"When I was in Paris I didn't want to touch politics because it wasn't interesting for me," she said. But Lu warned her "politics governs everybody — even if you don't touch [it], it will touch you."
Tchen says she didn't understand what Lu meant until a few years later when she was applying for a visa to enter a competition in Italy. Because Italy had no diplomatic relations with Taiwan she couldn't enter the country and therefore missed the competition.
"My husband said to me, come back to Taiwan where people need you," she said.
Arriving back in Taiwan in the early 1980s, Tchen continued to research music, and published Music Taiwan (音樂台灣) in 1984. It was also during this time that Tchen's husband was incarcerated for three years for sedition.
Tchen says that although her husband wasn't born a political animal, she understood that his years in prison had changed his outlook about Taiwan's direction. In 1986, the year he got out of prison, Lu became a founding member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DDP) and Tchen dove into learning about all facets of Taiwan's culture and history.
"[Lu] said if we don't have history and culture we are nothing, so we have to build them up."
Changing perceptions
Tchen says that back in the 1970s artists began to think about what it meant to be Taiwanese but by the 1980s they had begun to create. "When they create they say 'are we Chinese or not.' By 1987 we were saying 'we are Taiwanese,'" she said.
By the time the DPP came to power, Tchen had learned enough about Taiwan to put her theories into practice. She was duly appointed to run the Council for Cultural Affairs.
"It was the first time the DPP was in power, so for our culture it is different. Before that, Chinese culture was the main policy. But since I became minister, [though] Chinese culture [remained] important … I [focused] a lot on our Taiwanese culture, which had been ignored during the Martial Law period.
"I respect Chinese culture — like in France, you have ancient cultures, but they developed their own culture. If you have this cultural [awareness] you can develop your own culture. This is to give you the knowledge, but your own culture gives you the roots."
Tchen says that cultural policy will continue along the lines it has in the past, though not at the expense of any cultural group in Taiwan.
"We must to go back to our history and we have to go back to our culture because without that we are nothing," she said.
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