Jazz returns to Taichung on smaller scale

Jazz is back, but just don’t call it a festival as the Give Me Five concert series is set to kick off tomorrow in Taichung. Running through Oct. 31, the small-scale performances take the place of the annual jazz festival, which was canceled for a second year in a row due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In years past, the multi-day event attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators. “It’s totally different this year,” Hsiao Jing-ping (蕭靜萍), head of performing arts for the city’s Cultural Affairs Bureau, says. Nearly 30 traditional and contemporary jazz bands will perform at venues throughout the city. The old Taichung railway station will play host to the largest of the concerts, with performances taking place on the abandoned tracks. Crowd sizes will be limited to 500 spectators at the old train station, while most of the other sites are even smaller. Hotels and restaurants around the city will also host concerts, but numbers will be limited due to safety concerns. “Whether it’s 10,000 people or 10, we’ll do our best,” says Richard Li (利啟正), bassist for Skyline, a jazz fusion band set to perform on Sunday. Organizers stressed that government COVID-19 regulations will be followed, including the wearing of masks, temperature checks and real-name registration via QR code. Tickets for the concerts are free, but must be confirmed in advance through an online booking system. “We hope people truly appreciate the music,” Hsiao says. She adds that she feels optimistic that the traditional large-scale jazz festivities would be back next year.

By John Evans

Grammys aims for full inclusion

The Grammys will stick to its word with the public release of the full inclusion rider to ensure equity and inclusion in hiring on all levels of production for next year’s ceremony. The Recording Academy released on Tuesday an eight-page document detailing the rider’s purposes and objectives. The agreement requires producers to recruit and hire more diverse candidates backstage and in front of the camera for the 64th annual awards ceremony on Jan. 31. Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said he’s proud of the initiative and hopes the concept can “move the needle.” The academy announced the adoption of the inclusion rider in August. “The inclusion rider is something that will provide an opportunity for people that may not have had one before,” he said in a recent interview. “That’s really important to me. I wouldn’t be here if someone didn’t give me an opportunity. I’m trying to make pathways and make sure there’s areas for people to work into a system and climb their way through.” The rider requires Grammy producers to audition, interview and hire onstage and offstage people from groups that have been historically and systematically excluded from the industry. Riders are addendums to contracts. The academy’s initiative was created in partnership with several groups including the Color of Change; inclusion rider co-authors Kalpana Kotagal and Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni; Ryan Butler, the founding director of Warner Music/Blavatnik Center for Music Business at Howard University; and Valeisha Butterfield Jones, co-president of the Recording Academy. Kotagal, a civil rights attorney, said the rider includes four key elements that will drive improvement for representation and equity. She said there’s a commitment to diversifying hiring pools, benchmarks and targets for hiring, collection and analysis of applicant and hiring data and strict accountability measures. “By committing to use the inclusion rider for its 2022

Meet Uganda’s ‘rudest woman’

Her sexually explicit protests have been likened to pornography, but Ugandan activist and writer Stella Nyanzi says sex is the most effective — and entertaining — way to shake people out of their apathy. “I learnt very early that there are some topics in Uganda that are tired and... the only way to capture attention is to introduce some shock value,” the 47-year-old said during an interview in Kampala. And plenty of people have been shocked by Nyanzi’s methods, which range from calling President Yoweri Museveni “a pair of buttocks” to baring her breasts during a court hearing. But the former university researcher, who holds a doctorate on sexuality in Africa and boasts nearly 300,000 followers on Facebook, is unrepentant. “We don’t see or we pretend we don’t see what’s happening in society especially the excesses and the violations” under Museveni’s decades-long authoritarian rule, she said. “To say to a violent, militant, brutal regime that you are violent, stop, does not (have) as much impact as to say ... fuck the rapist, militant penis of the dictatorship.” She has paid a high price of her willingness to challenge authority — imprisoned for “cyber-harassment” in 2019 after she posted a profane poem on Facebook about Museveni and suffering a miscarriage after being beaten in jail. Although she insists that her losses are “not worth writing home about,” grief is at the heart of her quest to bring down Museveni. After losing her parents in quick succession six years ago — unable to find life-saving medicines or get an ambulance in time — Nyanzi turned to humor, in part to escape the overwhelming sadness that engulfed her. In her hands however, humor has also become a weapon to channel her rage against a government she blames for the deaths of her parents and thousands of Ugandans who lack access to reliable

