In 1983,1 when Bai Xianyong白先勇, a Modernist Chinese American writer from Taiwan, published Nei Zi 孽子 (Evil Son),2 it was the first modern Taiwanese novel centered on male, same sex desire. Howard Goldblatt’s 1990 English translation is titled Crystal Boys.3 Bai’s novel Nei Zi focuses on a tongzhi同志 (homosexual)4 community of hustlers in Taipei in 1970, as told by a homeless teenager. During this period, the Guomindang (Nationalist) party ruled Taiwan, the Republic of China, under an extended period of strict martial law (1949–1987), while promoting traditional Confucian and patriarchal values as the central controlling mechanism of its nationalistic rhetoric. Bai’s novel demonstrates how, from within a seemingly monolithic superstructure of the city, the characters’ ongoing creation of hybrid queer public and private spaces produces temporary cracks in the hegemonic patriarchal structure.
Bai’s 1983 novel has also inspired a series of Taiwanese adaptations in film, television, and the stage over the past few decades. In 1986, when director Yu Kan-ping 虞戡平adaptated Nei Zi into a film by the same name (English title: Outsiders) it was the first licensed commercial gay film released in Taiwan. Cao Ruiyuan’s 曹瑞原 2003 adaptation of Nei Zi into a popular mainstream Taiwanese miniseries was also the first to address male homosexuality in public television. Cao and Bai Xianyong collaborated on a stage adaptation of Nei Zi for the Taiwan National Theater in 2014. The passage of time between each adaptation of Nei Zi, from 1986, 2003 and 2014, can reveal multifaceted, fluid, and overlapping spatial-temporal iterations of public and private queer urban spaces and stories of continuance and community.
I focus on how three key urban spaces intersect with different conceptions of time in Bai’s novel and its subsequent adaptations. After first examining domestic space in a military dependents’ residential village, I turn to a highly politicized and historically significant public park and an underground gay bar, both in the heart of Taipei’s governmental, business, nightlife and brothel districts. Rather than view these multilayered urban spaces as ‘static slices through time,’ I turn to cultural geographer Doreen Massey’s call to reveal them as a multiplicity of contrasting temporalities that are ‘open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming […] If time is to be open then space must be open too’ (1995, 59). Massey urges us to view places as ‘as temporal and not just spatial: as set in time as well as space’ (1995, 186). Bai’s novel, in particular, interrogates ideas of homogenous space as it points to a more open and fluid reading of Taipei’s cityscape as always in process—a juxtaposition of spatial-temporal trajectories involving queer bodies, desires, and communities all undergoing continual ‘negotiation[s] with the hegemonic identities and stories we tell’ (Massey 2005: 158–9).
Bai’s novel begins with a description of how a few months prior, the father of the main character A-Qing, chased him out of his home with a string of curses. This is followed by his high school’s official notice from May 5, 1970, expelling him for engaging in ‘an immoral act…that damaged the reputation of the school’ (Bai 1990, 1). A flashback eventually reveals that A-Qing was caught having sex for cash at school with a much older adult supervisor the day after his beloved little brother died from tuberculosis (69–70). Driven from his home, A-Qing runs to Taipei’s New Park (renamed 228 Memorial Park in 1996), the still-thriving site of a long-established gay male cruising area, unobtrusively nestled between buildings of the nation’s capital and commerce center. The narrative describes the park and the deep friendships A-Qing forms with a group of young destitute gay hustlers based there.5 While heavily downplayed in all the subsequent adaptations, the novel centers on these male prostitutes and cross-generational gay relationships. The novel’s principle theme is an enduring familial sense of community and continuance A-Qing forms with the hustlers and a few elders centered on the park. A-Qing and his new friends are under the ‘protection’ of Chief Yang, a middle-aged, self-appointed park guru who looks after their safety and well-being while also functioning as their consensual pimp. Every evening, the characters re-signify the culturally, commercially, and politically saturated site of the park to reveal alternative temporalities. They continually refer to the park as their ‘anarchical kingdom,’ but are always acutely aware that it can offer them no protection from the voyeur-like intrusion of the outside world. After a police raid, some of the park elders try to open a gay bar with Chief Yang in the hopes of creating a safer private/public queer space named ‘Cozy Nest’ until a popular tabloid exposé draws in a parade of voyeuristic and taunting gawkers, forcing them to shut it down.
