Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (14 page)

2
. All personal names are pseudonyms. Because it is not uncommon for individuals in Taiwan to adopt foreign names, I follow the informants’ preferences and use English and Japanese names when applicable.

3
. The worship (
baibai
), called
zehqe
in the local dialect Hoklo, on the second and sixteenth day of each month on the lunar calendar is for the gods of household foundations (
degizo
in Hoklo) and the wandering ghosts (
mngkaokong
in Hoklo) who happen to pass by the door. Some have also added
caishen
, the Money God, to the list. The relationship between Taiwanese and the ancestors, ghosts, and spirits they worship is often described in terms of debt (Ahern 1973). Thus, spirit money is offered in worship. For discussion on Taiwanese religious practices, see Feuchtwang (1974); Wang (1974); and Weller (1987). While individual shops take care of
zehqe
, the Committee for Development in New Kujiang organized
baibai
on
pudu
, the communal worship for wandering ghosts, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar.

4
. There were four such treaty ports in Taiwan. In addition to Dagou, Tamsui was opened in 1862, Keelung in 1863, and Anping in 1864. Written in Chinese characters that mean “beating a dog,”
Dagou
is actually a transliteration of an Aboriginal phrase whose meaning is still unclear. Because
Dagou
reads too crudely, the Japanese replaced it with two Kanji characters that are pronounced similarly as “Takao” in Japanese. The name Kaohsiung (Gaoxiong) is the Mandarin pronunciation of these two characters.

5
. See Wu-dar Huang et al. (1992). As Japan’s first overseas colony, Taiwan served as a lab for urban planning that aimed to solve urban problems in Japan, experimenting with methods of efficient control and maximizing economic benefit (Su 2010; Ye 1993).

6
. This aid was part of Cold War politics in which the United States helped to protect Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China by allying itself with Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan to contain the spread of communism.

7
. On December 25, 2010, Kaohsiung City was merged with Kaohsiung County to form a special municipality. The combined population of the municipality is 2.7 million.

8
. The area was called Horie (canal) Machi (district) because it was built on a land next to the canal.

9
. The term
danbang
originally meant itinerate traders who bring goods from one location to sell in another.
Bang
(literally “group” or “gang”) can also be used
to
refer to trade organizations in traditional China. Itinerate traders often operate (
pao
) alone (
dan
). Therefore, their activities are described as
pao danbang
. Here,
pao
connotes the double meaning of “run” and “operate.” In Taiwan, itinerate traders frequently traveling across borders are now called
danbangke
, while the term
danbang
has come to refer to the trade instead of the trader.
Shuihuo
(water cargo) refers to foreign goods that are brought into the country through unauthorized and/or unofficial channels.

10
. Xinkujiang Jingpin Shangchang. The official English translation is New Kuchan Shopping Mall.

11
.
Place-making
refers to the combined effort of physical and discursive construction of “locality.”

12
. In the early 1990s, the Council for Cultural Affairs began to implement programs to “develop comprehensive communities” through writing local histories. While these projects were designed and promoted as cultural projects, many communities took part for economic reasons. Following the council’s initiative, the Department of Commerce also implemented the Image Business Clusters Construction Program in 1995 and the Business Street Development and Advancement Program in 1996 to revitalize small towns or business areas. In 2000, the two initiatives were combined to form a single Business Streets and Districts Development Program to eliminate the official division between urban business streets and the rural business clusters.

13
. Facilitating social change and transformation of consciousness through spatial reform has been an objective of modern urban planning (Scott 1999; Su 2010). Neoliberal logic, however, demands more than planning for social change. It seeks to make cities “better” through producing new kind of spaces that are more suitable for the flow of capital and new kinds of citizens who are more competitive in the market (Thrift 1999).

14
. Nearly 500 shops of various sizes were located within the area, over 200 of them inside NKSM. In addition to NKSM, there were four other small-sized malls (
shangchang
).

15
. New Kujiang is not the only project that was inspired by Euro-American and Japanese shopping areas. In the handbooks published by CSDC, examples are drawn from Japan’s business streets and American towns (CSDC 2000; 2001). The area around the Harajuku station in Tokyo is a hangout for youth famous for its street fashion.