Frozen potatoes vs turkey

A Chinese-made Korean War epic has topped the global box office, tapping a vein of rising patriotism in China and prompting moviegoers to post videos of themselves eating frozen potatoes to emulate the hardships endured by soldiers in the conflict. The Battle at Lake Changjin (長津湖), released to coincide with China’s Oct. 1 national holiday, had grossed nearly 5 billion yuan (US$779.13 million) by Tuesday, according to data compiled by Lighthouse, a box office tracker owned by Alibaba Pictures. That puts it ahead of current global blockbusters including the latest 007 film, No Time To Die, and Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, according to IMDb-backed movie data Web site Box Office Mojo, and makes it the biggest-grossing war film ever, overtaking Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which took in US$526.9 million. Having premiered 20 days ago, the three-hour-movie currently accounts for half of all films being shown in Chinese cinemas, according to Lighthouse. It was made with the support of the central government’s propaganda department, according to state news agency Xinhua. Starring Wu Jing (吳京), who directed and played the lead role in Wolf Warrior (戰狼), another nationalistic Chinese blockbuster, the film depicts Chinese soldiers battling the much-better equipped US troops during the bitter cold of the 1950-1953 war. The conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving US-led UN forces technically still at war with North Korea. The movie, which cost US$200 million, is the latest in a series of patriotic titles China has churned out in recent years. The film has been embraced by official media, and a former journalist was arrested by police for suggesting on a social media platform that the soldiers frozen to death in the movie had been foolish. One scene in the movie shows soldiers chewing frozen small potatoes between battles while their US counterparts

Ashes from the Amazon

Tired of seeing the lush Amazon destroyed over many years, Brazilian street artist Mundano decided to let nature speak for itself: he painted a giant mural in Sao Paolo using ashes he collected from the scorched rainforest to raise awareness of climate change. The giant 1,000-square meter fresco titled The Forest Firefighter — featuring a heroic figure who is helpless in the face of a raging fire — will be inaugurated on Tuesday. “The idea came from impotence. We’ve been seeing for decades how the jungle has been burnt, and in the last few years that has reached record levels,” Mundano, who goes by one name and calls himself an ‘artivist,’ said. Mundano, 36, collected 200kg of ashes from different areas affected by fires to create the mural on a building close to Avenida Paulista, the main avenue running through Brazil’s largest city. The ashes came from the Amazon jungle, the Pantanal wetlands, the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado savannah. BRINGING ASHES TO THE PEOPLE Mundano hopes his mural will raise awareness among Sao Paulo residents about the vast fires that ravage Brazil’s precious ecosphere every year. “No one sees the fires, they’re very far away in the Amazon. The idea is to bring the ashes here to the people to create greater empathy,” said Mundano. In June and July, Mundano felt the heat of the fires firsthand when he went to collect the ashes. But what also caught his attention was the distress of the firefighters trying to extinguish the flames that do so much damage to Brazil’s flora and fauna. Symbolizing the fauna in the mural is a crocodile skeleton painted next to the heroic firefighter. The entire fresco is made in various shades of black and gray depending on how much water Mundano mixed in with the ashes. The black and white artwork contrasts sharply with the colorful

Concrete: the world’s third largest CO2 emitter

If concrete were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth, behind only China and the US. How can this material, essential for global housing, construction and infrastructure, be made less damaging to the planet? Cement is the most utilized material on Earth, consumed to make concrete at a rate of some 150 tonnes each second. According to the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA), around 14 billion cubic meters of concrete are cast each year. Cement production alone accounts for as much as seven percent of global CO2 emissions — three times the emissions produced by aviation. “That’s more than all the emissions from the European Union or India, just behind those of China and the US,” Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a key contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said. And with ever-growing urbanization rates in Africa and Asia, the planetary impact of this elementary building material is only likely to grow. Cement is the main binder that holds together the pebbles and stones in concrete. It is primarily made of clinker, a residue produced by firing clay and limestone in a furnace. When it is heated, CO2 is produced. In order to manufacture one tonne of cement, the process of firing to 1,400 degrees Celsius produces roughly one tonne of CO2. This chemical reaction, which has stayed unaltered since cement was first manufactured over 200 years ago, is responsible for 70 percent of the sector’s emissions. The remaining 30 percent comes from the energy used to fire the furnaces themselves. REDUCING EMISSIONS? The concrete industry has said it wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. In October it set the objective of reducing its emissions “an additional 25 percent” by 2030. This would save some five billion tonnes of CO2 over the course of the decade. Purging the sector of CO2 emissions

