Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  The brown man in the blue suit and the riotous tie was named Huang Hua. He swiftly launched into a story of hardship and sacrifice that one came to expect in DPP campaign offices, and yet the cumulative effect of these stories was humbling. Huang had been arrested three times between 1963 and 1975, for promoting Taiwanese independence. He spent ten years on Green Island, a grisly camp for political prisoners, where he was locked up for much of the time in isolation, reading British history, Gibbon’s history of the Roman empire, and biographies of U.S. presidents. Huang said the governers of Green Island were not educated enough to understand the political content of these books. He was finally released in 1986, the first year an opposition party was allowed to take part in national elections. Peng Ming-min, the DPP leader, who had spent all those years in the United States fighting for Taiwanese freedom, was his “teacher,” he said.

  Mr. Huang was not a famous or glamorous figure but an obscure university librarian. His story of a lifetime of sacrifice dropped into a casual conversation was typical of many I heard in Taiwan, but it was the kind of story one would like to blast into the ears of all those who say that “the Chinese” don’t care about politics. Once again I marveled at the tenacity of people like Huang. His passion for national sovereignty was undimmed by the years he spent in prison. Even if China were to become democratic, he said, Taiwan should still be an independent country. He viewed the dissidents from China with suspicion. They were not to be trusted, for whatever they said about Taiwan now, their ultimate aim was to build one China. If they ever came to power, Chai Ling or Wei Jingsheng or Wang Dan or whoever, they would be just the same as Chiang Kai-shek or Chairman Mao. Clearly, one of the things that kept Huang and others like him going was a deep-seated animus against mainland China, an animus born in the violence and terror of the early years of KMT rule.

  I wanted to hear more, but that was the last I saw of Huang. We were invited to join the parade on the way to the DPP rally, and as soon as I stepped outside, I lost him in the crowd. The street was blocked by jeeps, taxis, tractors, and forklift trucks, all bearing the white-and-green banners of the opposition party. There was a deafening racket of car horns, firecrackers, men shouting through megaphones, campaign jingles, and the chanting of party slogans. Revving cars and motorbikes created a blue, dusty haze that hung heavily in the stifling subtropical air.

  Someone shoved me into one of the taxis, and that is how I met Kathy. Sitting in the front seat. She turned around, smiled, and said: “Hi, I’m Kathy with a K.”

  A wiry bundle of nervous energy, in her early thirties, Kathy Wei had short hair and a long, thin face. She spoke fast in an American accent, which she had picked up at college in Binghamton, New York, and later, working at a local TV station in California. The cars began to inch forward, honking their horns and adding their fumes to the haze, which gradually took on a sulfurous orange color as the afternoon wore on. Along the route, men and women, many with children in their arms, held up three fingers: the number of the DPP on election forms. Kathy jiggled her knees, looking this way and that, humming with excitement. She told me about her life in America and her job at the TV station, where she had worked with Taiwanese and Chinese from the mainland. Her feelings about “the Chinese” were mixed. She wept when she watched the crackdown on Tiananmen Square, yet she found mainland Chinese difficult to get on with, lazy and resentful of Taiwanese wealth. The Taiwanese, she said, were more like Americans, industrious and self-reliant. A Taiwanese friend had told her to ignore the Chinese. “We cannot change them,” she’d said, “so just don’t let them change us.”

  We stopped near the small park where the rally was to take place. There was no chance of getting through the traffic. Green flags and green-and-white party banners fluttered lazily. The noise of campaign songs, car horns, and amplified voices was enervating. Because of the muggy heat, we walked into a 7-Eleven to buy bottles of water. A young man in a white T-shirt, carrying crates, put down his load as soon as he saw me, thumped his chest, and exclaimed: “I am Taiwan man! China no good! We don’t want China!”

