Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film 9780231512817

Citation preview

re p re se nti ng at rocity in tai wan

global chinese culture

global chinese culture David Der-wei Wang, Editor

michael berry Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

Representing Atrocity in Taiwan the 2/28 incident and white terror in fiction and film

Sylvia Li-chun Lin

columbia university press

new york

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this series. Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the University of Notre Dame toward the cost of publishing this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. Representing atrocity in Taiwan : the 2/28 incident and white terror in fiction and film / Sylvia Li-chun Lin. p. cm. — (Global Chinese culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-231-14360-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-231-51281-7 (electronic) 1. Taiwan—History—February Twenty Eighth Incident, 1947. 2. Taiwan—History—1945– I. Title. II. Title: 2/28 incident and white terror in fiction and film. III. Series. DS799.823.L57 951.24'905—dc22

2007 2007023259

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Designed by Audrey Smith c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Howard—L. I. G.

conte nt s

Acknowledgments ix Note on Chinese Words and Names

xiii

Prologue: Looking Backward

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part i. literary representation 1. Ethnicity and Atrocity

19

2. Documenting the Past

47

3. Engendering Victimhood

73

part ii. cinematic re-creation 4. Past Versus Present

101

5. Screening Atrocity

128

6. Memory as Redemption 154 Epilogue: Looking Forward Notes 183 Bibliography Index 235

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ac k nowle dgme nt s

“my mother went to the market on the morning of 2/28. She returned with an empty basket and told us she’d seen many bodies on the street.” That is my first “memory” of the 2/28 Incident, as related by one of my sisters-in-law. I can still picture the frightened look on her face, but what strikes me most now, thirty years later, is how she abruptly stopped, after a stern look from my mother. I didn’t know then what 2/28 was, but I didn’t dare ask, having sensed a deeprooted fear in them. The fear was contagious, and I never did ask her. There was a dirty-looking man begging at the market, the sight of whom always threw a fright into me. Crippled, he dragged himself along on useless legs in tattered pants. He seemed to be nearly blind, for he looked at people with a blank stare; I was just tall enough to meet his hollow eyes. Everyone in town was kind to him. I later learned that he’d once complained loudly about the taxes he had to pay. He soon disappeared, reappearing in the marketplace three months later, having lost his mind along with his mobility under brutal treatment by the Garrison Command, which suspected him of acting as a Communist spy. This book grew out of personal memories of living in Taiwan under martial law, but also out of a scholarly impetus to examine this page of Taiwanese history. The research and writing have been supported by various organizations, the most generous of which has been my home institution: a start-up research fund and a library account when

x

acknowledgments

I was hired at Notre Dame paved the way for acquiring indispensable books and films; a faculty research grant further helped augment my collection of research material, with the hiring of a research assistant in Taiwan during the SARS scare, when travel to Asia was inadvisable; a summer stipend and salary recovery during my year of leave provided me with the time to write; finally, a publication subvention from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts helped make this book available. I truly appreciate the assistance from the University of Notre Dame. My thanks also to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for Scholarly Exchange for a junior scholar grant that made it possible for me to take a year off to write and revise. Several people read portions of the manuscript at various stages: Bonnie Adrian kindly lent her expertise on ethnicity by reading the first section of chapter 1; Nick Kaldis supplied thoughtful comments on the prologue, the introduction to part I, and chapters 2 and 5; Christopher Lupke provided timely and sensible suggestions on chapter 3; and Jeffrey Kinkley sent his insightful comments on the prologue, the introduction to part I, and chapters 1 and 2. I thank Chris and Nick for their camaraderie and support.To Professor Kinkley goes my deepest gratitude for his unfailing support since I first arrived in the United States for postgraduate work. I also must thank my former graduate student and dissertation advisee, Heng-hsing Liu, himself an outstanding scholar. Serving as my research assistant in Taiwan, he helped collect valuable material and is always on the lookout for the latest scholarship from Taiwan on my behalf. Over the years, I have benefited from the friendship and support of more kind and generous people than it is possible to thank here. A few must be mentioned, however: William Tay, for his interest in my work, his generosity toward his friends, and an incredible memory that provided immediate bibliographic information; Lili Selden, for her effervescent attitude toward life and her unstinting friendship since my first visit to the Notre Dame campus; Joyce Wong Kroll and Victoria Cass, for their love of language and a good read. It is difficult to express just how much their friendship and moral support have meant to me. Jennifer Crewe, of Columbia University Press, always an enthusiastic supporter of literature from Taiwan, deserves mention here; without her discerning eye and literary taste, the best Taiwanese fiction would not see the light of day. I also thank my editor at the press, Irene

acknowledgments xi

Pavitt, for her patience and meticulous editing, and David Wang, for including this book in his Global Chinese Culture Series. It has been a pleasure working with them all. The comments and suggestions from the two anonymous readers helped me refine my theoretical approach and sharpen my arguments, and I thank them both here. My family, although they never quite understood what exactly I was doing and why it took so long to finish, have been helpful in different ways. My mother passed away before she had a chance to know that I was writing a book (and in English!); she would have been proud to share the news with her friends. My third sister, Li-hua, has been my biggest supporter in the family. To my brothers, who helped out financially during my graduate-school years, a belated thank you, since my family has never been particularly good at expressing feelings and emotions toward one another. Finally, to Howard, for his everlasting love and support, I dedicate this book.

note on c h ine se word s and name s

i have preserved chinese name order for all but a few people mentioned in this book, putting the family name first. Transliteration of most Chinese words and proper nouns follows the pinyin system, except for the names of those well known in the West, such as Chiang Kai-shek and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

re p re se nti ng at rocity in tai wan

Prologue: Looking Backward

four hours after its installation, the cenotaph commemorating the 1947 February 28 (2/28) Incident in Taiwan was destroyed, and the copper plaque bearing the inscription describing the incident was pried off its base and thrown into a nearby fountain in the Memorial Peace Park in Taipei. Apparently dissatisfied with the official version concerning the causes and aftermath of the incident, relatives of the victims trashed the cenotaph to vent their anger and frustration. Although later the plaque was restored, it continues to anger the opponents of its content.1 After a study entitled Research Report on Responsibility for the 2/28 Massacre was published in 2006, John H. Chiang (Chiang Hsiao-yen) brought a defamation suit against the compilers for claiming that his grandfather Chiang Kai-shek should bear the most responsibility for the incident, as it was he who had sent the enforcement troops to Taiwan, where they arrested and shot many people indiscriminately.2 The suit was dismissed on the grounds of freedom of speech and academic pursuit, not on the accuracy or credibility of the report. These are just two of the many occurrences exemplifying the controversial nature and consequences of representation and interpretation, all demanding that the circumstances of the incident be portrayed accurately. Can any historical event ever be accurately described either on a commemorative plaque or in a research report? If not, then what kind of narrative validity can fictional re-creation claim? Does fictionalization remove all vestiges of truthfulness? How should readers, particularly those from later generations, approach such texts?

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prologue

 This book investigates the strategies and problems of the literary recreations and cinematic depictions of the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror in Taiwan. By examining events in Taiwan’s past, I inquire into the issues and pitfalls of representing acts of government atrocity and forming public and personal memories, as well as the problems of restoring history and the possibility of knowing historical truth. I explore these texts for their intrinsic artistic values and their overall importance to Taiwan’s effort to recover and reexamine the past, which all too often, particularly the 2/28 Incident, has been exploited by politicians. Moreover, I analyze the notion of “closure” in some of these texts, not to question its significance but to raise the possibility that expediency can sometimes impede the progress toward true reconciliation. These issues are critical whenever one group of citizens is oppressed, victimized, and persecuted at the hands of another, owing to ideological, religious, or ethnic differences. When regimes change, how do the victims regain their voice and reclaim their history without resorting to hysteria and vengeance? What and how do people learn through fictional and cinematic explorations of traumatic and contested events of the past? In other words, whereas shifts in governance necessitate a rethinking, rewriting, and reinterpretation of historical events, the process itself demands judicious deliberation to avoid a reversal of interpretive tyranny. Owing to the suppression of information about the 2/28 Incident and instances of government abuse of civil liberties and human rights during the White Terror era, these texts have become one of the venues through which future generations learn about the past. We therefore must be aware that the ways we understand and interpret a given event are intertwined with the ways in which the event is represented.

a brief note on historical background In 1517, a group of Portuguese sailors spotted a verdant island about one hundred miles off the coast of southwestern China and named it Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island), or, in Chinese, Taiwan.3 It is a moun-

Looking Backward

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tainous island, then inhabited largely by indigenous people of Austronesian ethnicity, and a place where Han Chinese from the mainland came to search for a better life or adventure. A large wave of immigrants followed the end of the last (Ming) dynasty of Han Chinese rule when the Manchus established the Qing dynasty in 1644. In 1887 Taiwan was made a province of the Qing court but a few years later, in 1895, was ceded to Japan when the Qing court was defeated by the newly modernized Japanese military.Taiwan remained a colony of the Japanese until the end of the World War II, when the Allies agreed that “territories stolen by Japan” would be restored to China, then ruled by the Nationalist government, which had overthrown the Qing in 1911.When Japan surrendered in 1945,Taiwan thus became part of the Republic of China, headed by Chiang Kai-shek. For many countries, the end of World War II meant the beginning of reconstruction, but for the Nationalist government in China, the war had not ended; only the enemy had changed—from Japanese invaders to Chinese Communists. Although the Taiwanese first celebrated the end of Japanese colonial rule, their festive mood was short-lived. The problems following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the colonial government were compounded by other troubles resulting from the arrival of the new government, which was manifested in the February 28 Incident. Because the government suppressed information about the incident, our knowledge of it will probably always remain incomplete. For instance, the number of deaths will never be determined; the exact causes of the conflict are difficult to pinpoint; and its impact on Taiwan over the subsequent four decades remains disputable. Scholars continue to investigate, particularly, the causes of the incident, which is an indication of the flaws in the historical accounts.4 Although many aspects of the incident legitimately invite controversy, the basic facts are universally accepted, the details of which, pieced together from various accounts, remain incontrovertible. On February 27, 1947, Lin Jiang Mai, a Taiwanese widow with two young children, was selling legal cigarettes in one of Taipei’s busy commercial districts.5 She supplemented her income by also carrying contraband, untaxed cigarettes. When agents of the Tobacco and Alcohol Monopoly Bureau formed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government confiscated her cigarettes, both legal and illegal, along

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prologue

with all her money, she begged them to return the legal cigarettes and the money from the legitimate sales. In response to her resistance, one of the agents hit her in the head with the butt of his pistol, drawing the attention of residents and shop owners in the area. In their struggle to escape from the angry crowd, one of the agents fired his pistol and killed a bystander, Chen Wenxi. On the following day, February 28, 1947, news of the beating and the killing quickly spread throughout Taiwan, plunging the island into a mixture of protests, uprisings, and armed rebellion. The Taiwanese people demonstrated their resentment of the new arrivals from China by attacking them, and over the next few weeks, chaos reigned on the island. The Taiwanese gentry, including businessmen and prominent local figures, tried to negotiate with the governor-general to restore order; but most of them were later arrested and executed. On March 8, a large contingent of troops from the Chinese mainland arrived in northern Taiwan. Eyewitnesses reported that as soon as they landed, the soldiers opened fire at everyone in sight. Bayoneting, rapes, and robberies were followed by the looting of homes and buildings. When order was finally restored in late March, an estimated twenty thousand Taiwanese had been killed or “disappeared.”6 In late 1949, the last remnants of the Nationalist government, driven off the mainland by the Communists, fled to Taiwan. Earlier, in May 1949, martial law had been declared to ensure the total submission of the Taiwanese, ushering in the White Terror.7 In the name of stability and security, the Nationalist government immediately stripped the residents of Taiwan of their civil liberties, creating an atmosphere of pervasive fear, with the Garrison Command “responsible for arresting and punishing individuals who threatened ROC [the Republic of China] security and public order. Civilians were subject to arrest by military personnel and trial by military courts. By one estimate, military courts tried the cases of more than ten thousand civilians during the martial law period.”8 Many of those arrested were dissenting intellectuals like Chen Yingzhen, whose work is examined in chapter 2,9 but a substantial number of innocent people also were unjustly incarcerated by either overeager agents of the Garrison Command or enemies who made false reports. For instance, in 1963, soldiers from the Garrison Command arrested nine hundred people in northern Taiwan’s remote, mountainous Luku area. Many of

Looking Backward

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them were illiterate miners, arrested merely because they happened to know their village head, a suspected Communist. They were tortured and forced to sign confessions that then sent them to Green Island, Taiwan’s equivalent of Alcatraz for political prisoners.10 Among those arrested were teenagers whom the head of the secret service later used as his personal maids and household servants. In addition to the persecution of anyone suspected of plotting to subvert the government, one of the most pernicious effects of the White Terror was the fear instilled in the citizenry and the self-censorship that the people of Taiwan learned to practice in response to the omnipresence of the Garrison Command’s surveillance apparatus. In addition, some of the family members of those who had died or disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the 2/28 Incident were constantly harassed and carefully watched, and victims of the Luku incident almost never discussed their experience with their children. Intellectuals were often charged with sedition simply because they belonged to reading groups—for example, Zhong Haodong, whose life became the model for Lan Bozhou’s story examined in chapter 3 and for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film studied in chapter 5. Even those abroad could not escape the net of persecution, as the Nationalist government inserted spies or recruited informants among overseas students to report on anyone who criticized the government and/or were engaged in activities related to the mainland, Communist China. With the thought police continuing to patrol the Taiwanese people’s everyday lives, the struggle against the suppression and violation of human rights never ceased. Finally, in the winter of 1979, the most significant event in Taiwan’s democratization took place and began the end of the Nationalist totalitarian rule: the Formosa Incident in Kaohsiung. The complex political and social factors leading to the incident were intertwined with international and domestic politics.11 Briefly, those opposed to the Nationalist rule, who were represented by the dissident magazine Formosa (Meilidao), organized a rally on December 10, International Human Rights Day. What was intended as a peaceful demonstration turned violent, with the riot police using tear gas on the demonstrators. The major figures associated with the magazine were arrested, including Taiwan’s current vice president, Annette Lü Xiulian. Under international pressure, however,

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prologue

the Nationalist government abandoned its closed-door military trial system, for which, before the Formosa Incident, it was infamous. Those on trial and their defense lawyers later became leading members of the Democratic Progressive Party, which eventually won the presidency in 2000. But what is equally noteworthy about the incident was that most Taiwanese citizens accepted the government’s position that these dissidents were in fact threatening national security and should be severely punished. The democratic ideal that a nation’s citizens should be free to voice dissenting views without fear of persecution was completely alien to the majority of the Taiwanese, who deemed the fight for such rights as being seditious. Only after martial law was lifted in 1987 were they finally able to freely and openly reflect on the injustices of the past four decades. Consequently, since then, literary, scholarly, historical, personal, and cinematic accounts of the past have mushroomed, as the people in Taiwan feel the urgent need to remember, reconstruct, and rewrite that part of their history.

representing the past: issues and problems The purposes of this book are, first, to examine the salient features of literary and cinematic representations of the government’s atrocity against its people and, second, to investigate problems arising from the various forms of re-creation. Since martial law was lifted, there has been an outpouring of texts on Taiwan’s past, including fiction, collections of poetry, reportage, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, historical research, archival documents, conference proceedings, and feature and documentary films. Because these texts are being created in the present about the past, we need to ask “how historical memory, understanding, and meaning are constructed.”12 In reading the burgeoning scholarly and artistic works dealing with this period, one detects a sense of urgency to maintain a historical record of the events. What is at stake in this reconstruction process is best illustrated by Pierre Janet’s distinction between “habit memory,” the “automatic integration of new information without much conscious attention to what is happening,” and “narrative memory,” “consisting of mental constructs, which people use to make sense out of experi-

Looking Backward

7

ence.”13 In Taiwan after martial law, because many people feel that they have been robbed of their past, there is the danger that they may not actively or consciously analyze what they read or see in literary and cinematic texts. Consequently, these uninterrogated textual and screen memories form their only memories of the 2/28 Incident. We will see, particularly in the initial, overwhelmingly negative reactions to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness, how the anxiety over the first film ever to portray the 2/28 Incident was rooted in a fear of the power of “habit memory.” That is, the critics were wary of Hou’s screen version or believed that it would automatically become its viewers’ “memory” of the incident. Conversely, as Dominick LaCapra points out in his discussion of memory as a crucial source for history and its complicated relations with documentary sources, “even in its falsifications, repression, displacements, and denials, memory may nonetheless be informative— not in terms of an accurate empirical representation of its object but in terms of that object’s often anxiety-ridden reception and assimilation by both participants in events and those born later.”14 The issue, then, is not to reject memory as unreliable but to be informed of its imperfect nature while remembering the past without being paralyzed or manipulated by that memory. Confronting the Taiwanese is not simply this double-edged sword called memory, which helps them cut through the dark veil of forced collective amnesia while revealing holes in the fabric of the past, but also the problem of imagining an event (or incident) that the writers and film directors themselves have not lived through and thus must reconstruct out of someone else’s memory, which may be either a government archive or a survivor of the event. Maurice Blanchot put it elegantly, noting that postgenocide, children “are thus obligated to fill in the blank spaces with their own words and imagination, to find their own way back to the past that has been denied them—to remember what they did not know.”15 Indeed, for most of the writers and film directors whose works are analyzed in this book, reconstructing the past based on someone else’s memory presents a monumental challenge. Consequently, the people in Taiwan, who must often learn about their past through textual and cinematic representations, are seemingly twice removed from that past. Memory is never innocent; how and what one remembers is inevitably colored by one’s perspective or politics,

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prologue

especially when dealing with atrocity.What is termed the politics of memory is, in effect, “rhetoric about the past mobilized for political purposes.”16 Another, related problem is that prior knowledge of the outcome may overtake the narrative. That is, when one already knows what happens in the end, it becomes difficult to relate the story without including sensational descriptions or character stereotyping and without focusing solely on the destruction carried out by the perpetrators or the impact on the victims.17 In many cases, women become the predominant figures and metaphors, for when a great majority of those executed or disappeared are men, women become a thematically convenient and narratalogically expedient symbol in the portrayal of the injustice, particularly given the stereotypical image of women as weak and helpless. But at the risk of inane teleology, we have to ask what end this type of narrative serves. Or to put it differently, if representing the government’s suppression and persecution in film and fiction is intended to commemorate and to remember, what is gained beyond “knowing” what happened? Some of the texts thus emphasize closure by means of an Aristotelian formula of conflict and denouement, but this can degenerate into “a simplistic and therapeutic, ‘feel-good’ ethos in general” or a “vapid triumphalism.”18 Some recent scholarship on Taiwan, especially regarding the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror, uses Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma,19 which “describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”20 Indeed, some of the victims portrayed in the films and fictions studied in this book respond to the traumatic experience of the White Terror by exhibiting some of the characteristics that Caruth describes. But these are fictional characters created to indict government’s persecution and should never be confused with real, actual victims, even though one may be persuaded to accept that in an analogous way, the recollection of Taiwan’s past mirrors the symptoms of a trauma patient, by drawing a parallel regarding the “delayed” response and uncontrolled “repetitive appearance.” Delayed, because of government-imposed amnesia (which is also a manifestation of trauma in a clinical sense); repetitive, in that since the lifting of martial law, there has been a natural urge to return to the past.21

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The analogy, however, remains just that, and we should not lose sight of the distinction between an actual victim of atrocity (like those executed or incarcerated and their families) and the nation in which the perpetrators of the atrocious acts still reside. It is imperative to distinguish between real, personal trauma and metaphorical, national trauma, for to conflate the two can trivialize those who have actually had the experience.“Fidelity to trauma,” as LaCapra argues, should not be “generalized or emulated, however unconsciously through identification, by those who have the good fortune to be ‘born later’ and are in a position to have different demands placed on them, notably in terms of forms of thought related to social and political action.”22 Furthermore, the study of the representation of Taiwan’s past should remain in literary and cinematic realms, whereas the examination of actual victims of traumatic events belongs to the purview of psychology and sociology. My discussion draws on the abundant scholarship in Holocaust studies and, to a lesser extent, atomic literature and the bombing of Hiroshima. It should be clear to readers that I am not implying that these twentieth-century events are in any way similar or comparable. The Nazis’ massacre of Jews, with the collaboration of citizens of other countries, was a systematic genocide, whereas thousands of residents of Hiroshima were incinerated on a single day and others suffered permanent physical and psychological scars. Taiwan’s 2/28 Incident and the ensuing decades of the White Terror embody essential differences from the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. Significantly, the perpetrators of the Taiwan atrocity were not from a different country or race (such as Aryans versus Jews or Americans versus Japanese), and many continue to live alongside those they victimized. In this regard, closer parallels can be found in China’s Cultural Revolution, although here there is no clear distinction between victim and victimizer, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia.23 More important, the incident and the effects of the White Terror were buried in history for forty years, whereas the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were not prohibited, at the risk of imprisonment or worse, from speaking about their experience, and the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, single incidents of apocalyptic horror, were only briefly required to be silent.

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prologue

some key terms What happened on February 28, 1947, has been variously termed the “2/28 Incident” (shijian), the “2/28 Popular Uprising” (minbian), and the “2/28 Revolution” (geming). Other terms—such as “riot” (baodong), “political and military event” (shibian), “rebellion” (panbian), and “massacre” (can’an)—also were used in the initial government announcements, newspaper reports, and leaflets but did not retain the discursive currency of “incident,” “revolution,” and “popular uprising.”24 These are, to be sure, loaded terms, and one’s choice becomes a declaration of one’s political allegiance. In this book, I have opted for “incident,” for it is the most commonly used word in scholarship dealing with Taiwan. I also use the term “2/28 Incident” knowing that what I discuss in this book is not limited to what happened on a single day. Ample research has shown that the 2/28 Incident was not simply the beating of a cigarette vendor or the accidental killing of a bystander but also the ensuing arrests and shootings in March 1947. Similarly, the Formosa Incident of 1979 refers to more than just a crackdown on the rally for human rights on December 10, 1979, called the Kaohsiung incident by some. Another term that needs clarification is “White Terror,” which some people use to refer exclusively to the persecution of intellectuals during the 1950s and others use for the entire era of martial law (1949–1987). I chose the latter, for the oppressive political climate lasted well into the late 1970s when the Formosa Incident took place. Therefore, for practical and political reasons, I use the word “atrocity” in my discussion of this period of Taiwanese history. Practically, in some cases, victims of the White Terror also were involved in the 2/28 Incident. Politically, most people agree that the White Terror, which exerted pervasive pressure on people to censor themselves to avoid arrest and imprisonment, was a result of the incident.25 It therefore is fitting for these two topics to be studied together, hence the inclusive term “atrocity,” but neither is privileged over the other, because government atrocity against its people in Taiwan took on such diverse forms as indiscriminate violence and extralegal execution, and other infringements on basic human rights, like living without fear of persecution or freedom of speech, freedom of congregation, and freedom of information.

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The word “atrocity” is a complex notion that is yet to be authoritatively defined. My application of the term to encompass the 2/28 Incident as well as the period of the White Terror derives from the conceptual approach adopted by human rights activists and scholars. Claudia Card’s definition of atrocity includes relatively public atrocities like mass rape as a weapon of war and private atrocities of domestic violence.26 Although including domestic violence is questionable, I find her characterization of complex and troubling forms of complicity to be applicable to the prominent aspect of the White Terror era in that “victims of oppression are used to maintain and administer the very machinery of oppression.”27 More relevant is her observation that perpetrators commonly do not perceive their acts as atrocities (for instance, Gu Zhengwen, the head of the secret police who conducted the mass arrest in Luku, was unrepentant and unapologetic). In contrast, Michael Humphrey defines atrocity as “an act of violence against individual bodies, . . . a political act which brings to the fore the conflict in the relationship between modern state power and individual life.”28 His overemphasis on bodily pain, however, neglects the psychological impact that is equally detrimental, especially to survivors. In her studies of the efforts of truth commissions to uncover state terror and atrocity, Priscilla Hayner highlights the focus of investigation on “a pattern of abuses over a period of time, rather than a specific event.”29 Echoes of the White Terror can be found in the objectives shared by the twenty-one truth commissions she examined: to investigate “politically motivated or politically targeted repression that was used as a means to maintain or obtain power and weaken political opponents; and in each of these cases, the abuses were widespread, usually affecting many thousands of persons.”30 In Taiwan, the Nationalist government’s persecution of dissidents was an unequivocal means to consolidate its power from the moment of its arrival in Taiwan until the outbreak of the Formosa Incident, although in the early days of its rule, the regime used anti-Communist rhetoric to coerce the residents into submission. A closer examination of the diverse truth commissions that Hayner analyzed reveals further resonance with Taiwan’s situation. The investigation of the 2/28 Incident four decades after its occurrence mirrors what she regards as the purview of historical truth commissions,

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which attempt to clarify past events and give due respect to “previously unrecognized victims or their descendants.” In addition, “estimates of the number of victims of the White Terror run as high as ninety thousand arrested and about half that number executed. The number of arrests and executions from the 1960s through the mid-1980s may have been lower, but a similar pattern continued.”31 Both the earlier period (mainly the 1950s and early 1960s) of arrests and extralegal executions and the later period of less violent acts are reflected in the various regions covered in her study. A case in point is the violation of human rights in East Germany, where the victims suffered less physical harm but “violations of international human rights conventions and norms, including political, mental, and psychological repression” were prevalent and almost omnipresent in the role of ideology in education, literature, and daily life.32 Similar examples of violation are readily available in Taiwan’s past, from the imprisonment of journalists like Bo Yang to the broader government policy against freedom of congregation. A related issue in the study of atrocity is the appropriate terminology for the victims. In Taiwan, there is a distinction between victims of violent acts, shouhai ren, and victims of political persecution, shounan ren.The former is often associated with the victims of criminal behavior, such as assault or murder, whereas the latter is used exclusively for political prisoners, prisoners of conscience, and those who are unjustly executed and disappeared. For lack of a more exact term in English, “victims” will have to do.

 This book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with literary portrayals and the second focusing on cinematic re-creations. I have combed through a substantial number of texts and selected those that best lend themselves to my explorations and discussion. Those texts that I decided not to use either did not fit the themes of my study or repeated and added little to what other texts offered. Both Holocaust studies and atomic scholarship provide an illuminating framework for the study of atrocity and its representations, particularly in the area of literary re-creation. In regard to cinematic representation, we all are reminded of critiques of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in its portrayal of the Holocaust and its prerogative for

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closure. Studies of historical films, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, also shed light on the characteristics and traps of representing history in films. In addition to these works, I also employ cinematic theories regarding such techniques as flashbacks and melodrama to investigate strategies of representing atrocity on screen. In lieu of a conclusion, I have opted for a brief analysis of Lan Bozhou’s Vine Intertwining Tree as a way to recapitulate key issues raised in this book, for Lan’s novel is in itself a concrete example of the everlasting imprints of atrocity on the Taiwanese people’s minds.

PART I

Literary Representation

the literary representation of atrocity in Taiwan can be divided into three periods. The first covers the immediate aftermath of the 2/28 Incident and is mostly composed of short stories, some of which have only recently been unearthed.1 After the initial response to the conflict and massacre came a long period of silence, largely because of the oppressive political atmosphere but also because so many members of the Taiwanese elite died in 1947. Not until the early 1980s did writers begin to break through the taboo and re-create from their imagination or personal experience stories about the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror. This phenomenon is best characterized by what Mieke Bal calls “cultural memorization,” a process occurring “in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future.”2 This modification of the past can be found in the many literary works in the second and third periods by such prominent writers as Li Qiao, Zhong Zhaozheng, Yang Zhao, Li Ang, Chen Yingzhen, Dong Nian, and Lan Bozhou. Owing to the strictures of martial law, works from the second period tend to make only oblique or cursory references to the incident and particularly the government persecution of dissidents. For instance, the execution and incarceration of leftist intellectuals are mentioned briefly in Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road,” yet they serve a catalytic function in the development of the story. Dong Nian’s novella “Last Winter,” which is centered on the Formosa Incident of 1979, cleverly avoids explicit comment by incorporating news reports.

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The third period began with the lifting of martial law in July 1987, although several years passed before writers finally were sure that they were free from the thought police. Now, open descriptions of and direct reference to the past forty years have become the norm. As their titles suggest, Li Qiao’s two-volume novel Buried Injustice of 1947 (1995) and Zhong Zhaozheng’s Angry Tides deal specifically with the periods before and after the 2/28 Incident. The most recent development (a fourth period, perhaps) is the highly self-reflexive style of pondering the (im)possibility of recapturing the past and discovering the truth. Wuhe’s “Investigation and Narration” (2002) and Lan Bozhou’s Vine Intertwining Tree, both fictional works that deal with investigating and reporting on the disappeared who allegedly were involved in the uprising of 1947, are the most representative of this new mode of writing. As ethnic differences are generally believed to be a major factor in the 2/28 Incident and the subsequent strife, chapter 1 of this book covers the volatile issue of ethnicity and provincial identity, a political land mine in Taiwan’s past, present, and, by all indications, future. Even though politicians continue to manipulate the question of provincial origin (shengji) and identity (rentong), novelists have attempted to transcend the binary opposition of victim and victimizer. Most noteworthy is the deployment of gender in the depiction of ethnic conflicts and resolution, such as the dichotomy of Taiwanese female versus mainlander male in Ou Tansheng’s “Intoxication.” This binary opposition is reversed in Lin Wenyi’s “Under the Snow” and Zhong Zhaozheng’s Angry Tides. In Lin’s story, a Taiwanese man occupies the subject position in recounting the persecution of a second-generation mainland woman, and Zhong’s novel suggests the impossibility of ethnic harmony through the failed marriage of a Hakka man and a mainland woman in the 1940s. Li Qiao’s “Notes of Taimu Mountain” uses the sacred Taimu Mountain of the Yuanzhumin (the original inhabitants) as a metaphor for Taiwan, but the portrayal of ethnic relations reveals a hierarchical order that places the mainlanders at the bottom of humanity and compassion. Contrasting the past with the present to promote peaceful ethnic coexistence, Lin Shenjing’s “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang” encounters an impasse in which the well-intended ending of the story contradicts its central message.

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Chapter 2 examines the genre of documentary fiction as a vehicle for using personal and public memories to re-create history. This narrative strategy invokes “an emotional response to the ‘sense of the real,’ a reinforcement of a work’s supposed factuality, and the establishment of the authentic link between writer, text, and events.”3 The claim of authenticity, however, should not obscure the inherent fictionality of such a literary re-creation. To illustrate how documentary fiction is an interpretation of the “facts of the past,” I analyze the extensive writings of Lan Bozhou, a leader in gathering eyewitness accounts, especially his “Song of the Covered Wagon,” which chronicles and reorganizes the pertinent aspects of the life of an actual victim of the White Terror in the 1950s. Dong Nian’s “Last Winter” adopts a different and complex narrative technique to relate the story of a pair of former radicals as the Formosa Incident unfolds. In addition to news reports, Dong Nian has created an intricate numbering system for each section of the story, producing a text that requires the reader’s full participation. Chapter 3 focuses on portrayals of women as victims of the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror, since they often were victimized twice, first when their husbands/fathers/sons were “disappeared” and then as survivors who had to fend for themselves in a hostile environment. As highly contested “territory” in the construction of national history, these women’s roles were fraught with ambiguity during the White Terror era. This notion of victimhood has been defined and subverted in fictional works, from the innocent bystander in Lin Shuangbu’s “A Minor Biography of Huang Su,” to the self-sacrificing and self-effacing woman in Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road,” to a redeeming prostitute in Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua,” and finally to questionable victimhood in Lin Ang’s “The Devil in a Chastity Belt.” Together, these stories exemplify a textual evolution of the image of female victims while at the same time exposing the underlying stereotypes and sociocultural expectations regarding Taiwanese women in general. To be sure, the themes of some of these texts overlap. For instance, the second-generation mainland victim of the White Terror in Lin Wenyi’s “Under the Snow,” a portrayal of ethnic differences, could very well be studied as a story of gendered victimhood. Similarly, Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua,” centering on the relationship between a

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mainland man and a Taiwanese woman, can shed additional light on the portrayal of ethnicity. But as readers will discover, my discussion of literary representation identifies the major political and stylistic issues that probe the limitations of the texts’ narratological strategies; it is not intended as a comprehensive survey of literature on atrocity in Taiwan.

1. Ethnicity and Atrocity

“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 category.”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 to Taiwan from different parts of the mainland, do not necessarily share the same language or customs: “In addition to the group’s superior position over Taiwanese,

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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 trajectories.”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 Chen Yi 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 contemporary Taiwanese 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 the Taiwanese, 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 that Taiwanese 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 the White Terror. Both stories feature a romantic relationship between a Taiwanese and a mainlander, but with different outcomes that entail evolving strategies to exploit ethnic relations in writing injustice. “Intoxication,” written by Ou Tansheng, 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 criticism.”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, the Taiwanese 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 the Taiwanese 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 her Yang’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 precisely Yang’s inability to speak and comprehend Taiwanese 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 to Yang’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 the Taiwanese 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 a Taiwanese consciousness in her.When she returns to Taiwan

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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 southern Taiwan, 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 New York, 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 the White Terror 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 Lin Wenyi’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, a Taiwanese 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 on Taiwanese 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. Angry Tides, 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. The Taiwanese 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 a Taiwanese 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, and Wang 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 and Wang 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 contemporary Taiwanese 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 young Taiwanese 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 But Wang Junhui, the second Taiwanese 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 with Wang’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 called Yu 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 for Yu’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 shoots Yu in the shoulder.The story ends with the dying Yu 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 warn Yu 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 character Yu 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 the Yuanzhumin, 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, the Yuanzhumin speak both their tribal language and Japanese, and Yu 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 regard Wayong 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 to Yu’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 mistakes Yu for Lin Shuangwen, the ringleader of a violence-ridden protest in another city.Through Yu 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, or Yu 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 that Yu’s activities are harmful to national security.62 Therefore, the life-and-death struggle between Yu 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 showing Yu 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 the White Terror, 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.

2. Documenting the Past

historical documents and fictional re-creations of events complement each other in the transmission of historical knowledge, particularly after an extended period of suppressed information and a forced absence of political dissent. During the martial law era (1949–1987) in Taiwan, information about the 2/28 Incident of 1947 and the Formosa Incident of 1979, as well as their impact on people’s lives, was withheld from the populace, buried behind a facade of harmonious existence under the predictable pretense of national stability and economic prosperity. Even the discussion of these and related events could, and often did, lead to dire consequences. The release of formerly classified documents concerning these events after martial law was lifted finally made available to the Taiwanese people much of the history that had been denied them. But these documents cannot tell the whole story. The gaps have been partially filled by literary works, which occupy a more privileged position owing to the poetic license their authors enjoy. It is precisely this freedom that makes it important to study how literary works represent historical events, for we must aim to “understand the manner in which historical actuality and the forms in which it is delivered to us may be intertwined: it is to know what happened in how it is represented,”1 as James E. Young states in his pioneering work on representing the Holocaust. Novelists’ incorporation of authentic testimony into fictional texts as a literary device in Holocaust fiction has created significant narratological consequences and raised an important question: Can documentary fiction ever really document events, or will it always fictionalize them?2 This question must be asked about writers who

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have used authentic material, like testimony and newspaper reports, to re-create Taiwan’s past as a means of recouping the realities, however unpleasant, of those lost decades. To explore these issues concerning the documentation of the past, this chapter focuses on two novellas. The first, Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” (1988) a fictional rendering of the experience of real-life characters, narrates the life of Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu, who were born and educated in colonial Taiwan.3 In 1940, they and three friends went to the mainland to fight in the war with Japan, and upon their arrival in Guangdong, they were arrested under suspicion of spying for the Japanese. After being released shortly before they were to be executed, the five friends spent five years in southeastern China. When the war ended, they returned to Taiwan, just in time for the 2/28 Incident. In early 1950, both Zhong and Jiang were arrested by the Guomindang police; Zhong was executed, but Jiang was released. The second text, Dong Nian’s “Last Winter” (1979), is the story of the fictional characters Chen Linlang and Wang Rong, who come of age in Taiwan in the 1970s. Wang’s left-leaning radicalism lands him in a Guomindang prison for the subversive. After first waiting for him, Chen, mistaking the lack of news as a sign that he has been executed, gets married. But then Wang is released from prison and marries An’an, who later gives birth to a baby boy. In the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Formosa Incident, a chance encounter between the then-divorced Chen Linlang and Wang Rong, now the contented middle-class owner of a bookstore/café, ends with Chen’s kidnapping of Wang’s son and her subsequent suicide. These brief outlines are linear recountings of the lives of two couples in the aftermath of two major political events, the 2/28 Incident and the Formosa Incident. Neither story proceeds chronologically, however; instead, both employ unconventional narrative techniques requiring the reader’s active participation. Dong Nian’s story reads like a detective novel, not only juxtaposing past with present, but also framing the narrative around newspaper reports. Lan Bozhou calls on witnesses to testify on behalf of Zhong Haodong, supplementing his narrative with records of historical events. As I will demonstrate, these techniques enable the authors to involve the reader in a joint effort of recalling a Taiwanese past and challenging the customary understanding of how history is written.These narrato-

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rial strategies also raise many questions. Both stories use a technique that Young labeled “documentary fiction,” which touches on issues of writing history, creating memory, and narrating trauma. If an author intends to highlight the supremacy of people over their amorphous national history, which is usually written by those in power, how much space should be given to historical events and how much to the individual? Is it even necessary to situate the individual in historical events? How should the author define and represent a victim of historical circumstances, and does the inclusion of moral superiority or personal accomplishment heighten the injustice of political persecution? Sharing a number of similarities and differing in other aspects, both works reflect the political climate and representational politics in Taiwan. To be sure, the relatively relaxed censorship policy gives Lan Bozhou more creative freedom than Dong Nian had. Lan’s work, written and published one year after martial law was lifted (1987), deals with real-life figures and their travails in the first half of the twentieth century. Dong Nian’s story, completed immediately after the Formosa Incident of 1979, is a fictional account that had to pass censorship under martial law. Both feature left-leaning historical and fictional young men and women, some of whom were either executed or imprisoned. Moreover, both Lan Bozhou and Dong Nian incorporated documentary material into their texts.Together, these two works shed light on not only the strategies of documenting the past but also the politics of representing radicals and activists at a tumultuous time.

“song of the covered wagon” Lan Bozhou’s narrative adopts the form of personal testimony, having three witnesses speak directly to the reader about Zhong Haodong’s life: an individual identified as Zhong Shunhe, who was arrested with Zhong; Zhong Haodong’s wife, Jiang Biyu; and Zhong Liyi, Haodong’s younger brother. Following a roughly linear progression, from Zhong’s birth in 1908 to his execution in 1950, the story opens with a preface followed by five chapters, whose titles are those of movements in a musical composition, and ends with an epilogue. Each chapter is divided into subsections whose headings further identify stages of Zhong’s life. At various points, brief accounts of political

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events, as well as quotations from the diary and writings of Zhong Lihe, another brother of Zhong Haodong, are inserted as the preface, or prelude, to each movement.

Authenticity Versus Artificiality When reading Lan Bozhou’s story, we are immediately confronted with the question posed by Zhan Hongzhi, the editor of the collection in which this story was reprinted. In his brief comment on the story, Zhan declares that “Song of the Covered Wagon” is his favorite story of 1988, one that he recommended for the Seventh Hong Xingfu Short Story Prize, which Lan ultimately won. “But,” Zhan writes, “I must first resolve a thorny issue: ‘Is this fiction?’”4 Zhan’s solution is to apply a Russian Formalist approach in his reading; that is, fiction can be defined simply as “an art form that constructs a plot with words to narrate a story.”5 He goes on to observe that “Song of the Covered Wagon” incorporates all the elements of a good story, and “it just so happens” (pengqiao) that everything in it, including the personal testimony, is factual. The effort to re-create through witnesses’ accounts “ignores the fact that anything processed by memory is already fiction. Imagination and memory can be names for the same thing.”6 Ultimately, whether or not this story is fiction should not concern us here; what deserves our attention is the fissure opened up by Zhan’s dilemma. As Zhan claims, if the author’s intention is to restore history, how does he do that? Yang Xiaobin claims that Lan Bozhou creates the atmosphere of a roundtable discussion through the narrative strategy of journalistic reportage, which produces multiple voices, all of which touch on the same person, but from different angles. There is, however, no contradiction among the voices, because each repeats and reinforces the single voice of the author. Yang is critical of both this strategy and the descriptive section headings (for example, “Pure and Simple Feelings for the Motherland”), which reduce the work to “the glorious theme of the biography of a revolutionary” and turn the story into a “standard interpretation of Grand History.”7 A scholar of postmodern theories, Yang obviously based his criticism on a deconstructive denial of subject position, and his reading of authorial intention can be substantiated

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by the circumstance of Lan’s writing (the photographs and eyewitness accounts).8 But these features should probably be regarded more as characteristics of a literature of atrocity than as Lan’s failure to complicate the historical narrative. As John Treat points out, one of the strategies “to circumvent the pitfalls of rhetoric and figural structure is, most commonly, to be as literally ‘historical’ as possible so as to preclude the corruptive effects of language.”9 Obviously concerned that the controversy surrounding a long obscured event would be further obscured, Lan Bozhou chose to present Zhong’s story in the most literal form of historical writings. In other words, Lan’s story should be contextualized in the historical background of four decades of silence and oblivion.10 What deserves our attention is not the illusion of Grand History but the implication of this representational model—the testimonials—itself.The “interviewers’ questions do not merely elicit testimony but quite literally determine the kind, shape, and direction [that the] survivors’ stories take.”11 When reading the eyewitness accounts, we have to be aware of the potential, though perhaps unintended, manipulation of the interviewer’s questions, for “the subtle urging of an interviewer, who after all is no more than an emissary of the outsider’s point of view, can lead a witness to shift from one form of memory to another, and indeed control and shape the content of each.”12 In writing “Song of the Covered Wagon,” Lan draws liberally from his interviews with Zhong’s family and friends but never tells us the questions he asked or the format of the interviews. We get the impression that these eyewitnesses have spoken voluntarily, which falsely conveys a sense of autonomy and authenticity through the representational style. In addition, “the aesthetic and moral implication of what amounts to the author’s abdication of creative responsibility rest[s] not in the verifiability of individual facts but rather in the premises which underlie an ostensibly undoctored reconstruction of historical events. The very claim to historicity lends such works a certain authority.”13 While Lan may be concerned, as other docu-novelists are, that “the essential rhetoricity of their medium inadvertently fictionalizes the events themselves,”14 the more realistic strategies he uses only reinforce the fictionalized, constructed nature of his narrative. For instance, as the story opens, we are introduced to the first eyewitness, Zhong Shunhe, and are immediately drawn to the word “pseudonym” (huaming) enclosed in parentheses under the name. But as readers of a

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fictional work, we do not need to question the identity of Zhong Shunhe (or why Lan does not use his real name).15 It certainly is possible that this particular eyewitness did not wish to be identified, as the interviews that provide the material for this story must have taken place shortly before or immediately after martial law was lifted in July 1987. Nonetheless, whether this was a narratological decision or a genuine concern, the word “pseudonym” appears to make the account more authentic, suggesting that Zhong Shunhe is a real person who participated in the actual event and that the risk of political persecution has forced him not to identify himself. The pseudonym creates only the illusion of authenticity, not authenticity itself. By highlighting a presence—Zhong Shunhe (pseudonym)—the author introduces the possibility of an absence—the real Zhong Shunhe—or the agency of this locutional act. It simultaneously convinces and dissuades the reader by raising doubts about Zhong Shunhe’s identity, authenticity, and existence. Another feature that casts doubt on the presumed authenticity is the structure of the story. In the preface/prelude, Zhong Shunhe recalls his own arrest, along with Zhong Haodong, and Haodong’s unsuccessful reeducation and eventual execution. Zhong Shunhe’s narrative paints a detailed picture of the prison and of Zhong Haodong’s final departure from his cell as he sings in Japanese “Song of the Covered Wagon,” from which the story takes its title. The narrative is then picked up by Jiang Biyu, who interprets the meaning of the song in Chinese and relates how Zhong taught it to her after they met in the hospital where she worked. By describing the last moments of Zhong Haodong’s life and explaining the title of the story, this preface enhances our understanding of the effects of the White Terror on an ideological level and the life story of Zhong Haodong on a narrative level. Such an arrangement, despite its potential to elicit the reader’s sympathy, reveals the narrative’s constructed nature.

