This month’s demonstration by Taiwanese Aborigines outside the Presidential Office demanding “justice to be returned,” together with President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) apology early this month for historic wrongs, and her unannounced visit to the protesters a few days later, in addition to the recent condemnation by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the continued storing of nuclear waste on Orchid Island (also known as Lanyu), make the re-appearance of Barry Martinson’s Song of Orchid Island a very timely event.
Attitudes to human beings living traditional, rather than modern, life-styles have varied greatly over the last 100 years. Theories of degeneration and master races have vied with what remained of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the Noble Savage to produce a whole range of view-points. Are such people to be helped to join the modern world, dismissed as backward and doomed to cultural extinction or prized as curators of unique customs — not to mention languages — whose societies must be preserved at all costs?
US-born Barry Martinson is a Catholic priest still living in Taiwan who was sent to Orchid Island as a teacher at the age of 26. This was in 1971, and his Song of Orchid Island subsequently became something of a classic, first in Chinese translation, then in its original English. It’s now been re-issued by Camphor Press, the local publisher specializing in Taiwanese topics, as an e-book. There’s little doubt that Martinson’s attitudes must be rated as preservationist in the extreme.
It so happened that, quite by chance, I read this book alongside DH Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, published in 1926. The contrast was startling. Lawrence’s novel is crammed with opinions of the most outrageous kind, assertions about dark-skinned and light-skinned races, with the whites seen as effete and the Mexicans as doomed, plus endless references to the sullen oppressiveness of the country in the 1920s and the impossibility of European values flourishing there. Martinson’s attitudes couldn’t be more different. To begin with they are lacking in complexity or irony of any kind. What does transpire is a belief in the islanders’ essential happiness and “freedom,” despite what you’d think were some very restricting social conditions.
At one point a crucial exchange occurs between Martinson and a Taiwanese teacher who says “Culture? These people have no culture. Look at what they eat. Sweet potatoes and taro. No vegetables. They won’t use chopsticks … Sometimes the children are so dirty I can hardly stand it … Maybe you would like to preserve this island as a reserve for anthropologists, like the Japanese did … And then there are people like you who say everything is perfect here [and] Orchid Island is a paradise and the people are saints.” Tourists from Taiwan, who started going to the island towards the end of Martinson’s residence following the opening of a hotel, almost all appear to echo this skeptical reaction.
When the author goes to Taiwan’s central mountains to work planting saplings alongside his islander friends, Taiwanese officials are dumbfounded to see a foreigner attempt such work. At this point I had the feeling that this was probably how the book’s original publishers (it was first published in Chinese, remember) viewed the text as a whole. It was highly readable for them because here was an American, who could presumably enjoy whatever luxuries he wanted, going to live on the least developed of Taiwan’s off-shore islands and enduring conditions that few urban Taiwanese would ever contemplate being subjected to.
The book describes the Tao (or Yami) people as they were 45 years ago. Martinson wrote the book on returning to Taiwan, but left it in a drawer until he read a book by the Taiwanese author San Mao (三毛), who he’d met on the island. She ended up translating it into Chinese, and this was the version that was published in 1982.
Martinson returned to Lanyu several times, and on one visit, almost 20 years after he’d lived there, he found huge changes. People he’d known as grubby school-children were returning home for the Lunar New Year wearing fashionable modern clothes and polished shoes, and two of them had even published books about Yami culture. Tourism had brought a measure of prosperity to the island, but on the other hand nuclear waste from Taiwan had started to be stored there, with the islanders organizing demonstrations in protest. On one occasion, they blocked the harbor with Yami boats to stop a ship bringing new barrels of waste from landing.
In a recent radio interview Martinson said that, for foreigners, love comes first, and then service. Once you love the people you should ask them what they need, not present them with what you think they ought to have. Love and service are, of course, key Christian tenets, and Martinson comes out of this book as the kindest person on God’s green earth, though his innocence sometimes appears to exceed even that of the islanders.
In a sense the preservation of traditional conditions inevitably goes hand-in-hand with the occurrence of preventable tragedies. Martinson writes that at one point during his sojourn no boat from Taiwan had arrived for a month, and the plane from Taitung was out of service. That there were deaths that could have been prevented, as there were, seems inevitable. But when tourism finally brings a degree of unexpected prosperity, features of the old life-style begin to disappear. There doesn’t seem any way out of this dilemma.
If this book is indeed a classic it’s not because it’s full of fine writing or offers an especially sophisticated viewpoint (it’s no Tristes Tropiques), but because it preserves details of Lanyu life from an era when no one else was taking the trouble to record it. It’s full of the author’s photos, but then the whole book is a picture of a way of life that was in the process of passing, as indeed are all ways of life all the time, whether in New York City or on Orchid Island.
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