ­family’s home. Mr. Huang perceived the conversion of the Maiden Ladies Tomb into a park—­a fa­cil­i­ty of modern design and function—as a necessary move “to keep up with the times.” He had also wanted the tomb to be transformed into a t­emple ­because of the w ­ omen’s godly status. He sincerely believed that the goal of building a ­temple could soon be realized using the relationships he had cultivated with local politicians. For him, the park was not an end but a necessary concession—­only a step t­oward the ultimate goal of building a t­emple. Ultimately, the Maiden Ladies Tomb and the w ­ omen resting in it have taken on a new afterlife not only as a part of an ongoing pro­cess of remembrance embedded in larger social movements but also in the popu­lar cultural and religious world.

Epilogue ­Future Pre­sent, ­Future Past

I say: Indeed, female ghosts accomplish more than ­women as living ­human beings ever do. —­Li Ang, Vis­i­ble Ghosts

O

ne question that I often encountered when I presented my research findings on the “ghost” proj­ect—as it has come to be known among friends and colleagues—­was “Why now?” When the Kaohsiung City government broke ground on the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers in 2008, the ferry accident victims had been dead for more than thirty years and had rested quietly at the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb for twenty years. Why dig up the dead and overhaul their resting place ­after all this time? Another question constantly asked of me was w ­ hether ­there would have been a collective burial in the first place—­and thereby a renovation story for me to tell—­had the ferry accident victims not been all unwed w ­ omen. ­Others asked, more pointedly, how big a deal are ­these twenty-­five ­women and their lives and deaths? Embedded in any ethnographic proj­ect is inevitably an ele­ment of unpredictability. Had I not happened to be researching the change in the urban built environment of Kaohsiung, or had I not had a pivotal conversation with Wen-­hui Tang while serving as a visiting professor in the Sociology Department at National Sun Yat-­sen University where she teaches, I would not have learned about the existence of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb or the local feminist activism that worked to transform it. Personally, like the p ­ eople I worked with in C ­ ijin, I am fascinated with ghosts while fearing them at the same time. Coincidences aside, my choice of the Maiden Ladies Tomb as the focal point of scholarly inquiry is also based on the significance of the spectral in the Taiwanese cultural imagination and social practices. In recent years, death and haunting as a burgeoning field of anthropological research has gone beyond the traditional emphasis on funerary rites to 177

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interrogate burial practices and mourning and to interact with a wide array of issues such as race, gender, power, vio­lence, modernity, and technoscientific authorities in con­temporary socie­ties (Engelke 2019). The twenty-­five ­women are a big deal b ­ ecause they embody the power of kinship and its connections to cap­i­tal­ist accumulation and super­natural belief systems in the changing urban and global economies. The relationship between the Taiwanese and their dead is communicative in nature. The maiden ladies evoke a phantom perspective, spatiality, and temporality that cohabit, collide, or overlay with the perspective, spatiality, and temporality of the living world around them. Answers to the questions of why (the ferry accident victims ­were buried together), when (their graves ­were removed or relocated), and how (their collective burial site was revamped and re­imagined) all require the recognition of the importance of mortuary customs in affirming social continuities in the face of loss, on the one hand, and the prospect of reconfiguring social and cosmological o ­ rders in light of major politico-­economic changes, on the other. The transformation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb was a catalyst of such a reconfiguration. It enacted the sociality between living and dead, enlivening cosmic concerns such as the meaning of life and death, and, fundamentally, talks and practices that make bad deaths good.

Ghosts’ Perspectives When internationally renowned Taiwanese feminist writer Li Ang notes in the postscript of her novel Vis­i­ble Ghosts that female ghosts accomplish more than w ­ omen as living beings ever do, she is celebrating female ghosts’ liberation, agency, and power beyond life in a modernist context (Yenna Wu 2015, 60–61). In the novel Li tells the stories of ­women who died unjustly and became vengeful ghosts when Taiwan was ­under Qing rule (1683–1895). ­These ghosts all learn lessons of growth. An aboriginal female prostitute tortured to death by a sadomasochistic Han magistrate is encrusted in a thick layer of salt and cannot escape ­after death. Only hundreds of years l­ater, when a rainstorm washes off the salt and the ghost learns to let go of her obsession over her contorted body by performing an orgasmic dance, is she freed from centuries of shame and repression and able to fulfill her desire for in­de­pen­dence. A well-­educated girl born to a wealthy ­family commits suicide ­after she is slandered over an accident connected with her talent. Excluded from her (patrilineal) ancestral hall and abandoned by her ­family, the ghost finds that her movement is no longer hampered by her tiny bound feet and

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that she can visit parts of her ­father’s mansion which had been forbidden to her since childhood. The rejection by her f­amily paradoxically leads her to discoveries. A virtuous and capable ­woman murdered by her rich merchant husband (who subsequently escapes to the Chinese mainland) is unable to cross the Taiwan Strait to take her revenge. With the help of a geomantic master, she manages to overcome this barrier and puts an end to her culprit husband’s life. She also comes to appreciate traveling by herself and for herself. Each of ­these ­women regains freedom in her own way and eventually makes herself at home. Death, it turns out, enables the ghosts to “transgress” into new territories or experience new t­ hings (Yenna Wu 2014). In Li’s allegorical writing, death is not the end of spiritual growth but the beginning of enlightenment (Chang Yi-­hsin 2012, 163–164). The phantom protagonists all mature into power­ful agents who think and act by themselves and for themselves. In anthropological accounts, however, ghosts are often subdued and unobtrusive. When they take the initiative to be in contact, they are pre­sent but not quite ­there. They drop hints for the living to catch and decode, like mimes. Yet being unobtrusive is not equivalent to being passive; nor is silence indicative of powerlessness. Figuratively or ethnographically, modernity is an unfinished proj­ect, as witnessed in the returning specters of patriarchy in Li’s ghost stories (Sterk 2011) and in the traditional community of Cijin, where patrilineal kinship and popu­lar religion are taken deadly seriously. Just like Li’s vis­i­ble ghosts, the experiences of the Cijin ferry accident victims before and a­ fter death ­were conditioned by the patrilineal kinship system. Although ­these young victims might not appear as forceful and self-­determined as the fictional ghosts, their quietness spoke volumes. Their acquiescence as filial ­daughters—­and thus exemplary workers in Taiwan’s fast-­growing industrial sector and major wage earners at home—­made their short and unfulfilled lives a source of g­ reat sorrow for their parents and their homeless status a­ fter death a cause of indignation and activism for local feminists. Their story dramatizes the social tension between anxiety over the dead in general and concern for the dead in par­tic­u­lar, and it highlights the importance of emotions in ­matters of grief and mourning. The agency of the twenty-­five ­women springs from the complex feelings and experiences of loss, dispossession, regret, remorse, unfairness, and injustice that they have helped inculcate in memorials, monuments, and the vocabulary of everyday expressions. Their submission in life and muteness and exclusion in death has become the empowering force of their ultimate subversion.

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Spectral Spatiality Places, spaces, or geographies as historico-­cultural constructions can be understood as a par­tic­u­lar way of composing, structuring, and giving meaning to an external world in relation to the material appropriation of the land. Given the strategic location of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, it became understandable why dispelling the ghostly atmosphere of the place and rebuilding it with a modern, sanitized look was necessary from the vantage point of a postindustrial urban economy. The Kaohsiung City government’s portrayal of the ferry accident victims as noble workers d ­ ying on the job, as engraved on the lotus sculpture at the refurbished Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, is often taken as an endeavor to give ­these ­women’s life stories a wider context and more public meaning. Nonetheless, it could also be considered another attempt of the Kaohsiung City government to develop urban tourism. ­After all, what can be a better symbol than the image of twenty-­five young w ­ omen d ­ ying tragically on their way to work to characterize the romance and pathos of Kaohsiung’s past as a blue-­collar, working-­class city? Pro­cesses of placemaking such as the one undertaken in Kaohsiung are in the main a spatial reordering of the world associated with secularism and conducive to replacing traditional or religious notions and practices with modern and rational designs. However, to use a former burial space as a site of remembrance is inevitably to affirm the presence of an older terrain that persists, if only in memory, beneath the new and renovated landscape. Conscripting a burial space for a par­tic­u­lar kind of cultural and aesthetic work, while producing new meanings and new modes of human-­ghost encounter, has the paradoxical effect of resummoning the spectral. The question in the case of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb is, in effect, what social life for the dead was resurrected by the administrative authority of Kaohsiung City? If efficacy is the internal logic of the heavenly order that enables a lower-­form spirit like a ghost to move up the ladder of the celestial hierarchy, t­here have been pre­ce­dents in which godly standing—­prominent or not—is attained through the intervention of external forces. For example, the elevation of Matsu from a minor, regional god to the stature of T’ien Hou (Heavenly Empress) and the popularization of her cult coincided with the gradual rise of the Qing imperial authority over China’s southern coastal area (Watson 1985). More recently, during the Cold War, the body of Wang Yulan, washing ashore and found and buried by a soldier on the militarized Jinmen Island,1 was claimed by the military of Taiwan’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) government to be a slain victim of its

