On Saturday night, in what used to be — and will soon again be — known as the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, a free performance was given by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.
One of Taiwan’s most successful and treasurable cultural exports, Cloud Gate has for many years offered free summer concerts around Taiwan.
This time, however, founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) made special mention of the anniversary of the 921 Earthquake — the 10th anniversary.
His comments were followed by a minute’s silence, during which Lin asked for the audience of thousands to close their eyes and pray for the dead and the bereaved.
When the minute was up, the audience opened its eyes to see a lone woman on the stage, twirling in pain and confusion. The dancer continued this motion for an astonishing length of time. Always moving, her body was contorted and her expression changed from distress to horror to exhaustion.
The dance was called Requiem, and the performer was Dung Shu-fen (董淑芬). Those who had not seen this work before could have assumed that it was choreographed to represent and memorialize the terror and misery that befell the victims of Taiwan’s deadliest tremor in a lifetime.
It was, in fact, developed 20 years ago to mark the Tiananmen Square Massacre — a rare artistic acknowledgement in Taiwan at the time of that Chinese atrocity.
As Lin introduced the minute’s silence, he made tactful reference to instability — a hook that could have meant individual economic hardship, local political unease or even the violence in Xinjiang, depending on one’s perspective.
But Lin, a consummate showman and communicator, refused to drag the audience into a lecture on this or that incident or an extended revisiting of the night of Sept. 21, 1999.
Instead, he appealed to the common decency of his crowd, knowing that among them were people of every political description, ethnic background and religious persuasion.
This channeling of common decency allowed general repugnance toward the killings 20 years ago to blend with the sorrow over the deaths of more than 2,000 people 10 years ago, and the effect was powerful.
The crowd, assisted by a team of high school and university volunteers throughout the night, was as silent during that communal prayer as a crowd could be. In that silence, and in that heat, something remarkable and comforting could be felt: a sense of benevolent community and mutual respect on a scale rarely witnessed in secular contexts in this country.
Amid a media environment replete with cynicism and half-truths, the remarkable decency of ordinary Taiwanese is something that this politically fractured society can overlook all too easily.
Lin, who has done his best over the years to express the communal sorrow of both Taiwanese and Chinese, deserves credit and respect not only for presenting his troupe’s best face to a public gathering, but also for enriching them with a respectful and dignified reminder of their own humanity.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this