Autoethnography and Autoethnographic Fiction in Light of the Aboriginal Movement

In 1991, the Taiwanese Puyuma intellectual Sun Ta-chuan 孫大川 lamented that as a result of multiple colonization the decline of Taiwanese indigenous traditions was irreversible. He pointed out that, due to “the collapse of tribal societies and religious beliefs, loss of languages, and the qualitative change in tribal population,” Taiwanese aborigines are a “people that belongs to the dusk; the dusk consciousness best describes the torments, confusion, and realities deep down in their soul.”Footnote ¹ Sun perceptively observed how awakening to one's dusk consciousness helps indigenous peoples detect the traps lurking in the various concerns for them: the trap of becoming samples to the anthropologist, the trap of over-politicization by the politician, and the romantic trap in humanitarian concerns.Footnote ² As Sun noted, anthropologists, concerned solely with the most “primitive” aspects of aborigines, unwittingly treat the latter as samples,Footnote ³ whereas politicians focusing on political and economic modernization are only concerned with aboriginal rights and lack cultural and historical reflection. Humanitarians, on the other hand, romanticize aboriginal society as Eden, causing “some aborigines to retreat to the small world of their culture, breeding fantasies about the renaissance of the peoples with the assumption that the tribal order can be restored.”Footnote ⁴ As an aboriginal political activist, Sun was speaking at a juncture when the Taiwan Aboriginal Movement was moving in a new direction that stressed cultural restoration (the so-called Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement), with some aboriginal elites returning to their villages to re-learn their cultural heritage and collect oral histories from the elders. Beginning in 1983 with the magazine Gaoshan qing 高山青, the Taiwan Aboriginal Movement was officially launched when a group of aboriginal intellectuals founded the Alliance of Taiwanese Aborigines in 1984 to highlight the deprivation of aborigines' economic rights, land rights, and naming rights.Footnote ⁵ The movement succeeded in lobbying for self-renaming as “aborigines” in the Constitution in 1994, to replace the pejorative designation “mountain tribes,” an act that signified the symbolic attainment of subjectivity on the part of indigenous peoples. Sun's caution against the traps is significant in mapping out the new possibilities envisioned by Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement and the limitations it faced. While the movement shifted the emphasis from aboriginal rights to cultural revival, with the aboriginal village as the centre of living indigenous tradition, it both resisted the anthropological objectification of aborigines and deemed it unrealistic to expect the resurrection of traditional tribal order after so many waves of colonization.

Sun's critique of anthropology called attention to the latter's intricate relationship with aborigines and imperialism. Historically, aborigines' presence in Taiwan dates back at least eight millennia. Taiwan aborigines are Austronesian peoples genetically and linguistically related to other Austronesian ethnic groups.Footnote ⁶ During different periods in the past four centuries, imperial powers – Western (including Dutch and Spanish), Chinese, and Japanese – engaged in colonizing and assimilating Taiwanese aborigines through a series of “civilizing” projects. While the Qing government distinguished aborigines as “cooked” (shu 熟) or “raw” (sheng 生), depending on their degree of Sinicization,Footnote ⁷ the Japanese government not only perpetuated these terms but officially recognized nine aboriginal tribes based on systematic fieldwork completed by a dozen Japanese anthropologists.Footnote ⁸ This Japanese taxonomy was adopted by the Kuomintang government after 1945, but it struck many aborigines as artificial, given that traditionally they lived in independent villages which were never united under a common polity, “tribe.” Aborigines living in Taroko even disputed being identified as Atayal and succeeded in gaining official recognition as a separate aboriginal tribe in 2004. Nevertheless, as Sun Ta-chuan observed, official recognition of aboriginal tribes by the Japanese enabled aborigines to go beyond the boundaries of their separate villages to have a tribal identity, even to have inchoate pan-ethnic aboriginal consciousness and national identity, especially after the wartime campaign of kominka (imperialization).Footnote ⁹ Paradoxically, this ethnographic study, naming, and imperialization – which appropriated aborigines, relegating them to the lowest layer of social hierarchy by characterizing them as backward while demanding their allegiance to the Empire – ultimately triggered the beginning of the structural collapse of aboriginal societies and cultures.Footnote ¹⁰ Aboriginal societies fortunately remained vibrant under Japanese rule (1895–1945),Footnote ¹¹ yet their subjugation by Japanese imperialism prepared them for later subjugation by the Kuomintang.Footnote ¹² In addition to describing the tension between village identity and pan-ethnic aboriginal identity, Sun revealed that, far from being a disinterested, objective discipline and practice, anthropology has been both complicit with colonialism and enabling to aborigines. Anthropology may have represented aborigines from the vantage point of the metropolis (first Tokyo, and then Taipei), but it contributed to present-day pan-ethnic aboriginal consciousness, which is essential to the Aboriginal Movement since the indigenous peoples constitute less than 2 per cent of the population in Taiwan.

