I Am Taiwanese – A Documentary
Here’s the transcript which I will modify from time to time to be used as the overarching OS over the documentary that I am shooting. For now, it will serve as a summary based upon the information I gathered during the shoot.
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I am Taiwanese, or so I think. I was born in Phoenix Arizona and lived in Taiwan between the age of 2 and 18. I am also Chinese, but I am not sure if it’s a good idea to feel this way anymore.
This man is my mother’s father. He fled from China to Taiwan in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party defeated the KuoMingTang in the Chinese Civil War. He is a retired high school teacher that taught Citizenship for more than 30 years, and has lived in Taiwan for more than 60 years now. Just like me, even at the age of 88, he too, has an identity crisis.
This is a story about myself, my two grand fathers, interlaced with a short history, and the complicated reality of Taiwan. I am not sure where to begin, but I only know that in my blood there flows a subtle, contradicting irony, that I can’t seem to resolve, or even be comprehended. This is therefore a story of my attempt to grasp this contradiction that I must live with every day of my life.
People have come to know Taiwan as a stateless nation, a ghost in the international arena haunted by the dominating political and economic power of China, which has so far successfully coerced countries around the world to see and treat Taiwan as a mere ghost, and nothing more. Taiwan’s lame status-quo may be widely discussed. What people do not know, however, is the reality embedded underneath Taiwan’s struggle for sovereignty. In fact, the difficulty for one to even say “I am Taiwanese.” For there is too much history, pressure, too many tragedies, unfortunate circumstances, laments, for one to proclaim such identity.
China is Taiwan’s cultural motherland. Yet it is also Taiwan’s political and military enemy, with more than 980 missiles stationed across China’s east coast line against the island of Taiwan. How do you embrace a mother who threatens to eliminate your very own existence? How do one even begin to understand this ridiculous circumstance. Do we in fact need a mother?
I traced to my father’s father. He was born in 1907, during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. He lost his eyesight about 10 years ago but he still sees patients in the traditional Chinese medicine clinic that his father established in 1895 in a small town in central Taiwan. 1895, that was the year when the Chinese Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan to Imperial Japan as a colony, a turning point that forever changed Taiwan.
My grandfather often speaks Japanese to me. He studied business in Mejiro, Tokyo for 8 years during World War II. He has a close affinity to the country of Japan. Perhaps it’s also for this reason, I took two years of Japanese in college, and studied aboard at a university in Tokyo Japan during my junior year. Japan’s legacy on the island of Taiwan has far reaching effects that lasts until this day.
My mother’s father fought the Japanese military on Mainland China during World War II. Unlike my father’s father, his position toward Japan is completely different. Japan was a part of the Axis, an evil military aggressor clawing into all corners of the Far East. When he retreated with the fleeing KMT government to Taiwan, the island was viewed as an ex-colony inhabited with unruly ex-colonists pacified by an alien culture.
The Chinese government claimed the island without much respect. The economy was in disarray, society in chaos. And when my father’s father saw my mother’s father arriving to the shores of Taiwan with the new government, their hope for equal treatment, for better governance was quickly transformed from despair, to distain, later, hatred toward this foreign power. This was the seed. Somehow, I was borned, nonetheless.
Who is to blame? Who will weep for the contension that flows inside the veins of every Taiwanese citizen right now? I am experiencing it. We are all watching.
Their lives coincided because of history. Needless to say, both sides opposed to my parents’ marriage. My grandparents have only seen the other family once, on the wedding ceremony. And I, the product of this history, travel between the two, balancing awkwardly, often, unsuccessfully within the ideological prejudices that two groups have toward each other until this day. But they are my father and mother. They are my reality. They are now Taiwan, too late to be changed. And perhaps that is tragedy of this reality.
