“ethnicity,” as anthropologists have observed, is
a term that “invites endless and fruitless definitional argument among
those professional intellectuals who think that they know, or ought
to know, what it means.”1
This sense of frustration is understandable,
since anthropologists have been searching for decades for answers to
how and why a particular group of people consider themselves to have
the same ethnic origin.The array of theories is dazzling.The primordialists
argue that there is an “‘overpowering’ and ‘ineffable quality’
attaching to certain kinds of ties, which the participants tend to see as
exterior, ‘coercive,’ and ‘given.’”The instrumentalists, however, “treat
ethnicity as a social, political, and cultural resource for different interest-
and status-groups,”2
with a particular focus on the elite. There
also are the transactionalists, who believe that “ethnic groups must be
treated as units of ascription, where the social boundaries ensure the
persistence of the group,” which, in turn, is perpetuated by symbolic
“‘border guards’ (language, dress, food, etc.).”The social psychological
proponents focus on “differential estimations of group worth, and on
their collective stereotypes,” whereas the ethnosymbolists are mainly
concerned with “the persistence, change, and resurgence of ethnies
[sic], and with the role of the ethnic past or pasts in shaping present
cultural communities.”3
Even though these definitions are quite different, they share a trait
in that they “repeatedly raise points about symbolism, meaning, and
identity and about cohesion, solidarity, and belonging.”4
Considering
their central concerns together, we can conclude that
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ethnicity is a sociocultural construction used to categorize people
who interact within the same sociopolitical arena into different
groups.Various distinctive features or social markers may be
used to make these categorizations, but the emphasis is neither on
physical nor political characteristics; rather, it is on multiple factors
that reflect the general sociocultural circumstances in which social
interactions take place.5
In the case of Taiwan, ethnicity, often translated into Mandarin as
zuqun, is constructed on three principles: patrilineality, locality, and
language. Understandably, in a largely patriarchal society like Taiwan,
“people’s ascribed ethnicity is inherited from their father’s social cat-
egory.”6
In regard to ethnic conflict, locality and language play much
more important, and sometimes more detrimental, roles.The inhabitants
of Taiwan, largely shaped by immigration history, can be roughly
divided into (1) the Yuanzhumin (literally, “the original inhabitants,”
conventionally rendered as “the indigenous people”)7
of Austronesian
ethnicity, (2) the Hoklo (or Minnan, Southern Hokien) and Hakka
speakers of Han Chinese descent who immigrated mainly from southern
China before 1949, and (3) the Chinese who fled the Communist
rule around 1949.The latter two groups have been respectively identified
as benshengren (people with a local/Taiwanese provincial background),
or Taiwanese, and waishengren (people from other provinces
outside Taiwan), or mainlanders.8
As is evident in the various anthropological
approaches, ethnicity and ethnic identity are not scientific
categories, and ethnicity in Taiwan begs further explication.
First, in a peculiar fashion related to Sinocentrism and Han Chinese
immigration, the Yuanzhumin are relegated to a status that is
neither benshengren nor waishengren.When residents of Taiwan speak of
benshengren, they usually are referring to the Hoklo and Hakka speakers.
Second, the Hoklo and Hakka speakers are not identical groups
with indistinguishable cultural practices, nor do they even speak the
same language.Although these two groups are put in the same category,benshengren
or Taiwanren (Taiwanese,the people),Taiwanhua (Taiwanese,
the language) refers exclusively to Hoklo, not to both Hoklo
and Hakka.Third, the waishengren, who came toTaiwan from different
parts of the mainland, do not necessarily share the same language or
customs:“In addition to the group’s superior position overTaiwanese,
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their history and personal trauma—combined with shared material
and ideological interests—bonded this diversified group of mainlanders
from different provinces together.They thus became ‘constructed’
as a single mainlander group—wai-sheng-jen [waishengren].”9
This picture of ethnicity was formed largely by a historical accident.
Japanese colonialism intensified the lack of cultural exchange between
Taiwan and the mainland, and later the Nationalist government’s policy
helped solidify the provincial divide:“What makes sheng-chi [shengji,
provincial origins] an ethnic factor is neither about provincial origins
per se alone, nor interpersonal relations; rather it is the asymmetrical
positions of the groups in collective interaction—that is, a principle
by which group identities have emerged via intersecting historical tra-
jectories.”10
Hence,it is not surprising that Hoklo and Hakka speakers
are sometimes placed in the same ethnic category as Taiwanese and
that at other times they are identified as two separate ethnic groups.In
any case, irrefutable differences and unbridgeable divides have formed
along the line of provincial origins. But “cultural differences alone do
not ethnicity make; culture, or cultural difference, becomes ethnicity
if and when a group takes it up and uses it in certain specific and
modern ways. Naturally, too, ethnicity does not always or necessarily
make for conflict; certain kinds of ethnicity in certain situations with
certain catalyzing events make conflict out of ethnicity.”11
The catalyzing
event in Taiwan was the 2/28 Incident, in which the Hoklo
and Hakka speakers, as benshengren, were involuntarily pitted against
Governor-General ChenYi and his mainland officials/soldiers as the
waishengren, thus cementing the provincial divide as a manifestation of
ethnic difference.
Since martial law was lifted in 1987, investigations into the historical
background,causes,impact,and repercussions of the 2/28 Incident
have produced numerous works, ranging from conference volumes to
personal memoirs. Understandably, the causes of an incident of such
devastating magnitude and continuing (maybe even increasing) aftershocks
have been the focus of official, scholarly, and popular research,
in which ethnicity is, without fail, identified as the pivotal factor.
Although the causes of the incident should best be left to historians
and political scientists,ethnicity,or shengji (provincial origins),remains
a core problem in contemporaryTaiwanese society and politics and an
important trope in literary works dealing with the island’s past.
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The issue of provincial divide appears prominently, for instance, in
Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua,” in which a young, nameless Taiwanese woman’s
intimacy with a mainland man, Jin Hongzao, is interpreted as a
gesture to erase provincial differences.12
In the story, Jin Hongzao’s
wife, a mainlander, dies in the melee along with theTaiwanese, which
seems to point to a kind of pan-victimhood. Li Ao has vociferously
reminded the Taiwanese that many mainlanders also were killed in
the immediate aftermath of the incident.13
Of course, the issue should
never be about numbers—how many died—or which ethnic groups
suffered more. Nevertheless, the fact that some people believe that the
deaths of mainlanders need to be emphasized proves how pernicious
and persistent ethnic conflict remains in Taiwan. Indeed, ethnicity
continues to be a contentious issue in the ways thatTaiwanese citizens
approach history and contemporary politics, for “politics is more than
just the arena of interests or of social transformations. Politics is also
the arena of passions,where emotions can be readily mobilized behind
one’s own flag, and against another group.”14
Although ethnicity is not interchangeable with race, what Henry
Louis Gates Jr. cautions regarding the need to analyze how race is
intricately connected to writing is relevant. Substituting “ethnic” for
“racial,” we must examine “how attitudes toward racial differences
generate and structure literary texts by us and about us. . . . But we
must also understand how certain forms of difference and the languages
we employ to define those supposed differences not only reinforce
each other but tend to create and maintain each other.”15
This chapter
is devoted to literary portrayals of ethnicity and ethnic relations set
against the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror. In literary texts, ethnicity
is deployed to condemn atrocity, to promote peaceful coexistence,and
to explain the consequences of historical events,sometimes
at the risk of degenerating into reinforcing ethnic stereotypes or of
dispensing with the past by privileging “closure.”