  The park was actually a glorified playground, a scrubby place roughly the size of a baseball field. (The main stadium of Kaohsiung had been reserved that night for the KMT rally, for which thousands of people had been bused in from other areas, to watch a show of professional singers and dancers sweating it out amidst clouds produced by dry ice.) A smell of fried squid came from the food stalls that had been set up by enterprising vendors. People of all ages were milling around aimlessly. Two men dressed in cotton undershirts came up to offer me their views. One, a gaunt, toothless figure in his sixties, was a former dockworker, the other a plump primary-school teacher. Soon the group expanded to include at least ten people, their earnest brown faces glistening in the early evening light. Kathy translated from the Fujian dialect, which I could not understand. Was I aware of all the corruption? asked the former dockworker. And vote-buying by the KMT? Did I know about that? Kathy was stamping her feet with impatience, her eyes darting about the field. The dockworker, pressing his fingers into my arm, said that the Taiwanese people had been humiliated by official corruption, but now the truth would come out, for people were free to tell it at last.

  A brass band, playing with more vigor than skill, struck up the party anthem. The microphone was being tested by a man who seemed to be emitting amplified burps. Lights flickered on and off. There was a sudden hush, followed by loud cheering. I had lost Kathy for a moment and found her in the thickest concentration of people, near the entrance of the park, where she was leaping up and down, like a young girl, trying to get a better view. A spotlight hit the middle of the commotion. I could just see a group of men in suits and pale blue baseball caps being hustled through the crowd by younger men in flak jackets. Someone nudged me and mentioned the name Peng Ming-min. Then I saw him, the DPP presidential candidate, a tall man fixing a glassy smile on nothing in particular, his skin waxy with fatigue. Kathy reached out to one of the men in Peng’s entourage. He failed to notice her and swept past, looking straight ahead. Kathy turned around. Her eyes filled with tears. “This is the happiest day of my life,” she said softly. “Now I see him as a man.”

  It was a puzzling statement. Whatever did she mean “see him as a man”? Peng was speaking into a microphone, sounding hoarse and oddly hesitant; clearly, he was not a born public speaker. Then Kathy explained. One of the men with Peng, the one she had tried to touch, was her father. He had fought all his life for this moment, abandoning his family, living in exile in the United States, thinking only of “the cause.” And there he was now, standing on the platform a little behind Peng, supporting his party in a free election. Once an absent father, now a vindicated man of flesh and blood. I saw him in the distance, a bland-looking figure blinking into the spotlights through a pair of steel-framed spectacles. His name was “Ben” Wei Rui-ming.

  Kathy sketched an outline of her life the next morning. She was calmer now. Some of her wiry tension had worn off. Her story was as much about her father as about herself, the typical story of a native Taiwanese family.

  Kathy had been born in Kaohsiung, but spent her first few years in Japan, where her father was a law student. The family was supposed to have returned to Taiwan when Kathy was four, but after Kathy went home first, with her mother and elder brother, plans began to fall apart. Her father, having become involved in an organization that promoted Taiwanese independence, was unable to go back without being arrested. So he went to the United States instead, on a scholarship to study theology. Like many Taiwanese since the late nineteenth century, Ben Wei was a Christian, a Presbyterian. He had intended to become a minister.

  Back in Taiwan, Kathy’s family was under constant police surveillance. There were humiliating interrogations. When the family applied for permission to go to the United States, their passports were taken away, and gradually Kathy’s father became a distant and resented figure, visible only in a black-and-white photograph taken in Tokyo, which Kath
y kept. He was blamed for abandoning his family: His wife’s parents, as well as his own immediate family, believed that paternal duties should never be sacrificed for a political cause.

  There was another—historical—reason for family resentment. After the Japanese defeat in 1945, many native Taiwanese intellectuals had become involved in politics, hoping to be able to run their own affairs. Then the KMT officials began to arrive from the Chinese mainland, together with the gangsters and carpetbaggers. In Taiwanese eyes, these newcomers were primitive, lawless, disheveled, corrupt, arrogant, and often violent. The economy soon suffered, and comparisons with the immediate past were inevitable. The Japanese may have been harsh, but at least they had brought order, modern facilities, and a degree of civility. The mainland Chinese appeared to be bringing nothing but hardship.

