Holly's Secret Garden

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that election in Taiwan is nothing more than a melodrama full of tears, sound and fury, signifying nothing.
 
Election in Taiwan is a carnival festivity; the hierarchy of high and low, rich and poor is temporarily debunked when candidates implore electorates to give them a vote. The common populace enjoys a transitory delusion of their power, knowing that after the festivity, everything will be restored to its former state; the high and low, the rich and poor will resume their respective roles.

Discourses everywhere:
As if we don't know how to love our mother, social media taught us the ways---Flowers, gifts, feasts make this grand day a commercialized holiday. "Buy your mother something," so said the commercials. We are hailed by the dominant discourse, inescapably, resignedly and unknowingly!  Once the Festivity drops, everyone goes back to the normal world with dear mothers standing at the kitchen sink, washing toilets, drying laundry, making bed...... 
A structuralist analysis:     
"I love you, mother!" means "I'm always forgetting you!" Always without you in my mind, acutally, mother. But this day enforces the memory of you, eliciting the sentiment of gratitude in me, which lies dormant, languid, undisturbed in the depth of my heart. The space for a mother is monotonous. The sound of a mother, while sonorous, meets a dead end. Unlike lovers' world, mother' world is full of soliloquy without passionate or due response from the other side. Love message beckons an immediate and frenzied echo; mother's message waits for time to reverberate.

Fifty years of romance writing didn't awaken Giong Yao (瓊瑤)from the illusion of love. From the turbulent era of WW2 (幾度夕陽紅) to today's technological world, (花非花霧非霧) her kingdom of Love remains perfect, passionate, and eternal. The medium of Love may change from letter writing to email, smartphone and skype, but the essence of Love remains the same. It's violent tempests or burning flames to consume lovers away. Say "I love you" a thousand times and her fictional lovers don't feel exhausted by the soothing words, but the audience do! Love, once expressed verbally, loses its mysterious luster and becomes jejune. Oscar Wilde perceived this well: "The essence of love is uncertainty." The most unbearable part of romance is when lovers confess their love and are accepted by their beloved. The beginning of marriage is the end of romance. No wonder, Giong Yao's kingdom of Love is populated by unmarried lovers suffering from either unrequited love or temporary misunderstanding. And her lovers are always willing to die for Love, as if they had nothing else to do in life except to love. [sigh]  Aye, one should always remember the friar's warning in Romeo and Juliet:    
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so----

 

作者： 洪秀瑛、林志勳╱台北─浙江連線報導 |2012年5月30日 上午5:30

On my second viewing of Good Will Hunting, some lines still moved me to tears, especially Sean, the mentor’s remark about Life and Art. When he uttered these words, it seemed as if he was talking to me, not Will Hunting, the genius kid he was trying to help. Besides these, the part dealing with true friendship is also touching. These significant lines were illustrated as follows:
I. Life and Art

The instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for the truth and have begun striving for ourselves.  -----Buddha's teaching        
With the upcoming Presidential election in Taiwan on January 14, many overenthusiastic voters suffer from insomnia, anxiety, or illusion, collectively called “election syndrome.”Caught specifically during the election season, this disease causes obsessive voters physical and mental disorder. According to psychiatrists, it is hard to dissuade such people from getting too caught up in the election. Tranquilizers may help if the election fever disrupts their normal daily routine to an excessive degree.
This disease can be attributed to human nature. We are made of such stuff as crave for excitement and spectacle, both of which are manifest in the election campaign. To see the opposing candidates fight is a pleasure for some voters. Their stagnant life is ruffled by such a spectacle. At least, they have something to hate. And with something to hate, their life is endowed with the spring of thought and action. The jarring interests, the heated debate, and the denunciation of others’ values arouse excitement among the opposing supporters. They may assemble in crowds to show their worship to the favorite candidate; they may decry, interpret or recite the candidate’s remarks. Somehow, human mind takes a perverse delight in antipathy. Love may turn insipid; pain may be healed by time; hatred alone is immortal! For Taiwanese voters, the sentiment of hatred recurs whenever an election involving the KMT and DPP is held. The election campaign has become a never-failing source of hatred. And the irony is that the zealous voters love it! They find it a remedy for the ennui of their existence; in other words, it saves them from the boredom of life. Yet, these bigoted haters are not brave fighters as they smugly claim themselves to be. They are, in fact, the slender vines which must twist around the sturdy oak simply because they have no sufficient strength to support themselves. How sad they know so little about their weakness! It is the weak mind that should rely on a hero to lend it some luster.  

 
Recently, there was a sensational news about the romance between Taichung City Deputy Mayor, Hsiao Chia-chi's (蕭家淇) 18-year-old son and his 40-year-old female cram school teacher. According to the report, this romantic liaison began after Hsiao’s son entered college this summer, and was prohibited shortly after Hsiao knew this affair. Hsiao revealed how shocked he was initially by the fact that such an affair befell his son, only to admit later that perhaps falling for one's teacher is a rite of passage for his son’s mental growth. Interestingly enough, before such an enlightenment dawned on him, he fiercely accused the teacher of seducing his innocent son, who had the misfortune to fall prey to her female erotic power! (「課業輔導到床上去這像話嗎？」「她怎麼會對一個剛上大學、沒談過戀愛的小男生下手！」Now, the cram school teacher has fled to China, and Hsiao's son publicly lamented on his Facebook profile how adults’ interference caused him to lose everything.
This is a glaring example of something perfectly legal yet looked down upon by society. The teacher is unmarried; so is the student. There is no adultery involved here, only that gender and age still reign supreme in such affairs. Would people be as disturbed if the two criteria were reversed? What if it’s an elderly male teacher dating a young female student? Is it still a curse or is it a blessing? Some such marriages happened in the past and met with earnest applause, with the elderly males being respected celebrities and younger females their students or worshippers. Why didn’t our society denounce such a liaison? What is at stake here, the “should” or “should not” for the May-December romance?

 

Based on Roland Barthes’ analysis of the flood in Paris, 1955, this essay aims to examine the ravage of tsunami in Japan, 2011 with a similar semiotic approach.
The big flood brought by a massive tsunami of March 11, 2011, caused numerous deaths and serisous damage in the northeast coast of Japan. Despite the trials and agonies inflicted by Nature, the flood takes on two implications--- festivity and solidarity. 

     Just like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Taipei 101 has become a landmark in Taipei. It is a must-see for both tourists and locals. Tourists may be attracted by the modern architecture itself, while the locals can't help seeing it everwhere they go.      A tower, according to Roland Barthes, is always a dream and function, an expression of an ideal and also an instrument of a convenience (6). The duality of the tower finds its origin in the Babel myth. Babel is a tool for humans to communicate with God; meanwhile, it symbolizes a dream to compete with God. Hiding behind the visiting of a tower is exactly Hubris!      The panoramic vision of a tower is appealing in that we get the temporary control of space and time. For example, when we perceive Taipei from Taipei 101, our mind tries to decipher the mutation of the landscape nearby. We seek spontaneously certain familiar locations from our knowledge. In other words, the astonishment of space plunges us into the depth of time. And we all fall into a state of anamnesis. The current identity is dropped in the panoramic vision. We are merged into history while we are trying to recognize known sites. And a feeling of sublime rises with the inspection of history. Ah, this is civilization we witness; how great mankind are!             Reference Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of Calif. P, 1997.