Book Review: Haunted Modernities

Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, by Anru Lee (2023). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.

In 1973, an overloaded sampan ferry capsized in Kaohsiung Harbor, a major port in Taiwan’s second-largest city. The ferry was transporting workers to the Economic Prosperity Zone (EPZ) on Cijin Island. Twenty-five female factory workers lost their lives in this tragedy. In Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, Anru Lee examines how these women came to be memorialized, amid competing social and political attempts to shape the narratives surrounding the tragedy. As is detailed, bereaved families, feminist groups, and local municipal officials were all motivated by different agendas. By outlining this horrible occurrence and its aftermath, Lee succeeds in highlighting the contradictions of the patriarchal capitalism that characterized Taiwan’s post-World War II industrial development.

The city of Kaohsiung is located at the southernmost point of Taiwan. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was a center for Taiwan’s industrial expansion, as the site of major petrochemical factories and the world’s first EPZ. Alongside Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, Taiwan was one of the “Four Tigers” on the periphery of mainland China that were granted tariff-free access to the U.S. market, creating significant opportunities for factories to produce and sell their goods. In Taiwan, labor-intensive industries initially emerged in the cities and later spread across the island, drawing on all available labor pools, including young unmarried women. Families were grateful for the supplementary income that their unmarried daughters could provide. Factories, too, were grateful for “women’s work” that could be exploited as a source of cheap labor. The women workers themselves had more ambivalent feelings; they endured long hours for low wages yet came to see themselves as contributing members within a society and kinship system that had traditionally held them in low esteem. Indeed, without a robust labor organization to represent them, unmarried women workers all too often became expendable and forgotten, especially upon their deaths.

As Lee details, the families of these deceased female factory workers were primarily concerned with their ghosts. Within Taiwan’s patrilineal kinship system, women can only be part of their husband’s lineage, not that of their natal family. Therefore, it is believed that women who die out of wedlock are excluded from any lineage and are doomed to wander the earth as hungry, often vengeful ghosts, unacknowledged and unattended to in ancestral rites. Although absent from family altars and in lineage halls, these unmarried women nevertheless had to be appeased. The families formed a group to seek compensation from the employers and ferry company and chose to bury their daughters together, where their ghosts could be cared for and contained. To this end, the city complied and helped to build a cemetery, Twenty-Five Maiden Ladies Tomb, on Cijin Island.

Three decades later, however, the cemetery drew the attention of activists from Taiwan’s growing feminist movement. Offended by the term “maiden ladies,” the feminists were also incensed that the unmarried women were considered to be family less within Taiwan’s patrilineal system. Furthermore, they believed that women factory workers had never been fully acknowledged for their role in Taiwan’s economic success. The feminist groups lobbied the municipal government to convert the cemetery into a memorial for Taiwan’s women workers, which would finally recognize their contribution to Taiwan’s industrialization. Said feminists also viewed the memorial as an opportunity to reform the country’s patriarchal kinship system and to promote school curricula recounting women’s experiences.

The other major player in this narrative was the municipal government. Lee had been studying Kaohsiung’s efforts to transform its identity from an industrial to a postindustrial city when the issue of the women workers’ memorial emerged. As a major site of Taiwan’s industrialization, Kaohsiung and its economy had begun to decline as industry shifted to regions with cheaper labor. The city’s population was dwindling, and municipal leaders felt compelled to recreate Kaohsiung as a postindustrial city with an economy based on tourism. Central to this shift was the conversion of Cijin Island from an EPZ to a recreational oceanside paradise. Factories were transformed into hotels and beaches cleaned of the carbide slag waste dumped by petrochemical factories. A bridge had been built to connect the island to the city after the ferry disaster. However, the question of what should be done about the cemetery remained. From different vantage points, both city officials and feminist activists recognized the need to convert the cemetery into a memorial, and even considered relocating it to a more central location within a public park. The feminists were eager to memorialize Taiwan’s women industrial workers, whereas local authorities sought to commemorate Kaohsiung’s industrial past without drawing too much attention to traditional folk beliefs about the dead. The problem of wandering ghosts nonetheless persisted. Eventually, the twenty-five funeral urns of these women were buried under a mausoleum with a budding lotus flower on top.

In this section, Lee’s analysis is framed through the theoretical perspectives of “scaling” and “haunting.” Both the feminist activists and city officials used the ferry tragedy to tell a larger story to the wider public, scaling up. That said, the feminists wanted to use the study to glorify women and their labor, with an eye to changing Taiwan’s patriarchal system. The city officials, in contrast, wanted to use the women’s story to transform the city’s identity into a global site of postindustrial modernity. In the end, both parties were successful. Kaohsiung has refashioned its identity into an oceanside tourist Mecca, while new legislation and school curricula in Taiwan promote gender equity and changes in burial practices. Unmarried women ancestors can now be included on family altars and in lineage halls.

In overall terms, Haunted Modernities possesses within its pages an impressive reflective framework. It addresses the social, political, and economic contradictions of modernization that cannot truly be glossed over or erased, despite the efforts of those in positions of power. As Lee shows us, the dead women of Cijin Island speak to these contradictions, which are embodied in their ghosts. In Kaohsiung as elsewhere, the supernatural realm is ever present, no matter a place’s pretentions to “modernity.” As Max Weber reminds us, modernity might very well be an attempt to disenchant this realm and to silence voices that should never be suppressed in any moral universe. To the extent possible, Cijin Island’s Memorial Park for Women Laborers was a successful effort to challenge the combined efforts by patriarchy and capitalism to erase an essential, yet marginalized labor force. In this regard, the most compelling conclusion of Haunted Modernities is how the deceased not only influence the living but also continue to speak to the injustices of the world that they once inhabited.