Mary Louise Pratt remarks in her classic book Imperial Eyes that the relationship between colonizers and colonized, or travellers and “travelees,” involves co-presence, interaction, and interlocking understanding and practices. In what she calls the “contact zone,” or the space of colonial encounters, “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish on-going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”Footnote ¹³ Anthropologists “salvage” the most “primitive” objects and meanings from their contemporaneous indigenous societies that they view as destined to disappear. Yet, ironically, Taiwan's aborigines often turned to anthropologists for help as intensified assimilation policies and exposure to capitalist economy under Kuomintang rule from the 1950s to the 1980s devastated aboriginal cultures.Footnote ¹⁴ Sun's understanding of the awakening of aboriginal subjectivity after the first stage of the Aboriginal Movement depended on a research report written by Han anthropologists Hu Taili 胡台麗 and Liu Binxiung 劉斌雄 on the revival of rituals in the tribes from 1986 to 1989.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the oral nature of aboriginal cultures, the Taiwanese Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement often took the form of aboriginal intellectuals' ethnographic study, personal narratives, and even travel writing, in addition to performing traditional rituals and rebuilding communities. Ethnographic studies and personal narratives by such elite aboriginals as Sun Ta-chuan, Syman Rapongan 夏曼藍波安, Walis Nogang 瓦歷斯諾幹, and Liglav A-wu 利格拉樂阿烏 in the 1990s can be seen as what Pratt calls “autoethnography”Footnote ¹⁶ or “authoethnographic expression.”Footnote ¹⁷ As Pratt explains,

The fact that these Taiwanese aboriginal intellectuals have been Sinicized and are re-learning their own cultural traditions from elders as acolytes puts them in a position analogous to that of metropolitan ethnographers, except that they are also the others to the metropolis. Since they write predominantly in Chinese, but appropriate and transform the terms of colonizers, their texts are not “what are usually thought of as ‘authentic’ or autochthonous forms of self-representation.”Footnote ¹⁹ Rather, these texts not only reconnect them to their own culture but are conscious constructions in response to, or in dialogue with, metropolitan representations by Japanese and Han ethnographers and travellers. Addressed to both literate aborigines and Han, these aboriginal intellectuals mediate in the texts as translators in a double sense: from the aboriginal languages to Chinese language, and from oral to written forms of representation.

Unlike most Taiwanese aboriginal authors, who are satisfied with writing autoethnographies, the Bunun writer Tian Yage 田雅各 (Tuobasi Tamapima 拓跋斯塔瑪匹瑪)Footnote ²⁰ created modern fiction with autoethnographic elements. Politically and aesthetically he was influenced by the tradition of Taiwanese nativist modern fiction in resisting dominant culture.Footnote ²¹ A precursor to Sun Ta-chuan, Tian was almost the only fiction writer in the early stage of modern Chinese-language aboriginal literature, and for many years was the only aboriginal writer to be established as a writer of Taiwanese modern fiction. His fiction draws our attention not only to the issues but also to the literary imagination and language structure it contains.Footnote ²² This article seeks to explore how his three short stories, set and written in the 1980s,Footnote ²³ are autoethnographic fiction as well as modern fiction portraying contemporary Taiwanese aboriginal society caught between indigenous folkways and colonial modernity, and how the narrators of the stories tackle cultural translation. Central to the first two stories, “Tuobasi Tamapima” and “The Last Hunter” (Zuihou de lieren最後的獵人), is the question of how the traditional Bununs and the dominant society differently understand and interpret the Bunun customs of hunting and cutting wood. The third story “The Wake” (Anhun zhi ye 安魂之夜) revolves around how the Bunun people ceremoniously mourn the death of a Bunun soldier and how differently the old and young Bunun mourners think and behave during the funeral rite. Although the narrators of the three stories are quite different, they overtly or covertly take the position of the aboriginal intellectual negotiating the multiple voices of the texts and serving as cultural translators between two languages, two cultures, and two worldviews. These autoethnographic elements and the ambivalent, transcultural narrations distinguish Tian from many other contemporary Taiwanese writers of modern fiction. Prior to the Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement, he sought both to construct an aboriginal cultural identity vis-à-vis the metropolis and to envision a cultural revival within the indigenous community, while he also explored dilemmas and difficulties. Like other aboriginal intellectuals, he found his culture threatened by colonial modernity in two forms: firstly capitalism, which is aligned with technology, progress and development, but which leads to land pollution and aborigines' impoverishment, and secondly the centralized government's assimilation policies, which deny the value of aboriginal languages and cultures with the ultimate aim of destroying them through state apparatuses. At the same time as he was critiquing modernity and reclaiming cultural identity, however, he himself was at a crossroads between past and present, between traditional tribal knowledge and modern thought. In the last section of the paper, I will explore how in light of Homi K. Bhabha's theory of the untranslatable in cultural translation we can further our discussions of cultural translation and autoethnographic expression in Tian's stories.

Autoethnographic Expression and Cultural Translation in “Tuobasi Tamapima”

Tian Yage was a medical student at Kaoshiung Medical School before he worked as a medical doctor for a number of district health centres in aboriginal areas. He is renowned for his short stories collected in The Last Hunter (1987) and Lovers and Prostitutes (Qingren yu jinü 情人與妓女, 1992). Both short-story collections deal with problems confronted by indigenous people living in the village or in the city, such as loss of hunting grounds, discrimination and exploitation by the dominant society, loss of population due to migration to cities, assimilation into dominant culture, intergenerational cultural gaps and conflict, conflict between men and women, and prostitution. These stories also delve into indigenous peoples' traditional beliefs, ceremonies, taboos and mythologies. Although many stories are set in the village, the relationship between the village and the city is a theme in nearly all the stories. That the city represents the centre of colonial modernity whose influence has infiltrated the village is another implicit theme in the stories. The first story of The Last Hunter, entitled “Tuobasi Tamapima,” portrays the first-person narrator as a medical student with city habits coming back to visit his mother in the village; the story seems autobiographical in that the narrator bears the same aboriginal name as the author. Unlike his ancestors, he hates trekking and disapproves of the traditional farming method of burning the fields. Although his voice is subdued among multiple communal voices as he boards a truck, it is his voice that frames the whole story. At the outset, the narrator is mistaken for a Han by an old Han sentry. Although he immediately reveals his true identity, he revels in being able to pass for a Han: “I have become so white that people don't recognize me as a mountain man. So I'm superior to my people in the village.”Footnote ²⁴ Obviously he has internalized Han values and disparages indigenous folkways; here “white” is a social register that refers not only to the colour of skin but also speech and manners. As the truck approaches his village, he regrets coming back and misses the brilliant, boisterous city. Only the thought of his mother's welcome urges him to go home. If the author uses his Bunun name as the title of the story to show his true identity, he manifests that he is a modern aboriginal intellectual plagued by split consciousness.