“intoxication” and “under the snow”:
gender stereotype as ethnicity
In an essay on “Indians” in America and the problem of history, Jane
Tompkins wonders whether “it is an accident that ways of describing
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cultural strength and weakness coincide with gender stereotype.”16
The
answer to her question is self-evident, for the axis of the Manichean
oppositions “provides the central feature of the colonialist cognitive
framework and colonialist literary representation: the manichean allegory—a
field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions . . . good and
evil, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, rationality
and sensuality, self and Other.”17
Indeed, this scheme, dramatized as
gender differences,offers convenient paradigmatic shortcuts to unambiguous
contrasts of different groups, whether ethnic or racial. In
“Intoxication,” one of the earliest stories written about the 2/28 Incident,
ethnic differences used as gender stereotypes are manipulated
to indict the ill treatment of the Taiwanese by the mainlanders. Forty
years later,“Under the Snow” adopts a similar narrative strategy but
reverses the gender roles to convey the author’s criticism of theWhite
Terror.Both stories feature a romantic relationship between aTaiwanese
and a mainlander, but with different outcomes that entail evolving
strategies to exploit ethnic relations in writing injustice.
“Intoxication,”written by OuTansheng,a mainlander who went to
Taiwan to teach in February 1947,was published in a left-wing Shanghai
journal,Wenyi chunqiu,on November 15,1947.18
A rather melodramatic
story, “Intoxication” features a young Taiwanese woman, Ajin,
who nurses a mainland man, Mr.Yang, back to good health after he
is beaten by an angry mob on the day he arrives in Taipei, February
28, 1947.Ajin falls in love with Mr.Yang, but he merely takes advantage
of her; and when he finally recovers and grows tired of her, he
leaves, promising to send for her later.The bulk of the story involves
her frantic search for the ship that purportedly is taking him back to
Xiamen, China, and her tumultuous, alternating emotional states of
despair and hope. By all accounts a cheap tale of innocence lost and
love without reciprocation,this story is seriously flawed in its focus on
Ajin’s unrequited love,“turning it into an account of a passionate girl
jilted by a heartless man, thus diminishing its potential for social criti-
cism.”19
But as a case study of ethnic interaction,“Intoxication” sheds
light on the configuration of ethnicity in the immediate aftermath of
the 2/28 Incident.
Melodrama aside, noteworthy here is the employment of
(non)romance to narrate ethnic relations and the political implications
of such a portrayal. First, it is precisely the 2/28 Incident that
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brings the Taiwanese woman and the mainland man together. Second,
the plot highlights the fact that he is an innocent bystander
victimized by the angry mob that attacks any mainlander in sight.
Intriguing,however,is how the victim of ethnic assault then becomes
a victimizer himself, misleading Ajin and then abandoning her.When
the story opens, Ajin’s hope for a happy marriage is already dashed,
for Mr.Yang is leaving. It is hard not to read this metaphorically as
a comment on the relationship between Taiwanese and mainlanders.
In virtually all the studies and memoirs of the 2/28 Incident, theTaiwanese
are described as ecstatic at first when Japan was defeated and
Taiwan was to return to China; but their elation quickly turned into
disappointment and then to anger over the attitude, behavior, and
acts of malfeasance by the soldiers and officials from the mainland.20
The “intoxication” in the title refers to both the extratextual sentiment
of theTaiwanese in the wake of the Japanese surrender and the
textual infatuation Ajin feels for Mr.Yang. It is significant, then, that
the story starts in this fashion, for the parallel between a despondent
Ajin and the helpless Taiwanese highlights the core reality of Taiwan
at that time.
The disillusioned Taiwanese are not unlike the abandoned Ajin,
who believes in Mr.Yang’s sincerity and amorous feelings for her. She
never suspects for a moment that Mr.Yang is treating her like a plaything,
even at the end of the story after all her attempts to locate
him have failed miserably. She is further deceived by Mr. Zhu,Yang’s
friend, also a mainlander, into believing that Yang will soon send for
her.The deception comes in the cruelest form:Yang has written a letter
to Zhu asking him to lie to Ajin so that she will stop pursuing him.
When she pleads with Zhu to tell herYang’s whereabouts, Zhu gives
her the letter, knowing full well that she cannot read Chinese. Zhu
then misrepresents its contents, even lying that Yang misses her and
wishes to marry her at the earliest possible opportunity. Her failure to
“read”Yang’s intention is the original cause of her self-deception, and
her inability to comprehend written Chinese aggravates the severity
of her situation, both reminding us of the language barrier between
the Taiwanese and the mainlanders during this period.We also recall
that it is preciselyYang’s inability to speak and comprehendTaiwanese
that makes it possible for the Taiwanese to identify and attack him.
Although Yang suffers for his inability to understand Taiwanese, he
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later gains Ajin’s confidence and devotion, whereas Ajin’s language
difficulty only sends her farther down the road of deception. In other
words, in the battle over language, the mainland man commands a
superior position.
In addition to drawing a parallel between Ajin’s nonromance and
the Taiwanese’s false hope, the story is full of gender and ethnic stereotypes.Throughout
the story,Ajin is portrayed as naive,kindhearted,
hardworking, and filial but easily deceived. The narrator constantly
reminds us that she is just like the majority of Taiwanese women,
and it is difficult for readers informed of postcolonial theory not to
regard her as a symbol for Taiwan, the quintessential subaltern. None
of the mainlanders is cast in a positive light: Mr.Yang is a philanderer;
Mr. Zhu derives great pleasure from lying to Ajin for his friend’s sake;
and the master of the house where Ajin works as a maid also is a
womanizer who harasses her. Ajin falls victim to all these men, who
take advantage of her kindness and naïveté. More important, all three
mainland men occupy a higher social and economic status, for they
all are civil servants, while Ajin is a lowly maid.21
Reminiscent of the
Manichean opposition mentioned by Abdul JanMohamed, the conqueror
is cast as male, intelligent, and wealthy, and the conquered is designated
as female, weak, and poor.
But ethnicity presented as gender stereotype would lose its intensity
if the portrayal stopped at the dichotomized opposition of good
versus evil. Accordingly, Ajin is depicted as not entirely innocent, as
she also reveals an ulterior motive to be involved with a mainlander
from a higher social class.The author inserted the following comment
describing Ajin’s psychology:
For today’s Taiwanese girls, owing to the fact that the Taiwanese
were highly restricted in their chances of getting a higher education
in the colonial time, it is difficult to find a man with prominent
social status. Hence, even under normal circumstances, the
girls would congratulate themselves and feel secret elation if they
occasionally found a man with some status showing interest in
them,let alone the fact that the man was an unmarried civil servant
from the Mainland appearing before them as a citizen of powerful
country.Therefore, it was no accident that this eighteen-year-old
girl [Ajin] fell so easily for him.22
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The inherently imbalanced power structure between men and
women, as well as between the mainland and Taiwan, is important to
the narrator’s observation.Ajin, in other words, is attracted also to the
external “value” added toYang’s identity as a mainlander, for later on
we read about her fantasy that reveals her wish for a better life:
She fantasized about how they’d get married and what kind of
peaceful and quiet life they’d spend together. People would actually
call her Mrs.Yang. He might even take her to the mainland.
