英文摘要
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Ku Cheng-chiu (Gu Zhengqiu 顧正秋, 1929-), the most important founding member of Peking opera (jingju 京劇) in Taiwan, has participated in the publication three of her biographies since her legendary early retirement in 1952. Published over a long span of time from 1967 to 2003, these unusually frequent writing projects on the same old story of an actress repeatedly hint incidents still untold due to the ongoing hostility between China and Taiwan. This paper proposes to chart the three biographies of Ku as the female artist’s consecutive self-representation of her performance on and off stage against the prolonged but now forgotten cold war across the Taiwan Straight.
I begin with a close reading of the first two biographies of Ku, the first written by Liu Fang it/ in 1967, the second recorded by Chi Chi Oi Ji in 1997, comparing how Ku variously remembers and erases events under different occasions as Taiwan's political circumstances underwent tremendous transformation over those three decades. I propose that in her consecutive biographic records, Ku remembers jingju's striving for survival by avoidance, oblivion, and blanking Out its context, namely, fifty years of political struggle. Her way of telling by not telling further reveals the existence of a war that is hard to define, but exists nevertheless. The two biographical accounts of Ku's participation on the historical stage of jingle surprisingly transcribe Taiwan's soeio-political scenario over three decades.
I then analyze Ku's third biography, probing into how a woman artist’s autonomy is defined not by what she was expected to talk about, but rather by how she chose (not) to talk. I conclude by taking the three biographies, though written in very different political contexts, together-as an actress' consecutive performance of her peculiar way of remembering an ongoing war that has cast tremendous impact on her life on and off the stage, but was gradually cast into oblivion.
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