Giant Syrian refugee puppet nears journey’s end

The transcontinental odyssey of Little Amal will begin its final stage this week when the giant puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian girl reaches the shores of the UK after walking thousands of miles across Europe. Bells will chime and choirs will sing as Little Amal appears on the beach today in Folkestone, Kent, after making the same cross-Channel journey that has been taken so far this year by more than 17,000 people seeking refuge from conflict, hunger and persecution. On the last leg of her journey, Little Amal will visit Canterbury, London, Oxford, Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield and Barnsley before the extraordinary and complex 14-week traveling street theater ends in Manchester on Nov. 3. “It’s been challenging, it’s been difficult at times, but it’s also been amazing and incredible,” said David Lan, one of the producers of The Walk, who has been “on this journey right from the beginning three years ago, and on every step of the way” since Little Amal left Gaziantep near the Turkish-Syrian border at the end of July. The idea of Little Amal’s journey in search of her missing mother evolved from The Jungle, a highly acclaimed play about young refugees in a camp near Calais that opened at the Young Vic in London in 2017. The play’s producers, the Good Chance theatre company plus Lan, Stephen Daldry and Tracey Seaward, came up with the idea of taking its message of displacement, loss, dignity and hope to villages, towns and cities across Europe. HOPE FOR THE MARGINALIZED Little Amal, whose name means hope in Arabic, was created by Handspring, the company that made the equine puppets in War Horse. She stands 3.5m tall and is operated by a team of eight puppeteers working shifts to control her legs, arms and facial features. “They create the emotional life of the puppet,” said

Vienna museums join adult-only OnlyFans

More than a century after the artists of the Vienna Secession declared “to every age its art; to art its freedom,” the Austrian capital has found a new site for artistic expression free from censorship: the adults-only platform OnlyFans. Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans — the only social network that permits depictions of nudity — in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries. In July, the Albertina Museum’s new TikTok account was suspended and then blocked for showing works by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki that showed an obscured female breast, forcing the museum to start a new account. This followed a similar incident in 2019, when Instagram ruled that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens violated the platform’s community standards which prohibit any depictions of nudity — even those that are “artistic or creative in nature.” In 2018, the Natural History Museum’s photograph of the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf figurine was deemed pornographic by Facebook and removed from the platform. The Leopold Museum has likewise struggled to promote its collection of nudes by the expressionist Egon Schiele, with advertising regulators in Germany, the UK and US refusing to show them in a city tourism campaign in 2018. (The tourist board successfully resubmitted the posters with banners obscuring the bare bodies reading: “Sorry — 100 years old but still too daring today.”) A short video featuring the painting Liebespaar by Koloman Moser, made to mark the Leopold Museum’s 20th anniversary this year, was rejected by Facebook and Instagram as “potentially pornographic.” ON FULL DISPLAY These works and more are now on full display, safe from the threat of censorship, on Vienna’s OnlyFans profile — and only teased from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Helena Hartlauer, a Vienna tourist board spokesperson, said the city and its cultural institutions had been finding it

Notes from Central Taiwan: Miramar II: The rebirth

It’s not even a road yet. At the moment it is merely a hint of upturned sod off Highway 11. When I visited last week the digger was sitting there unattended for the holiday. And yet, there it was, terrifying. On the site plan the locals obtained, the road goes down to the south end of Taitung County’s Shanyuan (杉原) Beach. That beach now hosts the infamous Miramar hotel, built on land taken from aborigines by the government in 1987 and handed over to a developer to build a hotel in 2004 as a build-operate-transfer (BOT) project. The hotel became the focus of a bitter struggle between environmentalists and developers over the potential destruction of one of the most beautiful and unique stretches of beach and bay in Taiwan, where the coast’s notorious rip is far from the beach, and Indian Ocean corals and sea turtles may be found. Today the abandoned Miramar is a ghastly bright corpse in the center of the beach, a bit back from the water, but not out of the reach of typhoons. It was repurchased from the developer by the county government last year, seemingly ending the long battle. The building is empty, but part of the parking lot is used. Originally the Miramar plans called for villas running north from the main building, and to the south, much closer to the water on a shelf of sand, another hotel building, roughly the size of the first. That second building, as one quickly learns when walking over the area, would have been an easy target for a big typhoon. The villas were given up first as the developer attempted to compromise with environmentalists and keep the main building. The second was never started. The original plans also called for a long, high wall to seal off the