Framed as the narrator's trip back to his village, the story “Tuobasi Tamapima” can also be seen as an autoethnographic fiction about the Bunun community under Kuomintang rule, since it presents a dozen villagers with diverse views on indigenous folkways and colonial modernity. Despite differences among them, the younger generations prefer to have money, commodities and modern conveniences whereas old men have reservations about modern ways of life. Old Hunter Wumasi not only dislikes young people who have lost their ancestors' ability to run and chase bare-footed after animals but considers money the filthiest thing in the world. He believes that indigenous people should stick to the traditional life of farming and hunting rather than receive school education or work in factories, for he thinks they can neither compete with Han students in school nor avoid being mistreated when working in factories.

The elders' defence of their hunting and timber rights and bewilderment at the banning of these turn into heated arguments and even engage the narrator in a debate. In having the elders articulate their views as distinct from hegemonic conceptions and perceptions, these conversations constitute the most powerful autoethnographic expression in the story, given that they contest the dominant society's denigrations of aborigines as barbarous poachers and stealers of national wood. As an educated aboriginal, the narrator explains that national laws now claim that those precious trees belong to the Forestry Bureau, and that Hunter Di'an should not cut trees outside the aboriginal reservation again lest he violate the law. His remarks irk Hunter Wumasi so much that the latter calls him “college student,” rebuking him for talking nonsense. Staring at the narrator, he contends that before those who speak Chinese came, those trees belonged to the forest and could always be cut to make furniture. The narrator muses to himself that he is unable to make these elders understand the spirit of a democratic country, for they were born free to hunt, fish and farm. What he fails to see is that the “democratic country” is far from being a democratic one but is rather one of internal colonization in terms of its policies toward aborigines. Hunter Wumasi even claims that the ban on hunting is harmful to nature. Contrary to the beliefs of dominant society, he contends that the Bunun hunter helps maintain the balance of the forest's animal life, for Bunun codes and taboos of hunting enable the hunter to live in tune with nature. Attacking the Forestry Bureau for destroying the forest despite setting up a national reservation for animals, he tells a story about a group of monkeys being forced to move constantly as the old forest is replaced by plantation forest full of the noise of cars, robbing the monkeys of hiding places and food. Given that plantation forest destroys biological diversity in the old forest, his attack is scientifically based. Thus, Hunter Wumasi's criticism of the Kuomintang's policy for depriving aborigines of their hunting rights entails contesting worldviews about how to keep ecological balance – although he does not use such terms. Schooled in indigenous knowledge of nature, he challenges hegemonic conceptions about methods of environmental protection as well as stereotyped images of aborigines as backward and barbarous. In contrast, the narrator's earlier disapproval of the indigenous farming method of burning the fields duplicates hegemonic conceptions; what he does not know is that this farming method together with nomadic farming is more eco-friendly to soil, although less productive.Footnote ²⁵

Even though the narrator endorses city values mostly, it is not clear whether the author takes the same position since he has the elders dispute the law and articulate their knowledge of nature so eloquently. As the only college student in the village, the narrator is both insider and outsider. To the people on the truck he serves as the translator of the laws of the government while at the same time to the reader he is a translator of these people's speech, behaviour and thought, supplying knowledge about what they think of themselves, Bunun values and national laws. As an insider, he notes that a young mother blushes when her baby cries because Bunun mothers hate to be viewed as inadequate mothers, and that Hunter Wumasi tells an incredibly funny story because Bunun hunters are great story-tellers. The narrator's outsider position, however, puts him in a dilemma. Accustomed to city life with its conveniences, laws and survival tactics, he finds it difficult to reason with the elders who stick to indigenous folkways. On several occasions he disagrees with the elders but keeps his thoughts to himself. Echoing the call for school education by the dominant society, he “wanted so much to tell them that wisdom is not confined to the village, that wisdom can conquer evil, idleness, and poverty.”Footnote ²⁶ On the other hand, he also senses the point of the elders' criticism that education and job opportunities become tools of colonialism that take young people away from the village. Aware of his alienation from the sight of the moon of his native land, he cannot help wondering if he had made the right choice leaving the village to attend school. This amounts to a self-critique of, and guilt about, his complicity in the process of Sinicization. He still reveres the elders and remains fascinated by indigenous tradition, especially the stories about hunting, taboos and mythologies; he even secretly joins the chorus of a song, the lyrics of which he almost forgets. In recording instead of giving his answer to the debates between colonial modernity and indigenous culture, the narrator both serves as a translator between two languages and two cultures and shows his torment as a self-divided aboriginal intellectual.

