Before
I knew Rosa, who was my son’s research cohort in Toronto, I didn’t quite know
that many Taiwanese were hostile of the island returning to the fold of the
motherland. We are all descendants of Yellow Emperor, right? And after all, by
that time (early 2000s), China had already expressed its preparedness to accommodate
“one country, many systems” type of federation. My third brother Yew Sim went
to Taiwan for his university education; it was in the early 1960s then. Taiwan
was synonymous with Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek then. As a school boy, I
always thought that they had a mission, i.e., to recapture the mainland. And
why are they talking about independence now?
“Oh, we don’t consider ourselves Chinese; as
a matter of fact, my father hopes to see me marrying a Japanese!” This was
more or less what Rosa told me!
Of
course, it was not nice for me to ask her why. She was already a medical doctor
doing her sub-fellowship at one of the top neurological science centres in the
world. She was young, pretty and smart. “Maybe she had not met the right
calibre Chinese,” I thought.
Let’s
face it; we Chinese men are not a very appealing lot to many “sophisticated”
western-educated ladies. As a matter of fact, one of my nieces who grew up in
Melbourne has never thought of going out with an Asian! She is tall and
beautiful. She says she finds Chinese men “boring’!
I
have not given much thought to the subject until I read this book: Become
“Japanese” – Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation by
Leo T.S. Ching.
I
won’t say the book is an easy read. The substance in its original form must
have come from a literature review perhaps undertaken by the author when he was
doing his graduate research. But I must say the book offers me a great deal of
insights into what being Taiwanese is really all about.
Now I can understand what
Rosa has said and why Tsai Ing-wen, who won the recent presidential election
with a huge majority, has chosen to thank, of all countries, US and Japan in
her victory speech. Tsai, who is a former university professor, is the leader
of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Isn’t this the party of Chen
Shui-bian, the disgraced ex-president of Taiwan?
DPP draws its support largely
from the locally born Taiwanese, who form the majority of the population now!
Kuomintang’s fraternizing with China is bad news to them now!
If I may paraphrase
Ching: The early settlers (from South China, mainly Ming-nan Fujianese and Hakkas) did identify themselves very
much as “Ming” Chinese. Unfortunately, under the Qing (Manchu) rule, they were
left much to their own devices. The island was ceded to Japan in 1895 after
China lost the Sino-Japanese War. The Republic of China (ROC) regained control of the island only
in 1945. But much “damage” had already been done during after this 50 year “absence”.
Even though the Taiwanese were not treated as equals, Japan did everything to “nipponise” Taiwanese whom the Japanese
considered were so culturally inferior that they might need 80 years to make
them “Japanese”. Much was also done by the colonial government to improve the
island. At the outset of World War II, many Taiwanese, especially the elites,
had already identified themselves as Japanese. Poverty and corruption were
rampant in the mainland; on the other hand, everything seemed “perfect’ in
Japan. Lee Teng Hui’s family were a case in point. The Stockholm syndrome[1]
ran its course!
The return of Taiwan
to ROC did not help much to reverse the course. After his defeat by Mao in
1949, Chiang Kai-sheik fled to Taiwan with some 2 million mainlanders. He ruled
the island with an iron fist. The mainlanders did not speak the local Ming-nan dialect; there was simply
little love between the two Han groups. When mainland China was still doing all
the sloganeering, Taiwan was already becoming a new economic tiger. Contempt
for the former was simply natural, hence the rise of DPP.
Come to think of it;
if Yuan had ruled China long enough, would Chinese-ness be different? And didn’t
Chinese wear pit-tails during the Machu rule?
Under a new environment,
isn’t a fact that ethnocentrism will begin to fade with the emergence
of second or third generations? Maybe the Jews are an exception - for obvious reasons.
[1] A phenomenon in which
hostages become empathetic toward their captors to the point of defending and
identifying themselves with the latter. Some of us may still remember the case
of heiress Patricia Hearst’s abduction and indoctrination by the Symbionese Liberation
Army and subsequent involvement in a bank robbery.
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