TALLER No. 3: PREVENCIÓN DE ACCIDENTES EN EL HOGAR . 72

First, there are generational differences in LN Village. Cultural reproduction concerns the maintenance, modification, and discarding of diasporic living prac- tices among the generations born and raised in the post-migration era. Everyday cultural practices at home and in the village all shape the identities and behav- iours of the second and succeeding generations. And the house is a prime agent of socialization because a ready-made environment fashioned by a previous generation and lived in for a long time becomes an object of thought (Carsten and

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Hugh-Jones 1995: 2). The conditioning factors affecting identity and activity among younger generations which set them apart from their immigrant par- ents/grandparents include: meeting people from other communities in education and the workplace, forming relationships with people from other ethnic groups, growing awareness of vernacular traditions across the island of Taiwan, and in- creasing social mobility and immersion in Taiwanese popular and religious cul- ture. Collective memory is therefore also generation-specific because the period of late adolescence and early adulthood is a prominent source of generational memories (Belk 1990). In this respective, children not only ‘represent continuity’ (in the classic formulation), but may be said to ‘embody processes of growth, regeneration, and transformation’ (Carsten 2000: 16). There are understandable differences between the first and the subsequent generations of Juancun

Waishengren.36

According to Mr Li (Li 2006), a second-generation and the only ‘village historian,’ some first-generation residents started their own families in Shanghai before retreating with military forces to Taiwan. In LN Village, about 30 per cent of the second-generation villagers were born in mainland China and then moved to Taiwan with their parents. The second generation, lacking the inherited ad- vantages of their native peers, had to work harder to become successful. As to those who had chances to seek second life outside of Taiwan, some left to study abroad or joined a ship’s crew while others married American soldiers. Since education was key to upward social mobility, first-generation villagers strove to give their children a better learning environment and hoped for the best. Due to limited social networks, most of the second generation devoted themselves to

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Second-generation Waishengren, or 'second-generation Mainlanders', refer to the offspring generation raised by the first-generation immigrant Mainlanders: not those who came to Taiwan as grown-ups, but those born in Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, or who came to Taiwan in their early childhood, together with their parents at the end of the Chinese civil war (1946-9), and who were raised and politically socialized in Taiwan under the Mainlander-controlled dictatorial period of government of the Republic (1948-87) (Corcuff 2011: 37).

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‘military, civil and teaching careers’ (軍公教); few made managed to start their own business. ‘Like father, like son,’ many second-generation sons went into the army (Tsao 2007), primarily because it helped relieve their parents’ burden. Their tuition was waived, and monthly allowances were paid. However, sec-

ond-generation villagers were still represented by all trades and professions. The second-generation Waishengren are now in their fifties or sixties, currently at the apex of their active lives and professional careers. In the 2000s, four former generals, a number of lieutenant colonels or colonels, doctors, teachers and public servants were sons and daughters of LN Village, which was also home to a few prominent citizens, including Ms Chong (the city councillor), Mr Fang Jr (the head of JG Borough), Mr Chang (the village head), Mr Lee (the head of the One Person One Tale Theatrical Company), Mr Hu (the head of Chi Deh Crane En- gineering Co.), and others such as college tutors, military education instructors, and school teachers (Lin 2009).

Mr Li points out (Li 2006) a few facts about the second generation. First, in times of financial distress, the eldest child was expected to start work as soon as pos- sible to share the burden of the family to give their younger siblings a better education. Daughters, particularly older siblings, used to strive for the best and were of great tenacity. Second, the second generation grew up together in the village: the elder ones looked after the younger ones, and played hard and long every day. ‘Those days were full of happiness,’ Mr Li recalls. They bonded ex- tremely well. Therefore, children of the juancun may take on very different roads, but they always care about one another, share a sense of honour and justice, and patriotism. Third, the military salary was raised in 1980, and some

first-generation villagers decided to retire from the army and sought second ca- reers. Between 1986 and 1990, many of their children left home to work in the cities and start their own families. In the years following the early 2000s, third generation and their grandparents were among the main residents of LN Village while working-age second generation were away. After the mid-2000s, the third generation no longer needed daily care from their grandparents and returned to

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their home outside of LN Village, leaving the first generation quiet days and nights, empty houses and rooms, and a palpable sense of desolation.