Personal Life Versus Public Events The first two testimonies, by Zhong Shunhe and Jiang Biyu, placed side by side as a preface and shifting from the imminent execution to the explication of a song, underscore the narrative’s strategy of alternating between the private and public Zhong Haodong. The purpose,

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obviously, is to present a more complete portrayal of “the tragic tale of a Taiwanese intellectual.”16 The arrangement of the remaining chapters continues the juxtaposition of political events and personal life, with the political dominating, driving, and overtaking the personal, thereby calling into question the representation of an individual in relation to historical events. By using a single person as a microcosm, the narrative turns the individual into a victim of history while reaffirming the omnipotence of historical events. In a word, the hero of the narrative is deprived of subjectivity. For instance, the third chapter, “Principal Zhong Haodong and His Comrades,” quotes a page from Zhong Lihe’s diary, dated February 28, 1947, to highlight the theme of the chapter. Zhong Haodong does not, however, appear in this excerpt, which focuses instead on a young victim of the 2/28 Incident with a detailed depiction of his face and his bullet wounds. “The bullets entered from his left chest and exited from under his right arm. Some of the entry wounds were very deep, giving the appearance of black holes. A piece of flesh at the edge of the exit wound looked like a young woman’s nipple.”17 The images of black holes and a young woman’s nipple are so strikingly incongruous that we wonder how we can learn more about Zhong Haodong from such a gory, perhaps even titillating, description. Does the diary entry imply a parallel between Zhong Haodong and the nameless victim? That is, are we to associate the scene with Zhong Haodong’s execution (which is not described in Lan’s text)? The emphasis on public events is heightened in the narrative throughout this chapter. It opens with Jiang Biyu’s recollection of Haodong’s and her life in Taiwan after returning from wartime China, when she took a job at a radio station in Taipei and he became the principal of a high school in the northern port city of Keelung. It was during this time that their second child (the first, she recalls for the reader, was put up for adoption in China) died of malaria. Zhong Liyi continues the story by relating what kind of principal Zhong Haodong was and how the elders from their hometown were impressed by his simple and frugal lifestyle. Zhong Shunhe, who apparently worked at the same high school, adds his observations of the democratic way in which Zhong Haodong ran the campus. Even though Jiang describes her heartbreak over their child’s death, the narrative structure leaves little room to explore her sorrow, as Zhong Liyi and Zhong Shunhe “invade” the private aspect of their life and replace it with something

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akin to a character witness. As the critic Chen Fangming observed: “Whether it is historical writing or literary creation, he [Lan Bozhou] needs to solve an urgent problem—his penchant for ideological predetermination. . . . In order to compose his work under this ideological hubris, he inevitably focuses on the hero of his work, while other victims in related cases of persecution become obscured.”18 Indeed, Lan Bozhou’s Marxist bent and interpretation of causal history ultimately shape his representation of Zhong Haodong’s life, subsuming personal tragedy under Lan’s need to explain historical events. This concentration on the hero also results in moralistic overtones in Zhong Liyi’s and Zhong Shunhe’s recollections of Zhong Haodong, whom they describe as a generous person and a competent educator with only the interests of the school in mind.19 Indeed, owing to Zhong Haodong’s democratic style of leadership, “the whole Keelung High School, from the principal to the janitors, focused on the students; no one fought for power or personal interests.”20 Such a moralistic judgment appears to heighten the tragic nature of Zhong Haodong’s death: the death of a good man.21 While it may seem insensitive to question the necessity of stressing a victim’s positive attributes, we cannot overlook the implication that a victim’s worth is contingent on his or her lifestyle.To put it differently, and more bluntly, would it lessen the injustice of his death if Zhong Haodong had been an ordinary person or a mere bystander during the indiscriminate shooting on February 28, 1947? Others have called attention to this tendency to ascribe goodness to victims, which we can see in, for instance, Sidra DeKevon Ezrahi’s critique of Jean-François Steiner’s documentary fiction: It is not the highly subjective selection or distortion of facts per se but the composite stereotype, a simplistic reductionism in the portrayal of character and situation. . . . What emerges in this novel is a glorified sense of Jewish superiority and revisionist nationalism. It is an extreme example of a quality inherent in the literature, something which R.J. Lifton calls the “documentary fallacy”—an overriding loyalty to the dead which generates a kind of hagiographical excess, denying them the “dignity of their limitations.”22 In Lan’s story, the moralizing tendency derives from perhaps an underlying discursive anxiety over the proper way to describe a vic-

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tim of such tragic proportions. It is a fact that many intellectuals like Zhong who would have made post–World War II Taiwan drastically different were killed by the Nationalist government and, moreover, that his life was buried in history for several decades. It is not easy to handle this sort of subject matter, which is likely why Zhong needs to be presented in such a positive light. The contention between personal and public is most obvious in the second part of the chapter, in which Zhong Shunhe and Jiang Biyu relate the 2/28 Incident. Zhong Shunhe first describes what he saw on that day and his worried search for Zhong Haodong, who looks like a mainlander.23 Jiang continues the narrative by recounting what was happening in Keelung. A group of Taiwanese came to the high school and asked Jiang and other teachers to hand over the rifles used for the military education class. As Zhong Haodong was away, Jiang was forced to take charge. When she refused to turn over the rifles, the Taiwanese scolded her, “You’re a Taiwanese yourself. Why won’t you open the storeroom?” Eventually she told them that she wouldn’t give them the key but that they could do whatever they wanted. The Taiwanese broke down the door and took all the rifles. When Zhong returned from Taipei, he praised her for properly handling the people’s demand. What she remembers and deems important to include in her testimony is extremely impersonal; there are no personal feelings or private exchanges between Jiang and Zhong. All we know about Zhong’s reaction to this encounter is, “You handled it very well.”24 We have no idea how she felt when the Taiwanese questioned her allegiance or what else Zhong, as her husband, might have said to her. Here Zhong appears only as a public figure, his emotion stripped away in the narration, and consequently, so does Jiang, who appears to be a mere mouthpiece. The overemphasis on Zhong’s public image in Lan’s eulogistic rendition also reveals an insidious side of documentary fiction, as evidenced in the ambiguity of (Jiang’s) memory and (Lan’s) re-creation, for it is unclear where Jiang’s recollections cease and Lan’s representation of her memory begins. That is, by selecting parts of Jiang Biyu’s remembrance of the past and turning it into a coherent, chronological narrative, Lan erases his own presence and thus infringes on Jiang’s memory. “Memory” as Lawrence L. Langer asserts, “sacrifices purity of vision in the process of recounting, resulting in what I call tainted memory, a narrative stained by the disapproval of the witness’s own

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present moral sensibility, as well as by some of the incidents it relates.”25 In Lan’s story, the narrative technique of testimonial makes it impossible for the author to clarify the ambiguity, thus tainting both Jiang’s memory and the memory of Zhong Haodong.

The Individual in History The erasure of authorial presence is most evident when Zhong Shunhe takes over and the narrative is dominated by a day-by-day account of riots and massacres, starting on March 1 and ending on March 9.Told in an intentionally objective voice, this historic event is reduced to its barest essentials, in which individuals such as Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu are swept away in history. For example, “March third. A group of dock workers attacked the military warehouse on Pier 14, but were forced back by armed soldiers. Many were killed or injured, all of whom were thrown into the ocean.”26 Or “March fifth. Rumors everywhere about the imminent arrival of the Nationalist soldiers and military police to quell the riot in Taiwan. Everyone was frightened and on edge.”27 In order to recount the daily occurrences succinctly, Zhong resorts to an impersonal tone and converts a story about Zhong Haodong into an itemized, reductive historical record. It is only in Jiang’s final addition to this chapter that we learn more about Zhong Haodong. But her brief description is nothing more than that of a character witness: that Zhong had taught his students so well that none of them was arrested or killed and that he was among a handful of Taiwanese high-school principals who were able to keep their jobs. The arrest and killing of high-school students, as well the discriminatory treatment of the Taiwanese, are glossed over in the narrative. That is, where we expect outrage over the senseless killing, we instead find absurd praise for Zhong as a good teacher and a capable principal. As a leftist intellectual, Zhong Haodong presents a problem for Lan Bozhou, the author, writing in the early days of the post–martial law era. Given the lingering anti-Communist atmosphere, a left-leaning socialist is seen as a de facto Communist. How, then, does Lan praise Zhong without appearing to endorse Communism?28 Another attempt to give Zhong Haodong a place in modern Chinese history appears in the fourth chapter, “The Motherland That Turned from White to Red,” which is prefaced by a brief account of the civil war on the mainland

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and the eventual retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. The source of the account is not identified, though it reads like a description from a history text.We recall that earlier chapters are introduced by either a passage from an essay or a diary entry. What, then, is the reason for quoting impersonal historical accounts that by the time of the story’s publication would have been well known to readers in Taiwan? A possible answer is implied in Jiang Biyu’s narration immediately following the accounts, in which she summarizes Zhong’s ideological transformation and shift of political allegiance. As a youngster, he had worshipped Chiang Kai-shek, but the corruption of Guomindang members he witnessed in China then changed his mind. This is an attempt to situate Zhong in the historical moment when his left-leaning ideology and the 2/28 Incident intersected to culminate in his arrest and execution, but it leaves unanswered the question of whether Zhong had agency or was simply being acted on by history. In other words, was he merely a victim swept away in the torrent of historical events? The remaining narrative in the chapter seems to inscribe agency to Zhong’s actions, for Jiang reveals that in his belief in the need for socialist reform, Zhong published an underground newspaper, Enlightenment (Guangming bao), to spread his ideas about class differences. But by incorporating historical events into the text, the author has, perhaps inadvertently, privileged the role of history and minimized the significance of the individual. The difficulty of writing about a socialist in an anti-Communist country is underscored in Jiang Biyu’s narration of the days leading up to Zhong’s death, in which she juxtaposes the personal with a bare-bones description of political events from the spring of 1950 to October 14, when she was notified that Zhong’s body was ready to be picked up at the morgue. Here we encounter a startlingly detailed and yet depersonalized account of the day, when we are told the cost of the coffin demanded by the morgue and the total amount of money that her father had with him. The only personal moment is Jiang’s reflection on the way Zhong was executed: Little sister told me that Haodong was shot three times, all in the chest, and that the injury to his forehead was probably caused by his fall. He also clasped some dirt in his hands. I thought to myself that he probably hadn’t suffered much, since the shots in the chest meant he died instantly.29

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Here we observe an incongruity between the mundane detail of money and the heartrending image of an executed husband.To be sure, we can regard Jiang’s mention of the morgue’s demand as a criticism of the policy regarding the bodies of executed political prisoners. More important, this seemingly unnecessary detail points up the injustice of Zhong’s execution while lessening the unease of eulogizing a figure long considered by the government to be subversive and seditious. In contrast, details regarding the amount of money seem to overshadow the grief that the family must have felt. In his comments, Zhan Hongzhi argues that the author cruelly suppresses all emotions until the end when Zhong Liyi, Haodong’s younger brother, lies to their mother about his ashes. After telling her that the ashes came from a temple, he says, “I couldn’t control my sadness. I ran into my room and shut the door. At first I just howled, then I started to wail, tears falling uncontrollably.” Even this final outburst of emotion, Zhan claims, “is not allowed to run unchecked. The author’s restraint enables his story to display a kind of ‘unfinished sorrow,’ which is endless.”30 Zhan’s comment echoes his earlier claim that this story should be treated as a fictional work that “happens to” (pengqiao) describe real people and actual events. Such a viewpoint underscores the artificial rearrangement of events, which does not, however, devalue the artistic accomplishment of the work. Even though the author may have tried to create the glorious theme of the biography of a revolutionary in his intentional restoration of history, the text is a fictional work filled with fissures and the clash between the personal and the public.31 Critics like Zhan Hongzhi and Chen Fangming have praised Lan Bozhou for the breakthrough in his use of a simulated eyewitness account. In the context of writings about the White Terror, Lan’s story was the first to look at the ambiguous space between documentary and fiction. A survey of novelistic works on the 2/28 Incident reveals that a significant number of short stories fall into two categories: imagined characters set in a historical background, and the fictional re-creation of documentable figures.32 Lan Bozhou presents us with a third possibility—a fictionalized documentary—and thus introduces a new form for representing Taiwan’s past. Nonetheless, the reader must bear in mind that Lan’s story is fiction, which may still claim equal footing with written history, since the latter is “never a mirror but a construction, congeries of data pulled together or ‘constructed’ by

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some larger project or vision or theory that may not be articulated but is nonetheless embedded in the particular way history is practiced.”33

“last winter” Like Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon,” Dong Nian’s “Last Winter” uses an uncommon narrative style to relate the story of two former political radicals and their divergent fates during and after the 1979 Formosa Incident. Also similar is the difficulty facing Dong Nian in creating a story about dissidents who engage in violent acts. In order to appear impartial and to circumvent possible repercussions during the martial law era, Dong Nian opts for a complex organizational structure and incorporates seemingly authentic news reports to draw a parallel between the characters’ past actions and current affairs in Taiwan in the immediate aftermath of the Formosa Incident, which was a rally on International Human Rights Day that resulted in riots and the arrests of prominent members of the opposition. Convoluted as it might appear, this narrative strategy highlights crucial issues of atrocity and trauma while questioning the concept of knowable history, causality, and memory.

The Past and Its Consequences In her discussion of Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma, Ann Whitehead observes that “if trauma is at all susceptible to narrative formation, then it requires a literary form which departs from conventional sequence.”34 With a fragmented narrative and highly inaccessible interiority of characters, Dong Nian intentionally employs an unconventional literary device to confront and record a traumatic sociopolitical event. He documents the Formosa Incident by looking backward and at the same time asking whether the past and its impact can ever be fully comprehended. He uses dates as section headings to guide our reading progression.This elaborate scheme serves several purposes: to emphasize that the past is always implicated in the present; to symbolize the disjointed nature of the past for the story’s characters; to imply that causal links between events are not always readily apparent; to question the possibility of interpreting and understanding the past; and to highlight the false concept of linear history:

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literary representation 12/7 12/12 12/13 12/14

1979 1979 1979 1979

A1 A2 A3 A4

12/15

1979

A5

12/16

1978

A6

12/16

1979

12/19 12/20 12/22 12/23 12/25 12/29

1971 1979 1979 1979 1969 1979

A7/B3 A8 A9 A10 A11/B1 A12

01/01 01/03

1970 1980

A13/B2 A14

01/04 01/10

1980 1980

A15 A16

01/12

1980

A17

01/13 01/14 01/15 01/17 01/17

1980 1980 1972 1977 1980

A18 A19 A20/B4 A21/B5 A22

01/18 01/19 01/24

1980 1980 1980

A23 A24 A25

01/26

1980

A26

01/27 01/29

1980 1980

A27 A28

02/11

1980

A0

Wang Rong and An’an’s prenatal exam News report about the Formosa Incident Wang at his own bookstore/café News report about the incident / An’an in labor—going to the hospital News report about the incident / Wang and An’an arguing—going to the hospital News report about the U.S. and PRC normalizing their relations35 News report about the incident / Wang waiting at the ward Linlang getting an abortion News report / An’an’s baby is born News report / Linlang at work News report / Wang and his mother Wang and Linlang going into the mountains News report / Wang and his mother at the train station Linlang and Wang on the train News report / Wang seen by Linlang, denying knowing her News report / Linlang at home News report / Wang and his mother talking about baby and Linlang News report / Wang’s college reunion; Linlang goes to see him An’an at her home in the south Wang goes to see Linlang Wang in prison Wang is released Wang at game arcade; sees Linlang and they argue Wang and Linlang go on a trip Wang sees his son and An’an Linlang sees Wang and An’an leave; goes to see his mother; takes baby Wang searches for the baby; An’an angry at him Linlang and baby; tired Wang goes to pick up the baby; Linlang kills herself Wang visits Linlang’s grave

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The story’s first entry, December 7, 1979 (when Wang Rong accompanies his wife, An’an, for a prenatal examination), is marked A1, followed by December 12, 1979, marked A2, and so on. We read on until we come to an earlier date, December 16, 1978, and although it obviously is in the past, the author marks the entry A6, in order that the reader will consider this event, the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, as an integral part of current history. But how the changes and setback in the Republic of China’s foreign relations will figure a year later in the Formosa Incident is left for the reader to speculate. The first event, the Formosa Incident, frames the background of the story of Wang Rong and his reencounter with Chen Linlang at the end of 1979, and the second event, the normalization of relations, takes place in 1978. These events are presented in the format of news reports and appear either as a single entry on a particular day or precede personal events also occurring on that day. Nowhere does the author make clear how these events affect the characters’ lives, so the reader can only make inferences based on the scanty information revealed in the entries dealing with Wang’s prison life (A20 and A21) and his conversation with his mother (A12). For instance, the first entry,Wang Rong and An’an’s hospital visit (A1, December 7), is followed by a summary of the outbreak of the Formosa Incident in Kaohsiung (A2, December 12), which is then followed by a description of Wang at his bookstore/café (A3, December 13). Judging from the publicity the incident generated in Taiwan at the time, it is incomprehensible that Wang Rong would be totally unaffected. Only in his conversation more than two weeks later with his mother, who has just returned from the United States and inquires about the incident, are we given a brief glimpse of what he feels deep down, however unsatisfactory that may be: “I heard that something happened in Kaohsiung.” “A minor riot.” “You’re not involved with those people, are you?” She looked worried. “You should have learned your lesson.” “Hmm,” he said. “More or less,” he added after a brief silence, “But I can’t say I’ve learned my lesson. I should say I’ve wised up, really wised up.”36

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From this snippet of conversation, we can deduce that Wang apparently was involved in a similar incident, which resulted in his imprisonment. But exactly what he did is again left to the reader to guess. Ann Whitehead elucidated the function of such disjointed narration: History is no longer available as a completed knowledge, but must be reconceived as that which perpetually escapes or eludes our understanding. Such a notion of history implicitly repositions the relation between language and the world, so that the text shifts from a reflective mode—based on a position of self-awareness and selfunderstanding—to a performative act, in which the text becomes imbricated in our attempts to perceive and understand the world around us.37 Indeed, not only does history cease to be accessible in its entirety, but the causal connections between events often are obscured. In this story, as if to exemplify this notion, the author places, in news report– like language, the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China and subsequent protests in Taiwan (December 16, 1978) immediately before the protest carried out by pro-independence Taiwanese in the United States against the arrests of those involved in the Formosa Incident (December 16, 1979). Here we have two protests that took place on the same day one year apart, but we are not told why they appear together in the narrative. Instead, we have to determine the connection ourselves, even though scholars like Chen Fangming argued that the former contributed to the inception of Formosa magazine, which led to opposition activities that culminated in the arrests and imprisonment of dissidents in late 1979.38 As we have seen, this story was written immediately after the incident, and the author did not have the kind of hindsight and narrative freedom available to scholars and writers after martial law was lifted. Read twenty years later, the story not only serves as an exemplary case of a consequence of censorship but also illustrates the impossibility of ever fully recording the past and grasping its significance. The intentionally jumbled past and present also demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting the causality of events, as the news reports that precede many of the entries reinforce the author’s (presumed)

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reluctance to comment on causality. Not only are there two separate political events, but the connection between them and their connection to the main story are never explained. Immediately apparent in the juxtaposition of the events from different points in time is Dong Nian’s intention to comment on the connection and the disconnect between past and present, which he does through his narrative strategy. First, the artificially arranged dates and events present an apparently seamless, linear narrative because the dates that head each section give the reader the (false) impression that events narrated in the story take place from December 7, 1979, to February 11, 1980. Only when we look at the year do we realize that the events can be traced back as far as 1969, ten years before the beginning of the main story. When we look closely at the years, we discover that not only are the past and present mixed up, but the events in the past are similarly out of order. Second, the author’s numbering of events (for example, A7/B3) interrupts the narrative flow and creates more uncertainty about how the story should be read. Should we completely disregard the numbering and follow the narrative flow, or must we rearrange the events to “set the record straight”? Moreover, there is an unresolved ambiguity in the main character, Wang Rong, that further weakens the dubious connection between the past and the present. As Wang Rong waits while An’an is in labor, the narrative cuts back to Linlang’s abortion eight years earlier. The flashback appears to belong to Wang Rong, who is reminded of the aborted baby by the imminent arrival of the new one. But the itemized narrative style makes the connection vague, and the reader is left in the dark regarding Wang Rong’s thoughts and feelings. We therefore must assume that the birth of his new baby triggers old memories of another time and another life, creating a tantalizing relationship between the past and the present. On the one hand, the author’s insertion of the past into the present convinces us that only an amnesiac can have a clean slate and that no one is immune to the shadow of the past. On the other hand, facing the opaque inner world of Wang Rong, we are forced to confront the issue of interpreting the past and its consequences. “The distinction between past and present is an essential component of the concept of time. It is therefore fundamental to both historical consciousness and historical knowledge.”39 The insertion of the past into the present—that is, the absence of

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distinction between the two—entails a lack of historical knowledge, which reflects the author’s intention of underscoring the impossibility of knowing the past.

Domesticity and Atrocity Although Dong Nian is reluctant to clarify the connections between historical events and their impact on the individual, that does not mean that his decision to frame the narrative in the events of 1978 and 1979 was random. Rather, Dong Nian chose to approach the issue of atrocity from a completely different angle—that is, domesticity. We recall that the novella begins with Wang Rong driving An’an to the hospital for a prenatal examination, in which much of the narrative concerns the baby boy whom Wang’s former girlfriend later kidnaps. Unlike Lan Bozhou’s story, in which the protagonists’ private life is constantly marginalized, Dong Nian’s story centers on personal events and family. Familial life (or the lack of it) thus becomes an important trope, for the birth of the baby and the reappearance of the childless Linlang in Wang’s life after his incarceration are intertwined, producing a narrative tension that can be resolved only through her death. Dong Nian appears to stress the importance of familial life, the lack of which eventually leads to ostracism. For instance, Linlang comes from a poor family whose inability to afford medical care causes her mother’s early death from a lung disease. Linlang later has an abortion, resulting in infertility, which, in turn, prompts her to kidnap Wang’s baby. She starts on a downward spiral toward desperation and selfdestruction once she meets the now married Wang again. In contrast, Wang evolves from an indifferent father-to-be and a distracted husband into a caring and responsible adult. In a way, the development of the story represents Wang Rong’s domestication. At the beginning of the story, we are told that Wang never expresses any opinion about the imminent birth of a baby boy and that “he was quiet on the subject and showed no sign of happiness.”40 “In contrast with her [An’an’s] concern over the baby, he had almost no reaction whatsoever.”41 But after the kidnapping, he is quickly transformed into an “average” father, who also succeeds in appeasing his young, petulant wife. Wang Rong and Chen Linlang clearly are on different, even oppo-

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site, trajectories. In his younger days, Wang evidently was more radical, someone who, as the story hints, may have been a bomb maker or at least contemplated such an extreme act to protest against the many evils of capitalism. He also is the one who indoctrinated Linlang into opposing the capitalistic society developing in Taiwan. Upon his release from prison, however, he is a completely different person, someone who believes that bombs are useless and that “the nation is still the last and the most concrete organizational unit.”42 Linlang, in contrast, has nearly become his former self, a woman who visits the office of Formosa magazine and publishes essays on democracy and politics. Her kidnapping of his baby seems to reinforce the author’s emphasis on domestic life and its positive effect of changing Wang into a gentler person. Simply put,Wang finds new meaning in life and hope for the future in his growing family, whereas Linlang, divorced and without a family or close friends, turns into a fanatic. Their outcomes are predictable:Wang is reconciled with his wife and the family of three will live happily ever after, whereas Linlang is doomed, with suicide her only solution. The manifestation of Linlang’s radicalism is disconcerting to the reader. After the news of the Formosa Incident has been widely disseminated, Linlang is worried that she may be implicated, since she has visited the office of Formosa magazine. She even entertains the idea of lying about her whereabouts during the tumultuous days leading up to the incident. The plan also attests to the author’s privileging of familial life: a young man working for Linlang declares his feelings for her, which prompts her to consider making up a story about spending the night of the incident with him. The thought, although immediately dismissed, then leads her to consider marrying the young man: She really should get remarried; she should say yes if the young man brought it up again. She had nothing to lose, since she had enough money and was capable of living an independent life. “Oh, that’s really not true,” she muttered to herself, “I’m not capable of living alone; I’m strong because of my ideals. But so what if I’m strong?”43 Her self-doubt precludes any possibility for her to be a “hero.” Worst of all, while her radicalism is glossed over in a few references

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to her visits to the office of Formosa magazine, her “real” radical act is kidnapping her former boyfriend’s newborn baby boy! Not only does she not take part in any protest activities, but the kidnapping is actually the result of jealousy of Wang’s new life and is carried out on a defenseless baby. In drawing a parallel between family and the nation, we see Linlang as the disrupter of familial/national stability, and so she must be eliminated. Even though suicide is sometimes portrayed as an act of courage or, at the very least, a force of will, Linlang’s action is presented more as a desperate act.

Writing Trauma We have seen how seemingly unrelated political events conveyed through news reports and the jumbled dates make for a difficult read. That may have to do with when the story was written. Under martial law, writers were often wary of directly referring to sensitive topics, let alone offering personal comment. Nonetheless, “Last Winter” displays unmistakable characteristics of “trauma fiction,” for which the best definition can be found in Ann Whitehead’s discussion of Cathy Caruth’s work: “Caruth’s conceptionalisation of trauma profoundly problematises the relation between experience and event. Trauma carries the force of a literality which renders it resistant to narrative structures and linear temporalities.”44 Both Wang Rong and Chen Linlang are traumatized by the experience of her abortion and his imprisonment, and both exhibit symptoms of trauma patients, even though the author, whether intentionally or not, assigns them opposite outcomes based on how they come to terms with their traumatic experience. According to Caruth, trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.45

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To be sure, Caruth is referring to real, specific, physical, and emotional trauma and its resultant effects on the psyche, not to fictional characters. Nevertheless, a closer examination of Wang Rong and Chen Linlang as victims of trauma will help shed light on our overall understanding of the story. Linlang, perhaps, suffers from the more severe posttraumatic symptoms, first from her abortion and then from Wang Rong’s imprisonment. But Wang’s inability to deal with his situation and their relationship also contributes to her problems: “What can I do? You stopped writing to me, so I thought you’d been executed. . . . I nearly killed myself. Ah, things might have been better had I had done so back then.”46 At the end of story, she does, in fact, commit suicide, which can be regarded as evidence that she has failed to deal effectively with her traumatic experience. “Trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival. It is only by recognizing traumatic experience as a paradoxical relation between destructiveness and survival that we can also recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility at the heart of catastrophic experience.”47 Linlang’s failure in her struggle for survival by traumatizing another person can best be explained by using Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between acting out and working through. Simply put, “acting out is related to repetition, and even the repetition compulsion—the tendency to repeat something compulsively”48—and “in working through, the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem and to distinguish between past, present, and future.”49 Most immediately evident is Linlang’s repeated contemplation of suicide. Even kidnapping Wang’s child represents a kind of reversed repetition. By forcefully taking Wang Rong’s baby as her own, she is not only repeating the experience of having Wang’s baby but also trying to repeat her own loss of the baby in An’an. Wang Rong, conversely, seems to have worked through his problems. But his character remains problematic owing to his transformation from a radical youth who condemns the increasingly capitalistic society in Taiwan50 to a contented middle-class husband/father who appears to be apathetic to political events. We wonder whether he has indeed achieved a critical distance from his problems and learned to distinguish past from present, or if he has simply isolated himself in his new life by convincing himself that he is a changed person. In a long

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conversation with Linlang, during which she accuses him of capitulation, he has the following to say about his new view: We need stability, for we continue to live in a state where too many people are concentrated in a comparatively crowded space with an unequal distribution of wealth. Such a situation accelerates an oversecretion of adrenaline and makes us easily irritable, prone to sleepiness and to tearing each other up. We’re accustomed to throwing the military, the people, wealth, hope and everything else into self-destruction, plunging us into an inferior position in worldwide competition. We really do need stability because we need time. We need everyone to be self-aware, so that we can really tackle practical problems on a more permanent basis, after we struggle and learn.51 However grandiose his rebuttal may appear, we cannot help but question how Wang Rong will ever accomplish the task he sets out for others, since he seems to be mired in personal anguish, emotional detachment, and constant quarrels with his wife. He is, in essence, a contradictory character. So while he seems to have worked through his traumatic experience, his emotional state suggests that he is at best a disillusioned man living with compromise or self-delusion. These contradictions can best be explained by the narrative style, the jumbled past and present, as well as the disconnect between external events and inner worlds, in the way a traumatized person experiences and relates to the world.

Private Lives and Public Events Wang Rong’s troubled psyche brings us to the topic of writing private lives and public events, a major issue in my discussion of Lan Bozhou’s text. As I mentioned earlier, a conspicuous feature of Dong Nian’s story is the use of dates as section headings, which begin with December 7, 1979, and end with February 11, 1980. The main story line of this section is the birth of Wang Rong and An’an’s baby, the return of Wang’s mother from the United States, Linlang’s kidnapping of Wang’s baby, and her suicide. Earlier dates and events are interspersed in this

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linear progression and disrupt the narrative flow: December 16, 1978; December 19, 1971; December 25, 1969; January 1, 1970; January 15, 1972; and January 17, 1977. Although the narrative moves back and forth between the present and the past (for instance, Linlang’s abortion in 1971 is sandwiched between two current events, before and after the birth of Wang Rong’s baby), the author has intentionally ordered the dates so that the story first reads as if the events occurred in a chronologically sequential fashion.52 Each of the entries from December 14, 1979 (two days after the Formosa Incident), to January 12, 1980, opens with a news report that stands alone without comment from the author or the characters, thus conveying the impression that the characters in the story are living under the shadow of public events but are reluctant to voice their views. Moreover, with dates preceding each section, the story reads like a diary without a first-person diarist/agent. “Last Winter” also can be regarded as an abbreviated version of history, although it immediately calls into question whose history the story is relating. The use of itemized news reports not only enables the author to bypass government censorship but also emphasizes the effects of the White Terror on the characters and, to a less evident degree, on the author. In other words, Wang Rong and Chen Linlang, who are former dissidents, are necessarily afraid to express their personal views for fear of further persecution. For the author, Dong Nian, the fear was all the more real, as he completed his story while the Formosa Incident was still unfolding. To complicate this already complex reading process, or perhaps to guide the reader through the maze of events, the author adds two sets of sequential numbers (A-number and/or B-number) to each entry. The A-sequence marks the narrative’s liner progression, and the B-sequence, out of order, flags past events, which are given an A-sequence number also, to highlight the order in the progression of present events. This intricate system demands full participation by the reader, who must rearrange events into chronological order and sort out the entangled connections between public events and their impact on the characters’ private lives. Most significant, the intentional anachronism blurs the distinction between past and present, between the private and the public, thus invalidating causality and underscoring the illusiveness of panoramic historical knowledge.

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" Lan Bozhou’s and Dong Nian’s texts are similar and dissimilar in so many ways that studying them side by side enables us also to examine the politics of recalling, recording, and reading the past. Lan’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” was written four decades after the occurrence of the real event, and Dong Nian’s “Last Winter” fictionalizes the Formosa Incident almost as it unfolded before the eyes of the author. In addition, Dong Nian published his story while Taiwan was still shrouded in the stifling atmosphere of martial law, which ended a year before Lan Bozhou’s text was published. The varying degrees of freedom to write indeed affected how the two authors approached their subject matter. Nonetheless, read now, both these stories have become texts that record the past, and “what was evidence for the writer at the moment he wrote is now, after it leaves his hand, only a detached and free-floating sign, at the mercy of all who would read and misread it.”53 It is precisely this transformation from truth to fiction that makes it important to examine the particular characteristics and pitfalls of their representations. Lan Bozhou’s text tries to restore history by focusing on an individual; his employment of eyewitness accounts nevertheless underscores the reality that no account can claim to be complete. The narrative strategy of beginning Zhong Haodong’s story with the moment just before his execution also entails an artificiality that makes the reader aware of its constructedness, despite the linear, progressive history— from his childhood to his unjust death—that follows. Moreover, by inserting itemized historical events, the narrative also introduces the perception that public events are somehow more important than an individual’s life, which, in turn, privileges the very government-oriented historical writings that Lan sets out to refute. All the witnessnarrators, although themselves victims of the White Terror, are trotted out to corroborate Lan’s story of Zhong, but Lan has cleverly manipulated the forum style of narrative structure, which allows him to avoid characterizing and depicting the other characters’ inner worlds. If indeed this strategy was intended to enable the author to focus on Zhong, in order not to lose sight of what he set out to accomplish— the depiction of the death of one good man—it unfortunately also

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makes Zhong hollow, a scarecrow dressed up as a man of lofty ideals and admirable moral character, but little else. Moreover, notwithstanding the fact and heinous circumstances of Zhong’s execution, the narrative style and focus leave little room for other victims, such as Jiang Biyu and Zhong Shunhe, and, when stripped of all subjectivity, Zhong Haodong appears to be either superhuman or nonhuman. Lan, who has been continually interviewing and unearthing eyewitnesses and survivors, as well as writing fictionalized accounts of victims,54 is keen on rediscovering the past.55 But in his effort to comprehend and recover it, Lan cannot avoid the logic of causality. As “Song of the Covered Wagon” shows, Zhong Haodong’s eventual execution is a result of his involvement in leftist activities, which is directly linked to the Guomindang’s anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. In contrast, Dong Nian avoids an explicit explanation of causal links between events, to the point of glossing over the reason for the imprisonment of the main character,Wang Rong. Again, Dong Nian’s story was written under martial law, and both the story and its narratological style exemplify the suffocating atmosphere of the White Terror, in which writers practiced self-censorship and skirted sensitive topics. To be sure, the tension between authorial intent and narratorial reality is itself witness to Taiwanese history, but Dong Nian’s “Last Winter” also illustrates the difficulty of representing government atrocity at any time. Unlike Lan Bozhou, Dong Nian uses fictional characters and situates them around the time of the 1979 Formosa Incident. The rehabilitation of Wang Rong, whose earlier subversive act landed him in prison, appears to be successful, as the disjointed juxtaposition of national and international events with personal, domestic life bespeaks his total detachment from the incident. That detachment is disconcerting, since the reader expects more intense reactions from a former victim of the government’s suppression of dissidents. But the muted reaction is understandable when approached from the perspective of trauma; Wang Rong, like Chen Linlang, has yet to work through his traumatic experience. In addition, by situating his characters in a domestic milieu, Dong Nian problematizes the notion of victimhood and runs the risk of trivializing the effects of state terror manifested in the persecution of dissidents. That is, what message is conveyed to the reader if Chen Linlang, who is only peripherally involved in the Formosa Incident,

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does nothing more than kidnap her former boyfriend’s baby? What is the reader to think when she contemplates fabricating a romantic liaison with her employee as an alibi? Or her suicide, for that matter? There is a notable discrepancy between her passionate denunciation of a capitalist, material world56 and her actions. To be sure, we cannot and should not expect the kind of martyrdom exemplified by Zhong Haodong, but the rendering of victim into victimizer is disconcerting and requires the reader’s vigilance. Because the two texts rely on the narrative structure and strategies to re-create the past, it is incumbent on the reader to be wary of the documenting fallacy, for “by allowing himself to be moved to the willing suspension of disbelief by the documentary novel’s contrived historical authority, the reader risks becoming ensnared in the all-encompassing fiction of the discourse itself, mistaking the historical force of this discourse for the historical facts it purports to document.”57

3. Engendering Victimhood

while it may be coincidental that a female cigarette vendor was beaten by the authorities, thereby opening a floodgate of Taiwanese discontent and Nationalist brutality, women and the images of women have often played a crucial role in times of crises in both actual national politics and popular imagination. In “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death,” Lydia Liu examines the co-optation of Xiao Hong’s work by male critics throughout modern Chinese literary history. Beginning with Lu Xun and Hu Feng, Xiao Hong scholarship has been subsumed into a national discourse that insists on interpreting her novel as an anti-Japanese allegory while obscuring or ignoring the plight of rural women.1 In a way, by refusing to acknowledge that the women in Xiao Hong’s novel are women first and Chinese second, these critics (most of them male) deny them a gendered victimhood and actually inflict a second (albeit symbolic) victimization. Using a rape scene in Xiao Jun’s Village in August as a contrast, Liu is critical of this patriarchal national consciousness: “As a sign of symbolic exchange, the raped woman often serves as a powerful trope in antiJapanese propaganda. Her victimization is used to represent—or more precisely, to eroticize—China’s own plight.”2 Liu’s now classic essay reveals, among many insights, the contestation over the representation of women and the interpretive ownership of the symbol of the female body vis-à-vis foreign aggression at a time of national crisis. This is by no means unique to China; similar battles were waged over women’s veils in colonial Algeria and the practice of sati (suttee) in British-ruled India. In “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz

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Fanon describes the changing role of the women’s veil in colonial Algeria. “If we [the French colonial government] want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hid themselves and in the houses where the men kept them out of sight.”3 Owing to the veil’s metonymic nature, the French colonizers believed that unveiling the women would lead to the total subordination of the Algerian (male) population. During Algeria’s struggle for independence, many women unveiled and reveiled themselves in their participation in the revolutionary action. Whether the aim was total subjugation or independence, the Algerian women, both veiled and unveiled, were called to perform for colonial conquest and later national salvation. Ironically, as Winifred Woodhull points out, the postindependent Algerian government demanded the reveiling of the women because it was essential to recovering Algerian traditional culture and uniting a nation that would otherwise be torn apart by economic disparity and political struggle.4 The imposed reveiling exposes the high stakes and underlying anxiety at issue when colonial or nationalist patriarchal narratives address the place, function, and symbolic value of women. Similarly, sati, the self-immolation of widows, took on overcharged religious, nationalistic, and colonial implications in British-ruled India. Lata Mani investigated how the image of self-immolating widows was manipulated by the British colonial government to solidify and substantiate its authority: “The widows were presumed to be uneducated and incapable of both reason and independent action.”5 What necessitated this denigration of Indian women in general was an imperialistic desire to demean the colonial subjects through a convoluted route of reasoning: “Officials in favor of abolition argued that such action was in fact consistent with upholding indigenous tradition. And indeed this was how the regenerating mission of colonization was conceptualized by officials: not as the imposition of a new Christian moral order but as the recuperation and enforcement of the truths of indigenous tradition.”6 In other words, the Hindu intelligentsia was considered ignorant of its own culture, hence their endorsement (active or passive) of sati. The widows were double victims of such ignorance, so it is not surprising that “the widow was often described as a ‘tender child.’”7

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This is not to say that all Indian male intellectuals defended the practice; many were passionate and eloquent opponents of sati. What is of interest here is the exploitation of the widows’ will—that is, whether or not they willingly immolated themselves along with their husbands. The proponents of sati emphasized women’s will, but “the petition [against the prohibition of sati] seeks to demonstrate that the East India Company’s criminalizing of sati is based on an erroneous reading of the scripture.”8 Women receded into the background but at the same time were turned into a battleground, where the colonial authority and indigenous intelligentsia vied to prove each other wrong in their interpretation of the Hindu tradition. In short, a debate on a practice that is cruel beyond measure became a competition for the authoritative reading of scripture, and the contest between indigenous sovereignty and colonial domination remained the underlying subtext. In these three regions, women at various times in their nation’s history were classified and then declassified as victims of the conquest of imperialism, and they were simultaneously the manifestation of indigenous tradition and the embodiment of the inferiority of their culture. To be sure, Xiao Hong’s text differs from the other two because it is fiction, but the subject matter and decades of scholarship point toward a similar tendency to exploit women in the name of nationalism, even though women often exist on the margin of national discourse. By looking at these regions together, I am not suggesting that the issues facing the women in China, Algeria, and India were necessarily identical or even comparable. Rather, a brief consideration of the complexity of interpreting the place of women in the nation’s discourse in these three regions gives us a multifaceted point of departure for our inquiry into the interplay between women and the representation of victimhood in Taiwan.What we have seen is the nation’s (that is, men’s) changing demands on women at a time of colonial domination and national crisis and how unstable the sign of victimhood has been. A similar trajectory can be detected in Taiwan after martial law when the crisis is long over and has been obscured for decades and the image of women as victims figures prominently in the recuperation of that critical moment. This chapter examines several literary texts featuring women in the representation of national (domestic) atrocity.

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the literature of atrocity and women The four decades following the 2/28 Incident were marked by a government-imposed collective amnesia.9 Essential to the Guomindang’s government’s successful domination of Taiwan, this amnesia is similar to what Homi K. Bhabha calls “the obligation to forget”: It is through this syntax of forgetting—or being obliged to forget— that the problematic identification of a national people becomes visible. The national subject is produced in that place where the daily plebiscite—the unitary number—circulates in the grand narrative of will. However, the equivalence of will and plebiscite, the identity of part and whole, past and present, is cut across by the “obligation to forget,” or forgetting to remember.10 To defy this obligation and dismantle the nation imagined by the Nationalist government, writers have tried to reconstruct history by creating stories and attempted to recoup the Taiwanese past and redefine Taiwanese culture. In the literary recuperation of Taiwan’s forbidden history, women are often, and unavoidably, portrayed as victims. But the discussion would go no further if writers did little more than repeat the common trope of woman as victim, which is a well-worn discursive device found in the scholarship on Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death or the debates about self-immolated widows in colonial India. For the Taiwanese writers, the choice has been virtually obligatory, since the men were either executed or imprisoned and women were the actual victims, not just a symbol of victimhood. As a scholar pointed out, “For the men who died in the 2/28 Incident, the day marked the end of their stories, while for the women they left behind the 2/28 Incident was the beginning of theirs.”11 Although women can serve as a powerful metaphor for government violence against its people,Taiwanese women were victimized twice in the 2/28 discourse: they were expected to represent themselves as women bereft of loved ones and, often, economic means while signifying something larger than themselves. In most of the current scholarship on and in witnesses’ accounts of 2/28, women are simply called forth to recount the men’s stories, with

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their own stories receding into the background.12 It is as if the sole significance of their existence is to bear witness to the fact that atrocious acts have been committed, their own victimization obscured. An example is Jiang Biyu, Zhong Haodong’s widow. In “Song of the Covered Wagon,” Lan Bozhou’s employment of eyewitness accounts accentuates Zhong Haodong’s importance while eclipsing the roles played by other equally significant characters, particularly Jiang Biyu, who was summoned only to bear witness to Zhong’s heroism. Moreover, such a monolithic rendition reduces her to a mere skeleton of ideology (and a simplistic ideology at that). In Good Women of Taiwan, Lan Bozhou ascribes the following epitaph to Jiang Biyu: The seventy-four years of Jiang Biyu’s life are a perfect illustration of how a patriotic generation selflessly devoted its youth to the survival and continuation of the nation [minzu], and what historical rewards its members received in a chaotic, orderless and uncertain time for their effort to “help the flowers of peace and democracy bloom.”13 Although any critique, no matter how carefully and thoughtfully constructed, of the portrayal of Jiang’s suffering and achievement can easily be construed as belittling criticism, we must be careful not to subsume the real-life Jiang Biyu under the grand scheme of national salvation. As Gu Erde commented about Jiang Biyu as represented by Lan, Strictly speaking, Jiang Biyu was not someone deeply involved in politics, as she never led any political movements. Her political aura came from two men. In “Song of the Covered Wagon,” the first sentence Jiang Biyu uttered by way of introducing herself is, “I’m Jiang Yunyu [the name she was given at birth]; I’m Zhong Haodong’s wife and Jiang Weishui’s daughter (adopted daughter).” Her connection to politics originated from her father and husband, one of them a leader of the opposition movement in colonial Taiwan, the other a political victim of the White Terror Era.14 If we read between the lines, we detect a subtle criticism in Gu’s comment, which contradicts Lan’s original intention.That is, not only is she represented as playing a minor role in two very political families, but she is stripped of her subjectivity when her self-identification is

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contingent on her relationships with the two male figures in her life. In the grand scheme of things, Jiang Biyu as a victim of the White Terror pales in comparison with her role as the wife of a victim of the White Terror. Other literary works dealing with the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror present a much more complex and controversial portrayal of women as victims. But here too is a problem with the literary project of restoring history. History, as Jacques Le Goff explained, is related to seeing: “This conception of vision as the essential source of knowledge leads to the idea that istor, the one who sees, is also the one who knows, istorien.”15 In the Taiwanese situation, it is unclear how women, who usually were not present at the scenes of atrocious acts and who therefore did not see them, can claim legitimate representational authority and to what extent their absence from this history can restore that history.

