Chewing the Scenery
灑狗血
by Tanya Visceglia
For a conflict-averse society, Taiwan certainly loves to roll around in high drama, both in art and life. Even a restaurant meal with friends is ripe with dramatic potential. We fight for the privilege of treating our companions, during which the bill is yanked back and forth with cries of protest: “No, you paid last time.” “You can pay next time!” The winner of the bill-grab then races to the cash register, slapping money onto the counter. The loser either tries to shove money into the winner’s pocket or flings down his own credit card on top, ordering the counter staff not to touch the winner’s money UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. This is a friendly game that everyone understands.
Real arguments among customers might take a darker turn: a restaurant table covered in dishes could be flipped over to punctuate the intensity of disagreement. This messy, clattering scene is acted out so often in Taiwanese soap operas that it has its own name: “bing do” (翻桌). Granted, I’ve never seen bing do performed sober (or by a woman, for that matter), but it happens often enough for restaurants to post signs warning would-be drama kings that the fine for this behavior is NTD 5000 (USD 150) per tantrum. After a particularly grueling round of “Humiliation Dodgeball[1],” my friend’s husband quit his job by overturning the conference table at a meeting and stalking out of the room. Taiwan does enjoy a good show.
In on-screen dramas, this level of melodrama or extreme contrivance is called “sa gou xie.[2]” Literally translated as “spraying dog blood,” it was originally used to describe what a Taoist priest did to pull out all the stops at an exorcism. If demons resisted all other methods of expulsion, the priest would spray the blood of a black dog around the house, and poof! – the demons would disappear. Taiwanese soap operas, nicknamed “eight o’clock affairs[3]” () after the prime-time slot they occupy, offer a sumptuous dog-blood buffet: long-lost brothers, secret affairs, deathbed confessions, memory loss, hidden identities, and grabs for the family fortune.
These shows first started cropping up after the ban on local languages had been lifted in the nineties. Supported by the Bentuhua movement (本土化運動), they were part of a larger effort to resurrect local languages as a means of reconstructing Taiwanese identity. Melodramatic and raw in both themes and production values, they were often associated with elderly or uneducated audiences and were criticized, like western soap operas, for their hyper-stylized characters and overreliance on the invisible hand of coincidence[4]. Nonetheless, the most iconic of these shows, The Unforgettable Memory (意難忘)[5], remains the longest-running primetime drama in Taiwan’s history, with a total of 526 episodes. From its debut on September 22, 2004 to the series finale on September 28, 2006, it had the highest viewership of any show ever aired in Taiwan. By popular demand, the entire series was rerun twice, from 2010 to 2014[6]. Like Trump voters in opinion polls, it seems that a lot of people were watching, but in secret.
Free of the cultural imperative to dismiss the show as “unwholesome[7],” I was unapologetically addicted. I started watching it with my first girlfriend in Taiwan (the smooth operator from Karaoke) to improve my Taiwanese language skills. Taiwanese is a phonetician’s wet dream: it has an extremely complex system of sound contrasts that trip delicately off the tongues of native speakers but are extremely difficult for a second-language speaker to master. Although faithful viewing didn’t do much for my Taiwanese pronunciation, I was already hooked. Come for the tone sandhi, stay for the show. My students protested: “That’s for old people! So cheesy! How can you watch that?” I struggled to articulate what made the show so satisfying and familiar. During one episode, as ominous music cued the good brother’s betrayal by his shiny-eyed family rival, it dawned on me: The Unforgettable Memory was Taiwan’s answer to Dallas[8].
Dallas had been my favorite show in junior high school. In 1978, no force of nature could have wrested me from my place in front of the TV at 8:00 on Friday nights. On plastic-covered sofas all over America, we gawked at the unimaginable oil wealth of the powerful Ewing family, while Schadenfreude over the utter hash the characters were making of their lives kept our envy at bay. After nine seasons of Dallas imprinting, The Unforgettable Memory pulled me in fast and deep. Fuming in the doorway of the ancestral manse, the pitiless matriarch drives her pure-hearted daughter-in-law away for daring to come from the wrong side of the tracks. In the lobby of her husband’s office, a betrayed wife slaps his disingenuous mistress, who spirals down a flight of stairs, shrieking “Big sister, (no relation) forgive me. I’m sorry.” Like Dallas, The Unforgettable Memory delivers the Full Monty of human conflict: personal fulfillment vs. family obligations, self-interest vs. self-sacrifice, free will vs. destiny, and love vs. betrayal[9].