By Michael Turton

Taiwan in Time: State-sponsored luxury

Oct. 18 to Oct.24 To chief engineer Kinsuke Hasegawa, the completion of the Taiwan Railway Hotel was just as important as the launch of Taiwan’s first north-south railroad. Many guests — most notably Japan’s Prince Kotohito — would be coming to Taiwan for the Western Trunk Line’s inauguration ceremony on Oct 24, 1908, and it was imperative to host them at the extremely lavish new establishment. Hasegawa personally presided over its construction for the final months, which carried on day and night with over 1,200 workers toiling in shifts. They just made it — four days before the official ceremony. Designed by German-educated architect Tsumunaga Matsugasaki, the European-style, red-brick structure was Taiwan’s first Western hotel. Destroyed when the US bombed Taipei in 1945, it was located where today’s Shinkong Life Tower stands in Taipei. The building resembled other notable colonial structures in the area, including the governor-general’s office, but it was reportedly the first to feature French-style mansard roofs, which frequently appeared on future government buildings. The hotel housed the nation’s first elevator, and boasted a bar, barber shop, reading room, tennis courts and a swimming pool. Anyone could stay at the hotel, but its room rates limited customers to the wealthy and privileged. In 1935, only 5 percent of guests were Taiwanese, while 74 percent were Japanese and 21 percent foreigners. It never turned a profit, but the government poured money into it to keep it afloat, not only as a status symbol to show visitors the progress of the colony, but also as a popular venue for official events, banquets, conferences, exhibitions and artistic performances. PURE LUXURY Matsugasaki, a Japanese noble/royal, spent the bulk of his formative years in Germany. He was made a baron in 1884 after his return to Japan, and first became acquainted with Taiwan after designing former

By Han Cheung

Taiwanese literature gets comic book treatment

Wu Shih-hung (吳識鴻) isn’t an avid reader of comics or Taiwanese literature. An animator by trade, Wu first became involved with Fisfisa Media (目宿媒體) through its acclaimed documentary series on Taiwanese writers, contributing his distinct ink brush-style artwork to the 2011 feature on Wang Wen-hsing (王文興), The Man behind the Book (尋找背海的人). “When I first joined the company, people were talking about how good the animations in The Man behind the Book were,” editor of Fisfisa’s comic division Lee Pei-chih (李佩芝) says. “Every new employee had to watch it.” When Fisfisa decided to launch its long-discussed comic venture featuring acclaimed poet Yang Mu’s (楊牧) coming-of-age essay collection Storms over Hills and Ocean as one of the first subjects, Wu was recommended despite having no experience with comics and having never read Yang’s work. “I only drew comics as a kid,” Wu says. “But animators also have to make storyboards, and I felt that the process should be quite similar to making comics. So I decided to give it a shot.” The resulting piece won the prestigious Belgium-based Raymond Leblanc Prize last month, which in addition to cash rewards provides the opportunity for Fisfisa to work with world-class Belgian comic editors to refine its final product. Both Chinese and French versions of the comic will be released next September to coincide with the popular Comic Strip Festival in Brussels. “It was a unanimous decision for all of us,” says Gauthier van Meerbeeck, awards judge and editorial director of Belgian comic publisher Le Lombard, which will be handling the comic’s French edition. “We’ll just be working on the editing, we have little to say about his artwork.” COMIC INTERPRETATIONS Lee says Fisfisa planned on producing both documentaries and comics since its inception in 2009, but due to various obstacles they didn’t start the comic side