Conflict between Tribal Values and Hegemonic Conceptions in “The Last Hunter”

Tian's portrayal of the elders' assertion of their rights of hunting and cutting wood anticipates the aboriginal activists' Return Our Land Movement in 1988 and boycotting of the state policies of establishing national parks in the 1990s. As the Tsou intellectual Pu Zhongcheng 浦忠成 points out, it was the Japanese that started converting lands owned by aborigines into national reservation or national forest, policies that the Kuomintang continued by seizing the remaining lands owned by aborigines and turning national forest into national park.Footnote ²⁷ Many a national park in Taiwan occupies lands that used to be the living territories of aborigines, lands that gave rise to stories about the origin of the tribes, histories about the migration of clans and villages, and legends about fighting.Footnote ²⁸ By making laws to sever aborigines' ties with their ancestral lands, the Kuomintang not only rendered obsolete aborigines' hunting practices and concepts about nature but destroyed their cultural value systems built upon such customs, knowledge, skills, as well as myths and legends.Footnote ²⁹ The hunting issue raised in “Tuobasi Tamapima” is further explored in “The Last Hunter.” If traditionally a Bunun man is either a hunter or a farmer taking pride in his physical strength, “The Last Hunter” shows how the encroaching modernity threatens his world. Hunter Biaz goes to the forest after a fight with his wife Pasulang but has difficulty finding his prey due to the decrease of animals. What's worse, in order to avoid accusations of poaching and owning an unlicensed gun, he has to bribe a police officer by giving him the best of his game. Biaz sticks to the traditional role of a hunter and farmer, despite having hated his old-fashioned father for doing so and giving him a poor, hard childhood. Urged by Pasulang, he once tried to earn more money by getting a temporary job outside the village, yet was unfairly laid off by the Han employer after toiling for five days. Finding himself cheated and humiliated, he stops getting temporary jobs in spite of Pasulang's constant nagging. Feeling safe and content living in the village, he nevertheless comes to realize that the village is no longer a self-sustaining paradise. A great proportion of forest is turned into national property so that what used to be traditional common hunting ground becomes off limits. Moreover, land development has brought humans, roads and cars, which have intruded upon the living space of animals and forced them to retreat to higher mountains. Even on his own hunting grounds, animals are decreasing so rapidly that he has little use of his hunting skills. If he used to feel proud of being a great hunter, he is faced with the possibility that one day he may have neither prey nor hunting grounds. Above all, Biaz is no longer allowed to hunt freely like his ancestors on his own hunting grounds because the government bans hunting and guns.

Although Biaz remains optimistic and confident, the narrator suggests that indigenous folkways are crumbling due to intensified assimilation policies and new laws that not only deprive aborigines of their livelihood but encourage the invasion of capitalist economy. For one thing, money presents itself as a new value in place of the traditional one. For another, the state power is embodied in the Mainlander police officer, who calls Biaz a “savage” and charges him with law-breaking by his very act of hunting. Duplicating hegemonic stigmatizations, the officer denigrates aborigines as a whole as cruel, lazy, dirty, backward, uneducated, unlawful and shameless. On top of this, he threatens Biaz with words like “All you hunters should be put into jail in order to be educated.”Footnote ³⁰ Claiming that he is a kind-hearted man who has to arrest Biaz to protect animals, he nonetheless reveals his duplicity by eating the meat of a squirrel, which he may have obtained from another aboriginal hunter as a bribe to avoid punishment. He further undermines his own hypocrisy when he suggests that Biaz bribe his way out by giving him the best of his game. Endorsing the assimilation policy, he not only berates Biaz for speaking Chinese with a strong accent but demands Biaz's Chinese name while dismissing his Bunun name as illegitimate. Thus, he denies not only the values of indigenous cultures and languages but the subjectivity of indigenous peoples.

The narrator portrays Biaz as a man whose concerns, fears and joys are shaped by Bunun taboos and beliefs as well as the changing world that encroaches on him. By presenting Biaz as a muscular, amiable, god-fearing and nature-loving hunter who follows the Bunun codes in hunting but who is humiliated and mistreated by the police officer, the story can again be seen as an autoethnographic fiction contesting the hegemonic stereotyped images of the aboriginal hunter. Born into a witch family, Biaz abides by tribal customs and taboos. Thus, when Pasulang throws the small chair he had made for their future child, he is worried that if any of its legs is broken, they may be cursed to have a broken-legged child. Apparently destined to be a hunter, Biaz is born in a month in which, according to the Bunun calendar, men teach boys archery by having them shoot at boars' ears under the moonlight. Hunting connects him to his ancestors through the stories and legends about hunting and tribal histories, as well as knowledge about nature. Enjoying the serene beauty of the forest, Biaz recalls an old Bunun story his father had told about a valiant hunter named Tuobasi who had avenged the death of his baby by shooting one of the two suns at that time – the shot-down sun then turned into the moon. Inspired by the story, Biaz is determined to name his future child Tuobasi regardless of its gender. Hunting is for him not only the way to be a Bunun man but an escape from fighting with Pasulang over money and her miscarriage. Bluffing to a fellow hunter, Biaz naively declares that the population of forest animals remains the same since they are free from vasectomy; in so saying he pokes fun at the government's family planning programme that encourages men to undergo vasectomies. Ironically, even though animals can escape vasectomy, they are still threatened by land development and plantation forest.