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archenemy, the Chinese Communist Party. Wang Yulan was subsequently made into an anticommunist heroine whose cult was promoted by Jinmen’s military government as a symbol of re­sis­tance to communism (Chi 2009; Szonyi 2008). Both cases reflect the close relationship between religion and politics and the power of state authorities to canonize a deity. (­Whether or how state-­sanctioned cults are accepted by local communities or face contestations of meanings or interpretations is, of course, a crucial but dif­fer­ent ­matter.) The remaking of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers has borne similar ramifications, not so much in the sense of raising female ghosts to the eminence of goddesses but in the sense of according the deceased a physical appearance in public spaces and a discursive presence in the public mind. From the original, unremarkable graveyard in an isolated corner of Cijin, to the second, repositioned burial on the roadside of Cijin’s main thoroughfare with an eye-­catching memorial archway, and to the third and final conversion involving the removal of individual graves and the establishment of a budding lotus sculpture with a carefully crafted epitaph, the relocation and renovation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb over the years was a state-­sanctioned pro­cess of making bad deaths good by exalting private grieving into public remembrance. The young ferry accident victims w ­ ere granted immortality and deified as national heroines.

Phantom Temporality Like spatial disposition, temporality is an intrinsic property of memory. Spatiality aside, the transformation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb has exhibited a shift from a tragedy associated with the cyclical temporality of lineal reproduction and continuity (governed by the life cycle meta­phor of birth, growth, decline, and death) to the linear temporality of national history and pro­gress (frequently indicated by economic expansion). Even though the Maiden Ladies Tomb reconstruction was modernist in intention and secular in nature, it was nevertheless accepted by the deceased’s families, who looked upon it as an act of po­liti­cal authority that had the effect of sanctifying their ­daughters. This is, in part, ­because the spectral world has its own perception of time, which exists in­de­pen­dently of both the politico-­economic time of the state and the familial-­genealogical time of private h ­ ouse­holds. Unlike living h ­ uman beings who, regardless of how long they live, w ­ ill one day die and transition to being denizens of the afterworld, dead ­people live forever once the transition is made.

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If the dead are power­ful, they are also vulnerable b ­ ecause they rely on the care of the living—­family or other­wise. Unsettled souls are potential ­causes of unresolved trou­bles in this world. From the very beginning, parents of the ferry accident victims faced a predicament between their lasting worries for the eternal well-­being of their ­daughters—­who should have been married and led gratified lives but instead died violent, untimely deaths—­and the normative value that dictates against incorporating the spirit of a female descendant into her patrilineal ancestral shrine. The fact that the parents ­were aging and increasingly near the end of their own lives exacerbated their concerns, which propelled them to seek (or accept) help beyond their h ­ ouse­holds. Their ­daughters w ­ ere, of course, hardworking, wonderful girls—­they did not need to be reminded of that—­and a public acknowl­edgment of their virtues was certainly welcome. But that was not the point. Ultimately they w ­ ere looking for some assurance that the welfare of their ­daughters’ spirits would be continuously and regularly cared for, especially a­ fter they, the parents, passed away. This became clear to Professor Wen-­hui Tang and me when Mr. Lin, the Cijin District Office liaison to the deceased’s families, came to us one day with a pressing look and wanted us (whom he took as having some special ties with the municipal authority) to reaffirm for the parents the city government’s promise of holding a spring memorial ceremony (on Ching-­ming Day) and a fall commemoration ser­vice (on the day of their ­daughters’ deaths) in front of the Buddhist lotus sculpture—­the young ­women’s burial chamber—­every year. The city government pledged to get the families’ cooperation before the tomb renovation. While we felt we could not speak for the city government, Professor Tang promised that she would at least hold a ser­vice with her students in the coming spring. Yet it was apparent from the disappointed expression on Mr. Lin’s face that Professor Tang’s promise failed to give him and the families the assurance they ­were seeking. It was a firm commitment from the government that they wanted to hear. Recognizing the temporality of the spectral also helps us appreciate the potential of continual spiritual growth, w ­ hether displayed by Li Ang’s ghost characters, who learned to explore new t­ hings or new territories, or demonstrated in the ongoing deification of the twenty-­ five deceased ­women. Acknowledging the multiple temporalities of memory reveals the role the ­women play as the condition and grounds for forms of remembering. It enables us to see memorials as pro­cessual rather than fixed objects, through which we can attend to their shifting dynamics, denoting the time span of some forms of commemoration and the decline of o ­ thers.

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Remembering Forward Acts of remembrance are not self-­contained but rather rely on entanglements with interrelated social pro­cesses. Synchronically, remembering as a public ritual or community activity both feeds on and draws out the simultaneous existence of concurrent interpretations of the past. The multiplicity of participants produces the layered complexity of the remembering. Diachronically, the entanglement of memory manifests itself in the dynamic relations between acts of remembrance and changing mnemonic arrangements. Memory, materiality, and time seem to come together in an emergent space called a memorial, monument, or heritage site. Yet, far from offering itself as a testimony to the past, the space of memory—­and the memory said to be embodied in the space—is always bound in its own temporal context, which is the pre­sent. “History” or “memory” is not simply something produced or represented by heritage sites or moments. It is something actively and continuously negotiated, re-­created, or recalibrated by ­people, communities, and institutions when they remember, reinterpret, and reassess the meaning of the past in terms of the social, cultural, po­liti­cal, or economic needs of the pre­sent. What we see of the past is predicated on our relationship with the pre­sent—or, to put it another way, the past is activated by the questions we put to it in our current moment. Essentially, cultural meanings attached to acts of remembrance are unstable. They are fashioned through the desires and aspirations of the pre­sent and legitimized and validated through an association with the past. They are realized through d ­ oing. In this regard, remembrance as the reification of memory and memorials or heritage sites as spatial techniques of remembrance correspond to each other operationally. They are mutually constitutive, albeit in a most problematic way. A heritage site such as Kaohsiung’s refurbished Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers can trigger memory and actions. However, it can never be relied on to deliver a planned response. Rather, a heritage site can be seen as an interlocution through which to interrogate what lies within and beyond its characterization. Ultimately, a heritage site—­along with the commemorative activities spun from it—is a pro­cess that mediates recognition of and anxiety over changes. It emblematizes thinking about and acting on not only questions such as “What has happened?” or “What have we accomplished?” concerning the past, but also “What is happening?” or “What should we be ­doing?” about the pre­sent and f­ uture.

