The inauguration rally on May 21 here in Kaohsiung turned out to be a happy mixture of pop concert, night market and democracy in action. We got up with Aya, Jolin, and assorted other musical acts, I plunked down for 520 T-shirts, key chain and other assorted paraphernalia, and went away having witnessed a little piece of history.
The Taipei Times and its speech-writing publisher Antonio Chiang got it exactly right: Taiwan has stood up. Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) speech made a mockery of "one China."
Today Taiwan is far more modern than China -- for that we must thank Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and other brave men and women for changing the laws, Chen, Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) and countless others for demanding that the laws be changed.
China, meanwhile, cooks the books, spreads pink slips far and wide, and still breaks the heads of dissidents, labor activists, separatists, et al. Traditional Chinese culture, as Chen noted, advocate attractive, not oppressive measures. Taiwan, it turns out, has become more traditionally Chinese than China.
The CCP has no hope of ever winning the hearts and minds of the folks I saw on inauguration night. They're too traditional, too modern, and Beijing cannot fight a two-front war of that sort -- not without another Cultural Revolution. Globalization is the fear of modern society -- but not in Taiwan. Here a split identity just comes naturally. The best of both worlds, some call it.
So we wait and grow, and fix our own errors. There's plenty to do just eradicating corruption, making life more liveable, and maybe teaching Taiwanese kids to speak Taiwanese. My neighbors here still call me a foreigner, as I am still, after three years' residence. But maybe by the time President Chen steps down, they will feel differently. I'll speak the local language better than Jiang (江), I'm sure, and I'll know more of the culture and history, the values, hopes and dreams of the place I call my home than he will. I'll never be Chinese -- my nose is too big for that!! -- but maybe I can be Taiwanese. Today this looks like a good country to belong to.
Lawrence T. McDonnell
Fenghan,
Kaohsiung County
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