Mamiyaroid 16

Puzzle Pieces

My parents met in Taiwan while my father was serving in the Navy during the American war in Vietnam. After I mentioned a book about Taiwan to my father he texted that when he came back from serving in Vietnam, and trying college, he took an anthropology class and it turned out the professor had written an anthropological study of a family in Taiwan, and my mother’s second oldest aunt had married into that family his professor had written about. This was one of those hair raising coincidences but about 8 years prior I had independently discovered this same writer when I researched religious practices in Taiwan. I became interested in Margery Wolf when I learned her husband was also an anthropologist. I even attempted to write a fictionalized version of this couple…but didn’t pull it off.

There is more to this story I don’t feel comfortable discussing until I find the proper form to write it in, but I’m still interested in writing something about this, because there are so many ethical concerns surrounding anthropology, especially around cultures and who gets to “explain” cultures and to what audience and for which purposes, but for now I am going to let it percolate in my brain until a form in which to write about all of this makes itself clear to me.

The aunt that is supposed to have married into the family Margery Wolf studied was my mother’s second oldest sister. I don’t know her name because according to Taiwanese custom I was always required to call her Ayi (aunt) and my mother addressed her as Di Gi (2nd oldest sister, in Taiwanese). I don’t know much about my aunt except what little I experienced. She had a worldly smoker’s laugh, had been to Europe, was the only member of her family to convert from Buddhism to Christianity (and my cousin, her son, is still Christian, as is his wife, who is indigenous Taiwanese).

Until the 1930s polygyny was legal in Taiwan and my great grandfather and my grandfather both had two wives, concurrently. My grandmother was my grandfather’s “first” wife, which gave her more status. My great grandfather and my grandfather were both gold miners in Jiu Fen. I just say this to try to make sense of this story my mother told me about my aunt. Apparently the family my aunt married into was wealthy, but my mother told me a confusing story about my aunt’s stormy marriage. It seems my aunt’s mother-in-law was trying to position her son into an even more prosperous marriage since my aunt was beautiful, but by the time she married, our family fortunes had turned because of my grandfather’s death.

Here are notes I took in 2012 or so:

2nd aunt—her husband’s mother was the 2nd wife, told him (aunt’s husband) to divorce her. He pretended to, but didn’t. Married a wife of his mother’s choosing, but she left him for a white American. He crawled back to 2nd aunt, and because he never actually divorced her, when he died she inherited his property.

I remember my aunt living in a large house, perhaps the spoils of her trials with this husband who supposedly couldn’t quit her. But in truth I know very little about her. My mother lived the majority of her life in New York, so even she only knows as much as my aunt cared to tell her, or what little my cousin might reveal to her. And I don’t speak Mandarin or Taiwanese, all things that prevent me from researching or interviewing anyone in much depth. Which makes me question the depth of anthropological knowledge. There is what your subject tells you…and what they’re not telling you. You’d have to interview many people to get a fullish picture…And that’s all if you’re able to speak a language fluently. If you’re using interpreters. So much is interpretation rather than fact.

What I do have are photographs:

My aunt is on the left, and the woman on the right is my mother. All taken in Taiwan.

Until next time…

Adalena

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-Adalena Kavanagh