My daughter-in-law didn’t want me to live with her and my son under one roof. She would rather rent a separate apartment for me. Though she made a lot of money from her business (a preparatory school), she was unfilial to me: never cooked me a meal after marrying my son. But I would sneak into their home, and then clean the house, make their bed, and wash their clothes (Mrs Chen, interview, 19 March, 2010).

My eldest son and his wife live in a four-floor detached house (1 mile away) with plenty of rooms, but his children didn’t want to live with them. Therefore after marriage my grandson bought another house in Jubei (2.5 miles away), which cost them 8 million NT dollars (approximately 160 thousand pounds) (Mrs Pan, interview, 29 September, 2009).

Mrs Pan, who was born in China, disagrees with her grandson’s decision of not living with his parents, while Mrs Chen, born in Taiwan and married to a low-rank LN villager, takes the independent life of her son and daughter-in-law as disre- spect. Similar feelings and complaints among others were vented during my fieldwork, but head-on collisions were seldom observed. The narratives not only give us an outline of social practices of kinship but also show us that those who were born and raised in Taiwan have different ideas about home from those of the exiled generation (and their Taiwanese spouses). Since issues of cultural reproduction naturally raise questions concerning the maintenance and modifi- cation among the subsequent generations born and raised in post-migration settings (Vertovec 2000: 15-16), the issue of generational difference requires further investigation through historical/diachronic analysis (Yang and Chang 2010: 121).

In addition to differences between generations, there are also gender differences. In the village built for air force soldiers and their dependents, the role of women, compared to that of their husbands, was more challenging, changeable and adaptable. The position of women in families and in the wider immigrant com-

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munity often underwent considerable transformation, particularly when women took up post-migration employment. Domestic service was one of the gateways to a better life in LN Village. Mrs Pan described her life of raising her children and working as a maid for a professor of National Tsing Hua University, while Mrs Zheng recollected those days of hardship in the 1950s:

Before dawn back then, I had to walk to the faculty accommodation, and began daily chores from igniting coal balls, boiling water, filling the flask, doing the laundry, and sweeping the rooms. His house was so spacious that I could not clean it in one day. Before noon, I hung clothes on the airer, washed the dishes from last-night’s dinner, pre- pared the rice and processed the food for him to cook before rushing home for making lunch for my six kids returning home from school. Around 2pm after doing the laundry at home, I went back to the pro- fessor’s for more housework and dinner preparation (Mrs Pan, inter- view, 29 September, 2009).

It was very difficult for us in the past. Each day I had to make both ends meet by laundering ten suits of uniforms and four bed linens of soldiers stationed nearby. Even when I was pregnant, I strived to earn more money by working as a school janitor. The time was so rough that I tried not to recall it (Mrs Zheng, interview, 17 December, 2009).

In the 1960s, women and children in the village became temporary manual workers, manufacturing small products such as Christmas lights. Together they bit the cord off, connected it to the bulb, and covered it with colourful plastic petals; when their children were asleep, they tested the circuits.37 This manual work increased their income significantly and changed the landscape:

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I used to make hairnets until 11 pm every evening and earned 600 NT dollars per month, which was 100 dollars more than my husband’s ar- my pay. The construction cost of the kitchen and the three bedrooms was paid using the money I gained from making hairnets and through ‘Rotating Savings and Credit Association’ (互助會) (Mrs Chou, interview, 21 January, 2010).38

Women had to face long-day absences of their husbands in military service, overcome difficult days without stable electricity and water supply, and feed their children with limited resources. These women calculated and saved, with a constant eye to improvements. They worked diligently to realise their dreams of a better education and home for their families. Mr Li sang the praises of the juancun women (Li 2006): ‘Without the hardworking mothers who shared the burden of the family, supported husbands and raised kids, we couldn’t make it to today’. However, the temperaments and life of women vary in different types of juancun: women in Air Force villages enjoying ballroom dancing, those in Army villages restraining themselves, those in Navy villages being fond of playing cards, those in military police villages mostly native Taiwanese, and the ones in intelligence agent villages living a widow-like life.