Notes

Introduction Epigraph. Benjamin 2003, 389–390. ­Unless noted, all translations from the Chinese are my own. Chapter 1. The Death of ­Women Workers 1. This is in contrast to many other ­women’s groups in Kaohsiung, whose main missions are less to challenge the patriarchal social structure and more to make social services—­such as counseling, self-­help or study groups, and assorted adult-­education classes—­available to ­women. 2. ­Here I adopt P. Steven Sangren’s notion of culture as “a mode of production of desire” (2017). Sangren proposes that culture is “instituted fantasy”—­that is, “­imagined scenarios, narratives, or social arrangements that indicate how p ­ eople might desire ­things to be” (2013, 282; emphasis in the original). As such, culture as instituted fantasy is also a “mode of production of desire.” Moreover, desire is not only a product of cultural dynamics but is also a producer of “culture” and its constitutive institutions, such as the ­family. H ­ uman beings are inherently social. Accordingly, the self is mediated by the social world. One’s sense of self-­identity and personhood is dependent on “the confirming presence of o ­ thers, the reflection and assessment of efficacy on o ­ thers” (Weiner 1999, 246). In organ­izing social relations, ­people strive to bring into being a world that they would wish it to be—or, to realize a fantasy. Desire, therefore, is a product of social life, but it also motivates and produces social actions. The possibilities of failure to carry off t­hese actions set off an array of anx­i­eties. Accordingly, desire has a cultural shape, but it is also a way of inhabiting that shape which is reflexive, often tainted by one’s inability to carry out the desire. Approaching desire as concurrently an emergent effect of cultural experience and a producer of social life elucidates the mutually constitutive

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relationships between culture and individual (Sangren 2017, 170). It implies agency. ­There is another side to the story about desire, however. Social arrangements or collective institutions impose limits on individual wishes, due to the fact that p ­ eople inevitably have to accommodate ­others’ desires while they try to fulfill their own. To adhere to shared cultural forms, p ­ eople experience frustrations, dystopias, unfulfillable desires—or, borrowing from Sigmund Freud, “discontents”—­inherent to the functioning of sociality (Sangren 2017, 68). As a result, they face situations that require them to reduce anxiety, control anger, manage distress, hold on to love, or ­handle loss—­the affective aspects of ­human existence that w ­ ill in turn shape their participation in communal life (Gammeltoft and Segal 2016, 406). Desire, manifested in the form of individual agency, thus also appears in ­people’s attempts to mitigate the discrepancy between normative expectations and everyday experience (Sangren 2012, 125). Chapter 2. The Significance of Insignificant ­People Epigraph. Chen Fen-­lan, vocalist, 1958, “A Lone Girl’s Dream,” by Yeh Chun-­lin, lyricist, and Masao Yoneyama, composer. 1. The Taiwanese government separates SMEs into two categories based upon product types, available capital, and number of employees. Category 1 is relevant to the current discussion: it includes manufacturing, construction, and mining and quarrying, with investment capital from shareholders of $80 million New Taiwan dollars (US$2.42 million) or less, with fewer than two hundred employees (Lee and Joie 2017, 32). 2. This is not to discount the hard-­won accomplishments of Taiwan’s ­labor movement, however. While a full reckoning is beyond my range ­here, I offer a brief discussion of the l­abor movement ­after the 1980s in chapter 5. 3. The disasters of 2014 w ­ ere the latest case in point. On July 31, 2014, a series of gas explosions occurred in the Cianjhen and Lingya Districts of Kaohsiung, following reports of gas leaks ­earlier that night. Thirty-­ two ­people ­were killed and 321 o ­ thers w ­ ere injured. The affected pipelines w ­ ere designed and constructed by the China Petroleum Corporation, Taiwan. It is suspected that ­these pipelines ­were used for gas delivery to the petrochemical factory of LYC Chemical Corporation. 4. Over the years, EPZs have evolved from initial assembly and s­imple pro­cessing plants to encompass high-­tech and science parks, finance zones, logistics centers, and even tourist attractions. The investors are

Notes to Pages 40–67





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no longer foreign companies but Taiwanese enterprises. Mi­grant workers from Southeast Asian countries have also rapidly replaced Taiwanese workers as the main EPZ l­abor force. 5. This was reported in the 2006 documentary “Tamen de gushi: Shengchanxianshang de rongyan” (The Lost Youth: ­Women and Industrial Work in Taiwan 她們的故事: 生產線上的容顏), directed by film maker Ke Wan-­ching. 6. Tsai Chia-­ching, a civil servant who is a Cijin native and worked at the Kaohsiung City government’s district office in Cijin before being transferred to another government agency, delineates in her book Zhanzheng yü qianyi: Caixing juluo yü Cijin jindai fazhan (War and Migration, 2016) how the history of the Tsai lineage involves constant displacement and resettlement on Cijin Island within the short span of fifty years following the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The relocation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, detailed in chapter 1, is also a case in point of the spatial influence of the state policy.

Chapter 3. Filial D ­ aughters, Pious Ghosts 1. The Factory Act was repealed on November 21, 2018, and is no longer active. Currently, the ­Labor Standards Act, passed in 1984, is the most impor­tant ­labor law that provides minimum standards for working conditions and protects workers’ rights and interests. 2. Despite multiple inquires, I was not able to find out the name of the fifth ­father on the coordinating committee. 3. Yet, according to Kuo He, the trea­surer of the five-­member coordinating committee at the time, NT$250,000 (and not the widely cited NT$90,000) was the final amount agreed upon between the Kaohsiung City government and the owner of the sampan ferry com­pany.. 4. In light of the ­later phenomenon of deification, the big ­sister’s account might have more to do with justifying the ­women’s god status than to recount what happened at the burning of the King Boat. Nonetheless, it reveals the importance of popu­lar religious beliefs in the lives of t­ hese families. 5. It is worth noting that group graves have always had a presence in Taiwanese popu­lar religion. For example, ­people would build a shrine or a small ­temple to ­house unidentified bones or bodies floating to the shore, discovered during road construction, or found on a battlefield, where t­hese ghosts would be worshipped as a generic and anonymous group and receive offerings during the annual seventh-­month ghost

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Notes to Pages 68–69

festival or when supplicants have specific requests to make. It is a form of ghost welfare (Weller 1994b, 130). Commonly known as youyinggong (有應公)—­especially ­after the Japa­nese colonial period (Chen Wei-­ hua 2014)—­these ghosts are seen to grant all requests made to them, and their shrines or t­emples typically display banners that read “You qiu bi ying” (有求必應; All requests ­shall be answered; see Weller 1994b, 131). Another example of group graves is yimin ­ temples (義民廟, ­temples of righ­teous ­people), which are dedicated to community defenders, broadly defined. Such t­emples w ­ ere common in Taiwan from the early nineteenth ­century on, when armed conflicts between Han settlers and indigenous p ­ eoples of Taiwan, between Han settlers and the Qing imperial government, and among dif­fer­ent Han ethnic groups ­were constant. Yimin ­ temples assert par­ tic­ u­ lar cultural significance among the Hakkas in northern Taiwan, as yimins ­were considered fallen heroes who died while defending Hakka settlements from outside aggressors. Some Hakka yimin ­temples ­were also officially eulogized by the Qing imperial court and/or the Japa­nese colonial government as the resting places of courageous individuals loyal to the po­liti­cal regime. ­These “righ­teous ­people” are not viewed as ghosts but representative of the Hakka identity by their local communities. The twenty-­five ­women who perished in the ferry accident are similar to youyinggongs and “righ­teous p ­ eople” in the sense that all three groups of the deceased died u ­ nder problematic circumstances and could not be integrated into a f­amily or lineal genealogy and transformed into ancestors to be worshiped by patrilineal descendants. However, the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb is dif­fer­ent from you­ yinggong shrines or yimin ­temples, as the identities of t­ hose laid to rest at the Maiden Ladies Tomb are actually known; they w ­ ere ­daughters of named individuals. Additionally, just as the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb is not a maiden t­ emple, it is not like a youyinggong or yimin ­temple, where both the spirit tablets and ashes or bones of structurally anomalous individuals in Taiwan’s kinship system are stored. As I have noted, the bone urns of the twenty-­five ferry incident victims w ­ ere buried at the tomb, whereas their spirit tablets ­were placed in dif­fer­ent places based on the decisions of their families. 6. The mayor of Kaohsiung was not elected but appointed by Taiwan’s central government, due to Kaohsiung’s status as a special municipality at the time. 7. I thank Professor Wen-­hui Tang for her insight on this point.