16
. This negative view toward vending is not limited to the planners of New Kujiang. Shuenn-Der Yu observes that, in Taiwan’s modernization process, vending has increasingly been “condemned as an activity sabotaging Taiwan’s economic and social well-being” (2004: 133). Chuang’s study (2005) in Taipei’s Yongkang community shows their attempt to confine vendors in a designated area and improve the appearances of vending stalls. Tai (1994) provides detailed account
on
changing policies on vending in Taiwan. Donovan (2008) and Shepherd (2008) also trace the perception of vending as a threat to public order, a cause of traffic congestion, a potential health problem, and a source of unfair competition in different countries.

17
. Street vending is officially considered as illegitimate business, and the Taiwanese government stopped issuing business licenses to street vendors in the 1970s. However, when street vendors are fined, they are cited not for violation of business laws but for blocking traffic.

18
. See Donovan (2008) for an overview of theories that consider street vending and informal economies as a social safety net.

19
. See Tai (1994) for an account on why street vendors in Taiwan made the decision to enter this field.

20
. This increasingly visible presence of Japanese popular culture in Taiwan as well as other East Asian locations has become a much-discussed topic in both popular and academic discourses. See, for example, Befu and Guichard-Anguis 2001; Chiou 2003; Chua 2004; Iwabuchi 2002, 2004; and Lee 2002. The “South Korea Wave” (
hanliu
) has also hit Taiwan since the early 2000s.

21
. The incident is sometimes referred to as the Kaohsiung Incident. In 1979, an International Human Rights Day rally in the park turned into violent confrontations between the police and the demonstrators who called for reforms. Many of the participants arrested were associated with
Meilidao
(Formosa) magazine, an oppositional publication supporting Taiwan independence, thus the name “Formosa Incident.”

Chapter
Three

On the Streets of Beijing
Medical Melodrama in the Everyday

TRANG X. TA

Beijing Streets

Rural migrants come to the cities to find work, but sometimes they come in search of medical care.
1
As the nation’s capital, Beijing is in some ways the final destination for those seeking care from urban hospitals.
2
The costs of travel to the city are part of the burden of medical expenses for rural families. Their illness narratives performed on the streets for donations from passersby have become an everyday feature of the urban landscape. One family’s struggle to seek treatment for their child’s leukemia, which I encountered one day on the streets of Beijing, reveals the parameters of an economy of hope and despair in postreform-era China. In “publishing” their story of medical hardship on the street, they become a reminder of rural despair haunting the urban landscape in a society where the gap between country and city marks a biopolitical divide in people’s life chances. I use the metaphor of publishing to refer to the way these stories stake a claim on a public sphere that refuses to recognize their desperate need as worthy of notice.

Economic liberalization policies in the last three decades have radically transformed Chinese cities, and the presence of migrant workers is a continual reminder of the source of the labor required for urban development. At the time I encountered this family, projects to prepare Beijing for the international visitors attending the 2008 One World, One Dream Summer Olympics
had begun, heightened by government efforts to sanitize the streets.
3
The sanitization campaigns not only transformed the physical landscape of the city but also included the forced relocation of the city’s homeless, transients, and petitioners—all those who did not belong in spaces newly created for international visitors and middle-class Chinese citizens. Under production was the creation of a world-class city that would meet global standards of cosmopolitanism. Thus, this family’s appearance in this newly designed space was an unwelcome eruption of the rural.

At the same time, however, the pathos of their performance unwittingly reproduces a banality of the everyday that fails to disrupt the uneven social order that characterizes “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
4
In this chapter, I use this street story to raise the question of why some stories are taken up as worthy of compassion and others are not. In the “postsacred” era of industrial capitalism, the state has the monopoly on spectacle. This family’s story is too easily dismissed as another example of the pervasive tragedy that constitutes the everyday. They are thus caught in a paradox: They must move passersby to donate, but their very deployment of melodrama is what leaves them open to the suspicion that they are manipulating public sentiment. By way of contrast, the story of Chengcheng, a girl from a poor, rural family, also struggling with leukemia, readily received the media attention that the family on the street had longed for. However, Chengcheng’s illness narrative is recast as a story of exemplary individual sacrifice, deflecting attention from the lack of rural health care to the project of infrastructural development as a priority for economic growth. Chengcheng did not stay in the city to seek medical treatment, but neither did she die anonymously in the countryside. One story demonstrates the growing disparities of the socioeconomic order, and the other serves instead to reinscribe the developmentalist logic of the state focused on economic growth. Both stories suggest the limited conditions of possibility whereby individuals, families, and communities are now “free” to develop their economic futures as they adapt to the market rationality of neoliberalism.