“The Mountain Road” and Revictimization Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road” is one of the earliest and best-known stories about the effects of the White Terror.16 Written in 1983, before martial law was lifted, the story is significant on at least two levels. Historically, its subject matter is audacious, as Chen’s own personal life can attest to the intolerance of the ruling Nationalist government of any dissenting or critical views.17 Structurally, “The Mountain Road” sets an example for a narrative style of retelling a past that can never be complete, as opposed to the straightforward, linear narration that Lin Shuangbu used in “A Minor Biography of Huang Su,” also published in 1983.18 “The Mountain Road” is told from the perspective of Li Guomu, whose sister-in-law, Cai Qianhui, is hospitalized at the beginning of the story. Doctors at various hospitals have not been able to diagnose the cause of her illness. When asked whether Cai has recently experienced any great sadness, Li Guomu recalls how his sister-in-law wept over a newspaper report of the parole of four political prisoners who were arrested in the early 1950s, along with her husband, Li’s older brother, Li Guokun, who was executed. The report marks the beginning of the deterioration of Cai’s health. After Cai wills

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herself to die, Li finds among her effects a letter to one of the newly released prisoners, Huang Zhenbo, with whom she had had a romantic relationship. The letter reveals that not only was she not married to Li’s brother, but she did not even know him well. In the early 1950s, when the government conducted massive arrests of left-leaning intellectuals, her parents had secretly arranged for her brother to cooperate with the government and turn in his comrades. Although he had complied, he still was arrested with those he betrayed. Guilt and shame over her family’s action prompted Cai to pretend to be the wife of Li Guokun and to work for the Li family for the next thirty years. David Der-wei Wang, reading Chen’s story as an illustration of Communist hunger politics, observed that “Chen Yingzhen has invested the story of this enigmatic figure with a touching allegory about political idealism and its betrayal.”19 A similar observation can be found in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang’s analysis of Chen’s works: “Chen Yingzhen’s stories are despondent, lamenting the fate of idealistic individuals betrayed by the unpredictable course of history. They also condemn contemporary Taiwanese society for its rampant materialism and devotion to creature comforts, products of the capitalist evil corrupting people’s lives.”20 Indeed, as the letter discloses, Cai Qianhui castigates herself for abandoning her ideal and indulging in material comfort. But Chen Yingzhen creates the figure of a self-sacrificing woman in order to indict capitalist society, in contrast to the idealism and self-devotion of young men like Li Guokun and Huang Zhenbo. In the process, Chen describes the inhumane and lasting effects of the White Terror: a family sacrificing other families in order to save their son; a woman sacrificing her own youth as a form of reparation; and a younger brother’s inability to face the past resulting from many decades of self-censorship. Examining Chen’s story for the ways that literature bears witness against history,Yomi Braester argues that “‘Mountain Path’ [sic] points to literary testimony as always-already belated, addressing either the mute dead or the deaf living. The author cannot recover a voice free of the doubts—his own and his readers’—that have been ingrained during years of oppression and suppression.”21 A literary recuperation of a historical past by its very nature cannot but remain fragmentary at best. In Braester’s view, such a characteristic in fictional works by

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Chen and others “is a sign of Taiwanese writers’ recognition of their inability to redress past wrongs and rewrite history into a narrative of progress and redemption.”22 We can take Braester’s argument a step further and examine how Chen’s story exemplifies the effects of the White Terror, by applying Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of autobiographical memory as the memory of events that we have personally experienced in the past. It may also serve to reinforce the bonds between participants. . . . It stands to reason, however, that autobiographical memory tends to fade with time unless it is periodically reinforced through contact with persons with whom one shared the experiences in the past. . . . In any case, autobiographical memory is always rooted in other people.23 The power of suppression affects people not solely by the loss of their historical memory (the “forgotten” 2/28 Incident) but also by the more sinister effect of isolation, of which Cai Qianhui is the prime victim. Without periodic reinforcement through contacts with other participants, because they either were killed or are still imprisoned, she loses her memory of the past until the day she reads about the release of the one of the political prisoners, a coparticipant. Conversely, the author exploits the fading of Cai Qianhui’s autobiographical memory, even though it serves the purpose of protesting government suppression, in his attack on the detrimental effects of capitalism, which, in turn, questions the portrayal of the victims, particularly women, of atrocity. Like Li Guomu, whose brother is executed, Cai Qianhui, whose brother also was arrested, is a victim herself, although she may not consider herself one, for she believes that by collaborating with the government to save her brother, her parents have deprived her family of the status of victim. The development of the story suggests that there can be only one kind of victim, and, in a perverse way, this story calls into question the definition of victimhood. What constitutes a victim of political persecution seems to be self-determined in Chen’s story. Cai’s own brother indeed betrays his comrades, but is the betrayal not a result of the suppression of dissident and persecution? Does his right to claim victimhood stop once he is coerced into collaborating with the government? As her letter reveals,

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“Six months later Hanting [Cai Qianhui’s brother] returned, pale and exhausted. . . . Unable to endure the pangs of conscience, he started to drink, and on several occasions when drunk he admitted to me that he had implicated many people who were later arrested.”24 Would repentance alleviate his guilt? Although it is not meant as an apology for her brother’s action, my contention focuses more on the effects of the White Terror, which, not unlike the cruel conditions during the Cultural Revolution on the mainland, twisted humanity and stripped many people of compassion and conscience. Moreover, what is particularly disturbing about Chen’s story is the double victimization the author inflicts on Cai Qianhui in order to convey his well-known opposition to capitalism. As Braester points out, “her survival seems immoral when compared to the fate of the long-imprisoned and the dead.”25 To put it more bluntly, Chen Yingzhen criticizes the Taiwanese people’s complacency and indulgence in material comforts by having Cai Qianhui confess in her letter to Huang Zhenbo:“Your release from prison has shocked me into awareness. I have been tamed by the capitalist commodity society, have been so well nourished that I have become a sort of domestic animal.”26 Cai Qianhui not only is a woman-cum-domestic animal who betrays the idealism of her younger days, but also represents the kind of Taiwanese who pursues sensual enjoyment. “Feminists can charge Chen Yingzhen with indulging the idea of female self-effacement in support of a male-centered revolutionary cause,” David Wang writes. “I suspect, nevertheless, that Chen Yingzhen is no more an ideological fanatic or a misogynist than he is a modernist informed by the (anti-)heroism of the absurd.”27 While some may argue that Chen is likely more an ideologue than a misogynist, we cannot help but question the employment of women as the embodiment of comfortable domesticity and, more important, Chen’s portrayal of a self-sacrificing devotee to the dissidents’ cause, particularly because her redemption is denied to her twice. Cai Qianhui willingly turns herself into a de facto servant of the victim’s family to redress a crime committed by her family. “When the men [in her life] are imprisoned or die for righteous causes and justice, the women have to take care of their offspring, but when the women accumulate a bit of wealth as a result of their hard work, they are condemned as domestic animals.”28 She slaves away for the victim’s family, not only to

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compensate the family whose son was implicated by her own family, but also as a way to punish herself:“I worked extremely hard. I worked myself as though I were being driven by a cruel and abusive master, making myself a slave physically and emotionally.”29 But her labor only leads to the enjoyment of a comfortable life (albeit self-proclaimed), from which she needs to be redeemed once more, this time, by her death. On the narrative level, when her mission of atoning for a crime she did not commit is accomplished, the author has Cai Qianhui will herself to die in order to deliver his political diatribe.We are reminded of the Algerian women who were unveiled and veiled at the whim of the male colonial and Algerian governments in their effort to recoup (male) dominance and authority. On the surface, Cai Qianhui appears to be a positive, sympathetic character, a figure like Mother Earth, but in fact, she is a triple victim: of the White Terror, of her own convictions, and of the author’s need to condemn capitalism. Her death “is a necessary means for filling in the blanks in history.”30 We could even argue that her death is inevitable, for the author needs her to die in order to make a point. David Wang put it most succinctly by contending that “‘Mountain Path’ faces the challenge of recalling, elegiacally, the bygone days of political fervor amid the ruins of revolutionary praxis”31 and that after atoning for her brother’s failure to be a true revolutionary, Cai Qianhui now has to redress the failure of a whole generation. Moreover, this narrative strategy renders her a powerless woman who seems to live in the past and for the past. The occasions in which we see her speaking are mostly taken up by reminiscences of the past and often in fragments, as she lacks contact with her coparticipants in the past. A similar view can be found in Lucien Miller’s analysis of Chen’s works: “For many of [Chen Yingzhen’s] characters, this contemplative mode of participation and transcendence is difficult to achieve because too often their reflection is carried out in a selfenclosed world of their own making.”32 The last instance of Cai Qianhui’s inability to speak for herself is the letter, unsent and discovered posthumously. The mystery of the cause of her death and the reason for her self-sacrifice are finally solved by the male narrator, who refuses to share the letter with anyone, including his wife, who also is portrayed as a caring, hardworking woman. The textual violation and narrative violence in the way that female victims are presented

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is disturbing and reflects the problems with Chen Yingzhen’s gender politics: “It is the effect of a male-centered historical view to have a female protagonist as the one who transmits and forgets the memory of the White Terror, and it is undoubtedly an ‘example’ of ‘ideological predetermination.’”33

“A Minor Biography of Huang Su” and Madness Compared with the other works analyzed in this chapter, Lin Shuangbu’s story falls into a category all by itself. Whereas all women in the other stories are guilty by association, “A Minor Biography of Huang Su” places the female victim directly at the scene of the massacre. In other words, the female victims in other stories suffer because men in their families (parents, brothers, or husbands) are implicated or involved. By contrast, rather than characterizing these women as victims of family connections, Lin’s story describes the firsthand experience of an innocent victim who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. “A Minor Biography of Huang Su” is the story of nineteen-yearold Huang Su, who, in the space of a single day, changes from a happy bride-to-be into an accused murderer and eventually into a madwoman. The story opens on a spring day in 1947, as Huang Su awakens at the crack of dawn, filled with excitement. She is getting married in two weeks, and her mother is taking her shopping in town. After making purchases at a fabric store, Huang Su and her mother arrive at a sundry shop, where her mother picks out a cleaver for Huang Su just as a commotion breaks out on the street. Two crowds of angry mobs attack each other with clubs, bricks, and broken liquor bottles. Huang Su, separated from her mother, is carried along with the mobs and eventually falls down on a corpse when she is hit on the back.The cleaver, intended as a domestic instrument for her wifely duties, is mistaken as a weapon in the public outcry, and Huang Su is arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. But she then is proclaimed not guilty at the execution ground, at the moment the executioners are about to shoot her. She is literally shocked out of her wits and goes mad. When she returns home, she learns that both her parents have fallen ill during her imprisonment

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and that the marriage proposal has been withdrawn. After both parents die, Huang Su is neglected by her brothers and sisters-in-law and wanders around the village aimlessly as an aging madwoman. The story ends with her walking down a railroad track as a train bears down on her. Scholars who have examined Lin Shuangbu’s story inevitably mention his revelation of its background. According to Lin himself, the character of Huang Su is based on the image of a madwoman in the village where Lin attended middle and high school. But the story would lose its significance if it were not for another extratextual figure: Lin’s high-school English teacher, who somehow let the words “2/28” slip into his lecture one day. Lin claimed that he raised his hand to ask the meaning of 2/28, but the teacher, in a state of panic, adamantly denied that he had said anything. The author continued with his questions after class, and finally the teacher, speaking Taiwanese, told him the first thing Lin had ever heard about the 2/28 Incident. The teacher also mentioned the madwoman in town and explained why she had gone mad.34 It was not until many years later that Lin Shuangbu finally decided to write the story. It is difficult, perhaps pointless, to determine the veracity and credibility of the extratextual story, but the author’s intention to re-create history is clear, as Lin himself explained: “A concrete individual case in a historical event emerges and the cold setting now finds a lively protagonist.”35 In a way, we can argue that the re-creation of history— the story of Huang Su—is the joint effort of a high-school English teacher, his student, the adult author, and the madwoman and that the story would probably have been much different if even one of the participants had been omitted. The creation of this story mirrors the unearthing of the 2/28 Incident’s history: from ignorance (the young author) and self-imposed silence (his teacher) to inquiry to finally naming the victims. Although we may fault the author for exploiting the image of a madwoman, we could make an equally valid case for the author’s attempt to redress historical wrongs and for his giving a name to the madwoman. Both Xu Junya and Jian Suzheng consider the story to be an example of gender stereotyping by a male writer. Lin Shuangbu “employs a gender conception based on a patriarchal value system and turns women into a symbol of Taiwan. When the country is in turmoil,

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women cannot help but be dragged in to become the most innocent victims.”36 Echoing Xu Junya’s reading, Jian Suzheng adds that what truly concerns the author is not the experience of women but the destiny of the collectivity. Indeed, what can better represent the ultimate effect of the 2/28 Incident than an innocent woman, particularly one who is just about to be married? We also recall that the widow destined for sati was often portrayed as a “tender child,” invoking a pathos in the contrast between the young woman as the epitome of innocence and the injustice inflicted on her. Different from the rhetoric of anti-sati discourse are the metonymic characteristics of this betrothed madwoman. On a textual level, the marriage proposal is withdrawn because of the possibility of contamination (which also appears in Yang Zhao’s story “Yanhua”). Her fiancé’s father has told her mother that his son cannot marry a former political prisoner (not a madwoman). Her mother retorts, “You know fully well that Asu [Huang Su] isn’t one.” “What does it matter whether I know or not,” Wang Jinhai’s father sighed. “People’s words are poisonous.”37 Even though Huang Su is released, she will have to carry the stigma with her for the rest of her life. In accordance with the politics of representing atrocity, we detect in the fiancé’s father’s words a slippage from the actual, physical disability of mental illness to the abstract, amorphous but omnipotent stain of having been a political prisoner. Needless to say, the latter is more pernicious and pervasive in its power to terrorize and thwart any hint of dissent. Following this line of reasoning, we find that Xu’s and Jian’s critiques seem incomplete, if not misapplied altogether. What is at issue in this story is not merely a helpless woman representing a powerless Taiwan at the mercy of the Nationalist government, but the trope of a betrothed woman plus madness. In her analysis of Jane Eyre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests that the function of the madwoman, Bertha Mason, is “to render indeterminate the boundary between human and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law.”38 In a similar vein, it is only through his description of the subhuman figure of Huang Su that the author can convey a sense of outrage over injustice and senseless killing.39

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A novel published in 1989, Chen Ye’s Muddy River, also features a woman gone mad after her fiancé is arrested and executed. But madness alone cannot and does not adequately represent the severity of suffering endured by the Taiwanese. Interestingly, Chen Ye’s madwoman, Yinchai, like Huang Su, also loses her fiancé, which leads us to wonder whether the combination of a marriage proposal, a woman, and her madness is the most effective means of representing state terror (we will see that both Cai Qianhui and the nameless woman in Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua” are unmarried, and, as my analysis shows in the last section of this chapter, even though the Grieving Founding Mother in Li Ang’s “The Devil in a Chastity Belt” is married, she is rendered sexless by the demand of opposition politics). The ending of Huang Su’s engagement resulting from her madness means that the possibility of childbearing is forever denied her. If we consider her a sort of “everywoman” of Taiwan, then Huang Su and her madness are far more significant than merely serving as a symbol of indiscriminate violence, for her childlessness mirrors the absence of the local Taiwanese elite for the first two decades after the incident. Furthermore, a fundamental difficulty of this kind of representation can be surmised from the suspended ending, when Huang Su is standing on the tracks and facing a fast-approaching train. That is, if the protagonist were to be hit by the train, would her death intensify or lessen the senseless and indiscriminate persecution that starts Huang Su’s journey down the road from madness to death? Would it be more tragic? Whether intentional or not, Lin Shuangbu’s portrayal of Huang Su’s uncertain fate alerts us to the issue of effectively representing tragedy.

“Flower in the Smoke” and Questionable Victimhood In an essay on women, provincial origin, and history in 2/28 fiction, Jian Suzheng delineates three stages in the fictional representation of women in 2/28 literature: the period between retrocession and martial law (1945 to the early 1980s), the years shortly before the lifting of martial law (in 1987), and the post–martial law era. This periodization helps illustrate the changing portrayals of women, from innocent victims to ameliorating and unifying figures of provincial divisions to

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personifications of the complexity between public/national history and private life.40 The lifting of martial law in 1987 was indeed a watershed for Taiwanese literature. Before that year, writers understandably practiced self-censorship, whereas the period after martial law ushered in a cacophony of literary subjects, including political satire directed at the president, and female sexuality. Hence, periodization encompasses this subgenre of 2/28 literature both synchronically and diachronically, although the expansion of topics and the increasingly transparent references to 2/28 have been contingent on the gradual relaxation of government control. While it is not my intention to conduct a survey of Taiwan’s literary works on this subject, let alone their periodization, it is important to examine how the representation of women evolved. To do that, I look at a 1987 story by Yang Zhao entitled “Yanhua.”41 Narrated by an omniscient “third” person, “Yanhua” describes an encounter between a young woman and Jin Hongzao, a friend of her father’s. The young woman’s father, a member of a committee investigating the bloodshed caused by the illegal cigarettes incident and later a member of a settlement committee, was arrested and then executed. The wife of Jin Hongzao, a mainlander, also died during the incident when a group of angry demonstrators stormed the police station where she had sought refuge. The intertwined past of the story’s only two characters is revealed through their conversation. The story does not contain much action until one day the young woman invites Jin to her house, where she asks him in and guides his hand in touching her naked body. Shortly after that night, which appears to be the climax of the story, Jin is arrested and dies in prison. Jian Suzheng places Yang Zhao’s story in the second period, with the following justification: 2/28 fiction written toward the end of the martial law era was gradually divested of its angry, dark accusatory tone, and the indiscriminate antipathy toward the Mainlanders slowly dissipated. Most of the works now took into serious consideration the fact that the Mainlanders were also victims of political persecution. Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua” . . . , though also using female characters to describe the fate of the Taiwanese, broadens the definition of “Taiwanese” to include the Mainlanders and eliminates the dichotomy

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of “self ” and “other” that in earlier 2/28 fiction placed the Taiwanese at the center. Moreover, the kindness and tenderness of female characters was also used as a medium of communication between provincial groups.42 Jian’s characterization of Yang’s story emphasizes the common features of fictional works written during this period.43 Without a critical analysis of this approach, Jian gives the impression that she is satisfied with merely pointing out similarities. A closer examination of the story, however, exposes the fallacy of using women as a trope for harmony among provincial groups. What immediately attracts an informed reader’s attention is the fact that the young woman does not have a name, whereas the mainland man does: Jin Hongzao. At one point, the young woman is referred to as Wang Heshun’s daughter. The lack of a name symbolizes the absence of a discernible individuality, which may signal the author’s intention to present her as the quintessential Taiwanese woman, the “everywoman” of Taiwan. Moreover, it underscores the double victimization derived from the contaminating effects of the 2/28 Incident, as evidenced in the withdrawal of the marriage proposal in “A Minor Biography of Huang Su.” For many members of the victims’ families, the 2/28 Incident was a contagious disease; they were shunned by society and harassed by the military police or the secret service. In the young woman’s own words, Except for the closest relatives, “none of his friends, colleagues, supervisors and subordinates dared come [to pay respect at his bier]. Not a single one of them dared to come.” All of a sudden, [the family] was isolated, like being quarantined during the plague. . . . From then on, she felt that she herself was like a plague. Shunzi’s [Heshung’s] daughter. That was Shunzi’s daughter. Occasionally someone would sneak something to her or help her secretly because she was Shunzi’s daughter, but in public every one of them stayed clear of her, absolutely clear of her.44 Her profession seems to confirm the author’s intention. Although nowhere in the story does the author explain how she became a prostitute, it requires little imagination to deduce that after her father’s

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death, the girl’s family fell on hard times and she turned to prostitution as a way to survive. Prostitution, like rape, is a well-worn metaphor for the injustice inflicted on the subjugated.45 In this story, prostitution has an additional significance and serves an important, if disturbing, narratological function. That is, the woman has sex with American GIs, not Taiwanese men. Although we could read too much into this trope, it is impossible to avoid discussing the meaning of such a choice of profession (albeit by the author). Is prostitution the only weapon in the author’s narratorial arsenal to portray the devastating effects of the 2/28 Incident? He appears to be convinced that no other line of work could adequately convey the sense of injustice. But in the process of personifying the atrocious crimes of the 2/28 Incident, the author symbolically victimizes the victim’s daughter a second time. The young woman’s profession also serves to criticize the absurdity of provincial differences. She reveals to Jin Hongzao that after her father’s death, her grandmother made every child in the family swear never to marry a mainlander, and her romantic relationship with a mainlander is therefore forcefully terminated by the elders in the family: “‘I cannot marry a Mainlander,’ she said, giving him an eerie but enchanting smile, ‘but I can sleep with foreigners.’”46 Jian Suzheng reads this passage as a stricture against control of the female body: “The female body becomes a battleground for political struggle; women, under the domination of family clan and provincial groups, lose autonomy and control over their own bodies and sexuality.” Earlier in the essay, Jian described Yang Zhao as a male writer with a feminist consciousness, and the comment just quoted suggests a positive reading of Yang’s condemnation of the Taiwanese people’s irrational hatred for mainlanders. Although we may find it difficult to disagree with Jian’s estimation of Yang’s endeavor, we must also question whether the juxtaposition of provincial divides and nationality differences is itself also biased and why provincial disharmony must be censured in terms that further emphasize the division between self and other. In other words,Yang seems to be implying that having sex with foreigners is a more serious violation of Taiwanese individuality and supremacy than is marrying a mainlander. He has found it necessary to articulate the narrowly defined provincial identity through a nationalistic paradigm.

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Jian Suzheng approaches this issue from a drastically different perspective, particularly in regard to the scene in which the young woman asks Jin Hongzao to touch her: His hand shook slightly as it rested on her gaunt, bony shoulder. He wanted to remove his hand, but he couldn’t. . . . Taking a deep breath, he let his hand slide along her shoulder, her right arm, her right elbow, her right wrist, and her right palm. Her hand grabbed his and put it on her neck. . . . Carefully he moved his hand along the space between her breasts all the way down to her abdomen and her navel. He realized it wasn’t as difficult as he’d imagined, but she suddenly grabbed his hand again, this time to place it on her right breast. . . . She took a deep breath and placed his hand on her private part while opening her legs slightly. . . . Shaking his head, he said, “No, we can’t.” She said insistently, “You promised.” His hand touched her hair, very very gently caressing the most sensitive area. He arched his upper body to look at her. The expression on her face was not the kind of flushed beauty or charm associated with sex; instead it was more like peace from redemption. She nearly jumped up to grab hold of him. Choking on tears, she said, “I always felt that my body was so filthy I could never cleanse it no matter how I tried.” Her tears dripped onto his body through the open collar of his shirt. “Last night that White GI pushed down hard on me and kissed every part of my body, including. . . . I hate him. It’s fine now; now I feel fine. My body is mine again.” 47 In Jian Suzheng’s view, the young woman’s action represents a new attitude toward provincial identities: The contradiction that [the young woman] “cannot marry a Mainlander but can sleep with foreigners as a prostitute” can be resolved only after the barrier between provincial groups is dismantled and the provincially based labels of “self ” and “other” are peeled off. There is nothing sexual about the young woman playing an active role and guiding Jin Hongzao to caress her body. First of all, it is a symbolic gesture of the mingling of the Taiwanese and Mainlander, and secondly, it represents a female resistance to political struggle and demand to take back the control of her own body.48

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Jian’s well-intentioned reading notwithstanding, it is difficult not to consider this passage an expression of male fantasy, as it remains unclear how a young woman guiding an older man, her own father’s friend, to touch her naked body constitutes the elimination of provincial differences. Jian and perhaps the author seem to be suggesting that the mere fact that the young Taiwanese woman asks a mainland man to touch her is evidence enough for the emergence of a new attitude toward provincial differences. Such a reading/writing inevitably elides the issue of victimhood and simplifies the cause of the 2/28 Incident. That is, by using the intimacy between a Taiwanese woman and a mainland man, both of whom are victims of 2/28, to suggest the elimination of provincial hatred, Jian and Yang imply that provincial differences were the sole or primary cause of the incident. Although I will not present historical research to refute such a simplistic explanation, the many works by historians and scholars clearly point to far more complicated causes. How the young woman’s action can represent resistance to political struggle remains unclear as well, both logically and narratologically. This reading likely comes from the fact that at her grandmother’s request and at her father’s bier, she swore not to marry a mainlander, so that actively seeking body contact with Jin, a mainlander, and thus disregarding her earlier promise can be considered a defiant act. But the passage just quoted displays at best a crude understanding of female subjectivity vis-à-vis ethnic conflict. If indeed the young woman is motivated by a desire to defy familial control over her body, then doesn’t Jian Suzheng’s idea of symbolic attitude toward provincial harmony mean a different kind of ideological yoke? Once again, female subjectivity has been subsumed under ethnic politics.

Who Is the Victim in “The Devil in a Chastity Belt”? “The Devil in a Chastity Belt” is the first story in Li Ang’s famous and, to some, infamous collection Everyone Sticks Incense into the Beigang Burner. Criticism of the collection following its publication is well known and not particularly relevant to my study.49 Suffice it to say that the story and others in the collection explore the relationship between sex and politics and the means by which women gain power in Taiwan.

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The debates and scandal, however, have obscured the aspect of the female victim of an authoritarian government and Li Ang’s subversion of the definition of victimhood.The stories examined in this chapter so far have focused on female victims who suffer either because of family members (father or brother) or because of an untimely presence at the scene of a massacre, all of them “guilty” by association. Common among such literary works, women appear innocent even by today’s standard; that is, none of them is portrayed as a member of the Communist Party or as a left-leaning intellectual, even though there were a few female activists and Communist Party members.50 Furthermore, these women are usually presented as passive recipients who atone for other’s crimes or are simply incapable of living on their own. It is in this discursive milieu that Li Ang’s story becomes poignant and meaningful. The nameless protagonist, later nicknamed the “Grieving Founding Mother,” comes from a Taiwanese middle-class family, which gives her an education in music, Japanese tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and literature. As a high-school music teacher, her only connection with politics at first is her husband, “Cannon,” a legislator who was arrested during a crackdown on political dissent. After her husband, whose only crime was meeting with foreign observers, is sentenced to fifteen years in prison, she is elected as a people’s representative and later becomes a legislator. Similar to other female protagonists in stories dealing with the 2/28 Incident or the White Terror, the nameless Grieving Founding Mother is an involuntary participant in politics. In this way, Li Ang underscores Taiwan’s gendered political arena, in which women are not expected to and are usually discouraged from playing an active political role.51 Unique to Taiwanese opposition politics, however, a few women, like the protagonist, gained visibility and political positions when the men in their lives were arrested and imprisoned during the White Terror. The irony of the Grieving Founding Mother is that it is precisely her husband’s arrest that gives her the opportunity to become active in politics. Accordingly, if active participation in politics is a form of female empowerment, then Li Ang has completely subverted the definition of a female victim by problematizing the meaning of victimhood. That is, without her husband’s arrest, she would never have become a victim, but her victimhood, in turn, has

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given her political resources unavailable at the time to many other Taiwanese, men and women alike. Nonetheless, the author refuses to pin down the definition of victimhood by making her protagonist’s participation dubiously motivated. The Grieving Founding Mother has gone into politics not because she is interested in opposition’s cause but because she believes that it is the only way for her to be reunited with her husband. Even she herself, after a remarkable performance in the congress, intimates to a woman writer that “there is nothing great or admirable about me; I didn’t choose to make this sacrifice willingly. All I want is to go back to the life I had before, with my husband back beside me, and a home of our own, and our two children.”52 Her confession may read like a glorification of motherhood and wifedom, but a sense of irony is discernible if we contrast the emphasis on her role as a mother/wife with the grandiose nickname/title, the Grieving Founding Mother, bestowed on her.That is, she would rather be a full-time mother than the founding mother of the nation, but circumstance and the political realities of Taiwan demand that she forgo the former and adopt the identity of the latter. Li Ang also seems to be proposing a different kind of victimhood, one derived not from the imprisonment of her husband but from the unbearable burden of martyrdom. In contrast to the ambiguity concerning the force behind the protagonist’s transformation from a graceful music teacher into a political activist, Li Ang explicitly portrays her as a desexualized being: “Her romance and her love-life as a woman had forever ceased to be in her thirty-second year, on the Christmas Eve of the Big Arrest.”53 From then on, frozen in time and space, she can only be the “grieving mother of the nation,” leading a life of “forced celibacy and repressed sexuality,”54 not a woman with feelings and desires.The process and function of defeminization call to mind Ban Wang’s discussion of the sublime and gender: Sublimation is a transformation from a lower to a higher, purer state of existence. In psychoanalytical terms, this would mean a transformation of instinctual and libidinal energies into “higher,” culturally sanctioned and valued activities. In the light of the tension between the masculinist sublime and the feminine detail, this implies that culture is a process of overcoming and sublimating the

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feminine. It is a constant vigil to defend against those disruptive, feminine elements.55 In the masculine world of opposition politics, the feminine is indeed considered disruptive, and sexual desire must be suppressed in order for the grieving mother to complete her induction into the hall of (male) politicians. But more important, the grieving mother stops smiling after she is forced to send her children abroad to avoid discrimination. In other words, the formation of the Grieving Founding Mother is completed by her separation from her children, not by her husband’s arrest. Thus we must ask, for whom is the founding mother grieving? As a mother, she grieves for the loss of her children, but she is not simply a mother; she is the mother of the country (guomu). A different, higher meaning is ascribed to her, a simple woman with a simple wish for a happy family life, and she is doomed to play the greater role. Appealing to her motherly role in the family (jia) to counter the political persecution from the nation (guo), she nevertheless falls into the trap of a depersonalized identity, because the meaning of her existence, not unlike that of Cai Qianhui, is contingent on the rhetoric of family. This kind of victimhood is gender specific and is inflicted on the woman not only by an oppressive government but also by men in the opposition camp. In order to exploit the image of a political prisoner’s wife, the men in the party prescribe a rigid quasi-widowhood, and her career as a public figure is forever clouded by suspicion regarding her ability to fully participate in opposition politics:56 “Since women were defined in terms of reproductive and caretaking functions for which they were assumed to be suited by nature, they were excluded from full participation as citizens.”57 Ironically, it is precisely this function of caretaker that is exploited by the opposition camp.That is, the image of a mother grieving for her fatherless children (not for her loss of a husband) serves as the ultimate accusation against government oppression. Also noteworthy is Li Ang’s moniker for the female protagonist: the Grieving Founding Mother (of the Nation), or Beishang de guomu. Quoting John Schaar’s writing on authority, Kathleen Jones observed that “the founding of communities constitutes a symbolic birth unique among all births: it is a birth without mothers.”58 But the birth of an imagined Republic of Taiwan is a birth by mothers alone.Whether by

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serendipity or by design, Li Ang creates a guomu not only to counter the dominant discourse of the Guomindang, whose iconic founder, Dr. Sun Yat-sun, is the founding father, guofu, but also as a gesture to reclaim authority in the ambivalent status of women in the opposition camp. Consequently, the grieving mother in Li Ang’s story operates in a narrow space cracked open by the unique political conditions of Taiwan, but she is forever walking a tightrope that is the very embodiment of such ambiguous victimhood.

" At the beginning of this chapter, I introduced women from three different regions and the pivotal roles they played (willingly or unwillingly) in shaping their nations’ tradition at a particular historical juncture. In colonial Algeria, the unveiling of the indigenous women became a civilizing project for the French, and the reveiling by the Algerian male authority represented a sign of recovered Algerian cultural heritage. Indian widows and sati were turned into a virtual site of immolating Indian tradition in a contest of scriptural interpretation. In both countries, women were marginalized, set aside as trophies to be claimed by the victors. Similarly, in their readings of Xiao Hong’s novel about women and suffering, Chinese male intellectuals chose to view them as victims of foreign aggression rather than as women oppressed by Chinese culture and poverty. It is no coincidence that women in Algeria, India, and China gained such discursive attention at similar junctions of their history: the birth of a new nation, which was carried out through the contestation of traditions and the creation of new historical narratives.59 Not dissimilarly, Taiwan after martial law witnessed the birth of a new nation with a new historiography, particularly in the literary field. Writers are re-creating scenes in and the impacts of various events to fill in the gaps in history, and a new Taiwan is being written into existence. In this body of literature, women as victims are clearly considered one of the most powerful tropes to convey a sense of injustice. What I cite as examples in my examination of the literary employment of female victims can be considered as quasi-archetypes: self-sacrificing wife, madwoman, prostitute, and grieving mother. This obviously is not an exhaustive list of female victims in reality, for, as mentioned earlier,

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literary works generally exclude female activists and Communists. We read about fictional re-creation of Zhong Haodong’s unflinching walk toward the execution ground, but we cannot find a literary portrayal of female victims in such a circumstance.60 This sort of selective, somewhat narrow, roster is politically motivated because writers need a particular type of victim to advance their agenda, whether to condemn moral degeneration and a loss of ideals or to indict the pernicious effects of the White Terror. Yet as I have shown in analyzing Li Ang’s story, the definition of victimhood is in fact never transparent. Such equivocal portrayals of women as victims not only indicate an evolving understanding of Taiwanese history but also become a crucial narrative device that helps avoid what was best summed up by David Wang: “A ritual account of the most repugnant crime can degenerate into a most boring pastime and ultimately trivialize the crime itself. A literature of constant engagement will produce the effect of a literature of alienation.”61

PART II

Cinematic Re-creation

we have seen that under martial law, the political climate in Taiwan was inhospitable to literary portrayals of government atrocity against its people. Nonetheless, writers devised a variety of strategies to circumvent the restrictions and subvert the taboos. In contrast, cinematic re-creation had to wait until 1989, when Hou Hsiao-hsien filmed A City of Sadness. To be sure, there were many reasons that cinematographic representation took so long to appear. All things considered, in terms of venue and finance, it was easier for writers to publish their work and to pass censorship, as long as the portrayal was not overly and overtly critical of the government. But this was difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish in film production. It therefore is not surprising that A City of Sadness came on the scene two years after martial law was lifted. Since then, filmmakers have had a more or less free rein in presenting Taiwan’s past on the screen,1 even sometimes with official endorsement.2 By default, cinematic re-creations of the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror fall under the purview of historical film, a contested medium in its potential to represent and misrepresent history, as well as create (false) memories of the past: “Film changes the rules of the historical game, insisting on its own sort of truths, truths which arise from a visual and aural realm that is difficult to capture adequately in words.”3 The truths purported to be conveyed through historical films, however, should never be considered the truth, for as Pierre Sorlin reminded us many years ago, “historical films are all fictional.”4 For post–martial law Taiwan, a difficulty resides in the inherent contradiction between being receptive to the “truth” imparted by historical

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films and being keenly aware of the subgenre’s fictionality, particularly because the historical past was unearthed and the events were dramatized in film almost simultaneously.5 What and how, then, can we learn from historical films? Or as a historian asked: “What criteria are applicable for judging visual history? How does film contribute to our sense of the past?”6 To these we might add questions such as: How do visual images represent atrocity differently than written words do, and how do the differences shape our perception and, to a certain extent, our memory of a certain historical event? Part II looks at a few films in order to investigate issues in cinematic re-creations of the 2/28 Incident and the White Terror. Chapter 4 examines the representational concept of contrasting the present with the past and studies the use and abuse of the past. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women features a film within a film, with an actress of the 1990s playing the wife of a leftist intellectual executed in the 1950s. This salient characteristic has prompted some critics to regard the film as a criticism of the aimless, decadent youth of the 1990s, who pale in comparison with the idealistic, dedicated intellectuals of an earlier time who were willing to die for their political convictions. Situating my analysis in the larger context and the effects of the White Terror, I argue that Good Men, Good Women explores the possibility of knowing about the past while exposing the devastating consequences of the White Terror for the Taiwanese and their unwillingness to confront that past. Hsu Hsiao-ming’s Heartbreak Island juxtaposes the main characters’ past during the 1979 Formosa Incident with their post-incarceration present. In this film, the past is narrated in several flashbacks that serve, in Maureen Turim’s term, as causality; that is, the flashbacks are used to construct a causal link between past events and present actions. The shortcoming of this film technique is that it reduces the Formosa Incident to a motivational force behind the female protagonist’s fatal actions. Both Hou’s and Hsu’s films are based on literary works examined in chapter 2, the former partially on Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” and the latter on Dong Nian’s “Last Winter.” Accordingly, this chapter concludes with an analysis of the cinematic adaptation of literary works. Chapter 5 begins with an examination of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness and the controversy surrounding his portrayal of the 2/28

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Incident. A City of Sadness was severely attacked immediately after its release in Taiwan. Subsequently, scholars and critics came to its defense by pointing out its unique cinematic techniques and narrative content, which now are considered a breakthrough in Taiwanese cinema. The circumstance that elicited these diametrically opposed reactions is complicated and falls outside the range of this study. Of interest here is a question raised by Hou’s detractors, whether the film is indeed about the 2/28 Incident, since it centers on a Taiwanese family and the rise and fall of their fortunes.7 Another issue revolves around the representation of violence. Both issues are at the core of representing atrocity and force us to ask exactly what “should be” re-created on the screen and how. Answers to these questions can be found (albeit in an analogous way) in Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness. Both A City of Sadness and March of Happiness use the strategy of indirectly depicting the incident by emphasizing the individuals and their lives over the historical incident itself, a cinematic style known as Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life), “a form of micro-analysis of history” from the perspective of ordinary people.8 Chapter 6, on Wan Ren’s Super Citizen Ko, explores the functions of memory and its cinematic re-creation in the form of flashback. Unlike the flashbacks with a single originator in Heartbreak Island, Super Citizen Ko recasts the past through the flashbacks of the two main characters, the former political prisoner Ko and his daughter. When discrepancies arise in their flashbacks of the same event, a contest is waged between the father’s concerns for the political, public state of Taiwan and the daughter’s personal, private longing for a happy family life.The indictment of the government’s thought police, which was a hallmark of the White Terror, comes through most powerfully when the public and the private clash, when passion for the country’s future results in eighteen years of imprisonment and a broken family. With its cinematic subject and techniques, this film raises such issues as accountability, responsibility, and recovery from trauma, all of which have been deemphasized in Taiwan’s search for truth and reconciliation.

4. Past Versus Present

earlier chapters discussed the narratorial functions of contrasting the past and the present in literary representation. For instance, in “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang,” Lin Shenjing uses the contrast to highlight better, more harmonious ethnic relations, as opposed to an earlier time when misunderstanding and distrust wrecked the lives of the Taiwanese villagers and the nameless mainlander. Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road,” in contrast, privileges the past over the present in its condemnation of capitalism in Taiwan.Whether the past is rife with ethnic conflict and the present is free of tension, or the past is praised for political idealism and the present is censured for indulgence in material comfort, the contrast is manipulated to serve political ends or politicize the re-creation of a turbulent era. After the lifting of martial law in 1987, members of the intellectual and political arenas were finally given an opportunity to look back and reflect on the period of suppression of dissent and protest. Consequently, changes in the political climate and cultural terrain have often resulted in a comparison of past and present. Some people lament the loss of innocence and political conviction, and others condemn the politicians’ exploitation of opposition movements for political capital. For instance, Hsu Hsiao-ming, who directed the movie Heartbreak Island, points out that “many people in our society have benefited politically and economically from the Formosa Incident” of 1979.1 The question of whether the past can ever be completely recaptured and re-created in literary and cinematic texts continues to plague practitioners of both art forms. The concern over the demands placed on film directors and

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audiences in the cinematic representation of the past is dramatized in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women, the third installment of his Taiwan trilogy.This chapter examines further the contrast between past and present and analyzes the ways of representing the White Terror on the screen. As Hou’s and Hsu’s films were adapted from literary texts, a comparative study of film and fiction further illuminates the complexities of narrating the oppressive White Terror era.

GOOD MEN , GOOD WOMEN

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women is partially based on Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon,” which was analyzed in chapter 2. Lan’s text adopts the form of personal testimony, having eyewitnesses speak directly to the reader about Zhong Haodong’s life and following a roughly linear progression, from Zhong’s birth in 1908 to his execution in 1950. In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinematic rendition, personal testimony is replaced by a different narrative strategy: a film within a film. A movie is being made about the experiences of two real-life figures from Taiwan’s past, Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu, played by the actress Liang Jing, whose own life also is divided into past and present. In her past (three years earlier), her boyfriend was shot to death while dancing with her in a nightclub. Liang Jing settled the gangland murder by accepting 3 million new Taiwan dollars. In her present, the anonymous person who stole her diary calls her on the telephone without speaking and faxes her portions of the diary concerning her relationship with her now deceased boyfriend. The film within a film is shot in black and white, and Liang Jing’s life is done in color. Voice-overs describe Jiang Biyu’s life, with Liang Jing as the narrator. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s strategy in Good Men, Good Women is an extension of his techniques in the first two films in the trilogy, which intentionally distance the audience from the events depicted on the screen.That is, between the first and third film, the trilogy increasingly emphasizes the untrustworthy nature of visual representation. Hou’s second installment, The Puppet Master (Ximeng rensheng, 1993), tries to prevent the audience from identifying with the characters by having an actor, Lim Giong (Lin Qiang), play the puppet master, Li Tianlu, while Li himself speaks directly to the audience about his life. Such features keep the

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audience aware of the artificiality of representation, for “transparent ‘documentation’ of historical ‘truth’ is impossible. Knowledge of the past is always subjective and fragmentary, shaped by the needs and concerns of the individual writing in the present moment.”2 In Good Men, Good Women, Hou reaches the apogee of his distancing narrative style, applying a technique that is simultaneously self-referential and selferasing. By showing the process of filmmaking and by framing the life story of Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu in film fragments, Hou forces the audience to confront the process of make-believe and cinematic artifice.That is, the movie constructs the stories of Jiang Biyu and Liang Jing while simultaneously deconstructing the process. The final installment of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan trilogy was originally to be set in contemporary (1990s) Taiwan, portraying a political prisoner’s difficulty in adjusting to post–martial law Taiwan upon his release. It was intended to contrast Taiwan’s past and present, as the film would conclude a trilogy covering the island’s history from Japanese colonization to post–martial law Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the original story line was later replaced by the life of Jiang Biyu and Zhong Haodong, as portrayed in Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon,” although the contrast between past and present was preserved in the narrative technique of a film within a film. Consequently, as I have indicated, some people consider the film as criticism of the Taiwanese youths of the 1990s for their indulgence in material comfort, moral degeneration, and aimless lifestyles.3 But I argue that although plausible, such an interpretation is too narrowly teleological, for the director is not content merely to depict a clear-cut contrast. Instead, the most noticeable cinematic feature of Good Men, Good Women—layering the stories of Jiang Biyu and Zhong Haodong’s lives in China and Taiwan and Liang Jing’s past and present—is a narrative technique dramatizing the pernicious effects of the White Terror by exploring the ways the Taiwanese approach their past while raising questions about our knowledge of the past, both personal and national.

What Is the Past? Unlike Lan Bozhou’s story, which covers the life of Zhong Haodong more or less in its entirety, Hou’s rendition uses the film within a film

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to focus on Jiang and Zhong’s life before their departure for China and the period immediately following their return to Taiwan. Obviously, although a film within a film cannot encompass the lifetime of a character, this narrative strategy is able to highlight the fragmentary nature of a quasi-biography. The filming allows us to see only snippets of the characters’ lives; the juxtaposition of three time zones further enhances the discontinuity, while problematizing our knowledge of events. It also raises the question of how someone, film director or not, represents the past. As the following analysis shows, the issues of what one can know and how one recounts the past are contingent on each other and mutually implicated. One scene that subtly but effectively tackles the impossibility of knowing the whole truth is of a discussion group session led by Zhong following his return to Taiwan, the one that most directly touches on the cause of his arrest. He concludes that the 2/28 Incident resulted from the landowners’ exploitation of the tenant farmers rather than from a conflict between the Taiwanese and the newly arrived mainlanders. Whether or not his interpretation is accurate should not concern us here; instead, what is of interest is the filmmaker’s oblique reference to the impossibility of understanding the past, either recent or distant. There is a sense of futility in Zhong’s downfall, as his attempt to understand the causes of a recent event and his efforts to spread his belief prove to be fatal. In short, the past can be dangerous. The sense that the past simply cannot be recaptured is presented in a highly allegorical manner in a scene in which Jiang and her friends become prisoners, accused of spying for the Japanese. This is the first extended depiction of their life in China and the tenuous connection with their distant past—the Motherland. In repeated and yet somewhat varied interrogation scenes, an interpreter is required to negotiate between the Taiwanese-speaking intellectuals and the suspicious Cantonese-speaking army officer. Four of the prisoners—Jiang Biyu, Xiao Daoying, Xiao Daoying’s wife, and Zhong Haodong—are repeatedly asked about their reasons for coming to China. Although humor is inserted in the interrogation,4 it is evident that emotional ties between the Taiwanese and the mainland are hopelessly broken by misunderstandings and distrust, which are exacerbated by the language barrier. Seemingly to push this issue to its extreme, Liang Jing narrates the

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circumstances surrounding Zhong’s publication of Enlightenment and how a reader inadvertently exposed his own identity and was arrested by the Nationalist government, a scene that is described over a blackand-white shot of Jiang Biyu’s burning books at home. It is a brief shot with no dialogue; the audience must rely on Liang’s voice-over narration to make the connection between the underground publication and the reason for the book burning. A question concerning this cinematographic strategy immediately arises: Why use Liang Jing instead of a dialogue or intertext? I suspect that Liang’s voice-over adds yet another layer of uncertainty to the “facts.” Narrating the reason for Zhong’s arrest does not necessarily entrust Liang with authority or any claim to truth, although the audience is asked to believe that she knows the facts and is able to supply us with an explanation. Avrom Fleishman’s analysis of an external speaker of a voice-over best exemplifies Liang Jing’s role: For an external narrator, to speak in voice-over is to declare authority as an ultimate source of the story and yet . . . to refrain from personal responsibility for the statements made. This is much in the manner of the novelistic “omniscient narrator,” a purportedly neutral deliverer of the facts themselves that, upon inspection, turns out to be a coded system for inducing this impression.5 By external voice-over, Fleishman means that the narrator is not a character in the event that he iterates, which, when applied to Good Men, Good Women, is complicated, since Liang Jing is a character in the movie but not in the film within a film she is making. Her authority is undercut as it is being established, further creating the impression of Liang Jing as an untrustworthy narrator. Liang Jing’s dubious credibility is introduced in several scenes early in the movie, in which we see her and others in costume, posing for a still photographer. These shots are preparation for the filming of the film within a film and are followed by another scene in black and white, an actual scene from the film within a film. These scenes simultaneously serve two functions: they underscore the fragmentary nature of the story being told in the movie and, at the same time, remind the audience of the artificiality of filmmaking. Moreover, a brief, dialogueless, lovemaking scene in the past between Liang Jing

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and her boyfriend appears just before these introductory shots of moviemaking. The contrast is so striking that spectators must alter their viewing habits and their subjective relation to the film, what the Russian Formalists termed the technique of defamilarization: “Film audiences for whom ‘seeing is believing’ tend to forget that cinematic visualizations of history are not transparent windows on the past or mirror reflections but are, like verbal narratives, constructed re-presentations.”6 This defamiliarization appears in The Puppet Master, in which Li Tianlu, on whose life the film is based, speaks directly into the camera in a movie about him played by an actor. But whereas The Puppet Master seems to imply the blurring of “acting, dreams, and life” (hence the Chinese title, Ximeng rensheng), Good Men, Good Women privileges the acting part. Unlike Lan Bozhou’s story, which gives detailed descriptions of Zhong and Jiang’s life and living conditions, as well as the guilt Jiang feels after giving away her son, Hou’s film within a film deals with this time period (spanning five years) with just a few scenes. Even the Japanese, whose military presence in China is the cause of the couple’s patriotic efforts, are given minimal space, specifically a scene in which they sneak into the Chinese village where Jiang is staying, to steal food. It is obvious that Hou is not interested in making an antiwar movie. Still, the fact that the principal villain of modern Chinese history is pushed to the periphery is noteworthy, that rather than being shown brutalizing the Chinese or pillaging their homes, the Japanese merely steal a little food from the Chinese villagers. Although some viewers may fault Hou Hsiao-hsien for not painting a more negative picture of the Japanese, for not directly depicting the savagery so well documented in history books and so often seen in anti-Japanese films, Hou renders them inconsequential and forces the viewers to focus on the individual: Jiang Biyu. More important to our purpose is Hou’s interest in the people’s history and the use of a single, brief shot of the theft to encompass all of Jiang’s life on the mainland.

