it has been twenty years since martial law was lifted
in 1987,which ushered in dramatic changes in every aspect of Taiwanese
citizens’ lives. Most noteworthy are the unprecedented civil liberties
that guarantee the freedoms of speech, press, and congregation.
Gone are the thought police who patrolled their daily lives; no longer
do they have to fear persecution for expressing dissenting views now
that theWhiteTerror has become a part of Taiwan’s less than glorious
past.These two decades have also witnessed a surge in remembering
the past, especially the 2/28 Incident and the government persecution
during the White Terror era. Scholarly research, compilations of
eyewitness accounts, oral histories, and re-creations in film and fiction
have helped fill in gaps in Taiwan’s recent history. In this book, I
examined the politics, strategies, and pitfalls of literary and cinematic
renditions of Taiwan’s past. Recent literary works are now moving
toward a self-reflexive interrogation of the writing process as writers
grow increasingly aware of the problems and limitations of realist,
even mimetic, representation. In this epilogue, I focus on a novel by
Lan Bozhou, likely the most prolific writer/researcher on the period
of martial law, to recapitulate the issues I raised.
Lan Bozhou’s Vine Intertwining Tree recounts the story of a young
Hakka man, Ali, who tries to uncover and write about the life of
another Hakka man, the fictional Lin Minghua, who was executed
in the early 1950s for his leftist thoughts and activities.1
The novel
touches on problems of investigating atrocity, interviewing eyewitnesses,
interpreting material, and narrating the story of victims. As
does Lan’s earlier work, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” the novel
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begins with the end, when Ali has finished his project on Lin Minghua
and returns with his wife,Ajing, to Lin’s village to give a presentation
on his book.The first third of the novel deals withAli’s research
into Lin Minghua’s life through interviews and correspondence with
survivors and eyewitnesses. The remaining two-thirds of the novel
are a metafictional probing of interpreting and representation, as Ali
struggles and experiments with a variety of genres to find the most
suitable voice in which to recount Lin’s story. He finally settles on a
novelistic form and finishes a novel also entitled Vine IntertwiningTree,
on Lin Minghua and Lin’s wife,Fu Shuangmei.In the meantime,Ali’s
personal life also seems to have taken on metafictional characteristics,
with letters from his former girlfriend examining and explaining
the reasons for their breakup.The end of Lan’s novel returns to the
beginning, when Ali and Ajing meet with the villagers at the publicity
gathering for his novel. Because Lan’s novel is too complex for
me to discuss in only a few pages, I will concentrate on Ali’s search,
research, and re-creation.
between facts and fiction
The strategies that both Lan Bozhou and Dong Nian used in their
earlier novellas to create the impression of factual accounts appear
again in Lan’s novel: eyewitness testimonials and news reports. In Vine
Intertwining Tree, fictive reports and essays from the print media and
sentencing documents also are incorporated into Ali’s research.These
self-contradictory documents generate even more confusion in Ali’s
understanding of Lin Minghua’s life.Indeed,Lan may be reflecting on
problems he has encountered in his own research on major figures in
Taiwan who perished in the late 1940s and the 1950s.What he reveals
in this novel, whether or not intentionally, further underscores the
legacy of atrocity:not only were the victims executed,but their stories
usually were buried for years, and many were greatly distorted. Some
intellectuals who were executed in the aftermath of the 2/28 Incident
were simply labeled“Communist”or“Communist spies,”or“traitors,”
even though their “offense” was simply organizing a reading group or
expressing dissenting views. Under the totalitarian control of thought
and interpretation, however, facts become fiction and fiction becomes
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facts.To be sure, Lan’s intention is not merely to emphasize this gray
area but to stress what was best summed up by James E.Young:
The aim in comparing several variant versions of the same event is
not to find the truest, or the one that corresponds most closely to
the reality, or to undermine the credibility of these witnesses. It is
rather to trace the manner in which this act has been grasped by
several different survivors,how they have assimilated it to other preexisting
legends and to their own understanding of the camp, how
it has reinforced particular truths already held, how it was molded
to conform to their beliefs, and how it was sustained imaginatively
as a kind of inspiration to other victims.2
The strategy of using eyewitness accounts is questioned partly
because they unavoidably contradict one another. Moreover, not
everyone is willing to talk to Ali (Fu Shuangmei being the most
important figure in this regard). One person who does talk to Ali
withholds information until he feels he can trust him. Some of the
eyewitnesses are reluctant not simply because they are traumatized but
also because the lingering fear of persecution still exerts a great deal of
influence on these former political prisoners.We recall in Super Citizen
Ko Ko’s friendYou Minshun, who repeatedly changes the subject
of their conversation when Ko asks about Chen Zhengyi’s grave site.