  Tensions between Taiwanese and mainlanders exploded on February 28, 1947, when KMT troops fired into a crowd of protesters in Taipei. Taiwanese all over the island rebelled, which resulted in martial law and a ferocious military crackdown. In every city and town people were massacred. Students, journalists, doctors, academics, and other suspected rebels, branded as “communists,” disappeared in the night, many never to come back alive. Bodies wrapped in jute bags floated down the Tamsui River in Taipei.

  More than twenty thousand Taiwanese died as a result of the “2-28 [February 28] Incident,” souring relations between Taiwanese and mainlanders ever since. Kathy’s maternal grandfather had been a schoolteacher under the Japanese and had grown used to their sense of order. Many of his friends were killed in 1947. From then on, like most Taiwanese, he decided to retreat from politics into a sullen colonial acceptance of mainlander rule as the only way to survive. His son-in-law, Ben Wei, had decided otherwise, however, and brought trouble upon his family. So as Kathy was growing up, her father’s name was not to be mentioned.

  One day, when she was fourteen, her father called from the United States. He had married another woman by then, a pharmacist in Flushing, Queens, and had abandoned his plans to become a minister. While helping his new wife run the pharmacy, Ben Wei became deeply involved in the Taiwanese independence movement.

  Kathy’s feelings were complicated. Her father’s life may have been a source of bitterness in her family, but she also heard many complaints about the government mentioned in private. Like all Taiwanese children, she was subjected to daily KMT propaganda in school: reverence for Sun Yat-sen, the “Father of the Nation,” reverence for Chiang Kai-shek and his struggle to reclaim China. This was the dogma, the “correct thinking,” to which all Taiwanese had to conform. In front of every school or public building stood a statue of Sun or Chiang and a yellow map of China, denoting the ultimate defeat of Red China. “We were always told that the KMT was good,” Kathy said, “but I have eyes and ears. I could see that bribery went on, and people were frightened.”

  One day, Kathy’s urge to rebel was activated by something of no great importance, a routine event in fact, but it is often just such small things that inspire resistance. The students were assembled in her classroom and told to come forward, one by one, to pledge their loyalty to the KMT. Kathy didn’t know what to do at first. When it was her turn, she was angry and nervous. On a sudden impulse, she ran away and locked herself in the dormitory. I asked her why she had done this. Was it out of loyalty to her father? No, she said. It wasn’t that. She may have resented her father, but she remained intrigued by him. “No. I guess I did it out of loyalty to Taiwan.”

  When she was finally permitted to go to the United States, as a student, Kathy got to know her father for the first time. They had much catching up to do. But he was a busy man, always going to meetings or traveling to Washington. He became even busier after 1978, when President Carter recognized the People’s Republic of China and severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan. For years, Taiwanese dissidents in the United States had been trying to lobby Washington, but as long as Taiwan had to be cultivated as “Free China,” they met with little success. After 1978, however, the thuggishness of the KMT government was becoming embarrassing, even in Washington. The overseas dissidents, galvanized the following year by the Kaohsiung Incident began to have more influence. President Chiang Ching-kuo came under pressure to grant some liberties. In 1987 martial law was lifted. In 1992, Kathy went home. Her father returned two years later. It was the first time he had seen Taiwan since 1963. He arrived at the airport in Taipei with Peng Ming-min. Twenty thousand people had come out to welcome them. It was a tear-filled event. Kathy was there, too. But he didn’t even notice her.

  I flew from Kaohsiung to Taipei the day after the presidential election. Most of the posters and banners had been cleared off the streets during the night. Here and there countrywomen, shawls wrapped around their faces, were still busy sweeping up pictures of those pink-faced bank managers in blue suits. I thought of Kathy. I knew how unhappy she would be with the result. President Lee Teng-hui, the KMT candidate, had soundly beaten the DPP. The KMT still had the money and the networks, cultivated over many years of patronage, to bring out the votes. The only consolation, perhaps, was the fact that President Lee was not a mainlander but a native Taiwanese, and he had done much to promote democratic reforms.

  When I went to see Ben Wei in the half-empty rooms that had served as Peng Ming-min’s campaign office, he was smiling. Chinese and Japanese often smile to hide their embarrassment or a misfortune. But this wasn’t like that. Wei, a studious man with a stubborn jaw and soft, delicate hands, looked genuinely happy. He said he had gone to a church the night before that had been full of DPP supporters, many of them crying. Wei, however, saw it as a kind of victory that there had been an election at all. He spoke softly, with frequent pauses, sometimes in English, sometimes in Japanese, which came to him more easily. I told him I had seen Kathy.

