by Chiru Yang “We will be foreigners wherever we are,” said Professor Shen Chih Chung of the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. “We always have to (re)blend into local society, even if we have not been there for a long time.” “Once we leave our home country,” he said, “we are in an irreversible process of disfiguration, and there is no way of turning back.” During his twenties and thirties, Prof. Shen had to face the novelty of living in France. But when we see him now topped with a beret and holding a pipe in his mouth, he certainly seems French. Is it just nostalgia? Or has he just picked up a new style? His memory of his days in Paris, he admitted, where he followed in the footsteps of famous philosopher Jacques Derrida, has been entirely romanticised. From plucking strawberries in the suburbs of Paris, to roaming on his bike around the city, to pondering the paintings in the Louvre, the only purpose he felt was to relish every slice of life. “If there is anything I miss in terms of French culture,” he related, “it would have to be their sense of politeness, and the art of speaking and behaving even your genuine sentiments are different.” This, he said, is totally opposite to Taiwanese society.
Returning to his homeland was not an easy task. As far as he can recall, the first term he taught at NTU a student pointed out that he spoke Chinese with an odd accent. On another occasion, he attempted to take a stroll in Taipei just as he did in Europe, and some of his family found it ridiculous: “Why not just take a bus?” On the whole, he admitted that he has had a hard time understanding the way that people approach things. “The brain is an untouchable area,” he explained, “and my brain seems to be composed in a way different from both the French and the Taiwanese.” Perhaps this is the reason he will not feel at home wherever he is, after having staying for many years in an exotic land. To Find a Family by Founding One “There was no good reason to end this interminable voyage in France,” he remarked, if it was not the idea of founding a family in order to find where he truly belonged. It was a chilly and dark morning in a quaint town in Germany that changed his life. A pair of drowsy eyes was arrested by an amazing image outside his window. His neighbour’s family was enjoying their breakfast, talking and laughing in a warm and joyous atmosphere, whereas he was shivering nonstop and feeling cold and lonely. This made him burningly desire to have a family and stirred him into action. He discussed the idea with his girlfriend in Paris, and then went straight back to Taipei and got married immediately. “Even now,” he said proudly, “breakfast is the most enjoyable time of day with my family.” But it appears that this decision was more complicated than salmon spawning their eggs in the river where they were born. “I would always feel that I was a guest in France,” he complained, “and I wanted to be the head of my own family.” In France he would always stumble upon invisible barriers even if he had been officially accepted by the local community. The solidarity of a Chinese family seemed to him more reliable, and perhaps deep in his mind he still clung to a part of Chinese values even after living away from Taiwan for so long. A Series of Unconscious Decisions Many of our decisions are made without our true comprehension. Why did he go to France just to be different? Why did he decide to return to Taiwan? Why did he come back to Taipei as an ideal place to raise his child? Apparently, even to him, the answers were not always completely clear. What gave him the desire to depart from his home country? Was it some innate impulse to leave his nest? Why was he obsessed with France instead of other countries? Was he just over-idealising the culture there? “It might sometimes seem that we know why we insist on certain things,” he pointed out, “however, actually, we don’t.” As a scholar in psychoanalysis, he believes that to some degree humans are limited by their unconscious desires, which might be called their fate. But it is pointless to struggle with questions of determinism since it does not really matter. Everything is unchangeable. “I never thought that one day I would become a professor in a literature department either!” he laughed. a
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May 2024
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