At the end of Bai’s novel, A-Qing returns to the park to meet his friends after some time has passed. He runs into a homeless boy sleeping on the same bench that he slept on during his first night there and helps the young runaway much in the same way that one of the park’s older, self-appointed guardian/historians, Grandpa Gou helped him. Here, Nei Zi closes the plot in a circular fashion, with actions that suggest the continuity and coherence of an alternative community, an ongoing bond of brotherhood and spatio-temporal reterritorializing of queer urban spaces that, although fragmented and tenuous, still lives on. In addition to its overarching father/son theme, Bai’s novel is intently focused on the park as the central locus of the plot as all the characters keep returning there as their symbolic and literal home. Each adaptation of Bai’s novel consistently circles thematically, metaphorically, and visually around the park.
Background
The son of a high ranking Guomindang general, Bai Xianyong’s family fled China in 1948 to Hong Kong when he was eleven, on the eve of the Communist victory. Four years later, his family settled in Taiwan and in 1963, he immigrated to the USA. Bai’s fiction is part of Haiwai Wenxue (Overseas Chinese Literature) popular from the 1960s to 1980s, during which authors in the USA published in Chinese for an overseas audience. Often preoccupied with the past, their work conveyed a simultaneous, bi-directional nostalgia—for Mainland China and a pre-industrial, rural Taiwan. Bai’s fiction, blended modernist techniques and traditional Chinese poetics that was imbued with a deep sense of rootlessness and homelessness. The exile motif in Taiwan’s modernist literature, not bound by geography or ethnicity, was more an embodiment of a cultural identity crisis, complicated by modernization, fierce political oppression and the growing global isolation of Taiwan at the time (see endnote 5). More importantly, Bai wrote Nie Zi over a decade after leaving Taiwan, thus adding simultaneous and multilayered gaps of place, time, distance and memory. As Svetlana Boym points out, ‘nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time’ (2007, 8). Bai’s fictional characters were usually Mainland émigrés in Taiwan or the USA, who held a deep nostalgia for the homeland, a sense of exile or rootlessness, and disillusionment with Taiwan’s growing political isolation that created a country in its own exile.6
Bai explained that Nie Zi addresses struggles between marginalized individuals and society’s attitudes towards the next generation (TPTF 2003). Early Nei Zi reviewers in the 1980s focused on the themes of father/son conflict and downtrodden communities while also often applying allegorical readings that echoed Taiwan’s precarious global and local situation at the time (Chang 1993). The characters were often read as victims, symptomatic of the problems facing Taiwanese youth, their orientation a result of poor family life and urban squalor, in a city and society gone bad (Ming 1982, 45–66). Renewed interest in Nie Zi in the mid-1990s has led to a rich body of nuanced readings that track the novel and its always evolving reception and influence through the lens of queer theory and history of Taiwanese tongzhi identity politics (Chen 2011, 37).
Using, as the mode of adaptation, an older, the 1970s Qiong Yao 琼瑶 styled, Taiwanese domestic melodrama, a genre over-determined by patriarchal ideologies (Hoare 1993, 33, 37, 41), Yu Kan-ping’s 1987 film Nei Zi sets Bai’s novel in the late 1980s when social anxieties around AIDS were surging in Taiwan. In the late 1980s, Taiwanese filmmakers, where still adapting literature from the influential root-searching nativist xiangtu wenxue 鄉土文學 movement, while at the same time reflecting a shift towards less government censorship (1983) and calls for democratic reform.7
In 2003, Taiwan Public Television released Cao Ruiyuan’s 20-episode drama Nie Zi to much success (TPTF 2003).8 Cao felt that Bai’s fiction beautifully reflected the ethos of the times while echoing an important part of Taiwan history that spoke to an entire generation (Ma 2015). Cao and Bai chose a lighter and more abstract approach for the stage version when they collaborated on their 2014 Nie Zi theatrical production. The play employs a non-linear, dreamlike style that merges past and present, reality and imagination with a set design centered almost completely on the park. While Bai has writing credits for all adaptations, he was most directly involved in the television series and play.
