Taiwan in Time: June 27 to July 2
Over the years, the term “Orphans of Asia” (亞細亞的孤兒) has been used to describe a number of things, including Taiwan’s political isolation and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops stranded in Thailand and Myanmar after they lost the civil war.
But originally, when Taiwanese author Wu Cho-liu (吳濁流) first used the term as the title of his debut novel, written in Japanese during World War II, it referred to Han Chinese living in Taiwan under Japanese rule because they neither truly belonged to Japan or China.
Photo: Tsai Meng-shang, Taipei Times
The novel follows Taiwanese intellectual Hu Tai-ming (胡太明), who, after leaving for China after being mistreated in Taiwan by the Japanese, found himself also the subject of discrimination by the Chinese, who distrusted him and saw him as a Japanese traitor.
“Hu is a victim of this twisted chapter of history,” Wu wrote in the introduction to the Chinese edition, adding that he wrote the book for both future Japanese and Taiwanese to remember that period.
It was quite a daring move for Wu to write the novel while Taiwan was still a colony of Japan, especially during war time when imperialist fervor was at a peak and absolute loyalty was required. He writes that he had to hide his manuscripts or disperse them in various places in the countryside because he would have been charged with treason if they would have been found.
Photo: Wang Chin-yi, Taipei Times
“Nobody would dare use that kind of historical backdrop in a novel in those days, much less depict the true reality of those times without any hesitation or restraint,” Wu wrote. “History often repeats itself. But before it repeats itself again, we need to look at the facts so we can learn our lessons.”
Wu details in the introduction the immediacy in finishing the novel as Japan neared defeat in 1945. The Americans had captured Manila by then, and there was much speculation among intellectuals on where they would land next, and how the Japanese would react in case they chose Taiwan.
“The fear in my heart was completely suppressed by my urgency to finish the novel,” he wrote. “The airstrikes were becoming more frequent, and you couldn’t predict when a mishap would happen. Thinking back, I’m glad I had that kind of drive. If I were to write it today, I would not be able to convey the same sense of reality.”
Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times
Born on June 28, 1900 and living to be 76 years old, Wu spent about half of his life under the Japanese and half under the KMT. His novels have often been studied due to their detailed descriptions of Taiwanese society during and after Japanese rule.
Wu was raised in a prominent Hakka family in the Hsinchu area, and received both a Chinese and Japanese education.
His life experiences closely mirror the ideas in Orphans of Asia. Wu worked as a teacher after college, but soon became monitored by police for his criticism of the education system and also because he read magazines published by Taiwanese students in Japan, such as Taiwan Youth (台灣青年), which often contained writing that authorities considered subversive.
Because of this, Wu was transferred to one of the most remote areas for teachers in the Hsinchu area. He describes this as a time where he had “no dreams and no ideals,” but it was also one of the happiest of his life.
Wu did not start writing stories until he was about 36 years old. In 1937, he left the countryside and started teaching at a larger school, where discrimination against Taiwanese staff was rampant and he was forced to rethink his position. The Japanese also invaded China around this time, and the authorities started their aggressive “Japanization” process of the Taiwanese people.
Finally, after a conflict with Japanese staff at the school, he quit his job and headed to China in 1941 — a place where many Han Chinese in Taiwan at the time saw as their motherland.
Wu landed in Nanjing, which was then ruled by the Japanese collaborationist government headed by Wang Jingwei (汪精衛). He did not speak Mandarin at first, and soon found that due to anti-Japanese sentiment in China, the people there often saw Taiwanese as Japanese spies.
“Taiwanese are like orphans who lost their parents,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Fig Tree (無花果). After seeing that the situation was no better in China, Wu returned to Taiwan and started working on Orphans of Asia.
After the Japanese left and the KMT took over, Wu was finally able to publish the novel, which was translated into Chinese in 1959.
But here is the irony of Wu’s literary career: The Fig Tree, published in 1970, was immediately banned by the KMT due to its description of the 228 Incident, and did not reappear until it was republished in 1988.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
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