The conflict between personal freedom and filial piety[10], the Confucian cultural dictate to honor and obey one’s parents, often comes to a head in the interaction between mothers and daughters-in-law[11]. A son’s loyalty is traditionally tested with the question: “If your wife and your mother fell into the ocean, who would you save?” The only right answer is “my mother”, since as an outsider, his wife occupies the lowest position in the family pecking order. But as a son and a husband, either way he answers, he’s fucked. And the epic, cage-fighting battle between mothers-in-law and wives for the upper hand in a marriage can spill a river of toxic dog blood into any couple’s life.
The Unforgettable Memory and Dallas both spend seasons weaving through the classic loyalty trope: “marry that woman over my dead body”. In Dallas, The Ewing’s favorite prodigal son Bobby elopes with Pamela Barnes, daughter of the family’s nemesis, Digger Barnes. Bringing her home to South Fork lights the fuse for years of scheming, hissing and shouting matches among senior and junior Ewings to defend or run off “that Barnes girl”. In The Unforgettable Memory, the widowed Wang matriarch flies into a rage when her eldest, most dutiful son brings home Fang Lizhu. “You will never marry that bar hostess!” Mrs. Wang had lost her husband to a similar scheming minx, whose involvement with shady characters had also indirectly caused the death of the Wang patriarch. Eventually, both Jock Ewing and Mrs. Wang are won over by the pure-hearted daughters-in-law of questionable provenance. Pamela and Lizhu both reveal themselves to be more xiaoxun than the mercenary Sue Ellen and Lai Suling, who had both come through more respectable channels and appeared more traditional at first blush. Endings are very satisfying: a pure heart wins the day, and evil is exposed and punished. But these stories seldom wrap up as neatly for the daughters-in-law in my circle of friends.
The struggle for control of the household between my friend Yuling and her mother-in-law ended in divorce. Like many newly married couples, she and her husband moved into an apartment owned by her husband’s parents. Since both the property and son were “hers,” Yuling’s mother-in-law felt free to drop by any time, often with extended family in tow. Even when the apartment was blissfully free of visiting relatives, Yuling would come home to find the invisible hand of her mother-in-law at work. Her laundry basket had been moved from the left to the right side of the washing machine because “it was more convenient.” The contents of her refrigerator were rearranged in “a more sensible order”.
After she discovered that her personal papers and diaries had been rifled through, she began keeping an increasingly unappealing series of pets in her room to discourage entry: first, a lab rat, then an iguana, then a ferret. The snooping continued until the day her mother-in-law entered Yuling’s room to find a hissing snake coiled up in a tank. “She can’t keep a snake in here! Tell your wife to get that snake out of my house.” Yuling’s husband did nothing. But what were his options? Mother and wife, at the bottom of the ocean. You can save only one…. Yuling ended up swimming to safety alone, Her parents told her she couldn’t come back home, since she had already “married out” of their family, and her old room was currently occupied by her brother’s children. Today, she lives in Australia with her second husband, where an ocean separates the couple from both their in-laws and families of origin.
A son’s devotion to upholding his mother’s values is also common bone of contention. My friend Vanessa’s mother-in-law prides herself on thriftiness, so in every encounter with her daughter-in-law, she works in a dig at Vanessa about her wasteful habits and dispenses unsolicited saving tips. One night, during dinner at a hot pot restaurant, she scolded Vanessa for spending too much money on cosmetics. “A raw egg is just as good as those expensive face masks!” She then ordered a raw egg from the server, cracked it into a bowl, and applied it to her face at the table. “See how simple that is? And my skin is as smooth as it was twenty years ago.” After they had finished dinner, her mother-in-law sailed smugly out of the restaurant with the egg mask still dripping from her chin, while Vanessa paid the bill. Her husband said nothing.
