Tag Archives: 民進黨

The Green Crown Prince Cheng Wen-tsan of Taoyuan

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The fun thing about Taipei is that political opinions are often very in your face, whether it is a taxi driver going on about how the ruling party is driving the economy into the ground or a random bit of graffiti scrawled on a traffic box about the Taoyuan Mayor that piques your curiosity as to the context:

太子鄭文燦
Crown prince Cheng Wen-tsan

The frame of reference for this fantastic piece of “artwork” dates back to the words of Taipei City Councilor Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) back in May. He suggested that there were double standards going on, in that the 1st Mayor of Taoyuan Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) had received special treatment when it came to the Novotel outbreak of coronavirus because of his favorable position in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, as Lo put it he is a 「綠朝太子」 “the crown prince of the Green dynasty” – here green is a reference to the colors of the DPP vs the blue of the opposition KMT (Lo’s party). The accusation is that Cheng was able to push all of the responsibility on to the central government because of this special treatment, while other mayors got lambasted for doing the same. Lo then went on to taunt Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), asking him if he was jealous of this special treatment (an attack based on Ko’s tumultuous past relationship with the DPP).

Ko–who always seems to have a quip at the ready–.replied that if he’d pushed all the the responsibility to the central government, the situation would have been f*cked long ago and he doesn’t have it as easy as some (pointing no elbows at Cheng I’m sure).

Pulling a fast one with 奧步 àupō͘

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「奧步」 is the common written form for the Taiwanese expression 「漚步」 àupō͘ meaning a sly or crafty move.  This is just one of those phrases you’ll hear again and again. I heard it a while ago in the run-up to the election:

「尤其是大家其實現在都在期待就是民進黨最後會出什麼奧步。」

“Especially when at the minute everyone is actually waiting to see what crafty maneuver the DPP will end up pulling at the last minute.”

arc

You can hear it around the 11:04 point in the video below:

I heard it again just now while getting my hair cut (shorn off), in the Taiwanese soap opera 《炮仔聲》 (Ep 327) playing in the background.  It was translated into Mandarin in the subtitles as 「耍手段」:

「這個江宏傑真的有夠可惡，只會耍手段，不是用錢收買人，就是抓人的親人來威脅。」

“That Kang Hong-kiat is a real piece of work, he’s always got some sly trick up his sleeve. If he isn’t buying people off, he’s using people’s families to threaten them.”

arc

You can hear her say it here (1:46;47).

Earlier in the episode, one character describes getting a woman drunk in order to get her into bed (quite rightly) as an 「奧步」, although this time it’s translated into Mandarin as 「卑鄙手段」 “how could I use that kind of dirty tactic?”

arc

You can hear him say it here (0:40:56).

It’s one of those really useful phrases that’s really hard to find the right situation to use. In the first example I used, it’s used in a Mandarin sentence, so you can use it that way too, but make sure your tones are on point if you’re going to, or you’ll stand there shamefacedly repeating yourself until you have to spell it out like I did in the kitchenette at work when I called my colleague a 抓耙仔 jiàu-pê-á/liàu-pê-á (a snitch). I said bei instead of pei or something *shrugs*.

選舉

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我在台灣沒有投票權，跟政治人物的接觸也頗為有限。我們里的里長出來拜票的時候，看到我，一直貼在嘴巴上的僵硬微笑會一時鬆開。有時候某些候選人一不留意就會伸手過來要跟我握手，一抬頭看到我的白臉就會立刻把手收回來。但是當一個外來者也有好處。其一是朋友之間或在工作場合，不用跟人表達你家的政治立場，就算你想要告訴別人，也沒人要聽；同時你的政治立場也不會在潛意識的層面上，被同事或朋友察覺出來。簡而言之，台灣人不會以他們一般的標準來對待你，因此你可以很自（白）由（目）地詢問他人的政治色彩。不過久而久之，你不用問也多少會感覺到。

 