Notes to Pages 72–78







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8. Kao Mao’s ­mother understands this social pressure deeply, as she was the subject of neighborhood gossip when she was a young daughter-­in-­ law in the Kao f­amily. When Kao Mao’s m ­ other gave birth to three ­daughters in a row, she had to endure the indifference that elder members in the f­amily expressed t­oward the newborn baby girls and the blame directed to her for her incapability to bear a son. Only when she delivered her fourth child and first son, Kao Mao, was she released from the pressure to produce a male heir. Kao Mao’s ­sister recalled, “My ­mother bore three d ­ aughters consecutively! I was born the second. When the third d ­ aughter came out, my [paternal] grandpa and grandma totally turned against my mom. They told the midwife to give up on the newborn. They said what’s the point of having so many girls. . . . ​They put it in such a nasty way that it was so hard for my mom to bear!” (quoted in Tu and Tang 2016, 24). 9. The hundredth day is a significant day in Taiwanese death rituals. On the hundredth day a­ fter death, Taiwanese treat the dead with wine and food. Some families also employ lay Buddhists or Taoist priests to chant before the spirit to release the soul of the dead from purgatory. 10. In recent years, quite a few families moved the god statues of their ­daughters—or s­ isters, if the person in charge was a ­brother due to the passing of the parents—­from Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple to their homes. ­There did not seem to be one uniting reason b ­ ehind ­these moves. The families frequently told us that they did it ­because the deified w ­ oman asked for it. Nonetheless, we did find that a common reason seemed to be the desire to benefit—­financially or other­wise—­from the magical power of the deceased. Similarly, all the sanctified w ­ omen who joined Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva at the Miao-­feng ­Temple ­were sent home by her spirit medium, her eldest s­ ister, albeit for a dif­fer­ent reason. The eldest ­sister justified this move by asserting that the families of t­hese deified ­women ­were jealous of the fact that Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva was the only one getting the visitors’ attention. “It’s exhausting to have to deal with the constant complaints and bickering,” she explained. “In the end, I told them to go their own ways.” Still, a few parents de­cided to leave their d ­ aughters’ god statues at a local t­emple permanently. For example, Chuang Kok informed us that he made a NT$30,000 donation to Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple in exchange for the permanent placement of his d ­ aughter’s god statue. Chuang explained, “One day I ­will be gone, and her [the ­daughter’s] ­brothers have their own families to care for. This ­will be the best

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Notes to Pages 81–95

solution. Nobody needs to be burdened with the worry anymore.” Regardless of t­ hese recent developments, the families mostly followed the pattern of inviting the god statues home, where they ­were placed and worshipped on a dif­fer­ent floor of the ­house, separate from the families’ ancestral altars. 11. While distinguishing public t­emples from private ­temples in Taiwan, Joseph Bosco (1994, 426) states that a public ­temple is “where community festivals are held. . . . ​[It] symbolizes the unity of the village and is the focus of village solidarity. . . . ​The public t­emple represents the village, and the t­emple’s leadership often coincides with village leadership. All villa­gers are expected to participate in public offerings to the gods. . . . ​and to make financial contributions to the renovation of the ­temple and to public festivals.” In contrast, private ­temples—­like Miao-­ feng ­Temple, in this case—­“usually belong to an individual, sometimes to an association. . . . ​They are the focus of religious activity for a community of believers instead of for the ­whole village. . . . ​Followers of a certain god may come to the private ­temple to consult the god, especially if the par­tic­ul­ar god gains a reputation for being efficacious (ling)” (Bosco 1994, 427).

Chapter 4. Subservient ­Women, Worker Heroines 1. To characterize the w ­ omen’s movement as “autonomous” is to emphasize the w ­ omen activists’ aim of steering clear of state influences and avoid any po­liti­cal party affiliations; see Fan 2003. 2. See Inter-­Parliamentary Union and UN ­Women 2019. The data for bicameral legislatures are based on the percentage in the lower ­house. 3. Nevertheless, the po­ liti­ cal scientist and feminist activist Chang-­ ling Huang (2017) cautions us not to overemphasize feminist influence, even ­under state feminism. In the case of Taiwan, despite the unpre­ce­ dented alliance between the central government and feminist activists since the early 2000s, po­liti­cal parties (be it the Demo­cratic Progressive Party or the KMT) still must court a diverse array of constituencies, and their major agendas do not always align with ­those of feminists. 4. The most infamous women-­only custom is likely the khàu-­lōo-­thâu (哭路頭) ritual, which stipulates that when a married d ­ aughter returns to attend the funeral of her parent or paternal grandparent, she must start howling as soon as she reaches the front door of her natal h ­ ouse. Then she should enter the ­house by crawling ­until she reaches the catafalque, where she w ­ ill continue howling. The reason b ­ ehind this custom is that a married d ­ aughter cannot visit her parents or grandparents as they are

Notes to Pages 96–108







191

­ ying, and may only show her filial piety through howling and crawling d ­later, at their funerals. Khàu-­lōo-­thâu is often criticized as a gender-­ discriminatory practice b ­ ecause it only targets w ­ omen who are customarily required to reside with the families of their husbands but, by ­doing so, are paradoxically perceived as unfilial for not being able to be with their parents or paternal grandparents in the last moments of their lives. 5. In fact, this need may extend for a period of time. It may be days a­ fter New Year’s Day that a daughter-­in-­law ­will fi­nally get the opportunity to visit her natal f­amily. Likewise, if their parents are dead, married ­daughters visit their eldest ­brother’s ­house on the second day of Chinese New Year. In such a case, it would be the ­brother’s wife—­the eldest sister-­in-­law—­who bears the responsibility of receiving ­these visiting daughters/sisters, which, in turn, prevents the eldest sister-­in-­law from visiting her own natal f­ amily on the second day of the New Year. 6. The vice president mentioned by the chairman was Annette Lu Hsiu-­lien, one of the pioneers of feminism and w ­ omen’s liberation in Taiwan. 7. The film was the first documentary produced by the TGEEA; see Tsai Ching-ju 2009. 8. The National Cultural Association has since been renamed the General Association of Chinese Culture. 9. The Awakening Association of Kaohsiung was initially established as a regional office ­under the Awakening Foundation’s diversification effort, but over time Awakening Kaohsiung became increasingly in­de­ pen­dent from the original foundation. It is currently a separate organ­ ization that has its own bylaws, elects its own board members, and primarily takes on issues pertinent to Kaohsiung City or southern ­Taiwan.

Chapter 5. Blue-­Collar Industrial City, Blue-­Color Ocean Capital Epigraphs. Kaohsiung Pictorial 2004b, 2005; Tseng 2004. 1. While export pro­cessing zones are governed by the Export Pro­cessing Zone Administration within the Ministry of Economic Affairs, science parks—­which ­were established to provide a base of operations for Taiwan’s high-­tech industries—­fall ­under the authority of the Ministry of Science and Technology. Currently t­ here are three science parks in Taiwan: the Hsinchu Science Park in northern Taiwan, the Central Taiwan Science Park in Taichung, and the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. Among them, the Hsinchu Science Park is the oldest and most influential.

192











Notes to Pages 109–119

2. Before the redistricting of Taiwan’s administrative structure in 2010, ­there w ­ ere two special municipalities, Taipei and Kaohsiung, both of which had a population of more than 1.25 million. ­After the 2010 redistricting, New Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, and Taoyuan joined the rank of special municipalities. As a result of the redistricting, the three largest cities in Taiwan are New Taipei City (population 4.01 million), Taichung (2.81 million), and Kaohsiung (2.77 million). Taipei (pop. 2.64 million) as the capital remains the most impor­tant city in Taiwan. 3. It should be noted that the City-­Harbor Merger remained more a dream than a real­ity at this point. This was primarily due to the fact that the owner­ship of the Kaohsiung Harbor land was in the hands of multiple central government agencies, including the Port of Kaohsiung ­under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, the National Property Administration u ­ nder the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Defense, to the extent that p ­ eople jokingly said that any government approval regarding this land “would require the signatures of more than two thousand clerks” (Tu 2018, 116). The situation only changed in 2015, when the Executive Yuan dictated that the Kaohsiung City government and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications should form a joint venture, the Kaohsiung Port Land Development Corporation, to consolidate authority over the management of the harbor’s land (Tu 2018, 117). 4. Sentosa, an island located in the central region of Singapore, was once a British military base and a Japa­nese prisoner-­of-­war camp during World War II. In 1972 the Singaporean government renamed the island and rebuilt it into a popu­lar tourist destination. It is now home to a popu­lar resort that receives more than twenty million visitors a year. Attractions on the island include “a 2 km (1.2-mi) long sheltered beach, Fort Siloso, two golf courses, 14 h ­ otels, and the Resorts World Sentosa, which features the Universal Studios Singapore theme park and one of Singapore’s two casinos”; Wikipedia, s.v. “Sentosa,” last modified October 27, 2022, 19:26, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Sentosa. 5. Among the most impor­tant workers’ strug­gles w ­ ere strikes in 1988 by railway workers in Kaohsiung, bus d ­ rivers in Miaoli, and employees of the Far Eastern Textiles Com­pany in Shinju (Minns and Tierney 2003, 114). 6. The trade ­union movement in state-­owned enterprises pre­sents a dif­fer­ ent trajectory of Taiwan’s l­abor movement. In contrast to factory workers in Taiwan’s small and medium enterprises who faced the prospect of factory closures, employees in large state-­owned enterprises

Notes to Pages 120–137



193

fought the state’s privatization efforts. The trade u ­ nion movement in the public sector was, therefore, a result of antiprivatization; its goal was to ensure the workers’ continued status as state employees. Although most state enterprises have now been privatized (with the state as the largest stakeholder), the u ­ nions remain strong. 7. The activists included Taipei MRT construction workers (all male) who suffered from decompression sickness (popularly known as divers’ disease) and (primarily female) workers for RCA Taiwan who ­were exposed to a wide range of toxic chemicals used in electronics production and suffered from cancer years l­ater (Ku Yu-­ling 2008). Both cases are still tied up in court at the time of this writing.

