“Tak tahu cakap, Ah! Awak apa bangsa? Cina, bukan? [Can’t you speak, Ah! What ethnicity are you? Chinese, no? ]: Representing the Sinophone Truly in Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (黑眼圈) ”

The Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley presents a discussion of the ways in which Tsai's film addresses the hierarchical relations between various Sinitic languages and cultures.

Speaker: Pheng Cheah, Professor, Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Moderator: Weihong Bao, East Asian Language and Culture, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Center for Chinese Studies (CCS), Center for Southeast Asia Studies

By focusing on the daily life-world of Malaysian Chinese and their relations to other ethnicities, Tsai Ming-liang’s film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, touches on a central issue in the recent academic debate on Sinophone literary studies: the oppressiveness of Chinese literary tradition and contemporary Chinese literary language in relation to the experiences of the Sinophone world.

Ng Kim Chew, the brilliant Mahua writer and literary critic, has noted that the vernacular Sinitic script, which is based on Mandarin, fails to depict the sounds of Malaysian Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew and other dialects, and that existing Chinese literary genres cannot capture the reality of Southeast Asian societies because they do not fully engage with the social environment. Ng’s social-cultural formation and educational background is similar to Tsai’s. Born ten years apart, both are Malaysian Chinese, received their university education in Taiwan, and have made Taiwan their home and base for artistic production. This paper discusses the ways in which Tsai’s film addresses the hierarchical relations between various Sinitic languages and cultures.