講到這一點也不是很準確，因為你可以大概從一些細節，猜測他人的家庭是藍是綠是紅，但這也不代表在投票箱前，他們就會聽話地投給父母要他們投的那位候選人。我待過不同「顏色」的學術和工作單位：藍的綠的大學、綠的科系、紅媒體到白的公司，後來也算是回到一個（還帶一點藍的）綠色單位。在每個單位都需要看很多宣傳品，也因此很容易被洗腦。在藍的單位時也許會覺得綠營做事不踏實，不懂得妥協；在綠的單位時也許會覺得藍營只有在看錢、沒什麼原則。可能都有；可能都沒有，不過也許都是因為我們以不同框架看，所以會有不同的印象。

 

講到框架，我以前一直對柯文哲有一種說不太出口的反感，可能是略受媒體的影響，說他恐同、親中、自我感覺良好等等。媒體最近也有報導他父母在最後時刻替他到中選會登記連署，最後卻遲到了。媒體報導這則新聞的大方向帶有一點幸災樂禍的意味。但就算深綠的人看到這則報導，儘管讀起來很爽，應該也很清楚這大概不是真相。柯文哲若真的想選，不會拖到這時候，還派老人家幫他登記。剛好我最近在看柯文哲寫的《白色力量3》，柯P對民進黨很失望不是因為民進黨對他的直接攻擊，而是他們在明明知道一個污衊他的假新聞報導是偏頗的情況下（如器官移植的葛特曼案），還去煽動爭議。 

 

也許當一個選民最重要的，是能夠離開同溫層，用不同的框架反省政治立場。

 

ㄟ對啊，我忘了……你上次總統大選是投哪一位？

‘When you can’t fatten your pig, but your dog is ballooning’ 「豬不肥，肥到狗去」

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Untitled

A friend of mine posted a Taiwanese phrase in a Mandarin-language Facebook post recently that caught my eye:

「人生第一次抽中1元飲料，居然是幫［某某人］買咖啡，這就叫豬沒肥，去肥到狗吧~~」

The post translates roughly to:

For the first time in my life I got a drink for NT$1 in a lucky draw, and it turned out to be when I was buying a coffee for [name omitted], isn’t this what they call [lit.] the pig not getting fat, while the dog balloons.

There seems to be several variations of this phrase, including the one above, the version my colleague suggested 「豬沒肥，肥到狗」(ti bô pûi, pûi tio̍h káu) and the one listed on the Ministry of Education dictionary 「豬毋大，大對狗去」(Ti m̄ tuā, tuā tuì káu khì (Click link for audio)). A literal reading of the phrase is someone being unable to fatten their pig for market, while the dog, which is meant to serve as a guard dog, and should be agile, is getting fat instead.

One explanation of this phrase I found at this blog, suggests that it was originally quite a misogynistic phrase, as it could be used to describe a situation wherein the son of a house, who would actually benefit the family if he got a good education, gets bad grades in school, while the daughter, who wouldn’t benefit the family with an education, gets good grades:

未命名1

A very horoscope-heavy profile on Weiling Chen (陳慧翎), the director of the Taiwanese drama On Children (《你的孩子不是你的孩子》) and the actor in the recent first episode, Ivy Yin (尹馨) makes reference to this interpretation, when the director (Chen) mentions that her mother once used the phrase, comparing her and her younger brother:

雙魚座的陳慧翎成長壓力來自不被了解，難忘媽媽說過「豬不肥、肥到狗」，意旨為何她比弟弟優秀。

“Piscean Chen Weiling’s pressure growing up came from not being understood. She always remembers when her mother said, “the pig won’t get fat, while the dog gets fatter,” questioning why she was more brilliant than her little brother.”

It does seem to have a wider application, however, as both the poster and the subject of my friend’s post were male. In this context it’s kind of a mixture between ‘casting pearls before swine’ and a bitter cry of ‘why do some guys have all the luck.’ My friend is suggesting (jokingly) that he deserves good luck, but instead it’s being wasted on his friend.