What to Do with the Past If Hou’s Good Men, Good Women is intended to contrast the idealism and sacrifice of a group of Taiwanese intellectuals with the decadent and

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meaningless life of modern-day Taiwan youth, as some critics contend, the character of Liang obviously serves to exemplify the contrast. Yet, if we consider how Liang Jing deals with her own recent past and the distant past, Jiang’s life, the focus of this contrast becomes blurred. First, there is a palpable disconnect from the past and an apparent unwillingness to recall her own past.The movie opens with a shot of Liang Jing’s apartment.The phone rings, waking up Liang, who is, as usual, sleeping amid a pile of blankets and pillows. She gets up and walks slowly over to her fax machine, from which a page of her diary is hanging, waiting for her. From her voice-over, we learn that the diary entry records a recent lovemaking scene with “L” on the third anniversary of the death of Liang’s boyfriend, Ah Wei. After reading the fax, she goes into her bathroom; the camera remains outside, and we hear her singing about lost love. Nothing in this shot tells us about how she feels; there is no emotion in her voice.This shot shows us a young woman who seems to be unaffected by her past, an impression reinforced by the subsequent shot, which shows her making love with Ah Wei. The two scenes do not appear to be connected, and Liang Jing seems intent on living a life devoid of any memory of her past. The distant past of Jiang Biyu, the character she plays in the movie, appears to mean even less to her. We thus are left to wonder whether she is really apathetic to her past or if the past is so hard for her to face that she pretends not to care. The same scenario is repeated in the next shot of the present-day Liang Jing. The phone is ringing again, and this time she answers but there is no response, except for the fax machine that continues to spit out a longer section of her diary. Prasenjit Duara’s comparison of history with a telephone call is fascinatingly applicable here: “History comes to us like a telephone call to which we are obliged to respond, presumably, within its initiating framework. Thus we in the present together with our caller from the past, are coproducers of the past.”7 If we substitute “history” with “the past,” then we see Liang Jing’s past coming back to her in the form of a telephone call. But there is no response when she answers. The initiating framework is unknown to her, and lacking the coproducer, she is unable to produce the past. She thus must rely on the faxed page from her diary, but the diary itself comes to her in fragments. Symbolically, this is a particularly important scene, for it sets the tone and defines the theme of the movie: the ambiguous way in which the

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Taiwanese approach their past. During the martial law era, the government suppression denied the past, especially the 2/28 Incident, to the people. It was an imposed collective amnesia. When the people were finally allowed to look back and examine the past after martial law was lifted, they were confronted with the lack of an initiating framework, as is Liang Jing in the movie, when the caller from the past refuses to communicate with her: “How we respond to the call and how differently we may respond from each other reflects both our present circumstances and our creativity.”8 The circumstances reflected in Liang Jing’s life and in the Taiwanese people’s present is the inability to produce a meaningful response. They are left bewildered, which exemplifies the effect of the White Terror. Following this allegorical reading, we see the faxed pages of her diary as a form of written history, the most common means through which we know about the past. This metaphor is reinforced by the thermal fax paper that transmits uncut documents. As the machine spews them out continuously, we are presented with the illusion of continuity: one entry follows another, creating a false sense of linkage between entries.9 But the diary entry is incomplete on two accounts. First, the faxed pages are only a portion of a book-length diary, and second, even if the diary were whole, it could present only an incomplete record of what has happened, because the recorder of the diary cannot cover any one day’s events comprehensively. Likewise, for the people in Taiwan over the past forty years (from 1947 to 1987), history as they know it is highly subjective and full of omissions. We can draw an analogy between the stolen diary and modern Taiwanese history, particularly pertaining to the 2/28 Incident.That is, by forbidding the Taiwanese to talk and write about this part of their past, the Guomindang government stole their history from them and, like Liang Jing’s experience of retrieving it through the fax machine, fed it back to the people in bits and pieces.10 Moreover, the process of reassembling historical information is fraught with manipulation, and what is offered often reads like fiction, which is implied in Liang’s monologue about the film they are shooting and why she feels she is turning into Jiang. “These, of course, are impossible thoughts thrust credibly into the audience’s head; that the black-and-white film it [the audience] has already been watching hasn’t been shot yet, and that real people are turning into fictional characters while fictional characters are turning into real ones.”11

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The faxed diary alerts us to the dual theme of Good Men, Good Women: the impossibility of gaining full knowledge of the past and an unwillingness to confront that past. To achieve the latter, Hou’s movie uses several narrative techniques to arrange the layered stories. The most obvious is Liang Jing’s interaction (or, more accurately, lack of interaction) with the role she is playing and, by extension, with Jiang Biyu’s past. We recall that Liang is first seen dressed in costume for a photo session, a shot without dialogue. In the early part of the filming, we often hear her refer to the movie in a dispassionate voice. For instance, in shot 17,12 Liang’s voice-over is juxtaposed with the visual image of a command center in Huidan, Guangdong:“It’s been close to a month since we started the rehearsal, but I have no idea when we’ll begin shooting the movie. I feel I’m becoming Jiang Biyu.” Her own words notwithstanding, Liang is never seen to be visibly affected by the role she is playing. Some critics might argue that the following scene, the interrogation by the Japanese, implies a kind of identification.That is, by jumping from the present-time Liang Jing to the historical Jiang Biyu, a connection between actor and role, present and past, is formed. I interpret the cut differently, as the comment on rehearsal is only one segment of Liang’s voice-over, which also includes a dream she had the night before about Ah Wei and her puzzlement over her sister’s negative attitude toward her. The inclusion of this personal information about the actor’s life not only minimizes the likelihood of Liang’s identifying with Jiang but also underscores Liang’s dubious connection with the past: the quasi-national past represented by Jiang, her own past with Ah Wei, and her problems with her sister. Later shots reinforce Liang’s uncertain connection with the multiple past. In shot 23, in which the imprisoned Jiang and others are being transported to another location, Liang Jing’s voice-over describes how the five of them were rescued. Her depiction sounds like the recitation of a script, with no emotional involvement in the events in the film within a film. Included in this voice-over is yet another brief reference to Jiang Biyu: “That day, when I went to the hospital to see Jiang Biyu, she said I look like her when she was young, and that she too was very pretty.” We are not privy to Liang’s inner world and do not know how she reacts to Jiang’s comparison, but the similarity between the two appears to be limited to the physical.13 The voice-over is carried into the next shot, in which Liang is looking at her fish bowl and wondering

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about her stolen diary:“I came home after filming today to find another faxed diary entry. I really don’t know why the thief stole my diary. The person calls but doesn’t say anything. It feels strange to read my own diary every day.” The juxtaposition of Jiang Biyu’s past and present and Liang’s past and present paints an intriguing picture. In a way, past and present are disjointed, with the past existing only on the periphery of their present life. It is, coincidentally, an echo of Liang’s comment about reading her diary—“strange”—an effect that is intensified by the use of voice-over, “a resource that can be used for the cinematic equivalents of two very different options in novelistic narration, third-person ‘omniscience’ and first-person retrospection—the apparently impersonal historian’s view and the subjective confessions of personal experience.”14 As a voiceover narrator of Jiang’s and her own life, Liang Jing plays both roles, and hence her narration hovers between the view of the historian and the confession of personal experience, which conveys a sense of disconnect that embodies the suppression of historical memories. Signs of a similar disconnect can be found in two other segments about Jiang’s life that Liang Jing narrates. In shot 41, in which the Japanese are shown running away after stealing the villagers’ food, the camera pans up to show the canopy of a tree while Liang states: Nineteen forty-five, the war with Japan was over. Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu ended their five years of guerrilla life on the mainland and returned to Taiwan. Zhong Haodong took up a position as principal at Keelung High School, while Jiang Biyu worked at the Taipei Radio Station. They had put their first-born son up for adoption in China because of the war; their second son died of a high fever the year they returned to Taiwan.15 In Lan Bozhou’s story, Jiang relates the incident and the guilt she felt about not taking good care of the child. In Hou’s movie, not only do we not see the scene acted out, but we also do not hear about it through Jiang’s voice. Instead, it is through the faceless voice of Liang Jing, the woman playing Jiang, that the death is made known to the audience. This scene also exposes how the story and the film deal differently with time and events. Lan’s story relates events in detail, punctuated by references to the time line. For instance, we are told that Zhong

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Haodong and Jiang Biyu returned to Taiwan in April 1946 (in the movie, we learn only that they returned to Taiwan shortly after the end of the war) and that their child died in August 1946. Lan’s story is rife with clashes between the public (national, historical incidents) and the personal (private, familial events). It is a text that is afraid of losing its significance if it is not contextualized in the historical. In contrast, Hou’s movie strives to focus on the personal, thereby glossing over the public occurrences. In the much discussed opening shot of A City of Sadness, the dismembered voice of the emperor of Japan is heard on the radio announcing Japan’s surrender, while the Taiwanese are busying themselves with personal activities surrounding the birth of a child in an adjoining room. Hou similarly tries to relegate public history to the margin of personal life in Good Men, Good Women. Furthermore, when public events are introduced with definitive dates in Good Men, Good Women, they are meant to cast more doubt on the validity of than to add clarification to the circumstances. An example is another scene narrated by Liang Jing that takes place before Jiang Biyu is arrested. Shot 43 shows Jiang Biyu burning books: In the fall of 1948, after school began at Keelung High School, Zhong Haodong and his friends started publishing Enlightenment. . . . In May 1949, the [Guomindang] retreated to Taiwan. In August, a graduate of the Business School at Taiwan University sent a copy of the underground publication to his girlfriend, thus revealing his identity and causing his arrest. Again Liang Jing’s voice is dispassionate and matter-of-fact. Most interesting, however, is how she plays the dual role of reader of and commentator on history. On the one hand, her emotionless voice gives the impression that she is merely reciting events in Zhong and Jiang’s life. On the other hand, her recitation of the enactment of events gives the appearance that she is making a connection between cause (the underground newspaper) and effect (the arrest). Liang serves as a bridge between actions and consequences. But is this really how truth is revealed? As Walter Benjamin reminds us: “Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously.”16 In Good Men, Good Women, the

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causal linkage is intentionally broken and blurred because it is not Hou’s intention to point out the way to search for truth or even imply that truth can be discovered at all. The shot following Jiang’s arrest depicts an argument between Liang Jing and her sister, who accuses Liang of seducing her husband.17 An argument leading to a physical confrontation further suggests the theme of unknowable facts: Liang Jing denies any involvement with her “brother-in-law,” whereas her sister cites what other people are saying to prove her case. These two shots of Jiang’s past and present seem unrelated; at most we can say that Liang’s argument with her sister serves again to contrast the triviality of her life with Jiang’s. But does Jiang Biyu’s life really have no bearing on Liang Jing’s life, and does one’s past, whether personal or national, indeed leave no marks on one’s present? To answer these questions, we must examine the ending of the movie. In shot 51, Liang is again harassed by the anonymous, silent caller when her fax machine spews out yet another long roll of her diary. Dragging the faxed paper with her, Liang Jing begins talking to the person on the other end. She asks the caller why he or she took her diary and, at one point, actually begins to call the caller Ah Wei, begging him to come back. This scene is followed by four shots dealing with Zhong Haodong’s death. In shot 56, the second-to-last shot of the movie, Jiang Biyu is seen burning spirit money as she reads a letter from Zhong Haodong. When she finishes, she looks up and wails. If Liang’s one-sided telephone conversation with the thief indicates a blurring of past and present, then the arrangement of the shots of Liang and Jiang also implies a connection between the two, however tenuous that connection might be. Jiang’s life is implicated in Liang’s life;18 since we all are shaped by our pasts, whether personal or national, the final installment of Hou’s Taiwan trilogy can be regarded as a comment on the complex, contentious past that cannot be easily understood or interpreted but is nevertheless intricately connected with the present.

HEARTBREAK ISLAND

Heartbreak Island is the second film by Hsu Hsiao-ming, following Dust of Angels (Shaonianye, an la! 1992), a realist dissection of 1990s youths living on the margins of Taiwan’s prosperity. With its vivid depiction

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of violence and drug use, Dust of Angels was derived from the director’s concern about a generation of youth from broken families in a rapidly changing rural society that is ill equipped to deal with the impact of modernization. Hsu is a highly political filmmaker with a clear social conscience who does not shy away from ideological teleology, which is even more noticeable in Heartbreak Island. In an interview with the preeminent film critic Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping, Hsu revealed that after reading the film script adaptation of Dong Nian’s “Last Winter,” by Guo Zheng, a novelist in his own right, he read the novella himself and was deeply moved. He then worked with Guo Zheng and Dong Nian to revise the script, a process filled with disagreements. Guo Zheng wanted to cast the female protagonist (Chen Linlang) as a quasi-proletarian revolutionary, and Dong Nian, unfettered by Guo’s “Marxist critique of a small minority monopolizing the majority of resources,” regarded the sources for the novella and film script purely from the perspective of personal experience.19 Hsu had his own agenda for the cinematic representation of the Formosa Incident of 1979, which is best summed up in his own words: “I tend to feel contemptuous of those who turned their back on their own ideals.”20 It is therefore not surprising that Hsu chose the contrast between past and present to explore changes in the lives of some of the activists who fell victim to government brutality in the aftermath of the Formosa Incident. In the film, Chen Linlang finally is released after thirteen years of incarceration. As a college student, Chen had been involved with her teacher Wang Rong, who was active in the opposition movement that culminated in the confrontation in Kaohsiung in the winter of 1979. Following an abortion, she leaves the site of conflict and checks into a hospital.When Wang comes to see her, he is arrested and later put in prison, from which he sends her a letter written in blood. Mistaking his invocation of their relationship as “eternal love,” Linlang turns to such extremist tactics as making and throwing bombs as a way to avenge his wrongful execution, for which she is arrested and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. After she reenters society, she finds, to her great disappointment and anger, that most of her former comrades have turned into complacent bourgeoisie who are content with their middle-class lifestyle.Worst of all is Wang Rong, now married with a newborn baby boy and running a successful coffee shop and qigong classes in the basement of the shop. Disillusionment,

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a sense of betrayal, and dislocation eventually drive Linlang to kidnap Wang’s son and, true to the ending of Dong Nian’s novella, to commit suicide by slitting her wrists. Just as Hsu Hsiao-ming, by declaring his contempt for those who betrayed their own ideals, made Heartbreak Island as a political statement and cinematic manifestation of personal belief, it also is easy for viewers and critics to treat this film as a mere diatribe. A closer examination, however, reveals that it is as much a tirade against Wang Rong and the like as a criticism of the effects of the White Terror. In other words,Wang Rong’s change in attitude resulted from the overall atmosphere of suppression and his personal experience of imprisonment. A look back at the past, however, raises more questions than answers in explaining the motivation for Wang’s metamorphosis and Linlang’s actions, particularly through a liberal use of flashbacks.These flashbacks, all from Linlang’s perspective, play a crucial role in dramatizing the contrast and demonstrate that ultimately the film calls for a political interpretation at the expense of the personal, the failed romance between Linlang and Wang Rong. Flashbacks, writes Maureen Turim, “give us images of memory, the personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past. In fact, flashbacks in film often merge the two levels of remembering the past, giving large scale social and political history the subjective mode of a single, fictional individual’s remembered experience.”21 In Linlang’s case, her flashbacks are clearly intended to serve as a collective memory of the lost past, in which personal history is intertwined with the political, and it is precisely this mixture that underscores the theme of the film. As Turim further explains, One of the ideological implications of this narration of history through a subjective focalization is to create history as an essentially individual and emotional experience. Another is to establish a certain view of historical causality and linkage. By presenting the result before the cause, a logic of inevitability is implied; certain types of events are shown to have certain types of results without ever allowing for other outcomes than the one given in advance.22 The historical causality in this film, represented through Linlang and, to a lesser extent, Wang Rong, fingers an oppressive political cli-

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mate as the culprit for the inevitable compromises one has to make. Furthermore, we should not take too literally Hsu Hsiao-ming’s selfproclaimed indictment of those who betray their ideals, for the cinematic style ultimately produces an irresolvable contradiction between directorial intent and the film.

Past as Causality Heartbreak Island has, strictly speaking, two pasts: the political—Wang’s involvement in opposition politics—and the personal—Linlang’s relationship with Wang Rong. Owing to the nature of the film, the political and personal aspects are intertwined from the very beginning. Since the flashbacks to Wang’s political activities and his relationship with Linlang are presented solely from her perspective, the political aspect is unavoidably colored by her recollection, interpretation, and re-creation, which serves as the historical causality and linkage posited by Turim. The director uses this historical causality to explain and dramatize Wang Rong’s betrayal, but the highly personalized nature of the flashbacks and their connection with the present problematize Linlang’s action, consequently turning the film into an examination of a former political activist/rehabilitated terrorist. All together there are seven flashbacks, presented in the classical sense of flashbacks in that, except for the first one, they all are triggered by Chen Linlang’s present situation and thought processes. But the flashbacks form an organic whole to explain her kidnapping Wang’s son and taking her own life. The film opens with shots of a long dark hallway and Linlang looking out through the slot in her prison cell door. Then the opening credits appear on the screen, followed by a Taipei cityscape, in which Wang Rong is engaged in a qigong session and his mother returns from shopping with his baby, who is then handed over to his wife, An-an.Then the camera cuts to Linlang in prison, thus beginning the first flashback: the voice-over news report of the riot in Kaohsiung (1979, about a decade earlier) bleeding into a scene at a hospital, where Linlang is lying in bed with a friend at her side when Wang Rong appears in the doorway.The police quickly come in and take him away. It is not until the fourth flashback that we learn the reason she was in the hospital: she had just had an abortion, and the hospital stay was the

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result of complications from the procedure. These two introductory segments draw a stark contrast between Wang’s normal family life and Linlang’s life in prison, as her flashback emphasizes the difference and gives the audience the first hint of her later actions. Like the disjointed arrangement of events depicted in Dong Nian’s original novella, Heartbreak Island begins with Linlang’s past in an anachronistic manner by flashing back to the reason of her imprisonment—Wang Rong’s arrest—but the connection is made clear only later when we learn from her conversation with Wang that she intends to avenge his (presumed) execution. In short, the Linlang of the past was not a political activist with strong beliefs but a young woman who had lost her lover/mentor to the Nationalist government’s political oppression. We are reminded of the Grieving Founding Mother in Li Ang’s “The Devil in a Chastity Belt,” in which the female protagonist loses her husband to the government’s surveillance machinery during the same incident. Whereas the Grieving Founding Mother opts for involvement in the political process—running for office—to counter the government’s power, Linlang chooses the radical action of making bombs. Both texts evoke the image of a suffering woman turning to political activism not because of her political convictions but because of her love for the man in her life. The main difference is, of course, that Linlang is looking backward to search for a reason to move forward, and since “recollection is about the confrontation with absence and forgetting,”23 her inability to deal with the changes in her present life drives her to further drastic, even desperate, measures. As triggers to recalling the past, the seven flashbacks explain more about Linlang’s action than about Wang Rong’s transformation, or about the (dis)connect between past and present. Flashbacks 2, 3, and 4, three consecutive segments, are sandwiched between similar shots of the newly freed Linlang in her old apartment. After the first flashback of Wang Rong’s arrest, we learn three important things about Linlang’s past: Flashback 2.Wang enlightens Linlang about inequalities in the world. Flashback 3. Wang and Linlang visit Wang’s hometown. Flashback 4. Linlang talks to a doctor about her pregnancy and her desire for an abortion.

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Flashback 2 is important in that it conveys the image of an apolitical Linlang, thus underscoring the changes taking place in her life. As the flashback begins, Wang is shown writing late into the night. When the sleeping Linlang wakes up, Wang instructs her on the importance of opposition movements, prompting her to question why he must be the one who fights the injustice. Flashback 3 takes Linlang and the audience back to Wang’s hometown, where his Taiwanese gentry family lives. We see Wang’s mother presenting a pair of golden bells (a homophone with Linlang’s name) to Linlang, and Wang’s father, like most Taiwanese parents, discouraging Wang from getting involved in politics. Taken together, these three flashbacks form an elliptical narrative of Linlang’s life before prison. Although they have no apparent logical connection (spatial or temporal) with one another, we must assume a chronological order from her initiation (into opposition politics) to a visit back to Wang’s hometown to her decision to stop the pregnancy. Maureen Turim’s observation on flashbacks with nostalgic characteristics is illuminating here: Nostalgia is a figure ambiguously attached to the flashback; the past is an object of desire, due to its personal, intense, and even liberating attributes, but it is also dangerous and frightening. Flashbacks in most cases terminate at precisely the point at which they must be sealed off, in which the imperatives of fixing interpretations and reaching judgments in the present must be imposed.24 We detect a sense of nostalgia at work in Linlang’s recollections, and indeed for her, a judgment has been reached and she finds Wang Rong in order to confront him. The next flashback, the fifth, occurs shortly after Linlang spots Wang and his family leaving in his car, and she faints. In this flashback we see the young Linlang running home to see her mother engaged in sexually charged intimacy with a man who is not Linlang’s father, whose absence is never explained. Then the camera cuts to a scene of the adult Linlang calling her mother from a pay phone.We can assume that this particular flashback is triggered by seeing Wang and his family, but the flashback itself also prompts her to phone her mother. The fusion of different facets of past and present elicits a subjective

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response that plays a significant role in a chain of actions in Linlang’s life after prison, because flashbacks infuse the present with the weight of the past, allowing an already subjectively rendered site to give way to another that is even more subjective, in that it is constituted as a memory image. If subjectivity is the site of these fictions, memory is the site that offers explanations for the dark subjectivity one experiences in the present. The flashback becomes a means of expressing the mood of remembrance in instances in which memory is bitter, nostalgic, melancholy, obsessive—anything but simply happy.25 In other words, Linlang’s past, presented as flashbacks, is used to illuminate the causes of her present actions. Turim’s characterization of the memory as bitter and obsessive is an apt description of Linlang’s state of mind. Although the obsessive nature of Linlang’s memory is an adequate explanation for her act of kidnapping, the flashback contributes little to linking her political beliefs to the kidnapping, especially when we examine the scene in which she confronts Wang Rong about the abandonment of his ideals. When Wang argues that “times have changed, and we must change too,” Linlang stresses that she wants to help him finish what they started, to which he responds,“You’re crazy.”The leap from her wish to continue their former activities to kidnapping his son is too great to be an acceptable explanation, except that her mental state is deteriorating rapidly. The arrangement of these flashbacks makes us wonder whether she is searching in her relationship with Wang for a surrogate family. This impression is intensified when she later kidnaps his son, since her abortion (depicted in flashback 4) has made it impossible for her to have children. Or perhaps she believes that Wang’s baby will replace the one she lost in order for her to form an imagined family. Either way, these flashbacks construct logical links and offer information about her personal motivation. The only direct reference to the Formosa Incident and Wang’s involvement in it appears in flashback 6, with highly symbolic significance. It is triggered by Wang’s letter written in blood, which Linlang finds at her mother’s house after she leaves prison. It is, we recall, this letter that turns her into an avenging bomb-making terrorist.The sight

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of the letter takes her and the audience back to the past, where she and Wang are engaged in a conversation; but we hear only a news report about the arrest of two members of the opposition movement on the day before a demonstration in Kaohsiung escalated into a violent confrontation between riot police and protesters. The conversation is followed by a scene in which Linlang visits an abortion clinic, after which Wang puts her on a bus back to Taipei.The flashback ends with her on the bus, watching the city of Kaohsiung become embroiled in unrest as blood begins to flow between her legs. Chronologically what comes next is the scene of her stay in the hospital, presented in flashback 1. Astute viewers will quickly grasp the connection among the blood Wang uses to write the letter, Linlang’s blood from the abortion, and, more subtly, the blood shed on the streets of Kaohsiung. Although the director indicated that he was interested more in exploring the lives of marginal figures involved in the Formosa Incident than in the incident itself or of major figures like Shi Mingde and Yao Jiawen, the reference to blood points to the film’s delicate engagement with violence that occurs at the scene, without resorting to a gory depiction. Linlang’s pregnancy, brought on because of her attraction to Wang Rong’s ideology and terminated on the eve of the Formosa Incident, symbolizes the end of an era. It is, ultimately, a fruitless struggle. Nonetheless, like the letter written in blood, the abortion has lasting repercussions in their lives a decade later. Similarly, the Formosa Incident of 1979, although resulting in the imprisonment of many opposition activists, has always been credited as the single most important event in Taiwan’s democratization. That is, the consequences of an event, whether personal, like a terminated pregnancy, or political, like an aborted attempt at obtaining greater civil liberties, can be influential for years afterward. Flashback 7, depicting Linlang’s intention to leave Wang Rong before the incident casts another shadow over her, for it leads to her kidnapping scheme. In the flashback, upon seeing her packing, Wang tells her that she can leave if she is afraid, and she replies tearfully that she is afraid for him, for his safety. By this time in the film, we know everything there is to know about their past and about his metamorphosis from political activist to “normal” bourgeois husband and father. It is safe to argue that by placing this last piece of information about

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the past here, the director intends the audience to see the reason why she kidnaps Wang’s baby: Linlang has become a woman avenging the wrong done to her by Wang Rong (and perhaps by society), which is exactly the kind of movie Hsu did not want to make.26 Compounding this (mis)representation of Linlang is her suicide, which further renders her as a displaced and dislocated character, a social misfit. It seems, however, inevitable that suicide is the way out for Linlang and perhaps for the film itself. If Linlang represents an unwanted past that post–martial law Taiwan, symbolized by Wang Rong, would rather bury, then what better way to deal with it than to literally kill it off? This is the impression left by the final scene of the film: an ambulance is driving off with Linlang’s body while Wang Rong stands there, one arm holding the baby and the other around his wife’s shoulder. Order has been restored in Wang’s life, which was temporarily disrupted by the haunting past, and Linlang, the ghost, has been exorcised with her suicide. The present is finally rid of the past. Appearing as the last flashback in the film, this scene deserves further discussion, not only because it reiterates Linlang’s reasons for her past and her present acts, but also because it serves the dubious function of conveying the alleged purpose of the film. At the end of the movie, when Wang confronts his former girlfriend-turnedkidnapper, he utters tearful regrets that it was his fault and that he should have let her leave years before. The former political activist’s sentiment is understandable, for from his perspective, he is responsible for Linlang’s transformation. But his lack of more meaningful reflection on the past is apparent and disturbing to the extent that we wonder whether Linglang, and not Wang, is the intended target of critique for betraying one’s ideals. That is, the characterization of Linlang as a kidnapper fails to convey the director’s contempt for those who betray their ideals, since she does not appear to have any political ideals and is portrayed as close to deranged.27 Most unsettling is the ending shot, in which Wang, along with his wife, is presented as a bereft parent and the victim of a vengeful former girlfriend. In order not to reduce the film to a melodrama of lost love and revenge, we must treat Linlang symbolically as Wang’s past coming back to haunt him. Wang’s distant attitude toward Linlang represents a disconnect with the past, similar to Liang Jing’s unwillingness to remember the past in

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Good Men, Good Women. Linlang’s imprisonment can then be considered as discarding or burying one’s painful memory of the past, even though the past remains in one’s unconscious. Not unlike Liang Jing’s distance from her own past and from Jiang Biyu’s life, Wang Rong’s desire to forget should not be regarded merely as emblematic of the victory of a bourgeois lifestyle over political dedication but as a result of the pernicious effects of the White Terror, which has changed a former political prisoner into someone who just wants to live a normal life.28 As mentioned earlier, Linlang’s suicide is a cinematically and politically expedient strategy to rid the present of the past, albeit in a disquieting manner that reminds us that “women, in being relegated to absence, silence, and marginality, have thereby also to a degree been relegated to the outskirts of historical discourse, if not to a position totally outside of history.”29

Present as Consequences Despite Hsu Hsiao-ming’s caustic criticism of people like Wang Rong, Heartbreak Island is more than a political diatribe. In fact, by examining the changes in the minor characters’ lives over the decade following the Formosa Incident, we discern its impact on them. For instance, the young college girl who was Linlang’s best friend is now the mother of two, and she refuses to tell Linlang where Wang Rong is, obviously believing that Linlang should forget about the past. In the scene in which Linlang asks about Wang, we see the girl crying on Linlang’s shoulder. Although we are not told the reason for her tears, we can speculate that despite a seemingly comfortable life and two children, she is not happy with her life. Also of interest is that Linlang is the one lending her a literal shoulder to cry on. Another friend, obviously a member of the opposition movement, is now selling cheap clothes in a night market. He justifies this development by claiming that times have changed and he needs to make a living.30 Yet another acquaintance from an earlier time, Jinguang, a political fanatic, wants to run for president and asks Wang to serve as the minister of defense in his administration if he is elected. Jinguang later offers Linlang the same position, reiterating the importance of treating the soldiers with love and care. Although we may laugh at Jinguang’s

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unrealistic dream and delusional fantasy about being the president, we cannot ignore the altered political climate after martial law was lifted, in which the naive dream of running for president is available to anyone, without fear of dire consequences. Compared with the persecution of activists who demanded more civil liberties during the demonstration that resulted in the largest-scale arrest since the 1950s, Jinguang’s freedom to say and do whatever he wants is a change that should not be ignored. Hence, his character invites us to ponder whether the present is indeed worse than the past. The film’s most problematic character is Linlang, whose search for Wang Rong and kidnapping of his son can be seen as an attempt to create an imagined family. After her release from prison, in addition to her disillusionment with the changes in her friends, Linlang returns to her home in a juancun (villagelike residential compounds for mainlanders relocated to Taiwan), only to find her mother lying dead in bed, an obvious suicide. This seemingly gratuitous plot twist serves to remind the audience that Linlang has nothing, no friends, no family. To be sure, we can attribute the changes, especially the belated news of her mother’s death, to the political oppression of the martial law era, which has created a distance between mother and daughter. But from a neighbor’s incessant criticism of Linlang, we learn that her flight from home, like her radical actions after Wang’s arrest, was not politically motivated. The problematic nature of Linlang’s character derives from her gender. As we have seen, in the fictional and cinematic rendition of defiance against government oppression in Taiwan, women are almost never depicted as active participants. They are either innocent bystanders, like the protagonist in “A Minor Biography of Huang Su,” or guilty by association, like the Grieving Founding Mother and Jiang Biyu. Linlang appears to be the only female character who takes control of her life, but the contrast between past and present makes her actions appear misguided and dubiously motivated. Here we may find it useful to contemplate E. Ann Kaplan’s questions about “the relationships between images of women on film and the level of fantasy, desire, unconscious wishes and fears that has both individual and social/historical formations. Whose desire is at work in a particular film? Whose unconscious is being addressed?”31 On a practical level, because the film script is the product of people with different

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ideologies, it inevitably results in a distracted film. On a discursive level, it is not too far-fetched to argue that Heartbreak Island addresses the unconscious of the Taiwanese (men) in the 1990s, while women serve as a foil for a cinematic gaze at the dislocated present and the lost past.

fiction versus film The differences between literature (mostly fiction) and cinema demand changes and adjustments when a literary work is adapted into a film, whether adapting John Steinbeck’s realist, social critique The Grapes of Wrath or John Fowles’s metafictional The French Lieutenant’s Woman: “When a novel, short story, or play is made into a movie, a metamorphosis occurs. We often speak simply of ‘filming a book,’ as though the characters in a work could step off the page and perform before a camera, but this expression fails to convey the complicated process involved.”32 When compounded by other factors, such as politics and ideology, the conversion to cinema can further alter a literary text to the point that a film bears only remote similarities to its original source.33 The two novellas, “Song of the Covered Wagon” and “Last Winter,” analyzed in chapter 2 use complex narrative strategies that only further complicate the adaptation process. Lan Bozhou’s utilization of eyewitness testimony, though technically easy to accomplish on screen, makes a poor cinematic version of the original. Similarly, the mise-en-scène of Dong Nian’s intricate chronology of events poses an insurmountable challenge to any director foolish enough to take on the task. Furthermore, different authorial and directorial intents accentuate the alterations that are inevitable in this process, as demonstrated by the following comparative analysis. Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” tries to restore history by focusing on an individual, but his employment of eyewitness accounts nevertheless underscores the reality that no account can claim to be complete. The narrative strategy of beginning Zhong Haodong’s story with the moment just before his execution also entails an artificiality that makes the reader keenly aware of its constructedness, despite the linear, progressive history—from his childhood to his

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unjust death—that follows. Moreover, by inserting itemized historical events, the narrative also creates the perception that public events are somehow more important than an individual’s life, which, in turn, privileges the very government-oriented historical writings that Lan sets out to refute. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women, in contrast, narrates two women’s lives in a disjointed manner while questioning our knowledge of the past. In an oblique way, it also examines the Taiwanese people’s approach to their past. Liang Jing, living a life seemingly detached from her own past, as well as Jiang Biyu’s past, is emblematic of such an attitude. But the structure of the movie also underscores people’s tenuous connection with their past. Robert A. Rosenstone’s comment on experimental films best characterizes Hou’s approach to the past in Good Men, Good Women: “History as experiment does not make the same claim on us as does the realist film. Rather than opening a window directly onto the past, it opens a window onto a different way of thinking about the past. The aim is not to tell everything, but to point to past events, or to converse about history, or to show why history should be meaningful to people in the present.”34 It is clear that Lan Bozhou and Hou Hsiao-hsien have approached the representation of the White Terror very differently. As someone who has been continually interviewing and unearthing eyewitnesses and survivors, Lan is keen on rediscovering the past.35 In his effort to comprehend and recover that past, he cannot avoid the logic of causality. For instance, Zhong Haodong’s eventual execution is seen as a result of his involvement in leftist activities, which is directly linked to the Guomindang’s anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. Hou Hsiao-hsien, in contrast, explores the fragile link between past and present to simultaneously re-create and question the representation of the past, in a detached and yet quotidian manner.36 The differences between Lan and Hou can easily be ascertained by their narrative styles and, to a lesser extent, the focus of their stories.The first-person narrators—Jiang Biyu, Zhong Shunhe, and Zhong Liyi—in “Song of the Covered Wagon” speak directly from their own experience, thus creating a sense of authenticity and credibility. Good Men, Good Women, however, is told exclusively from Liang Jing’s perspective, giv-

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ing the impression that the film is, after all, one woman’s story. In addition, we cannot help but notice that Zhong Haodong, the center of Lan’s story, does not occupy a significant space in the film. Liang Jing and Jiang Biyu (particularly because she is played by Liang Jing) are the focus of Hou’s movie, a subtle reference to women and history best expounded by Chu T’ien-wen: “After men all died for their struggles, women came out to comfort the battlefield and bear witness to historical facts.”37 Similarly, owing to the differences in media, Hsu Hsiao-ming deviates from Dong Nian’s version in dramatizing the story of Chen Linlang and Wang Rong regarding the Formosa Incident. Dong Nian’s “Last Winter” was written within days of the Formosa Incident, at a time when creative freedom was limited and writers needed to practice self-censorship. He was restricted in commenting on the incident, thus resorting to elliptical references to news reports. When Hsu Hsiao-ming made Heartbreak Island in 1995, the changes in the political climate gave him not only more freedom but also a perspective, both unavailable to Dong Nian. Hence the Formosa Incident becomes the past in Linlang and Wang Rong’s lives, and their present is contemporaneous with that of the film audience.This temporal shift is a highly political and politicized choice by the director, for Hsu is not as interested in representing the Formosa Incident as in condemning those who abandon their ideals. Dong Nian’s novella moves back and forth between the past— Wang Rong and Linlang’s romance—and the present—the Formosa Incident of 1979. By using dates to punctuate the temporal shifts in order to avoid giving the impression of a flashback from the perspective of a certain character and through the incorporation of news reports, the novella creates an impression that collective memories can be manufactured. After the archival documents were made available to the public and eyewitness accounts were collected and published, it became clear that contemporary reports from the news media (print and electronic) about the Formosa Incident were biased against members of the opposition movement, painting a picture of terrorist mobsters with the intention of overthrowing the government. The film version, using flashback, becomes the story of one woman’s life from naive, apolitical college student to bomb-making

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terrorist-cum-kidnapper. The juxtaposition of past and present via flashbacks creates the impression that all of Linlang’s actions hinge on her desire to recapture the past, although it is unclear which past she tries to recover: the political past, when everyone seemed to be imbued with lofty ideals (Wang being the epitome), or the personal past, when she and Wang were lovers. There is a displacement of the political with the personal in Heartbreak Island, whereas in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women, the personal is clearly meant to dominate the political. Noteworthy also is Wang Rong’s wife, An’an, who plays virtually no role in Hsu’s film. Except for frantically searching for the baby after the kidnapping, she is largely invisible. In the fictional version, however, she is prominently featured. As a member of a younger generation, An’an is ignorant of Wang Rong’s past involvement in radical activities and is uninterested in politics. Throughout the novella, she is petulant and constantly engaged in willful behavior. In particular, bewildered by Wang’s silence and detachment, she asks him whether he is “hiding something from her.” The literary portrayal of An’an not only sets up a contrast with the older generation—Wang and Chen—but also hints at Taiwan’s younger generation’s lack of historical memory. By diminishing An’an’s significance in the film, Hsu has effectively and drastically changed Dong Nian’s text and eliminated the importance of generational memory in the transmission of knowledge about Taiwan’s tortured past. Consequently, multilayered pasts versus present in “Last Winter” are replaced by a streamlined contrast between the past and the present of two main characters in Heartbreak Island. Dong Nian’s novella concludes with Wang Rong’s visit to Linlang’s tomb, where he waters the chrysanthemums while thinking, “All the entangled gratitude, grudges, happiness, and suffering were truly in the past.”38 A sense of closure, embedded in the emphasized notion of letting bygones be bygones, colors the overall tone of the novella.39 The ending is clearly a humanistic gesture aimed at the need for reconciliation and tolerance, but the inherent danger of such an ending is the slippery slope of forgetfulness to obliteration of memory. Hsu Hsiao-ming, likely concerned about this tendency to forgive and forget, halts the cinematic narrative at the moment of Linlang’s suicide. When Wang Rong, with his nuclear family intact, watches the medical

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personnel cart Linlang’s bloody body into an ambulance, the audience is left to ponder his state of mind and the entangled issues of Taiwan’s past and present. As evidenced in the cinematic and literary texts studied in this chapter, the contrast not only serves as an effective narrative strategy but also carries prominent ramifications for the future, for the recalling of the past is always about the future.

5. Screening Atrocity

no film in taiwanese cinema history has received as many accolades or as much criticism as A City of Sadness (henceforth referred to as Sadness), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the first Taiwanese film ever to win Venice’s Golden Lion Award for Best Film. Immediately after its release in 1989, the film and its director came under scathing attack by critics from the entire range of Taiwan’s political spectrum. A collection of essays entitled The Death of New Cinema, whose main target of criticism was Hou and his film,1 was followed by another wave of articles to counter the charges. Almost all the latter, written in either Chinese or English, focus on specific aspects of the film to refute the critiques in The Death of New Cinema. One article even challenges Hou’s detractors to watch the film a few more times so that they can appreciate his aesthetics.2 Some examine the film’s technical aspects—Hou’s use of sound, intertext, and photography—and others concentrate on issues raised in the film—questions of multiculturalism, identity politics, the myth of the motherland (that is, mainland China), representation of trauma, and so on.3 At the core of the criticism is the representation of history or, to be more exact, of the 2/28 Incident, but it also entails larger issues that have loomed over Taiwan’s political and cultural landscapes since the lifting of martial law. That is, who owns this part of Taiwanese history, who is legitimate to speak for Taiwan and recapture its past on screen, and by what means? Implied in the critics’ objections to Hou’s film is a hegemonic interpretation of the incident, for their critique of his techniques is often indistinguishable from their criticism of the film’s content. Here I give a brief account of the critics’ complaints in regard

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to Hou’s failure to faithfully re-create the incident on the screen, not to rehash the now largely discredited criticism, but to highlight the difficulty of re-creating a forgotten historical event. I then shift my attention to certain scenes from Sadness to investigate the politics of filmic representation of atrocity. As a contrasting study of cinematic re-creation of the 2/28 Incident, the second half of this chapter analyzes Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness (1999), particularly Lin’s use of melodrama and treatment of violence. With the story ending on the eve of the 2/28 Incident, March of Happiness explores similar issues regarding this period of Taiwan’s history, although it is noticeably more ambitious by including the last days of the colonial period, and its content and cinematic techniques follow a different approach.

A CITY OF SADNESS

Although many readers are familiar with A City of Sadness, a synopsis is in order here. Sadness centers on the Lin family, especially the sons: the eldest, Lin Wenxiong, is the owner of a nightclub called Little Shanghai; the second son is absent throughout the film because his whereabouts are unknown after having been drafted by the Japanese army to fight in the Pacific War; Wenliang, the third son, has returned as a traumatized war casualty from the mainland, where he worked as an interpreter for the Japanese; and the youngest son, Wenqing, is a deaf-mute photographer. The movie opens as Wenxiong’s concubine is giving birth to a son during Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast of Japan’s surrender.4 Wenliang later recovers from his trauma and becomes involved in shady business deals with the brother of Wenxiong’s concubine, which, in turn, embroil him in disputes with a rival group, the Shanghai gang. The gang members use their connections with the Nationalist government’s representative in Taiwan to falsely accuse Wenliang of being a Communist spy. Wenliang is arrested and jailed, forcing Wenxiong to seek help from the Shanghai gang. Although Wenliang is eventually released, he has been so traumatized by the brutality in prison that he loses his sanity and never recovers. Wenqing, who operates a photo studio away from home, is involved with radical friends who are dissatisfied with the new government. One of his friends is Hiroe, whose

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sister, Hiromi,5 works as a nurse in a local clinic and later becomes Wenqing’s wife. Wenxiong is killed while defending the brother of his concubine. In the meantime, the 2/28 Incident and its aftermath are spreading across the island. Wenqing and his friends are arrested, but later he is released. Hiroe flees to the mountains to start a commune-like work-study group, but the location is discovered and all the members of the group are rounded up by Nationalist government soldiers. Wenqing and Hiromi plan to flee with their child but decide not to, and Wenqing is arrested again. The film ends with the Lin family sharing a meal, but the contrast with the opening scene is unmistakable, for the only members left are the aging patriarch, women, children, and the mentally unstable Wenliang.

Re-creating Historical Events Among the various venomous attacks on A City of Sadness and its director is the film’s failure to properly represent history, as summarized by Robert Chi: “It does not show what it ought to show.”6 Hou is accused of “vulgarizing historical interpretation,” owing to the “director’s ignorance of historical facts.” Hou, it is said, “should have worked harder and his think-tank should have been better equipped to deal with these issues” of representation: “Historical events are obscured, and not given in great enough detail, as the director has mistakenly believed that the audience was well-informed.”7 To be sure, these charges are to some extent personally motivated, but they nevertheless draw our attention to such questions as whether a film audience goes to the theater to learn about their own history or whether cinema should be required to teach the “correct” history. Apparently, implied in the criticism is the belief that an accurate version of historical truth can somehow be obtained through a cinematic rendition. Naive though these assumptions may appear to us now, when contextualized in Taiwan’s history itself, the contention over the 2/28 Incident in Sadness is the very embodiment of government suppression and the annihilation of people’s memory. That is, the oppressive atmosphere of the White Terror created a mnemonic vacuum, which people eagerly sought to fill with what they believed should be retained. In a word, Sadness itself is a victim of the White Terror.

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The contention surrounding the original event and subsequent interpretations calls to mind Oliver Stone’s JFK, which also has been severely criticized: “Much of the hostility seems to have been generated by his freehand mixing of documentary, feature, and pseudo-documentary footage.”8 Stone’s cinematic techniques create an impression of historical veracity, with JFK’s “‘desperate need’ to recuperate a unified and fixed view of history so as to secure what is commonly thought to be the only foundation for the formation of national identity and community.”9 Although Stone’s conspiracy theory has been attacked by film critics and historians as well as by former and current government officials, as Robert Toplin argues, “Stone’s movie raised legitimate questions about the history of the cold war that had been the focus of attention by scholars and journalists for many years.”10 The movie’s credibility has long been debated but nevertheless rekindled public interest in an important page in American history. Similarly, Sadness, despite the controversy, remains a milestone in Taiwan’s understanding of and search for the past, however fragmentary that may be. Just as JFK may have served “as the beginning of a new understanding of Kennedy’s assassination, not the end” and “offer[s] questions, not answers,”11 Sadness functioned as a beginning for the Taiwanese, and its timely appearance helped ushered in an alternative approach to history. Sadness has been accused of beautifying the image of the Japanese and their culture, thus portraying the Taiwanese as slaves to the colonial government. But Hou’s critics tend to focus on the content, on what they regard as an incomplete, insufficient portrayal of the 2/28 Incident.Wu Qiyan, for instance, laments that A City of Sadness “should be an unprecedented breakthrough in Taiwanese film history, but what it manages to accomplish is merely opening up a narrow crack in a history covered up by time and political powers; [the Taiwanese people’s] historical experience does not appear in its entirety.”12 In retrospect, we now realize that Wu has overlooked the opportunity that the film offered the audience, to confront the fact that no historical experience can ever be completely recaptured on screen (or in writing). Moreover, Wu’s insistence on the impossible task of representing historical events in their entirety betrays his anxiety over the possibility that “history as drama is shot through with fiction and invention from the smallest details to largest events.”13 For him, obviously, the danger that fictional

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invention may obscure the real facts about Taiwan’s past can be eliminated through an unadulterated, cinematic totality.We could label such blind faith in verity as the fallacy of facts: “Facts are supposed to provide the basis for arbitrating among the variety of different meanings that different groups can assign to an event for different ideological or political reasons. But the facts are a function of the meaning assigned to events, not some primitive data that determine what meanings an event can have.”14 Related to the attack on Sadness’s incomplete historical representation is a concern about the lack of explanation; that is, in the critics’ view, the film ought to have presented a detailed and complete explanation of how and why the 2/28 Incident happened. Wu Qiyan complains that “the limited viewpoint cannot provide an internally consistent explanation [for historical events]. Therefore, in the movie, we see suffering and oppression, but cannot see the causes of suffering or the external forces of oppression.”15 Lu Kuang makes a similar charge: “When the movie is over, we still don’t know what some of the characters did to be arrested or what the 2/28 Incident was all about.”16 In Chi Yanqi’s denunciation, “The dissidents in A City of Sadness are so vacuous and ignorant that their romanticism becomes [an] unrealistic, naive illusion and nauseating cliché.”17 Obviously, disregarding the fact that cinema is not a tutorial on history, Chi and many like-minded critics would like to have had more scenes devoted to the leftist intellectuals, Hiroe and Wenqing, and perhaps more of their actual actions against the persecution of the Taiwanese. Furthermore, Wenqing and Hiromi’s romantic relationship only aggravates these critics’ displeasure over the director’s intentional elision of history, which is reflected in Liang Xinhua’s view: “Regrettably, the director and the scriptwriter were completely incapable of conducting a dialogue with history to develop a broad and profound historical view for their contemporaries; instead they escape into an unchanging and romantic fantasy world of aestheticism to displace their views and reflections on society and history.”18 The most serious assault is directed against Hou Hsiao-hsien’s political motivation and ideology. Although for Lu Kuang the film does not express a clear-cut political ideology of a pro-Taiwanese and antigovernment stance in re-creating the scenes of Taiwanese suffering, Mi Zou criticizes the director’s view of history, claiming that it

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is similar to what was proposed by the then president, Lee Teng-hui, who exhorted the Taiwanese to be forward looking and leave the incident to historians.19 Adding to this scathing criticism, Chi Yanqi believes that Sadness completely distorts the historical facts by following the official explanation, that the incident was instigated by Taiwanese Communists and Taiwanese mobs: The so-called government corruption and social injustice are presented only through the cynical narration of the characters, and the suppression of the 2/28 Incident is represented in the style of “re-counting.” . . . The movie does not seriously question, let alone subvert and critique, the official assessment of the incident. In contrast, the scene in which the Taiwanese beat up the mainlanders uses “visually veritable” images as proof. Moreover, the Taiwanese who carry out the beating are fierce looking, with their hair, long, scraggly, like hooligans or an angry mob. No one in the audience would believe that these people are rebelling because they suffer oppression.20 We can surmise that taken as a whole, the critics’ dissatisfaction with the depiction of the 2/28 Incident in Sadness derives from a false belief that historical events can be faithfully represented and that there is a proper way for historical representation in films (and other media as well, of course). Specifically, and as far as this chapter is concerned, the main contention concerns the power of visual dramatization versus verbal narration. Moreover, even though most critics from both camps question the possibility of fully representing historical events, little is said about whether atrocious acts should even be enacted on screen at all, for they seem to be more preoccupied with the accuracy than with the legitimacy of representation.