Of course Mother and Sister would go too. She imagined that the
situation there must be very good and she’d be absolutely happy
with her life. There’s no poverty, no hunger; everything is better
than Taiwan, even better than Japan; otherwise, how come Japan
was defeated this time?23
Although we might find her dream of a good life to be legitimate,
we cannot help but be struck by the slippage between personal/feminine
desire and national/political discourse.The displacement of private
happiness with a longing for the all-powerful China corresponds
to the substitution of gender stereotype for ethnicity that runs through
the story. In the end, no one fares well, for Mr.Yang is a philanderer
who likes to haggle, and Ajin pins her hopes for a better life on an
undeserving man while looking down on a friend who is reduced to
prostitution in order to survive. The author, however, must portray
Ajin as irrational, foolish, and gullible in order to accentuate Yang’s
abuse of her, even though the author is obviously sympathetic to her
situation. But when describing ethnicity in these gender terms, the
portrayal becomes self-defeating in that it magnifies the stereotypical
binary opposition of superiority versus inferiority.
Serendipitously, Lin Wenyi’s “Under the Snow,” published in the
winter of 1987, the year martial law was lifted, denounces the Nationalist
government’s disregard for human rights and bears uncanny similarities
to “Intoxication.”Told by a first-person narrator to a reporter,
the story relates a romance between theTaiwanese narrator and a second-generation
mainland woman who meet in New York. During
their time together, the narrator, dismayed by the woman’s lack of
knowledge and understanding of Taiwanese culture and history, tries
to instill aTaiwanese consciousness in her.When she returns toTaiwan
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with the intention of telling her parents about her relationship with
the narrator, she is arrested at the airport. Sentenced to fourteen years
in prison for an “intent to subvert the government,” she is released
after seven years. While the romantic relationship between them,
unlike the story of Ajin and Mr.Yang, is genuine,“Under the Snow”
also relies heavily on gender stereotype in its depiction of ethnicity,
but with various reversals.
On six separate occasions, the woman in the story is referred to as
“a frail, tender, delicate woman.”24
Her physical appearance is underscored
to highlight the contrast between the man’s height (six feet)
and his inability to help her and, more important, between his earthy,
masculine Taiwanese-ness and her elite, effete mainland heritage. He
is a farm boy from Jiayi in southernTaiwan, and she, the daughter of a
general,has spent virtually all her life in the northern city of Taipei.In
a way,this story is an exemplary text of the periphery writing back,for
the two characters represent the center and the margin of the power
structure in Taiwan, and the many reversals symbolize the Taiwanese
desire to take back the discursive power of ethnic relations.The divide
between north and south and its concomitant implications25
are further
reversed in the two protagonists’ relationship, in that he plays the
role of a mentor guiding her through a journey of Taiwanese history.
For instance, at their first meeting, he criticizes her for not being able
to speak a word of Taiwanese, even though she was born in Taiwan.
Later he inculcates in her the need to identify with Taiwan,“a place
that has nurtured her for over two decades.” He is, in a word, a male
Taiwanese chauvinist.
That conclusion may seem harsh, for it is, after all, legitimate for
him to demand that she speak Taiwanese and identify with Taiwan.
Moreover, she herself does, in fact, gradually come to agree with his
view and asks him to teach her Taiwanese.What is disturbing is the
rhetoric of ethnicity in which the Other is described in terms of
lack, and the gender and ethnic Other seems always to play a passive
role.Whether intentional or not, the author’s employment of a firstperson
narrator gives the Taiwanese male absolute subjectivity as the
agent who controls all the information, for he not only teaches her
what he thinks she needs to know about Taiwan but also relates her
story to us. Conversely, the story can be regarded as a kind of textual
recuperation of Taiwanese subjectivity, for the political reality in
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Taiwan before martial law was lifted required everyone to identify
with the mainland and everything associated with that place “that
you cannot even visit.”26
It thus is only through the man’s monologue
and his instruction to her about Taiwan that Taiwan’s legitimacy can
be confirmed.
The woman’s ignorance of Taiwanese history was politically engineered
by the Nationalist government’s policy of segregation and
suppression of Taiwanese consciousness. Many mainlanders and their
families lived in tightly knit, closed-off compounds that formed their
own little worlds, isolated from the rest of Taiwanese society. Hence,
it is significant that the two people meet in NewYork, for the political
atmosphere in Taiwan would not have allowed them to discuss
Taiwanese politics freely. Even so, she has come under suspicion, for
during theWhiteTerror no one could escape the insidious Nationalist
government’s surveillance of its people, in Taiwan and even overseas,
by spies who disguised themselves as students or by students who
worked for the Nationalist government’s monitoring apparatus:“They
probably said she watched movies from Communist China in school,
listened to their symphonies, or read a few books.”27
It is unclear to the reader whether the woman in fact had read
the “forbidden” books or watched movies from the mainland, for
the narrator is vague about why she is arrested, except that “they
said she had a roll of film negatives with her when she arrived at
the airport.”28
But it is precisely this vagueness that accentuates the
pernicious nature of the White Terror, as the Kafkaesque lack of specific
charges is symptomatic of the omnipresent,omnipotent government
censorship at work.The narrator also comments explicitly on
the suppression of dissent: “I don’t understand why I’m exiled just
because I have my own views and opinions.This is really inhumane.”
“Could a newspaper in Taiwan publish the full content [of what I
just told you]? I heard that sometimes an article is changed so much
that it turns into a completely different essay.”29
He even has a confrontation
with an overseas Taiwanese who accuses him of promoting
Taiwan independence, during which his left arm is broken. All
these incidents are intended as criticism of government persecution
and the pervasive power of the White Terror, as even average people
were sometimes willing to serve as accomplices and inflict even more
injury on the victims.
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As we will see in chapter 3, women serve as more powerful and
convenient tropes for victimhood in that their perceived biological
inferiority can more easily incite sympathy and outrage.In LinWenyi’s
story, the mainland woman is repeatedly described as delicate and
tender, which is clearly meant to stress the injustice she experiences.