A report in the Liberty Times used the phrase in a political context too, although the fact that Tsai Ing-wen is a woman may make the use of the phrase more natural. If you couldn’t tell from the subtle objective tone below, Liberty Times is not a big fan of the KMT:

國民黨一向認為兩岸關係為其強項，其領導菁英都想跑北京領命，現在恐怕成了選票毒藥，致英雄無用武之地。

在這樣的情況演變下，如果蔡英文不犯錯，十一月的選舉大勢不難推估，唯有執政黨穩固了這次中期選舉，才有可能促使北京重新考慮其對台對口的設定，兩岸在明年才有機會鬆動緊繃的局面。不過，中國到頭來肯定會發現竟是「豬不肥，肥到狗」。這樣的辯證關係，豈不是很好玩嗎？

“The KMT has always considered cross-strait relations its strength, and its leading elites take their orders from Beijing. Now, it seems, this has become toxic to their election hopes, so these heroes are unable to make use of their skills in this department.

As the situation continues to evolve, if Tsai Ing-wen doesn’t make any mistakes, the overall trend of the November election isn’t hard to guess at, as only the party in government will be sitting pretty in the mid-term elections. It’s only this situation that will drive Beijing to reconsider their stance on Taiwan. Cross-strait tensions are unlikely to ease until next year. However, China, in the end, is sure to discover that “the pig isn’t getting fatter, while the dog is ballooning”. Isn’t this dialectic quite good fun?”

This suggests that China will end up working with the DPP (the fat dog), rather than the KMT (the skinny pig), despite its idea of which party should be the best for it to work with.

Mixing Taiwanese Proverbs?: 「相罵無好話，打架恨無力」 sio-mē bô hó-ōe, sio-phah hīn bô-la̍t

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So by now everyone’s quite likely seen the photo below of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Su Chen-ching (蘇震清) choking Kuomintang (KMT) legislator Chen Yi-min (陳宜民) over the latter’s attempt to disrupt the DPP’s passing of a holiday bill. The bill is an altered version of a KMT bill that the DPP had opposed while in opposition. The KMT reportedly has little opposition to the bill itself, but were objecting to what they see as DPP partisan hypocrisy in trying to pass a bill they had previously opposed and in passing the bill without allowing any time for debate. The KMT are not necessarily opposed to the practice of passing a bill without debate, but are rather a little miffed that the DPP is doing this despite praising and visiting students taking part in the Student Sunflower Movement, who were protesting the very same method of passing bills when the KMT was trying to pass a cross-strait trade-in-services act in 2014. Despite more publicity being given to the photo below, the KMT reportedly stuck the proverbial boot into a few DPP legislators too, but less conspicuously.

fight

Photo source: Wild East Magazine

Anyway, this post is not primarily concerned with politics, but rather with a Taiwanese phrase used by former New Party legislator Li Sheng-feng (李勝峰) when commentating on the scuffle on TVBS’s political chat show ‘The Situation Room’:

 

「相罵無好話，打架恨無力」 sio-mē  bô  hó-ōe,  sio-phah  hīn bô-la̍t

Nothing good or auspicious is said when people are cursing at each other; people hate themselves for not being able to hit each other harder in a fight.

I originally thought that this was a mixture of two phrases in Taiwanese:

1. 「相罵無好話  相打無揀位」sio-mē   bô  hó-ōe, sio-phah bô kéng ūi which means “It’s easy to say awful things when arguing and to underestimate your strength in a fight”.

2. 「相罵恨無聲，相拍恨無力」sio-mē  hīn  bô-siaⁿ , sio-phah  hīn bô-la̍t which means “When in an argument, you hate yourself for not being able to shout them down louder, and in a fight you’ll hate yourself for not being able to hit them harder”, or, you’ll always try and find a way to bring the other person down.

