Democracy on Trial: Social Movements and Cultural Politics in Postauthoritarian Taiwan

7. Walking Democracy: Street Life and Local Politics in a Taipei Neighborhood

Walking Democracy: Street Life and Local Politics in a Taipei Neighborhood Walking was once a nightmare in Taipei. Imagine an office worker rushing to work on foot and in his way there is a monstrous row of motorcycles blocking the sidewalk. Frustrated, he looks around, only realizing that vehicles parked on the roadside prevent all detours. After risking his life by running into a car lane and safely returning to the side of the street, he steps right into a pile of garbage bags that have been sitting out overnight, rotting and emanating the scent of last night’s dinner leftovers. Upon sniffing , cursing, and being glad that the suit he is wearing has not taken up any of the smells, fate drops one of his feet onto a street dog’s droppings. The day is over, and he unfortunately stinks. The return of the fading and often untold memories of such difficult times may disturb many Taipei residents who now talk, write, draw, and fantasize about a city life of flaneurs—that is, walkers who are at home on the streets and aimlessly wander around in Baudelaire’s terms.1 It is this disturbance that prompts me to investigate a changing culture of streetwalking , which is probably best portrayed in the books of a popular local writer-painter Jimi 幾米 (a pen name). The protagonists, always graceful and nomadic, in his bestselling urban adventure books stroll around the city in search of romantic encounters, awaiting a colorful moment of surprise , often ephemerally eventful.2 It is this form of walking by Taipeiren 台北人 (Taipei residents) that is now gaining currency. Harvard-based and Asia-wandering literary critic Leo Ou-fan Lee, in his Cities’ Sonatas, himself playing a main part of Jimi’s melodrama, gazes through shops in unknown streets and alleys, of which the lives and landscapes, he argues, most| ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | SEVEN | 176 | DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL vividly represent Taipei’s culture vis-à-vis that of other East Asian cities.3 Examining the daily trivialities of this emerging lifestyle, this chapter illuminates a history of street activities in which varying social and political experiments materialize and collapse in newly demonitored urban space. These experiments significantly change how, how often, and for what reason the people of Taipei walk in the streets, such as their speed, gestures, routes, goals, and mental states among acquaintances and strangers —a sensually physiological revolution has already begun. This change to the appearances of bodily movement reveals a rising urban culture, in which the evolution of this basic act into a multiplicity of human moving gestures allows city residents to reexplore their living environment. This chapter continues to delve into an ethnography of Yongkang, exhibiting the multiplicities of street life in which people walk to observe, encounter, and realize perceptions of liberty, identity, security, and individuality . Walking, as de Certeau suggests, has an “enunciative function .”4 De Certeau suggests that the footsteps of walkers lead observers to recognize daily practices which often, shadowed by the ideology of a utopian urbanistic discourse, “have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics .”5 Joseph Amato digs into a history of walking and identifies a process of transformation of walking from necessity to choice, which involves changing recreational lifestyle and social philosophy. Amid this history of individualization, Amato argues, walking as talking never loses the role as a means of protest.6 By reading pedestrian “speech acts,” I particularly observe daily happenings in the streets and alleys, raising questions as to how streets emerged as meeting points and how walking has become an aesthetically and politically significant act.7 An afternoon in November 1997, as I was sitting in a street café and listening to activists in Yongkang talk about their baoshu (tree-saving) action , the feeling and vision of déjà vu lingered. “We gave away flyers right on the park corners and walked down the streets and alleys (saojie 掃街). To reach residents hidden in the apartment buildings, we had to push the electronic bell of every household, stood on the side of the streets, and managed to explain to them the issues through the intercoms before they hung up. We even got up early so we would have a chance to chat with WALKING DEMOCRACY | 177 local senior citizens who were usually practicing taichi in...