A Family of Three

Families are a common sight on the busy streets of Beijing, especially in an area with a high density of shopping venues and public plazas, but the family
of
three that I encountered on a day in October stood out in an unsettling manner.
5
A young boy was lying on a stretcher wearing a fabric facemask while his parents attended to him as if the side of the street were a hospital room. They occupied a space near the entrance to an upscale shopping complex with brand-name boutiques and a large chain grocery store. Camped out amid the cosmopolitan backdrop of gleaming high-rises they appeared out of place; nonetheless the lack of alarm from passersby signaled to me that this tableau was an unexceptional scene.

Neatly arranged in front of the family were booklets from several hospitals that in China are used to keep records for patient visits. Each hospital sells its own booklet to record a patient’s medical history, usually with the name of the hospital on the cover. Patients are required to present their booklet for the doctor to record the details of each visit.
6
Added to this display was a fraying clipping from a local newspaper, identification cards, a sign relating a brief account of their son’s illness, and a plastic bucket for donations. Most passersby tended to walk by, glancing in the direction of the family as they entered or exited the shopping complex; none stopped to speak with them. As I lingered over the documentation of their medical case, the father walked over and picked up a booklet to show me his son’s diagnosis of leukemia. They had gone to several hospitals, and the recommended treatment was always the same: a bone marrow transplant they could not afford. As the father turned the pages of the booklet to show me the medical history of his son, the mother started crying and began speaking in more detail about their child’s condition. Passersby would stop for a few minutes to listen before hurrying off. The mother continued telling the story as the father retreated into the background to give their son his herbal medicine.

They had come from Anhui, one of China’s poorer provinces.
7
The boy, now ten, had been diagnosed with leukemia at age seven. He had been enrolled under the health insurance policy at his elementary school, but there was a ninety-day interim period before the coverage was to have taken effect.
8
His illness was discovered after only sixty days from the date of enrollment, so the insurance company refused to cover his medical expenses. The doctors told the family there are three likely causes of the disease: genetic predisposition, exposure to toxic chemicals, or overuse of medications at an early age. Their son had been frequently sick as a young child, and the mother believed that the overuse of the antibiotics used to treat him must have been the primary cause. She blamed the doctors in the countryside for
not
understanding the consequences of excessive medication (
yaowu guoliang
) in young children.

They used the money they received from donations to cover food, medication, and hospital visits for blood transfusions every twenty days. Without the transfusions, their son would be unable to move or eat. They had been living on the street ever since he was first diagnosed, even though they were well aware that they were unlikely to collect the 300,000 yuan (approximately US$47,000) for the operation from street donations. The mother stated, “If you do not have money, do not go to the hospital, because if you are short even one penny it is not acceptable. All hospitals are like this.” They had been giving their son an imported medication that cost over 100 yuan (approximately US$16) a day, which they were no longer able to afford to do. Altogether they had spent 200,000 yuan (approximately US$31,000) over the past three years on medications and hospital visits. By this point, they were reduced to giving him a less expensive Chinese herbal medication as a “psychological consolation” (
xinli anwei
), even though they felt that the medicine was not as effective. He had no remaining immune defenses, and their living conditions on the street made it difficult to maintain a sterile environment. Once, when the family had eaten at a restaurant, the son suffered from diarrhea. After that, they set up a little portable cookstove to boil his herbal medication and to cook for him. If they had been at home, she would have been able to disinfect everything properly, but this proved to be difficult on the street. People had advised them to abandon their son at a hospital, but they could not bear to do so because he might contract something that would hasten his death. As long as they were with him, they could at least care for him.