But the ethnic power structure narrated in gender terms is not altogether
unproblematic, as the first-person narrative renders her silent;
that is, aTaiwanese male speaking for a mainland Other makes female
agency impossible.While that may help the author achieve the goal
of censuring the White Terror, it defeats the purpose of transcending
ethnic divisions.The mainland woman is powerless to defend herself
and speak her own mind. In a word, ethnicity is subsumed under the
overriding agenda of indicting the government’s persecution of real
or imagined dissidents. In addition, the theme of romance between a
Taiwanese man and a second-generation mainland woman inevitably
begins with ethnic unity and ends with an unsettling sense of hope:
I’m waiting for her here. I’ll take her to the Hudson River, to see
the Taiwanese painter. . . . No matter how heavy the snow, how
cold the night, I’m taking her there, my beloved woman who has
suffered so much, so that she’ll never, ever disappear from my side
again. Isn’t that so? I often feel that, even if the wind is strong and
the snow heavy, there must be the seeds’ intense anticipation for
spring buried in the soil under the deep snow, and that is life, love,
and hope.30
While it is difficult to argue against such an optimistic, uplifting
tone, the hopeful ending nonetheless elides the issues and advances
the agenda of collective amnesia that was so often advocated by government
officials and criticized by activists.31
ANGRY TIDES: failed marriage as ethnic conflict
Angry Tides, by the renowned Hakka writer Zhong Zhaozheng, is a
family saga that starts at the end of World War II when members of
the Lu family return to Taiwan from Tokyo and Manchuria. Clearly
intended to invoke a chaotic political situation and the sentiments of
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the Taiwanese after the Nationalist government takeover, the novel
ends with the 2/28 Incident, during which one of the Lu sons dies
while attacking an airport and another is arrested and imprisoned for
forty days, even though he did not participate in the uprising. The
novel was published in 1993 to critical acclaim, seen by some as a
breakthrough in the fictional rendition of Taiwanese history.32
The
emphasis onTaiwanese history should come as no surprise for a writer
with two trilogies on the same subject.Zhong’s earlier work,published
during the martial-law era,focused on the colonial period.AngryTides,
written in the relaxed political atmosphere of the 1990s, tackles the
2/28 Incident,in which ethnic conflict is shown in the form of a failed
marriage between a Hakka man and a mainland woman.
The couple is Lu Zhilin, a former medical student at Tokyo Imperial
University, and Han Ping, who comes to Taiwan with her sister,
who is married to a Hakka man.As someone from Beijing, a cultural
and political center, Han represents not only mainland China but also
Chinese civilization. Lu, in contrast, is a colonized Taiwanese; in fact,
he is a Taiwanese steeped in Japanese culture. Both are displaced in
postwar Taiwan: she is out of place in Taiwan, and he is a remnant of
the colonial past. Lu Zhilin is someone with a triple consciousness:
Taiwanese, Japanese, and Chinese.33
His attraction to Han is doomed
from the beginning, as her allure is fraught with unstable ethnic consciousness,
which “following Hegel, is a function of knowing rather
than a quality of being; identity is static and determined existence,
whereas consciousness is becoming and desire.”34
In other words,
owing to his triple consciousness, Lu has no fixed identity; instead, he
is always desiring and becoming (from Taiwanese to Japanese to Chinese).
Symbolically, his desire for Han Ping is a desire for a Chinese
identity. But the colonized’s attempt to mimic the colonizer (whether
the Japanese or the mainland Chinese) always ends in failure.35
On a textual level, Lu Zhilin’s attraction to Han Ping, a mainland
woman from Beijing, is a way for the author to comment on postwar,
postcolonial Taiwan, where all the Taiwanese must now identify with
China, a mysterious, remote land that has suddenly burst into their
consciousness. Consequently, Han is portrayed as an enigma, and the
narrative, presented solely through Lu’s perspective, invites the reader
to perceive the mainland woman as incomprehensible and yet in total
control of the dynamics.When, for instance, Lu is first introduced to
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Han, she “casually stood up and took a step forward, extending her
right hand toward the three young men who were bowing at their
waists, first to Zhilin.”36
The greeting styles signal their cultural differences
but, more important, underscore the disparity between them,
which is conveyed through the vivid image of a Taiwanese man continuing
the Japanese custom of bowing at the waist,greeting a woman
from the mainland who is standing upright. In a symbolic way, it is
the colonized Taiwan bowing to the victor of World War II. Later,
during the dinner party, Lu is once again put in a passive position,
when, through interpretation, Han asks him questions, a novelty, since
Taiwanese women are discouraged from initiating exchanges with a
(male) stranger. His inability to comprehend China, characterized as
an inability to speak and understand Mandarin, only intensifies his
desire for her.
The asymmetric dynamics of their interaction continue throughout
the novel.He agrees to be her tour guide,alternating between English
and written Chinese as a means of communication; the tour of Taipei
also serves as his tutorial sessions in Mandarin Chinese. But whereas
he learns to speak Mandarin, she learns virtually no Hakka from him.
The lopsided relationship is carried into their marriage, when one
day he realizes that not only has she completely disrupted his family
structure, but his entire family, including his parents, has become subservient
to her whims and desires.His father’s submissive attitude even
reminds him of how his father treated the Japanese during the colonial
era.TheTaiwanese regarded the arrival of the Nationalist government
as merely the substitution of one colonial government, the Chinese,
for another, the Japanese.What is intriguing is the way in which this
national strife is carried out in the domestic milieu, in which the
mainland woman represents the new colonial government.
This strife-ridden domestic relationship finally reaches a breaking
point after the 2/28 Incident, during which ethnic differences and
the potential for violence they represent are configured in the form
of a broken marriage. Lu Zhilin and Han Ping are one-dimensional
figures representing two different ideologies and interpretations of the
2/28 Incident. Han favors the official explanation that the Taiwanese,
slaves to the Japanese colonial rule, initiated a barbaric attack on the
mainlanders. Even though he disagrees, Lu lacks the linguistic ability
to express his objections. His inability to express his views and defend
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his position on the incident can be regarded as an implicit comment
on the voiceless Taiwanese and their linguistic inferiority.The limited
amount of English they share only lands them in a quagmire of debating
between words like“revolt”and“riot.”Han insists that the incident
was aTaiwanese revolt against the government, and Lu believes that it
was a riot against injustice. In the end, the now pregnant Han decides
to return to the mainland, thus ending a brief marriage based more
on superficial harmony derived from incomprehension—an infatuation
with the Other—than on mutual understanding.The failure of
this marriage demonstrates the impossibility of peaceful coexistence as
long as the Taiwanese suffer injustice and ill treatment.
Furthermore, if Han’s pregnancy signifies the potential for a future
of ethnic harmony, then the subsequent loss of the baby carries multiple
meanings for this allegory of ethnic relations. For one thing,
Han’s departure is described in a cryptic, almost dismissive manner.
Although she hints earlier to her sister that Taiwan is too dangerous
for her and that she may return to the mainland, the reader does not
learn of her return until the last chapter,when Lu Zhilin is leaving for
Japan to resume his studies.Similarly,the loss of the baby is mentioned
only in passing:
Zhilin recalled a line in Han Ping’s letter from Beijing that said,
“Unable to keep the baby, I feel deep regrets.” Zhilin had trouble
interpreting the meaning of such a phrase. No, he really couldn’t
understand what she meant and could only speculate and conclude
that the baby was gone.Whether due to abortion or miscarriage,
he didn’t know.37
But if the baby is to represent the future of ethnic harmony, then
the cause of the loss becomes extremely important; that is, an abortion
would represent a willful and violent termination of that future,
whereas a miscarriage would imply a hopeless situation beyond human
control.The author provides no answer, but it is significant that the
opportunity for future ethnic harmony is irrecoverable.
At the risk of overinterpretation, the failed marriage deserves further
discussion. If we regard it as a futile attempt at ethnic harmony,
we also must consider the implications of Lu’s journey to Japan at
the end of the novel. Han Ping’s return to the mainland is inevi-
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table, for her fears and her sense of superiority do not allow her to
remain in Taiwan; moreover, removing her from Taiwan symbolizes
the unbridgeable gap between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese.