Chapter 6. Super­natural Beings, Modernist State 1. With the popularity of cremation, columbaria have also become crowded. As a result, still other methods of burial have been introduced. Woodland and parkland—­and, to a lesser degree, sea—­burials have been advocated by Buddhist groups and endorsed by the government in recent years as environmentally friendly alternatives (Kong 2012, 425). 2. Feng shui (Chinese geomancy) is a pseudoscientific traditional practice originating from ancient China, which claims to use energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment. Feng shui has been put to use in a wide range of popu­lar pursuits, such as “to decorate or clean up homes for greater happiness, balance personality and interior design, improve ­career opportunities and work per­for­ mance, focus on s­imple living, achieve harmonious relations with the environment or just install quick changes to increase the quality of life” (Bruun 2008, 1). 3. Chastity archways are commemorative arches erected to honor ­women who maintained their widowhood or killed themselves in order to accompany their dead husbands into the netherworld in ancient times. 4. Wooden divination blocks are used by Taiwanese to communicate with super­natural beings (gods, ghosts, or ancestors). They are carved into a crescent shape. Each block is round on one side (known as the yin side) and flat on the other (known as the yang side). They are always used in pairs. When cast, t­here are four pos­si­ble answers that a pair of divination blocks can produce: (1) a “divine” answer (聖筊), which is a yes when one block has its flat side and the other has its round side facing up; (2) an “angry” (怒筊) or “crying” answer (哭筊), which is a no when both blocks have their flat sides facing down, indicating that

194

Notes to Page 160

the super­natural being is displeased by the question; (3) a “laughing” answer (笑筊), when both blocks have the flat side facing up, which indicates that the spirit is laughing; this could mean a no or it could mean that the spirit is laughing ­because the inquirer should know the answer or ­because the answer to the question is obvious; and (4) a “standing” answer (立筊), when one or both blocks fall but stand erect on the floor, which indicates that the super­natural being does not understand the question and therefore the question is nullified or the procedure must be repeated. Chapter 7. Beyond the Memorial 1. Recognizing differences is deemed essential to gender equity education (Li-­ching Wang 2014, 25). The Gender Equity Education Act has broad coverage of not only both sexes but also sexual minorities, and it includes provisions concerning the content of educational materials and discrimination, harassment, and vio­lence at all levels (Shu-­Ching Lee 2012, 254). A full review of the effect of gender equity education, particularly on gender pluralism, is beyond the scope of this chapter; suffice it to say that an early emphasis on sexual assault and sexual harassment went largely unchallenged. Yet, starting in 2011, the rise of a conservative religious movement that defends traditional morality and sexualities brought fierce contestation on the issues of abortion, same-­ sex marriage, and gender equity education (Ming-­sho Ho 2019; Ke-­ hsien Huang 2017). Conservative forces oppose the implementation of a curriculum that teaches students to be aware of bullying be­hav­ior targeting sexual orientation, gender temperament, or gender identity (Chen Chao-­Ju 2014). Their main argument is that “the government should not create a category to ‘normalize’ the LGBT population and ‘protect’ their ‘deviant’ be­hav­ior” (Ming-­sho Ho 2020, 151). While the strug­gle over gender pluralism continues, it is impor­ tant to note that Taiwan legalized same-­sex marriage on May 24, 2019. It was the first country in Asia to do so. 2. Resonating with the breadth of the Gender Equity Education Act, the gender equity education curriculum also covers a wide range of topics, including traditional body and sex education; plurality in sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual temperament; heterosexual and homosexual intimate relationships; diverse ­family structures; gender and folk customs; and gender equality in the science, technology, engineering, and mathe­ matics (STEM) fields (Hsiao, Wang, and Hong 2012). In practice, ­human anatomy and physiology and sexual assault prevention, both subjects of

Notes to Pages 163–169







195

traditional sex education, are the two most commonly covered gender-­ equity education topics from primary schools to colleges and universities. In addition, while “gender and folk customs” continue to be time-­ honored subjects in gender equity education, t­here has been a fast-­growing emphasis on gender pluralism, as illustrated in the contents of Liangxing pingdeng jiaoyü jikan (Education for Gender Equality Quarterly), a Ministry of Education publication. 3. Some of the principal examples are Su and Hsiao 2005; Tsai and You 2008; Hsiao, Wang, and Hong 2012; and the Liangxing pingdeng jiaoyü jikan (Education for Gender Equality Quarterly). 4. Since my interview with Professor You in 2013, the Grades 1–9 Integrated Curriculum has been expanded into the Grades 1–12 Integrated Curriculum. 5. In contrast to the “gender and folk custom” reform that is largely accepted by the Taiwanese public, gender pluralism remains a highly controversial issue. Professor You frequently came face to face with antigay groups at public hearings when she served on the Gender Equity Education Committee u ­ nder the Ministry of Education. She described one of the worst confrontations: We ­ didn’t realize how many [of the antigay] ­ people ­ were ­going to be pre­sent at [that par­tic­ul­ar] public hearing. We totally underestimated the fervor of t­ hese religious zealots! They packed the ­whole conference room, stared at us with vehemence, and interrupted our speech constantly. ­ There w ­ ere only a few of us, the committee members. We felt so vulnerable sitting in front of the podium. ­Toward the end of the hearing the hostility was so high that none of us on the committee dared to linger or even use the rest­room before ­going home! We left the conference room immediately a­ fter the hearing was over, and kind of sneaked away from the back door without anyone paying attention. It still makes me shudder now I am telling you the story.





6. See Lo Su-­juan 2014. Lo is a se­nior executive officer at the Department of Civil Affairs, which is the department in charge of the gender equity business u ­ nder the Ministry of the Interior. 7. Traditionally, the Ministry of ­Labor was the sole government agency that supervised funeral ser­vice workers. However, as part of ongoing government efforts to improve the quality of Taiwan’s funeral ser­ vice sector and ensure better consumer protection, the Ministry of

196

Notes to Page 180

the Interior has been working with the Ministry of ­Labor to or­ga­nize professional training and national mortician skill tests since the early 2010s. Specifically, following the 2012 revision of the Funeral Industry Management Act, the Ministry of the Interior obtained the authority to set administrative rules for funeral director certification. The new system comprises three facets: professional training, skills testing, and funeral director certification. In 2013 the Ministry of the Interior acquired the authority to administer the B-­class funeral director certification test, one of three qualifications for the funeral ser­vice professional license. Epilogue

Epigraph. Li 2004, 237. 1. Jinmen is a border territory of Taiwan, only 1.8 kilo­meters from the nearest place in China.

