THREE DAYS BEFORE the election, I drove to a DPP rally in the city of Hsinchu. From Taipei, sections of the highway ran straight as an arrow: it had been designed to double as a landing strip in case the Communists bombed the airport. Hsinchu still looked prosperous—its high-tech processing district was massive—but the Taiwanese economy was mired in its worst recession ever. In 2001, the Taiwanese GDP had shrunk for the first time since 1949, and unemployment rates had risen every month. Plants and jobs were making an exodus to the mainland, where labor was cheaper.
Growing Taiwanese investment in the mainland had added a new dimension to cross-strait relations. Since the beginning of Reform and Opening, economic links had been one of the Communists’ strategies for regaining Taiwan (one explicit goal of the Special Economic Zones was “the return of Taiwan to the Motherland”). Twenty years later, this appeared to be the only mainland tactic that might pay off. Intimidation and threats had never worked, but the economic power of the People’s Republic was becoming increasingly difficult for Taiwanese to ignore.
After the Hsinchu rally, I met with the vice-mayor, Lin Cheng-chieh. He told me to call him by his English name, Jacky Lin. Like every political figure I met in Taiwan, he immediately agreed to an interview and spoke openly. The Taiwanese had quickly grown accustomed to a free press, and there was none of the mainlander’s fear of a foreign reporter.
Jacky Lin’s father had been a Kuomintang special agent. In 1956, the Taiwanese government instructed the man to sneak across the Hong Kong border and set up a secret radio broadcast station in Jiangxi province. It was a dangerous, difficult mission, and the man was caught in less than a week. For a while, the Communists held him in a southern prison, and then they sent him to a labor camp in remote Qinghai province. Back in Taiwan, there was no news at all, and the Kuomintang informed the family that the man had been killed. But his wife refused to remarry, and she always told Jacky and his three siblings that their father would someday return. When his father disappeared into the mainland, Jacky was four years old.
He was twenty-seven when the first letter arrived. His father was alive and out of jail, but now he was stranded in the Fujianese countryside, trying to convince the Communists to let him go home. By the early 1980s, the Communists agreed, but now the problem was the Kuomintang, who feared a double agent. Finally, in 1983, both sides agreed to the transfer, and Jacky’s father returned to Taiwan.
He arrived just in time to see his son get into political trouble. Jacky became one of the early leaders of the DPP, known for his skills at organizing street protests. He spent time in prison; his father, although a staunch Kuomintang supporter, was sympathetic (“he told me to do whatever I believed in”). In jail, knowing that his father had had it much worse, the young man looked on the bright side (“it wasn’t so bad. I could read books, and I didn’t have to answer the phone”).
Despite his early commitment to the DPP, Jacky renounced his party membership in 1991. He disliked the infighting that had overtaken Taiwanese politics—like many fledgling democracies, the island had experienced political fragmentation, and now there were five major parties and a host of smaller groups. People often voted according to when their ancestors had arrived on Taiwan; the DPP catered to natives, while the Kuomintang appealed to those whose families had fled the mainland in 1948 and 1949.
Jacky also disagreed with the DPP’s push toward independence. He remained on good terms with his former political allies, but he had no formal allegiance to any party. He was a minor city official: a small, balding man with a mustache and a paunch. His father had passed away a year earlier.
“If my family had been in Taiwan for eight generations, then I’d be more inclined to support independence,” Jacky told me. “You have to look at people’s experience before you can figure out how they’ll respond. The Chinese were put here in Taiwan because of a historical event. As a result, we had a chance to build a democracy and become a functioning capitalist society. We can say that it’s a mission for the rest of China. If I look at the great Chinese leaders—Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping—all of them had the same goals. They all wanted to modernize China. And yet all of these leaders were eventually defeated. Deng had some success, but it was incomplete. So that’s our mission. Taiwan is an experimental region—it’s an experiment for the mainland. Because of that, even though we are just a small island, our democracy is important to the future of China.”