  “You know,” he said, “I am sixty now, and I have been part of the movement since I was a student in Japan. I suffered a lot for our cause. I couldn’t see my daughter, Kathy, for fifteen years. But I don’t feel any regret. If I were born again, I would do the same. For I have no choice. I don’t know how long I will live, but I’ll do my best to educate people, to teach them to take the future of Taiwan seriously. To be annexed by China would be a great tragedy for the Taiwanese people.”

  Wei saw the election as an enlightening process. He wanted to instruct young Taiwanese about constitutional law. But he kept returning to the price he had paid for his life in exile. His son still had not forgiven him. Wei mentioned a film—he couldn’t remember the title—about a political prisoner whose daughter visits him in jail and tells him that she respects his ideals but then asks why, if those ideals were so important to him, he brought her into this world. Wei had seen the film in America, with Peng Ming-min, who had also left his children behind in Taiwan, and together they had wept in the dark. As soon as the movie was over, Wei rushed to a public phone to call Kathy and tell her how sorry he was. He apologized again when he picked her up at the airport in New York. “When I saw her at Kennedy airport . . .”

  The memory stopped him in mid-sentence. He pulled out his wallet and produced a crumpled black-and-white photograph of his family, taken in Tokyo, when Kathy was three. A woman and two children were looking solemnly at the camera, Tokyo’s version of the Eiffel Tower looming fuzzily behind them.

  Wei suggested a Japanese restaurant for lunch. After a short gap in our conversation, while we both chewed on our pork cutlets, Wei suddenly said: “I kept going. I never thought of giving up.” I asked him why. “Maybe because I’m a Christian.”

  He mentioned his grandfather, who had taken part in a failed rebellion against the Japanese back in 1896. His grandfather hid in a Presbyterian mission, whose missionaries, mostly from the United States, were sympathetic to the Taiwanese and made many converts. Wei continued: “From the very beginning I had hoped to build a nation that was different from China. Most intellectuals in Taiwan are Christians, about 90 percent of them Presbyterian. We believe that every ma
n was created equal, and we have the right to choose what kind of society or nation or system we think is best. That would certainly be different from Chinese society. For we believe in freedom and individualism.”

  Wei doesn’t like China. He went there once, in 1993, for a visit and was shocked by the crowds, the filth, the coarse manners, and the general dishonesty. Everywhere he went, he said, he was cheated. It was a common reaction of Taiwanese in China. Even though Taiwanese dissidents had often been called “communists” by the KMT, their contempt for the Chinese Communists ran as deep as their hatred of the KMT, for both pretended to represent One China, of which the Taiwanese wanted no part.

  I reminded Wei that the Generalissimo had been a Christian, too. Wei smiled: “Well, he had a right to claim he was a Christian. But he killed so many people in an un-Christian way.”

  Killing on a massive scale is one of the foundations of modern Taiwanese nationalism. Most nations have a founding myth of martyrdom. They are myths not because killings did not take place but because bloody events are given a coherence in retrospect, turned into a story, and encrusted with symbolic meaning that pulls people together in a shared memory of collective suffering. The 2-28 Incident is a myth of that kind, the founding myth of a democratic Taiwan.

  Memories of the killings in 1947 were so painful and left such resentment that it was not permitted to mention them under the old, pre-democratic KMT regime. They were officially buried, erased from the public memory, just as positive memories of the Japanese empire were to be expunged. For many years Japanese films were banned in Taiwan lest they provoke nostalgia. Instead, the KMT promoted its own myth of martyrs, who had struggled heroically to save China from the Japanese and then from the “Communist bandits,” a myth whose theme was of returning one day to the Chinese motherland. There was no mention in any Taiwanese textbooks of the 2-28 Incident, no memorials, no streets named after it, just a chilly blanket of official silence. The memory lived on only in frightened whispers among trusted relatives and intimate friends.