Witnessing and Representing Atrocity The long passage just quoted regarding the scene in which the Taiwanese beat up mainlanders is often cited as the most glaring evidence that Hou does not give a balanced, impartial depiction, since the Taiwanese are cast in a negative light. Compounding this perceived biased

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representation is the lack of visual dramatization of the massacre of the Taiwanese.That is, the image of the Taiwanese as victimizers is dramatized, but the image of the Taiwanese as victims of government brutality on a much larger scale is revealed only through narration.We recall that those Taiwanese who were furious over the injustice inflicted by the Nationalist government sought out mainlanders for revenge. The governor-general, Chen Yi, then retaliated by sending troops recently transported from the mainland out to the streets, where they began indiscriminately shooting everyone in sight. What bothers Chi Yanqi and others is the different ways in which these two violent incidents are presented to the audience. For the first incident, we see Taiwanese carrying clubs and scythes; chasing passengers, presumed to be mainlanders, off the train; and beating them. Then the camera cuts to the stunned expression on Hiroe’s face, followed by a scene on the train of a different group of Taiwanese interrogating Wenqing. Under the pressure,Wenqing, who has been deaf since the age of eight, blurts out that he is Taiwanese. His interrogator then switches to Japanese, and when he gets no response, he is about to hit Wenqing, and if it were not for Hiroe’s timely appearance, Wenqing would have suffered the same fate as the mainlanders. At first glance, it is not surprising that some Taiwanese critics would consider this scene inflammatory and prejudicial. But the scene’s significance changes drastically if we look at the entire sequence: after the outbreak of the incident, Wenqing and Hiroe go to Taipei; injured mainlanders are sent to Hiromi’s clinic;Wenqing returns and seeks out Hiromi at the clinic, and as he writes to tell her what he witnessed, he faints; Governor-General Chen Yi gives a speech on the radio regarding the well-intentioned measures taken by his administration; Hiromi goes to the studio to see Wenqing, who then writes out what he saw, which is followed by a reenactment of the “infamous” scenes on the train; and finally, in a night scene, a seriously injured Hiroe appears in Wenqing’s studio and tells Wenqing and Hiromi about the mass arrests and killing ordered by Chen Yi. Of particular importance is the sequence of these scenes: a static shot of the village rooftops seemingly enveloped by Chen Yi’s heavily accented Mandarin broadcast, Wenqing’s written account, and the dramatization of violence on the train, followed by Hiroe’s account. These segments raise questions concerning the witnessing and relating historical events.

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We need to examine exactly what is conveyed by the scene of the Taiwanese mob’s violence against the mainlanders and Wenqing. Hou’s detractors have castigated him for portraying the Taiwanese as hooligans or an angry mob and “no one in the audience would believe that these people are rebelling because they suffer oppression.”21 Indeed, the Taiwanese are the victimizers in this scene, but its significance changes dramatically when we consider perspective, the narrative point of view. Virtually all the critics consider the dramatization to be part of Wenqing’s recollection, and therefore the dramatization of violence against the mainlanders serves to denigrate the Taiwanese. But because Wenqing is a deaf-mute, this scene could not possibly be part of his recollection. The camera angle and the place where Wenqing is sitting on the train make it impossible for him to see what is happening off the train, let alone see the stunned look on Hiroe’s face. After Wenqing is rescued by Hiroe on the train, Hiroe goes on to explain angrily that Wenqing cannot hear them:“He’s been deaf since the age of eight. How could he hear what you’re saying to him?” Simply put,Wenqing, who is looking out the window, could not have heard what Hiroe is telling his assailants about his hearing problem and then recount that to Hiroe’s sister, Hiromi.While some might dismiss this incongruity as a directorial flaw, I propose that we look at the film as it is presented and focus on the issue of perspective. Since Wenqing cannot have seen or heard what is happening behind him, the train scene cannot possibly be presented from his point of view. I believe that juxtaposed with Chen Yi’s broadcast about protecting the law-abiding citizens, which is meant to deceive the Taiwanese, this scene dramatizes the official version that the incident was largely the handiwork of Communists and hooligans, thereby absolving the government of its responsibility for having failed the Taiwanese. Of particular interest is Wenqing’s recounting. Christopher Lupke argues that “just as the deaf/mute cannot speak or hear, his imperfect fulfillment of his duty as witness points us toward the broader question of silencing dissent in Taiwan, both then and throughout the Chiang Era.”22 Chen Ruxiu also observes that this scene illustrates the fate of the Taiwanese as a devastating historical tragedy witnessed by a deafmute, which, in turn, symbolizes the suppression of the incident.23 The sense of tragedy is magnified when we consider that the Taiwanese, symbolized by Wenqing, cannot talk about the incident, so that what

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is left is written words (quasi-history); but then even the person who witnesses and records the event is “disappeared” at the end. Furthermore, the scene also makes an implicit comment on how historical knowledge is transmitted. That is, written words, including memoirs and eyewitness accounts, are what we have to make sense of the incident. But written records—whether objective or personal/subjective history—always are selective. Besides the question of whether historical events can be reproduced in their entirety, one of the major issues regarding representation of the 2/28 Incident in Sadness is the different modes of portraying violence against the Taiwanese. Some critics contend that while the Taiwanese assault on the mainlanders is dramatized for the audience, the scenes in which native Taiwanese were massacred because they simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time are narrated by the injured Hiroe, not visually enacted. These critics, it seems, would prefer to have an equal length of visualized violence against the Taiwanese to demonstrate what Hiroe relates: “Chen Yi sent troops out, arresting and killing people along the way.” The fact that Hiroe, the narrator of the violence against the Taiwanese, is an eyewitness and a casualty himself already “implies” that atrocious acts are being carried out. His narration also makes an oblique comment on the lasting effect of the incident. When the Nationalist government tried to erase records of the incident by forbidding the people to talk about it, personal accounts related in private, as in the scene at Wenqing’s studio, were the only means of transmission. The detractors’ preference obviously derives from the tendency to privilege visuality over orality, without regard for the possibility that not all violence can (or must) be dramatized on the screen in order to convey the degree of suffering and tragedy. Perhaps Mirian Bratu Hansen’s critique of Schindler’s List is applicable here, when she argues that the film “does not seek to negate the representational, iconic power of filmic images, but rather bank on this power.”24 Perhaps what the critics from The Death of New Cinema group would prefer is for Hou to exploit the iconic power of filmic images and hence sensationalize the brutality against the Taiwanese. When dealing with the re-creation of atrocious acts, we should not rely on familiar tropes and common techniques to narrate an event that will likely never be fully understood, so that we are not left with only scenes of violence that

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neither enrich nor augment our knowledge. Even the lofty notion that “screen violence provides a viewer with the opportunity to purge hostile feelings in the safe realm of art”25 rings hollow, for such an ideologically and politically motivated proposition for screen violence is, ultimately, gratuitous: “Movie violence must contain multitudinous meanings if it hopes to avoid the prisons of ideology and cliché, if it seeks to draw anything more than a distant, formalized response, if it wants to outlast its moment.”26 This highly contested scene is emblematic of Hou’s directorial style, for he “marshaled a variety of idiosyncratic techniques and production decisions to sculpt for the spectator a rendering of the February 28th Incident that is willfully mutilated, establishing from the outset and throughout the film that any attempt to apprehend the unvarnished truth concerning the liquidation of dissent on Taiwan is practically impossible.”27 Another example that shows the film’s intention to avoid the common (Hollywood) technique of sensational dramatization can be found in a largely ignored scene, in which the director deals similarly with the fate of another intellectual, Lin Laoshi, or Teacher Lin. Lin is a friend of Hiroe’s, whom Hiroe introduces to Wenqing and other leftist intellectuals. When Wenqing returns from Taipei, he recounts to Hiromi in writing that Lin has been going to the meeting hall every day. Later, while they are tending to his injuries, Hiroe tells Hiromi and Wenqing that Lin has disappeared and that members of the settlement committee have been arrested. Not only does Lin’s appearance foreshadow Wenqing’s and Hiroe’s arrests, but it also makes yet another oblique comment on the government’s persecution, without dramatizing his arrest and possible execution. Visual dramatization may not necessarily be effective, for often the unpresented can most eloquently convey the unspeakable.

Writing, Reading, and Recounting Atrocity One of Hou’s critics has complained that “whenever issues of politics are about to appear, the camera quickly turns away from real political oppression and violent events to mountains, oceans and fishing boats, which is an attempt to displace and misplace the actual problems with the beauty of mountains and rivers and static scenery.”28 Although

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largely duplicating the criticism referred to in the previous section, such a stricture itself appears to be misplaced when we examine the scenes in which the Nationalist government action against the Taiwanese is depicted: Wenqing’s arrest and time in prison (narrated through a voice-over of Hiromi reading a letter from Axue,Wenxiong’s daughter); the released Wenqing taking a letter and the personal effects of an executed cellmate to the latter’s family; Axue relating to Hiromi that the restaurant Little Shanghai was shut down in March, when many people were killed and Wenxiong’s friend was arrested; a night scene in which a stranger delivers news of Hiroe’s arrest; and, finally, Nationalist soldiers rounding up Hiroe and other dissidents. All these scenes involve reading, writing, and recounting, which is Sadness’s signature technique of indirect treatment of the incident. June Yip has argued that Hou’s movies, especially Sadness, should not be treated as historical but as historiographical films.29 That is, Sadness is not so much about re-creating the 2/28 Incident on screen as it is an exploration of ways in which historical events are represented. I would take this idea further to concentrate on how Sadness comments on writing (albeit in filmic language) about atrocity. As denounced and praised by critics in both camps, Sadness not only uses a deaf-mute photographer to witness and partially recount historical event but also heavily relies on Hiromi’s diary and letter in the form of a voice-over to narrate political and social situations during the 2/28 Incident. The device of a woman narrating events is first attacked by Mi Zou, who believes that the film implies that women cannot be part of history: “Hiromi is simply recounting Wenqing’s life; we rarely get a sense of her own view or value judgment.”30 Although appearing to praise Hiromi for her characterization of the suffering wife of a victim of the 2/28 Incident, Liao Ping-hui regards her role as a conventional strategy: It is in fact a very traditional and passive approach to use a feminine means to wrap and cover up history, so that people can continue to endure and survive with the wound and continue to live. This is perhaps why Chu T’ien-wen and Hou Hsiao-hsien chose Hiromi to show how a person can be completely helpless in a political situation, but they represent current conditions in a nostalgic, uncritical attitude.31

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Predictably, this “failure” has been subsequently rehabilitated by scholars and film critics. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh uses Hiromi’s diary to show how the film subverts instructional, official history.32 June Yip is even more direct when she contends that “the effect of Hou’s insistence on filtering all public historical events through language, as well as through the subjectivities of individual characters, therefore, is to remind us that all historical knowledge is mediated through human acts of narration and to underscore the idea that the history is, after all, storytelling.”33 As we can see, for the detractors, individual characters like Hiromi, a character on the periphery of historical events, cannot possibly convey the intensity of the detrimental effects on the Taiwanese. However, if we can agree that Hou Hsiao-hsien neither is interested in re-creating history nor intends to represent the 2/28 Incident via familiar tropes of dramatization, then Hiromi’s diary and letter reading become an effective conduit for illustrating the effects of the 2/28 Incident and the subsequent crackdown. Although we still have questions about women’s agency in the torrents of history, as mentioned in chapter 2, women become the primary transmitters of historical memory in Taiwan precisely because most of the men were “disappeared.” Furthermore, Hiromi’s diary and letters (to and from Axue) serve a metaphorical purpose in commenting on the means through which cases of extrajudicial persecution are remembered in the oppressive political climate of the White Terror. When the Taiwanese were forbidden to openly discuss the incident and other abuses of civil liberties, such private media as diaries and letters became the only means of keeping the memory alive. When the memory is then conveyed through Hiromi to us, it takes on a verbal form akin to oral transmission, which was the only means left to the Taiwanese to even become aware of the incident.34 The personal act of keeping a diary is not so much a comment on Hiromi’s lack of agency as a manifestation of the fear of the omnipresent censorial apparatus. This is best illustrated in a scene in which Hiromi visits Wenqing’s family and Axue tells her why they shut down the restaurant and that her father’s friend, a Mr. Xu, also was arrested. At that moment, her aunt—possibly Wenliang’s wife—effectively shuts her up by simply saying, “Axue!” The fear of saying the wrong thing, which could invite further calamity, is palpable in that single utterance of the girl’s name.

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Hou’s avoidance of dramatizing violence without flinching from confronting the government’s suppression is best exemplified in a night scene in which the news of Hiroe’s arrest is relayed to Hiromi and Wenqing: a nearly pitch-black setting in which we can barely make out a dark figure knocking on the door. Wenqing appears, turns on the light, and opens the door; the man, a messenger, takes out a letter and gives it to Wenqing; and Wenqing makes some gestures, obviously inviting the man inside, but the man waves him off and quickly disappears into the dark night. The dark night and the faceless messenger conjure up a sense of secrecy with a tinge of danger heightened by a dog barking. Except for the barking dog and the knocking on the door, this scene is played in complete silence, with no verbal exchange, and yet it is powerful enough to convey the oppressive atmosphere of the White Terror.35 We do not need to be told how risky it would have been for the messenger to deliver the letter, for Wenqing already has been arrested once and soon will be again. The sense of omnipresent danger is best communicated to the audience in another sequence of scenes, also without verbal exchanges.We see a railroad track and hear the whistle and rumbling of a coming train; between the spaces of the moving train cars we spot Wenqing, Hiromi, and their infant son; and when the train passes, the family, with their suitcases, is in plain view. We later learn from Hiromi’s letter to Axue that they planned to flee after Hiroe’s arrest but decided not to because they knew they had no place to hide. Just as Hiroe was ferreted out from his hideout in the mountains, Wenqing and Hiromi would never be able to escape the net cast by the Nationalist government even if they did manage to find shelter. The aborted escape is criticized for its obscurity, for “even the most imaginative audience cannot possibly figure out that they are contemplating flight.”36 It is unnecessary to point out that this critic missed Hiromi’s revelation to Axue, but such a blunder is symptomatic of Hou’s detractors, for they fail to understand that Sadness is more than the sum of its parts. The critics ignore that “anything other than a virtual copy of the real event must emphasize certain aspects of the events and neglect others”37 and search in vain for a faithful re-creation of the 2/28 Incident. Even though they are keenly aware of the incident’s historical significance to Taiwanese society, they forget that traumatic events—“events of such magnitude or singularity that they can neither be completely

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forgotten nor adequately remembered—can only find their appropriately tenuous representation in the ‘de-realization’ effected by . . . fragmentation.”38 With a fuller understanding of the fragmentary nature of representation, perhaps a discursive battle no longer needs to be waged over the ownership of this part of Taiwanese history and the legitimate interpreting and representing authority of the events.

MARCH OF HAPPINESS

As if to respond to some of the issues regarding the interpretation and representation of the 2/28 Incident in A City of Sadness, ten years later, in 1999, Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness (henceforth referred to as Happiness) revisited the site of the incident, the Tianma Café (Tianma chafang, also the Chinese title of the film). Perhaps owing to changes in Taiwanese politics, culture, and society over the preceding decade, Happiness attracted little critical attention in Taiwan, even though its approach to the incident is more pointed than that of Sadness.The film was invited to all the major film festivals (Cannes, Nantes, Toronto, Pushan) and was selected to represent Taiwan to compete for Best Foreign Film of 2000 at the Academy Awards. As I have written elsewhere, international film festivals and awards are not always the best indicators of a film’s achievement.39 But the government’s attitude toward Happiness, in contrast with Sadness’s initial concern over censorship, provides a yardstick for us to measure the creative freedom that directors (and writers) now enjoy in approaching the formerly taboo topic of the 2/28 Incident. Therefore, I will examine how Happiness tackles the portrayal of this event, which will contribute to our understanding of the complicated cinematic re-creations of the individual in a violent historical event. The differences between these two films are neither superficial nor insignificant; we need only read a prominent film critic’s comment to realize the complexity: “It is certainly audacious of Lin Cheng-sheng to try to follow in the footsteps of [A] City of Sadness, Hou Hsiaohsien’s account of the same period of Taiwanese history. Instead of confronting history directly, as Hou did in his own film, Lin tries to mix it with allegory.”40 For Hou’s detractors, whose criticism of Sadness I cited earlier, it is disputable whether Hou did indeed confront

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history directly, but the persistent reference to confronting history directly has become an albatross around both directors’ necks. The contrasting reception of these two films, made ten years apart, seems to have become its own theater of the absurd: the earlier movie—Sadness—was accused of eliding and failing to confront history but was praised ten years later for confronting history and used to disparage the second movie—Happiness—for failing to confront history.The strange twists and turns of these two films demand that they be examined together, not to prove that one is better than the other, but to show how historical events such as the 2/28 Incident can be represented differently, as evidenced in the contrasting words in the titles:“sadness” and “happiness.”41 In this section, I analyze Happiness from three different aspects: Lin Cheng-sheng’s use of melodrama, the portrayal of violence, and the focus on the individual. March of Happiness begins in the last days of Japanese colonial rule and ends during the outbreak of the 2/28 Incident, with its main plot revolving around Ayu, the daughter of a successful fish-ball wholesaler, and Ajin, an intellectual who has traveled to Tokyo and Shanghai. They meet at the Tianma Café, where Ayu and other young artists plan their stage plays in the back room. When Allied fighter planes begin bombing Taipei, the theater group is disbanded and its members return to their respective hometowns. Ayu and Ajin correspond with each other and fall in love. When the Japanese surrender, the members regroup at the café but are prohibited by the Nationalist officials from staging their old play, just as the Japanese had done earlier. After the owner of the café, Zhan Tianma, intercedes on the artists’ behalf, they are allowed to resume production but only to put on patriotic Chinese plays. A mainland soldier, Xiaobao, is particularly upset with the play’s heavy Japanese flavor as well as anything else associated with Japan. One day, when the soldier is meeting with an uncle at the café, a former Japanese official comes to bid farewell to Zhan Tianma. After the Japanese leaves, Xiaobao follows him out and shoots and kills him. In the meantime, Ayu’s father wants her to marry Xie Renchang, the son of a doctor in town and, without regard for her objections, completes the engagement. Left with no choice, Ayu and Ajin decide to elope, and they choose the fateful date of February 27, 1947. Earlier that day, the soldiers accompanying government agents of the Alcohol and Tobacco Monopoly Bureau had seriously injured a

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woman cigarette vendor and matchmaker for Ayu and Renchang, and also killed a bystander. A group of soldiers storm onto the stage at the theater, and one of them, gun in hand, orders the actors and actresses to stop. Ajin, who was on his way to the pier for his rendezvous with Ayu, stops to look for his guitar upstairs at the theater. When he walks out from behind a curtain to leave, his suitcase bumps into an object. The noise draws the attention of the gun-wielding soldier, who fires and kills Ajin. Meanwhile, Ayu has arrived at the pier, where she waits patiently for Ajin, unaware that he will never come. The film ends with a scene of Taiwanese throwing objects out of a building (presumably the Monopoly Bureau office) and intertext about the March massacre and the subsequent forty years of martial law.

On the Verge of Melodrama In the review cited earlier, Shelly Kraicer refers to an article by Jacques Mandelbaum, in which “Mandelbaum believes that Lin is convincing at melodrama, and picks out a strand of political engagement in all of Lin’s films (the problematic of a divided China, which he [Mandelbaum] sees mapped out in a particular tension between the individual and the community in each film) that is directly confronted in the present work.”42 Mandelbaum is astute in detecting traces of melodrama in Happiness, for the film does exhibit striking characteristics of the genre, which, according to Thomas Elsaesser, derives its “dramatic force from the conflict between an extreme and highly individualized form of moral idealism in the heroes . . . and a thoroughly corrupt yet seemingly omnipotent class. The melodramatic elements are clearly visible in the plots, which revolve around family relationships, star-crossed lovers and forced marriage.”43 Owing to theoretical issues, however, I argue that Happiness falls short of a full-blown melodrama; yet it is precisely this position of being on the verge of melodrama that a profound sense of tragedy of the 2/28 Incident can emerge without resorting to gory, overly sentimental, or sensationalized depictions. In discussing Henry James in his pioneering work, The Melodramatic Imagination, literary scholar Peter Brooks lists some of the basic elements of melodrama: “the confronted power of evil and goodness, the sense of hazard and clash, the intensification and heightening of

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experience corresponding to dream and desire.”44 These ideas are relevant to my analysis of Happiness, even though the subject of Brooks’s study is literary melodrama and he places the origin of melodrama in the French Revolution. Later scholars in literary and cinematic fields have revised and augmented some of Brooks’s arguments. Christine Gledhill’s edited collection of essays, for instance, includes studies of historical, domestic, material, and psychological melodramas, thus broadening the scope of the approach of melodrama to film studies.45 But questions still remain as to whether the theory of melodrama can be applied to non-Western films, since the subject matter of all these essays is Western films. In summarizing Brooks’s connection between the emergence of melodrama and the rise of postrevolutionary bourgeois consciousness, Linda Williams cites Brooks’s argument that “late eighteenth and nineteenth-century melodrama arose to fill the vacuum of a post-revolutionary world where traditional imperatives of truth and ethics had been violently questioned and yet in which there was still a need for truth and ethics.”46 Given this culturally and historically specific context, it is understandable that some might challenge the applicability of the concepts of melodrama to a Taiwanese film or to any non-Western film, for that matter. William Rothman effectively critiques Brooks’s cultural and historical premises while essentially arguing that various forms of melodrama might emerge in different parts of the world.47 E. Ann Kaplan also interrogates the relevance of Western melodrama theories to Chinese cinema. Even though she reiterates Brooks’s claim of the origin of Western melodrama and how it came out of the bourgeoisie’s desire to be distinguished from the working class and the aristocrats,48 Kaplan acknowledges the presence of the characteristics of melodrama and their subversive power in recent Chinese cinema. I will not discuss here the origins of melodrama, but I will borrow some of Brooks’s and others’ ideas to demonstrate how melodrama and its characteristics can be useful in analyzing Lin Cheng-sheng’s approach to represent the tragedy of the 2/28 Incident, for melodrama has “long served as a crucial social barometer during times of ideological crisis, making it as a genre a valuable object of study for political analysis.”49 One of the prominent features of melodrama is its use of the Manichaean polarity of good versus evil; consequently, there are victims and villains who play out the struggle between virtue and vice, in

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which the former triumphs over the latter. Understandably, in such a scheme, a happy ending is in order.50 For the greater part of the film, Happiness follows a similar scheme but pulls back at the last moment when the good are not vindicated and a happy ending is aborted. In order to achieve the sense of tragedy,51 Happiness complicates the Manichaean polarity by doubling the binary opposition with a parallel between the nation and the family, thereby mingling domestic melodrama with historical melodrama. In the domestic milieu, as shown in Elsaesser’s description quoted at the beginning of this section, Ayu and Ajin, the star-crossed lovers, face her tyrannical father’s objections to their romantic relationship. Moreover, Ayu is being forced to marry the doctor’s son, whom her father clearly believes is a more suitable match for the daughter of a successful businessman. Profit is his principal concern,52 and he has a mind for efficiency, for he constantly exhorts his employees to work faster and has his daughter help out at the shop. Although we would be hard-pressed to call her father evil in the conventional sense of the word, there is nevertheless a polarity between patriarchal order and individual freedom to choose, common in domestic melodrama. Tyranny, particularly the patriarchal kind, must be defied, so Ayu and Ajin decide to elope.53 Polarity also exists in the national/historical realm in Happiness, but in a more complex configuration. In the early part of the movie, the Taiwanese theater group skirts the Japanese colonial censorship by having two different plays ready. Two lookouts are posted outside the theater, and when they spot Japanese colonial officials, one of them notifies the actors to change costumes and switch to a Japanese play while the other delays the officials’ entrance by offering them cigarettes. The oppressive domination of colonial authority controls every aspect of Taiwanese life, but this kind of tyranny can be resisted only through circuitous devices, not challenged, and needs the full cooperation of an understanding audience. Hence the Taiwanese, represented by the audience and the cast as innocent colonial subjects, are confronted with the indomitable power of the colonial censorial apparatus. Later, when the Nationalists arrive with a similarly oppressive mechanism of control, the group is forced to stop indefinitely, as the official reason for halting the performance is malaria. No one is given any clear indication as to whether or not this is true and, if it is, when malaria will be eradicated so the performance can resume.

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Again, the political tyranny of the Nationalist government cannot be challenged directly. But this time, the old ruse of double play is replaced by rendering the cast instead as hooligans in order for the performance to continue. Zhan Tianma,54 speaking through an interpreter, lays out the situation for the Nationalist official: hooligans need something to occupy their time and energy so they will not cause trouble; therefore, it is to the government’s advantage to allow the theater group to continue. In other words, the Taiwanese Zhan has to debase his own compatriots by referring to them as hooligans in exchange for artistic freedom.55 The Nationalist government, represented by Xiaobao, is clearly the villain, the agent of terror. Although the director attempted to psychologize and rationalize the first instance of violence, the shooting death of the Japanese colonial officer by Xiaobao (a mainland soldier who fought the Japanese before coming to Taiwan), Xiaobao is portrayed as someone full of hatred for the Japanese and, to a lesser degree, for the Taiwanese. Before killing the Japanese, he complains to his uncle that the war with Japan has ruined his chance of getting married and having a family. After threatening everyone in the coffee shop with his gun, he runs out and lies in wait for the Japanese. The shooting and killing of Ajin appears to be an accident, but the officer is distrustful and permanently on edge. The lack of any repercussion from the senseless killing of two men implies the government’s complicity, which intensifies the polarity between the innocent Taiwanese and the nefarious Nationalist government. When we compare these two binary oppositions—patriarchal tyranny versus individual freedom, and corrupt government versus helpless Taiwanese—the sense of tragedy and the sheer weight of indomitable historical forces come through clearly. On the one hand, in the personal realm, patriarchy is defied, but in the national arena, the tyrannical government cannot be challenged. On the other hand, the attempt to defy the patriarchal oppression accidentally brings forth an irreparable outcome of government suppression: the death of Ajin. The two strands of melodrama—domestic and historical—develop separately at first and then gradually merge and culminate in the elopement and the death of Ajin. Peter Brooks’s characterization of melodrama best illustrates what Happiness accomplishes by bordering on the edge of melodrama: “The polarization of good and evil

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works toward revealing their presence and operation as real forces in the world. Their conflict suggests the need to recognize and confront evil, to combat and expel it, to purge the social order.”56 While in the domestic setting, we can safely argue that the young lovers triumph over the father, but both the film and Taiwan’s historical reality inform us that a totalitarian government demands the complete obliteration of personal freedom and civil liberties.

Violence and Historical Accuracy In the first part of this chapter, I raised the issue of the legitimacy of representing violence on the screen. Hou Hsiao-hsien and his Sadness were censured for visually dramatizing Taiwanese attacking mainlanders but having Hiroe narrate the massacre of Taiwanese verbally and thus obliquely. For some critics, this complaint derives from an anxiety over the accuracy of representation; for others, from their respective political stances. Sympathizers and proponents of Hou’s film cited the nascent relaxation of censorship in the early days after martial law was lifted (1989) as evidence of his cautious approach to the 2/28 Incident in the film. To be sure, after forty years of government suppression of dissent, the Taiwanese were accustomed to censoring themselves, but I would argue that film directors like Hou were keenly aware of these sensitive issues of representing violence. A closer look at the recreation of violence on screen in Lin’s film (1999) will be helpful in expanding our conception of the dramatization of violence. The first violent scene in Happiness, the shooting death of the former Japanese colonial official, comes as a surprise, although we have been given hints that Xiaobao is agitated at the theater, where mainland officials are invited to watch the new play that the Taiwanese put on to celebrate the end of the war and the departure of the Japanese. Later he also complains about the war with Japan and with the Communists on the mainland and points his gun wildly at everyone in the café when he orders the Japanese to leave. As he ambushes the Japanese in the alley, we sense that something violent is about to happen; nevertheless, when he fires two shots at the fleeing man, we still are shocked, partly because the story thus far is largely centered on the romance between Ayu and Ajin. Although some critics may contend that the

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ruthless shooting death of a fleeing Japanese portrays the mainland soldier in a negative light, the audience never actually sees the Japanese going down, a conclusion that we infer only from the circumstances and the gunshots. Moreover, we should consider this scene as more symbolic, that these shots are the warning signs of a different era, serving as an effective and symbolic ending of the Japanese colonial rule and the dawn of an even more violent (albeit implied) time. The shooting scene is used to comment on the political situation in Taiwan.We see the camera cut back and forth between the scene in the alley and the scene at a barbershop; Zhan Tianma, the owner of the café, is having his face shaved while talking with someone (presumably the barber). The latter is concerned that all “these people from the Motherland” carry firearms and that a trivial altercation could end in serious gunplay. Zhan then offers his own opinion that only those who are afraid would try to scare others. Just as he utters this fatally accurate comment, gunshots are heard in the distance.The first violent scene, therefore, is more likely the director’s interpretation of historical events, a comment in hindsight. The second violent incident, the cigarette-confiscating scene, is understandably the film’s most controversial aspect. Shelly Kraicer complains that “it seems awfully nervy, if not downright heavyhanded, for Lin to include as a main character the famous cigarette vendor who was attacked by Kuomintang [Guomindang] troops.”57 The cigarette vendor indeed plays an important role, for she also is the matchmaker, a symbolic force that ends the lovers’ future, just as the real-life Lin Jiang Mai was the accidental catalyst that set the tragedy in motion. Yet it is questionable whether the vendor in the film, played by Grace Chen, is meant to represent the real-life Lin Jiang Mai. For one thing, her name is never used in the film except when she is beaten and Ayu’s father runs over to check on her. Even in that scene, the Grace Chen character is referred to only as “Ah-mai.” We may infer that “Ah-mai” is Lin Jiang Mai, since a typical Taiwanese way of nicknaming someone is to add “Ah-” to the last character of the person’s name. Even so, an audience with passing knowledge of the incident, unlike those of Sadness ten years earlier, knows that the scene is historically inaccurate.The real-life Lin Jiang Mai was accompanied by her young children, a daughter and a son, when her money was snatched away and she was beaten. She is often portrayed in his-

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torical accounts as a poor, even dirty-looking, woman struggling to raise her children. In Happiness, the Grace Chen character is radically different from the iconic woman,58 whose personal tragedy is forever implicated in the national trauma of the 2/28 Incident, whereas the historical event caused irreparable damage to her family.59 It is difficult not to wonder whether the Grace Chen character really is a filmic duplicate of the real-life Lin Jiang Mai and, if so, how we should interpret such a cinematic addition. It also is easy to fault Lin Cheng-sheng for letting his political ideology override artistic considerations. It may have been ill advised for Lin to add such an iconic, historical figure and a historical setting—the Tianma Café—to a fictional work. Conversely, all of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s characters in Sadness are fabricated.60 I do believe, however, that it is not important whether or not the Grace Chen character is the real-life Lin Jiang Mai, for one of the film’s central themes is a feeling of the inevitable force of history in the sense that “the future will come, no matter what.”61 Shelly Kraicer put it most lucidly by saying that “this stratagem [of adding the woman cigarette vendor] telegraphs, like the elopement date itself, exactly what is going to happen in the film long before it actually transpires.”62 Just as Ayu and Ajin are swept away in the torrent of historical events, the cigarette vendor, whether or not it is Lin Jiang Mai, can only succumb to a force more powerful than an individual. The shooting death of Ajin constitutes the last scene of violence in the film, one in which the film’s central theme emerges most clearly. Unlike the first scene, in which Xiaobao shoots and kills the Japanese colonial officer, Ajin’s death is an accident. He is ready to leave for the pier but is delayed by the search for his cherished guitar, which he had used to compose the song of hope, “March of Happiness.” Ajin and Ayu would have been safely on the boat if the Nationalist soldiers had not chosen that moment to burst onto the stage, if Ajin had not emerged at that exact moment, and if he had not knocked something over. These “ifs” correspond to Bill Nichols’s term of the conditional mood, “devoted to matters of suppositions.”63 Nichols also proposes another linguistic term, the subjunctive mood, which is particularly relevant to and illuminating in approaching Happiness, for the mood is “a set of verb forms that represents an attitude toward or concern with a denoted act or state not as fact but as something entertained in

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thought as contingent or possible.”64 Framed in the subjunctive mood, the shooting death of Ajin can be regarded as a directorial meditation on what could have been and what should have been. Ajin and Ayu should have been able to elope, just as the beating of Lin Jiang Mai could have been avoided, and the massacre should not have happened. In short,Taiwan could have and should have been a much better place, and that, I would venture, is the central message of March of Happiness.

Focus on Individuals When A City of Sadness was first shown in Taipei, many who expected to see a cinematic re-creation of the 2/28 Incident were disappointed; some, including critics of The Death of New Cinema, castigated the misrepresentation of the film as a movie about the 2/28 Incident for foreign audiences.They were dissatisfied that the plot revolved around the Lin family, particularly the romantic relationship between Hiromi and Wenqing, as well as the gangsters’ infighting. Their denunciation originated from a monolithic view of the representation of historical events, which June Yip countered when she wrote, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films can be seen as attempts to write such a “history from below,” deliberately rejecting the vantage point of the rulers in favor of the perspective of the common people. Milestones of public political history are pushed away from the centers of his films, allowing the everyday experiences of ordinary Taiwanese families to come to the fore . . . the film gives names and voices to . . . the ordinary citizens whose personal stories together make up Taiwanese “popular memory.” 65 In addition to the salient characteristic of focusing on the people in Hou’s films, we also can interrogate the ways in which Hou’s film approaches the 2/28 Incident by once again bringing in Lin Chengsheng’s March of Happiness. Lin’s film devotes even less filmic space to politics, except for the ruses to which the theater group resorts in order to circumvent the colonial and Nationalist governments’ control over artistic freedom. Moreover, whereas in Hou’s Sadness Wenqing and Hiroe are left-leaning intellectuals, Lin’s characters do not

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engage in any overtly antigovernment activities. Happiness ends on the eve of the 2/28 uprising, with only the final intertext informing the audience of the aftermath of the incident. Instead, Lin focuses on several characters to explore the individual’s fate at such a tumultuous moment. Like Hiromi and Wenqing, Ayu and Ajin suffer because of the incident, no matter whether one is a leftist like Wenqing or a less political musician like Ajin. In short, tragedy played out in a domestic, private setting can be as powerful as a grand epic of national history. Understandably, the sense of tragedy largely emanates from the last scenes, in which Ayu waits for the man who will never be able to carry out his promise of a happy life together. We can certainly read this scene allegorically by comparing Ayu’s dashed hopes with the Taiwanese people’s unrealized anticipation of peace and prosperity when Chen Yi took over.The scene of unbearable sadness is conveyed by the notion of pathos, which, “unlike pity, is a cognitive as well as affective construct. The audience is involved on a character’s behalf and yet can exercise pity only reading and evaluating signs inaccessible to the dramatis personae.”66 That is, the audience is privy to the information that Ajin has been killed and therefore is able to evaluate the situation: “Such archetypal melodramatic situations activate very strongly an audience’s participation, for there is a desire to make up for the emotional deficiency, to impart the different awareness.”67 It is precisely through this participation from the audience that the tragedy and its absurdity are realized on screen. The three main characters—Ayu, Ajin, and Xie Renchang— deserve further examination. Ayu is a young, headstrong Taiwanese woman who enjoys singing and acting. Ajin, a talented musician and intellectual, studied in Tokyo, where he fell in love with a Japanese girl, and later traveled with her and her father to Shanghai, where the father and daughter worked as spies for the Japanese. Renchang is perhaps the most intriguing character of the trio. His father is a doctor, an amiable, polite, and refined man. Dr. Xie does not flinch or express displeasure when Ayu shows up for the matchmaking meeting with makeup on for the play that makes her face look as if she were wearing a Japanese flag on each cheek. Renchang, however, comes across as a simpleton. When we first see him, he is sitting in the audience with an enchanted look, watching Ayu on stage.The same scene is repeated one more time when she is rehearsing for the new play after the end

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of the war. Although everyone is aware of the romantic relationship between Ayu and Ajin, Renchang does not complain except to plead with her to continue walking with him, when all she wants is for him to leave so she can read a letter from Ajin. It is much later that he realizes that Ayu and Ajin are involved in a romantic relationship, but he takes no action. Instead, he relies on the paternal power of Ayu’s father to secure a marriage agreement. If we viewed their backgrounds metaphorically, Renchang would represent the local, the Taiwanese whom Ayu, another Taiwanese, is supposed to marry. Ajin is a product of colonial legacy (Taiwanese and Japanese), further complicated by his experience on the mainland. On the narrative level, Ayu’s feelings for him are the driving force behind the plot development and an indispensable feature of domestic melodrama. On a symbolic level, Ajin represents for her the exotic, a longing for the hybridity of Taiwanese cultural heritage, which encompasses Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China.68 His death signals the impossibility of multiculturalism, which is viewed by some as a subplot of Sadness.69 As Ayu sits by the pier waiting, “the future, no matter whether it is good or bad, will continue to come,” but it will no longer be a future of a happy union. Her facing the darkness parallels the symbolic darkness that shrouded the Taiwanese psyche for the next four decades.

" It would be pedantic and pointless to say that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness and Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness are two completely different films, and yet focusing on their differences can be fruitful in approaching cinematic renditions of the 2/28 Incident. In addition to the obvious differences in terms of story line and mode of representation, most striking is what the two films strive to accomplish. As the discussion in the first half of this chapter shows, the controversy surrounding Hou’s Sadness proves the notion that “documentary historical knowledge is impossible,” a point that the film tries to convey: “Film as a medium is poorly suited to the transmission of factual information if it is to remain true to its own aesthetic imperatives.Yet this kind of pedantic criticism—making factual accuracy (or inaccuracy) the chief criterion for judging the merits of a historical

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film—has been around a long time.”70 Hou is less interested in a realistic, faithful re-creation of a traumatic event that has had an everlasting impact on Taiwan than in exploring how historical events can be recreated on the screen. In short, as mentioned earlier, A City of Sadness is less a historical film than a historiographical work. Lin Cheng-sheng’s March of Happiness, with its strong melodramatic characteristics, is not, strictly speaking, a historical film. Even though the story takes place at the historical site of Tianma Café with the iconic cigarette vendor, Happiness imparts interpretive knowledge rather than historical information. In this regard, Lin’s film, like Hou’s, is less concerned with transmitting accurate historical facts; instead, Happiness provides an interpretation of how and why the incident happened, by means of melodrama and a subjunctive mood of miseen-scène. In particular, the scenes of violence attempt to analyze the cause of the incident.With the shooting death of the Japanese colonial officer, we are given a connection between the overabundance of firearms and the subsequent accidental killing of a bystander. When Ajin emerges from the upstairs of the theater and the edgy mainland officer fires at him wildly, the audience can conclude how senseless and yet repercussive his death is, like the shooting death of Chen Wenxi, the bystander shot on February 27, 1947. The consequences of Chen’s death could have been contained, and the incident would not have happened. But the reality is that what should have been done was not, and what should not have happened did happen. Taiwan, like Ayu at the dark pier, was to be deprived of happiness for decades but, as the English title implies, must keep marching toward the future. Ten years after the appearance of the controversial A City of Sadness, Lin Cheng-sheng made his March of Happiness, when there were both more records and more artistic freedom. His film can be seen as an answer to Hou’s film and the criticism leveled against the director. It is crucial that we notice how Lin also skirts a direct portrayal of violence and opts for a melodramatic mode. Atrocious incidents, these two films seem to suggest, can never be effectively re-created on screen, and alternative modes need to be explored.

6. Memory as Redemption

when hou hsiao-hsien’s idea for Good Men, Good Women changed from the problems of adjustment for a newly released political prisoner and his daughter to a film within a film,1 the original inspiration from Chu T’ien-hsin’s story “Once upon a Time There Was a Man Called Urashima Taro” took on a life of its own. Hsu Hsiao-ming’s Heartbreak Island also takes up the issue of reintegration into society but focuses more on the betrayal of political ideals. And Wan Ren’s Super Citizen Ko uses the iconic figure of a political prisoner and sets up a sharp contrast between past and present. In all three films, both the personal and the historical past are constantly recalled to serve cinematic and ideological purposes. Super Citizen Ko, in particular, is saturated with the past of its main character, Xu Yisheng, but the film is preoccupied with atonement to the extent that the construction and representation of his memory become a form of redemption. Super Citizen Ko revolves around Xu Yisheng, an intellectual who was a member of a reading group in the 1950s.2 Like many of his contemporaries, such as Zhong Haodong, he is arrested for reading prohibited material and charged with intent to subvert the government. While under torture, he reveals the name of another reading-group member, Chen Zhengyi, who takes the blame as the leader and is later executed. Ko is sentenced to sixteen years in prison. Shortly after the beginning of his incarceration, Ko hands divorce papers to his devoted wife, with the intention of sparing her embarrassment and suffering. Instead, she commits suicide, leaving their young daughter to fend for herself. When Ko is released, he goes into self-imposed exile in

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a nursing home for twelve years, until one day a dream about Chen Zhengyi’s execution prompts him to reenter society and embark on a quest for Chen’s burial site. Settling into the comfortable apartment of his now married daughter, Ko continues to live an isolated life with little interaction with his daughter and her family. He roams the streets of Taipei and travels out of town, looking up old friends to ask where Chen’s grave is located.When he finally finds it in an overgrown bamboo grove, Ko lights up the area with candles to offer his apology. The film starts in media res with Ko waking up in the nursing home, and his past is relived and related to the audience through an interior monologue during his search for Chen’s grave. Chen Ruxiu has argued that “what he [Ko] is searching for is himself ” and that his only path to redemption is trying to find his friend’s grave.3 If we accept Chen’s analysis that Ko’s search is a kind of self-rediscovery, then the memory dredged up in the process becomes a form of redemption that finally delivers Ko from his suffering. This interpretation also is reinforced at the ending when Ko lights the candles. How, though, is this redemption possible (or is it even necessary?), and how, as a cinematic re-creation of the White Terror, does the film increase our understanding of the representation of the government’s persecution of intellectuals? Finally, how does the closure function? As Robert Chi points out, Super Citizen Ko “enacts a cathartic closure”4 and “was lauded as being, obviously [when compared with Good Men, Good Women], much less cool, much warmer, and hence more intimate, more humane, more moving,” for it “offers a memory that audiences were more likely to identify with, be moved by, assent to, and remember.”5 It is precisely the complicity inherent in this type of film that demands investigation, for in their appreciation of the film and sympathy for its tormented protagonist, the public’s memory of the White Terror is formed from Ko’s personal (and fictional) memories.

memory as interiorization Much of what we learn about Ko’s past and present emotional state is related in his interior monologue, which is a convenient and convincing cinematic technique for an old man who has just come out of selfimposed isolation. The interior monologue itself is a strategic option,

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for “soliloquy and interior monologue are cinematic codes for exteriorizing thought. Their conventions work to the same end in making unspoken thoughts available to the audience, whether the character is alone or in the presence of others. . . . When this language undertakes to tell a story, we have a narrational activity that calls for a covering term to represent a common mental origin. Thus mindscreen narration.”6 What is most illuminating about this technique is the fact that “mindscreen narrations were not limited to being tools for conveying the main story but were seized on for dramatic scenes of self-confrontation.”7 The main character’s interior monologue in Super Citizen Ko, in which he questions the meaning of political ideals and admits his guilt, allows him to confront a past that he has tried to suppress. In addition to the critical function of self-confrontation, an interior monologue creates a subtle but important impression of Ko’s world as a former political prisoner. Because the other characters “may be present but do not hear the words,” his sense of isolation is intensified. In other words, the interior monologue allows the director to insulate Ko from society in order to stress the detrimental effects of political persecution. Because an invisible label has been attached to former political prisoners, they have no choice but to live in isolation. Moreover, because the damage to their mental health and psychological well-being cannot be easily verbalized, Ko’s interior monologue serves as a symbolic function when he talks to himself but no one else, similar to the attempt made by his fellow political prisoner to ensure his own safety. During the previous year, Ko’s friend Professor Wu suddenly begins exhibiting a form of paranoia; he wears headphones and listens to propaganda broadcasts all day long to demonstrate to the listening device (which, he believes, the government has implanted in his head) that he has nothing but pure, patriotic thoughts. Wu’s wife tells Ko that she has repeatedly told Wu that martial law has been lifted but that he never believes her: “When the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted, . . . it not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity.”8 Most ironic is the fact that Professor Wu’s persecution complex appears only after martial law is lifted. When freedom of speech and of congregation are finally given to the people, the past comes back to haunt Wu and plunges the victim of the White Terror into paranoia.