By Han Cheung

Highways & Byways: The island severed from ‘mainland’ Taiwan

Yuguang Island (魚光島) is a rarity among islets. It wasn’t formed by volcanic action, by the natural accumulation of sediment or by humans dumping rocks. Like Kaohsiung’s Cijin (旗津), it was a peninsula until the authorities decided, for the sake of economic development, to sever it from “mainland” Taiwan. Back in the 17th century, at least 11 barrier islands made of mud and grit flushed out from inland Taiwan dotted the coast near Tainan. Likening them to humpbacked sea creatures, early Han settlers dubbed them kunshen (鯤鯓), and numbered them from north to south. Due to the huge amount of sediment washed downriver each typhoon season, Taiwan’s southwestern coastline gradually shifted outward during the 18th and 19th centuries, absorbing the kunshen. As islets they’re long gone, but as place names a few of them survive. Modern-day Anping District (安平) includes Erkunshen (二鯤鯓, “kunshen no. 2”) and Sankunshen (三鯤鯓, “kunshen no. 3” on Yuguang Island). Sikunshen (四鯤鯓, “kunshen no. 4”) is in Tainan’s South District (南區). For most of the 20th century, vessels accessing Anping Harbor (安平港) did so via a channel not far from the old town, at the northern tip of what’s now Yuguang Island. However, this entrance is too shallow for all but fishing boats and pleasure craft. In the 1970s, the government began developing a new commercial port at Anping to take some of the pressure off Kaohsiung Harbor. An entrance deep enough for 6,000-tonne cargo ships was dug between Sankunshen and Sikunshen. Tainan folks began to refer to what had been (and, on government documents, still is) Yuguang Borough (漁光里) as Yuguang Island. The cranes and docks of Anping Port (安平商港), which was upgraded to an international commercial port in 1997, aren’t of interest to or accessible by tourists. Yuguang Island, by contrast, attracts swarms of visitors, on weekends in

By Steven Crook

The Beatles are back with a happier ending

The Beatles are back this autumn with a new book, reworked final album and much-anticipated documentary that sheds new light on their fraught final days. Let It Be, released in 1970, has long been considered the legendary group’s breakup album. That is partly because it was the last album they released, and also because it was followed by a making-of documentary that showed deep tensions among the fab four. However it’s not that simple: Let It Be was actually recorded before 1969’s Abbey Road but sat on the shelf for a year because the band weren’t satisfied with it. In fact, Paul McCartney was never satisfied, having been left out of the mixing sessions by fabled producer Phil Spector. A new remix of the album by Giles Martin — son of The Beatles’ usual producer George Martin — aims to bring it closer to the band’s wishes. But speaking to NME this week, Giles Martin admitted that “Paul’s main issue with what happened is that he normally had a lot of input into the arrangements, and he didn’t with Spector.” ‘UPS AND DOWNS’ More important to the band’s history may be the new documentary The Beatles: Get Back coming next month from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. He went through the many hours of outtakes from the original film to show a much more upbeat side of the Let It Be sessions. Ringo Starr is a fan. “We had ups and downs, but even around all that — which you’ll see with the Peter Jackson edit — we were having fun, which [the original documentary] never showed, joy and fooling around and shouting at each other. It’s what four guys do,” Starr told Ultimate Classic Rock. Roger Stormo, editor of The Daily Beatle, said there were definite tensions, with George Harrison storming out for several

An idiosyncratic tribute for an idiosyncratic band

As a young man starting college, director Todd Haynes fell immediately for the Velvet Underground — the band which, musician Brian Eno famously said, didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went and started a band. It sounds like the storyline of a great fictional music film: Amidst the flower-power hippie era, a rock band emerges from the New York avant-garde art scene with the opposite ethos, dressed in black with an outsider vibe, singing about drugs and seedy sex. This group of unlikely personalities and unwieldy talent collaborates with Andy Warhol on edgy shows that meld music, visual art and performance — a unique mix that brings little commercial success. But the band will be credited as one of the most influential in rock history. The Velvet Underground, Haynes’ wonderfully idiosyncratic, brilliantly constructed rock doc — or rockumentary? — tells just that story. And it’s true. Unless you are, like Haynes, a diehard fan of the band that launched the career of Lou Reed and was managed by Warhol, you might find it surprising that some refer to it in the same breath as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But such is the regard in which the Velvet Underground is held by many, who point to its influence on punk and other styles — even though it lasted some six years before the mercurial Reed walked away in 1970, and never achieved real mainstream success. Whatever your level of familiarity, Haynes’ doc — the first for this accomplished director — is so stylistically compelling, it doesn’t really matter what you knew coming in. His aim is not merely to tell the story of the Velvet Underground, through interviews and an astonishingly vast collection of archival material (all shot before the early 70s), including generous snippets of avant-garde filmmaking. He seems, in