Although the focus of narration in “The Last Hunter” is mostly Biaz, it shifts sometimes to other characters such as Pasulang, the Han police officer and a Hakka grocer. The impersonal third-person omniscient narrator only reveals his presence as aboriginal intellectual/translator when he mediates between different vantage points or when he comments on the black smoke that rises from the chimneys of the villagers' houses: “Here nobody ever thinks that black smoke causes air pollution, since people believe that black smoke soars to the sky with the clouds.”Footnote ³¹ When Biaz runs into the police officer, the narrator depicts Biaz as both astonished by the officer's unkindness and amused to find the greedy officer's nose resembles that of a hungry mountain boar. The narrator also portrays the officer's fears of Biaz's physical strength and machete as he threatens him with jailing, Biaz's compromises due to his fears of imprisonment and Pasulang's leaving him, and Biaz's anger as he calls the officer a bandit in Bunun. Juxtaposing Biaz's covert insistence on coming back to hunt (even without a gun) with the officer's suggestion that Biaz give up hunting, the narrator reveals the conflict between tribal values and hegemonic conceptions. He negotiates the clash of the two worldviews by dismantling the officer's claim of being a civilized man championing animal protection. If the title “The Last Hunter” implies the imminent doom of the hunting practice, Biaz's final words suggest his continual resistance.

The Power of Oral Tradition and the Debate between Orality and Writing in “The Wake”

An autoethnographic story, “The Wake” portrays a wake mourning the death of an aboriginal soldier and is implicitly in dialogue with the dominant society which is ignorant of indigenous culture, while it also shows the generation gap within the village. Starting with an ill omen the dead soldier's father gets just before he receives the bad news, the story shifts to the night of the funeral and the multiple voices which probe into the cause of the death. While the parallel shift from the soldier's Chinese name to his Bunun name marks how the dead man is returned to his community, discussions over the cause of his death not only suggest the soldier's violation of the Bunun codes of masculinity but touch on the indigenous people's relationship with the military and the state. Three different versions of how and why Idik died are offered. The first, provided by Idik's close friend, attributes his death to his troubled love relationship with a promiscuous Atayal woman. The second, offered by his uncle, ascribes his death to social pressures in military training, specifically the shooting orders which gave him nightmares about killing people. The third, provided by the village officerFootnote ³² who accompanied Idik's father to bring back his corpse and based on information from the military, attributes his death to emotional problems that led to his alleged disobedience to his superiors. In all three versions, the possibility of Idik's death being a suicide looms. Young people tend to think that Idik killed himself because of his painful breakup with his girlfriend, whereas elders believe the real cause is his inability to resolve the conflict between the shooting orders and his own ethics. The elders' view may have something to do with the fact that historically aborigines had been sent to the battlefields fighting for their colonizers. Both the Japanese in the past and the Kuomintang at that time demanded allegiance without recognizing their status as real subjects of the state.

These different views on the cause of Idik's death shed light on Bunun ethics and conceptions of masculinity inflected by Christianity. According to his uncle, Idik's ethics were moulded by traditional Bunun beliefs in loving “people on the same land” and inflected by Christian beliefs in universal love. As a soldier, however, he was compelled to repudiate his ethics. On the other hand, Idik's uncle may have broadened the Bunun notion of “people on the same land” here to include other tribes and peoples. This suggests that Bunun ethics are under the influence of Christianity.Footnote ³³ As far as notions of masculinity are concerned, Bunun society traditionally put a premium on valour and manhood. Idik, however, was effeminate. Since it is generally believed that no one has ever heard of a Bunun man killing himself, for a Bunun man even to express a suicidal wish is deemed unmanly.

The wake is centred on two important rituals: first, Idik's mother drives Idik's soul out of the village by flicking a bunch of reeds at the corners of the house and at the coffin before flicking the reeds at the ground as she walks along the path toward the setting sun; and second, the relatives and family friends sing a Bunun elegy. While the elegy both celebrates human life – to help the dead Idik to be sent to heaven – and consoles the souls of Idik's parents, family and friends, most young people from Idik's family cannot sing it. Instead, they choose to watch videotapes of Japanese wrestling matches. In their excitement about the wrestling, they almost forget that they are mourners at the wake for Idik and that earlier they had dug a hole in the public graveyard for Idik's coffin. The juxtaposition of the ritual performers with the videotape viewers is telling of the intergenerational cultural gap and the tension between indigenous culture and colonial modernity. At the time the story is set, there were only three television broadcasting stations in Taiwan (the Cable Television Bill did not pass until 1993). Still in the control of the government or the Kuomintang, television was a powerful means of colonial modernity, even more powerful perhaps than school education because it apparently aimed to provide entertainment rather than instruction. Fascinated by television, younger generations turned away from Bunun culture.

Since the wake is a Bunun social occasion for mourners to share stories about the dead and sing elegies for them, it is a culturally important event for Bunun people to relive and re-enact their oral tradition. Aside from performing rituals, the mourners tell each other Bunun stories, myths, legends and taboos. Performativity is integral to oral tradition. Since it is not written down, there may be different versions of the same story. Even old people may forget and need to check with an elder about the details of a taboo. As the only young man intrigued by such old stories and taboos, the village officer wishes that they could all be written down to be better understood and preserved. The old people disagree, however. An old minister argues that only when one breaks taboo do elders explain it and then one learns about it, whereas a written law is something given and oppressive, allowing for no negotiating ground. The privileging of orality over writing not only indicates pride in oral tradition but carries overtones of resistance to state apparatuses such as laws, education and the media.

