Keeping moments of beauty from the past alive in the nation’s collective memory is possible, as long as Taiwanese are willing to examine and preserve their history, said Wang Tzu-shuo (王子碩), a self-avowed technology geek and history buff.
Wang, 45, is a game developer with two games under his belt and the owner of GJ Taiwan Books, a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Tainan’s Central West District (中西) that specializes in books of serious academic or reference value on Taiwanese history, culture and everyday life.
At their heart, his many and varied projects are “a rejection of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) fantasy of a greater China,” Wang said.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
“The more you know, the more you see the enormity and irreversibility of the erosion to our collective historical memory,” he said. “I am desperately trying to find the bits and pieces of our history that are forgotten.”
Recently, he began a venture to colorize old black-and-white photographs, some of which have gone viral on social media.
Appropriately, his interest in Taiwanese history began with an old black-and-white picture that he saw as a schoolboy, which showed a fellow student at Tainan First Senior High School strolling down the streets of colonial-era Tainan, Wang said.
The image raised challenging questions that made him re-evaluate what he thought he knew about the past and its relationship to the present, he said.
The picture showed the Hayashi Department Store as a thing of “unbelievable beauty,” not the then-unrestored and ugly structure he knew as a boy, Wang said.
Moreover, the image showed a crowd of Tainan residents, who appeared genteel and sharply dressed, while the textbooks he read asserted that under Japanese rule, “Taiwanese ate yam vines and bark because they were poor,” he said.
The experience “totally changed my preconceived notions about Tainan being an ugly, messy city,” he said.
Later in life, as his aptitude for coding grew, he continued to pursue reading and research as a hobby, he said.
“During that time, I believed that online games would be the best way to popularize history-consciousness for a large audience,” he said.
A decade ago, Wang’s studio created Taiwan’s first Web-based graphics engine, which it leveraged to develop two massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), Brave Hearts of Liu Dui (六堆鑼鼓聲) and The Promise of May Snows (五月雪的約定).
Both games were inspired by real events surrounding the life of Lin Shuang-wen (林爽文), a 19th-century Taiwanese Hakka who led a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty, Wang said.
The games incorporated Taiwan’s topography into the map, so players grinding for levels would assimilate detailed knowledge not taught at schools, while voice acting was partly performed in the Hakka language, he said.
Since the game studio took on many projects with a public-education agenda, revenue often fell short of covering the costs of server maintenance and updates, hiring personnel for special projects and other expenditures, he said.
Taking contracts helped, but filling the revenue gap required a long-term solution, which led to his founding of GJ Taiwan Books five years ago, which he believed would be a win-win for the studio and the book business, he said.
At the outset, he knew that professional managerial skills make or break a bookstore, and he could not rely on emotional appeals to Taiwanese localism, he said.
The approach he took was to offer quality books written for a specific audience at prices to compete with online bookstores, or a variation of the Blue Ocean Strategy in business management, Wang said, adding: “Bookshops exist in the free market and regular market rules apply.”
For quality, GJ Taiwan promotes good books that failed commercially, Wang said, citing Fucheng Jinxi (府城今昔) as one title that went from forgotten to certified best-seller.
GJ Taiwan merchandise is managed to project a unique Taiwanese personality, he said.
The bookshop’s red envelopes bear greetings that wish the recipient a long life and good fortune “as lasting as Yushan (玉山)” or “as vast as Sun Moon Lake (日月潭),” substituting the cliched “Southern Mountains” and “Eastern Seas” of China that are irrelevant to Taiwan, he said.
The model seems to be working. Bucking the trend among brick-and-mortar bookstores, GJ Taiwan is turning a profit and expanding, having opened a second venue in Taipei’s Liuzhangli (六張犁) last year, Wang said.
Also last year, Wang began the project of bringing color to historical photographs, initially to honor the request of a stubborn friend, whose concept involved graphics technology, he said.
“My position was that the loss of authenticity is not reversible, because there is no metadata for films and no software has the computing power to simulate those properties,” he said.
Undeterred, the friend demanded that he put in colors using image editing software, as he did not feel confident filling in the colors for anything other than the sky or ground, Wang said.
The breakthrough came when he simply dispensed with technology and had the images colored by hand, Wang said, adding that the first was an image of Taipei’s Meiji Bridge, which was demolished by then-Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
“I posted the colorized picture on Facebook and the shares went through the roof,” Wang said. “I knew then that I had found the big guns I needed to promote Taiwanese culture and history.”
Skepticism about colorization of old photographs is unfounded, he said.
“For people trying to promote the memory of Taiwan, colorizing pictures is a great medium short of putting people in a time machine to see the beauty of old sights that are no longer here.”
The technical aspect of colorizing black-and-white images is simple in comparison to the research that goes into ensuring historical authenticity, he said.
“There are plenty of experts for issues like the color of buildings and plants, and reconstructing lighting angles, but the real hard parts are things like the color and pattern of the clothes people are wearing,” he said.
“You can still find experts for kimonos, but what should be done with the Western dresses that people wore during the Japanese colonial period? ... That turned out to be something the experts do not agree on,” he said.
“That puzzle, a fracture line in Taiwan’s cultural memory, had to be teased out and elderly people who lived through the colonial period were interviewed for our speculative reconstruction on the color of dresses,” he said.
The colorization project is an effort to reconstruct the everyday life of historical Taiwanese, reconnect the present with the past and to save memories that would otherwise be consigned to oblivion, he said.
When he shows his anthology of colorized photographs to elderly people, the most common response is excitement at seeing the colors of scenes from their youth, followed by tearful recollections of how their parents had taken them to the streets shown in the book, he said.
As the project adds more images to its collection, a “time machine” section would be opened at the bookstore for people to compare present locations with what they looked like in the past, he said.
Japanese movie Your Name has resonated with him, because its melancholic message about the inevitability of losing the collective memory that comprises our personhood is relevant to his work, he said.
“As long as we put in the effort, we can keep beautiful parts of our memories alive,” Wang said.
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