Home
The very first words of Bai’s novel read as follows, ‘Three months and ten days ago…Father kicked me out of the house… He was screaming in a trembling, hoarse voice filled with anguish and fury: ‘YOU SCUM! YOU FILTHY SCUM’ (Bai 1990, 13). All of the Nie Zi adaptations closely parallel and emphasize this core dramatic scene in Bai’s novel where A-Qing’s father violently expels his son, chasing him down a dark alley. In fact, this is the melodramatic opening title sequence for every episode of Cai’s 2003, 20-part drama series.
The descriptions of A-Qing’s family home are a vital feature of Bai’s novel. As Rosemary George reminds us ‘homes are not neutral locations; to imagine a home is as political an act as imagining a nation’ (1996, 6). Rich with social commentary, the novel’s representation of A-Qing’s decaying family home serves to interrogate ideas of Taipei as a homogenous site of modernization. A-Qing’s father is a discharged, low ranking veteran who, like many that fled China after the Communists’ victory, arrived penniless for an indefinite exile in Taiwan and were quietly forgotten. He is broken, drunken, abusive, and violent. Early in the novel, A-Qing’s young mother abandons her family to run off with another man, only to die destitute and alone from a venereal disease. A-Qing’s beloved little brother eventually dies from tuberculosis, in part due to their poor housing conditions, right before A-Qing is kicked out.
Their home is in the military dependents’ 眷村 village, a remote ghetto of 1000 homes quickly assembled after 1949 for retired Guomindang soldiers. A significant part of Taipei’s urban landscape and political history, these were thrown together as temporary housing in accordance with the Guomindang’s master narrative that they would eventually take back and liberate the mainland.9 Residents had no rights to the land since it was government property, so there were few improvements or renovations. Low-income mainlanders in these ghettos were caught up in a series of controversial demolitions and forced relocations in 1990s as part of the rapid urbanization trends of the period.
In their adaptations of Bai’s novel, both Yu and Cai’s portrayals emphasize A-Qing’s home. Yu’s previous family melodramas often revealed tensions between rapid economic growth and ideological/spatial urban constrictions, focusing on how these pressures played out in domestic spaces. For example, his 1983 film, Papa Can You Hear Me Sing 搭錯車 centers on a poor army veteran in this village whose home is demolished and he dies abandoned after his daughter leaves to pursue fame. Spatial-temporal relations in Nie Zi suggest how urban development, economic growth, and planning intersects with bodies, locales, and left-behind communities that have conflicting relationships with this relentless flow of progress.
Bai’s novel questions the views of modernizing Taipei as a homogenous space of progress. A-Qing describes his neighborhood on ‘Lane 28 of Longjiang Street’ as filled with rotting and ‘dilapidated’ wooden homes that were all ‘broken or crumbling…like a huddled pack of ragged beggars’ (Bai 1990, 46). It seemed as if they were ‘pushed and shoved by the taller buildings until they were about to crumble and slide into the river (Bai 1990, 63). His was the ‘the oldest,’ ‘darkest’ and most run-down home in this ‘dead-end of dead-ends’ lane where ‘decay hung over the area’ (Bai 1990, 46–47). It was ‘surrounded by a constant ‘overpowering stench’ from mountains of rotting trash and unpaved roads that turned into ‘rivers of foul, black, stagnant water’ in the rainy season (Bai 1990, 46). Filled with decay, mildew, chronic dampness, holes, and leaks from previous typhoon damage; the home was ‘was deathly still inside … as it quietly rotted’ (Bai 1990, 47).
Bai’s novel reveals the park as a layered and contested space that reflects dynamic change and transformation. In contrast, A-Qing’s family home is an image of decay and stasis—ideologically solidified around fixed patriarchal representations of space and time. When A-Qing returns to that ‘familiar smell of decay,’ he feels ‘nothing had changed’ in his ‘ruined, chaotic home,’ where time seemed to stand still (Bai 1990, 178). Except for a layer of dust over everything, he finds his room untouched since he left months ago (Bai 1990, 178).