He spoke softly, with none of the condescension that Chinese intellectuals sometimes showed when talking to a foreigner about history. The Chinese often bragged about the length of their past, but they could be remarkably humble about the present: they readily admitted that, after thousands of years, they still hadn’t figured out how to make China work. They were still trying—the experimental cities, the experimental island. Just give us some more time. China wasn’t built in a day.
“I think that Chiang Ching-kuo was like Deng,” Jacky continued. “Both of them had true vision. They didn’t have much charisma, but they were very practical. You know, they’re kind of similar—short guys who were practical. We need more little guys like that.”
NO PARTY CARRIED the election. For the first time, the Kuomintang lost outright control of the legislature, and the DPP gained seats, but it wasn’t enough for a majority. Alliances would have to be hammered out between the four biggest parties.
On the evening that the results were announced, I attended a press conference held by Sisy Chen, an independent who had won a seat. A native Taiwanese, she had been a founding member of the DPP, but two years ago she had left the party. She was flamboyant—a popular talk show host who had become one of the island’s most controversial politicians. Her campaign posters featured a series of four portraits that superimposed her head onto the bodies of famous foreigners. Three were iconic Westerners: the Mona Lisa, Queen Elizabeth, and Winston Churchill. The fourth campaign sign featured Sisy Chen bearded, wrapped in a turban and with her right index finger upraised: Osama bin Laden.
She was a woman who, having once been attractive, confronted middle age with outright defiance. At the press conference, she wore a black dress with a low-cut front; a string of pearls had been wrapped twice around her neck. She had dyed red hair, and her false eyelashes were nearly two inches long. Under the photographer’s lights her thick makeup glowed a soft orange.
It was hard to imagine a victor who showed less respect for the election that she had just won. After the press conference, she told me that Taiwan’s constitution encouraged elected officials to build narrow bases of support, since that was adequate in the fragmented political field. In her opinion, Taiwan aped democracy: they had the rallies and the speeches, but they lacked values and lucidity.
“This is the most ridiculous system in the world,” she said. “The constitution is a very valuable tradition, but there’s no such common value in the third world. In Taiwan, democracy becomes another tragedy of the third world experience. In country after country, it’s the same. Democracy doesn’t mean coherence; it means a political tool used to divide the country. The state can only buy votes or please voters in cheap ways. They just take care of their one-third voters and neglect the others.”
She continued: “The fundamental reason is that we’re not in the tradition of the European democracy. The third world leaders’ fundamental idea is to design a constitution that allows them to stay in power. In the U.S., the institution is more important than the elected leaders. It’s not that way in Taiwan. It’s not that way in Indonesia. It’s not that way in the Philippines.”
She spoke excellent English; she had studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at the New School University in New York City. When I asked about the campaign posters, she smiled.
“It’s a kind of art of imitation,” she said. “I like Queen Elizabeth because she made Britain become an important country. And I had my portrait done as Mona Lisa because she is an older woman but she still looks pr
oud. That was three years ago, and I did it because I was forty and was getting fatter and fatter. I had to face the fact that I didn’t have a good figure anymore.
“I like Churchill because he was such a strong leader, and a man’s leader. I wanted to see how people would respond if I dressed up as a man. And Osama bin Laden—I just wondered what would happen if I put my face on his head. I think of him in a different way from most people. He’s a terrorist, but he’s also showing a kind of anger to the Western governments.
“I disagree with what he did, of course, but I was very conflicted when it happened. I hate this kind of behavior, and I hope that this cycle of terror can be stopped. But on the other hand I have very strong sympathy for the Muslim story, and I don’t like this simple thought that the Muslims are bad. It’s a kind of orientalism, I think. Edward Said, the Palestinian, described how people see this world through the eyes of the Westerner, taking the historical stance of the Westerner. By using this method we just spread the prejudices of the Westerners. They decide how we look, and I have a lot of problems with that.
