Fullmetal Alchemist, ep. 17-19

Look! I finally made myself a FMA icon! I figure I will be posting on this enough to warrant one.

( Spoilers for all three eps )

Because I can't leave well enough alone...

Anyhow, a recent post on LJ and associated comments got me to thinking. I'm not posting this as a comment in there because I figure it will be fairly idiosyncratic on my end, very long and rambling, as per usual, and also because I don't feel up to making an argument or being rational or anything. So to keep in mind: these are some gut feelings of mine, some of which I have thought about for some time and some of which I haven't quite puzzled out yet.

I don't quite get the visceral response to the flag that I am getting that some people do. I'm not quite sure if it was because I spent half of my life in Taiwan, because I seem to not glom onto other symbols much or what. I suppose I just never quite wrapped my brain around the thought that flag=country, despite the parade with flags at the Olympics or the encyclopedia article with numerous flags or flag pins and everything, or a childhood spent listening obsessively to "Wee Sing America" and singing very loudly about the red, white and blue.

I can't tell if this is a response-to-America-the-nation thing, which on my end is extremely complicated, or a simple me-no-get-symbols thing. I'm not sure. I've never seen anyone desecrating a cross, so I don't know if I would have a gut reaction to that. I have more of a gut reaction to national anthems, probably because I sing them and that connects me to them emotionally. I feel an extreme gut reaction if I think about someone burning down my house and all my things, or a library, or ripping books apart. I think this may be because those things, while physical, are still things -- they represent something to me, but they don't represent something to everyone. They represent my memories, or the potential of knowledge or something like that.

Also, I find that I am rather wary of symbols. I guess I am ambivalent toward any concept that can be boiled down into a symbol, be it flag or family crest or whatnot. Symbols in fiction I grok; symbols in real life are a bit iffier for me. I think this is because I tend to be hesitant to adopt a symbol, because I feel that so many different people believing so fervently in one symbol probably means that there are many different interpretations for said symbol, so that when two people say that they fight for the flag/cross/keychain/who knows, they may be fighting for completely different things, depending on what they believe on, but they are projecting their different ideologies onto a single item.

I'm still trying to dig around for symbolic objects that I find meaningful that are also meaningful to a large group of people (aka, people who are not just me and my group of friends), but I think the last one I really stood behind was... er... our senior class flag from high school (don't mock me!). And now, thinking back on it, I suspect a large part of that was because my class was so small (17 some people) and that I had known them for so long. It was intensely personal for me, and the fact that 16 other people shared it didn't matter quite so much. When I went to college, the whole college mascot and team and colors thing never quite clicked with me. First off, we had ugly colors. Haha, right, I suppose that's not supposed to matter, but honestly, I didn't want to walk around everywhere with college paraphernelia on. I don't think it's because I don't want to be associated with my college, but that I don't feel all that personally involved with it. Hrm. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't wear a Taiwan flag or an American flag.

I think I am just tired of politics. I am tired of political parties and how polarizing they are -- in Taiwan my parents and most of their friends are for one political party, and my friends are mostly for another, and each side keeps accusing the other of things, and I know people on both sides, and while I should be more involved, I'm not, so both sides just end up looking silly. In America, well, I do identify more with one party than another, but I'm just so sick of people going around saying "blah blah conservatives do this blah blah liberals do that blah blah." I know, I should practise what I preach. And also, patriotism/nationalism frightens me. I use the term patriotism/nationalism mostly because I have a sneaking suspicion that if you (generalized) do it, it's "patriotism," but if "they" do it, it's "nationalism." And I dislike the grouping of people into left and right, or top and bottom, or any such simple categories, because the cultural studies part of my brain mostly just wants to squiggle about on the floor and yell, "But it's all so complicated!"

I guess my general opinion is that I don't particularly believe in nations.

*waits for everyone to drop dead of horror and start flaming me*

(sorry, I've said stuff like this before to people back in college and gotten some fairly boggled looks and gotten into quite a few arguments)

What do I believe in? I'm not sure. I believe in people. I believe that most people in most places, regardless of nationality or race or gender, get hungry and are tired, enjoy being happy and dislike being sad. I believe that a lot of what we consider to be nationality are actually bits and pieces of historical cause and effect that go way back. I believe that history affects people, and that history is what builds that fragile notion of culture and nationality, and historical aftermath is what keeps much of it in place. And while I believe the notion of nation has a place, especially in uniting people, I am more wary of people united than people being individual people. This is probably because I tend to feel that I can understand people being people, but people acting under a big flag or political party or army begin to frighten me because of how ideals can take over. And yes, often these are good ideals, but I feel that the group mentality can often overtake the notion of the individual person and render the "other side" faceless and impersonal.