As imagined spaces, homes are shifting sites of intersecting territorial, temporal, cultural, familial, national, and individual affiliations. The narration of an ancestral home and a homeland is, in part, an individualized expression of a relationship with a conceptualized idea of origin, native space, and place. Added to the spatio-temporal gap of overseas nostalgia built into Bai’s novel, published a decade later in America, the portrayal of A-Qing’s home and sense of homelessness has wider implications.I left everything where it was, closed the door behind me, and walked outside…the rain pelted my face painfully. I ran down the lane into the wind, faster and faster, until it was the same scene over again. When I reached the end of the lane I turned and looked back. Just then I felt the sobs building inside me, and the tears began to flow. This time I really knew how miserable it was to give up your home. (Bai 1990, 178)
Both Yu’s 1986 film and Cai’s 2003 drama series show A-Qing sneaking back into his family home when the father is out to leave the ashes. In Cai’s 2003 drama series A-Qing hides and watches his father return before he walks away. However, in Yu’s film, the cinematic organization of space centers on a long take with the father located inside the home. The son is positioned outside, peering into the home, partially framed by a window and filled with torment as he looks at his father while he is drenched by the storm—forever outside. Yu’s film often seems to reinforce public/private binaries for the point of view of the assumed viewer, who is ideologically located on the inside of the patriarchal and domestic space, looking out at the spectacle of the homeless gay ‘outsider’ as a violent monsoon begins to rip the house apart. In Cao’s more contemporary 2014 theatrical adaptation, the set design no longer positions A-Qing as ideologically outside the family home by using transparent windows and walls positioned in the back of the stage while A-Qing is featured center stage wrestling with his guilt. Whether intentional or not, this serves to effectively reduce the ideological power of patriarchy and domestic space as they are downplayed in the performance.
In Yu’s film, after he is kicked out, the camera immediately draws the viewer to an image of A-Qing shaking with fear and cold, huddled in the dark corners of the dark, foggy, and threatening park. When the older pimp/mentor Chief Yang first comes across this figure of pathos he seems to speak for the intended viewer asking, ‘Shouldn’t you be going home, son?’ This didactic message seems to frame the entire film, from opening until resolution. After A-Qing is cast out in Yu’s film, his family home and its surroundings undergo further physical and symbolic destruction that increases in proportion to the family’s breakdown. The saturated imagery of the cluttered household objects in the home reveals a cultural energy turning in on its self. Shown as a shack, vulnerable to the elements and covered with dust and mold, we see close up shots of an interior infested with filth, roaches and clutter. The film closes with an invented scene (not in Bai’s novel) with A-Qing smiling as he makes his way back to his father’s home bearing gifts, for his first visit back. The sun comes out for the first time in the film and his violent and alcoholic father is miraculously reformed as he prepares for his son’s visit. We see the father happily repairing, tidying up and dusting off the family pictures in what has suddenly become a bright, clean, and well-ordered home.
Cai’s more contemporary drama series and stage adaptations sidestep A-Qing’s permanent sense of exile by inserting a scene where he takes a small step towards reconciliation with his father on Chinese New Year by placing a gift outside the door, left unresolved. They also echo the thematic focus of the novel as they circle back to the park for affirmation and continuance rather than stasis. In contrast, Yu’s film closes with this invented scene where we find the ‘newly reformed’ prodigal son returning. While all the plots are circular in each adaptation, the original novel, drama series and 2014 play point outward to possible alternative queer communities, brotherhoods, subjectivities, sites and futures; whereas Yu’s film turns inward to its only option—turning back the clock, as all roads lead back to the father.