Like the narrator of “The Last Hunter,” the impersonal third-person narrator of “The Wake” serves as an unobtrusive translator. The narrator sometimes narrates partially from different characters' viewpoints and sometimes from the vantage point of the community. By presenting the inner thoughts of Idik's father and the village officer, for instance, the narrator not only contrasts the views of different generations but helps negotiate and translate between different positions. Idik's father is traditional but does not refrain from breaking taboo sometimes, whereas the educated village officer is unfamiliar with indigenous culture but seems interested to learn it. Their positions can thus be critiqued by each other. Most importantly, the narrator presents the multivocality of the community and shows the power of indigenous oral culture. In fact, the very form of “The Wake” succeeds in reproducing oral culture by not only transcribing the speech of diverse individuals but also presenting how stories invite stories, and legends invite legends in an on-going development. The interaction and role-exchange between storyteller and listener distinguish the story from modern fiction. As Walter Benjamin notes in “The Storyteller,” whereas the novelist secludes himself in writing, the storyteller “takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.”Footnote ³⁴ The same story is told and retold in different ways, carrying the traces of the storytellers. The layers of retellings constitute a web of collective memories and experiences and show the living power of oral tradition.

It is noteworthy that the on-going debate in “The Wake” between writing and orality ends in an ambivalent “both/and.” On the one hand, the debate ends with the advice by an unidentified voice that “we should get together more often and live together. If we don't want to abandon Bunun ways of living, we can't leave our village. In the past, taboos and legends had been in the charge of the leader of the tribe. Now we are on our own to get such knowledge, since the village head does not take care of it.”Footnote ³⁵ The stress on reviving the community and oral culture in the tribe is made more urgent by social changes under modernity, with the leader of the tribe replaced by the village head. On the other hand, the narrator still endorses writing, since this story, like Tian's other published stories, is presented in written form. As a translator between two cultures and two languages, then, the narrator suggests that indigenous people depend on the village for the revival of their culture and heritage; at the same time, they cannot survive without knowing how to cope with modernity, although modernity often comes with assimilation. Just as the tension between indigenous culture and dominant culture is inevitable, so the modern aborigine is caught in split consciousness.

The Untranslatable in Cultural Translation and a Call for Rethinking the Taiwanese Modern Subject

Himself trained in modern medicine, Tian Yage is self-conscious about writing autoethnographic fiction and his own role as a cultural translator. As he confesses in his preface to The Last Hunter, his ultimate goals of writing are firstly to enable different ethnic communities to understand each other so they can get along peacefully and secondly to arouse aborigines' interest in creative writing.Footnote ³⁶ Austronesian languages being spoken ones without a writing system, he has to think first in Bunun and translate his thought into Chinese when he writes.Footnote ³⁷ In his introduction to The Last Hunter, the Han writer Wu Jinfa 吳錦發 insightfully elaborates the fascinating qualities of Tian's fiction: a unique language and narrative voice, a colourful portrayal of Bunun communal and everyday life, and profound reflection on the uneven relationship between dominant culture and minority culture.Footnote ³⁸ In an important article on the aboriginal writers' appropriation and subversion of Chinese through translating indigenous speech into Chinese writing, the Han cultural critic Fu Dawei 傅大為 also touches on Tian's intervention in his stories.Footnote ³⁹ In the last part of the paper, I would like to examine how by applying Homi Bhabha's theory of the untranslatable in cultural translation we can further our discussions of the issue of cultural translation and authoethnographic expression in these stories. While Walter Benjamin has addressed the untranslatable in translating from one language to another, Bhabha develops this “foreignness of languages” into the newness of cultural translation. As he explains,

Due to the differential systems of social and cultural signification, the disjunction in cultural temporalities needs to be negotiated. The foreign element in the performance of cultural translation reveals the “indeterminate temporality of the in-between.”Footnote ⁴² Writing in the colonizer's language, paradoxically Tian cannot help but turn aboriginal culture and language into a foreign element – especially to the Han reader – in order to underscore aboriginal subjectivity and difference. In other words, the autoethnographic elements in these works of fiction mainly constitute the foreign element. In light of Bhabha's theory, one may ask the following questions: what is the narrator's strategy of cultural translation? How does the narrator in each story retain the foreign element in cultural translation and contribute to the autoethnographic expression? How is the narrative voice a complex modern one positioned in the “indeterminate temporality of the in-between”?