As a further display of loyalty, Vanessa’s husband makes a huge show of his own thriftiness. To arrange their first date, he called her and said “Meet me at the night market. We’ll go Dutch. See my email for details.” He then hung up without saying goodbye. His mother must have been so proud. He had spent less than one minute on the phone, so he paid not one penny for the call. Now, his mother is making noises about moving in with them. Vanessa bobs and weaves on this delicate subject: “Ma, our apartment is too small. Maybe if you buy us a bigger apartment….” Her MIL snaps back “Why do you need a bigger apartment? You’re not going to give me a grandson.” Vanessa, shamed by the mention of her infertility, retreats to her corner. The MIL presses her advantage: “Just give me that little room you use for storage. No need to waste money on a new apartment.” But Vanessa knows that if that happens, her mother-in-law will be on the phone to her husband’s older brother every day, crying: “They shoved me into a tiny little room with camping equipment. After all I’ve done for them.” Stalemate.
As a queer outlier, I was spared the worst of the MIL drama. I loved my mother-in-law. For a woman of her generation, she was exceptionally kind and accepting of both my foreignness and sexual deviance. At the age of eight, she had been given away to another family because her own family had too many daughters. Still, she managed to graduate from a good high school and pass the test for a civil-service job at the phone company. Working as a phone operator, she could eavesdrop on any call in the neighborhood. If any other woman dared to call A-lun’s father when they were dating, she would get on the line and order the woman to back off. At office parties, she was known for her drinking skills: chugging a 40-ounce beer with no hands, she balanced the bottle on her lower lip. In the summer, she would come into our apartment, and whip out her gua sha ban and order me to “Take off your shirt and sit down!” Scraping it across the back of my neck, she tutted: “Look at this. I’m barely touching you and there’s already a bruise. I’m surprised you don’t have heat stroke already.” For a sassy, hard-drinking woman who had worked her whole life, the last two years of her life were a frightening slide into advancing dementia. One day, when I took her to the doctor, she wandered off. I found her in a hospital corridor, clutching prescription slips, trying to puzzle out whether she had already seen the doctor or not. As I took her arm and led her to the pharmacy counter, she mumbled: “How could this have happened? How did I get like this?”
Since my marriage to A-lun wasn’t seen as real, I could just relate to my mother-in-law as a person and be kind. A-lun and I received no benefits, but we were also under no obligation to dance to anyone’s tune. We contributed time, effort and money and asked for nothing but tolerance in return. But if I had been married to one of her sons, she might have seen me as a different level of threat: a potential rival for control of her son or the household.
As a foil for the dutiful, micromanaged daughter-in-law, viewers now meet the painted, scheming xiaosan (little three, or mistress). This trope is also more satisfying in art than in life. A soap opera mistress can be spotted immediately and isolated from the herd of good women. Dipping her painted head to gaze at her target adoringly, she simpers a siren call for male rescue. Until the very second an affair is revealed, xiaosan faces the wife with an innocent pout and widened eyes. In soap operas, she always gets her comeuppance, usually in the form of a ringing, public slap that sends her reeling to the ground or spiraling down a flight of stairs.
A YouTube compilation of badiandang mistress scenes lures viewers with the caption: “If you have a mistress or are a mistress, prepare to be slapped.” The wide-eyed, girlish xiaosan counters the slap with a dog-blood fountain of apology. Kneeling, slapping herself in the face, she begs for forgiveness. Calling the wife “dajie” (big sister) folds in a backhanded compliment, digging at the wife for being older, and by definition, less desirable. In contrast, the shameless bar hostess xiaosan screeches recriminations at the wife: it’s all her fault for ignoring him/being/wrapped up in her children/letting herself go. As in the MIL scenes, the men mostly stand by in stony silence or take their own share of slaps without flinching. In Dallas, JRs mistresses ended up thrown off roofs or drinking alone in their tacky bedsits. See what happens.
Alas, real life is not quite as satisfying. Last year, I heard the story of a wife who became suspicious of her bank-executive husband’s frequent absences. Mr. Guo had told his wife he was busy finishing an EMBA. During that time, his wife covered at family obligations and even helped him with his work toward the degree. One day, after her husband had refused her invitation to lunch, she turned up at his office unannounced to find him cozying up to a female colleague. Guo’s wife had him followed for two weeks, then confronted him with photos of multiple hotel visits and some sperm her private detective had collected in a tissue.