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Index

Page numbers in italics type refer to illustrations. ancestors: Act for Ancestor Worship Guild, 167–168; divination blocks used to communicate with, 193–194n4; Hsiao Jau-­jiu as the first female officiant at the Hsiao lineage ancestor worship ceremony, 96–97, 160; as one of three types of beings in Taiwanese popu­lar religion, 16, 70; privileging of male over female descendants, 22, 72–73; sons and not ­daughters entitled to a place at their ­father’s ancestral altar, 16, 70, 157 Asia New Bay Area, Mayor Chen Chu’s forwarding of, 113 Awakening Foundation: gender-­biased instructional materials identified by, 158–159; restructuring of Awakening magazine into, 87 Awakening Kaohsiung: in­de­pen­dence from the Awakening Foundation, 191n9; Ms. Hsu’s work with, 121, 126; professionalism of core members of, 102; Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Landscape Construction and Naming field survey, 102, 124, 126, 129–130, 136 Benjamin, Walter, epigraph, 1 Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry, 61 Bosco, Joseph, 190n11

Boyer, Christine, 18 Buddhism: bo­dhi­sat­tva worship, 72, 148; Namo Amitabha chanting, 148. See also funeral practices; lotus statue for the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers; Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva carbide slag: Cijin Beach restored with the removal of, 115–116; dumping along the Cijin shore of, 41; mounds on two sides of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, 90–91, 117; removal from the site of the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, 131 Chen Chu: Asia New Bay Area megaproject ­under, 113; biography of, 140; burial ground reclamation as a major policy of, 140–142; as mayor of Kaohsiung, 101, 102, 103–104, 111, 113, 124, 133; as secretary-­general to Tsai Ing-­wen, 133 Chen Hsiu-­hui, 98 Cheng, Mr. (funeral director), role as a public educator and advocate of funeral custom reform, 174–175 Chuang ­family migration from southern China to Taiwan, 70 Chuang Chin-­chun, 137; opinion about spiritual tablet placement of unmarried ­women, 73; practice of whipping of ­daughters’ coffins resisted by, 73

223

224Index

Chuang Kok (­father of Chuang Ting-­ ting): donation made to Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple for his ­daughter’s god statue, 137–138n10; god statue made for his ­daughter, 79–80; on his ­daughter’s educational aspirations, 55; as a member of the coordinating committee, 54, 63, 137; a tâng-­ki (spirit medium) consulted by, 74, 80 Chuang Ting-­ting (ferry accident victim), 55 Chuang Yue-­kui (ferry accident victim): deification as Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva, 75–77; her eldest ­sister as her spirit medium at Miao-­feng Gong, 75 Chung-­chou Village: common surnames in, 70; diminished use of the pier at, 14; filming of Ke Wan-­ching’s documentary in, 103; fishing industry in, 38; Kuang Chi Gong (Big ­Temple) in, 81, 138; sewage treatment plant located in, 41. See also ferry accident at Chung-­chou pier, Cijin (Sept. 3, 1973); Kao ­family in Chung-­chou Village Cijin District Office: Civil Affairs Bureau, 133–134; relocation of, 116, 141 Cijin District Office–­Mr. Lin: the city government’s promise of holding a spring memorial ceremony and fall commemoration ser­vice as a concern of, 182; communication with families about of the renovation of Maiden Ladies Tomb, 133–134, 139–140, 182; consent forms from families obtained by, 137–139; instructions received for removing individual graves from the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, 142–143; interest in religion, 134; talking points to persuade families of the benefits of the city’s plan, 134–135 Cijin Island: Black Sand Festival, 116; creation by the expansion of Kaohsiung Harbor, 11, 37; displacement

and resettlement of the Tsai lineage on, 187n6; educational attainment in, 42, 43; fishing and shipbuilding industries in, 38, 40, 42–43; Japa­ nese colonial government development of, 38; kinship, lineage, and gender traditions of, 69–71; map of, 10; Matsu ­Temple, 114–115, 116; population of, 42, 42; redevelopment of, 115–116, 141; urban tourism, 114–115, 115, 124, 155, 180. See also Chung-­chou Village; ferry accident at Chung-­chou pier, Cijin (Sept. 3, 1973); Kao ­family in Chung-­chou Village; War and Peace Theme Hall death and the dead: bad deaths defined, 61; bad deaths made good, 61, 178, 181; Eight Characters of Birth Time, 65–66, 95; the field of death and haunting in anthropological research, 177–178; good death defined, 61; places occupied by ­people who had died bad deaths, 91; power and vulnerability of the dead, 181–182; power of the state in shaping the world of death, 151, 181. See also funeral practices; ghosts; twenty-­five deceased ­women Death Café, public forum focused on death-­related issues, 172–174 deceased ­women. See twenty-­five deceased ­women deified ­women, Chuang Yue-­kui deified as Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva, 76–77 Derrida, Jacques, 23 desire: individual agency as a manifestation of, 185–186n2; Sangren on culture as “a mode of production of desire,” 185–186n2 Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple: location and history of, 143–144; Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb compared with, 144, 176

Index225

Export Pro­cessing Zones (EPZs): dreams of upward social mobility associated with, 36; evolution of, 186–187n4; paid industrial ­labor for young ­women provided by, 34, 47–48, 51; and the postwar economic development of Taiwan, 47–48. See also Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone (EPZ) Factory Act: overtime regulated by, 50; repeal of, 187n1; underage workers regulated by, 62 feminist activists. See ­women’s movement feng shui (Chinese geomancy), 132, 193n2 ferry accident at Chung-­chou pier, Cijin (Sept. 3, 1973): circumstances, 11– 12, 58; and feminists’ advocacy for gender equality, 156; King Boat burning performed for, 65, 187n4; survivors of, 12–13 festivals: labor-­themed cultural festivals, 119; as placemaking strategies, 112, 116; Yingwang (Welcoming the Lords), 164 Formoso, Bernard, 61 Freud, Sigmund, 186n2 funeral practices: alternatives to cremation and columbaria, 193n1; cremation and columbaria, 116, 127–128, 141; government-­propagated mortuary reform campaign, 166–170; group graves, 187–188n5; the hundredth day ­after death, 189n9; khàu-­lōo-­thâu ritual, 190–191n4; King Boat burning collective mortuary ceremony, 65, 187n4; mortuary ritual reforms, 157–158, 169–170; spiritual tablet placement, 73, 75; whipping of ­daughters’ coffins, 73; yimin ­temples of righ­teous ­people, 188n5 Gates, Hill, 36 Gender Equity Education Movement: funeral custom reform, 166–175;

Gender Equity Education ACT (2004), 89, 157, 159–160, 194n1; gender equity education curriculum resonating with, 160, 194–195n2; Gender Mainstreaming Directive (2005), 165; LGBTQ rights, 89, 160, 169; ­mothers’ stories written by Prof. Hsiao’s students, 161–162; Pingdeng zizhu, shenzhong zhuiyuan published by the Ministry of the Interior, 94–95, 168–169; Professor You Mei-­hui’s “Practicum on Gender Education,” 163; re­sis­tance from conservative forces, 194n1, 195n5; Sexual Harassment Prevention Act (2004), 159. See also Awakening Foundation; Awakening Kaohsiung gender issues: gender mainstreaming, 88–89, 93, 94, 99, 156, 157, 165–167; gender-­sensitive national mortician certification, 94–95, 158, 169–170, 195–196n7; global industrialization as a gendered pro­ cess, 34, 53, 151; khàu-­lōo-­thâu ritual, 190–191n4; and the ­labor force in Cijin, 45, 46; normative cultural ideology subordinating young factory ­women, 35–36; pre­ ce­dence of gender over ­labor in families’ remembrance of the deceased, 37; restrictions on married ­women visiting their natal families, 95–96, 191n5; sons and not ­daughters entitled to a place at their ­father’s ancestral altar, 16; the UN’s gender equality agenda, 85; ­women’s wage ­labor participation, 49–50, 52, 55. See also Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (KAPWR); Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ ect; Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers; patrilineal ideology; Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association (TGEEA); ­women’s movement

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ghosts and haunting: deification of, 25, 75–76; ethical formations revealed by haunting, 29; the field of death and haunting in anthropological research, 177–178; locations of, 28; the logic of the modern state eluded by, 151–152; as one of three types of beings in Taiwanese popu­ lar religion, 16; plague expulsion rites, 65; power of, 24–25, 29 global industrialization: as a gendered pro­cess, 34, 53, 151; escalating international competition impacting Taiwan, 123; impact on the Four Asian Dragons, 19, 33–34 glocalized turn in the global economy: impact on Taiwan, 26; postindustrial economic regeneration of Kaohsiung timed with, 25 god statues: of deceased ­women left at Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple (San-ma Gong), 78, 80, 189–190n10; placement at altars of their f­athers’ ­houses, 78–79; tâng-­kis (spirit mediums) consulted regarding, 74, 79–80 Gordon, Avery, 23, 24 Harrell, Stevan, “Why Do Chinese Work So Hard?,” 53 Harvey, David, 4 heritage: as a cultural tool, 4–5, 123–124; ­labor culture and industrial heritage as new fronts of ­labor activism, 119–123; redevelopment of industrial heritage sites as an economic strategy, 17, 18, 112 Hong ­family, migration from southern China to Taiwan, 70 Hsiao I-­ling, oral histories of Kaohsiung EPZ female workers, 49 Hsiao Jau-­jiu: as co-­editor of, Danian chuyi hui niangjia, 95, 160; as the first female officiant at the Hsiao lineage ancestor worship ceremony, 96–97, 160; gender-­conscious critical thinking fostered in her teaching, 161–162