“I’m not a person who says things quickly. This is evil! This is good! I’m a person who needs deeper thought. People here have very strong sympathy for New York, but they don’t understand why bin Laden is such a hero to the Muslim states. I try to explain that even though he is wrong, there are reasons why he is a hero. There are historical reasons. The words of history are also the words of war. All of our memory is recorded by war. You say who you are—I grew up during World War One, or I grew up during World War Two, or I grew up during the cold war. That’s who we are.”
THE DAY AFTER the election, I said goodbye to Professor Shih. His son, Shih Lei, a retired anthropologist at the Academia Sinica, escorted me to the elderly couple’s apartment. On the way, he told me that they had voted after all.
“They voted for the Kuomintang, as they always do,” Shih Lei said. “They’re quite traditional, you know—most people of that generation are. They’re very nationalistic.”
I asked him if he was the same.
“I’m Zhongguo zhuyi,” he said with a smile. It wasn’t a real phrase; he was making a play on words that sounded roughly like “Chinese-ism.” I asked what it meant.
“It means I support China,” he said. “But I won’t support a party blindly because it’s supposed to be patriotic. I support China, but I also support democracy. And I think that Taiwan should return to the mainland eventually. Those are my politics. I don’t support either the Kuomintang or the DPP.”
We entered the apartment, where the elderly couple sat in the living room. I had brought a National Geographic article that I had written about Xi’an archaeology, and I gave it to Professor Shih. He studied the tomb diagrams.
“The orientation is always interesting,” the old man said. “In Anyang all the royal tombs are oriented in the same direction, angled slightly to the west. I think it’s because of the sun—at a certain time of day, the shadow moves in that direction.”
We talked about archaeology, and then Juan Hsing mentioned the election.
“We lost,” she said. “It was a bad result. More support for independence.”
She asked if I had interviewed any candidates, and I mentioned Sisy Chen. “She’s interesting,” the old woman said.
Professor Shih seemed to have fallen asleep—his eyes were closed and the open magazine rested on his birdlike chest. His son said that he agreed with Sisy Chen’s politics, and then the old man’s left eye suddenly flickered open.
“Is the Yangling tomb west of Changling?” he asked, referring to the Xi’an region.
I said that I didn’t know for certain.
“I went there in the thirty-second year of the Republic,” he said. “I also visited Wu Zetian’s tomb. That’s a beautiful spot. Have you been there?”
I told him that I had.
“And I saw Qin Shihuang’s tomb,” he said. “But of course there wasn’t anything in that area back then. They hadn’t discovered the terra-cotta warriors yet.”
The tiny man grew silent. I said that I should go, and I shook his hand—skin as cool and thin as paper. Outside, his son escorted me to the street, and I asked which year he had been born.
“Twenty-third year of the Republic.”
I did the calculation—1934. Confused, I added again, and then I said, “But Juan Hsing said they weren’t married until after they came to Taiwan.”
“That’s right,” Shih Lei said. “She’s not my mother. My father’s first wife—my mother—died more than ten years ago, on the mainland. She never made it to Taiwan. In 1949, she wasn’t in Nanjing, because she was caring for her father-in-law. She stayed behind and hoped that we’d be able to return.”
On the street a light rain was falling. Now I realized why Professor Shih hadn’t recalled the year of his marriage as promptly as the dates of the found artifacts. That was Chinese history: things you remembered and things you tried to forget. His son turned to me while we waited for a cab.
“I came to Taiwan a little bit later than my father,” he said. “Before I left the mainland, my mother gave me a message for him. She said that if something happened, and they were separated for good, then he should go ahead and remarry. I think she sensed that the country was going to be divided.”
PART FOUR
20
Chinatown
January 2002
POLAT’S SECOND LANDLORD WAS CHINESE-AMERICAN. THE MAN HAD grown up in Guangdong, and during the Cultural Revolution, his father had fled in a rowboat to Hong Kong. Eventually, the father received political asylum in the United States, and then he brought his sons over. For a while, one son ran a Chinese restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area. After selling the restaurant, he invested in a pair of red-brick row houses on Sixth Street NW. The landlord and his family lived in part of one house, and they rented the rest out to other immigrants.