What does it mean,then,for Lu Zhilin to return to Japan,and how are
we to interpret the author’s position regarding Taiwanese ethnicity?
Before boarding the ship for Japan, Lu Zhilin says to his cousin and
niece who have come to see him off,“You should find a place where
you truly belong and walk down that road toward tomorrow.That’s
all we can do, right?”38
Apparently, Lu believes that Japan is where he
belongs.The significance of a former imperial subject of the Japanese
colonial government returning to Japan is open to discussion, to be
sure.We could argue that Lu Zhilin fails to shed his colonized self and
willingly submits to further colonization. But if we place his decision
in the context of the 2/28 Incident, we see that the choice is inevitable,that
it is his only recourse,that the incident ultimately drives the
colonized back to the former colonizer.
“three sworn brothers of xizhuang”:
an archaeology of ethnic relations
Published in March 1986, Lin Shenjing’s “Three Sworn Brothers of
Xizhuang” reads like a detective novel in that it unravels an entangled
ethnic past and reveals the circumstances surrounding acts of violence
only at the end of the story.39
It takes place in the present, several
decades after the event—the 2/28 Incident in this case—and hence
offers an implicit or explicit comparison of past and present. Moreover,
this story is permeated by an ambiguity concerning the perpetrators
of suffering, implying that it is the ordinary people, not the
government, who inflict pain on others or themselves.
The story begins with a group of teenagers, one of them a secondgeneration
mainland boy, playing baseball.A home run sends the ball
into a secluded area behind a temple, a place forbidden to the village
children.The owner of the baseball is thus caught between his desire to
retrieve the ball and his fear of the place.Then his mother appears and
orders them all home, but not before scolding the old man guarding
the temple for leaving the place accessible to the children and posing
a danger to them. Next the reader is introduced to a scene in “Qiu’s
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Clinic,” in which a Taiwanese man’s complaint about his toothache
is being translated by the doctor’s son, Qiu Dawei. Because Dr. Qiu
is from Shandong, China, he speaks poor Taiwanese and relies on his
wife and son as interpreters.The rest of the story revolves around the
three boys—Qiu Dawei, Lin Mingshan, andWang Junhui—the sworn
brothers of Xizhuang.When Lin Mingshan, who is good at carving,
wishes he had a better knife, Qiu Dawei, a more privileged boy, offers
to buy it for him but is turned down. In a conversation with an older
villager, Wang Junhui discovers the secret behind the secluded area:
a madman, a mainlander (waishengren) is locked up in a small room
behind the temple.Wang then goes in and retrieves the baseball.When
the topic of a carving tool comes up again, the three boys decide to
steal the donation money from the temple.After the villagers discover
the theft,Wang persuades the other two boys to release the madman
in order to divert the villagers’attention from their search for the thief.
During the villagers’ confusion when they discover that the madman
has disappeared, Lin Mingshan’s family is notified by the village head
and the chief of police that Lin’s grandfather will soon be released
from prison.
The mysterious disappearance of Lin’s grandfather is finally revealed:
After the 2/28 Incident, Grandfather Lin,Wang Junhui’s grandfather,
and a third man (the father of a clerk in the Farmers’ Association),
also sworn brothers, took over a radio station to broadcast news of the
attack on Taiwanese.The clerk’s father was killed, and Lin Mingshan’s
andWang Junhui’s grandfathers were arrested.Wang’s grandfather later
died in prison, but Lin’s is now being released. In the final episode,
the villagers find the body of the dead madman. The secret of his
imprisonment also is revealed: when the sworn brothers of the earlier
generation were arrested, the villagers suspected that the nameless
mainlander was a government spy who had reported the sworn
brothers’ whereabouts, so they captured him. Unable to understand
the mainlander’s language but unwilling to set him free, the villagers
imprisoned him in a room they built behind the temple and entrusted
the old man to care for him.In an epilogue-like final section,the three
present-day sworn brothers of Xizhuang are seen going to visit the
graves with flowers in their book bags.
Careful readers of this text would likely notice the lengthy description
of the contemporary Taiwanese village and the friendship of the
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three boys. Eventually it becomes clear that the boys’ present-day life
is meant to serve as a contrast with the excavated past. Indeed, we can
detect a representational tendency in works (literary and cinematic)
on Taiwan’s history to set up a contrast between past and present.
Often the past is cast in a heroic and idealistic light, while the present
seems to be dwarfed by comparison. The contrast highlights sacrifices
made by members of the earlier generation or underscores their
unjust deaths. In Lin Shenjing’s story, however, past and present are so
shrouded in ambiguity that we cannot help but suspect that the author
is torn between wishing for a better tomorrow and lamenting the loss
of a glorious yet irretrievable past.This dilemma is caused by two dissimilar
but equally unsatisfactory approaches to representing atrocity.
The first approach emanates from a political/ideological teleology,
a contrast deriving from the author’s intention to comment on
Taiwan’s political realities. After four decades of White Terror, many
young Taiwanese were estranged from the past by their parents passively
admonishing them to keep politics at arm’s length, while the
government actively suppressed dissent, and any investigation of historical
events like the 2/28 Incident was forbidden. As a result, to
better indict political suppression, the younger generation of Taiwanese
is described as obsessed with sensual gratification and material
comfort. The subtext of this representational strategy seems to
be the assumption that the young Taiwanese would have behaved
differently had they known their history. Blaming a lack of historical
memory is a seductive way out of the problematic juxtaposition of
a better past and a degenerated present, but it does not explain why
the lack of historical memory would necessarily lead to the pursuit
of materialism.
The second approach involves narratorial expediency. Through a
stereotypical portrayal of contemporaryTaiwanese youths as hedonists
with a lax sense of morality, writers and filmmakers can more easily
ensure that the sacrifice and heroism of the earlier generation shines
through brightly.In other words,the need to idolize and idealize those
who fell prey to acts of government brutality demands that the next
generation be inferior to the previous generations in every respect.
Lacking political conviction and caring only about material comfort,
the young Taiwanese are forever living in the shadow of their elders,
with little hope of ever becoming their equals.Narrative of this nature
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inevitably simplifies the complex historical factors shaping Taiwan’s
current cultural state while creating one-dimensional characters.
When the ideological teleology of censuring the government is
conveyed through such narratorial expediency,a narrative that clearly
promotes ethnic harmony becomes disjointed, even self-defeating.
In “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang,” the most immediately discernible
juxtaposition of past and present is the two sets of sworn
brothers.The earlier trio are Taiwanese villagers who, according to
Lin Mingshan, during the conflict between mainlanders and Taiwanese,
“took over the radio station in town so they could broadcast
[the 2/28 Incident]; in the end one of them was killed and my
grandfather and Ahui’s [Wang Junhui’s] grandfather were arrested.”40
In contrast, the present-day sworn brothers are engaged in delinquent,not
heroic,activities:they steal money from the temple and,in
order to cover up their crime, release the madman, thus causing his
death. Even before the villagers discover the release and subsequent
death of the madman, we learn of the higher esteem in which the
people hold the older trio: When Wang Junhui’s father complains
to Li Tiansong, whose brother was the slain man of the earlier trio,
that the three young boys are lazy loafers who went to the temple
to swear an oath of brotherhood,Wang’s father states that they need
to be taught a lesson:
“What’s wrong with swearing an oath of brotherhood?”Tiansong
said. “Back then my brother, your father, and Mingshan’s
grandfather were also sworn brothers.”