But my (very gracious) Taiwanese friend called his mother in the south and she said that the phrase that the guy says on the TV program does actually exist and that it is the same as the meaning of No. 2 listed above. But she also pointed out that people in southern Taiwan say “hūn” instead of “hīn”.

Feel free to share your opinion or any similar phrases you have in the comments section.

 

Smearing political rivals in Taipei: Freddie Lim take-down! 林昶佐被林郁方「抺黑」了

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Have you been enjoying the flood of campaign leaflets flowing through your letterbox? I’m living near the boundary between the 5th and 8th electoral districts, so have been getting a range. One particular leaflet released by KMT candidate Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) caught my eye, as the entire thing was dedicated to smearing Lin’s rival for the 5th electoral district of Taipei, Freddy Lim (founding leader of the New Power Party (時代力量) and lead singer of heavy-metal band Chthonic):

whyyouburnflag The front side of the leaflet poses a question to Lim:

I want to ask Freddy Lim: “Why did you burn our national flag?”

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A Review of Li Ang’s ‘Everyone Chews on Sugarcane by the Side of the Road’ 李昂的《路邊甘蔗眾人啃》書評

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lubian

Warning: there is adult content in this post.

This is Li Ang’s much anticipated follow up to her 1997 book Everybody sticks it in the Beigang Incense Burner (《北港香爐人人插》), which I’ve yet to read. At first glance it is an irreverent look at the misogynistic self-aggrandizement that characterizes the generation of democracy campaigners who rose to fame after being imprisoned in the martial law era in Taiwan, some of whom later formed the Democratic Progressive Party and went into government under former president Chen Shui-bian. The book also deals with the symptomatic nature of the way the February 28 incident and the White Terror continue to manifest themselves in the political arena. Although this might seem a rather obscure or outdated theme, it can give us an insight into the background of the political mindset in today’s Taiwan, particularly in light of the recent Sunflower Movement and the problems in governance that it has highlighted. The attempt to smear the participants of the Sunflower Movement in March and April as violent rioters, for example, is reminiscent of the Kuomintang’s rhetoric against democracy protesters during the 1980s and 1990s that features in the book.

The book centres around the life of Chen Junying (陳俊英) from his youth as a dissident during the Martial Law era, to his slow drift into irrelevance as a retired politician living in the US in his later years. Li Ang goes to great pains in the introduction, stating several times that the character isn’t based on any one person in particular – her protestations are so frequent however that it’s almost as if she’s prompting us to take this denial with a pinch of salt.

Chen feels owed by Taiwanese society and Taiwanese women in particular and he has a mantra that recurs throughout the book which rationalizes his misogynistic behavior:

(My translation) He was forever the one being let down, it wasn’t just the Taiwanese people who owed him, didn’t Taiwanese women owe him too‽ So it was natural for him to sleep with a good number of women when he came out of jail.

The book can be read as a satire up to a point and parts of it are quite funny, recalling the satirical bite of Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You /《玫瑰玫瑰我愛你》, like the protagonist’s assumption that he will ejaculate more than other men because of the years he spent in prison, and because he thinks so much of his own masculinity:

(My Translation) She discovered that Chen Junying was excessively liberal with toilet paper after making love. When he climaxed, he didn’t leave that much ejaculate in her (his sperm wasn’t particularly greater in volume than other men, nor did it smell fishier), and not much of it would drip out of her vagina after they’d finished, so one or two sheets of toilet paper would have been enough to absorb it all. He would grab a handful of tissue from the box, however, and pass her a pile, watching her as she meticulously wiped herself clean of any trace until all of the tissue was used up.

In the same vein, Chen takes a very chauvinistic attitude during sex, as, despite being reviled as a dissident by many women in his youth, he still finds time to grumble about the only girl who is willing to get together with him, and treats her with scorn, viewing her status as the product of a “mixed marriage” between a mainland soldier and an aborigine as below his – with a lot of his fellow dissidents using the phrase 「無魚蝦也好」 (bô hî, hê mā ho – If there’s no fish, you can make do with shrimp) to  tease him

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