Guo denied the affair and began punishing his wife by insulting her and withholding household expenses. Checking his computer for further evidence, she discovered dozens of sex tapes with multiple partners. Guo’s wife swooped into his office in a badiandang fury, screaming at the xiaosan that she would ruin both of their careers if xiaosan didn’t leave her husband alone. In the end, both Mr. Guo and xiaosan had to resign from the bank, but they’re still together. In another plot twist, this xiaosan is also married. Her husband chose to forgive her “to keep the family together” and because he hadn’t touched her in years. No neat package of justice prevails here. Just a raw, humiliating tangle of human misery.
As for me, my girlfriend who loved The Unforgettable Memory so much chose to end our relationship with one of its classic scenes. One night, I was coming back from a research trip to Taipei, and A-xiang was supposed to meet me at the bus stop. When I called her to confirm my arrival time, an unfamiliar woman’s voice answered her phone. She told me that A-xiang was drunk, and I’d better come pick her up because no one knew where she lived. When I arrived, my girlfriend was vomiting at the curb, and two people I had never seen before were warning her with raised and shaking fists: “You have to tell the truth! If you don’t tell her, we’ll do it now!”
Desperate to avoid a confrontation with the weeping, handwringing xiaosan standing on the sidelines. I rose to the drama of the occasion. After dragging A-xiang’s drunk ass home, I threw a glass of water in her face and (cue ominous music) asked: “Are you in love with that woman?” She replied: “I don’t know.” “In that case,” I said, “you have to leave tomorrow.” The next day, I changed the locks. I had been paying all the bills anyway. For three months, I couldn’t eat anything without retching, and I slept next to the toilet hugging her wifebeater and a bottle of vodka. But I didn’t take her back.
From time to time, the xiaosan would call me to protest her innocence: the affair was my fault for working too many hours, not spending enough time with A-Xiang. She was a good woman. Her love for A-xiang was “yuanfen” – destiny. After the newness of their affair had worn off, those calls morphed into shrieking accusations whenever A-xiang didn’t come home: “Where is she? I know she’s with you!” Art imitates life imitates art. And now I’m writing about it, so the circle is complete. Since then, I haven’t had nearly as much relationship drama with anyone else. And I’ve never found a show in Taiwan that could hold my attention for as long as The Unforgettable Memory.
[1] See Workplace Culture for details.
[2] “灑狗血” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. 10/01/2020. https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B4%92%E7%8B%97%E8%A1%80?fbclid=IwAR2jb-F51Dty6J1gltG9xq3IbDRshHzRtCEzTR9xnF98E4bBHVAEFd6X-Mk
[3] Badiandang (八點檔)
[4] Kasarełło, L. (2015). The Pop-Cultural Phenomenon of Taiwanese TV Drama: Remodeled Fairy Tales and Playing with Virtues. Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia, (28).
[5] Guo, H. and Lin H. (2004-2006). The Unforgettable Memory. Formosa Television.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unforgettable_Memory
[7] 不營養
[8] Salzman, D. (1978-1991). Dallas. Lorimar Productions.
[9] Chen, Y. and Hao, X. (1997), Conflict Resolution in Love Triangles: Perspectives Offered by Chinese TV Dramas’, Intercultural Communication Studies, VII: 1.
[10] 孝順 (xiaoxun)
[11] 婆媳關係 (poxiguanxi)
Tanya Visceglia
Tanya Visceglia is a linguist, Brooklyn-born expat, and an 18-year member of Taiwan's LGBTQ+ community. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Chang Ching Guo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Her non-academic writing uses sociolinguistic concepts to frame and interpret lived and shared experience in her original and adopted homelands. Her essays Not for Nothin and For Joan Nestle were featured in Monologging in 2020 and 2021. Her essay 921 appeared in the latest issue of Expat Press. She is represented by Natalie Kimber at The Rights Factory, and her essay collection Shelter in Another Place is currently out on submission.