For two hundred and sixty dollars a month, Polat occupied a room on the second floor of the Chinese family’s home. His lodgings were square—nine feet by nine feet—and nothing had been hung on the walls. The room contained a color television, a hot plate, a water boiler, and an electric radiator. All five of his books were English study texts. On the desk, a Chinese tear-away calendar had been frozen on a random date: October 14, 2001. The single window looked out through the thin parallel bars of power lines.
The room was cramped, and Polat would rather not have shared a bathroom with a Chinese family. They rarely spoke—in fact, Polat and the landlord never even exchanged immigration histories. Polat avoided talking to Chinese people about his political background, and the landlord had no interest in sharing his story, either. Polat learned about it from other residents.
The relationship was awkward, but the location was a big improvement over the corner of Franklin and Rhode Island. In the District’s grid, Polat had moved toward the center; his row house stood near the intersection of Sixth and Q. In the past, this neighborhood had been called Shaw or Mount Vernon, but nowadays it was becoming known as part of Chinatown. The area was changing: the new Washington Convention Center was being built nearby, and the government was about to convert some of the local subsidized housing to conventional market rentals. The neighborhood had been predominately black and poor, but it was becoming more mixed. A number of immigrants had moved in—many of them Chinese—as well as some young middle-class whites. A few blocks away from Polat’s home, a gay congregation had founded the Metropolitan Community Church.
These were early signs of gentrification, and perhaps Sixth Street might eventually gain the kind of prosperous diversity that was rare in an American urban neighborhood. But you could still see the old divides between black and Chinese when you walked south from Polat’s apartment. Sixth Street had few business establishments, and a number of row houses were in bad repair. The best-kept plots belonged to traditionally black churches: Springfield Baptist, First Rising Mount Zion Baptist, Galbraith A.M.E. Zion. On the corner of L
Street stood the Eritrean Culture and Civic Center, and then on I Street, painted onto the side of a brick building, was an old sign: FUJIAN RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION.
After that, the neighborhood shifted to the heart of the District’s small Chinatown. Restaurants and shops lined the streets—China Boy Delicatessen, Chinatown Market—and here almost everybody flew an American flag, which was rare in the black neighborhood. Along H Street, flags hung thick and signs were bilingual: China Doll Restaurant , Eat First Restaurant , Wok N Roll Restaurant . Near the corner of H and Seventh, a Chinese-style pailou, or entrance gate, had been erected. Inscriptions noted that the structure had been dedicated in 1986 as a “friendship archway” by Chen Xitong and Marion Barry, the mayors of Beijing and Washington, D.C. The pailou had gained unexpected resonance when, in the years following the dedication, both mayors went to jail. In 1990, Barry was convicted of possession of crack cocaine; eight years later, a Beijing court found Chen guilty of corruption. But that particular U.S.-Sino link was left uninscribed on the pailou, another irregularity that lurked beneath the capitals’ neat grids.
The Chinatown signs also shifted unevenly between two worlds. The jokey racism of the English names vanished in translation: in Chinese, the China Doll Restaurant blossomed into “Beautiful Chinese Garden,” and the China Boy Delicatessen gained a measure of dignity (as well as an entirely different product line) with “Chinese Child’s Fresh Noodles.” The Wok N Roll Restaurant transformed itself into “Hall of Precious Flavor.” At H and Eighth, an English sign advertised CHINATOWN GIFTS, but the Chinese sign— —meant something completely different:
SERVICE CENTER FOR PERSONNEL LEAVING THE COUNTRY
“I THINK THAT’S the sort of business that works with jiade visa companies like the one I used in Beijing,” Polat said one evening, when we drove past the Chinatown sign. “Those companies need to have contacts in America, and I think that’s probably what they’re doing at that shop. They arrange letters like the ones I had from Los Angeles. On that sign, when they say ‘country,’ they mean China. Why would anybody need help getting out of America?”
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