OF all the writers who dealt with the subject of the bloody 228 Incident of 1947 exactly 54 years ago, the late Wu Cho-liu (
Born in 1900 to a Hakka family in Hsinchu County, Wu wrote The Orphan of Asia (
PHOTO: HSINCHU COUNTY CULTURE CENTER
According to Poyen Lin (林柏燕), director of the Historical Museum of Hsinchu County and an expert on Taiwan literary history, the title Flowerless Fruit is representative of a people whose society is kept from blossoming. Lien-kio (連翹), a type of creeping plant which Hakka people typically use to adorn the facades of their houses, is repeatedly trimmed to stem excessive growth. The characteristic of the plant to grow, despite being constantly trimmed, is a similar symbolic reference to the hardened spirit of Taiwan's people.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Although he calls himself "a spineless man" in one of his works, Wu consistently shocked his friends with his head-on approach to writing about the sensitive 228 Incident. Most notable is the fact Wu named informants who tipped off KMT authorities with fabricated information to hunt down many of Taiwan's leading intellectual and social figures after the 228 Incident.
Under martial law, which lasted from 1947 to 1987 in Taiwan, Wu was lucky merely to have his books banned from publication. The usual punishment for open indictments of the KMT government -- which hoped to whitewash the 228 Incident as a communist uprising -- was jail and sometimes execution.
Wu called on his readers to look beyond the KMT as the root cause of the bloody 228 Incident crackdown. He traced the incident to the Japanese colonial period, when patterns for abuse of Taiwanese society were deeply laid.
As Chen Yu-ling (陳玉玲), professor of literature at Providence University (靜宜大學), pointed out in a recent book on colonialism, the Chinese who took over rule of Taiwan following Japan's defeat in World War II quickly assumed the role of colonizers. Chen says many Taiwanese returning from China were keen to become loyal "Emperor's subjects" to the KMT and were complicit in the devastating distortion of the economy that led Taiwan into a severe economic crisis immediately after the war.
Furthermore, the new ruling Chinese and returning Taiwanese angled themselves into positions of power, shutting other ethnic Taiwanese out of power under the pretext that they had been tainted by Japanese rule and therefore unfit to govern. For Taiwanese who often suffered under harsh Japanese rule, this amounted to rubbing salt in an old wound. These attitudes planted the seeds of bitter contempt on the part of Taiwan's intellectual class.
As Wu observed while working in Nanjing as a reporter during World War II, Taiwanese living in China during the war tended to come under suspicion of being Japanese spies often simply because they could speak Japanese. This lack of trust exacerbated the sense of abandonment felt by many Taiwanese since the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 ceded the island to Japan. This tension was best described in Wu's first book The Orphan of Asia. This novel, written between 1943 and 1945 in Japanese while he was working as a reporter in Taipei, is widely cited as the first literary expression of a Taiwan consciousness in opposition to a China consciousness.
The most daring passages of Wu's writing occur in the last chapter of Taiwan Lien-kio, in which he discusses the issue of "Taiwanese traitors" who misled martial law authorities under Taiwan governor general Chen Yi (陳儀) to arrest and execute thousands of innocent Taiwanese in the wake of the 228 Incident and later during the "white terror period," which lasted until martial law was lifted. Complete statistics do not exist, but tens of thousands of people are thought to have lost their lives with many more held in jail without trial during those four decades.
Wu called the returning Taiwanese who joined hands with the KMT authorities in rampant corruption "half breeds" (半山), and wrote in clear terms that many were informants for the government.
Chung Ao-cheng (鐘肇政), a presidential adviser to President Chen Shui-bian(陳水扁) and Wu's life-long friend, told the Taipei Times that "Wu could not believe the KMT authorities were able to know so many prominent members of Taiwanese society within such a short period of time [after arriving in Taiwan in 1945] and arrest or kill them without outside help. Therefore, those `half breed' Taiwanese must have provided name lists."
Chung said Peng De (彭德), who then served as a member of the Taiwan Provincial Commission probably gave Wu the list of informants' names. "My guess is that the person must be Peng De. Peng was also a Taiwan Hakka and knew Wu since they first met in Nanjing," Chung said.
Wu started to record his experience of the 228 Incident while working as a reporter at the Min Bao (民報), the only civilian newspaper at that time. He completed Flowerless Fruit in the 1950s and began work on Taiwan Lien-kio in 1967, writing out of fear that "the truth of the incident might be distorted in the future." Flowerless Fruit, however, had been banned in Taiwan and was only available outside the country until the end of martial law.
Wu first published portions of Flowerless Fruit in Taiwan in 1964 in the magazine Taiwan Literature and Art (台灣文藝), of which he was the publisher. The first half of Taiwan Lien-kio -- which was originally written in Japanese in an extremely secretive manner, with manuscripts hidden under charcoal bags, in bamboo food baskets and inside holes bored out of the wall of his home -- was also printed in segments in the magazine over several years.
In Taiwan Lien-kio, Wu provides a personal account of the 228 Incident, saying that gunfire could be heard through the night of March 8, 1947 in Taipei. First stepping out of his home on March 10, Wu went with another reporter to look around the neighborhood near the George Mackay Memorial Hospital where they both lived. They saw a college student in uniform and four of their neighbors dead on the side of a road and narrowly escaped death when they noticed two soldiers setting up a machine gun aimed at them and dashed away just in time.
Wu says he later learned many of his colleagues had either gone missing or were killed in the incident. The president of Min Bao, for example, is still listed as missing. At least six other newspapers either had their presidents, editors-in-chief, general managers, editorial writers and editors arrested or executed. Six newspapers in Taipei alone were banned from publication. Another five reporter friends of Wu were killed.
Throughout martial law, Wu was unable to publish Taiwan Lien-kio in its entirety in Taiwan because of its treatment of the 228 Incident. Wu asked Chung to hold the book's unpublished chapters and requested that Chung have the whole book published only 10 or 20 years after he had passed away. Chung then translated the unpublished chapters from Japanese to Chinese and printed the complete work in 1986, one year prior to the end of martial law and 10 years after Wu's death at the age of 77.
The three books, The Orphan of Asia, Flowerless Fruit and Taiwan Lien-kio provide a valuable account of events that remain today as a nightmare in Taiwan's history.
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