Most of the conversations and interior monologues in the stories are in fact spoken or thought in Bunun but presented in Chinese, which means that they are translations by the narrators. The narrators often present the Chinese translation without drawing our attention to it. Nevertheless, the diverse views of the characters on indigenous folkways highlight the clash between the views of Bunun hunters and hegemonic conceptions, as well as intergenerational conflict within the village. I would argue that, given the marginalization and foreignness of aborigines at that time, the apparently smooth translation on the part of the narrators is to bridge cultural difference and make the aboriginal world accessible to Han readers. The narrators, notwithstanding, also reveal and negotiate the disjunction in cultural temporalities by sometimes presenting the untranslatable. One important strategy is to give both the Bunun name and the Chinese name, which the author himself exemplifies by having both printed on the covers of his two books. All the protagonists of the stories are mainly called by their Bunun names to indicate their cultural identity, and these names are rendered in Chinese homophones based on their transliteration. Bunun words and phrases in the stories serve similar functions. Although the stories are written mainly in Chinese, they blend some Bunun terms and phrases whose meanings are explained in the endnotes. Inasmuch as these transliterations remain illegible to Han readers without the endnotes, they signify the untranslatable in translating from Bunun to Chinese. Half of these Bunun words and phrases are culture-specific and have no equivalents in Chinese; as a result, the endnotes introduce the reader to Bunun concepts and knowledge. Interestingly, the other Bunun words do have equivalents in Chinese. The endnotes to “Tuobasi Tamapima,” for instance, explain common words and phrases such as “mother” and “thanks.” When the narrator of “Tuobasi Tamapima” wishes to see his mother at his journey's end, he uses the Chinese transliteration of the Bunun word “dina 笛娜” (mother). In addition, terms such as “buluo 部落” (aboriginal village or tribe) also mark cultural difference.Footnote ⁴³ Such rendering underscores the foreign element in the interstices in cultural temporalities. Moreover, to manifest aboriginal perception as distinct from that of Han one, the narrators use humorous or satirical phrases such as “Hunters love bluffing so much they can even move the whole village” (lieren zui xihuan chuiniu, tamen chui de dong zhengge buluo 獵人最喜歡吹牛, 他們吹得動整個部落),Footnote ⁴⁴ “Educated girls wearing gloves and stockings to plant rice shoots scare those shoots to death” (duguo shu de nüsheng xiatian chayang, dai shoutao, chuan chang siwa, yang miao dou bei tamen xiasi le 讀過書的女生下田插秧, 戴手套, 穿長絲襪, 秧苗都被他們嚇死了),Footnote ⁴⁵ or “Those brown-skinned government officials have amazingly variable backbone” (neixie zongse pifu de gongwuyuan, tamen de jizhui zhen bianhua duoduan 那些棕色皮膚的公務員, 他們的脊椎真變化多端).Footnote ⁴⁶ Not surprisingly, these nonstandard Chinese phrases often inhabit the “indeterminate temporality of the in-between” in cultural translation by describing aborigines' interaction with or response to modern experiences. Apart from presenting a creolized cultural experience, all such nonstandard use serves to creolize the Chinese language for the use of indigenous peoples. Thus, instead of denying the disjunction in cultural temporalities by slavishly writing standard Chinese, the narrators re-write the Chinese language by translating Bunun into Chinese to make the latter a new indigenous language.

Another very important strategy in retaining the foreign element is re-inscribing indigenous oral culture by transcribing the stories, myths and legends the characters tell each other. Considering that these serve the same social function as codes of behaviour, taboo, ceremonies and witchcraft for indigenous people,Footnote ⁴⁷ this also constitutes powerful autoethnographic expression in these stories. As Pu Zhongcheng points out, for aborigines, religious beliefs, cultural customs, codes of social conduct, concepts and values, knowledge and experience are often mixed up.Footnote ⁴⁸ Just as Hunter Wumasi's story about the origin of Dirty Water Creek in “Tuobasi Tamapima” contains the history of inter-tribal fighting and a clan's migration, so the legend Biaz's father related about a valiant hunter in “The Last Hunter” evokes the mythic past of the tribe. Aside from these communal old stories with legendary or archetypal figures, there are also stories about the recent past with ordinary people. In “Tuobasi Tamapima,” the story about Drunkard Gobil's grandfather, who had been beaten by the leader of the tribe for having skipped a raid on a Tsou village, indicates that not every Bunun hunter is a valiant warrior. Moreover, if story-telling is a salient feature of each story, “The Wake” is itself a tour de force of aboriginal oral tradition. Apart from having stories invite stories, sometimes the narration is reduced to a minimum so that the reader has to figure out the identity of the speakers in conversations and their relationship. In so doing the narrator trains the reader acoustically, suggesting that story-tellers must have oral memories and that the story should be read aloud, if not performed. Above all, the debate in the story about orality and writing is significant in responding to hegemonic conceptions that aborigines have neither history nor literature by revealing that they have oral history and literature which is passed down through communal activities. Prior to Sun Ta-chuan, Tian here portrays aborigines as living in their history and literature through sharing stories and legends in everyday activities. As Sun points out, historical accounts of Taiwanese aborigines used to be written by colonizers, such as Chinese travellers and officials, Western missionaries and Japanese anthropologists, who treated them as the object rather than the subject of history.Footnote ⁴⁹ Blinkered by their worldviews, the colonizers failed to see that Taiwan's indigenous peoples had resonant, longstanding oral histories, and that for thousands of years Taiwanese aborigines depended on diverse ceremonies, activities, customs, and institutions for the collective transmission of their historical memories and communal values.Footnote ⁵⁰

While the stress on performativity and the oral/aural in these stories points to the foreign element in cultural translation, it should be noted that these stories are superbly written modern fiction with complicated narrative voices. Modern fiction, as a modern cultural discourse originating in the West and developing in late 20th-century Taiwan, stresses the narrative technique of “showing” rather than “telling,” sophisticated characterization and use of point of view. It is often infected with the modernist sensibility described by Edward Said as “self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony.”Footnote ⁵¹ Tian Yage masters these techniques and conveys the modernist sensibility so well in his stories that his achievement is acclaimed by Han writers such as Ye Shitao, Li Qiao and Wu Jinfa. All three stories vividly portray a rural aboriginal community and a wide range of characters with distinct personalities, behaviour, ways of thinking and speaking. The narrative voice mediating the multiple voices in these stories is a complicated, ambivalent one, situated in the “indeterminate temporality of the in-between” in cultural translation. “Tuobasi Tamapima” delineates the first-person narrator as a self-conscious aboriginal intellectual caught between the metropolis and the village, hence his ambivalence and the constant disruption of speech and thought in his narration. Given the discrimination against aborigines in dominant society, he is secretly glad that he can pass for a Han, even though he reveals his aboriginal identity immediately. Given the patriarchal Bunun society, he dares not talk back to the elders, even though he knows he is right about survival tactics in the dominant society. Guilty about his Sinicization but convinced that aborigines cannot survive by sticking to the old folkways, he is smitten with double consciousness. The other two stories display an ironic, self-conscious awareness differently. The impersonal third-person narrators adroitly shifting in and out of the characters suggest that each of their viewpoints is limited and partial while only the self-conscious narrators, presumably the aboriginal intellectuals, know what is at stake in the encounter with colonial modernity. “The Last Hunter” ironically portrays Biaz's limited knowledge and takes him into the snare of state power, whose embodiment turns out to be a hypocritical, corrupt Han official. “The Wake” ironically depicts a vibrant communal event plagued by signs of its cultural decline, as Idik's death triggers concerns for transgression of masculinity and taboo which, together with worries about young people's assimilation, culminate in a self-conscious debate on whither the aboriginal community goes under modernity.

