Despite Lin's sympathetic analyses of what Taiwan's artists have managed to come up with, it can still be argued that something far more hard-hitting, and of epic stature, in literature and film, is both possible and desirable.
Sylvia Lin also points to women as popular images of suffering, even though, as she says, most of Taiwan's political victims were men, and looks at the issue of ethnicity in representations of Taiwan's history. Lin is, incidentally, a Taiwanese translator and scholar working in the US at the University of Notre Dame, Illinois, and is married to perhaps the most illustrious translator from Chinese into English that we have, Howard Goldblatt.
So - still no full account in English of Taiwan's years of state terror, and still no Taiwanese novels or films that depict the period's horrors head-on? This would appear to be the fundamental situation, only partially revealed by this nonetheless scrupulous and carefully argued book.
Possibly the reality is that modern Taiwan is simply too proud of its recent achievements to want to look back. The one-party state wasn't without its supporters, after all. "Most Taiwanese citizens," Lin writes of that earlier period, "accepted the government's position that these dissidents were in fact threatening national security and should be severely punished. The democratic ideal that a nation's citizens should be free to voice dissenting views without fear of persecution was completely alien to the majority of the Taiwanese, who deemed the fight for such rights as being seditious."
Despite such fighting talk, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan isn't the rallying cry this state of affairs ideally calls for. Instead, it looks scrupulously and honestly at the artistic results of the situation. So what is still needed is some young Taiwanese writer, some modern Emile Zola untouched by the academic proprieties, to bewail from the rooftops the continuing lack of a full account of such a hideously cruel, and indeed horrific, past, pointing the finger of accusation where he or she will.
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