The difference, of course, is that both Ko andYou are former political
prisoners, whereas Ali is from the younger generation, whose sketchy
knowledge of the past comes from furtive references made by the
older generation.
In“Song of the CoveredWagon,”Lan Bozhou uses a forum style of
representation, with each eyewitness coming forward to recount and
supplement information about Zhong Haodong and his life. Since
we are not privy to the questions that the interviewer asked his interviewees,
we inevitably get a uniform picture of the victim.This monologic
style is ideologically driven to serve a political function:the tragic
and unjust death of a good man. In Vine Intertwining Tree, Ali’s questions
are often placed alongside the witnesses’ answers, in the form of
a conversation.As studies of Holocaust witnesses show, the interaction
between an interviewer and an interviewee can affect the accounts,
which demonstrates the importance of including the interviewer’s
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questions. Even though Lan’s interviews are fictional, by emphasizing
Ali’s presence the novel draws our attention to the interview process
as well as to the complex politics and psychology behind the questions
and answers.
victim and victimhood
In the beginning of Vine IntertwiningTree,Ali arrives at Zhutouzhuang,
where he was born,to work as a member of a research team compiling
“A Cultural History of Zhutouzhuang.” He is to work on an important
aspect of Hakka culture, the folk songs, but his interest in Lin
Minghua and Fu Shuangmei takes him further and further away from
collecting and compiling them, until finally he has to resign from the
team. Lin Minghua, Ali’s research shows, was a Communist engaged
in an armed struggle against the Nationalist government. Lin’s political
affiliation has several ramifications. On a textual level, ChenWanli,
Ali’s friend who employed him, objects to including a Communist in
the village chronicle,mainly because the funding for the chronicle was
raised by an anti-Communist, pro–Taiwan independence politician.
From the cold and unsympathetic way in which ChenWanli raises his
objection, we see that he also personally opposes the idea.Ali therefore
has no choice but to resign if he wishes to continue investigating
Lin Minghua’s life and death.
The larger implication of Chen’s opposition concerns the victims
of atrocity in Taiwan, as some people advocate distinguishing among
the different kinds of victims: those mostly innocent people who
were killed before and during the March massacre of 1947;those who
were falsely accused of sedition in the martial law era; and the Communists
or Marxists who engaged in antigovernment activities.The
last group was most active during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s,
the activists in the opposition (dangwai, literally “outside the Nationalist
Party”) were the dissidents associated with the magazine Formosa
who were incarcerated after the Formosa Incident depicted in Heartbreak
Island. Some people, like Chen Wanli in Lan’s novel, believed
that Marxists and those who promoted Communism deserved to be
punished and thus were not victims. But Ali disagrees: “Politics is
politics; history is history.”3
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Politics and history are, of course, intertwined, and so an examination
of them requires a different forum.For our purposes,the ambiguous
status of Lin Minghua’s victimhood is reminiscent of that of Super
Citizen Ko, Zhong Haodong, and Chen Linlang.The first two were
intellectuals (both high-school teachers) reading prohibited material;
Zhong was a leftist; and Ko’s political affiliation is not made clear
in the film. Neither Zhong nor Ko seems to have engaged in outright
armed struggle,as opposed to Lan’s character,Lin Minghua,who
learned how to make bombs.Would the fact that he intended to use
those bombs deprive him of victimhood? If so, how should we regard
Chen Linlang in Dong Nian’s “Last Winter”? By characterizing Lin
Minghua as a violent revolutionary, Lan Bozhou apparently intends
to question the whole notion of victims and their proper status in
Taiwanese history.4
past/present/ethnicity
As Ali embarks on his writing project, he sends chapters to his wife,
Ajing, who has remained in Taipei, where she works. In their correspondence,they
discussAli’s work,which in itself makes Lan’s novel an
interesting meta-meta-fictional work.What is pertinent to unearthing
and writing about historical facts is the appearance of Ali’s former
girlfriend, Awen, which sets up a contrast between Ali’s attitude
toward the historical and personal pasts.After receiving several anonymous
phone calls, Ajing finally realizes that the caller is Ali’s former
girlfriend and, without consulting Ali, gives her his address, to which
Ali objects:“I believe that what happened in the past should remain
in the past and need not be brought up.”5
Historical past and personal
past often are intertwined and entangled in their unfolding and interpretations.Ajing
responds with the following comment:“If you think
exploring the past of Lin Minghua and Fu Shuangmei has significance
in our contemporary society, then you should examine the romance
between you and Awen,for it would be meaningful to you,to me,and
to Awen.”6
But it turns out that Ali, like Liang Jing in Good Men, Good
Women, is incapable of coming to terms with his personal past.
