Ghost Month (44 page)

A large, populous country formally known as the People’s Republic of China that is located across the Taiwan Strait, to the northwest of Taiwan’s mainland. As one of the world’s longest-lived civilizations, and considering its diverse demographics and history of being divided and united countless times, China may be more a continent rather than a country. Through the centuries Chinese culture has greatly influenced Taiwan, along with China’s other neighbors. Probably best known as the birthplace of Confucius and the manufacturing site of Apple products, China lives in fear of an invasion by its small neighbor. Why else would it have more than 1,600 ballistic and cruise missiles aimed at Taiwan at the end of 2012, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense? Nonetheless, China has already invaded Taipei in the form of tourists crowding the memorial halls of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. The strategy of these shock troops is to disrupt solemn changing-of-the-guard ceremonies by talking loudly and using flash photography.

A political party founded by
benshengren
in opposition in 1986, although it wasn’t legally recognized until the next year, when martial law was lifted. Initially, the leadership comprised men and women who had been persecuted, tortured and/or jailed during the White Terror. The party was then bolstered by the return of Taiwanese dissidents from abroad throughout the 1990s. The DPP was founded mainly to advocate for Taiwan formally declaring independence from China, which regards the island as a stray sheep of a province that needs to be coaxed back into the flock—with electric prods if necessary. When the ruling Kuomintang party fractured ahead of the 2000 Presidential Election, the DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian managed an unlikely win. Ironically, warnings from China not to vote for Chen bolstered support for him. Chen served two terms, which were often marked by political gridlock, legislative showdowns and dwindling popularity. After leaving office, Chen was convicted of bribery, further tarnishing the DPP’s public profile. The party’s reputation recovered in time to nearly take the 2012 Presidential Election.

A word in Mandarin. When spoken with the descending tone, it means “to do.” When placed before the words “your mother,” the phrase rudely suggests something to be done to your mother.
Gan
can also be used alone to express the f-bomb. This usage of
gan
originated in Taiwan but has been growing among Mandarin speakers in China, along with the increased number of Taiwanese expats. Woe to any schoolkid unfortunate enough to have
gan
in their name.
The Last of the Whampoa Breed
, edited by Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-Wei Wang, includes a story about a kid named “Gansheng” by his
waishengren
dad, who was unaware that the name meant “fuck a baby” to the kid’s
benshengren
classmates.

The Buddhist goddess of mercy. In Taiwan she is worshipped by Buddhists as well as Taoists and adherents to I-Kuan Tao, a syncretic religion that incorporates elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam. The twenty-foot-tall Guanyin statue in Da’an Forest Park that Jing-nan contemplates in the first chapter has a controversial past. The statue was slated to be removed from the site during construction of the park in 1994, but Buddhist nun Shih Chao-hui staged a hunger strike by the statue until the Taipei city government relented. Why was the statue slated to be removed? There is a longstanding belief among Taiwanese that Buddhist iconography (and Buddhist monks and nuns) should be contained in monasteries in remote mountaintops, away from worldly matters. Taiwanese politicians often set up campaign headquarters in local Taoist and folk-religion temples, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, a Buddhist temple would never be seen as appropriate for such secular activities.

Nominally a subgroup of
benshengren
, Hakka have their own language and culture independent of other
benshengren
and
waishengren
. Unlike nearly every other distinct Han Chinese group, Hakka have resisted being absorbed into the melting wok
of turbulent history. Their name literally means “guest families,” which indicates that they were a people who were constantly on the move. Hakka communities exist throughout not only Asia but the world. Their respect for manual labor gave them the fortitude to establish Taiwan’s camphor industry under often-harsh conditions.
Wintry Night
by Li Qiao is an excellent saga about a tough-as-nails pioneer Hakka family just scraping by. As of 2012, one fifth of all Han Chinese, including
benshengren
and
waishengren
, are Hakka, according to the Republic of China’s Office of Information Services.

