This illustrated history of Taiwan has strengths, weaknesses and questions as it makes a contribution to Taiwan studies.
Let’s start with its strengths. The early chapters clearly show how up to the 1500s, Taiwan’s past was aboriginal and Austronesian, a needed perspective to counter many prevalent Han historical memes that speak of Taiwan as an inalienable part of China from time immemorial.
Episodic in nature and research, the work avoids any claim at being a systematic and comprehensive history; its professed aim is to the general public. Included in this is the postmodern awareness of the impact of many perspectives on history, something that later, however, proves to be a two-edged sword.
The most informative and detailed sections are the Japanese colonial and the post-1945 eras, which includes the 228 Incident and the period of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The author’s doctoral dissertation at Yale University examined the former while the latter with KMT indoctrination and Sinicization is something she personally experienced. Readers can see a person who learned to free herself from that narrow perspective and find the roots of a more Taiwanese perspective. This Taiwanese perspective is perhaps the strongest point of the work, how it was formed, and how it evolved from both the Japanese colonial era and that of the KMT.
Ironically, the work’s strength is also its limitation. The author cannot escape her generation. The work speaks of the present as having two stages, democratization (1987 to 2000) and trials and setbacks (2000 to the present). But aside from a brief mention of the Sunflower movement, in which student protesters occupied the Legislative Yuan’s main chamber for almost 23 days last year in protest against the government’s handling of a cross-strait service trade agreement, it fails to adequately tackle events that have occurred over the past two decades, the very period she lives in and one few would describe as having “setbacks.”
Additionally, to speak of Taiwan’s road to democracy as a “muddy road,” and the present situation as a “quagmire,” is clearly a perspective that differs from many of today’s mainstream thinkers.
The work suffers from what may be called a post-modernistic malaise and insecurity found creeping into academia. Researchers struggle with demands of methodology, relevancy and realistic ambivalence as they try to keep a variety of balls in the air. They support openness to all perspectives but are reluctant to leave the comfort zone of the past where end results are finalized and one can speculate without fear of anyone rising from the dead and saying, that is not the way it happened at all. In such situations, one who is a close reader and with an eye for tone and rhetoric will soon find that in such security, the writers inevitably slip into a rhapsodizing speculation.
A good example of this is seen in the treatment of Mona Rudao and the Hanaoka brothers. After admitting that the brothers are something of a mystery and that even less is known of Rudao, the author wishes she could read his mind for answers. Yet just pages earlier she had no fear in assigning motivation to all involved. This stands in contrast with the reluctance and discomfort to discuss the present age where all players are active and one can actually direct questions of motivation to participants. One grants that the participants of today may not necessarily answer such questions truthfully, but neither can the dead.
A different matter is text and how the author regularly begs off inserting more detail of past or present with a constant refrain that “time or space do not allow it.” This reviewer counted at least seven such references. The book further speaks of heroes in past ages, but makes no mention of Su Beng (史明), or his own seminal work on Taiwan’s 400 years of history. Is this academic snobbery? Trained in the Japanese era, Su remains an active iconic figure in today’s protests and an inspiration to many of the young.
If the work is for the general public more familiar with Hanyu pinyin, why does the work stick with the Wade Giles system and then give 10 pages of transliteration? And as for format, after stating that it is an illustrated history, why does it choose a format that does not show the illustrations off to their best ability?
Perhaps the book tries to be too much. Yet after all the disassociation and attempts at objective distancing from the present struggle and perspectives, the author ends hoping for a smoother road for Taiwan, saying, “Yes, it should be so. It should be so.” But is that realistic?
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