Wen-Li Soong
Department of Psychology Fu-Jen Catholic University
This is the writing of an observation about the “civilized-city movement” currently happening in China. The “observation” is not without emotional difficulties. The problem is exactly about a Taiwanese identity of a Chinese. In order to deal with this especially indispensible methodological problem, the author coined some arbitrary categories called “interfaces of relationing,” and it takes the form of a certain kind of autoethnography. “Auto,” which means the self, is obviously what the difficulty stems from. Whether the concept of civility is or is not precisely in the semantics of the “civilized-city movement,” the author determines that its starting points are Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, and Nobert Elias’s discourses of civility, and thus sets up the ground of this discourse as the societal being, the typical being and the relational being. This autoethnography is based on the author’s tourist journals written between 2000-2008 during several visits to some Chinese cities. The ground, the table, and the face are but some casual interfaces or frames for keeping the journals, but the problem of identity concerning historical memory is what the author is struggling with
Keywords：civility, interface of relationing, autoethnography, problem of identity