And I am still debating how to live nationless, because while I love America, I know that I am a creature who is more local than national. I love my city and my downtown street and my apartment, and I love the multiethnicity of the area I live in, but I know that my city and my street and my area are not America-the-nation, only a part. I don't know America-the-nation. I haven't gone everywhere there. I deeply love some things about it that I have experienced, but I find other parts problematic. Same with Taiwan. I feel this is not a contradiction, although I suppose a great deal of people must. I feel like I can live in different countries and love it there all the same, to enjoy the good things about a country while wanting the bad things to be made better, and I feel that I can do this for anywhere I choose to live. Also, it is fairly difficult to identify myself solely with one country and one nationality when I have lived in two, and that's just the two I have lived in. I want to live in more. I personally do not feel like this is a bad thing that brings down the nation I currently choose to live in, but as I said, I probably feel like this because it's me I'm talking about.

Anyhow, I am not quite sure what I mean to express in this post, except possibly a deep sense of ambivalence in symbols and in nations that I am still trying to understand.

ETA: Addendum

Addendum

And an addendum to the previous post:

(obviously, this topic strikes something rather deeply in me)

I think part of why I think of nationality and nationalism/patriotism as a dangerous thing is not because of the current context of liberal vs. conservative or Taiwan's green vs. blue. I think part of it is because my understanding of the concept of nation comes from history classes, and as such, my concept of the modern nation-state is one based on the historical background of the first notions of nation-state arising from imperialism on one end and the repercussions of being colonized on the other.

I think the history of imperialism and colonization are so deeply embedded in my mind that I cannot think of most history without somehow relating it to this theme; my instinctive reaction to studying early East Asian history is to find factors in it that say the eventual colonization of various countries was not inevitable, that something could have been done. But I also read history in an attempt to understand how it happened, to understand all the factors that tied into each other so that instead of sailing to America, China was instead divided up into pieces by European nations (and Japan and America).

This is not a subject of strictly academic interest to me, just as my lifelong interest in feminism and gender issues is not strictly academic as well. I grew interested in them academically because these concepts are so central to my personal life -- I am a Chinese female who was born in America but spent half her life in Taiwan, I am a woman living in a world where I am still aware that most of the management positions in my company are filled by men, I am an Asian living in a world where many look to Asia for technology but America for culture, where China is a growing threat and opportunity in people's minds. I don't always think about being Asian. Usually I think of myself as just me, living my small life. People usually don't overtly remind me that I am Asian. But I notice when I'm one of the handful of non-Caucasian people at a scifi convention, I notice when I ogle at celebrities in magazines and realize I can never have that haircut because my hair is different, I notice when I am in a pearl milk tea store and instinctively order in Mandarin. I am not saying this as though it is a bad thing. It is just a thing. It's a part of me, just like my fingers and toes are a part of me; it's something about me that I only notice when I am conscious of it, be it out of pride or recognition or of a feeling of sticking out. Similarly, my English marks me as well. It's another one of those things that I don't usually notice until I realize how strange it sounds to hear perfect English coming out of another Asian's mouth. That's when I stop and think and realize that that is how someone has probably reacted to me before. I don't notice until I'm in Taiwan again and all the salesladies are asking me if I'm going to college in the States.

So for me, declaring myself to be "Chinese" or "American" means something, it's not something I can say without conflict. Similarly, the notion of nation, the formation of that notion in conjunction with the rise of imperialism in Europe, all these ideas are not academic. They mean something personal to me because they help me define one of the questions I have been struggling to answer all my life. What nationality am I? What race am I? Why are these questions that I have to think about? Why must I have a race or nationality? (since the previous post was about nationality and patriotism, I'm sticking to those parameters. But since this is me, whenever I say something about nationality or race, you can probably apply the same question to gender and sex.)

I identify myself with a race because of historical factors, because even if I may not identify myself with a race, other people probably are, consciously or unconsciously. It's not something I can ignore because it's something that's just there. I think about nation so much because topics like this come up in casual conversation; there will be the occasional statement about how America is the best country in the world, or how America is lazy and has no work ethic, or how China is Communist and Taking Over the World (tm). And I can't even have that conversation, because I'm still at the stage in which I'm wondering, "What does the concept of 'America the country' or 'China the country' mean? How did those concepts come about? How can they exist in the minds of millions of people when each person has a different take on it?"

Similarly, how can I even talk about "Chinese history" when what we now think of as China wasn't what China used to be? How can I even think about it when several centuries ago, the Qing Dynasty didn't even think of their territory as "China"?

And in the same vein, I cannot think about identifying myself with a country or a nation without remembering post-colonial history and the nationalist revivals in many areas with colonization in their pasts. And as such, I always remember the conflicts inherent in those nationalist movements, in the problems of declaring a nation to be a territory and ignoring different ethnic groups and struggles, the problems of declaring nation to be a people who have no land, the problems of declaring nation to be a government or movement that doesn't necessary have the backing of everyone they claim to be representing.

I don't even know how to begin talking about nation, national identity and patriotism because I can't even define the terms.