The Republic of China’s Department of International Information Services puts the population of Taiwan’s first people at 2 percent, or about 520,000, at the end of 2011. Out of fourteen officially recognized indigenous groups, the three largest—Amis, Paiwan and Atayal—make up about 70 percent of all aborigines. The early decades of the Republic of China were marked by political disregard for aborigines, who were insultingly called “mountain people”—no matter where they lived—in official documents. Their sacred lands and burial areas were ruthlessly overturned and developed. In perhaps the most egregious incident, Thao (also known as Yami) living on their native offshore Orchid Island were told in the 1970s that the government was building a fish cannery that would provide needed jobs. The Thao later discovered to their horror that the facility was a nuclear-waste site. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that more than seventy thousand barrels of radioactive waste from Taipower are stored on the island as of 2013. It’s no wonder that the Indigenous Peoples’ Action Coalition of Taiwan staged a symbolic headhunt of the Republic of China government on its centenary in 2012. Omi Wilang, an Atayal, told the
Taipei Times
, “We have nothing to celebrate, as the aborigines have only suffered under the ROC government.” Actually, more than a few people of aboriginal descent have done well. A-Mei, a member of the Puyuma nation, is a huge pop star not only in Taiwan but in Asia as a whole. Like many Asian performers, she sells out shows in the US in those traditional meeting places of the Asian
community—casinos.
Cape No
. 7, a 2008 blockbuster, starred Van Fan, who is Amis.

The story of this Japan-born son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother has been exploited by different parties throughout the years to suit their political aims. The Ming Dynasty in China collapsed in 1644 at the hands of the Manchus and their allies. Koxinga, a Ming loyalist, built up and trained troops on islands offshore. He invaded Taiwan in 1661 and expelled the Dutch, who held sway over the island from Fort Zeelandia in present-day Tainan. Koxinga managed to rule over Taiwan until he was felled at an early age by either malaria or a fit of madness. The Manchus and their Qing Dynasty forces soon took control of the island. Centuries later, when Japan colonized Taiwan, Koxinga was upheld as a symbol of the shared heritage of the Japanese and Taiwanese. When the Kuomintang came to Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek was often compared with Koxinga as someone who would not submit to barbarians on the mainland. Koxinga is hailed by present-day Chinese officials as a man who expelled the Dutch from Chinese territory. Was he really a hero, though? After all, reading about Koxinga and his men raiding the shores of China and the Spanish-held Philippines makes them sound like the common pirates who took refuge in Taiwan over the centuries, albeit well-organized ones.

The Chinese Nationalist Party, also known as the KMT, co-founded by Sun Yat-sen several months after the Republic of China was declared in Nanking, China, on January 1, 1912. After the collapse of the Qing, China’s last dynasty, the opponents to a united China and enemies of the KMT were a colorful assortment of warlords who were incorporated into the revolution or eventually defeated. After Sun died in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek assumed leadership and purged the KMT ranks of left-leaning members as well as members of the Communist Party of China, although the Soviet Union had supported the KMT itself in its formative years. With the help of advisors from Nazi Germany (Chiang’s adopted
son Chiang Wei-kuo commanded a Panzer unit during the 1938 Austrian Anschluss), the KMT fought a large-scale war with Chinese Communists even as the Empire of Japan sought to expand control of northern China. Infamously, Chiang was kidnapped by his own troops to force him into an alliance with the Communists to fight Japan. While the KMT and Communists allegedly fought a united front against Japan, the Communists perfected their use of guerilla warfare and used it to great effect during the Chinese Civil War, which saw the KMT retreat to Taiwan in 1949 and establish Taipei as the new capital of the Republic of China. Under martial law on the island, the KMT and the Republic of China were effectively one and the same, a cozy situation that enriched the KMT coffers. In December 2001
The Economist
noted that the KMT was the richest party in East Asia. The party’s worst enemy turned out to be infighting, rather than Communists or the independent-minded Democratic Progressive Party. The party splintered ahead of the 2000 presidential election, and some now say that outgoing president and KMT chairman Lee Teng-hui had planned all along to hand the victory to DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian. In the wake of the election,
waishengren
lamented that the sting felt like losing China all over again, as documented in
Remembering China From Taiwan: Divided Families and Bittersweet Reunions After the Chinese Civil War
by Mahlon Meyer. The KMT used its time as an opposition party to build links with its old rival, the Chinese Communist Party. In 2005 officials from the two parties met in China in the highest-level exchange between them in sixty years, to seek peace and to forge trade links. It was an audacious move, as the two sides have never signed a peace agreement or armistice, and from a legal standpoint, the Chinese Civil War never ended. The KMT stormed back into power in 2008 with President Ma Ying-jeou’s election; he was re-elected in 2012.