If we view gender as a negotiated, contested, and interactive process (Martinez and Ames 1997), women are highly skilled creators and producers of decorative and useful objects, and they participate in the social labour, which actively en- gage in the creation, safeguarding and transformation of social relations (Bounia 2012; Goggin and Tobin 2009). Women and houses are central both to the ‘domestic’ process of creating relatedness inside houses and the establishment and reproduction of whole communities (Carsten 2000: 18). In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be argued that a house is built by women,

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since men only know how to build a house from the outside (Bachelard 1994: 68). The material culture of LN Village which makes the community’s gender as- sumptions more visible, and the women’s positions and roles are further explored in chapters 3 and 4.

Finally, there are differences in ethnic identity. As discussed in 1.2.1, there are four imagined major ethnic groups in Taiwan. In 1921, 28 years before the ma- jority of Waishengren moved to Taiwan, 66.8 per cent of the population of the East District were Hoklo, while 33.2 per cent were Hakka (Lo 2005). The de- mography of it dramatically changed after WWII. The formation of the juancun is entwined with the shifting of the armed forces. Residents of LN Village came from various provinces of North, Central, and South China. Most of them crossed the Taiwan Strait by sea (only a few by air). Of the 214 households in LN Village, the majority of men were from Anhui, Jiangsu and Shandong provinces where they were recruited.39 They started their family in Taiwan so that over 80 per cent of households were multicultural in nature (Hoklo, Hakka and aboriginals) (Li 2006; Tsao 2007). However, in the absence of more reliable data, it is difficult to ac- curately state the current demographic breakdown.

Many mothers, such as Mrs Zheng, Mrs Jia, Mrs Bian, and Mrs Chou, etc., were from Yun-nan provinces (in South-West China), so was my mother (Ms Wang, interview, 30 September, 2009).

There were native Taiwanese housewives here. Quite a few soldiers whose houses were located near the head of the village married Hoklo or Hakka wives. I was bullied by my (Chinese) neighbour. She even threatened me not to touch her newly-painted wall so it would not be

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In LN Village, most male villagers are privates, captains and lieutenants. Their original family homelands are Anhui (17 per cent), Jiangsu (15 per cent), Shandong (11 per cent), Zhejiang (10 per cent), Hunan (8 per cent), Henan (8 per cent), Guangdong (7 per cent), and Yunnan (6 per cent), where they were recruited (Li 2006).

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smeared. There were rumours and slanders against me which made me feel wronged in this village. My disappointing husband worsened the situation. I said to myself, ‘try not to care how many neighbours look down upon me – a Taiwanese Hoklo married to a loser in juancun’ (Mrs Chen, interview, 19 March, 2010).

Some mainland Chinese housewives were overbearing, always ad- dressing me as ‘Taiwanese’ with a derogatory meaning, while others treated me nicely. Later on I played Cupid in introducing a friend of mine (of aboriginal Lukai and Hoklo descent) from my hometown Pingtung (South-East Taiwan), now my sister-in-law, to my husband’s brother. We became good company in juancun (Mrs Tsai, interview, 30 September, 2009).

There was a time when harsh tension existed between housewives of different ethnic identities, but the ethnic diversity inside and outside the village continued to increase through time and international mobility. As the first generation grew older and physically weaker, care/nursing workers became the latest newcomers to the community.

The migrant nursing worker has been hired to take care of Mr Guo for two months. I teach her how to cook. She is a quick learner and a good cook now. She is an experienced care worker, who once worked in Hong Kong (Mrs Guo, interview, 14 July, 2010).

After decades of settling down here, the villagers originally from across the vastness of China gradually took roots in Taiwan, and saw this land as their homeland (Li 2006: 37). The ‘homeland’, however, is not of any general or tradi- tional definition, but of a reinvented, new kind of significance that is problematic to this research and is explored in Chapters 6 and 7.

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