The Park
Individual narrative negotiations of an ancestral home are always simultaneously personal and communal. Bai’s thematic preoccupation with the themes of exile, rootlessness, and homelessness saturates his portrayals of the home and the park in Nie Zi. Bai consistently reinforces a nomadic sense of homelessness for A-Qing and his friends. Grandpa Gou, one of the park elders, echoes this theme, ‘All you wild youngsters who’ve grown up on this island have that strain of wildness in your blood…You’re a bunch of fledglings who’ve lost your nest…struggling to keep flying ahead, with no idea where you’ll wind up (Bai 1990, 81). A few older clients, ‘sugar daddies,’ and mentors try to help A-Qing and his friends find housing and stable career paths, but they seem unable to settle down. While ‘wondering alone, never knowing where [his] next meal was coming from,’ waking up in a stranger’s bed after hustling, A-Qing ‘felt a longing for some place [he] could call [his] own. But…[he] always found an excuse to slip away…running…faster and faster, all the way to the park without stopping’ (Bai 1990, 109).
Rather than sealing it ‘up into one neat and tidy envelope of space-time,’ Doreen Massey urges us to recognize that a place, such as the park, also ‘stretch[es] through time’ and that ‘what has come together, in this place, now, is a conjunction of many histories and many spaces’(1995, 190–191). In Taipei, where space is the most valuable commodity, the park embodies tensions between converging territorial positions in a setting that includes government buildings, lotus ponds, traditional pagodas, an MRT station, playgrounds, and much more. This public park also conveys simultaneous and diverse political ideologies, with a temporal layering of monuments from four distinct decades of political rule, including ruins from the end of the Qing Dynasty and instillations from the Japanese Occupation to Guomindang rule. After it was renamed ‘228 Peace Memorial Park’ 二二八和平公園 in 1996 to commemorate the February 28 massacre and subsequent Reign of White Terror (1949–1987) in Taiwan’s oppressive past, it is now the site of the 228 memorial and museum. The park is brimming with the full flow of daily city life: retired men arguing politics or playing Go, early dawn tai chi or dance groups, students chatting, couples kissing, joggers and commuters passing through the MRT station, workers having lunch, people getting their fortune read, staging protests, or taking elaborate wedding photos.The area between our borders is pitifully small, no more than two or three hundred meters long by a hundred meters wide, that narrow strip of land surrounding the oval lotus pond in Taipei’s New Park on Guanqian street…It’s as though our kingdom were surrounded and hidden by a tightly woven fence—cut off from the outside world, isolated for the time being. But we are always keenly aware of the constant threat to our existence by the boundless world on the other side of the fence… Loudspeakers from beyond the trees frequently broadcast sensational news from the outside world. (Bai 1990, 17–18)
At night, the park has always been widely known as a gay cruising area even during the Japanese Imperial Era (Allen 2007, 106). Beyond a few scattered bathhouses and clubs, it was still the central male cruising area well into the late 1990s. It has now expanded into the Ximen area, where hundreds of cafés, bars, clubs, and retailers catering to the LGBTQ+ community and tourists have created one of the world’s most lively and progressive urban gayborhoods. Beyond cruising, the park has remained a vital social hub, tourist site, political site and meeting place (Martin 2003, 54). It still holds a deeply nostalgic and symbolic home base in the hearts of many older gay men in Taipei. In part due to Bai’s novel, it is ‘decisively linked with the subject of tongxinlian’ 同性戀 (same-sex desire) and serves as the central organizing point for the annual gay pride parade, LGBTQ+ activism, protests, and tours (Martin 2003, 47).
