He said it quietly, as something of an afterthought to underscore his suggestion that I not mire myself (or, more precisely, my thesis) in a catalog of Taiwanese political squabbles.
To be fair, my senior thesis adviser always speaks quietly, but this bit of hushed advice he added to the end of a brief exhortation to transcend. Yes, he asked that I find a larger issue whereby my thesis about Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall could transcend journalistic observation and rise to some level of removed, eternal, divine scholarship. "Take an Olympian view," he said. "Detach yourself."
He can be so dramatic.
Now before Lindsey gets her panties in a twist, let's consider this. I once had a dream of being a noble journalist as well, but I don't think I have the wherewithal. (Another thing he told me was that I should be less judgmental in my writing--it seems that I make neither a very good scholar nor a very good journalist.)
My thesis is about the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall: a formal analysis of its original plan, an evaluation of the design competition which yielded the plan, and with some luck, some comment on the social and cultural realities of the Republic of China post-1950 that manifested their particular troubles in the marble cupcake that sits in the middle of Taipei.
But it was an article in the New York Times that first alerted me to the trouble of its renaming in 2007. I felt, at the time, that this was an appropriate moment in which to catch this issue: Taiwan, on the cusp of a regime change;Taipei, in light of Beijing's rising stardom; a particular building, in the midst of a squabble over its meaning and moniker. To me, the topic and the building were made relevant by the news articles that every day chronicled the living and breathing folks--the protestors, the legislators, the tai-chi practitioners--that looked upon the cupcake as something more than a tourist trap.
A year later, I see, though, that particular moments do lose their shine, no matter how bright the spark at the time of touchdown (there is a reason why, I guess, newspapers are eventually used to pack china and as a streak-free alternative to cotton rags for cleaning glass): a new president has been elected and protested against, Beijing's Olympic performance did not make everyone forget about its human rights record, the issue of the memorial's name was quietly settled in a January legislative meeting.
The most vividly written section I have at the moment is a mini-chronicle of that recent battle. But I see now that relying on that moment can't make for the foundations of a 20,000-word paper. The marble cupcake has faded back into the Taipei landscape, its 70 meters--once making it the tallest edifice in Taipei--are now dwarfed by new symbols of Taiwan's international status.
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