Taiwan

“Mistah Hobison, how do you think about Taiwan?”

In 1999, Great Britain would return Hong Kong to China. It was certain, etched in stone – and only five years away. My students anticipated Hong Kong’s return with great relish … and a sense of inevitability that spilled into their thoughts about Taiwan.

Of course, weekly Communist lessons on the necessity of Taiwan’s return, whether through diplomacy or military force, also kept the island at the forefront of their minds.

When Mao Zedong led the Communist revolution, the previous government packed up a trove of historic treasures and fled to the island province of Taiwan, where they continued governing a land area not even one percent the size of the mainland. Why mainlanders cared about that puny renegade island centered perhaps on Taiwan’s economic success in the face of China’s struggles.

That I had little opinion about Taiwan was, in the minds of my students, opinion enough. No matter how I replied to their questions, their tones became intent. “Taiwan belongs to China.” “Taiwan must return.” “We await the day when Taiwan will return to our country.” And they’d shake their heads and say, “Perhaps the army will be needed.”

Read next ->

This entry was posted on February 8, 2008 at 7:40 am and is filed under Fall, beijing, china, travel. Tagged: , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Taiwan”

  1. Andrew Says:
    February 8, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    Your statement the previoius governmetn fled to the island province of Taiwan is grossly misleading. Taiwan was not a province of China when the the KMT took up residence there in 1947 as it was under the juress of the authority of the United States military who were the primary occupier of Japan. It was under the authority of the United States military that the KMT initially occupied Taiwan. Prior to that Taiwan was a province of Japan. I feel your article indicates the blatantly demented attitudes of your Chinese students towards Taiwan.

  2. the forester Says:
    February 8, 2008 at 4:35 pm

    I feel your article indicates the blatantly demented attitudes of your Chinese students towards Taiwan.

    Thank you for chiming in, Andrew. Since you’ve probably popped in midway, you may not realize this piece is part of a longer artistic work intended to accomplish something very similar to your accusation. At the outset I posted an important disclaimer; I’ll reproduce it here for the record:

    Write what you know, the adage says. Well, I lived in China for a year – I’ll write about that. People seem to enjoy those stories almost as much as I enjoy telling them.

    The funny thing was, while writing I discovered how much I didn’t know. The meaning of that holiday. The names of those fruity candies. How they made thousand year eggs. Holes in my understanding urged me to research more.

    I resisted those urges and left the holes unfilled.

    Why?

    Plenty of books out there provide gobs of facts about China. Honestly, they don’t interest me. I don’t know China from books.

    What I do know is this: I lived in China for a year, and it captivated me, bewildered me, amused and frustrated and utterly challenged me. I struggled to comprehend every single experience. If I wasn’t misinterpreting the language, I was missing cultural cues. Questions rarely helped – as a foreigner I wasn’t privy to complete or straightforward explanations. (The Chinese put their best foot forward.)

    Living in Beijing was, for me, passing hourly from one haze of uncertainty to the next. I arrived with the conviction that all humans are fundamentally the same; I departed utterly baffled by the depth of cultural differences.

    So I do not know the Chinese. All I know is that I spent a year among them. It drove me to think a lot about language and culture, and I flew home with some fun stories. This book is my effort to capture in words, as authentically as possible, what it was like to live in a country so different from my own, lacking the necessary skills to decode it.

    You accused this piece of being grossly misleading. I would counter that this entire book is grossly misleading — intentionally so, because while in China I was grossly misled by language and cultural barriers. Even near the end of a full year I felt I was constantly operating on misinformation. That the Communist government fed its citizens deliberate misinformation did not help matters.

    So yes, this article reflects the attitudes of my students. Deliberately. That is its point.

    Yet I must object to your use of the term demented, as it does a terrible injustice to the noble and magnanimous character of my students. The terms misinformed or manipulated would work better. Had either of us, Andrew, lived within a one-party political system all our lives, our own attitudes would taste of state sanctioning. There’s little way to correct what you don’t know you don’t know. That is why control of information is one of the primary modus operandi of autocratic regimes.

    Your bristling against a piece intended to reflect that reality makes me consider it a success. Note especially the concluding line, suggesting my students’ assumption of future military conflict. I trust you found it as haunting as I intended.

Leave a Reply