The grief is genuine. The admiration for the woman who has been an emblem of the UK for so many decades is deeply sincere. There will be appreciation for the great care she took in such a fractious age not to take a side, express a view or add to the rifts that sharply divide the UK.
Every nation needs a figurehead; and, however perverse the sheer randomness of being born into that role, she did it with remarkable skill and dignity.
How fitting that she should die just after performing her final and most important constitutional role, appointing a prime minister (her 15th).
How glad many will be that she lived to see the last hurrah of her platinum jubilee. There is no tragedy in the death of 96-year-old who kept going to the very last. Is that not the way we all wish to go?
We never knew her, hidden as she was behind that distant facade of royalty, but everyone could imagine her as they chose.
So many have measured their families, births, marriages and deaths, the growing up of their children, the passing of their grandmothers, against those royal events. So many wondered how she navigated her troublesome children, with their many divorces and scandals.
Some families saw their own soap operas reflected back at them. The grief people feel will be for all those losses and changes in their own families over the years.
As a young child, my mother saw the queen held up as a baby at Windsor Castle for all to see. I dimly remember standing in a park in the cold foggy early morning, waiting for her father’s funeral. I first watched TV at a friend’s house for the coronation. We were nearly crushed in Hyde Park with my children watching fireworks on the evening before Charles and Diana’s wedding.
Royalist or not, their comings and goings echo through our own lives.
There will be grief, too, for the vanishing of an era — or many eras, one after another, as she has been on the throne so long. Time passing makes us melancholy: We grieve for ourselves, too.
The hazy notion of an Elizabethan age marks out our personal and national histories.
She was the last link with World War II, with those pictures of her in uniform.
The queen’s reprise of “We will meet again” in her COVID-19 broadcast was a touching elegy for those more communally minded, wartime days.
Her reign saw the end of an empire, those pink slabs of the world in my old geography book, with the Commonwealth — that curious remnant she tenaciously clung to — now all that is left.
No doubt we will see public mourning on an epic scale, and sonorous worship of the mystique of monarchy from the BBC. Cameras will seek out the most profuse weepers in the crowds.
However, the true mood, I suspect, is a more personal sense of family memories and the passing of private as well as public histories.
Reigns are milestones in our lives: Shakespeare had ordinary folk marking their own memories as being in the time of this or that king.
Everyone has their own patriotism, their own way of expressing their love of home, their own reasons to revel in a thousand aspects of this nation.
Queen Elizabeth II, because she spans as much time as most people can remember, lays claim to a sense of country that may not be matched in future.
She did everything she had to do. Most important of all to her was to pass on the crown to the next three kings lined up into the far future. She steered her wayward family “firm” skillfully through 70 years of change and tumult.
Now, with a “Vivat rex,” there has been not a split second after her last breath for anyone to consider. That is how she planned it, why she never abdicated to retire in old age.
The magic of majesty is in its divine destiny. Let in choice, and all is lost. She reigned so well that there has never been a time when the people, if asked, would have chosen anyone but her. “Impossible act to follow,” one royal author opined on BBC News.
I am sure he did not mean it that way, but he could be right.
In a meeting with Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste on Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) vowed to continue providing aid to Haiti. Taiwan supports Haiti with development in areas such as agriculture, healthcare and education through initiatives run by the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF). The nation it has established itself as a responsible, peaceful and innovative actor committed to global cooperation, Jean-Baptiste said. Testimonies such as this give Taiwan a voice in the global community, where it often goes unheard. Taiwan’s reception in Haiti also contrasts with how China has been perceived in countries in the region
The world has become less predictable, less rules-based, and more shaped by the impulses of strongmen and short-term dealmaking. Nowhere is this more consequential than in East Asia, where the fate of democratic Taiwan hinges on how global powers manage — or mismanage — tensions with an increasingly assertive China. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has deepened the global uncertainty, with his erratic, highly personalized foreign-policy approach unsettling allies and adversaries alike. Trump appears to treat foreign policy like a reality show. Yet, paradoxically, the global unpredictability may offer Taiwan unexpected deterrence. For China, the risk of provoking the
On April 13, I stood in Nanan (南安), a Bunun village in southern Hualien County’s Jhuosi Township (卓溪), absorbing lessons from elders who spoke of the forest not as backdrop, but as living presence — relational, sacred and full of spirit. I was there with fellow international students from National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) participating in a field trip that would become one of the most powerful educational experiences of my life. Ten days later, a news report in the Taipei Times shattered the spell: “Formosan black bear shot and euthanized in Hualien” (April 23, page 2). A tagged bear, previously released
Young supporters of former Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) were detained for posting the names and photographs of judges and prosecutors believed to be overseeing the Core Pacific City redevelopment corruption case. The supporters should be held responsible for their actions. As for Ko’s successor, TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), he should reflect on whether his own comments are provocative and whether his statements might be misunderstood. Huang needs to apologize to the public and the judiciary. In the article, “Why does sorry seem to be the hardest word?” the late political commentator Nan Fang Shuo (南方朔) wrote
RSS