Ali’s past with Awen has another level of symbolic importance.
Both of Awen’s parents are from the mainland, and her father is a
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Guomindang official, which means that almost inevitably the issue of
ethnicity plays a significant role in Awen and Ali’s romantic relationship.
Just as in the fictional works analyzed earlier, romance or the
impossibility of it becomes a trope for an insurmountable obstacle in
ethnic harmony. Interestingly, however, in Lan Bozhou’s novel, ethnic
relations have a contemporary implication; that is, the search by
Awen, the second-generation mainlander, for the Hakka man some
years after she left him presents an impression of an identity reorientation.
Mainlanders have traditionally regarded the mainland as their
real homeland, which sometimes creates an identity crisis for their
children born in Taiwan. This reorientation, however, seems shortlived
and fraught with ambiguity, which Lan refuses to resolve at the
end of novel.Although a letter from Awen’s psychologist informs Ali
that Awen, a mental patient suffering from hallucinations, has left the
clinic without proper authorization, this piece of information elicits
no reaction or action on the part of Ali. In fact, the last we hear about
Awen is from her final letter to Ali, in which she relates an erotic
dream involving the two of them.The letter ends with her wish that
she could have Ali’s child.We recall that in Zhong Zhaozheng’s Angry
Tide, the mainland woman Han Ping and the Hakka man Lu Zhilin
eventually lose their baby, symbolizing the impossibility of peaceful
ethnic coexistence. In Heartbreak Island, the mainlander Chen Linlang
also loses a baby by theTaiwaneseWang Rong.But in Lan’s novel,this
is just a wish from a woman who may or may not be mentally unstable.
More important,Ali’s reluctance to confront his own past, represented
by Awen, shows that he is better equipped to deal with other
people’s pasts than with his own. In a way, this alludes toTaiwan’s past
and future, both of which are intertwined with ethnic issues whose
resolution is forever suspended.
representation
Among the literary and cinematic texts that I have studied in this
book, Good Men, Good Women is clearly the most conscious of its
fictional characteristics and constructedness. The structure of a film
within a film highlights the artificial process of filmmaking, which
creates a distance between the viewers and the film. Similarly, Lan
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Bozhou’s novel about researching and writing displays his recognition
that all representations are simulations. Such an approach to representing
the dark side of Taiwan’s past is problematic to some readers,
for the detached manner in which the narrative is constructed may
appear to lack a sense of engagement,which is one of the reasons why
Good Men, GoodWomen was so poorly received inTaiwan. In contrast,
even though the audience was more receptive to Super Citizen Ko,the
ending may have shut the door too quickly on that part of Taiwan’s
history.The realization that there may not be a suitable form of representation
is reflected in the remaining two-thirds of Lan’s novel, in
which Ali explores this possibility and shares his thoughts in his letters
to his wife.
Ali’s original plan is to retell Lin Minghua and Fu Shuangmei’s story
in the form of reportage, with himself as the alter-ego narrator/investigator.
For readers familiar with the postmodern notion of historical
writing,Ali’s decision may not come as a surprise.His choice of narrative
style also enables Lan Bozhou,the author,to consider issues regarding
the representation of atrocity and its victims.Interestingly,however,
Lan Bozhou the author eventually decides thatAli should not use Lan’s
own self-reflexive narrative technique, so Ali rejects the genre because
he does not have enough historical facts and explanations. He then
adopts the style of a realist novel, which mingles historical facts with
fictional re-creation, deeming it to be the most “suitable” style to deal
with such discrepancies and ellipses. In one instance,Ali believes that
one of his eyewitnesses may have betrayed Lin Minghua and caused
his death. Hence a fictional work—a novel—based on facts becomes
a convenient vehicle, in that the author cannot be held responsible for
any mistakes, inaccuracies, or allegations. For Lan Bozhou and anyone
engaged in research on Taiwan’s past, the recognition that what they
represent should never be taken as verbatim truth is critical, for without
that knowledge,they are simply replicating the errors made by the
Nationalist government during the martial law era, except that they
are replacing one version of the alleged truth with another.