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He is, in essence, the victim of “History as Tragedy,” in the sense posited by a film historian: “We might contrast these opposing visions of history by calling them respectively ‘History as Epic’ and ‘History as Tragedy.’ In ‘History as Tragedy’ people are seen as the product of their context. Their structures of consciousness, their forms of perception, their ways of being in and relating to the world have been inexorably shaped by their historical experiences. They are caught in the past.”9 Only through such a portrayal can the devastating effects of the White Terror be conveyed so poignantly.

contested memories As a film that deals with the White Terror, Super Citizen Ko does not rely solely on the detrimental effects of thought persecution. Instead, it uses flashbacks and evokes various kinds of memories to advance its central theme: “By suddenly presenting the past, flashbacks can abruptly offer new meanings connected to any person, place, or object. Flashbacks then gain a particularly rich dimension in the coding of the psychology of character, and because their evidence is the past, they immediately imply a psychoanalytic dimension of personality.”10 In Super Citizen Ko, we see ample instances of such coding, but what is most significant is that we see flashbacks of both Ko and his daughter, Xiuqin. When their memories of the past are flashed back to them, a discrepancy is inevitably formed. The variance can be explained simply by means of the cliché that people remember things differently. People do not remember an event in the same way because the event does not have the same meaning and importance for each person. It is through this variation in memory and the interpretation of that memory, then, that Super Citizen Ko conveys the aftermath of the White Terror. The most obvious discrepancy in memory is in Ko’s and his daughter’s recollection of the prison visit during which Ko hands his wife divorce papers. In Ko’s flashback, his wife sits down, smiles, and looks up at him. A reverse shot shows Ko looking at her and giving her the divorce papers. She gets up and starts to leave, but then turns to look at him before finally walking away. Like most of the flashbacks, this scene is presented in complete silence, although the emotional turmoil in both

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characters’ minds is clearly depicted through the wordless exchange between husband and wife. Later when his daughter relays her own memory of the same prison scene, we spot her standing behind her mother, watching the wordless exchange between her parents. When the mother gets up to leave, the daughter hesitates and then follows her mother out. The daughter’s flashback of the prison scene also is presented in total silence. Even though it is not much different from what the father remembers, their different perspectives succeed in distorting their memories. As Maureen Turim points out, “certain characters get certain kinds of flashbacks at given moments, and analysis of a film can benefit from remarking not only on the presence of a given flashback but the absence of others, not only on what information is presented in a flashback, but what is left out.”11 What is left out of the father’s flashback is the presence of his daughter and, as she complains to her aging father later, her feelings and her life after her mother’s suicide. Earlier in the film, we became familiar with the father’s lack of interaction with his daughter and her husband and son. Her recollection of the prison scene serves to highlight her absence from her father’s mind. Chen Ruxiu argues that Ko gradually realizes that he has been forgotten by the world, just as he forgot about his wife and daughter while he wasted his life for his ideals.12 In other words, Chen believes that the aging Ko regrets his life and wishes he could have lived it differently, for “he wants to prove that the past is just a dream and nothing is real.”13 Although we cannot deny that Ko’s youth was completely ruined by the absurdity of the White Terror, it is an oversimplification to read Super Citizen Ko as a film about regret for one’s youth. In fact, as Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” does, Super Citizen Ko exemplifies the question of appropriately allocating narrative space to the public and the private. The public, like the government control apparatus, is constantly invading the private sphere of familial life. Thus in these two flashbacks, we detect the competition between the private and the public. For Ko, the intellectual who joined a reading group, the concern was the public, the political situation of Taiwan in the 1950s. He decides to divorce his wife, believing that it would spare her hardships, with little regard for her private emotional state, which is best illustrated by her suicide.

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For his daughter, Ko’s ordeal is entirely personal, which is why she is against getting involved in politics. Her flashback of the boat ride home after the fatal visit accentuates the contrast between father’s and daughter’s memories. Her mother is standing with her back to the wind, and the daughter watches as her mother rips the divorce papers to pieces. Although Ko has no way of knowing about the boat trip, his daughter’s recollection of it indirectly reveals the devastating effects of the White Terror on the people’s private lives. In her case, her father is arrested because he has read some books with a few friends, and unbeknownst to her, she will soon become a de facto orphan. The flashback is most poignant for her, as an adult, recalling the incident many years later, for she now knows what the papers contained and what was going on in her heartbroken mother’s mind. Her father’s wellintentioned plan ultimately caused her mother’s death. At a time when serving tea to the members of the reading group cost a young woman (Professor Wu’s sister) three years of her life, there was no distinction between public and private, for everything one did and thought fell into the all-pervasive jurisdiction of the police state.14

fabricated memories The notion that private life can never be safe from an invasive and pervasive government control mechanism is further enforced in a different kind of memory, what I shall call fabricated, in that the characters either dream or imagine a scene in the past that they cannot have witnessed. In the beginning of the film, before the opening credits, we see the headlights of trucks in the dark meandering through a field. One of the trucks turns out to be a military vehicle transporting soldiers who will then execute the prisoners in the other truck.Then we see three prisoners kneel on the ground, and one after another they are shot in the back. Except for the three gunshots, this scene, like the other flashbacks, has no dialogue. The next scene shows a trembling hand clawing at a blanket; the camera then slowly pans up to Ko’s sleeping face. Ko opens his eyes and the camera cuts to the execution scene, in which the third prisoner, obviously Chen, falls forward as the bullet pierces his body, dark blood oozing out to stain his white shirt. A slight variation on the scene reappears as Ko’s flashback when he

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visits Youth Park, the former execution ground. In this scene, Chen is shown in full frontal shot when he looks up and then falls forward at the sound of a gunshot. As critics have pointed out, Ko cannot have witnessed the execution of his friend; rather, he dreams or imagines the scene after seeing Chen’s raised hands to indicate the sentence he has received. In one of the flashbacks, Ko hears the sound of chains clanging against the floor and walks up to the opening on his prison cell door to see Chen being led away. Chen raises his hands, his left showing two fingers of his left hand and one of his right, indicating the death sentence for political prisoners, according to article 2, section 1, of the martial law. The knowledge gained from Chen’s hand gesture leads Ko to fabricate the scene of Chen’s execution and also serves as the motivational force behind Ko’s termination of self-exile. But “since Xu [Ko] himself was not present at that event, nor does he find any witness to the execution, the image wavers between Xu’s point-of-view dream vision and a reality that no one in the film claims.”15 The film strongly suggests that the execution scene is part of Ko’s dream, and it is repeatedly shown with slight variations in the form of flashbacks. To some filmgoers, the repetition of the gory execution may seem gratuitous and unnecessary. In fact, its repetition may be derived from the idea of catharsis, which “has acquired tremendous force in contemporary culture and has become a foundational concept for explicating the relationship between visual media content and viewers.”16 Needless to say, we cannot resolve here the cathartic functions of screen violence, and so it may be more constructive for us to consider the mnemonic power of Ko’s fabrication or dream. That is, as a movie with a clear ideological agenda, Super Citizen Ko does not simply re-create part of Taiwan’s history (the past) but also creates a memory of that past (the future knowledge of that past), for memory “cannot be strictly individual, inasmuch as it is symbolic and hence intersubjective. Nor can it be literally collective, since it is not superorganic but embodied.”17 Wan Ren, the director, once disclosed in an interview that he was interested in creating a contrast between past and present to conduct a sort of reflection on Taiwan. But this process is far from being a mere cinematic re-creation, since it has strong political ramifications, as argued by Jonathan Boyarin: “What we are faced with—what we are living—is the constitution of both group ‘membership’ and individual ‘identity’

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out of a dynamically chosen selection of memories, and the constant reshaping, reinvention, and reinforcement of those memories as members contest and create the boundaries and links among themselves.”18 In a similar fashion, but focusing again on the private domain, Ko’s daughter, Xiuqin, fabricates in a flashback a memory of her mother’s death from her perspective. After the mother and daughter return home from the visit during which Ko hands his wife the divorce papers, Xiuqin is seen sitting on the bed and letting her mother comb her hair. Xiuqin then goes to sleep while her mother stares at herself in the mirror and swallows some pills (presumably sleeping pills).Then the camera cuts to the mother sitting against the Japanese-style door frame, burning letters and a wedding photo. Because Xiuqin cannot have witnessed her mother’s activities, she more likely inferred them later from the ashes and perhaps from a diagnosis of the cause of her mother’s death. This imagined scene is inserted in Xiuqin’s flashback between her recollection of the boat ride home and her memory of her mother playing the piano one last time. These details form the memory of a young girl whose father’s actions inadvertently brought on her mother’s suicide and left her a virtual orphan. Xiuqin’s fabricated memory serves two purposes. First, by inserting this imagined scene into her recollection of her mother’s last visit, she points an accusatory finger at her father for having neglected his responsibilities as a husband and a father, thus extradiegetically dispelling the myth about the families of political prisoners. Wan Ren revealed in the same interview his objection to the heroic and sympathetic images portrayed in print media (fiction, magazine articles, and biographies): “In fact, I discovered that subconsciously they [the family members of political prisoners] were bitter and were unable to forgive, resentful even.”19 Xiuqin’s resentment offers an important (albeit symbolic) dissenting voice in the representation of the White Terror and explodes the monolithic image of the victims and their family members as understanding, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing. A compelling contrast can be found in the character of Cai Qianhui in Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road,” who willingly subjects herself to a lifetime of toil and ultimately wills herself to death. Cai’s selfless and steadfast image, as analyzed in chapter 2, serves political and didactic functions, and Wan Ren’s character complicates the portrayals of victims of the White Terror, dispelling the mnemonic myth

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of victims and their families. In his discussion of how Hollywood filmmakers “establish and dramatize their portrayals through images drawn” from American mythology, some of which derive from literary works, Robert Toplin argues that these images “emerged especially from the movie culture itself. These visions wield tremendous emotional force in the present day. Consequently, the filmmakers produce part history, part myth.”20 Taiwan’s literary and cinematic history/ mythmaking presents an intriguing confirmation of and divergence from Toplin’s assertion. To be sure, Chen Yingzhen creates an iconic woman in “The Mountain Road,” which has, to a certain extent, created a minor mythology of suffering women. Lan Bozhou’s nonfictional Good Women of Taiwan, for instance, exemplifies such a literary lineage. But Wan Ren’s Super Citizen Ko offers a differing image in Xiuqin and may well be an alternative strand of myth. We cannot ignore, however, that Xiuqin’s mother commits suicide without regard for Xiuqin’s well-being, and after her mother’s death, she is passed around among relatives and must deal with police harassment alone. How do we then interpret the problem of culpability? Is the film implying that during the White Terror the Guomindang’s thought police was the sole culprit and that people like Ko, his wife, and his daughter were simply collateral damage? To answer these questions, we must return to the issue of memory in flashback and to Boyarin’s notion that a chosen selection of memories shapes and reshapes a social group and an individual. Flashback films, writes Maureen Turim, imbed the process by which memory forms the individual and the social group within the narrative. They narrate what it means to remember. They indicate what the power of memory can be for a fictional character while becoming a similar extension of that memory formation for their audience. Through their structuring of memory sequences as subjective recall of historical and personal experience, these films structurally underscore the process by which memories are granted the power to define the individual and the social group that identifies with the remembered experience of another’s story.21 In Super Citizen Ko, we can assume that Xiuqin’s memories are intended to represent the memories of all victims of the White Ter-

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ror as well as the memories of the Taiwanese in general. The film appeals to the sensibility of the average moviegoer and thus lacks a greater measure of self-reflection.There is an easily discernible parallel between a film that creates a story of the victims of the White Terror and the daughter of a political prisoner who imagines the last scene of her mother’s death. Consequently, in a perverse but clearly unintended way, the film calls into question the construction and transmission of memory. The conclusion of the flashback, however, falls victim to the temptation of melodrama, for toward the end Xiuqin is awakened by the sound of her mother playing the piano and sees her mother collapsing on the piano when overcome by the effect of the pills.22 The past remains mired in the past for Xiuqin, and her memories, both fabricated and real, serve primarily to vent her resentment and bitterness. In sum, she is representative of the kind of victim’s family that dramatizes the director’s politics. Although we can be sympathetic to the director’s intent, the scene is reminiscent of a film historian’s observation on mourning: “Despite its insistence on the didactic and transformative nature of confrontation with loss, the mourning paradigm monumentalizes, schematizes, melodramatizes, and hence oversimplifies the dynamic nature of the past and the role that the past plays in the present.”23

floating memories When a part of the past is presented as a flashback in Super Citizen Ko, it is, with few exceptions, attached to either Ko or his daughter as memory (imagined or not). Because of the difference in their perspectives, the screen memories they impart to the audience underscore the disastrous repercussions the Taiwanese suffered under martial law. These screen effects are achieved through flashbacks with unknown or unclear origins, or what I call floating memories. Shortly after we learn about Chen’s death sentence through Ko’s flashback, the older Ko is shown writing in his diary about Chen’s execution and its effect on him. Next we see Xiuqin’s husband trying to convince her that politics is no longer dangerous and that it is a good time to get involved. The camera then cuts to Ko writing at his desk while the conversation between Xiuqin and her husband can be heard coming from the

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living room. We are introduced to another flashback right after the husband asks, “What are you afraid of? Do you think I’d harm you? What do you women know anyway?” In this nearly pitch-black scene, soldiers are searching the Kos’ house, and Xiuqin and her mother are held back by a rifle-wielding soldier, watched helplessly by Ko, who obviously has been brought back from prison. The next scene shows Xiuqin and her mother running down the stairs and into the street as the camera pulls back to show a moving vehicle. Xiuqin runs after the truck and calls out to her father. When she stops running, a medium shot shows Ko staring at the camera (and presumably the receding image of his daughter). The scene then returns to the present, and she is in the kitchen chopping vegetables. The last shot of the flashback showing Ko’s face seems to have emerged from his memory upon hearing his son-in-law’s complaint about Xiuqin’s fear of political activities. Or the earlier part of the flashback might be her memory of soldiers ransacking their house. Or it could be a fusion of father’s and daughter’s memories, as the scene before the flashback is the father writing in his diary and the scene afterward is the daughter chopping vegetables. Not knowing the exact origin of the flashback helps highlight the contrast between the past and the present in regard to political freedom. For the son-in-law, who obviously did not suffer political persecution, the lifting of martial law means only an opportunity to be a player in the election game. For Ko and his daughter, merely an interest in politics in the form of reading and organizing a reading group can bring back terrorizing memories of torture and death. The contrasting attitude toward politics appears frequently throughout the film. Earlier, when Ko begins roaming the streets of Taipei, he encounters groups of protesters demonstrating against the construction of Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant and advocating for people’s rights. Back in his daughter’s apartment, Ko is inundated with images of violent confrontations between the riot police and protesters as he flips through the television channels, all of which are new to him and serve as a stark contrast with his own past. When we consider the cinematographic significance of these post–martial law images, along with the floating flashback, it is impossible not to regard the contrast as a commentary on politics in contemporary Taiwan. The older generation, represented by the young Ko, has higher

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aspirations and ideals, whereas the younger people, like Ko’s son-inlaw, are opportunists with no beliefs except in the service of personal gain. This contrast is intensified when Ko’s son-in-law is later arrested and charged with bribery.This contrast becomes less plausible, though, when we consider a statement made by Ko immediately after his flashback of being tortured in prison: “What are youths and ideals?” In other words, when the aging Ko questions his own youthful actions, the possibility that the film is privileging the older, idealistic generation no longer exists. Instead, the film seems to be mocking political activities, past and present. As discussed in previous chapters, the narrative strategy of contrasting the past with the present can problematize the work’s political and ideological stance if the author/director intends to privilege the past over the present. But by casting both the past and the present in a negative light, Super Citizen Ko seems to reject such an approach, for the film is less interested in validating Ko’s past actions than in promoting a kind of closure.This brings us back to the notion of redemption, best exemplified in another flashback. In this floating memory, Ko approaches a noodle stand, and the camera moves closer and closer, from Ko’s point of view, finally to focus on the stand owner’s face. The owner looks up and blinks a few times in the watery mist of the steaming noodles, followed by a brief flashback of Ko on a truck, very likely after the search of his house. In this flashback, Ko is shown, in a medium shot, looking slightly to his left (possibly at a birthmark on the soldier’s face); then the camera cuts to the soldier, who lights a cigarette and exhales before turning to look at Ko. These two scenes have the effect of the shot–reverse shot often used in scenes when two characters are engaged in a conversation. We are usually shown the face of A speaking, and then the camera cuts to B. This reversal of perspective gives the audience the impression that they are looking at A from B’s angle and then looking at B from A’s viewpoint. Applying this reading to the two scenes in this flashback, from Ko’s perspective we first look at the soldier as he lights his cigarette, and then from the soldier’s viewpoint we see Ko. If this is the case, the origin of the flashback is ambiguous, as it could be Ko or the former soldier turned noodle-stand owner or both. The uncertainty of the flashback’s perspective implies that both the soldier and Ko are implicated in a political turmoil that is beyond

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their control. Later, when the former soldier and the former political prisoner sit down at the noodle stand to share a drink, the former soldier says with a straight face, “Back then I was only charged with arresting people.” The subtext of his declarative statement is that he was simply following orders and was only a tiny cog in the Guomindang’s machinery of oppression and persecution. In their conversation, the former soldier says to Ko that the Taiwanese were not the only group targeted, as many mainlanders who exhibited any discontent also were arrested and sentenced to eight or ten years in prison. In a somewhat apologist fashion, the former soldier offers the explanation for the Guomindang’s policy that in the White Terror, many innocent people were arrested in order to ensure that not a single Communist infiltrator was spared. In the heyday of the collective anti-Communist paranoia, everyone was a suspect, and everyone could be the patriot who helped expose a Communist. The political climate at that time demanded that everyone be part of the anti-Communist enterprise.24 As a consequence, participants like the former soldier could be excused for taking part in enforcing the law. Much as we would like to forgive foot soldiers like the noodlestand owner, the scene still conveys a sense of absurdity while forcing the audience to reflect on issues of reconciliation and responsibility. On the one hand, we feel a sense of unease at seeing the former political prisoner drinking with the man who ransacked his house and terrified his family, not to mention that the organization he served indirectly caused the death of Ko’s wife. On the other hand, we wonder exactly how such an encounter should be portrayed cinematically. Wan Ren’s original plan for the movie was to depict a former political prisoner’s search for those who were responsible for his incarceration and to seek revenge. But he changed his mind when he learned more about the families of the victims and after reading Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road.”25 Redemption thus has replaced revenge as the film’s central theme, hence the floating memory of the scene on the truck and the post-incarceration encounter at the noodle stand. The wordless exchange of gazes on the truck becomes an emblematic gesture toward future reconciliation, for the unclear origin of the flashback metaphorically blurs the difference between the perpetrator and the victim. But we cannot help but wonder whether state terror like this can be easily forgiven by simply invoking the specter

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of the White Terror. That is, questions remain as to whether or not the soldier did indeed believe that the formation of a reading group threatened national security and whether all past wrongs could be simply written off as the consequence of a less democratic time. The fundamental issue raised by this scene has larger political and perhaps ethical ramifications: Can a perpetrator, however minor, be absolved of his responsibility because the political climate gave him no option but to follow orders? And should a film addressing atrocity promote such an approach to history? Marcia Landy’s meditation on material monument may be helpful here: The creation of monuments as a perpetual reminder of suffering and as an expression of the need for restitution is addressed both to the perpetrators and their heirs and to the handful of survivors and their offspring. The injunction to remember, the coupling of recollection to the motto “Never again,” the insistence on the healing effects of memory, and the need to provide appropriate cultural instruments to enhance this “work” are articulated for German as well as for Jew, Gypsy, and homosexual, and perhaps for all modern humanity.26 In the scenes of Ko’s meeting with the former soldier and the flashback of his arrest, we detect the director’s intention of addressing the issue of restitution between the perpetrators and their heirs and the survivors. But the noodle-stand encounter falls short of convincing us of the need to remember and, paradoxically, questions the healing effects of memory. Memory seems only to bring more suffering to Ko. In their conversation, the former soldier, with somewhat irrepressible pleasure, reveals to Ko that he has long retired from the Garrison Command and has opened the noodle stand with his wife and daughter. “Life isn’t bad,” he concedes, before asking, “What about your wife?”Well intentioned though it may be, the question seems thoughtless and cruel, and all Ko can do is keep drinking. To be sure, Ko’s search for the former soldier has nothing to do with his wife or his family life; his sole concern is finding Chen’s grave so he can rid himself of the guilt that has caused his self-imposed exile and tormented him for thirty-four years. Also implied in the scene is the contrast between a former perpetrator

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of terror and his victim: the former has a family and a humble but comfortable life, whereas the latter has lost his wife and is estranged from his only remaining family member. The recall of the past in this scene is devoid of therapeutic power, and remembrance seems only to heighten Ko’s determination to locate Chen’s grave. Memory does, however, bring deliverance for Ko. But it is not until he finally finds Chen’s burial site that Ko’s subconscious can conjure up the memory of his wife, although the scene is not a flashback recollection in the strictest sense. At the end of the film, when Ko returns to his daughter’s apartment after the candle-lighting episode, he collapses in the doorway. His daughter helps him to bed and, finding his open diary, starts to read, with Ko’s peaceful sleeping face serving as the backdrop. The film ends with a sepia scene of the aging Ko strolling on a breezy open field with his young wife and daughter on either side. Holding hands, they walk in slow motion, smiling at the camera, and then the frame freezes. Since it is utterly impossible that the old Ko could exist in the same time frame with his wife and daughter when they were young, this scene can only be imaginary. The most logical explanation is that it is Ko’s dream, but it also is possible that Xiuqin is imagining it while reading her father’s diary. Ultimately, we must consider the final shot to be a shared, imagined memory for father and daughter. It is a memory of the past and at the same time a memory for the future.

documentary memory In a fashion similar to the use of fabricated memory, Super Citizen Ko also incorporates archival footage at two critical junctures. These two segments, one from the late colonial period and the other from the early days of Nationalist rule, are strikingly similar in both their documentary nature and their function in the film. Both featuring the ruling governments’ display of military prowess, these documentary excerpts appear in a nearly seamless manner after following flashbacks of former political prisoners. They create intriguing, ideological interpretations of historical events and offer a personalized view of Taiwan’s past by juxtaposing personal flashbacks with archival footage.

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The first archival footage appears when Ko succeeds in locating the first person implicated in the reading group,You Minshun, a musician, who lives in a dilapidated, illegal shack and earns a living by playing at funerals and weddings. Unwilling to talk about Chen Zhengyi, You focuses instead on an earlier time, when both Ko and You were classmates and comrades in arms after being drafted by the Japanese colonial government to fight in the Pacific War.You then picks up his saxophone and walks out into the ramshackle yard, where he plays a march. With the military music playing in the background, we first see a black-and-white scene in which You, Ko, and three others from the same village sit for a photographer before they are sent to the battlefield. After the photographer’s flash, the camera cuts to documentary footage showing marching soldiers and a troop inspection by the Japanese governor-general of Taiwan, followed by archival film of battle scenes, including dead soldiers lying in the trenches. With the militant music continuing to play but at a lower volume, the camera cuts from archival footage to Ko and another soldier (possibly You) arriving at a Japanese house where deceased soldiers’ families kneel to receive their bones. This mixture of historical documentary film and fictional characters’ flashback ends with Ko and You crying with the families as the camera cuts to the roofs of illegal dwellings in Taipei in the 1990s. The immediately discernible significance of this segment is the ironic effect created when the archival footage clashes with the personal flashback.You was not a member of the reading group but nonetheless was sentenced to six years because he had paid a visit to his old classmate, Ko. We can infer that You, like so many victims of the White Terror, suffered both in prison and after his release. Constant harassment from local police and difficulties finding steady employment were but two of the most common forms of persecution, even after the prisoners had served undeserved sentences. It is therefore understandable that You does not want to discuss Chen or any related matter.27 Instead, he prefers to recall an earlier time, when as loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, they were offered the great honor of dying for the emperor. The recollection of the delivery of dead soldiers’ bones is clearly from Ko’s perspective, as we see the camera zoom in on his sobbing face. Accordingly, what is glorious for You represents only death in Ko’s memory.

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The irony of the archival footage becomes even sharper when contrasted with other footage whose appearance is filled with ideological and political implications. In a scene that triggers a combination of documentary film images and personal flashbacks, Ko visits Professor Wu, who puts on his headphones when Ko asks where Chen is buried. Ko lifts one of the earphones and hears an anti-Communist propaganda song. Then we see a black-and-white documentary of the Double-Tenth celebration, with Chiang Kai-shek inspecting the troops. As the shrill voice continues to drone on about the importance of recovering the mainland, the image of tanks displaying the military prowess of the Guomindang regime segue into military trucks rushing in and disgorging soldiers to arrest Ko and other members of the reading group. The functions of the documentary footage are many. First, it serves as an ironic reminder to the post–martial law audience of the absurdity through which most of them lived: Because the historical film by definition refers to a past reality known to most viewers prior to the film either from experience or from representation, they enjoy the effect of recognition. . . . This extra referent, which appeals to historical knowledge (and knowledge that exists outside of the film’s fictional sphere), produces an additional level of meaning and increases the meaning potential of the film.28 The documentary footage also highlights Wu’s damaged mental state and, by extension, that of other political prisoners. Most important, it is a silent accusation against the fascist state apparatus that in the name of recovering the mainland and resisting the Communists hunted down and persecuted many people, instilled a pervasive fear in everyone’s lives, and destroyed people like Professor Wu, Ko, and many more.The juxtaposition of real archival footage and the fictional depiction of Ko’s arrest has a subtle leveling effect in that it fictionalizes the real and brings a sense of realism to the fictional. As Anton Kaes argues in his discussion of Fassbinder’s historical film: “The viewer senses, even if unconsciously, the unresolvable dual status of historical narratives, as document and fiction, authentically true and at the same time used within a freely invented story.”29 Ultimately, however, Super Citizen Ko emphasizes more the question of how real the historical

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footage is, for as the Taiwanese who lived through the era can attest, the troop inspection was nothing but a staged display, a myth of the Republic of China. For all intents and purposes, the archival footage is as fictional as the film in which it is used. Placed side by side, the two excerpts of archival footage reveal startling similarities. For instance, the troop inspections by the governor-general of colonial Taiwan and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek are nearly identical, with the same kind of amorphous soldiers goosestepping before the podium in front of the presidential office (the former governor-general’s office taken over by the Nationalist government). Taylor Downing’s analysis of history on television is also appropriate here regarding footage in fictional films: “In newsreels, public information films, works of propaganda or television newscasts, film frequently not only captures an impression of what an event looked like but gives a topical and often revealing interpretation of that event.”30 Used several decades later, the incorporation of the archival footage in Super Citizen Ko presents a new interpretation that may be in direct opposition to the original intent. That is, both the military and the governor-general/president in front of their office are symbols of the state, but for the Taiwanese the definition of the state (guo) is extremely complex. Post–martial law debates over the issue of national identity inevitably return to the question of whether the Nationalist government was another colonial government, just like that of the Japanese. Although Super Citizen Ko does not dwell on this question, its title does hint at the issue of national identity: Citizen (Guomin, the original Chinese title). To which state does the title refer? It could well be a declaration of political allegiance, in the sense that a citizen of a given country should have the inalienable rights to congregate freely and to read any material that he or she wishes, without fear of persecution.

" Among the films dealing with acts of government brutality and the suppression of dissents in Taiwan, Super Citizen Ko is the only one in which the victim comes face to face with the member of the Garrison Command who arrested him, but the central theme of redemption forecloses any possibility of probing the issue of culpability.To be sure,

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we should be cognizant of prosecutorial romanticism, as defined by Paul van Zyl, which is “the notion that ‘retributive justice’ is a sufficient response to past abuse.” “The punishment of perpetrators is crucial to dealing with the past, but it will always be insufficient response to mass atrocity, and any successful attempt to deal with the past must seek to explore other strategies to make victims whole and to prevent a recurrence of past abuse.”31 Yet Ko’s search for truth (that is, Chen’s burial site) unconditionally validates and legitimates the need for reconciliation. Hence what we see is the tormenting of Ko’s conscience over unwillingly revealing Chen’s name. Perversely, Ko is the guilty one: he suffers years of isolation in prison and at the nursing home, and his wife commits suicide. Therefore, at the end of the movie Ko finally finds the site where Chen and others who were not identified by their families are buried.32 He lights the bamboo grove with candles and offers his apology to Chen Zhengyi. This overriding concern with closure entails an urge to move forward and contradicts the earlier moments in the film that were invested in recollecting and re-creating a memory of the White Terror. I am not arguing that we need to dwell on the past but am questioning whether in the end, Ko’s action (and, by extension, the film) mirrors the tired slogan of forgiveness in the post–martial law atmosphere of reconciliation. It is no wonder that Robert Chi states that “the whole premise of political prisoner as Urashima Taro seems to be a pretext that prescribes and prescripts Xu Yisheng’s candlelit voicing of apology for his betrayal of Chen Zhengyi.”33 While I believe that Chi has overlooked the entire film as a process of creating memory, I would argue that the ending hastily dispenses with many lingering issues that still face Taiwan. Dominick LaCapra’s analysis of mourning illustrates my concern: “In mourning one recognizes a loss as a loss yet in time is able to take (partial) leave of it, begin again, renew interest in life, and find relatively stabilized objects of interest, love, and commitment. Moreover, one remembers and honors the lost other but does not identify with the other in a specular relation that, however ecstatic or self-sacrificial, confuses the self with the other.”34 Whether Ko is eventually able to mourn the past and, analogously, whether Taiwan has succeeded in mourning the loss, remains the ultimate question.

Epilogue: Looking Forward

it has been twenty years since martial law was lifted in 1987, which ushered in dramatic changes in every aspect of Taiwanese citizens’ lives. Most noteworthy are the unprecedented civil liberties that guarantee the freedoms of speech, press, and congregation. Gone are the thought police who patrolled their daily lives; no longer do they have to fear persecution for expressing dissenting views now that the White Terror has become a part of Taiwan’s less than glorious past. These two decades have also witnessed a surge in remembering the past, especially the 2/28 Incident and the government persecution during the White Terror era. Scholarly research, compilations of eyewitness accounts, oral histories, and re-creations in film and fiction have helped fill in gaps in Taiwan’s recent history. In this book, I examined the politics, strategies, and pitfalls of literary and cinematic renditions of Taiwan’s past. Recent literary works are now moving toward a self-reflexive interrogation of the writing process as writers grow increasingly aware of the problems and limitations of realist, even mimetic, representation. In this epilogue, I focus on a novel by Lan Bozhou, likely the most prolific writer/researcher on the period of martial law, to recapitulate the issues I raised. Lan Bozhou’s Vine Intertwining Tree recounts the story of a young Hakka man, Ali, who tries to uncover and write about the life of another Hakka man, the fictional Lin Minghua, who was executed in the early 1950s for his leftist thoughts and activities.1 The novel touches on problems of investigating atrocity, interviewing eyewitnesses, interpreting material, and narrating the story of victims. As does Lan’s earlier work, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” the novel

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begins with the end, when Ali has finished his project on Lin Minghua and returns with his wife, Ajing, to Lin’s village to give a presentation on his book.The first third of the novel deals with Ali’s research into Lin Minghua’s life through interviews and correspondence with survivors and eyewitnesses. The remaining two-thirds of the novel are a metafictional probing of interpreting and representation, as Ali struggles and experiments with a variety of genres to find the most suitable voice in which to recount Lin’s story. He finally settles on a novelistic form and finishes a novel also entitled Vine Intertwining Tree, on Lin Minghua and Lin’s wife, Fu Shuangmei. In the meantime, Ali’s personal life also seems to have taken on metafictional characteristics, with letters from his former girlfriend examining and explaining the reasons for their breakup. The end of Lan’s novel returns to the beginning, when Ali and Ajing meet with the villagers at the publicity gathering for his novel. Because Lan’s novel is too complex for me to discuss in only a few pages, I will concentrate on Ali’s search, research, and re-creation.

between facts and fiction The strategies that both Lan Bozhou and Dong Nian used in their earlier novellas to create the impression of factual accounts appear again in Lan’s novel: eyewitness testimonials and news reports. In Vine Intertwining Tree, fictive reports and essays from the print media and sentencing documents also are incorporated into Ali’s research. These self-contradictory documents generate even more confusion in Ali’s understanding of Lin Minghua’s life. Indeed, Lan may be reflecting on problems he has encountered in his own research on major figures in Taiwan who perished in the late 1940s and the 1950s. What he reveals in this novel, whether or not intentionally, further underscores the legacy of atrocity: not only were the victims executed, but their stories usually were buried for years, and many were greatly distorted. Some intellectuals who were executed in the aftermath of the 2/28 Incident were simply labeled “Communist” or “Communist spies,” or “traitors,” even though their “offense” was simply organizing a reading group or expressing dissenting views. Under the totalitarian control of thought and interpretation, however, facts become fiction and fiction becomes

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facts. To be sure, Lan’s intention is not merely to emphasize this gray area but to stress what was best summed up by James E.Young: The aim in comparing several variant versions of the same event is not to find the truest, or the one that corresponds most closely to the reality, or to undermine the credibility of these witnesses. It is rather to trace the manner in which this act has been grasped by several different survivors, how they have assimilated it to other preexisting legends and to their own understanding of the camp, how it has reinforced particular truths already held, how it was molded to conform to their beliefs, and how it was sustained imaginatively as a kind of inspiration to other victims.2 The strategy of using eyewitness accounts is questioned partly because they unavoidably contradict one another. Moreover, not everyone is willing to talk to Ali (Fu Shuangmei being the most important figure in this regard). One person who does talk to Ali withholds information until he feels he can trust him. Some of the eyewitnesses are reluctant not simply because they are traumatized but also because the lingering fear of persecution still exerts a great deal of influence on these former political prisoners. We recall in Super Citizen Ko Ko’s friend You Minshun, who repeatedly changes the subject of their conversation when Ko asks about Chen Zhengyi’s grave site. The difference, of course, is that both Ko and You are former political prisoners, whereas Ali is from the younger generation, whose sketchy knowledge of the past comes from furtive references made by the older generation. In “Song of the Covered Wagon,” Lan Bozhou uses a forum style of representation, with each eyewitness coming forward to recount and supplement information about Zhong Haodong and his life. Since we are not privy to the questions that the interviewer asked his interviewees, we inevitably get a uniform picture of the victim. This monologic style is ideologically driven to serve a political function: the tragic and unjust death of a good man. In Vine Intertwining Tree, Ali’s questions are often placed alongside the witnesses’ answers, in the form of a conversation. As studies of Holocaust witnesses show, the interaction between an interviewer and an interviewee can affect the accounts, which demonstrates the importance of including the interviewer’s

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questions. Even though Lan’s interviews are fictional, by emphasizing Ali’s presence the novel draws our attention to the interview process as well as to the complex politics and psychology behind the questions and answers.

victim and victimhood In the beginning of Vine Intertwining Tree, Ali arrives at Zhutouzhuang, where he was born, to work as a member of a research team compiling “A Cultural History of Zhutouzhuang.” He is to work on an important aspect of Hakka culture, the folk songs, but his interest in Lin Minghua and Fu Shuangmei takes him further and further away from collecting and compiling them, until finally he has to resign from the team. Lin Minghua, Ali’s research shows, was a Communist engaged in an armed struggle against the Nationalist government. Lin’s political affiliation has several ramifications. On a textual level, Chen Wanli, Ali’s friend who employed him, objects to including a Communist in the village chronicle, mainly because the funding for the chronicle was raised by an anti-Communist, pro–Taiwan independence politician. From the cold and unsympathetic way in which Chen Wanli raises his objection, we see that he also personally opposes the idea. Ali therefore has no choice but to resign if he wishes to continue investigating Lin Minghua’s life and death. The larger implication of Chen’s opposition concerns the victims of atrocity in Taiwan, as some people advocate distinguishing among the different kinds of victims: those mostly innocent people who were killed before and during the March massacre of 1947; those who were falsely accused of sedition in the martial law era; and the Communists or Marxists who engaged in antigovernment activities. The last group was most active during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, the activists in the opposition (dangwai, literally “outside the Nationalist Party”) were the dissidents associated with the magazine Formosa who were incarcerated after the Formosa Incident depicted in Heartbreak Island. Some people, like Chen Wanli in Lan’s novel, believed that Marxists and those who promoted Communism deserved to be punished and thus were not victims. But Ali disagrees: “Politics is politics; history is history.”3

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Politics and history are, of course, intertwined, and so an examination of them requires a different forum. For our purposes, the ambiguous status of Lin Minghua’s victimhood is reminiscent of that of Super Citizen Ko, Zhong Haodong, and Chen Linlang. The first two were intellectuals (both high-school teachers) reading prohibited material; Zhong was a leftist; and Ko’s political affiliation is not made clear in the film. Neither Zhong nor Ko seems to have engaged in outright armed struggle, as opposed to Lan’s character, Lin Minghua, who learned how to make bombs. Would the fact that he intended to use those bombs deprive him of victimhood? If so, how should we regard Chen Linlang in Dong Nian’s “Last Winter”? By characterizing Lin Minghua as a violent revolutionary, Lan Bozhou apparently intends to question the whole notion of victims and their proper status in Taiwanese history.4

past/present/ethnicity As Ali embarks on his writing project, he sends chapters to his wife, Ajing, who has remained in Taipei, where she works. In their correspondence, they discuss Ali’s work, which in itself makes Lan’s novel an interesting meta-meta-fictional work. What is pertinent to unearthing and writing about historical facts is the appearance of Ali’s former girlfriend, Awen, which sets up a contrast between Ali’s attitude toward the historical and personal pasts. After receiving several anonymous phone calls, Ajing finally realizes that the caller is Ali’s former girlfriend and, without consulting Ali, gives her his address, to which Ali objects: “I believe that what happened in the past should remain in the past and need not be brought up.”5 Historical past and personal past often are intertwined and entangled in their unfolding and interpretations. Ajing responds with the following comment: “If you think exploring the past of Lin Minghua and Fu Shuangmei has significance in our contemporary society, then you should examine the romance between you and Awen, for it would be meaningful to you, to me, and to Awen.”6 But it turns out that Ali, like Liang Jing in Good Men, Good Women, is incapable of coming to terms with his personal past. Ali’s past with Awen has another level of symbolic importance. Both of Awen’s parents are from the mainland, and her father is a

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Guomindang official, which means that almost inevitably the issue of ethnicity plays a significant role in Awen and Ali’s romantic relationship. Just as in the fictional works analyzed earlier, romance or the impossibility of it becomes a trope for an insurmountable obstacle in ethnic harmony. Interestingly, however, in Lan Bozhou’s novel, ethnic relations have a contemporary implication; that is, the search by Awen, the second-generation mainlander, for the Hakka man some years after she left him presents an impression of an identity reorientation. Mainlanders have traditionally regarded the mainland as their real homeland, which sometimes creates an identity crisis for their children born in Taiwan. This reorientation, however, seems shortlived and fraught with ambiguity, which Lan refuses to resolve at the end of novel. Although a letter from Awen’s psychologist informs Ali that Awen, a mental patient suffering from hallucinations, has left the clinic without proper authorization, this piece of information elicits no reaction or action on the part of Ali. In fact, the last we hear about Awen is from her final letter to Ali, in which she relates an erotic dream involving the two of them. The letter ends with her wish that she could have Ali’s child.We recall that in Zhong Zhaozheng’s Angry Tide, the mainland woman Han Ping and the Hakka man Lu Zhilin eventually lose their baby, symbolizing the impossibility of peaceful ethnic coexistence. In Heartbreak Island, the mainlander Chen Linlang also loses a baby by the Taiwanese Wang Rong. But in Lan’s novel, this is just a wish from a woman who may or may not be mentally unstable. More important, Ali’s reluctance to confront his own past, represented by Awen, shows that he is better equipped to deal with other people’s pasts than with his own. In a way, this alludes to Taiwan’s past and future, both of which are intertwined with ethnic issues whose resolution is forever suspended.

representation Among the literary and cinematic texts that I have studied in this book, Good Men, Good Women is clearly the most conscious of its fictional characteristics and constructedness. The structure of a film within a film highlights the artificial process of filmmaking, which creates a distance between the viewers and the film. Similarly, Lan

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Bozhou’s novel about researching and writing displays his recognition that all representations are simulations. Such an approach to representing the dark side of Taiwan’s past is problematic to some readers, for the detached manner in which the narrative is constructed may appear to lack a sense of engagement, which is one of the reasons why Good Men, Good Women was so poorly received in Taiwan. In contrast, even though the audience was more receptive to Super Citizen Ko, the ending may have shut the door too quickly on that part of Taiwan’s history. The realization that there may not be a suitable form of representation is reflected in the remaining two-thirds of Lan’s novel, in which Ali explores this possibility and shares his thoughts in his letters to his wife. Ali’s original plan is to retell Lin Minghua and Fu Shuangmei’s story in the form of reportage, with himself as the alter-ego narrator/investigator. For readers familiar with the postmodern notion of historical writing, Ali’s decision may not come as a surprise. His choice of narrative style also enables Lan Bozhou, the author, to consider issues regarding the representation of atrocity and its victims. Interestingly, however, Lan Bozhou the author eventually decides that Ali should not use Lan’s own self-reflexive narrative technique, so Ali rejects the genre because he does not have enough historical facts and explanations. He then adopts the style of a realist novel, which mingles historical facts with fictional re-creation, deeming it to be the most “suitable” style to deal with such discrepancies and ellipses. In one instance, Ali believes that one of his eyewitnesses may have betrayed Lin Minghua and caused his death. Hence a fictional work—a novel—based on facts becomes a convenient vehicle, in that the author cannot be held responsible for any mistakes, inaccuracies, or allegations. For Lan Bozhou and anyone engaged in research on Taiwan’s past, the recognition that what they represent should never be taken as verbatim truth is critical, for without that knowledge, they are simply replicating the errors made by the Nationalist government during the martial law era, except that they are replacing one version of the alleged truth with another. Ali decides to write a realist novel in a linear style, and his protagonist is to be born into a poor farming family.7 This narratological choice (from the perspectives of both Ali and Lan Bozhou) originated from authorial intent to explain why Ali’s protagonist (Lin Minghua) eventually became a Marxist. Aside from this intriguing doubling, this

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need to explicate in Lan’s and Ali’s novels reveals their anxiety over the victims of the White Terror. That is, family background is the motivation for their ideological inclination, and it is therefore both understandable and acceptable that they should become Marxists. Similarly, this also explains why patriotic Han Chinese in Taiwan rose up against the Nationalist government, whereas they seemed to be docile and complacent loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor. Ali devotes two sections of his novel to the corruption of the Nationalist officials and the indignation felt by the Taiwanese. Portrayals of the chaotic situation immediately following the arrival of the Nationalist officials can be found throughout historical accounts and memoirs and are used widely in book-length novels, such as Li Qiao’s Buried Injustice of 1947 and Zhong Zhaozheng’s Angry Tides. Lan Bozhou implicitly questions the incorporation of such historical information through Ajing’s somewhat contradictory comment on Ali’s writing:“As a reader, I think that what you wrote in these four sections is basically laying out the historical process . . . and there’s no moving story in it. . . . Nevertheless, I still believe that, to people like me, who don’t know much about that part of Taiwan’s past, reading it is, to some extent, helpful.”8

women/eyewitness/atrocity Like many Taiwanese youths, Ali arrives in the Hakka village with no knowledge of the events that took place before his birth. It is only from conversations with the local elders that he learns about Lin Minghua and Fu Shuangmei, which is clearly Lan Bozhou’s way of highlighting the collective amnesia caused by the White Terror. Interestingly, what first catches Ali’s attention is the elders’ comment on Fu Shuangmei, the surviving wife of the political victim. As we have seen, the majority of the Taiwanese imprisoned or executed were men, so women naturally became testimonial figures and a source for unearthing historical injustice. In other words, women as victims proves to be a powerful image in the indictment of injustice, but at the same time, women as a trope tend to strip them of their subjectivity in the depiction of atrocity. Ultimately women are either victimized twice or reduced to mere representational tools, to be called to testify about their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.

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Ali searches for Fu Shuangmei in order for her to verify or refute what Ali has gathered from other witnesses: Ali believed that, more than any one else, Fu Shuangmei would be the one eyewitness who could clarify many of the contradiction and ambiguities, whether for the purpose of understanding Lin Minghua’s life or reading his [Ali’s] account as a story.9 Since their romance would be what interested people most, he figured that if he could interview Fu Shuangmei, then this reportage about Lin Minghua could be narrated along the plot line of their love story.10 Unlike in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” in which the author’s presence is effaced with the employment of multiple eyewitnesses/narrators, Lan Bozhou narrates the story in Vine Intertwining Tree solely from Ali’s perspective and maintains the distinction between the narrator and the author. In Ali’s quest for the story behind Lin’s arrest and execution, Fu Shuangmei remains an elusive figure. Although he finds eyewitnesses who give him information about Lin Minghua, what sparks his curiosity and interest is forever out of reach. Even when he finally locates Fu, she refuses to be interviewed. If Fu Shuangmei, who knows Lin Minghua better than anyone else, holds the key to a more complete picture of him, then she symbolizes knowable history. But the closest Lan can get is a glimpse of her at the end of the novel at the village gathering for his book. Her elusiveness may thus be a metaphor for the impossibility of finding facts and truth. Unlike some of the writing on this subject,11 Lan Bozhou’s novel does not question whether dissidents really were persecuted. Although Ali is unable to meet with Fu Shuangmei, she does send him the bullet-holed suit that Lin Minghua was wearing on the day of his execution. In other words, even though we may not know the whole truth, traceable evidence of what happened remains.