By Jocelyn Noveck

Artist Kacey Wong, attacking the red giant

Hong Kong dissident artist Kacey Wong (黃國才) bounces around his spacious studio like a kid in a playground. First to a towering cardboard robot, Attack of the Red Giant, which he pulled through the streets during Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protests in 2014. Then on to the face drawing box used to draw the portraits of protestors the same year. And finally landing on the llama on wheels, created in 2011 after the arrest of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未). “It says fuck you, but in a cute way,” Wong said, referring to his satirical artwork, born from the political unrest in the former British colony. Fearing imminent arrest back in his native Hong Kong, the 51-year-old artist fled to Taiwan over the summer. With the recent crackdown on political protests, including mass arrests, he has no plans to return to Hong Kong any time soon. It’s a self-imposed exile, Wong recently explained at his studio on the outskirts of downtown Taichung. Surrounded by fallow rice paddies, the studio houses his collection of sculptures and artwork dating back to the 1990s. An accordion, tucked away at home, is one of the more sentimental favorites. In 2018, Wong used it to play China’s national anthem while inside a red mobile prison. Sarcastically dubbed The Patriot, the performance piece would assuredly land Wong in an actual prison if performed today. Fellow artist, Edmond Lu (呂志明), a longtime friend of Wong’s, said he hoped Wong would continue to produce artwork that challenges the political status quo. “[Kacey] said he will never return to Hong Kong,” Lu said in a phone message. Lu is also a former Hong Kong resident who moved to Taiwan several years ago, in part, to pursue artistic freedom. Wong said he expects other artists and members of “the resistance” — as he calls

By John Evans

Battlefield: Legislative Yuan

There are no pig guts for me to throw in the legislative board game No. 1 Zhongshan S Road: The Scene of A Bill (中山南路一號 : 法案現場), so I trash the meeting room to delay the progress of a draft act I don’t like. Such is real life in the nation’s cutthroat lawmaking battlegrounds, and this sort of sabotage happens more often than one thinks — just two weeks ago, opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members smashed up the speaker’s podium to prevent Premier Su Chen-Chang (蘇貞昌) from delivering his policy report. My wiley opponent is ready, however, and has switched meeting rooms ahead of time. So I hit him with a sex scandal where he’s photographed leaving a motel with a female colleague, which limits his ability to vote on bills until the public eventually forgets about his transgressions. He can hold a press conference to clear his name, but he doesn’t have the right card. All this time, however, I’m working to block a bill that promotes gender equality, something that I would definitely not support in real life. But my party, or my character — who may or may not resemble a certain politician — does not gain much from supporting the issue. So I must shoot it down. This is the juicy side of the Legislative Yuan that the public is more familiar with, but these extreme or backhanded actions are just one portion of the arsenal lawmakers rely on to further their agenda. For much of the time, I’m making actions such as “amending a motion” or “requesting a public hearing” to keep the bill in second reading, or rallying public support and launching petitions. That’s the real meat of the process, and is what the game aims to educate its players about. ACCURATE SIMULATION After two years of fundraising

By Han Cheung

Book review: Fictionalizing Taiwan’s White Terror

Violence and oppression, we are told in the introduction to this collection of tales, are foundational to modern Taiwan, providing “a legacy that continues to influence its contemporary society.” It is interesting, then, that an anthology subtitled “Stories about the White Terror,” offers few instances of physical violence, a notable exception being a neighborhood dust-up involving a gossip nicknamed Big Mouth Yang. This incident, from Sung Tse-lai’s (宋澤萊) “Rice Diary,” is the first snapshot in a montage of quotidian happenings in the village of Daniunan (打牛湳), Yunlin County. The story forms part of a series focusing on life in this village in the 50s and 60s. At first glance, the squabble is an insignificant personal grievance. Yet, this land rights wrangle points to something deeper. Acknowledging that he could simply divide the disputed property, Big Mouth’s assailant Ban-hok nonetheless concludes that “in this downturn, with so much craziness and thievery all around — well maybe he was thief, too.” The implication is clear: In an era where legal and extrajudicial state expropriation underpins social transitions, anything is fair game. Lurking in the wings, the state is a nebulous presence, poorly understood by villagers who are increasingly anxious over a potentially disastrous harvest. At one point, a flashy county bigwig shows up spewing vacuous Qin Dynasty parables at the uncomprehending peasants, but there is no explicit statement of government culpability in Daniunan’s impending ruin. Instead, there are hints at institutional forces against which struggle is futile. These are juxtaposed against appeals for intervention from the spirit world, with the villagers concluding that an outwardly successful former resident is the incarnation of a divinity, returned to answer their prayers. But this apotheosis is exposed as sham, the prodigal son Lim Baiyi proving a false idol, transplanted from the shrine of industrial capital

By James Baron