Hsi-­chi-­chu Village, common surnames in, 70 Hsieh Chang-­ting, Frank: as Kaohsiung mayor, 101, 111, 117; po­liti­cal affiliation of, 111; as premier of Taiwan, 133 Hsu, Ms.: and Awakening Kaohsiung, 121, 126, 129; as a staff member of the Kaohsiung ­Labor Museum Preparatory Office (Kaohsiung Museum of ­Labor), 121 Huang, Chang-­ling, 190n3 Huang ­family: migration from southern China to Taiwan, 70; Mr. Huang’s designing of the lotus statue, 147–148, 176 industrial structure of feeling: concept of, 5; contribution of ­women workers to, 5, 6, 33, 52, 180; experienced real­ity of, 29, 32–33 industrial system in Taiwan: fishing and shipbuilding industries in Cijin Island, 40; global industrialization as a gendered pro­cess, 34. See also Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone (EPZ); petrochemical industry; science parks; small and medium enterprises (SMEs) Jinmen Island: discovery of the body of Wang Yulan, 180–181; status as a border territory of Taiwan, 196n1 Jordan, David, 74 Kao ­family in Chung-­chou Village: Kao Ah-­you (­father of Kao Ah-yu), 63, 79, 137; Kao Ah-yu (ferry accident victim), 53, 70; Kao Mao (­brother of Kao Au-yu), 53, 71–72; as a lineage not a ­family, 70–71; pressure to bear a son experienced by Kao Au-­yu’s ­mother, 189n8 Kaohsiung and Kaohsiung City government: Committee for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (CPWR),

Index227

88; competition with Taipei for economic power and po­liti­cal influence, 112, 114; educational attainment, 42, 44; mayors of, 101, 101, 188n6; pension and compensation issues of ferry accident victims addressed by, 13, 63; placemaking strategies utilized for urban (re) development in, 112–116; postindustrial economic regeneration of, 25; postwar development into an industrial hub, 38–39; redistricting of Taiwan’s administrative structure, 192n2. See also Asia New Bay Area; Chen Chu; Cijin Island Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (KAPWR): biographical backgrounds of core members, 90; the city government’s slow response to its efforts, 100–102, 124; criticism of karaoke businesses near the Maiden Ladies Tomb, 91, 131, 136–137; negotiation of dif­fer­ent scales of meaning by, 28, 84–85, 104–105; Taiwan’s patriarchal social system criticized by, 14. See also Tang Wen-­hui; You Mei-­hui (Professor at Kaohsiung Normal University) Kaohsiung City government–­Port of Kaohsiung: Cijin-­Kaohsiung sampan ferry ser­vice supervised by, 13, 67; and the City-­Harbor Merger, 113, 192n3; funds for the second Maiden Ladies Tomb, 67–68; global ranking of, 109; Hamasen rail lines leading to, 107 Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau: Awakening Kaohsiung field study commissioned by, 102; Ke Wan-­ ching’s documentary supported by, 103; Mr. Shi as chief secretary of, 117, 120–123; Ms. Huang as chief secretary of, 130–133; Name Change Movement at the Maiden Ladies Tomb, 100; plan to renovate

the tomb site into the Worker’s Memorial Park, 100, 117, 122, 124; steering of the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation, 109, 117–118 Kaohsiung Export Pro­cessing Zone (EPZ): dormitories at, 50–51; employee benefit programs, 50; establishment in the 1960s, 11, 40; evolution of, 186–187n4; former female workers featured in Tamen de gushi, 48–49, 52–53; ­labor force of, 40, 45, 47–52, 187n4; oral histories of female workers at, 49; routines of young ­women workers at, 33 karaoke businesses near the Maiden Ladies Tomb, 91, 131, 136–137 Katz, Cindi, 32 Ke Wan-­ching, documentary Tamen de gushi, 103–104; former female workers from Kaohsiung EPZ featured in, 48–49, 52–53; life stories of the twenty-­five deceased ­women portrayed in, 103; the story of Taiwanese female workers in the history of Taiwan told by, 103–104 Kuang Chi Gong (the Big ­Temple), 91, 138 Kuan Yin: deceased ­daughters as maid-­ servants of, 2, 74, 79–80; Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple as a private ­temple of, 78 Kuo He (­father of a ferry accident victim), 63, 135, 187n3 Kuo, Ms. C. (­sister of three ferry accident victims): consent form signed by, 138–139; continued presence of her deceased ­sisters in her life, 59–60 Kuo, Ms. H. (funeral reform advocate): Death Café Taiwan run by, 172–174; role as a public educator and advocate of funeral custom reform, 172, 174–175; Time Travel board game created by, 173–174

228Index

­labor activism: failure of crucial l­abor strug­gles in the 1990s, 118–119; impor­tant workers’ strug­gles, 192n5; ­labor culture and industrial heritage as new fronts of, 119–123; muted class consciousness in Taiwan, 36; in South ­Korea, 36; trade ­union movements in state-­owned enterprises, 192–193n6. See also Workers’ Memorial Day ­Labor Affairs Bureau. See Kaohsiung City ­Labor Affairs Bureau ­labor regulations. See Taiwan’s ­labor regulations Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ect: initiation of, 97–99; renovation of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Landscape Construction coordinated with, 104, 129, 149–150 Leach, Belinda, on feminist memorializing, 21 Li Ang: epigraph, 177; stories of ­women who became vengeful ghosts, 178–179, 182 Li Hsiao-­feng, on listening to “A Lone Girl’s Dream,” 31 Lin, Mr. See Cijin District Office–­Mr. Lin Liu Chung-­tung and Chen Hwei-­syin, Woguo hunsang yishi xingbie yishi zhi jiantao, 167, 169 Lo Su-­juan, 195n6 lotus statue for the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, 126, 150, 151; annual commemoration ser­vice at, 182; as a budding lotus, 148; design by Mr. Huang, 147–148, 176; epitaph for, 148–149; location of, 147 Lü Hsing-­cheng, on listening to “A Lone Girl’s Dream,” 31–32 Maiden Ladies Tomb. See Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Matsu (the Heavenly Empress): consecration at Kuang Chi Gong, 81; elevation and popularization of her cult in the Qing, 180

Matsu ­Temple, 114–115, 116 Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers: as an act of feminist memorializing, 1, 7–8, 20, 22; cultural legacy of, 27, 32; entrance, 154; epitaph for, 149–150; as a gender equity education example, 163–164; groundbreaking ceremony, 124; as a “­human rights landscape,” 164; jurisdiction of the Mortuary Ser­ vices Office, 118; as a lieu de memoire (place of memory), 3, 69, 156; naming of, 129–130; positive meaning of l­abor safety embodied in, 155; and the post-­industrial make­over of Kaohsiung City, 3–4; as a pro­cess of remembrance, 156–157; recollection of the shunning of unwed w ­ omen not addressed by, 2. See also lotus statue; Vessel sculpture memory: articulation of alternative memories at haunted places, 28; communities of memory, 32, 151; as a forward-­looking pro­cess, 8, 21, 28, 183; Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers as a lieu de memoire (place of memory), 3, 156 Miao-­feng ­Temple: status as a privately managed shrine, 81, 190n11; Yi-­ miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva’s altar in, 75, 78, 189n10 Mills, Mary Beth, 48 Ministry of L ­ abor: gender-­sensitive national mortician certification, 169, 195–196n7; Protection for Workers Incurring Occupational Accidents Act (2002), 120–121 Ministry of the Interior: gender-­sensitive mortuary practice promoted by, 94–95, 167–169, 195–196n7; Pingdeng zizhu, shenzhong zhuiyuan published by, 94–95, 168–169; public cemetery beautification proj­ ects, 127 mortuary practices. See funeral practices