“Tiansong, how could you make that kind of comparison,” the
village head said.“What they did back then was different.”41
While the younger sworn brothers are described as inferior in
comparison with their grandfather’s generation, the relationship
between the youngTaiwanese and the second-generation mainlander
is depicted in a positive way, even though the description is fraught
with a questionable, lopsided power structure. Early on we encounter
an amicable scene in which the Taiwanese farmer asks Dr. Qiu,
who is not a dentist, to help relieve his toothache. Dr. Qiu, as we
have seen, speaks Taiwanese with a Shandong accent but nonetheless
is able and willing to communicate with the Taiwanese farmer,
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with help from his son. The obligation of a medical doctor is to
cure people’s illnesses and alleviate their suffering. It is therefore all
the more ironic that at the same time that Dr. Qiu, a mainlander, is
helping a Taiwanese farmer, another mainlander has been locked up
in a small room by the Taiwanese villagers for something for which
he very likely was not responsible. Contrary to the earlier image of
mainlanders as outsiders who inflicted pain on the Taiwanese, Dr.
Qiu is now an integral part of the Taiwanese village, someone who
helps ease their physical pain.
The asymmetric power structure is most evident in the interactions
of the young trio,even though the three sworn brothers of the present
time are meant to represent improved ethnic relations. Whereas the
older trio was made up of three Taiwanese; the younger trio consists
of two Taiwanese and one boy, Qiu Dawei, whose father is from the
mainland. But Dawei is clearly the wealthiest boy, whose father is a
doctor, and the other two are farmers’ sons, one of whom has even
lost his father and grandfather. Dawei is described as generous, having
offered money to Lin Mingshan to buy carving tools.42
ButWang
Junhui, the secondTaiwanese boy, is the one who persuades the other
two to release the madman in order to cover up the theft.This may
seem to be only a teenage prank, but it actually is a criminal act with
grave consequences.
Even though the mainland boy,Qiu Dawei,goes along withWang’s
plan, this picture of peaceful, harmonious ethnic relations is unsettling,
particularly in the final scene when the villagers discover the
madman’s body:
“Ai!”Tiansong said.“A man’s life is over just like that. Now that
I think about it, I feel it’s so unjust.”
The village head also sighed.“Ai! When a person dies, burial is
the best solution.” He turned to Jinfu and said, “Jinfu, go tell the
funeral service people to come take care of this mad—this outsider’s
burial, after they perform the rites for your father.”
Jinfu nodded.
“One more thing,” the village head continued.“These two died
because of our Xizhuang, so I hope the tombstone will be carved
in the name of the whole village. I’ll go talk with everyone, and
hope they will all agree.”43
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There is a sense of denouement in the conversation between Jinfu
and the village head but virtually no feeling of Aristotelean catharsis.
It is as if the unjust death of two men and the decades-long imprisonments
(of the madman in the village and of Mingshan’s grandfather
in an offshore island prison) are simply water under the bridge.When
dealing with the suppressed 2/28 Incident and its disastrous effects on
the common people, who turn against an outsider, the characters in
this story seem more interested in a peaceful resolution and harmonious
ethnic relations.To be sure,we could argue that their unwillingness
to delve into the past is the result of the White Terror characterized
by suppression, as we will see in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good
Women. But we cannot overlook the fact that the villagers, young and
old,contributed to the death of the nameless mainlander,even though
their actions are caused by either suspicion or negligence, not by willful
viciousness.That is, the villagers might have been ignorant perpetrators
of a crime at a highly charged moment; still, especially when
compared with the lengthy narrative on the current ethnic harmony,
the ending is unsettling, because “certain wounds, both personal and
historical, cannot simply heal without leaving scars or residue in the
present; there may even be a sense in which they have to remain as
open wounds even if one strives to counteract their tendency to swallow
all of existence and incapacitate one as an agent in the present.”44
With the mainlander victim and the Taiwanese martyr buried—
coincidentally or, perhaps, ironically—side by side, given the symbolic
power of tombs and burials,we could argue that the villagers are burying
their past,although the reader is not privy to their inner world and
hence is unable to discern whether that past is viewed as ignominious
or painful or both. Indeed, at first, little of the past is revealed to
the young trio or to the reader, and when it is, the revelation elicits
questionable responses from the characters. For instance, when the
village head explains to the young boys how the mainlander came to
be imprisoned and subsequently went mad,we are given only Dawei’s
reaction: “‘Damn,’ Dawei said. ‘This is crazy!’”45
It is reasonable to
expect Dawei, the son of a mainlander, to be the one who exclaims
his bewilderment and indignation, but the phrase seems inadequate
and weak.
The narratorial haste to deal and dispense with the past is closely
tied to the author’s intention to illustrate the current, improved state
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of ethnic relations.When,for instance,past events and the secret about
the madman are mentioned, issues of ethnicity quickly take over, as
though they are an antidote to the poisonous past.After Wang Junhui
reveals that he has asked around but that no one is willing to tell him
anything about the madman, the following dialogue ensues:
“Someone has to know,” Dawei said.
“They say he’s a mainlander [waishengren],” Junhui said.
“Damn it!” Dawei said,“So what if he’s a mainlander? So am I.”46
At the end when the past is finally revealed to the younger generation,
the process seems anticlimactic, the listeners’ reaction vapid.
When Mingshan relates the actions taken by his grandfather and his
sworn brothers, Dawei reacts by saying, “How come I didn’t know
any of this?” Junhui replies,“It isn’t in the textbooks, so of course you
didn’t know.”47
We might reasonably expect the youths to respond with
more than just a brief question and answer about the (in)accessibility
of historical knowledge in textbooks.
To be fair to Lin Shenjing, this story exemplifies an attempt to
break through the dichotomized stereotype of the mainlander as
the perpetrator and the Taiwanese as the victim.The mainland madman
in the story is a victim of misunderstanding and distrust, while
the older Taiwanese sworn brothers sacrifice their lives to protest
against injustice. In the final analysis, both ethnic groups are victimized,
for the highly charged atmosphere of suspicion following
the 2/28 Incident turned ordinary citizens into irrational agents of
revenge. The author’s overriding intention to address this effect of
the incident turns the story into a kind of glorification of closure,
with its emphasis on final resolution and harmonious ethnic relations,
thereby giving a misguided assertion about “the possibility of
total mastery or full dialectical overcoming of the past in a redemptive
narrative or . . . a stereotypically Hegelian overcoming and reconciliation—wherein
all wounds are healed without leaving scars
and full ego identity is achieved.”48
Without a sincere, unflinching
look at the roots of ethnic strife, past and present, reconciliation
may be temporarily satisfying but the wound will always be festering
beneath the surface of peaceful coexistence and continue to be
manipulated for political gains.