The daily temporal flows of urban life and the continual transformations of the park are key themes in all the versions of Nei Zi. If we turn to Yu’s film as an example, it amplifies a staging of the park as a dark and threatening site—for cruising, sexual excess passion and murder. One scene starts with a wide-angle view of the park by day with images of modern space shared by diverse social and capital needs. Undergoing a complete transformation, the frame then slowly fades into a night shot where men start making their rounds cruising. They are often presented as dark shadowy figures in long shots, their silhouettes framed with deep blue hues, complete with mist and sinister background music. This cloak of darkness also functions as a prevailing metaphor for the park throughout Bai’s novel but it is presented more as a complex emblem of refuge and escape. A-Qing explains, ‘there are no days in our kingdom, only nights. As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes into hiding, for it is an unlawful nation’ (Bai 1990, 17). Here bodies and spaces are in constant transformation, as the hours of the day and the functions of public space are inexorably intertwined. The tongzhi ‘kingdom’ of the park is also ‘described as occupying an undecidable place in relation to visuality… between dark and light,’ day and night (Martin 2003, 189):All the differences among the old, the middle-aged, and the young, the high-class and the low…the suffering and the contented, simply vanished on the steps of the lotus pond in [their] secret kingdom. We stood there as equals …we began to move, stepping on each other’s shadows…for all our footsteps in that kingdom of ours wrote a page of history on the steps of the lotus pond. (Bai 1990, 232)
Our kingdom came to life in the darkness. The steps around the lotus pond were filled with shadows of moving figures. We started coming to life as night fell, throwing its protective cover of darkness over us…moving round and round the steps of the lotus pond in a ceremonial dance in frantic pursuit of each other long into the night, until dawn began to break. Late at night, in the wee hours…the deserted, defenseless streets belonged only to us. (Bai 1990, 29, 41)
While homosexual acts were not illegal according to code at the time of Bai’s novel, government laws contained vague provisions such as strict Martial Law curfews and allegations of prostitution, disturbing the peace or loitering that were sometimes used to harass gays in public spaces (Martin 2003, 62).We prick up our ears like a herd of frightened antelope in a predator-infested forest, forever on guard against the slightest sign of danger…every sound carries a warning. We listen for the sound of the policemens’ hobnailed boots as they march past the green barrier that separates us; the minute we hear that they are invading our territory, we scatter and flee as if on command…Our anarchical kingdom can offer us no protection; we must rely on our animal instincts as we grope in the dark for a path to survival. (Bai 1990, 17)
Cozy Nest
The article points to a cultural signifier, the ‘Golden Angel,’ one of the many barbershops and coffeehouses that function as transparent covers for the city’s most upscale brothels that were intentionally overlooked by the authorities. As A-Qing describes, ‘our new haven…was tucked away in a corner of this bustling lane where, unless you were one of us, you would walk right past it without noticing’ (Bai 1990, 204). Its mere placement in the heart of a thriving international red-light district ‘that came to life when night fell’ threatens to interrupt a seamless performance of the heterosexual code (Bai 1990, 204). The article ends with this message, ‘but fairies travel different roads, and a den of fairies cannot long exist in human society’ (Bai 1990, 282). After the article was published, outside Taipei descended with voyeur-like curiosity and overran the bar, eventually forcing it to close (Bai 1990, 285). The novel’s focus on the bar’s forced closure confronted dilemmas around the establishment and continuance of any self-identified queer site in the 1980s that once named—was easily targeted, subjected to voyeurism, and ghettoized.In the heart of our fair city, on Lane 125 of Nanking East Road, there is a convergence of restaurants and nightclubs where the nights are witness to unusually bustling activity. And there, tucked in among the barbecues, coffee houses, and Japanese restaurants, shrouded in secrecy, is a tavern called the Cozy Nest. If the reader enters through the narrow door beside the Golden Angel and descends to the basement he will find himself in an amazingly different world, a den of fairies…a group of pretty-face, scarlet-lipped, giggling ‘fairies.’ (Bai 1990, 282)
For the gay community in all the adaptations, their history was a constant rebuilding of momentary refuges from the voyeur-like gaze of the outside world. At the end of the novel, after the forced closure of Cozy Nest, when Grandpa Guo sees A-Qing in the park again he explains, ‘that’s how it always is’ as he goes on to name all the underground gay bars that opened and were forced to close as they were ‘discovered’ over the last decade (Bai 1990, 320). Guo continues, ‘this one opens, that one closes, round and round it goes. They’re all gone without a trace. But this old nest of ours [the park] is still here, just waiting for the tired birds to come home to roost, to rest’ (Bai 1990, 320).10
Nie Zi, and its many renderings, reveals the urban landscape of Taipei as a multiplicity of contrasting temporalities, identities, and trajectories that continue to reveal a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey 2005, 24). The themes of exile, rootlessness and homelessness that permeate Nie Zi are exactly what support its tenacious and lasting relevance as critics, filmmakers, playwrights, activists, and artists continue to revisit and retell this tale, decades after its publication.Place is latitudinal and longitudinal…it is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there. (Lippard 1997, 7)