From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1992 23:33:09 GMT

                                     Saturday, the 26th of December, 1992

Crawford Kilian writes, about finding images of E.T. as part
of the collection at the newly reopened Chen Family Temple in
Guangzhou:
  From this experience I drew a couple of lessons--that bad taste unites all
  humanity in iron bonds of kitsch, and that some culture isn't worth
  appropriating, period.

From my observation, the Chinese have a special predilection for kitsch.
Or rather, for what a North American thinks of as kitsch.

Now, I know that kitsch is a charge usually levelled at Americans
themselves, but Martha and I visited Taiwan in Christmas of 1987
[her father having moved there to a (no doubt exploitive) vice
presidency with Zenith Taiwan Corporation], and over the two weeks
we were there I never ceased to be struck at how tacky much of the
culture seemed to me. The ubiquitous unadorned cement-block construction,
of course, did little to help, but even many of the shrines and temples
were simply gaudy with neon and colored plastic. The monuments in Taipei
to maximum leaders Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek are colorized attempts to
out-Lincoln-Memorial the Lincoln Memorial. And then there is the
brightly-coloured ``Monopoly money'' that people would buy in bags, to burn
supposedly for the financial benefit of the ancestral ``hungry ghosts''
who frequent the altars at the shrines. We went on a day's excursion
from Taipei, flying to Hwalien on the eastern coastal strip, then taking
a tour bus up the beautiful white-marble Taroko Gorge. Coming back from
the temple at the top, we (a mixed bag of mostly Chinese, then Japanese
tourists, and finally this one American family---English the lingua franca)
were ``entertained'' by one of our tour guides who sang for us pop music
into a microphone which was mixed on top of instrumental background tapes,
she ranging lightly up and down the aisle of this lurching bus. Sort of
like Bill Murray.

We were invited to join Martha's parents at a wedding dinner for one
of the Zenith secretaries, which dinner was being held in a good restaurant
downtown Taipei. The guests bring money, and at the door the money is
counted, and the amount given is entered calligraphically next to one's
name on a large paper scroll. Of course, the dinner courses didn't quit,
and the food was wonderful, but there was some good deal of ceremony in
the middle of it all, with speeches by the parents of the bride
and groom (Chinese speeches seem to me to be especially an occasion for group
emotional display), and there was an entrance of the bride in white to the
Bridal Chorus from ``Lohengrin''---I kid you not---played over crackling
loudspeakers and this was all followed by the festive sound of firecrackers
going off---played over the same crackling loudspeakers. The bride and groom
later went around visiting table by table (just as is customary at American
receptions), except that every so often she'd disappear only to reappear in
a different, more sumptuous, dress, each dress after the white one brightly
coloured, some of western cut, some traditionally Chinese.

I interpreted my first-order impression that Chinese culture
had a large tolerance for kitsch to simply that the Chinese had
had a large tolerance for things---bright lights and neon and
blaring loudspeakers, and coloured plastic and paper---which to me seemed
tacky. I.e., that these things were probably not considered as tacky
to them as they were to me.

(Not that these things don't exist in American culture, mind you.
It's just that we don't tend to associate them with temples so much, unless
these be Las Vegas wedding chapels or televangelists' haunts. Also, lest
Francis pipe in about here mentioning Evelyn Waugh's _The Loved One_,
I'll preempt him with the time I came off of a week walking Hadrian's
Wall from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Carlisle: My friend and I had just
reached the outskirts of Carlisle, when we turned in to a convenience
store to get a chocolate bar. The folks running it noticed our American
accents and immediately launched into all about how their dream was to save
up to travel to Graceland, asking us if had we ever seen it, and declaiming
upon how wonderful Elvis was.)

I also found that some of the older temples, and the Grand Hotel
in Taipei, showed me that, however ornate and Byzantine was
the art and architecture, there was a magnificence and a very high
culture behind it. Also, I think that some of the older Taiwanese
farmhouse estates exhibit a serene and simple beauty.

Oh well, I've attended a few wedding receptions in New Jersey, too, where
they seem to go heavy on the kitsch.

               Mike Morris
        (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)