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“notes of taimu mountain”:
topographic imagination of history and ethnicity
The story“Notes of Taimu Mountain”is based on a real-life character,
Lü Heruo, a midcentury writer, musician, and member of Taiwan’s
Communist Party.In the aftermath of the 1947 incident,the Nationalist
regime cast its net wide to arrest anyone suspected of antigovernment
activities.49
Lü was forced into hiding on Luku Mountain in
northern Taiwan and was not heard from again. His death remained
a mystery until historians, through eyewitness accounts, finally ascertained
that he had died of snakebite.50
The last days of Lü’s life were
then re-created in Li Qiao’s“Notes of Taimu Mountain,”which opens
with Lü, now calledYu Shiji, leaving his hideout on the plains to look
for a friend,Wayong, of the indigenous Tso tribe.With help from his
friends in the tribe,Yu Shiji sets out to look for Taimu Mountain, a
sacred place in the tribe’s mythical universe. On his way, he encounters
a mainland Chinese bounty hunter, who, enticed by a huge sum
forYu’s death, forces him into an area infested with poisonous snakes.
Yu is bitten and then tricks the bounty hunter into also being bitten.
Before perishing with his prey, the mainland bounty hunter shootsYu
in the shoulder.The story ends with the dyingYu Shiji spreading seeds
of acacia, a resilient tree indigenous to Taiwan, around them both.
Taimu Mountain plays multiple roles in revealing the reality of and
possible solutions to ethnic conflicts in Li Qiao’s story (and perhaps
in Taiwan as well). Immediately discernible is the shelter it provides
for Yu Shiji. It is the mother of all mountains, mysterious, mythical,
and dangerous, guarded by poisonous snakes.The locals believe it is a
walking mountain that will evade an unwelcome climber.While stressing
that respect for the mountain is the only map to it, the local
elders also warnYu not to climb to the top of the mountain, for the
guardian snakes will kill any trespasser.Yu faces an apparently irresolvable
dilemma: he will either be captured by agents of the Nationalist
government on the plains or be killed by snakes on the mountain.
He chooses the latter and fulfills the elders’ predictions, mirroring
the fate of the real-life figure, the writer Lü Heruo. But the cause of
the death of the fictional characterYu Shiji serves to locate the three
major groups of residents (the Yuanzhumin, the Taiwanese, and the
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mainlanders) in a metaphorical Taiwan. Moreover,Yu’s death at the
hands of the bounty hunter enables the author to rewrite a personal
history that is implicated in national history.
One of the functions of Taimu Mountain is its microcosmic role, a
miniature of Taiwan, where theYuanzhumin, the original inhabitants,
are chronologically joined by the Taiwanese and finally by the newly
arrived mainlanders. The bloodshed on the mountain is an oblique
reference to the 2/28 Incident. But this demographic typology is full
of tension, owing to the author’s questionable portrayal of the three
major characters:Wayong,Yu Shiji, and the nameless bounty hunter.
A clear hierarchy is discernible in the way these three characters are
presented.Wayong is a peace-loving warrior who helps Yu escape to
the mountain. While it is debatable whether or not Wayong can or
should be characterized as someone akin to Rousseau’s noble savage,
his affinity with nature—specifically, Taimu Mountain—is indisputable:“Wayong
comprehends what the mountain peaks are saying and
hears the laments of the rivers.Wayong is always saying that the Earth
tells him lots of secrets.”51
In the story and in real life, theYuanzhumin speak both their tribal
language and Japanese, andYu Shiji, like many Taiwanese of that time,
is fluent in Taiwanese and Japanese, the latter used only sparingly in
the story.Wayong’s awkward speech—often punctuated by pauses, as
if he were incapable of forming complete sentences—is obviously
intended to imitate the pattern of someone not fluent in Taiwanese,
but the effect is an image of a stammering non–Han Chinese, rather
like the caricatured representations of American Indians in early Hollywood
movies:
“You, words, not serious.”
“People, hard to avoid, a place, save life.”
While it is tempting to view this simulation as demeaning, it actually
illustrates the difficulty of representing ethnicity through linguistic
differences:“It is clear that we do not yet have a vocabulary, beyond
the moralistic one, in which to examine the space in between: the
ambiguous middle area in the continuum between egregious stereotypes
on the one end and the strategic deployment of types (tropes by
which we recognize ourselves [or the Other]) on the other end.”52
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Indeed, the representation of ethnic differences often runs the risk
of well-intentioned typecasting that can easily slip into stereotype, of
which Li Qiao’s text is a good example.
Yu Shiji is a Taiwanese intellectual who plays the violin, a sign of
his advanced education,thus inviting the reader to regardWayong and
Yu as a binary opposition of nature versus culture. In a conversation
with Wayong and his cousin before his flight,Yu jokingly proclaims
himself to be a shallow humanist. He also is a leftist whose activities
eventually lead to his own death and contaminate the indigenous
sacred mountain. In her introduction to the collection in which this
story appears, Xu Junya calls attention toYu’s vicious scheme to trick
the mainlander into revealing the dark side of human nature and
Yu’s own eventual enlightenment:“In the face of nature, the struggle
and hatred among humans seems so laughable. But Yu Shiji finally
understands this absurdity just before he dies, an enlightenment that
his opponent, who shows no regret, even when he is breathing his
last, cannot attain.”53
In Yu Shiji’s case, although he is not a man of
nature, his death is his salvation, and the act of spreading the acacia
seeds redeems his crime, thus making him nearly as lofty a character
as Wayong, Li Qiao’s noble savage.
The mainland bounty hunter, in contrast, is beyond salvation; he
has no redeeming qualities. Greed drives him to kill:“Of course I’m
not going to give up.You’re worth a hundred thousand yuan.A hundred
thousand! Do you hear me?”54
The fact that he has no name
renders him relatively insignificant.The bounty hunter mistakesYu for
Lin Shuangwen,the ringleader of a violence-ridden protest in another
city.ThroughYu Shiji’s comment that the bounty hunter is“a dog that
knows nothing,” the author draws attention to the bounty hunter’s
ignorance of Taiwanese history, which is compounded by his greed
in the pursuit of a Taiwanese rebel who could be either Lin Shuang
[first tone] wen,Lin Shuang [third tone] wen,orYu Shiji.55
Compared
with Wayong, who understands nature, and Yu Shiji, an idealist, the
mainlander appears greedy, cruel, and obsessed with senseless killing.
Moreover,after being tricked into a den of snakes and bitten,“the man
reholstered his gun and sat there dazed for a while.Then he started to
sob, a deep, heart-rending sob that came from the very bottom of his
soul, choking on despair.”56
He is, in a word, a greedy coward, placed
at the bottom of Li Qiao’s ethnic hierarchy.