A Chinese dialect that was made the official language of Taiwan after the island passed to Kuomintang control at the end of World War II. From 1895 to 1945, the period that Taiwan was a part of the
Empire of Japan, Japanese was the official language. Notably, under the Japanese and the KMT, the Taiwanese language, which
benshengren
spoke at home, was outlawed. The abrupt change in the official language caused problems for the islanders. My uncle told me that when he was a schoolchild, his supposed Mandarin instructor was learning the language at the same time as the class, and that they all read the textbook together and at the same pace. Chiang Kais-hek himself spoke Mandarin secondarily and was most comfortable with his native Ningbo dialect. There are major differences between Mandarin and Taiwanese, which are mutually unintelligible when spoken. Mandarin requires the speaker to sing words in four tones; Taiwanese, which is descended from the Hokkien dialect spoken in China’s Fujian province, requires seven tones. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates that as much as 15 percent of Hokkien cannot be rendered accurately with Chinese characters, and on top of that, Taiwanese includes borrowed and absorbed words from Austronesian indigenous languages, Dutch, Japanese and English.

Like many gods and goddesses worshipped by Taiwanese and Chinese, Mazu represents a mortal person deified for their perceived good works. Lin Moniang was a young woman who lived on an island off the Chinese coastal province of Fujian a thousand years ago. Her father and brothers were fishermen, and she would aid them in coming home from storms by both mortal means—lanterns—and supernatural means—plucking them from the sea and bringing them to safety while in a dream state. Supposedly she never died, having ascended to the heavens from the oceans while still in her twenties. The legend led to her titles as Goddess of the Sea and Empress of Heaven. As such, she has given safe passage to many Chinese traveling to Taiwan over the centuries. Grateful
benshengren
built temples to her after establishing themselves in Taiwan. The Tourist Bureau of Taiwan notes that Mazu, literally “maternal ancestor,” is Taiwan’s most popular deity. She is easily recognizable by her black skin and the beaded veil that hangs from her headdress. Taiwan’s Mazu islands are named after the goddess. Mazu sits at the forefront of the Taoist pantheon.

Taiwanese have much affection for Japan and Japanese culture, and Taiwan is Japan’s closest neighbor in terms of being cozy with one another. They do not have official relations, mind you, as China and Japan have formal diplomatic ties, and having formal ties with China means you can’t have them with Taiwan. However, according to Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, only 5 percent of Japanese surveyed in 2013 viewed China favorably. That’s not surprising, considering a dispute between the two over some islands in addition to some historical matters. Taiwan also claims ownership of the islands, known as the Tiaoyutai to Taiwanese, but it reached a fishing agreement with Japan that tables the ownership issue for now. Another Japanese island dispute, with South Korea, has soured relations with that country, and South Korea’s insane northern neighbor frequently threatens to turn Japan into “a nuclear sea of fire.” And what of Russia? Another islands dispute. So why was Taiwan the only country Japan was able to reach a pact with? Moreover, how can a former colony have warm ties with its former master? Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, Qing Dynasty China ceded Taiwan and other properties to Japan. Taiwan at the time was largely undeveloped, and the people of Chinese descent on the island had been treated as second-class citizens by Qing officials. The Japanese built the infrastructure that helped support Taiwan’s economic surge in the 1960s and 1970s, long after Japanese rule ended. Even more importantly, the Japanese introduced Taiwan to baseball, and the legacy of that has been world-champion Taiwanese Little League teams and the proliferation of Taiwanese players in Major League Baseball. Unlike Japan’s brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula, which seemed to be punitive in nature, its administration of Taiwan was motivated by a need to show Western powers that it could be a benevolent colonial power. Japan built up Taiwan as a showpiece colony and vacation destination for Westerners. Make no mistake, Japan brutally cracked down on insurrections and marginalized dissent. Many Taiwanese who lived through the colonization, however, say that what happened after was worse. These days, Taiwanese and Japanese people rate each other highest in polls that measure sentiment for neighboring
countries, and Japan is Taiwan’s top source of imports—even higher than China. Visiting Japanese politicians throw out baseballs at Taiwanese games. The Taiwanese airline EVA Airways flies planes decked out with Hello Kitty characters. Japanese words (
ichiban, obasan
) live on in common Taiwanese usage, and Japanese underworld culture (tattooing, extorting companies at their shareholder meetings, disdain for guns) remains alive among Taiwan’s criminal groups. (For more on that, read
Heijin: Organized Crime, Business, and Politics in Taiwan
by Ko-lin Chin, which will leave you slack-jawed.) If this relationship still seems strange, consider the mutual affection that exists between America and its old colonial master, despite past enmity.