User:JoeHK247/sandbox-Justin



"The diagrams analysed the use of the book but perhaps the unconscious process and sequence of the diagrams revealed the best way to use it" - Book 28 NA 6665 M412

Story
His father tells him that the geometry and order of a rice field is a farmer's greatest pride: one profound statement in a daily routine of moralizing lectures and Confucian proverbs. The old farmer communicates with his son through a vocalized series of self-righteous thoughts: a Taoist dogma persistently spoken into his ears

His father is a farmer that grows several types of rice. The stalks come in varying lengths. The grains in many colors and sizes. An ordered grid of plantings creates a satisfying harmony that can be viewed from multiple perspectives. The rice stalks imply the lines of a vanishing point - any misalignment is painfully obvious within the perfect arrangement. The terraced fields climb the slope to his house at the top of the hill. His fields are on a seasonal rotation that maximize crop yield. He completes a daily journey from his house, following the flow of the water as it drains from successive rice paddies, unclogging dirt and rocks in the path of his irrigation. His son is a water guard - a name given to a watchman that prevents strangers and neighbors from stealing the water from the family's fields. Tomorrow his son leaves home to follow the water, to where it drains in the sea. He will soon be drafted - he is almost military age. His father wonders who will guard the water once he is gone. Today, the sound of government jeeps echo through the terraced hills of his father's rice paddies to take him away to the coast where, through big binoculars, he is placed with a view of the faintly visible outline of an island nation of brothers, sisters, and his mother. He gazes longingly at the enemy.

His mother escaped China not long after he was born, she fled the country as a political refugee. She came from a family of wealthy industrialists, part of the Kuomintang Nationalist party that escaped to establish the Republic of China across the water on the Island of Taiwan. He needs to escape. He deserts the army and wanders out into the open water.

It is the 16th day in the lunar cycle. The tides pull in and then out and form their own irregular Watermark. The Abalone Farms in the bay to the south of the city of Xiamen sway together, the farm plots of each family tethered to their closest neighbors. An endless grid of marine aquaculture floating and rotating in the East China Sea - a large directionless raft, a network, holding steady in rough seas and spread out in calmer weather. Each farm may float independently but they are never far apart. Children splash in the water, fisherman cast their nets. Out on the open sea, the son longs for the terraced hills and firm ground of his father's rice paddies, and the forgotten embrace of his mother. An army deserter, he cannot return to China for fear of the strict consequences, yet he is also unequipped to receive political asylum in Taiwan. They form an independent island nation belonging to neither Taiwan nor China. Caught in between, they conduct trade with both countries but maintain their political independence out on the ocean.

He recognizes the same man as he commutes between Kinmen and Xiamen on a daily basis, among the tourists staring out from their ferries. They make eye contact, familiar to one another yet neither has shared a word between them. Still regretting his estrangement from his mother, he takes the opportunity to return a document unintentionally dropped in the water by the man in an effort to seek his assistance in communicating with both his mother and father. The man, profusely grateful, offers to repay him in any way he can. He soon finds out that this man is a Taiwanese director, living in Kinmen and currently filming a movie in Xiamen. The document he returned is the only annotated copy of the movie's script, which explains the director's relief when it was returned to him. Using old postcards of Amoy, he communicates between both his mother and his father. They send him news from home and news from abroad, passed on by the director on his routine boat trips with occasional sentimental memorabilia from both countries.

Living in the water in between ROC and PROC controlled territories, the farmer's son is able to see history from the perspective of both sides. In his daily encounters with the director, he is able to help the Taiwanese man make sense of the vague boundaries that separate each culture and their understanding of one another. He draws a diagram of each country's political identification with historical events and the boundaries that separate reality from fiction from the unknown in a zone that is largely inhabited by opposing ideologies and propaganda. The director's documentary, movie and the books that preceded them are all elements that attempt to resolve these domains of reality and reference situations that are both real and imaginary.