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Yu’s death on Taimu Mountain is a narratorial device for Li Qiao
to fill in a blank page not only in Lü Heruo’s life but also in the Taiwanese
people’s collective memory. Like many idealistic intellectuals
who died as a direct or an indirect result of the 2/28 Incident, Lü
Heruo’s only crime was his leftist ideology, his earlier naive belief in
the Nationalist government’s sincerity in reuniting Taiwan with the
motherland, and his disillusionment that led to participation in possible
armed rebellion.57
He perished in the mountains for his belief,
and even his death was a taboo.As Lan Bozhou’s fieldwork and interviews
reveal, Lü’s death was in fact witnessed by at least one person
and known to several more.But for years,his whereabouts remained a
mystery to many, including Li Qiao, who wrote his story in 1984.We
should not assume that had he known, Li Qiao would have written
the story differently. On the contrary, it is quite possible that Li Qiao’s
re-creation of the last days of Lü Heruo’s life could very well have
been the same,for even though he was writing fiction and not history,
he clearly intended to restore a missing page to Taiwan’s history.58
The attempt to counter a heretofore monolithic, hegemonic
national history with the re-creation of a personal story, however, is
not unproblematic. On the narrative level, in the opening paragraph
of the story,Yu Shiji is a decidedly unheroic character:
Yu Shiji hid out in the Jiukeng area of Xizhi for four months, until
early June.On one early morning,the temperature dropped sharply
and a fog started to enshroud the mountains, sign of an imminent
typhoon, so he decided to flee the area.59
In other words, he is on the run even before the story begins, and the
development of the plot shows him going farther and farther away
from safety, ending eventually in his death.To be sure, Li Qiao is recreating
the last days of Lü Heruo’s life,and so much of the story centers
on the end rather than the beginning. Lü’s life before his escape is
described in a few lines:he studied the violin in Japan and returned to
teach at Jianguo High School in Taipei:
Then when he went back to his hometown,he happened to [ouran]
meet Zhang Xinyi and others;after that came the incident,then his
own changes. He set off on a path he could not have imagined; the
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meaning of life and the journey of his life changed completely. In
the end, it was unavoidable flight, hiding out, and more flight.60
There are later references to his membership in a Communist Party
branch, in which his duties are mainly writing propaganda. In short,
the author refers elliptically to Yu’s activities before his flight.“Did I
really do all those things?”Yu asks himself at one point.
It could well be the lack of sufficient biographical material and/or
the fear of censorship that forced Li Qiao to stress the end of Lü’s
life.61
But whether it is the former or the latter or a combination of
the two that has shaped the story, it resulted from the government’s
suppression of dissent, which for decades silenced the witnesses to
Lü’s death.Yet by glossing over the activities that led to Lü’s flight, the
author has, ironically, created a victim of the relentless government
crackdown, not a hero of the uprising. Li Qiao’s Lü Heruo is a victim
who wavers between ideological conviction and domestic happiness.
In privileging victim over heroic figure, the author has succeeded
in commemorating the 2/28 Incident and condemning the ensuing
arrest and execution of Taiwanese intellectuals.As a result, the perpetrator
of the killing is portrayed as a bounty hunter,not someone convinced
thatYu’s activities are harmful to national security.62
Therefore,
the life-and-death struggle betweenYu and the bounty hunter is not
ideologically driven; rather, it is intended as criticism of the earlier,
biased, official interpretation of the 2/28 Incident as a subversive riot
instigated by underground Communists in Taiwan.
That said,the story should not be read simply as one writer’s attempt
to recuperate another writer’s life or as a new rendition of historical
events in order to right wrongs. Instead, it is an idealistic, if not unrealistic,
evocation of peaceful coexistence among ethnic groups. Zhang
Henghao argued that
Li Qiao uses a macroscopic approach to reflect on the entangled
relationship among the Taiwanese, the mainlanders, and the Yuanzhumin,
with ultimate concern for the relations between humans
and Nature, as well as for humans and the land.The author stresses
the themes of using love and tolerance to resolve/counter opposition
and hatred, of respecting each ethnic and provincial group to
live in harmony, and of identifying with the land of Taiwan.63
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Zhang believes that Li Qiao is implying that ethnic/provincial tensions
will cease to be an issue once everyone in Taiwan truly identifies
with the island. He cites two incidents in the story to corroborate
his assertion.The first occurs when Wayong is showingYu Shiji the
escape route to Taimu Mountain: “Don’t lose heart, be confident
of yourself, you must believe in Taimu Mountain. Must love! Do
you hear? Love.”64
The second instance occurs at the end of the
story, after the bounty hunter has died of snakebite and Yu knows
that he also is near the end of his life. He spreads acacia seeds, originally
part of his disguise as a vegetable seed peddler, around him and
the mainlander, with some of the seeds falling on their faces and
their chests:
When the rains come, some of the seeds will sprout.When spring
comes, there will be a grove of cassia around here.The moment I
stop breathing is when I return to the great earth; my body will
become one with the great earth and I will return with the saplings
of Spring.65
Zhang’s interpretation posits an intriguing reading of Li’s story; that
is, Li Qiao is more interested in the future than in the past, and his
rewriting of a personal story serves less to commemorate a victim than
to imagine a better, brighter future of ethnic/provincial harmony. Sue
Vice terms this characteristic “back shadowing”—that is, constructing
a narrative with the privilege of hindsight, of already knowing the
outcome of an event.66
In light of the continuing conflicts among different
groups in Taiwan, it is understandable that Li Qiao wishes to
promote tolerance and love, as evidenced in his portrayal of Taimu
Mountain and the snakes (of hatred). But such writing itself poses a
danger to the ultimate goal of redressing atrocity,as Dominick LaCapra
has observed:
Being responsive to the traumatic experience of others, notably of
victims, implies not the appropriation of their experience but what
I would call empathic unsettlement, which should have stylistic
effects or,more broadly,effects in writing which cannot be reduced
to formulas or rules of method. . . . At the very least, empathic
unsettlement poses a barrier to closure in discourse and places in
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jeopardy harmonizing or spiritually uplifting accounts of extreme
events from which we attempt to derive reassurance or a benefit.67
In Taiwan, the unsettlement is not an obstacle to the future of
ethnic harmony but a necessary pause in the all too hasty effort to
move forward without proper consideration for the victims. Li Qiao’s
determined effort to emphasize the power of love in transcending this
ethnic divide, although admirable, ultimately privileges the future and
obscures the past.
From the stories and the analysis presented here, we discern narrative
patterns and their pitfalls emerging in the portrayals of ethnicity
and ethnic relations. Perhaps as a convenient narratological device,
romance and marriage are employed metaphorically to describe the
impossibility of ethnic harmony. Set against the background of the
2/28 Incident and theWhiteTerror, the failed relationships between a
mainlander and a Taiwanese serve a more significant, symbolic function.Under
this premise,characters often are imbued with metonymic
qualities to represent two separate ethnic groups, and gender stereotypes
inevitably arise in these portrayals. Moreover, the need to heal
the historical wounds of ethnic strife often finds writers caught in a
dilemma.For instance,Lin Shenjing’s intention to highlight the effects
of the 2/28 Incident on the average Taiwanese is compromised by a
more urgent pacifist agenda of ethnic harmony. A similarly uplifting
tone can be detected in “Under the Snow” and “Notes of Taimu
Mountain,” in which a better tomorrow is hinted at or anticipated.
This “redemptive token” is the pitfall of such a subgenre, for a fiction
writer “must think in terms of resolutions and completion. But what,
after having surrendered his characters to their fate, can he suppose
those resolutions and completions to be?”68
Ou Tansheng’s “Intoxication,”
written immediately after the incident, is an exception. Obviously,
without the vantage point of hindsight, Ou was more interested
in reporting the incident and its impact than analyzing its causes and
implications. While it is pointless to favor one over the other, it is
important that the commitment to ethnic harmony not override the
obligation to remember.
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