" In the investigation and re-creation of Taiwan’s historical past, intertextuality and cross-reference are pervasive, as evidenced in the expansion of Chu T’ien-hsin’s “Once upon a Time There Was a Man Called Urashima Taro,” the allusions to Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain

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Road,” and the evolution of Lan Bozhou’s works. These literary and cinematic re-creations become the sedimentation of a form of collective memory, which, “redefined as a social and individual practice that integrates elements of remembrance, fantasy, and invention, . . . can shift from the problematic role of standing for the truth to a new role as an active, engaging practice of creating meaning.”12 What is most important, then, is the continuing search for information while being aware of the incomplete nature of truth, facts, and knowable history.

note s

prologue 1. This incident took place on February 28, 1997. The construction of the memorial in Taipei was fraught with tension and politics; for instance, the ball-shaped structure designated for the inscription remained empty for two years while the content was being debated. It also is significant that Taipei was not the first city in Taiwan to erect a commemorative structure. Chia-yi’s memorial, the first, also was vandalized.This controversy will be the subject of my next project. For an architectural survey, see Sheng-lin Chang, “Memorial Space and Commemorative Behavior: A Case Study of the 2/28 Massacre Memorials in Taiwan” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994). 2. See the response to the court decision published by Chen Yishen, one of the compilers, dated November 23, 2006 (available at: http://www.228. org.tw/news_detail.php?id = 49). The English title, given on the back cover of the book, refers to the incident (shijian) as a massacre; the difference in the title alone is indicative of the significance of representational politics. I have chosen the term “incident,” which I explain later in the prologue. For a detailed analysis of Chiang’s role, see Zhang Yanxian et al., Research Report on Responsibility for the 2/28 Massacre [Ererba shijian zeren guishu yanjiu baogao] (Taipei: Ererba jijinhui, 2006), pp. 145–69. 3. This is a bare-bones outline of Taiwanese history intended to provide a context. For more detailed accounts, see Murray A. Rubinstein, ed., Taiwan: A New History (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1999); John F. Copper, Taiwan: NationState or Province? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996); and Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 4. For examples of recent works, see Chen Cuilian, Factional Struggle and Power Politics: Another Facet of the 2/28 Tragedy [Paixi douzheng yu quanmou

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zhengzhi: Ererba beiju de ling yi mianxiang] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1995); Zhang et al., Research Report on Responsibility for the 2/28 Massacre; and Wang Xiaobo, Taiwan Democratic Alliance and the 2/28 [Taimeng yu ererba shijian] (Taipei: Haixia xueshu chubanshe, 2004). Also see Wang Xiaobo, The Nationalist Party and the 2/28 Incident [Guomindang yu ererba shijian] (Taipei: Haixia xueshu chubanshe, 2004), and Chen Yi and the 2/28 Incident [Chen Yi yu ererba shijian] (Taipei: Haixia xueshu chubanshe, 2004). 5. In sources dealing with the incident, her name is often erroneously given as Lin Chiang-mai or Lin Jiangmai; in fact, Lin is her husband’s family name and Jiang (Chiang) is her surname, for the custom at the time was for the wife to place her husband’s family name before her own. 6. The number of Taiwanese killed is a subject of great dispute. George H. Kerr believed that the number was about forty thousand (Formosa Betrayed [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965]), whereas Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou claim that the number was ten thousand (A Tragic Beginning:The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991]). Twenty thousand is generally considered a more plausible number. What is at issue, of course, should not be the number but the circumstances under which the massacre occurred, its subsequent silencing, and the prolonged delay of any redress. An analogous case can be found in the debates over the number of Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre of 1937. For an insightful analysis of how such a focus on numeral accuracy overshadows the more important issues of redress and admission of guilt, see Daqing Yang, “The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Reflections on Historical Inquiry,” in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, edited by Joshua A. Fogel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 133–79. 7. “Partial martial law” is a term sometimes used by political scientists and historians to describe government policy between 1949 and 1987, which is commonly referred to in Taiwan as the “martial-law era.” With the ultimate power granted by the “Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion,” the Garrison Command reinforced the rules of martial law, including regulating foreign travel, emigration, and customs; censoring publications and broadcasts, prohibiting protests, demonstrations, congregation, and worker and student strikes and walk-outs; and banning the formation of new political parties. Over the years, some of the rules were gradually loosened, but full civil liberties were restored only after martial law was lifted. For a complete description, see Xue Yueshun, Zeng Pincang, and Xu Ruihao, comps., Documentary Collection of the Democratization Movement in Postwar Taiwan [Zhanhou Taiwan minzhu yundong shiliao huibian], vol. 1, The Martial Law Era (1945–1987) [Cong jieyan dao jieyan] (Taipei: National Archive, 2000). 8. Roy, Taiwan, p. 89. 9. Other well-known figures include Lei Zhen, a journalist and former official in the Nationalist government, and Bo Yang, also a journalist and writer.

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10. Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan, Investigation of the Luku Incident [Luku shijian diaocha yanjiu] (Taipei County: Taipei County Cultural Center, 1998); Zhang Yanxian and Chen Fenghua, Sobbings of a Cold Village:The Luku Incident [Hancun de kuqi: Luku shijian] (Taipei County:Taipei County Cultural Center, 2000). 11. Internationally, the Formosa Incident indirectly resulted from the U.S. government’s termination of diplomatic ties with the Republic of China and its normalization of relations with the People’s Republic; domestically, election scandals before the demonstration intensified the conflict between the ruling government and the opposition. For more details, see Roy, Taiwan, chap. 6, and Formosa Incident Oral History Compilation Committee, Toward Formosa:The Emergence of Opposition Consciousness in the Postwar Era [Zou xiang Meilidao: Zhanhou fandui yishi de mengya] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1999); A Party with No Name: The Development of the Formosa Political Group [Meiyou dangming de dang: Meilidao zhengtuan de fazhan] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1999); and Violence and Poetry:The Kaohsiung Incident and the Trial of Formosa [Baoli yu shige: Kaohsiung shijian yu Meilidao dashen] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1999). 12. James E.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. vii. 13. See the reference in Ernst van Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), p. 36. Janet also includes “traumatic memory (the events that resist integration)”; I discuss the issue of trauma in the next section. 14. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 19. 15. Quoted in Ellen S. Fine, “The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature,” in Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), p. 44. 16. Jonathan Boyarin,“Space,Time, and the Politics of Memory,” in Remapping Memory:The Politics of TimeSpace, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 2. 17. Raul Hilberg, “Roundtable Discussion,” in Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), p. 274. 18. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 152. 19. See, for instance, Robert Chi, “A World of Sadness,” in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), pp. 65–89; Ping-hui Liao, “Passing and Re-articulation of Identity: Memory, Trauma, and Cinema,” Tamkang Review 29, no. 4 (1999): 85–114; and Margaret Hillenbrand, “Trauma and the Politics of Identity: Form and Function in Fictional Narrative of the February 28th Incident,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 2 (2005): 49–89.

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20. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narratives, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 11. LaCapra has critiqued and modified some of her ideas, such as absence versus loss and acting out versus working through, which I will not reiterate here. 21. For instance, Hillenbrand fuses the literary victims with Taiwan’s traumatic past in “Trauma and the Politics of Identity.” 22. LaCapra, Writing History, p. 146. 23. In “Trauma and the Politics of Identity,” Hillenbrand makes a similar observation on the difference between the 2/28 Incident and these other atrocities (p. 58). However, earlier in the essay, she states that the forty-year silence in Taiwan resonates with the reluctance of Holocaust survivors to share their experiences with their children (p. 51). The suppression of transgenerational memories may have been similar on the surface, but we must keep in mind the critical differences in the causes: the Taiwanese were forced into silence by the government persecution apparatus. 24. See, for instance,Wang Jiansheng, Chen Wanzhen, and Chen Yongquan, 1947 Taiwan 2/28 Revolution [Yijiusiqi Taiwan ererba geming] (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1990);Yang Yizhou, 2/28 Popular Uprising:Taiwan and Chiang Kaishek [Ererba minbian:Taiwan yu Jiang Jieshi], translated by Zhang Liangze (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1991); and Lin Mushun, ed., February Revolution in Taiwan [Taiwan eryue geming] (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1990), But “2/28” is the most commonly used term. 25. Some, however, such as Chen Yingzhen and Lan Bozhou, have argued that the White Terror was the by-product of the cold war and American imperialism on Taiwan. See, for instance, Chen’s introduction, “American Imperialism and Anti-Communist Extermination Movement in Taiwan” [Meiguo diguo zhuyi he Taiwan fangong pusha yundong], to Lan’s Song of the Covered Wagon [Huang mache zhi ge] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1991), pp. 15–24. 26. Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 5–6. 27. Ibid., p. 6. 28. Michael Humphrey, The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 3. 29. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 14 (italics mine). 30. Ibid., p. 17 (italics mine). 31. Roy, Taiwan, p. 90. Although limiting the White Terror era to the 1950s, Roy’s account shows that the intensity of government persecution did not lessen dramatically until the early 1980s. 32. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, p. 61. Also of some interest is the role played by foreign countries, such as the United States in Taiwan and the Soviet Union in East Germany. Chen Yingzhen’s assertion cannot be casually dismissed.

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part i. literary representation 1. See, for instance, Ou Tansheng, “Intoxication” [Chenzui], and stories by Zhou Qing and Lin Jilan, in Literary 2/28 [Wenxue ererba], edited by Heng Digang, Zeng Jianmin, and Lan Bozhou (Taipei: Taiwan shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), pp. 96–132. 2. Mieke Bal, introduction to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), p. vii. Also note Bal’s notion that cultural memory signifies that “memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one” (p. vii). 3. James E.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative of the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 1.

1. ethnicity and atrocity 1. Elisabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, “History and Ethnicity,” in Ethnicity, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 19. 2. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., introduction to Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 8. 3. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 4. Jack David Eller, From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict: An Anthropological Perspective on International Ethnic Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 8. 5. Chen Chung-min, Chuang Ying-chang, and Huang Shu-min, eds., Ethnicity in Taiwan: Social, Historical, and Cultural Perspectives (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1994), p. 5. 6. Ibid., p. 15. Zuqun is a newly coined term by social scientists in Taiwan to refer to the unique ethnic conditions there. 7. In 1947, the Nationalist government promulgated the adoption of shanbao (literally, “mountain compatriot”) to refer to the non–Han Chinese residents, but it quickly degenerated into a derogatory term with discriminatory connotations. A new term, Yuanzhumin (original inhabitants) was proposed in the mid-1980s when the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines (Taiwan Yuanzhumin quanli cujinhui) was formed, and it is now widely used. For more details, see Yijiang Balu’er (Liu Wenxiong), “Why Do We Choose to Call Ourselves ‘The Original Inhabitants of Taiwan’?” [Women weishenme xuanze “Taiwan Yuanzhumin” zhege chenghu?], in Ethnic Relations and National Identity [Zuqun guanxi yu guojia rentong], edited by Chang Mau-kuei et al. (Taipei: Yeqiang chubanshe, 2001), pp. 187–90, and Melissa J. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). I have opted to use Yuanzhumin, as this is the preferred term in Taiwan, although

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“indigenous people” is commonly seen in English texts, such as John Balcom, trans., Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 8. In historical research, eyewitness accounts, and memoirs, the Hakka and Hoklo speakers are referred to as Taiwanese, or benshengren; I follow this convention throughout this chapter, unless the texts specifically identify the characters’ ethnic backgrounds, as in Lan Bozhou’s Vine Intertwining Tree (Teng chan shu). 9. Chang Mau-kuei, “Toward an Understanding of the Sheng-chi wen-ti in Taiwan,” in Ethnicity in Taiwan: Social, Historical, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Chen Chung-min, Chuang Ying-chang, and Huang Shu-min (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1994), pp. 108–9. There still is a tendency, particularly among the irrendentialists, to treat Hakka and Hoklo (and others, such as Cantonese and Shanghainese) as dialects rather than languages, even though the speakers of these “dialects” cannot understand one another. Indeed, Romance languages such as Italian and French, which share a Latin origin, are considered to be languages, not dialects. 10. Chang, “Toward an Understanding,” p. 111. See also his analysis of the five factors in the formation of a “mainlander” identity regarding how the diverse groups of waishengren forged a unified identity (pp. 108–9). 11. Eller, From Culture to Ethnicity, p. 11. 12. In chapter 3, I analyze Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua” from the perspective of gendered victimhood. 13. Li Ao, introduction to The 2/28 That You Didn’t Know [Ni bu zhidao de ererba], by Li Ao and Chen Jingzhen (Taipei: Xinxinwen wenhua, 1997). 14. Daniel Bell, “Ethnicity and Social Change,” in Ethnicity, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 140. 15. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Editor’s Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 15 (italics in original). 16. Jane Tompkins, “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 64. 17. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 82. 18. Ou Tansheng, “Intoxication” [Chenzui], in Literary 2/28 [Wenxue ererba], edited by Heng Digang, Zeng Jianmin, and Lan Bozhou (Taipei: Taiwan shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), pp. 96–132. 19. Lü Zhenghui, “Discovering Ou Tansheng—Another Side of Postwar Taiwanese Literature” [Faxian Ou Tansheng—Zhanhou chuqi Taiwan

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wenxue de yige cemian], in Literary 2/28 [Wenxue ererba], edited by Heng Digang, Zeng Jianmin, and Lan Bozhou (Taipei: Taiwan shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), p. 140. Lü is comparing Ou’s “Intoxication” with Lü Heruo’s “Winter Night,” in which the author “expanded on social problems by having a jilted protagonist become a prostitute.” 20. For some examples, see Li Xiaofeng, Decoding the 2/28 [Jiedu ererba] (Taipei:Yushanshe, 1998); George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); and Wang Xiaobo, The Truth About 2/28 [Ererba zhenxiang] (Taipei: Haixia xueshu chubanshe, 2002). 21. It is worth pointing out that Ajin once worked as an interoffice courier for the colonial government but loses her job after the Nationalists take over and has no choice but to work as a maid for mainlanders. The demotion is clearly intended to highlight the discriminatory treatment of Ajin, the Taiwanese, after the Nationalists’ arrival, when many government positions vacated by the Japanese were filled by mainlanders. We could even argue that the unequal position of a maid and her master further exemplifies the status of the Taiwan under the new regime. 22. Ou, “Intoxication,” p. 101. 23. Ibid., p. 131. 24. Lin Wenyi, “Under the Snow” [Fengxue diceng], in A Collection of Taiwan 2/28 Short Stories [Ererba Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Lin Shuangbu (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanshe, 1989), pp. 304–18. The original phrase in Chinese is xianxi rouruo. 25. The stereotypes of the north–south dichotomy include the following: the north (mainly Taipei) is characterized as a place with culture, gentility, refinement, intellectualism, sophistication, and complexity, whereas the south is earthy, close to nature, grassroots, uncouth, pure, and simple. There is also the implied reversal that he, although from the countryside—the periphery—graduated from the best college, Taiwan University, while she received her degree from Fu Jen Catholic University, a private institution. 26. Lin, “Under the Snow,” p. 313. 27. Ibid., p. 314. 28. Ibid., p. 305. 29. Ibid., p. 317. 30. Ibid., p. 318. 31. Immediately after martial law was lifted, government officials, including President Lee Teng-hui, rallied the people to forgive and forget and to look ahead to a better tomorrow of ethnic harmony. 32. According to Peng Ruijin, “the novel sets a precedent/model by creating a work that combines Taiwanese fiction with the transformation of Taiwanese history, its people and the land” (“Song of the Egrets” [Bailusi zhi ge], Taiwan wenyi, June 1995, pp. 34–37). Li Qiao, in contrast, praises the author’s focus on “the spiritual history of the Taiwanese” while “avoiding recreation of gory scenes” in recapturing a sad, bygone era (“Sentiments of

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the Era: Introducing Angry Tides” [Na shidai de ganshou: Jieshao Nu tao], Xin guannian, August 1997, p. 108). 33. Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 174–77. 34. Ibid., p. 195. 35. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 121–31. Bhabha’s idea of “almost the same but not quite” describes Lu’s situation in this novel and is an apt comment on the dominant discourse’s determined erasure of ethnic/cultural differences between Taiwan and mainland China. 36. Zhong Zhaozheng, Angry Tides [Nu tao] (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1993), p. 68. The narrative continues: “Before he had a chance to straighten up, the slender hand had already reached him. Momentarily caught off guard, he looked up to see the eyes staring at him. She nodded slightly, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth. It was indeed a charming smile—the smile of a charming girl. Zhilin’s eyes froze in midstare; he seemed unable to comprehend her intention.” 37. Zhong, Angry Tides, p. 392. 38. Ibid., pp. 293–94. 39. Lin Shenjing, “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang” [Xizhuang san jieyi], in A Collection of Taiwan 2/28 Short Stories [Ererba Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Lin Shuangbu (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanshe, 1989), pp. 208–74. 40. Ibid., p. 266. 41. Ibid., pp. 258–59. 42. In another scene, the trio encounters a paralyzed beggar woman and her two children. Qiu offers her all the money in his pocket. 43. Lin, “Three Sworn Brothers,” p. 274. 44. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 144. 45. Lin, “Three Sworn Brothers,” p. 273. A highly ambiguous phrase that can be understood in different ways is used here to express Dawei’s feeling: momingqimiao, which can mean “impossible to decipher” or “baffling” but sometimes is employed more as an exclamation of indignation, as with Dawei in this instance. 46. Lin, “Three Sworn Brothers,” p. 250. 47. Ibid., p. 266. 48. LaCapra, Writing History, p. 90. 49. On December 17, 1951, a public security announcement still listed Lü Heruo as one of the “hidden Communists” (qianfei) who had yet to turn himself in, even though by then he already may have perished in the mountains. See Lan Bozhou, The Images and Shadows of Writers Who Disappeared in the Misty Fog of History [Xiaoshi zai lishi miwu zhong de zuojia shenying] (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 2001), p. 115.

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50. Lan, Images and Shadows, pp. 115–56. 51. Li Qiao, “Notes of Taimu Mountain” [Taimushan ji], in Silent Spring: A Collection of 2/28 Short Stories [Wuyu de chuntian: Ererba xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Xu Junya (Taipei:Yushanshe, 2003), pp. 99–156. 52. Ann Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 36 (italics in original). 53. Xu Junya, “The ‘2/28’ in Fiction: An Introduction” [Bianxuan xu: Xiaoshuo zhong de “ererba”], in Silent Spring: A Collection of 2/28 Short Stories [Wuyu de chuntian: Ererba xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Xu Junya (Taipei:Yushanshe, 2003), p. 16. 54. Li, “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” p. 141. 55. Margaret Hillenbrand treats the mistaken identity as a sign of Yu’s hybrid, multiple identity, which “enables Li Qiao to point up the glorious parity (courage, enterprise, resilience) between resistance fighters past and present” (“Trauma and the Politics of Identity: Form and Function in Fictional Narratives of the February 28th Incident,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 2 [2005]: 76). While Li Qiao’s reference to the earlier resistance fighters shows his admiration for their courage and sacrifice, this conclusion seems far-fetched. For one thing, being mistaken as someone else does not automatically accord a person a multiple, fluid identity. Judging from what occurs at this point in the story, we see that Li Qiao clearly is critical of the mainlander’s lack of knowledge about Taiwanese history (“the dog that knows nothing about Taiwan”) and, more important, condemns the bounty hunter’s ruthlessness, which drives him to kill, no matter who his prey is. To him, all Taiwanese are the same, and what is important is to kill a Taiwanese in order to claim the bounty. 56. Li, “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” p. 151. 57. Lan, Images and Shadows, pp. 116–52. 58. Although rewriting history in recent years has become an area well traveled by writers and might appear to be “telling an old story,” restoring history in Taiwan remains an important project. 59. Li, “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” p. 99. 60. Ibid., p. 100. 61. A third possibility is that Li Qiao did not want to give the impression that he was eulogizing a Communist. By changing Lü’s name and casting doubt on his activities, the author effectively skirts the issue, unlike Lan Bozhou, whose re-creation of a real-life leftist puts him in the precarious position of glorifying an “enemy” of the state (see chapter 2 and the epilogue). 62. A similar observation appears in Hillenbrand, “Trauma and the Politics of Identity.” 63. Zhang Henghao, “Literary Approaches to the 2/28 Incident: A Thematic Comparison of ‘Notes of Taimu Mountain’ and ‘Moon Seal’” [Ererba de wenxue guandian: Bijiao “Taimushan ji” yu “Yueyin” de zhuti yishi], Taiwan wenyi 159, no. 10 (1997): 66–78.

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64. Li, “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” p. 126. 65. Ibid., pp. 155–56. 66. Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 2–3. 67. LaCapra, Writing History, pp. 41–42. 68. Irving Howe, “Writing and the Holocaust,” in Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), p. 191.

2. documenting the past 1. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 5 (italics mine). 2. Ibid., p. 52. 3. “Song of the Covered Wagon,” first serialized in Renjian Magazine (Renjian zazhi) in 1988, was included as the title story of Song of the Covered Wagon [Huang mache zhi ge] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1991), pp. 49–104, which also includes docu-fictional accounts of five other victims of the White Terror: Wang Tiandeng, Qiu Lianqiu, Lin Ruyu, Guo Xiuzong, and Jian Guoxian. In 2004, Lan Bozhou published an expanded version of the section on Zhong Haodong under the same title in book form. My study focuses on the earlier version for its historical timeliness and innovative narrative techniques. 4. Zhan Hongzhi continues: “No one, including the author himself, views it as a fictional work, since it relates the true story of real people [zhenren zhenshi, the story of a Taiwanese intellectual who fell victim to the 2/28 Incident]. The author sets as his goal the ‘restoration of history’ [lishi chongjian] by including oral descriptions from credible, related documents. Every word and sentence has its basis in fact and is definitely not fiction. Photographs of the protagonist in the story were even included when ‘Song of the Covered Wagon’ was first published, which implies its ‘documentary’ [jishi] nature” (“Commentary” [Pingjie], in A Collection of Short Stories from 1988 [Qishiqi nian duanpian xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Zhan Hongzhi [Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 1988], pp. 240–42). 5. Zhan, “Commentary,” p. 240. 6. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 139. 7. Yang Xiaobin, “Reality or Fictional Reconstruction/Deconstruction: Consciousness of History in Taiwanese Fiction” [Zhenshi huo xuhuan de chonggou/jiegou: Taiwan xiaoshuo zhong de lishi yishi], in History and Rhetoric: Essays on Contemporary Chinese Literature [Lishi yu xiushi] (Lanzhou: Dunhuang wenyi, 1999), p. 212. 8. Yang Xiaobin’s overdetermined postmodernist bent sometimes leads him to overlook the differences in terms used in Taiwan. For instance, in a different version of the same essay,Yang points out the pseudo-objectivity in “Song of the Covered Wagon” by citing Lan’s preference for “political suf-

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ferers”: “Under the guise of objectivity, the subjective message can be easily seized through its narrative mode. In the first paragraph, the phrase ‘political sufferers’ [Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 131] (rather than ‘prisoners’) has clearly the addresser’s (if not authorial) tendency” (“Telling [Hi]story: Illusory Truth or True Illusion?” Tamkang Review 21, no. 2 [1990]: 127–47). As I discussed in the prologue, there are two terms for “victims” in Taiwan, shouhai ren and shounan ren. “Political sufferers,” which Yang translates here, is actually zhengzhi shounan ren, for political prisoners, a standard term widely used in post–martial law Taiwan to refer to those prisoners of conscience persecuted by the Guomindang government. While I agree generally with Yang on the issue of subjectivity in Lan’s work, I believe that he overinterprets the significance of zhengzhi shounan ren (political prisoner) here. 9. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 57. By “pitfalls,” Treat is referring to the potential failure of a metaphorical or a metonymic approach in the writings of atomic literature, the former running the risk of “abstraction,” and the latter, distortion. 10. We should also keep in mind that a “contradictory” portrayal falls outside the scheme of a multivocal “chorus,” which is evidenced in Lan’s titling each section as a music movement. 11.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 166. 12. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1991), p. 9. 13. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone:The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 25. 14.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 23. 15. In the 2004 version of “Song of the Covered Wagon,” Lan dispenses with “Zhong Shunhe (huaming)” without explanation. There are various possible reasons for deleting Zhong Shunhe: the eyewitness refused to be included; he now appears under his real name; Lan was unable to secure the eyewitness’s permission for inclusion; and so on. A comparison of the two texts would be an intriguing project on the inclusion and exclusion of material, but it falls outside the scope of this book. 16. Zhan, “Commentary,” p. 241. 17. Lan Bozhou, “Song of the Covered Wagon” [Huang mache zhi ge], in A Collection of Short Stories from 1988 [Qishiqi nian duanpian xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Zhan Hongzhi (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 1988), p. 209. 18. Chen Fangming,“White Literature and White History” [Baise wenxue yu baise lishi], Literary Taiwan 4 (1992): 219–42. 19. “Some of the elders from our village didn’t believe [that Zhong Haodong led a frugal life]. It was only after they went to Keelung High School to pay Axie Ge [Zhong Haodong] a personal visit during their northbound trips that they began to believe the reports. After their return, everyone was talking about Axie Ge, a high school principal who was as honest as an old farmer” (Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 212).

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20. Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 213. 21. Another “tactic” that Lan employs to heighten the tragic nature of Zhong’s and Jiang’s life is the omission of their first child. In Good Women of Taiwan (Taiwan hao nüren), from which Lan draws some of his material for the story, Jiang reveals to Lan that she had gone to see the child before returning to Taiwan in 1943. Moreover, before her death in 1995, Jiang went in 1988 to China to visit her son and grandson.The omission of this information creates the false impression that Jiang never saw her child again in her life, which tends to accentuate the tragedy and injustice. 22. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, p. 32. 23. “Everyone was worried that he [Zhong Haodong] would be mistakenly attacked as an ‘ashan’ [someone from the Mainland], because he was dressed in a Sun Yat-sen style of jacket and his demeanor was more like a Mainlander, as he had lived in China for several years” (Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 214). 24. Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 215. 25. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 122. 26. Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 216. 27. Ibid. 28. Lan later took up this issue again in his novel Vine Intertwining Tree (Teng chan shu), discussed in the epilogue. 29. Lan, “Song of the Covered Wagon,” p. 235. 30. Zhan, “Commentary,” p. 242. 31.We also must question how comprehensive a picture the reader derives from such a narration. If the author intends the story to be a true account, then the question arises as to the reliability of memory. Here I am more interested in the production of the story and our perception of it, not its authenticity. 32. The most famous of the latter is probably Li Qiao’s re-creation of the last days of Lü Heruo’s life before his disappearance, in “Notes of Taimu Mountain” (Taimushan ji), discussed in chapter 1. 33. Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 52. 34. Ann Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 6. 35. The italics signal that the events are out of chronological order. 36. Dong Nian, “Last Winter” [Qunian dongtian], in Last Winter (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1983), p. 32. 37. Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, p. 13. 38. See, for instance, Chen Fangming’s introduction to the three volumes of oral history on the incident and trials, in Formosa Incident Oral History Compilation Committee, Violence and Poetry: The Kaohsiung Incident and the

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Trial of Formosa [Baoli yu shige: Kaohsiung shijian yu Meilidao dashen] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1999), pp. 1–8. 39. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 1. 40. Dong Nian, “Last Winter,” p. 2. 41. Ibid., p. 4. 42. Ibid., p. 80. 43. Ibid., p. 28. 44. Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, p. 5. 45. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narratives, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 4. 46. Dong Nian, “Last Winter,” p. 70. 47. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 58. 48. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 142. I am aware of LaCapra’s disagreement with some of Caruth’s theoretical writings on trauma, but their ideas complement one another for my analysis in this chapter. For a succinct summary of LaCapra’s objection, see Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, pp. 13–14. 49. LaCapra, Writing History, p. 143. 50. Although the author does not give a detailed depiction of the young Wang Rong, we get a glimpse of his earlier self in Linlang’s diatribe, for he was the one who initiated her into the radical thinking, and also through her comment that “they have completely brainwashed you [Wang]” (Dong Nian, “Last Winter,” p. 79). 51. Dong Nian, “Last Winter,” p. 81. 52. On December 16, 1979, Wang Rong is waiting outside the maternity ward, followed by December 19, but in 1971, when Linlang is getting an abortion, and followed by December 20, 1979, with the birth of the baby. Linlang’s abortion takes place in 1971, eight years before the birth of Wang’s son, but the exact date is set on December 19, so that it is seemingly part of the present. 53.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 24. 54. Lan’s most ambitious fictional work to date is Vine Intertwining Tree, about a Hakka intellectual, Lin Minghua, who disappeared shortly after the 2/28 Incident. 55. Perhaps the most palpable telltale sign of this project is Lan Bozhou, The Images and Shadows of Writers Who Disappeared in the Misty Fog of History [Xiaoshi zai lishi miwu zhong de zuojia shenying] (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 2001). 56. “‘I don’t want totalitarian dictatorship; I don’t want our government to sink to the position of agent for Western Imperialism while the whole country turns into a giant factory and processing plant; I don’t want our people to turn into cheap labor for these factories. Of course, some of them aren’t cheap labor; they’re the compradores and managers. They gulp down foreign liquor, wolf down seafood, and drive their luxury sedans, emitting

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black smoke everywhere. . . .’ She spread out the newspaper and said, pointing, ‘Look at this, corruption, financial crimes, naked movie stars and singers, murders, disco, air pollution, food poisoning, poor people’s tears, prostitutes’ misery. I don’t want these. I don’t want these!’ She cried and flung the newspaper under her chair” (Dong Nian, “Last Winter,” p. 79). 57.Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 64.

3. engendering victimhood 1. Lydia H. Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death,” in Body, Subject, and Power in China, edited by Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 157–77. A different version of the essay,“The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: The Field of Life and Death Revisited,” which I consulted but did not quote, appears in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 37–62. As Liu points out (p. 176, n. 4), scholars like Howard Goldblatt (Hsiao Hong [Boston: Twayne, 1976]) and Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua (Emerging from the Horizon of History: Modern Chinese Women’s Literature [Fuchu lishi dibiao: Xiandai funü wenxue yanjiu] [Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1993]) have resisted a “nationalist” reading. 2. Liu, “Female Body,” p. 161. 3. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, edited and translated by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 35–67. 4. Winifred Woodhull, “Unveiling Algeria,” Genders 10 (1999): 114. 5. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 27. 6. Ibid., p. 29. This is a simplified account of Mani’s extensive analysis of colonial presumption in terms of Indian tradition and its malleability in the British imperialistic endeavor. 7. Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 32. 8. Ibid., p. 51. 9. In the meantime, deliberate measures were taken to ensure that the local heritage was suppressed and supplanted by a constructed national memory. For an insightful analysis of how the Guomindang government claimed its political legitimacy, see Marshall Johnson, “Making Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of Nationality,” positions: east asia cultures critique 2 (1994): 177–249. 10. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 310. 11. Shen Xiuhua, Women’s 2/28 [Chamouren de ererba] (Taipei: Yushanshe, 1997), p. 11. 12. Shen makes a similar observation in her introduction to ibid., p. 14.

3. Engendering Victimhood 197 13. Lan Bozhou, Good Women of Taiwan [Taiwan hao nüren] (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 2001), p. 143. 14. Gu Erde, “When Women Meet Politics” [Dang nüren yushang zhengzhi], The Journalist, July 18, 2003, p. 48. Jiang Weishui was Jiang Biyu’s maternal uncle. 15. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 101. 16. Chen Yingzhen, “The Mountain Road” [Shanlu], in A Collection of Short Stories by Chen Yingzhen [Chen Yingzhen xiaoshuo xuan] (Taipei: Renjian zazhishe, 1985). The English translation is by Anne White, with Chu Chiyu and Huang Liangbi, in Renditions 39 (1993): 3–25. It is also translated as “Mountain Path” by Nicholas Koss, in Death in a Cornfield and Other Stories from Contemporary Taiwan, edited by Ching-hsi Perng and Chiu-kuei Wang (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–22. In addition to the essays I cite in this chapter is Wen-Shan Shieh, “Ideology, Sublimation, Violence: The Transformation of Heroines in Chen Ying-chen’s Suicidal Narratives,” Tamkang Review 32, no. 2 (2003): 153–73, which examines this story from the perspectives of Chen’s revolutionary idealism. 17. In 1968 Chen was sentenced to ten years in prison for his “subversive” activities by the Garrison Command, but he was released after seven years following the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975. For more details, see Lucien Miller, “A Break in the Chain: The Short Stories of Ch’en Ying-chen,” in Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives, edited by Jeannette L. Faurot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), n. 1. 18. Lin Shuangbu, “A Minor Biography of Huang Su” [Huang Su xiao bianian], in A Collection of Taiwan 2/28 Short Stories [Ererba Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Lin Shuangbu (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanshe, 1989), pp. 58–68. I analyze this story in the next section. 19. David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 138. 20. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 164. 21. Yomi Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 166. 22. Ibid., p. 100. 23. Lewis A. Coser, introduction to On Collective Memory, by Maurice Halbwachs, edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 24. Halbwachs analyzes the relation of autobiographical memory to historical memory as preserved in written and other types of records. 24. Chen, “Mountain Road,” p. 22. 25. Braester, Witness Against History, p. 163.

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26. Chen, “Mountain Road,” p. 25. 27. Wang, Monster That Is History, p. 143. 28. Chen Jianzhong, “Apocalypse: On the Politics of Memory in Chen Yingzhen’s Fiction” [Mori qishilu: Lun Chen Yingzhen xiaoshuo zhong de jiyi zhengzhi], Zhongwai wenxue 32 (2003):125. 29. Chen, “Mountain Road,” p. 23. 30. David Wang, “Lost in Thought Under the Milestone: Myth and History in Contemporary Taiwanese Fiction” [Lichengbei xia de chensi: Dangdai Taiwan xiaoshuo de shenhuaxing yu lishigan], Zhongsheng xuanhua, quoted in Braester, Witness Against History, p. 163. 31. Wang, Monster That Is History, p. 142. 32. Miller, “Break in the Chain,” p. 86. 33. Chen, “Apocalypse,” p. 125. Chen Fangming made a similar comment about Chen Yingzhen’s protégé, Lan Bozhou, and his work (see chapter 2). 34. Lin Shuangbu, “Witness and Encouragement—An Introduction” [Jianzheng yu guwu—Bianxuan xu], in A Collection of Taiwan 2/28 Short Stories [Ererba Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Lin Shuangbu (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanshe, 1989). 35. Ibid. 36. Xu Junya, “The ‘2/28’ in Fiction: An Introduction” [Bianxuan xu: Xiaoshuo zhong de “ererba”], in Silent Spring: A Collection of 2/28 Short Stories [Wuyu de chuntian: Ererba xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Xu Junya (Taipei:Yushanshe, 2003), p. 20. 37. Lin, “Minor Biography,” p. 66. 38. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 268. 39. Chen Ye, Muddy River [Ni he] (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanshe, 1989). 40. Jian Suzheng, “Women, Provincial Origin, and History in 2/28 Fiction” [Ererba xiaoshuo zhong de nüxing, shengji yu lishi] (available at: www. complit.fju.edu.tw/complit98/papers/paper12.htm [accessed July 14, 2003]). 41. “Yanhua” is a euphemism for a prostitute, but it also refers to flowers and smog, the subject studied by one of the main characters, Jin Hongzao. For lack of an English equivalent, I have chosen to translate the title literally here and use the romanized title throughout my discussion. See Yang Zhao, “Yanhua,” in Silent Spring: A Collection of 2/28 Short Stories [Wuyu de chuntian: Ererba xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Xu Junya (Taipei: Yushanshe, 2003), pp. 195–218. The story first appeared in Soul of My Hometown [Wu xiang zhi hun] (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1987). 42. Jian, “Women,” p. 3. 43. Jian includes a brief analysis of “Under the Snow” (Fengxue diceng) by Lin Wenyi (see chapter 2). 44.Yang Zhao, “Yanhua,” p. 216. 45. We recall how Huang Chunming criticized Taiwan’s economic reliance

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on Japan by portraying the narrator in “Sayonara Goodbye” as a pimp for seven Japanese businessmen on their pleasure trip to the narrator’s hometown. Other fictional works that use the image of a prostitute are Lü Heruo’s “Winter Night” (Dang ye), from the 1950s, and Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose I Love You (Meigui, Meigui, wo ai ni), and Li Qiao’s “Lan Caixia’s Spring” (Lan Caixia de chuntian), both written in the 1990s. See Liu Zhiyu, “The Portrayal of Prostitutes by Taiwanese Writers” [Taiwan zuojia bi xia de jinü xingxiang], Taiwan renwen, June 2000, pp. 1–20. Interestingly, all these works were written by men. 46.Yang Zhao, “Yanhua,” p. 217. 47. Ibid., pp. 213–14. 48. Jian, “Women,” p. 3. 49. A scandal ensued when one of the stories was first serialized in one of Taiwan’s preeminent newspapers, and it became a sort of instant roman à clef. The director of public relations for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was identified as the real-life model for the female protagonist, who sleeps her way to power. Li Ang was sued by the director, and many in the opposition camp attacked her for having painted such a negative picture of women in politics. The controversy thus turned a serious exploration of women’s accessibility to power into a sensational cat fight between two women. 50. For female socialist/activists, see Lan, Good Women of Taiwan. The most famous woman Communist is Xie Xuehong, the subject of Chen Fangming, A Critical Biography of Xie Xuehong [Xie Xuehong pingzhuan] (Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1991). See also Li Ang, Autobiography: A Novel [Zizhuan no xiaoshuo] (Taipei: Huangguan, 1999). 51. Even though Vice President Annette Lü occupies the number-two position, she has been under constant criticism, which, some believe, is caused by her vocal and sometimes brash approach to Taiwan’s political situation, but gender bias is also at play among the rank and file of the Democratic Progressive Party. For an insightful analysis of women and the DPP, see Yang Zhao, “Red Shirt Women Hold Hands, Resist Political Chauvinism” [Hongshannü qianshou, kang zhengzhi shawen], The Journalist, October 26–November 1, 2006, pp. 38–43. 52. Li Ang, “The Devil in a Chastity Belt” [Dai zhencaodai de mogui], in Everyone Sticks Incense into the Beigang Burner [Beigang xianglu renren cha] (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 1997), p. 59. The English translation is by Laura Jane Way, in Chinese PEN, spring 2000, p. 87. 53. Li Ang, “Devil,” p. 69; trans. Way, p. 97. 54. Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan, p. 163. 55. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 103. For the reference, I am indebted to Shieh, “Ideology, Sublimation,Violence.” 56. Before her husband’s arrest, people even wondered whether she might become an obstacle to her husband’s political career: “Would she ever stand in the way of her husband’s opposition work, for the sake of her young son and daughter and her lovely home, though? Nobody openly discussed this.

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People spat betel-nut juice on the ground and said with gruff tenderness, ‘Well, she’s a woman.’ What they left unsaid was: ‘They’re all like this’” (Li Ang, “Devil,” p. 81; trans. Way, p. 55). 57. Kathleen B. Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 27. 58. Ibid., p. 83. 59. To be sure, Algeria, India, and Taiwan all were former colonies, but the similarities highlighted in this chapter are not the linear, historical aspects but the determining roles of sati and veiling in the ways that the men in these societies constructed women as victims. Since sati and veiling were practiced before the colonial governments were established in India and Algeria, it is informative to observe the shifting narratives about women in these disparate regions. Whether China has a colonized history is open to debate, as wartime occupation and extraterritorial concessions are not generally considered “colonization.” 60. Lan Bozhou gives a cursory treatment of female victims in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” with two sentences describing the moment before the execution of Zhang Yiming, a teacher at Zhong Haodong’s school and a friend of Jiang Biyu. Even the depiction is impersonal and clichéd: “I [Jiang Biyu] saw Zhang Yiming, a smile on her face the whole time, unhurriedly walked out of the prison cell. Before she got on the prison transport, she was still shouting in an unwavering voice radical political slogans” (“Song of the Covered Wagon” [Huang mache zhi ge], in A Collection of Short Stories from 1988 [Qishiqi nian duanpian xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Zhan Hongzhi [Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 1988], p. 231). One senses a kind of banality in such stereotypical image of a revolutionary before execution. 61. David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-Communist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey, edited by Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 61.

part ii. cinematic re-creation 1. Before A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) was screened in Taiwan, there was a report that a few shots were cut by the Government Information Office, which censors the media. Later the producer, Qiu Fusheng, admitted that he was the one who cut the shots, for fear that the film might not pass the censors. 2. Here I am referring to the reception of the film and the crew of March of Happiness (Tianma chafang) by the then president, Lee Teng-hui. 3. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenges of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 14. 4. Pierre Sorlin, “How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick,

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N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 38. This essay was originally published in 1980. 5.The most illuminating example is Guan Xiaorong’s Why Don’t We Sing? (Women weishenme bu gechang), made during the excavation of a mass grave of victims of the White Terror in Taipei. Although it is a documentary film, its subject matter and opportuneness reflect the difficulties facing the people in Taiwan in this regard. Other documentary films on atrocity in Taiwan include Postwar Era and the 2/28 Incident: 1945–1949 [Zhanhou yu ererba shijian: 1945–1949], and The 2/28 Scars [Shanghen ererba]; Wang Tong’s Banana Paradise (Xiangjiao tiantang) also touches on thought control, specifically about the hyperfear of Communist spies (feidie) in the military, but it is only a minor concern in a film about the displaced mainlanders in Taiwan. These films deserve to be examined in a different forum and context and will not be covered here. 6. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, p. 10. 7. The most hostile critics even accused Hou of exploiting the political cachet of the 2/28 Incident. See Mi Zou and Liang Xinghua, eds., The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”] (Taipei: Tangshan Chubanshe, 1991), a collection of essays that first appeared in newspapers and magazines. For the political and social contexts of the controversy, see Robert Chi, “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in A City of Sadness,” Tamkang Review 29 (1999): 47–84, and “A World of Sadness,” in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), pp. 65–89. 8. Thomas Elsaesser, “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 159.

4. past versus present 1. Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping, “A Dialogue with Hsu Hsiao-ming,” in New New Wave of Taiwan Cinema 90s [Taiwan dianying 90 xin xin langchao] (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 2002), pp. 104–5. 2. June Yip, “Constructing a Nation: Taiwanese History and the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” in Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, edited by Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), p. 159. 3. For examples of this type of approach to Good Men, Good Women, see Chen Ruxiu, “History and Memory: From Good Men, Good Women to Super Citizen Ko” [Lishi yu jiyi: Cong Haonan haonü dao Chaoji da guomin], Zhongwai wenxue, October 1996, pp. 47–57, and Jerome Silbergeld, “The Chinese Heart in Conflict with Itself: Good Men, Good Women,” in Hitchcock with a

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Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 75–116. Silbergeld is actually quite ambivalent about such a contrast, for he argues that Good Men, Good Women “devalues unambiguous histories, and belittles singular outcomes as mere positivism” (p. 80), while continuing to stress the contrast between the self-indulgent Liang Jing and the self-sacrificing Jiang Biyu.There is an interpretive quagmire in this kind of comparison of the past and the present, which is best exemplified in Silbergeld’s question: “Was the Taiwan of the past (fighting for causes, but battle torn nonetheless) really so much more noble than the Taiwan of the present (indulging in the fruits of peace, and perhaps morally adrift), or is Hou Hsiao-hisen simply prone to nostalgia?” (p. 95). To extract oneself from such a predicament of superficial contrast, we must contextualize Good Men, Good Women in Taiwan’s decades-long suppression of memory and history. 4. When Li Nanfeng is asked where he comes from, he answers, “Taiwan Pingdong,” which is rendered by the interpreter as “Taiwan biandang” (Taiwanese lunch box). 5. Avrom Fleishman, Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 76. 6.Yip, “Constructing a Nation,” p. 146. 7. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 73. 8. Ibid., p. 73. 9. Obviously, one can argue that this type of fax machine was used because plain paper faxes were not widely available when this movie was made. That may well be the case, but what is important is the effect of false continuity conveyed to the audience. 10. I am indebted to Jeffrey Kinkley for pointing out the parallel. 11. Silbergeld, “Chinese Heart in Conflict with Itself,” p. 95. 12. The numbering of shots follows those used in Chu T’ien-wen, “Good Men, Good Women”: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Shooting Notes and Screenplay [“Haonan haonü”: Hou Hsiao-hsien paipian biji, fenchang fenjing juben] (Taipei: Maitian Chubanshe, 1995). 13. Lin Wenqi also observes the superficial similarities between the two and explains that Hou’s film deconstructs not only the official version of history but also relations between the nation and history (“History, Space, and Family/Nation in Taiwan’s Urban Films from the 1990s” [Jiuling niandai Taiwan dushi dianying zhong de lishi, kongjian yu jia/guo], Zhongwai wenxue, October 1998, pp. 99–119). But Lin’s argument focuses on the “rupture” (duanlie) between history and modern life owing to developments in Taiwan, rather than the effects of the White Terror. 14. Fleishman, Narrated Films, p. 78. 15. Hou Hsiao-hsien, dir., Good Men, Good Women [Haonan haonü] (3-H Films, 1995).

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16. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 263. 17. He is actually her sister’s boyfriend, but Liang calls him jiefu (brotherin-law). 18. This implication is concretized in Chu’s screenplay: “Jiang Biyu, or it could be Liang Jing, looks up at the sky and howls” (“Good Men,” p. 129 [italics mine]). 19. Chiao, “Dialogue with Hsu Hsiao-ming,” p. 104. 20. This phrase, clearly taken from the same interview with Chiao, is cited in David Walsh, “Four Films from Taiwan and China” (available at: http:// www.wsws.org/arts/1995/nov1995/taiw-n95.shtml [accessed October 13, 2005]). 21. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 2. 22. Ibid., p. 17. 23. Michael S. Roth, “Hiroshima Mon Amour:You Must Remember This,” in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 93. 24. Turim, Flashbacks in Film, p. 12. 25. Ibid., p. 68. 26. In the interview with Chiao, Hsu expressed his dissatisfaction with Guo Zheng’s earlier version of the adaptation, for it turns the movie into one about the revenge of a woman scorned (“Dialogue with Hsu Hsiao-ming,” p. 104). 27. This impression is most vividly and powerfully conveyed in a scene in which, with the kidnapped baby crying in the evening wind, Linlang is seen smashing the machine at the baseball cage where Wang Rong practices to “straighten himself out.” The juxtaposition of an innocent baby wailing in the dark with a crazed woman attacking an inanimate object further accentuates the degree of her mental instability. 28. Interestingly, Hsu reveals that Zhang Junhong, a former political prisoner himself and a prominent figure in the Democratic Progressive Party, told the director that some of Hsu’s criticism of former members of the opposition movement was too severe (Chiao, “Dialogue with Hsu Hsiao-ming,” p. 104). 29. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 2. 30. Noteworthy is the fact that he, too, refuses to reveal Wang’s whereabouts. 31. E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Feminism and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2. 32. Stuart Y. McDougal, Made into Movies: From Literature to Film (New York: CBS College Publishing, 1985), p. 3. 33. For instance, Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times, although supposedly based on Mo Yan’s “Shifu,You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh,” retains so little of Mo Yan’s novella that a comparative study is essentially meaningless.