Ali decides to write a realist novel in a linear style, and his protagonist
is to be born into a poor farming family.7
This narratological
choice (from the perspectives of both Ali and Lan Bozhou) originated
from authorial intent to explain why Ali’s protagonist (Lin Minghua)
eventually became a Marxist.Aside from this intriguing doubling, this
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need to explicate in Lan’s and Ali’s novels reveals their anxiety over the
victims of the White Terror.That is, family background is the motivation
for their ideological inclination, and it is therefore both understandable
and acceptable that they should become Marxists. Similarly,
this also explains why patriotic Han Chinese inTaiwan rose up against
the Nationalist government, whereas they seemed to be docile and
complacent loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor. Ali devotes two
sections of his novel to the corruption of the Nationalist officials and
the indignation felt by the Taiwanese. Portrayals of the chaotic situation
immediately following the arrival of the Nationalist officials can
be found throughout historical accounts and memoirs and are used
widely in book-length novels, such as Li Qiao’s Buried Injustice of 1947
and Zhong Zhaozheng’s AngryTides. Lan Bozhou implicitly questions
the incorporation of such historical information throughAjing’s somewhat
contradictory comment onAli’s writing:“As a reader,I think that
what you wrote in these four sections is basically laying out the historical
process . . . and there’s no moving story in it. . . . Nevertheless, I
still believe that, to people like me, who don’t know much about that
part of Taiwan’s past, reading it is, to some extent, helpful.”8
women/eyewitness/atrocity
Like many Taiwanese youths, Ali arrives in the Hakka village with
no knowledge of the events that took place before his birth. It is
only from conversations with the local elders that he learns about Lin
Minghua and Fu Shuangmei, which is clearly Lan Bozhou’s way of
highlighting the collective amnesia caused by theWhiteTerror. Interestingly,
what first catches Ali’s attention is the elders’ comment on Fu
Shuangmei,the surviving wife of the political victim.As we have seen,
the majority of the Taiwanese imprisoned or executed were men, so
women naturally became testimonial figures and a source for unearthing
historical injustice. In other words, women as victims proves to
be a powerful image in the indictment of injustice, but at the same
time, women as a trope tend to strip them of their subjectivity in the
depiction of atrocity. Ultimately women are either victimized twice
or reduced to mere representational tools, to be called to testify about
their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.
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Ali searches for Fu Shuangmei in order for her to verify or refute
what Ali has gathered from other witnesses:
Ali believed that, more than any one else, Fu Shuangmei would
be the one eyewitness who could clarify many of the contradiction
and ambiguities, whether for the purpose of understanding Lin
Minghua’s life or reading his [Ali’s] account as a story.9
Since their
romance would be what interested people most,he figured that if he
could interview Fu Shuangmei, then this reportage about Lin Minghua
could be narrated along the plot line of their love story.10
Unlike in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” in which the author’s presence
is effaced with the employment of multiple eyewitnesses/narrators,Lan
Bozhou narrates the story in Vine IntertwiningTree solely from
Ali’s perspective and maintains the distinction between the narrator
and the author.
In Ali’s quest for the story behind Lin’s arrest and execution, Fu
Shuangmei remains an elusive figure. Although he finds eyewitnesses
who give him information about Lin Minghua,what sparks his curiosity
and interest is forever out of reach.Even when he finally locates Fu,
she refuses to be interviewed.If Fu Shuangmei,who knows Lin Minghua
better than anyone else, holds the key to a more complete picture
of him, then she symbolizes knowable history. But the closest Lan can
get is a glimpse of her at the end of the novel at the village gathering for
his book. Her elusiveness may thus be a metaphor for the impossibility
of finding facts and truth.Unlike some of the writing on this subject,11
Lan Bozhou’s novel does not question whether dissidents really were
persecuted. Although Ali is unable to meet with Fu Shuangmei, she
does send him the bullet-holed suit that Lin Minghua was wearing
on the day of his execution. In other words, even though we may not
know the whole truth, traceable evidence of what happened remains.
In the investigation and re-creation of Taiwan’s historical past, intertextuality
and cross-reference are pervasive,as evidenced in the expansion
of ChuT’ien-hsin’s “Once upon aTimeThereWas a Man Called
Urashima Taro,” the allusions to Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain
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Road,” and the evolution of Lan Bozhou’s works.These literary and
cinematic re-creations become the sedimentation of a form of collective
memory, which,“redefined as a social and individual practice that
integrates elements of remembrance, fantasy, and invention, . . . can
shift from the problematic role of standing for the truth to a new role
as an active, engaging practice of creating meaning.”12
What is most
important, then, is the continuing search for information while being
aware of the incomplete nature of truth, facts, and knowable history.
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