While both the narrative voice and the form that combines modern fiction and autoethnographic fiction are positioned in the “indeterminate temporality of the in-between” in cultural translation, these stories suggest that the aboriginal intellectual's split consciousness can be enabling as well as painful. For the aboriginal intellectual cannot have indigenous identity without problematizing the barbarous/civilized, backward/modern binary oppositions that underwrite modernity, nor can he/she negotiate between indigenous cultural traditions and hegemonic conceptions without knowing both well. The aboriginal intellectual needs to have a double vision so that he/she may critique the values of each with those of the other.

One can further consider Tian Yage's purpose in writing Chinese-language modern fiction. There is obviously some contradiction in calling for return to the aboriginal village and writing in Chinese on the part of Tian and other aboriginal writers. However, as Sun Ta-chuan points out, even if technically speaking it is possible to write purely in Romanization or Chinese homophones of transliteration, it will reach few readers since few people will take the trouble to learn so many different languages.Footnote ⁵² The question here is not just that the aboriginal tribes speak mutually unintelligible languages,Footnote ⁵³ but also that each aboriginal tribe has a small population. Writing in Chinese helps break out of tribal isolation and assert pan-ethnic aboriginal identity. I would argue that writing modern fiction enables Tian Yage to assert not only his aboriginal identity but his identity as a modern subject, a double identity which again situates Tian in “the indeterminate temporality of the in-between.” Writing Chinese-language modern fiction establishes his position as an aboriginal intellectual and is a tacit recognition on his part of the legacy of colonial modernity, but his purpose is to manoeuvre for a rethinking of the Taiwanese modern subject as well. As the narrative voice of his stories is one of an aboriginal speaking as a subject rather than an object, speaking with the backdrop of the aboriginal village as the locus of indigenous traditions vis-à-vis the dominant society, Tian is implicitly demanding aboriginal rights and a reconsideration of the Taiwanese modern subject as well as a shift in the paradigm of historiography on Taiwan. Indeed, his other stories such as “Ma Nan Understood,” “The Memories that Cannot be Washed Away” and “In Search of a Name” explicitly address naming rights and the rights of writing aboriginal history.

While the diverse views in Tian's three stories indicate the influence of colonial modernity on indigenous communities, the narrators alternate between ethnic pride and dusk consciousness. Such alternation is inevitable, given the new possibilities offered by Taiwan Aboriginal Movement and the dilemma it confronted in the 1980s, and is perhaps prevalent in many indigenous movements. On the issue of the Pacific Islanders' reassertion of native identities or struggle for sovereignty, Arif Dirlik notes that the indigenous peoples of the present “are products of a modern historical experience who are internally differentiated, partake of the social, ideological and cultural diversities of the present and, consequently, hold diverse views of the present, the past and the future.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus the point is “not to recover a past that is gone, but reasserting its values as the source of new visions for the future against hegemonic conceptions of histories that deny all value to native traditions.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This echoes Sun Ta-chuan's argument which I discussed at the beginning of the article, and is a view shared by many Taiwanese aboriginal writers. With the rise of the Taiwan Aboriginal Movement and particularly its evolving into the Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement in the 1990s, there has been a wave of vibrant aboriginal writing which combines creative writing with political activism. Rather than seek to recover the tribal order of the past which is forever lost, it reasserts the values of indigenous traditions as the source of new visions for the future against hegemonic conceptions. Such writing, which is often autoethnographic, has succeeded in raising consciousness about aboriginal rights and cultural traditions as well as ethnic equality in Taiwan in the past two decades. The lifting of martial law in 1987 and President Lee Teng-hui's taking office in 1988 launched Taiwan into a new Kuomintang era; subsequently, widespread “language and memory reclamation projects” were implemented in the 1990s to nurture Taiwanese consciousness. In the new atmosphere of multiculturalism, the call for aboriginal subjectivity went hand in hand with the call for Taiwanese subjectivity. Significantly, as de-Sinicization became indispensable for the reclaiming of Taiwanese identity and culture, the sign of indigeneity was reinterpreted as constituting the Taiwanese “self” by the opposition party in 1996.Footnote ⁵⁶ Recognizing indigenous matrilineal rootsFootnote ⁵⁷ is an important move towards reconsidering the Taiwanese modern subject, although it also raises questions about the co-option of the Aboriginal Movement by the Taiwanese Identity Movement. With aboriginal culture reviving and aboriginal literature flourishing now, one cherishes all the more the vision of a precursor like Tian Yage, who underlined his aboriginal identity without losing his claim to be a Taiwanese modern subject. His stories suggest that indigenous identity is defined in relation to the indigenous community, which in turn, being heterogeneous itself, sustains indigenous cultural tradition vis-à-vis dominant culture. On the other hand, he calls for a re-conceptualization of the Taiwanese modern subject by demanding that ethnic diversity be taken into account.