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34. Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 58. 35. The most telltale sign of Lan Bozhou’s work is The Images and Shadows of Writers Who Disappeared in the Misty Fog of History [Xiaoshi zai lishi miwu zhong de zuojia shenying] (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 2001). 36. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Poetics and Politics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,” in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), p. 164. 37. Chu, “Good Men,” p. 129. 38. Dong Nian, “Last Winter” [Qunian dongtian], in Last Winter (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1983), p. 101 (italics mine). 39.The stress can be found in the same last section: “Looking at the tombstone, he recalled the faint smile at the corners of her mouth at the very last moment and wondered whether it meant that the nightmare of her memories had really become part of the past” (Dong, “Last Winter,” p. 100).

5. screening atrocity 1. Some of the criticism is ad hominem attacks on Hou Hsiao-hsien and, to a lesser degree, on his screenwriters, Chu T’ien-wen (Zhu Tianwen) and Wu Nianzhen. One critic accuses Hou of making films for a foreign audience while denying A City of Sadness its intrinsic artistic value by claiming that it rides on the coattails of the Tian’anmen Square Massacre in China to win the award. Later I will discuss those that are relevant to the topic of this chapter. For the complete gamut of criticism, see Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua, eds., The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”] (Taipei:Tangshan chubanshe, 1991). Robert Chi summarized the controversy and counterargument in “A World of Sadness,” in Trauma and Cinema: CrossCultural Explorations, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 65–89; see also Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Poetics and Politics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,” in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 161–85, and Robert Chi, “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in A City of Sadness,” Tamkang Review 29 (1999): 47–84. The title of the film has been referred to as City of Sadness and A City of Sadness in English. I use the latter, as this is what appears in the movie. 2. Shen Xiaoyin, “Of Course You Should Watch It a Few More Times: Cinematic Aesthetics and Hou Hsiao-hsien” [Benlai jiu yinggai duo kan liangbian: Dianying meixue yu Hou Hsiao-hsien], Zhongwai wenxue 26, no. 10 (1998): 27–47.

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3. Qi Longren, “The Discourse of Cultural Studies in Taiwanese Cinema of the 1990s: A City of Sadness as an Example” [Jiushi niandai Taiwan dianying wenhua yanjiu lunshu: Yi Beiqing chengshi weili], in Cultural Studies in Taiwan [Wenhua yanjiu zai Taiwan], edited by Chen Guangxing (Kuan-hsing Chen) (Taipei: Juliu tushu gongsi, 2000), pp. 319–33; Christopher Lupke, “The Muted Interstices of Testimony: A City of Sadness and the Predicament of Multiculturalism in Taiwan,” Asian Cinema, spring/summer 2004, pp. 5–36; Lin Wenqi, “‘Return,’ ‘Motherland,’ ‘2/28’: Taiwanese History and National Identity in A City of Sadness” [“Huigui,” “zuguo,” “ererba”: Taiwan lishi yu guojia rentong”], Con-temporary, February 1995, pp. 94–109; Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Can’t Women Really Be Part of History? Rereading A City of Sadness” [Nüren zhende wufa jinru lishi ma? Chongdu Beiqing chengshi], Contemporary, September 1994, pp. 64–85; Liao Xianhao, “Southern Otherness: A Postcolonial Perspective on Language, Silence, and History in A City of Sadness and China, My Sorrow” [Nanfang yilei:Yi houzhimin shijiao kan Beiqing chengshi yu Niupeng zhong de yuyan, chenmo yu lishi], Zhongwai wenxue 22, no. 8 (1994): 59–73. 4. As Nick Kaldis points out, “In many of his earlier films, Hou skillfully adds layers of historical and contextual meaning to similar long takes. . . . For example, the opening scene of his 1989 City of Sadness, where a long take with little dialogue is given complex individual, social, and historical texture through the use of off-screen sound” (“Compulsory Orientalism: Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai,” in Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, edited by Chris Berry and Feii Lu [Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005], p. 185, n. 19). 5. The Chinese pronunciations of the Japanese kanji are Kuanrong and Kuamei. It was a well-known colonial policy for Taiwanese to adopt Japanese names. 6. Chi, “Getting It on Film,” p. 48. 7. Wu Haoren, “A City of Sadness, a Director of Natural Laws, and a Happy Audience” [Beiqing chengshi, tianyi daoyan, kuaile guanzhong], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), pp. 88–93. 8. Shawn Rosenheim, “Interrotroning [sic] History: Errol Morris and the Documentary of the Future,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 327. 9. Vivian Sobchack, “History Happens,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 10. 10. Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 57. 11. Ibid., p. 67.

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12. Wu Qiyan, “Through the Narrow Crack of History” [Touguo lishi de na dao xiazhai xifeng], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei:Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), pp. 123–28 (italics mine). 13. Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 60. Rosenstone’s view echoes Pierre Sorlin’s assertion that even if historical films “are based on records, they have to reconstruct in a purely imaginary way the greater part of what they show” (“How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001], p. 38). 14. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 21 (italics in original). In his critique of White, Walter A. Davis goes further to argue that “representation is cognition.” It is beyond the scope of this book to delve into the complex issue of history and representation except to point out that Davis’s concept can effectively counter concerns raised by Hou’s critics: “Implicit here is the assumption that there is still some way to separate the ‘date’ and its comprehension from what is finally ‘rhetoric’—a way of presenting, even dramatizing things but not a mode of cognition whereby the data is had [sic] and known in the first place” (Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999], p. 5). I am grateful to Nick Kaldis for bringing Davis’s work to my attention. 15. Wu, “Through the Narrow Crack,” p. 128. 16. Lu Kuang, “A Digressive Movie: Space and Narrative in A City of Sadness” [Liti de dianying: Beiqing chengshi de kongjian yu xushi], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), p. 145. 17. Chi Yanqi, “Film, History, and Politics: On A City of Sadness” [Dianying, lishi yu zhengzhi: Beiqing chengshi guanhou zaji], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), p. 96. 18. Liang Xinhua, “Compressed, Displaced, and Misplaced History and Memory” [Bei yasuo, tihuan, daozhi de lishi jiyi], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), p. 167. 19. Lu Kuang, “Digressive Movie,” pp. 145–46; Mi Zou, “The Discursive Fog Shrouding A City of Sadness” [Huanrao Beiqing chengshi de lunshu miwu],

5. Screening Atrocity 207 in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), p. 110. 20. Chi, “Film, History, and Politics,” p. 97. I will return to this comment later. Huang Meiying similarly charged that “the scene in which the Taiwanese beat up the Mainlanders is too exaggerated, incongruous with the tone of the movie as a whole” (“Reproduced 2/28: The Sadness of Taiwan in 1989” [Zaizhi de ererba: Yijiubajiu nian de Taiwan beiqing], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua [Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991], p. 156). 21. Lu Kuang, “Digressive Movie,” pp. 145–46; Mi Zou, “Discursive Fog Shrouding A City of Sadness,” p. 110. 22. Lupke, “Muted Interstices of Testimony,” p. 24. 23. Chen Ruxiu, Historical and Cultural Experience in New Taiwanese Cinema [Taiwan xin dianying de lishi wenhua jingyan], translated and edited by Luo Pocheng (Taipei: Wanxiang tushu gongsi, 1993), p. 81. 24. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernist, and Public Memory,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 208. 25. Stephen Prince, “Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetic Design, and Social Effects,” in Screening Violence, edited by Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 19. 26. Devin McKinney, “Violence: The Strong and the Weak,” in Screening Violence, edited by Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 99. 27. Lupke, “Muted Interstices of Testimony,” p. 5. 28. Liao Ping-hui, “The Deaf-Mute Photographer” [Ji long you ya de sheyingshi], in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei: Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), p. 130. The italics indicate that these are original English words used by the author in parentheses. 29. June Yip, “Remembering and Forgetting, Part II: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan Trilogy,” in Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 85–130. 30. Mi Zou, “Women Cannot Be Part of History? On Female Characters in A City of Sadness,” in The Death of New Cinema: From “All for Tomorrow” to “A City of Sadness” [Xin dianying zhi si: Cong “Yiqie wei mingtian” dao “Beiqing chengshi”], edited by Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua (Taipei:Tangshan chubanshe, 1991), pp. 136–37. 31. Liao, “Deaf-Mute Photographer,” p. 130. 32.Yeh, “Can’t Women Really Be Part of History?” pp. 76–79.

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33. Yip, Envisioning Taiwan, p. 99. I would, however, take issue with the comment that history is merely storytelling, for as Robert A. Rosenstone observes, “History on film must be held accountable to certain standards, but—and this is the important point—these standards must be consonant with the possibilities of the medium. It is impossible to judge history on film solely by the standards of written history, for each medium has its own kind of necessarily fictive element” (Visions of the Past:The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995], p. 36). 34. In reality, many of the younger generation can get only snippets of information about the massacre through oral recounting from their elders, as described by Lin Shuangbu in the preface to A Collection of Taiwan 2/28 Short Stories [Ererba Taiwan Xiaoshuo xuan], edited by Lin Shuangbu (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanshe, 1989). 35. Although Wenqing is a deaf-mute, it does not preclude any verbal utterance from the visitor. 36. Lu Kuang, “Digressive Film,” p. 146. 37. Janet Staiger, “Cinematic Shots: The Narration of Violence,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema,Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 41. 38. Sobchack, “History Happens,” p. 8. 39. Sylvia Li-chun Lin, “The Politics of Filmmaking and Movie Watching,” in China’s Transformation:The Stories Beyond the Headlines, edited by Lionel M. Jensen and Timothy B. Weston (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 144–60. 40. Shelly Kraicer, “March of Happiness,” Chinese Cinema, October 18, 2004 (available at http://www.chinesecinemas.org/marchofhappiness.html [accessed October 18, 2004]). 41. I am well aware that March of Happiness is the English title and that the Chinese title, Tianma chafang, refers to nothing about happiness at all; but the English title is itself pregnant with meaningful contrast, and, moreover, the characters in Lin’s film are planning to put on a stage play by the same name. At the risk of overinterpreting, although the march in the title concerns a musical genre, it could be an ironic, allegorical reference to the March massacre, when Chen Yi’s reinforcements from the mainland opened fire on anyone in sight. 42. Kraicer, “March of Happiness.” 43.Thomas Elsaesser,“Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 45. 44. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1995), p. 155. 45. In his preface to the 1995 edition of Gledhill’s Home Is Where the Heart Is, Brooks responded to critiques by later scholars and defended some of his

5. Screening Atrocity 209 earlier positions regarding the rise of melodrama (“Preface 1995,” in Melodramatic Imagination, viii). 46. Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 301. 47. William Rothman, “Overview: What Is American About Film Study in America?” in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, edited by Wimal Dissanayake (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 254–77, esp. pp. 268–69. 48. E. Ann Kaplan, “Melodrama/Subjectivity/Ideology: Western Melodrama Theories and Their Relevance to Recent Chinese Cinema,” in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, edited by Wimal Dissanayake (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 9–28. 49. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 15. 50. As Elsaesser points out, though, “Whereas the pre-revolutionary melodramas had often ended tragically, those of the Restoration had happy endings” (“Tales of Sound and Fury,” p. 46). 51. By tragedy, I am simply referring to the fateful calamity befalling the Taiwanese in March 1947; the term is not meant to carry the Greek connotation, such as Oedipus’s realization that he is the cause of his own suffering. 52. Later when the Nationalist government takes over, he buys bags of rice in the hope of higher profit, only to be thwarted by the government officials, who warn him that hoarding rice is against the law. 53. Here is one of the significant differences from A City of Sadness, in which Hiromi and Wenqing’s relationship meets no parental objections and is even encouraged by the latter’s brother, who scolds him for his inaction after she comes to their house to see him, a highly unusual, if not scandalous, act at the time. 54. Zhan Tianma, like Lin Jiang Mai, is a real-life character. Zhan was a well-known “bianshi” of silent films, who narrated the story for the audience, and his Tianma Café was a favorite meeting place for artists and intellectuals. 55.We see another interesting “echo” to Hou’s A City of Sadness, in which the Lin family is characterized as hooligans (liumang). Pro-Taiwanese critics objected to this portrayal, for it debases and insults the Taiwanese. Such an assessment seems rather simplistic, for Wenqing is clearly not a hooligan. Most important, their father’s claim that he was considered a hooligan by the Japanese colonial government is actually a positive description of his pride that he did not succumb to the colonizer. That is, the hooligan in the eyes of the Japanese colonial government is a hero to the Taiwanese. In any case, Zhan Tianma’s depiction of the theater-group member can be considered as a response (intentionally or not) to Hou’s film and criticism. 56. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, p. 13. 57. Kraicer, “March of Happiness.”

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58. The Grace Chen character is well dressed and childless; a happy and humorous woman, she looks the part of a matchmaker. 59. In Ruan Meishu’s interviews with victims’ families, Lin’s older son, Lin Paoluo, who was not present at the beating, was quoted as saying that he never watched television or read newspapers, nor did he give any interviews, let alone talk about the 2/28 Incident. He lived an essentially hermitlike life (Sobbings in Dark Corners: Searching for the Families of 2/28 Victims [You’an jiaoluo de qisheng: Xunfang ererba sanluo de yizu] [Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 2000], pp. 343–44). 60. Rosemary Haddon claims that A City of Sadness is based on Lan Bozhou’s reportage work on Zhong Haodong (“Hou Hsiao Hsien’s City of Sadness: History and the Dialogic Female Voice,” in Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, edited by Chris Berry and Feii Lu [Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005], pp. 56–57). But a closer comparison finds no clear evidence of this adaptation. A more likely film using Lan’s work as a model would be Hou’s Good Men, Good Women. Zhong Haodong’s brother, Zhong Jidong, did state that the Teacher Lin character is based on Zhong Haodong, but Zhong Jidong goes on to argue that Hou made a chronological error by having these leftists hide out in the mountains before 1949, because the arrest of Zhong Haodong took place in the early 1950s, during the White Terror. The origin of this kind of argument is the urge to match characters in a film with historical figures, which inevitably results in discrepancies and unnecessary disputes. 61. This fatalistic phrase is uttered by Ajin, when Ayu is concerned about their future together, and reappears later in the last frame before the film ends. 62. Kraicer, “March of Happiness.” 63. Bill Nichols, “Historical Consciousness and the Viewers: Who Killed Vincent Chin?” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 60. 64. Ibid. Nichols is citing the definition from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. 65. June Yip, “Constructing a Nation: Taiwanese History and the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” in Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, edited by Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 142–43. 66. Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 30. 67. Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” p. 66. 68. One can, of course, recall the comment made by the narrator in Ou Tansheng’s “Intoxication” (Chenzui), in which the Taiwanese girl is portrayed as idolizing the man from a strong motherland (see chapter 1). 69. Lupke, “Muted Interstices of Testimony.”

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70. Denise J. Youngblood, “Repentance: Stalinist Terror and the Realism of Surrealism,” in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 140. 6. memory as redemption 1. Hou Hsiao-hsien originally planned to base Good Men, Good Women on Chu Ti’en-hsin’s story “Once upon a Time There Was a Man Called Urashima Taro,” about a former political prisoner and his difficulties in reintegrating into society after his release (Urashima Taro is the Japanese equivalent of Rip van Winkle). On the mutation of the story line, see Chu T’ien-wen, “Good Men, Good Women”: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Shooting Notes and Screenplay [“Haonan haonü”: Hou Hsiao-hsien paipian biji, fenchang fenjing juben] (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 1995), p. 14. 2. The film title is Chaoji da guomin, literally Super Citizen. The English title adds Ko, which is the Taiwanese pronunciation of Xu. The word ko is highly suggestive and adds another layer of meaning not immediately obvious to non-Taiwanese speakers: Ko is both a surname and a homophone for ku (bitterness, suffering).When spoken, Xu Yisheng literally means “suffering throughout one’s life.” In this chapter, I use Ko to refer to Xu. Similarly, Chen Zhengyi’s given name sounds much like “justice” in Taiwanese (with only a slight tone variation in Mandarin); hence, when justice is dead, the Taiwanese must suffer throughout their lives. 3. Chen Ruxiu, “History and Memory: From Good Men, Good Women to Super Citizen Ko” [Lishi yu jiyi: Cong Haonan haonü dao Chaoji da guomin], Zhongwai wenxue, October 1996, p. 55. 4. Robert Chi, “Picture Perfect: Narrating Public Memory in TwentiethCentury China” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2001), p. 287. 5. Ibid., pp. 288, 289 (italics mine). 6. Avrom Fleishman, Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 175 (italics in original). 7. Ibid., p. 177. 8. Susan J. Brison, “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), p. 40. 9. John Mraz, “Memories of Underdevelopment: Bourgeois Consciousness/Revolutionary Context,” in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 103. 10. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 12.

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11. Ibid., pp. 42–43. 12. Chen, “History and Memory,” p. 55. June Yip made a similar observation in the chapter “Memory and Imagination: Good Men, Good Women and the White Terror,” in Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 121–25. Yip appears to follow the conventional interpretation that the past is praised over the present, particularly in regard to politics. Although we can surely agree that Ko’s son-in-law’s corruption paints a bad picture of post–martial law Taiwan, we must bear in mind that activities like protests and demonstrations were strictly prohibited before martial law was lifted. Even making a film like Super Citizen Ko would have been impossible, which shows that it is oversimplifying the case to examine the film (or Taiwan in general) from a purely dichotomous stand of good past and bad present. 13. Chen, “History and Memory,” p. 55. 14. In the same scene in which the daughter talks about the past, a flashback shows her being called to an office to answer questions about her personal life: when she visited her father, with whom she went, what her father said to her, how long they stayed on the offshore Green Island for political prisoners, and the like. 15. Chi, “Picture Perfect,” p. 287. 16. Stephen Prince, “Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetic Design, and Social Effects,” in Screening Violence, edited by Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 19. 17. Jonathan Boyarin,“Space,Time, and the Politics of Memory,” in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 26. 18. Ibid. 19. Peggy Hsiung-ping Chiao, “A Dialogue with Wan Ren,” in New New Wave of Taiwan Cinema 90s [Taiwan dianying jiuling xin xinlangchao] (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe, 2002), p. 119. 20. Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 12. 21. Maureen Turim, “Psyches, Ideologies, and Melodrama: The United States and Japan,” in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, edited by Wimal Dissanayake (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 174 (italics mine). 22. It is the same piano piece that she plays in an earlier flashback in which the family of three is seen as in a happier, pre-persecution time. This melodramatic scene is probably why the audiences considered the film warmer than Good Men, Good Women. Its camp characteristic that helps “democratize” the audience also makes the film more accessible. For more on filmic camp and its accessibility, see Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 134–42. 23. Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis: University of

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Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 232. Because it is debatable whether Super Citizen Ko is concerned with the issue of mourning, I will not probe this aspect further but leave it for my next project, although, needless to say, mourning is inextricably tied to the victims of atrocity. 24. Those who grew up during the period can vividly remember slogans such as “Be careful! A Communist spy could be right next to you,” and “It’s everyone’s obligation to expose Communist spies.” 25. Chiao, “Dialogue with Wan Ren,” p. 119. 26. Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past, p. 232. 27. When Ko asks him for the second time if he knows about Chen,You replies, “Mr. Chen has been dead for so long; what’s the point in asking about him?” Another irony lies in You’s given name, Minshun, which literally means “submissive subject of the state.” 28. Anton Kaes, “The Presence of the Past: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 183. 29. Ibid. 30. Taylor Downing, “History on Television: The Making of Cold War, 1998,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 298. 31. Paul van Zyl, “Dealing with the Past: Reflections on South Africa, East Timor and Indonesia,” in Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present, edited by Mary S. Zurbuchen (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), p. 338. 32. In the heyday of the White Terror, the executed were buried in mass graves if their family members failed to claim the bodies in a timely fashion because they lacked the money (we recall the extortion exacted on Zhong Haodong’s family), were afraid, or simply were not notified. 33. Chi, “Picture Perfect,” p. 289. 34. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 184.

epilogue 1. Lan Bozhou, Vine Intertwining Tree [Teng chan shu] (Taipei:Yinke chuban youxian gongsi, 2002). 2. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 49. 3. Lan, Vine Intertwining Tree, p. 117. Ali later interviews Fu Shuangmei’s cousin, who offers a different view of Lin Minghua’s death: “Good, at least he didn’t die for no cause at all,” but “fortunately they didn’t succeed with their revolution; otherwise, Taiwan would have been turned into a mess by the

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Communists” (p. 189).These comments prompt Ali to reflect on the meaning of unearthing historical facts: “We should have the attitude of respecting historical reality when facing this intentionally buried period of the past. Only after we have obtained some degree of understanding about their time and ideals, can we then make some kind of judgment” (p. 190). 4. For a more detailed discussion, see Lan, Vine Intertwining Tree, pp. 502–4, in which Lan Bozhou himself makes an appearance to articulate his historical views and refute criticism of his ideologically driven works. 5. Lan, Vine Intertwining Tree, p. 285. 6. Ibid., p. 305. 7. The protagonist’s father joined a group of farmers to protest the Japanese colonial government’s agricultural policy, which affected the livelihood of the entire village. His father eventually died from torture in prison, thus planting the seed of the protagonist’s proletarian consciousness. 8. Lan, Vine Intertwining Tree, pp. 303–4. 9. Interestingly, in dealing with the fact that he cannot interview Fu, Ali mentions, in his letter to his wife, both Cai Qianhui in Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road” (Shanlu) and Jiang Biyu in Lan Bozhou’s own “Song of the Covered Wagon” (Huang mache zhi ge) (Lan, Vine Intertwining Tree, p. 253). Neither the fictional Cai nor the real-life Jiang was a true revolutionary; both were ardent supporters of the men in their lives. 10. Lan, Vine Intertwining Tree, p. 188. 11.Wuhe’s short story “Investigation and Narration” features a man whose father may or may not have died in the 2/28 Incident. His search for the answer eventually proves futile, for at the end of story he still cannot be certain how and why his father died or whether his father was a victim of government brutality or of his own stupidity. 12. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 259.

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Zhang Yanxian ઠ٬ዙand Gao Shuyuan ਢଥ౒. Investigation of the Luku Incident [ఏໟՖάቆ‫ߧފ‬ԥLuku shijian diaocha yanjiu]. Taipei: Taipei County Cultural Center, 1999. Zhang Yanxian ઠ٬ዙ, Gao Shuyuan ਢଥ౒,Wang Yishi ̙ධΔ, and Wang Zhaowen ̙‫́ݲ‬. The 2/28 in Jiayi Tropic of Capricorn [࿂໳̺ϖʅʅʉ Jiayi beihui ererba]. Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanbu, 1994. Zhang Yanxian ઠ٬ዙ and Li Xiaofeng Ө┣࣐ IUSVY A Collection of 228 Incident Memoirs [ʅʅʉՖάϖዞᎨ Ererba shijian huiyilu]. Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1993. Zhang Yanxian ઠ٬ዙ,Wang Yishi ̙ධΔ, Gao Shuyuan ਢଥ౒, and Wang Zhaowen̙‫́ݲ‬. The 2/28 in Jianyi and Yunlin Plains [࿂ෙͦ௴ʅʅʉ Jiayun pingye ererba]. Taipei: Wu Shanlian Foundation, 1995. Zhang Yanxian ઠ٬ዙ et al. Research Report on Responsibility for the 2/28 Massacre [ʅʅʉՖά௕έᔏᚙߧԥేѾ Ererba shijian zeren guishu yanjiu baogao]. Taipei: Ererba jijinhui, 2006. Zhong Yiren ᓎධʆ. Sixty Years of Bitterness [˻჻˗ʏ϶ Xinsuan liushinian]. 2 vols. Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1995. Zhong Zhaozheng ᓎ႟‫ݬ‬. Angry Tides [݊ᐤNu tao]. Taipei: Qianwei chubanshe, 1993.

i nde x

Algeria, 95; women as victims in, 73–75, 200n.59 “Algeria Unveiled” (Fanon), 73–74 Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines, 187n.7 Alltagsgeschichte (cinematic style), 99 Angry Tides (Zhong Zhaozheng), 16, 178, 180, 190n.36; ethnic conflict in, 29–33 archival footage, 168–71 artificiality, versus authenticity, 50–52 atrocity, 11–12; in A City of Sadness, 133–41; definitions of, 11; in “Last Winter,” domesticity as, 64–66; 2/28 Incident as, 11–12; in Vine Intertwining Tree, 180–82; White Terror as, 11–12 authenticity, versus artificiality, 50–52 autobiographical memory, 80 back shadowing, 45 Bal, Mieke, 15 Banana Paradise (film; Wang Tong), 201n.5 Benjamin, Walter, 111 benshengren (native-born Taiwanese), 19–20, 188n.8 Bhabha, Homi K., 76 Blanchot, Maurice, 7 Bo Yang, 12, 184n.9 Boyarin, Jonathan, 160, 162 Braester,Yomi, 79 Brooks, Peter, 146, 208n.45; The Melodramatic Imagination, 143 Buried Injustice of 1947 (Li Qiao), 16, 180

Card, Claudia, 11 Caruth, Cathy, trauma theory of, 8–9, 59, 66, 195n.48 censorship, by governments: of A City of Sadness, 200n.1; of 2/28 Incident documents, 47; during White Terror, 28–29 Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, 79 Chen Fangming, 54, 58, 62 Chen, Grace, 148–49 Chen Linlang, 60–69, 177 Chen Ruxiu, 135, 155, 158 Chen Wenxi, 4, 153 Chen Ye: Muddy River, 86 Chen Yi, 21, 134–36. See also City of Sadness, A; 2/28 Incident Chen Yingzhen, 4, 15, 79, 81, 197n.17; “The Mountain Road,” 15, 17, 78–83, 101, 161–62, 166, 181–82, 214n.9; on U.S. imperialism, 186n.25 Chen Zhengyi, 154–56, 163, 169–72 Chi, Robert, 130, 155, 172 Chi Yanqi, 132–34 Chiang, John H., 1 Chiang Kai-shek, 1–2, 57, 170; Nationalist government under, 3–4 Chiao, Hsiung-ping Peggy, 113 Chia-yi, 183n.1 China, Republic of: Nationalist government in, 3–4, 11; and U.S., 61–62. See also Chiang Kai-shek

236

index

Chu T’ien-hsin: “Once upon a Time There Was a Man Called Urashima Taro,” 154, 181, 211n.1 Chu T’ien-wen, 125, 138, 204n.1 City of Sadness, A (film; Hou Hsiao-hsien), 7, 97–99, 111, 128–41, 152; Alltagsgeschichte style in, 99; atrocities in, 133–41; avoidance of violence in, 137, 140; awards for, 128; biases against Taiwanese in, 133–35; criticism of, 128–29, 133, 150, 204n.1; diaries as narrative device in, 139; government censorship of, 200n.1; historical event re-creation in, 130–33; as historiographical film, 138, 153; and March of Happiness, 209n.55 closure, 22; in “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang,” 39 Communism, 56–57 cultural memorization, 15 Davis, Walter A., 206n.14 Death of New Cinema, The (Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua), 128, 136; on screen violence, 137 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), 6, 199nn.49,51 “Devil in a Chastity Belt, The” (Li Ang), 17, 86, 91–96, 116; Grieving Founding Mother in, 92–94, 116; victimhood as theme in, 91–96 diaries. See personal diaries documentary fiction, 49; authentic testimony as device in, 47; “Song of the Covered Wagon” as, 50 documentary memory, 168–71; and archival footage, 168–70; in Super Citizen Ko, 168–71 domesticity, in “Last Winter,” 64–66 Dong Nian, 15, 48–49; “Last Winter,” 15, 17, 48, 59–72, 98, 113, 123, 125–27 DPP. See Democratic Progressive Party Duara, Prasenjit, 107 Dust of Angels (film; Hsu Hsiao-ming), 112–13 Elsaesser, Thomas, 143, 145 Enlightenment (newspaper), 57, 105 ethnicity, 19–46; and closure, 22; definitions of, 19–20; and gender stereotypes, 22–29; and hierarchies, 42–43; and Japanese colonialism, 21; through linguistic dif-

ferences, 41; and marriage, 30–33, 46; in “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” 40–41; and Sinocentrism, 20; in Taiwan, 20; in “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang,” 33–39; in Vine Intertwining Tree, 177–78, 188n.8 Everyone Sticks Incense into the Beigang Burner (Li Ang), 91 eyewitness accounts: in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” 50–52, 58, 175; in Vine Intertwining Tree, 175, 180–81 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKevon, 54 fabricated memory, 159–63; in Super Citizen Ko, 159–63 Fanon, Frantz: “Algeria Unveiled,” 73–74 “Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death, The” (Liu), 73 Field of Life and Death,The (Xiao Hong), 73, 76; as anti-Japanese allegory, 73 flashbacks: in Heartbreak Island, 98, 114–21; nostalgia as part of, 117; in Super Citizen Ko, 99, 157–59, 163–66 Fleishman, Avrom, 105 floating memory, 163–68; in Super Citizen Ko, 163–68 “Flower in the Smoke” (“Yanhua”;Yang Zhao), 17, 22, 86–91; identity as theme in, 90–91; prostitution in, 89; victimization of women in, 86–87 Formosa (magazine), 5, 62, 65–66, 176 Formosa incident (1979), 5, 10; and “Last Winter,” 15, 59–62; and U.S., 185n.11. See also Heartbreak Island Fu Shuangmei, 179, 181 Garrison Command, 4–5; and martial law, 184n.7; in Super Citizen Ko, 171–72 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 22 gender: and ethnicity, 22–29; in “Intoxication,” 23–26; in “A Minor Biography of Huang Su,” as stereotyping, 84–85; sublimation of, 93–94; in “Under the Snow,” 23, 26–29 Gledhill, Christine, 144 Good Men, Good Women (film; Hou Hsiaohsien), 38, 98, 102–12, 124, 126, 154, 177, 202n.3, 211n1; cinematic devices in, 103–4, 105, 106, 109–11; diaries in, 107–9; film-within-a-film in, 103–4; past

index 237 versus present in, 106–12; technique of defamiliarization in, 106; voice-over in, 105, 109–11 Good Women of Taiwan (Lan Bozhou), 77, 162, 194n.21 Gu Erde, 77 Guan Xiaorong: Why Don’t We Sing?, 201n.5 Guo Xiuzong, 192n.3 Guo Zheng, 113, 203n.26 guofu (father of the country), 95 guomu (mother of the country), 94 habit memory, 6 Haddon, Rosemary, 210n.60 Halbwach, Maurice, 80 Hansen, Mirian Bratu, 136 Hayner, Priscilla, 11 Heartbreak Island (film; Hsu Hsiao-ming), 98–99, 101, 112–23, 154, 176; blood imagery in, 119; flashbacks in, 98, 114–21; and “Last Winter,” 125–26; past as theme in, 98, 115–21 Hillebrand, Margaret, 186n.23, 191nn.55, 62 historical documents, 47–49 historiographical films, A City of Sadness as, 138, 153 “History as Epic,” 157 “History as Tragedy,” 157 Holocaust, 9; and 2/28 Incident, 186n.23 Hou Hsiao-hsien, 7, 138–39; censure of, 147; A City of Sadness, 7, 97–99, 111, 128–41, 150, 152, 153, 200n.1, 204n.1, 209n.55; criticism of, 204n.1; Good Men, Good Women, 38, 98, 102–12, 124, 126, 154, 177, 202n.3, 211n.1; political ideology of, 132; The Puppet Master, 102–3, 106 Hsu Hsiao-ming: Dust of Angels, 112–13; Heartbreak Island, 98–99, 101, 112–23, 125–26, 154, 176 Huang Meiying, 206n.20 Humphrey, Michael, 11 idealism, political, 79 identity, as theme: in “Flower in the Smoke,” 90–91; in “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” 191n.55; in Super Citizen Ko, 171 India: sati in, 73–75, 95; women as victims in, 73–75 individual in history, 56–59 International Human Rights Day, 5, 59

“Intoxication” (Ou Tansheng), 16, 23–26, 46, 210n.68; gender stereotypes in, 23–26 “Investigation and Narration” (Wuhe), 16, 214n.11 Janet, Pierre, 6 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 25 Japan: and A City of Sadness, 131; and ethnicity in Taiwan, 21; and The Field of Life and Death, 73 JFK (film; Stone), 13, 131 Jian Guoxian, 192n.3 Jian Suzheng, 84–85; on “Flower in the Smoke,” 86–91 Jiang Biyu, 48–49, 52, 55–57, 71, 77, 102–3, 122, 124–25. See also Good Men, Good Women; “Song of the Covered Wagon” Jin Hongzao, 22, 87–90 Jones, Kathleen B., 94 juancun (residential compounds), 122 Kaes, Anton, 170 Kaldis, Nick, 205n.4 Kaohsiung incident, 10. See also Formosa incident Kaplan, E. Ann, 122, 144 Kraicer, Shelly, 143, 148 LaCapra, Dominick, 7, 45–46, 67, 172, 195n.48 Lai Tse-han, 184n.6 Lan Bozhou, 5, 13, 15, 17, 43, 48–49, 51, 64, 68, 70, 77, 173; Good Women of Taiwan, 77, 162, 194n.21; Marxism of, 54; “Song of the Covered Wagon,” 17, 48–59, 71, 77, 98, 103, 123, 158, 173–74, 175, 181, 192nn.3,8, 193n.15, 200n.60; on U.S. imperialism, 186n.25; Vine Intertwining Tree, 13, 15, 173–82, 188n.8 Landy, Marcia, 167 Langer, Lawrence L., 55 “Last Winter” (Dong Nian), 15, 17, 48, 59–72, 98, 113, 123, 125–27; anachronisms in, 63, 69; domesticity as theme in, 64–66; linear history in, 60–61, 69, 125; narrative structure of, 59–60, 62, 70; past as theme in, 59–64; private versus public as theme in, 68–72; radicalism in, 65; as trauma fiction, 66–68; victimhood as theme in, 71–72. See also Formosa incident Le Goff, Jacques, 78

238

index

Lee Teng-hui, 133, 189n.31 Lei Zhen, 184n.9 Li Ang, 15, 199n.49; “The Devil in a Chastity Belt,” 17, 86, 91–96, 116; Everyone Sticks Incense into the Beigang Burner, 91 Li Ao, 22 Li Qiao, 15–16, 45, 191n.61; Buried Injustice of 1947, 16, 180; “Notes of Taimu Mountain,” 16, 40–46, 191n.55 Li Tianlu, 102, 106 Liang Jing, 102, 104, 112, 125, 202n.3 Liang Xinhua, 132; The Death of New Cinema, 128, 136, 137 Liao Ping-hui, 138 Lifton, R. J., 54 Lim Giong (Lin Qiang), 102 Lin Cheng-sheng, 129, 141, 144; March of Happiness, 99, 129, 141–53, 208n.41, 209n.55 Lin Jiang Mai, 3–4, 148–49, 184n.5, 201n.59 Lin Minghua, 179, 181, 213n.3 Lin Paoluo, 210n.59 Lin Ruyu, 192n.3 Lin Shenjing: “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang,” 16, 33–39 Lin Shuangbu, 84, 208n.34; “A Minor Biography of Huang Su,” 17, 78, 83–86, 88, 122 Lin Wenyi: “Under the Snow,” 16, 17, 23, 26–29, 46 Liu, Lydia: “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death,” 73 Lü Heruo, 40, 43–44, 190n.49; as victim, 44 Lu Kuang, 132 Lü, Xiulian Annette, 5, 199n.51 Lupke, Christopher, 135 Mandelbaum, Jacques, 143 Mani, Lata, 74 March of Happiness (film; Lin Cheng-sheng), 99, 129, 141–53, 208n.41; Alltagsgeschichte style in, 99; characters in, 151–52; and A City of Sadness, 209n.55; critical reception of, 141; historical accuracy in, 147–50; Manichaean polarity as theme in, 144–47; as near-melodrama, 143–47, 151; violence in, 147–50 marriage, and ethnicity, 30–33, 46 martial law: and Garrison Command, 184n.7; “partial,” 184n.7; in Taiwan, 4, 6, 97, 173; and White Terror, 4

martyrdom, 93 media: cinematic re-creations in, 97–99; literature versus film, 123–27. See also archival footage; flashbacks; historiographical films; voice-over melodrama, 143–47; domestic, 146; elements of, 143–44; historical, 146; and March of Happiness, 143–47, 151 Melodramatic Imagination,The (Brooks), 143 memory, 7–8; autobiographical, 80; and cultural memorization, 15; documentary, 168–71; fabricated, 159–63; floating, 163–68; habit, 6; narrative, 6; politics of, 8 Mi Zou, 132–33, 138; The Death of New Cinema, 128, 136, 137 Miller, Lucien, 82 “Minor Biography of Huang Su, A” (Lin Shuangbu), 17, 78, 83–86, 88, 122; extratextual story in, 84; gender stereotyping in, 84–85; real-life basis for characters in, 84; victimization of women in, 83 “Mountain Road, The” (Chen Yingzhen), 15, 17, 78–83, 101, 161–62, 166, 181–82, 214n.9; autobiographical memory in, 80; narrative structure for, 78–79, 82; victimhood as theme in, 78–83 Muddy River (Chen Ye), 86 Myers, Ramon H., 184n.6 Nichols, Bill, 149 “Notes of Taimu Mountain” (Li Qiao), 16, 40–46; ethnic conflict as theme in, 40–41; identity as theme in, 191n.55; typecasting and stereotyping in, 40–42 obligation to forget, 76 “Once upon a Time There Was a Man Called Urashima Taro” (Chu T’ienhsin), 154, 181, 211n.1 Ou Tansheng: “Intoxication,” 16, 23–26, 46, 210n.68 “partial” martial law, 184n.7 personal diaries, 107–9; in A City of Sadness, 139 polarity, in March of Happiness, 144–47 political idealism. See idealism, political politics of memory, 8 Postwar Era and the 2/28 Incident: 1945–1949 (film), 201n.5

index 239 private versus public, as literary theme: in “Last Winter,” 68–72; in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” 52–56 prostitution, 89; and “Yanhua,” 198n.41 pseudonyms, 51–52 Puppet Master,The (film; Hou Hsiao-hsien), 102–3; technique of defamiliarization in, 106 Qiu Fusheng, 200n.1 Qiu Lianqiu, 192n.3 radicalism, in “Last Winter,” 65 redemption, as theme, 166 Republic of China. See China, Republic of Research Report on Responsibility for the 2/28 Massacre (Zhang Yanxian), 1, 183n.2 Rosenstone, Robert A., 124, 208n.33 Rothman, William, 144 Ruan Meishu, 210n.59 Russian Formalism, 106 sati, 73–75 Schaar, John, 94 Schindler’s List (film; Spielberg), 12–13, 136 shanbao (mountain compatriot), 187n.7 shouhai ren (victims of violent acts), 12 shounan ren (victims of political persecution), 12 “Song of the Covered Wagon” (Lan Bozhou), 17, 48–59, 71, 77, 98, 103, 123, 158, 173–74, 181, 192n.3, 193n.15; authenticity versus artificiality in, 50–52; Communism in, 56–57; eyewitnesses in, 58, 175; individual in history in, 56–59; interviews in, 51; objectivity in, 192n.8; private versus public as theme in, 52–56; pseudonyms in, 51–52; victimization of women in, 200n.60 Sorlin, Pierre, 97 Spielberg, Steven: Schindler’s List, 12–13, 136 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 85 Steiner, Jean-François, 54 Stone, Oliver: JFK, 13, 131 Super Citizen Ko (film; Wan Ren), 99, 154–72, 175, 211n.2; archival footage in, 168–71; camp characteristics of, 212n.22; documentary memory in, 168–71; fabricated memory in, 159–63; flashbacks in, 99, 157–59, 163–66; floating memory in, 163–68; Garrison Command in, 171–72;

“History as Tragedy” in, 157; interior monologues in, 155–57; national identity as issue in, 171; redemption as theme in, 166 Taimu Mountain, 41–42 Taiwan: benshengren in, 19–20, 188n.8; ethnicity in, 20; Formosa incident in, 5, 10; Garrison Command in, 4–5; martial law in, 4, 6, 97, 173, 187n.7; waishengren in, 20. See also 2/28 Incident; White Terror technique of defamiliarization, 106 “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang” (Lin Shenjing), 16, 33–39; closure in, 39; ethnic relations in, 33–39; ideological teleology in, 35; representational strategies in, 35 Tobacco and Alcohol Monopoly Bureau, 3–4 Tompkins, Jane, 22–23 Toplin, Robert, 131, 162 trauma, theory of, 8–9, 59, 66–67 “trauma fiction,” 66–68; “Last Winter” as, 66–68 Treat, John, 51 Turim, Maureen, 98, 114–15, 158, 162 2/28 Incident, 173; as atrocity, 11–12; casualty estimates for, 184n.6; Chen Wenxi in, 4; Chiang Kai-shek in, 1, 183n.2; cinematic re-creations of, 97–99, 128–53; commemoration of, 183n.1; government versions of, 1, 183n.1; and Holocaust, 9, 186n.23; Lin Jiang Mai in, 3–4; and Tobacco and Alcohol Monopoly Bureau, 3–4; various names of, 10; women as victims of, 17, 76–77. See also Angry Tides; City of Sadness, A; “Flower in the Smoke”; “Intoxication”; March of Happiness; “Minor Biography of Huang Su, A”; “Notes of Taimu Mountain”; “Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang”; Vine Intertwining Tree 2/28 Scars,The (film), 201n.5 “Under the Snow” (Lin Wenyi), 16, 17, 23, 26–29, 46; gender stereotypes in, 23, 26–29 van Zyl, Paul, 172 Vice, Sue, 45

240

index

victimhood, as theme: archetypes and women, 95; in “The Devil in a Chastity Belt,” 91–96; in “Flower in the Smoke,” 86–87; in “Last Winter,” 71–72; and Lü Heruo, 44; martyrdom as, 93; in “A Minor Biography of Huang Su,” 83; in “The Mountain Road,” 78–83; and prostitution, 89; and shouhai ren, 12; and shounan ren, 12; in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” 200n.60; in Vine Intertwining Tree, 176–77 victims, female: in Algeria, 73–75, 200n.59; in China, 75, 95; in India, 73–75, 200n.59 Vine Intertwining Tree (Lan Bozhou), 13, 15, 173–82; ethnicity as theme in, 177–78, 188n.8; eyewitness accounts in, 175, 180–82; narrative structure of, 179–80; representation as simulation in, 179; victimhood as theme in, 176–77; women in, 180–82 violence, avoidance of: in A City of Sadness, 137, 140; in March of Happiness, 147–50 voice-over, in Good Men, Good Women, 105, 109–10 waishengren (mainlanders and their descendents on Taiwan), 19–20 Wan Ren, 99, 166; Super Citizen Ko, 99, 154–72, 175, 211n.2, 212n.22 Wang, Ban, 93–94 Wang, David Der-wei, 79, 81, 96 Wang Tiandeng, 192n.3 Wang Tong: Banana Paradise, 201n.5 Wei Wou, 184n.6 White Terror, 2, 4–5, 10–11, 173; as atrocity, 11–12; cinematic re-creations of, 97–99; civil freedoms during, 10; and Garrison Command, 4–5, 197n.17; and martial law, 4; and U.S., 186n.25; victim estimates during, 12; women as victims during, 17, 78. See also “Devil in a Chastity Belt, The”; Good Men, Good Women; Heartbreak Island; “Last Winter”; “Mountain Road, The”; “Song of the Covered Wagon”; Super Citizen Ko; “Under the Snow” Whitehead, Ann, 59, 62, 66 Why Don’t We Sing? (film; Guan Xiaorong), 201n.5

Williams, Linda, 144 women: in Algeria, victimization of, 73–75, 200n.59; in China, victimization of, 75, 95; in “Flower in the Smoke,” 86–87; in India, victimization of, 73–75, 200n.59; and prostitution, 89, 198n.41; and sati, in India, 73–75, 85; in “Song of the Covered Wagon,” 200n.60; as trope, 8; and 2/28 Incident, as victims in fiction of, 17, 76–77, 83–86; in Vine Intertwining Tree, 180–82; during White Terror, as victims, 17, 18. See also victimhood, as theme Woodhull, Winifred, 74 Wu Nianzhen, 204n.1 Wu Qiyan, 131–32 Wuhe: “Investigation and Narration,” 16, 214n.11 Xiao Daoying, 104 Xiao Hong, 73, 75, 95; The Field of Life and Death, 73, 76 Xu Junya, 84–85 Xu Yisheng, 154, 172, 211n.2 Yang Xiaobin, 50, 192n.8 Yang Zhao, 15; “Flower in the Smoke,” 17, 22, 86–91 “Yanhua.” See “Flower in the Smoke” Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu, 139 Yip, June, 138–39, 208n.33, 212n.12 You Minshun, 169, 213n.27 Young, James E., 47, 175 Yuanzhumin (original inhabitants), 20, 187n.7 Zhan Hongzhi, 50, 58, 192n.4 Zhan Tianma, 146, 209n.54 Zhang Henghao, 44–45 Zhang Junhong, 203n.28 Zhang Yiming, 200n.60 Zhong Haodong, 5, 48–49, 52–58, 71, 77, 96, 102–5, 124–25, 154, 177, 192n.3. See also Good Men, Good Women; “Song of the Covered Wagon” Zhong Lihe, 50, 53 Zhong Liyi, 49, 53–54, 58, 124 Zhong Shunhe, 51–54, 71, 124 Zhong Zhaozheng, 15; Angry Tides, 16, 29–33, 178, 180, 190n.36