Index229

National Cultural Association: epitaph for the memorial park drafted by, 149–150; leadership of Chen Hsiu-­ hui, 98; Nüren de jihen: Taiwan nüxing wenhuo dibiao sponsored by, 99; renaming as the General Association of Chinese Culture, 191n8. See also Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ect Nora, Pierre, 3 Pao-an Chin-­shan ­Temple (San-ma Gong), deceased ­women’s god statues left at, 78, 80, 189–190n10 patrilineal ideology: cap­i­tal­ist logic in sync with, 53; Confucianism, 167–168; devaluing of ­women’s industrial ­labor, 55–56; privileging of men over ­women, 22, 55, 72–73, 95 petrochemical industry: carbide slag dumping by Formosa Plastics Corporation, 41; environmental impact on Kaohsiung, 39, 186n3; Taiwan as a global supplier of petrochemical products, 107 placemaking: festivals and spatial transformations as strategies of, 112; heritage as a cultural tool of, 4–5, 123–124; mediation of mourning and commemoration through the materiality of space, 28–29; Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers as a lieu de memoire (place of memory), 3, 69, 156; redevelopment of industrial heritage sites as an economic strategy, 17, 18, 112; spatial reor­ga­ni­za­tion associated with capitalism, 4, 26. See also industrial structure of feeling; memory popu­lar religion. See Taiwanese popu­lar religion Port of Kaohsiung. See Kaohsiung City government–­Port of Kaohsiung Rigney, Ann, on the “life” of memorial sites, 156

Sangren, P. Steven, on culture as “a mode of production of desire,” 185–186n2 scales and scalemaking: “jumping scales” as a po­liti­cal strategy, 26, 28, 85, 105; negotiation of dif­fer­ ent scales of meaning by KAPWR activists, 84–85, 104–105; politics of scale in the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation, 25–27; rescaling of the act of remembrance, 104–105; scales of commemoration bound to readings of the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, 26–27 science parks: as EPZs, 186n4; Ministry of Science and Technology authority over, 191n1; semi-­conductor companies concentrated in Hsinchu Science Park, 108 Singapore: columbaria used in, 127; as one of the Four Asian Dragons, 19; Sentosa, 114, 192n4 small and medium enterprises (SMEs): ­family orientation of SMEs in Taiwan, 35; role of EPZs in their development, 48; two categories of, 186n1 Smith, Laurajane, on heritage as a cultural tool, 4–5 Smith, Neil, 26 South ­Korea: columbaria used in, 127; ­labor movement in, 36 state-­owned enterprises: on land in Kaohsiung, 39, 110; trade ­union movement in, 192–193n6 state policy and the dead: close relationship between religion and politics reflected in, 180–181; Death Café as a public forum for discussing death-­related issues, 172–174; gender-­sensitive mortuary practice promoted by the Ministry of the ­Labor and the Ministry of the Interior, 94–95, 169, 195–196n7; Maiden Ladies Tomb–­relocation as an example of the spatial influence of state policy, 14, 26–27, 67–68,

230Index

state policy and the dead (cont.) 116, 133–134, 187n6; proper burial a concern of, 133; public cemetery beautification proj­ects, 127; tug-­of-­war between the state and families, 128–129, 133 Su Chien-­ling, as co-­editor of, Danian chuyi hui niangjia, 95, 160 Taipei and Taipei City government: Committee for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (CPWR), 88; mayors of, 111; redistricting of Taiwan’s administrative structure, 192n2; as Taiwan’s financial and marketing center, 112 Taiwanese popu­lar religion: divination blocks, 137–138, 143, 144, 193– 194n4; flexibility and individualism of, 78–79; god-­ancestor-­ghost cosmic order, 15–16, 70. See also ancestors; funeral practices; ghosts and haunting; god statues; Miao-­ feng ­Temple; tâng-­kis (spirit mediums); ­temples Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association (TGEEA), Danian chuyi hui niangjia published by, 95, 160 Taiwan’s ­labor regulations: impact on the petrochemical industry, 107; ­Labor Standards Act, 118, 187n1; slack enforcement of, 62–63. See also Factory Act Tamen de gushi. See Ke Wan-­ching, documentary Tamen de gushi tâng-­kis (spirit mediums): Chuang Kok’s consultation with, 74; as “prime religious arbiters,” 74 Tang Wen-­hui: Chung-­chou pier visited with the author (2013), 13; KAPWR activism focused on the Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb led by, 90–93; as a KAPWR member, 2, 12 ­temples: Miao-­feng Gong (Miao-­feng ­Temple), 75, 189n10; public and

private ­temples in Taiwan distinguished, 81, 190n11 Tianhou ­Temple, 138 Tsai Chia-­ching, 187n6 Tsai ­family, displacement and resettlement on Cijin Island, 187n6 Tsai Ing-­wen: Chen Chu as secretary-­ general to, 133; po­liti­cal affiliation of, 111 twenty-­five deceased ­women: attitudes of local ­people in Chung-­chou ­toward, 80–81; “consolation money” offered to families of underaged workers, 63; ­labor identity of, 36–37, 132; lasting effect and benefit to Kaohsiung City of, 64, 148–149; portrayal of their life stories in Tamen de gushi, 103; productive economic roles of, 5, 14, 17–18, 22, 24; regular and ongoing offerings to them a concern of their parents, 25, 130; spirit tablets of, 67, 73, 75, 188n5; youyinggong and yimins (“righ­teous ­people”) compared with, 188n5. See also Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers; Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb: arrangement of individual graves, 66, 66–67; assumptions about scalar affiliation disrupted by narratives of, 28; carbide slag mounds on two sides of, 90–91, 117; original site of, 1, 63; scales of commemoration bound to readings of, 26–27; sinisterness associated with, 1, 14, 16–17; unmarried status of the victims emphasized in its inscription, 67, 148, 155. See also ferry accident at Chung-­chou pier, Cijin (Sept. 3, 1973) Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb–­ memorial archway: chastity archways compared with, 132, 193n3; placement of, 68, 69; remaking for the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, 68, 181; removal and

Index231

de­mo­li­tion of, 132–133, 144–146; revised content carved on, 148–149; title engraved on, 67 Twenty-­Five Maiden Ladies Tomb–­ relocation: individual stories embraced as one story in a “community of memory,” 32, 124–125; Mr. Lin’s talking points to persuade families of the benefits of the city’s plan, 134–135; spatial influence of state policy exemplified by, 14, 26–27, 67–68, 116, 133–134, 187n6. See also Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers Vessel sculpture: design of, 131–132; location of, 131, 147, 150; rejection by families of the deceased ­women, 132, 147 War and Peace Theme Hall: forgotten Taiwanese Japa­nese Imperial Army soldiers remembered at, 164; location of, 164, 165 Weller, Robert P. on “fee-­for-­service religion, 143–144 Wolf, Arthur P., 15–16 ­women’s movement: focus on social ser­vices as the mission of most ­women’s groups in Kaohsiung, 185n1; genealogy of Taiwan’s ­women’s movement, 86–88, 190n1; maiden identity of the twenty-­five deceased as a focus of feminist critique and activism, 3–4, 14, 67, 90; Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers as an act of feminist memorializing, 1, 7–8, 15, 20, 22; rescaling and transformation of the act of remembrance to national and global levels, 6–7; revision of the Act for Ancestor Worship Guild in Taiwan, 167–168; Taiwan’s Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture exhibitions, 99. See also Awakening

Foundation; Awakening Kaohsiung; Gender Equity Education Movement; gender issues; Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of ­Women’s Rights (KAPWR); Landmarks of ­Women’s Culture proj­ect; Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers Workers’ Memorial Day: Kaohsiung City’s 2003 observance of, 121; memorial ser­vice held annually at the Memorial Park, 15, 150, 155; Name Change Movement at the Maiden Ladies Tomb initiated at, 100, 117, 122; victims of occupational injuries recognized at, 121 Yeh Chu-­lan: as mayor of Kaohsiung, 101, 102, 111; transformation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb into the Memorial Park for ­Women Laborers, 124 Yeh Chun-­lin, “A Lone Girl’s Dream,” 30–32 Yeh Pie: on the dispute between the deceased’s families and the city government, 144–145; Mrs. Yeh on the transformation of the Maiden Ladies Tomb into something like the Eigh­teen Lords ­Temple, 176 Yi-­miao Bo­dhi­sat­tva: altar in Miao-­feng ­Temple, 75, 78, 189n10; Chuang Yue-­Kui’s deification as, 75–77 Yingwang (Welcoming the Lords), 164 You Mei-­hui (Professor at Kaohsiung Normal University): on the city governments disinterest in KAPWR’s efforts, 100–102; “­human rights landscapes” identified by, 164; on re­sis­tance to gender equity from conservative forces, 165–166, 195n5 Zukin, Sharon, 18

About the Author

Anru Lee is a professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Gender and ­Labor Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring and coeditor of ­Women in the New Taiwan and The Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies.