MCLC: How a Taipei Girl Sees the Mainland

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How a Taipei Girl Sees the Mainland
Source: Global Times (7/10/16)
Taiwan author tries to build bridges with new book
By Huang Tingting
"The Chinese mainland is more open than we thought and is by no means 'as closed a country as North Korea' like people in Taiwan think it is!"
"I am sick of hearing clichés about how dirty and disorderly the mainland still is… According to an old Taiwanese granny who traveled with us to Guizhou Province in 2009, Taiwan was just as terrible as we think the mainland is now back in the day… Progress takes time. I learned to cast aside unnecessary prejudice to enjoy the beauty of this land."
The quotes above are from How a Taipei Girl Sees the Chinese Mainland, a small book that has sparked heated debates on both sides of the Straits.
Taiwan's official Central News Agency covered the book in late May, when Tsai Ing-wen, head of the Democratic Progressive Party, was sworn in to become the province's first female leader.
Starting a conversation
A Taipei-born woman who rose to fame by writing a series of short essays online about the sensitive issue of cross-Strait relations, Guo Xueyun soon became a target for extremists on both sides after her book was published in May.
Some cast her as a gold-digger looking to make money in the mainland by taking advantage of cross-Strait ties. Some even called her taijian (Traitor to Taiwan) or Pro-mainlander without even reading the book.
"I used to fight anyone who attacked me online, but now I don't. Considering the state of cross-Strait relations, I discovered that it's natural for people to want to fight when talking about the issue," the 27-year-old author told the Global Times when asked if she was upset about the remarks made about her.
However, she then added with a smile, "But many of my friends on the other side of the Straits told me they thought the book was good and that it didn't' make them uncomfortable at all. In face, most of my readers love what they have read."
Guo certainly does seem to have quite a fanbase. Waves of people flocked to Parkview Green Shopping Mall in Beijing to attend a book signing on July 1. Most of these were fans of her work online or curious passers-by attracted to the event. Sitting right next to her book editor, the slim, black-haired woman was just as lively and straightforward as her writing online.
"However, I still believe in honest conversations and heart-to-heart dialogue. They're always the best way to resolve misunderstandings," Guo said, to applause from those seated.
"At first, I was really nervous that the things I wrote might cause me trouble, but it turns out that I was just overthinking things," Guo said laughing, when asked if her book had been subject to rigorous official examination before being published.
According to Guo, she is constantly asked how she handled orders to revise any "inappropriate terms," that may have appeared in the first draft of her book.
"Actually I was asked to revise only two sentences. One is 'Beijing is more like a capitalist city than any other capitalist city in the world.'"
Instead of a long and boring academic treatise discussing cross-Strait relations, or a list of clichés reinforcing tired stereotypes, the book mainly consists of cute little anecdotes about the differences between people in Taiwan and in the mainland, that Guo collected while studying at Peking University and working in the mainland, mostly in Beijing, over the past four years.
"I never intended to bring politics in while writing the book. I just want to start a conversation, especially one between the young generations on both sides, to help people across the Straits get to know each other better," Guo, now a political analyst for a Beijing-based media outlet, told the Global Times.
"But, politics is not something you can just avoid."
A fresh start
 
After the controversial "tea-egg incident" (when a professor in Taiwan claimed on a TV show that mainland residents were so poor they couldn't afford hard-boiled tea-eggs) in 2013, Guo tried to find out what mainlanders thought about Taiwan on Tianya, a popular Chinese BBS, but she soon quit because she was tired of "the endless fights" in the comments.
Later she started writing blog posts on Douban, a Chinese social networking website that allows registered users to talk about films, books and music.
Now known by 25,000 followers as Ai Taipei (Love Taipei) on Douban, Guo still doesn't consider herself a professional writer, even after publishing her book.
"I am just an ordinary Taipei-born, average-looking girl with no fancy past story. I was born during the 1980s, when Taiwan stood as one of the Four Little Tigers of Asia alongside Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong. However, it wasn't long before our economy stagnated while that of the mainland began to pick up. Therefore as I was growing up, I always heard those around me talk endlessly about the glorious past while looking enviously to the booming development on the other side of the Straits," Guo said.
Guo told the Global Times that she is very happy with her life in the mainland and that the only thing the publication of her book has changed is that she now has more readers online who keep pushing her to update her blog posts - something that she enjoys very much.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 14, 2016
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