Ghost Month (45 page)

The Hanyu Pinyin system, which has been used in China since the 1950s and in Taiwan, officially, since 2009, would render the Wade-Giles romanization “Chiang Kai-shek” as “Jiang Jieshi.” Of course, not everybody has transitioned to Hanyu Pinyin. In fact, there are at least three other romanization systems that have been in concurrent use, including another type of pinyin. If you can’t read Chinese characters, don’t rent a car in Taipei, because the roads you’re looking for on your map likely won’t match up with the street name. To add one more layer of confusion, romanized street names (and other words) are often incorrectly spelled. In a country where standards and identity are in a state of flux, rendering one’s name in pinyin in Taiwan could be a political statement. Song Kuilan in this book renders her name in Hanyu Pinyin. As a mainlander who believes that Taiwan is a part of China, she happily uses the Chinese system. Chen Jing-nan, still using Wade-Giles, likes to keep things fuzzier. Adding the “Ah-” prefix to the second character of the given name—for example in rendering “Chen Shui-bian” as Ah-bian—is a colloquial term of endearment. Nancy would call Jing-nan “Ah-nan,” but they’re not cutesy enough a couple to use diminutives.

Concurrently a tropical island, an independent country, a remnant of the Republic of China as founded in 1912, and a province of
the People’s Republic of China. The population stands at about 23.3 million as of July 2013, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. As a Cold War ally, it is the smallest country, in terms of area, ever to have had a one-on-one mutual defense treaty with the United States. Taiwan sits on the Tropic of Cancer, just over 100 miles east of the Chinese shoreline. Most of the population lives in cities on the plains of the western half, while the scenic eastern half is mountainous, like a bumpy green rind. Over the centuries, Taiwan has been a paradise to headhunting native tribes and a haven for Japanese and Chinese pirates. Flags from the Netherlands, Spain, France, Japan and China have all been planted on its soil. Most importantly, though, Taiwan offers the best and broadest range of foods around. Its night markets are the buffets of East Asia.

Much has been written about the events of February 28, 1947, and the days after. In short,
benshengren
resentment against mainlanders boiled over, and mass rioting and killing erupted all over the island. Taiwanese students and veterans trained by the Japanese Imperial Army murdered
waishengren
, sometimes after subjecting their victims to tests to see if they could speak Taiwanese or Japanese and so prove they weren’t mainlanders. The Kuomintang, which had taken possession of Taiwan after Japan’s surrender in 1945, called in reinforcements from China, and through late March went on a retaliatory campaign as martial law was declared. It wasn’t an even battle. Far more
benshengren
were killed during the weeks-long conflict and far more Taiwanese leaders eliminated during the ensuing house-cleaning operation than
waishengren
killed in the original unrest. In
China’s Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s-1990s
, Joshua Fan notes that more
benshengren
died in the first five years of the KMT’s rule of Taiwan than in the entire fifty years that Japan ruled over the island. The incident itself was officially banned from history books and the press until martial law was lifted in 1987. In 1992 Taiwan’s government estimated that the number of dead totaled between eighteen thousand and twenty-eight thousand. Lee Teng-hui, then
president of Taiwan, apologized for the incident officially in February 1995, but it wasn’t appreciated;
benshengren
felt the apology didn’t go far enough, while mainlanders felt no apology was necessary for reining in an island in chaos. The 228 Incident remains a source of enmity between
benshengren
and mainlanders.

The terms
waishengren
and “mainlander” refer to those Chinese from all provinces who fled to Taiwan near the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. The CIA’s World Factbook estimates the population of mainlanders in Taiwan at 14 percent as of 2013. However, these literally “outside province people” are overrepresented at the most powerful levels of government owing to the long period of martial law that favored mainlanders over
benshengren
. The stereotype is that
waishengren
families were all wealthy, and that all of them claimed to have been on the last boat that made it over. In reality, most of those army families and refugees had lost everything on the mainland. Once in Taiwan, non-officers and civilians were housed in hastily built
juancuns
—military villages full of houses with concrete walls and floors; they were meant to be temporary, but some are occupied to this day by old men who never found a permanent home. Those not
lucky enough to get housing in a
juancun
improvised. Huaguang Community, which was originally built by the Japanese as a dorm for people working at the local jail and then unofficially occupied by
waishengren
, managed to hang on until it was demolished in 2013. In the film
A Brighter Summer Day
by Edward Yang, who was born in Shanghai and grew up in a
juancun
, the mother of a
waishengren
family scoffs with indignity that barely a decade after they fought the Japanese in China, they have to live in a colonial-era Japanese house in Taipei. How many mainlanders would have wanted to trade places with them to live in such nice houses, which even
benshengren
were largely excluded from! Note that the “mainlander” or
waishengren
identity is distinctly different from that of contemporary immigrants to Taiwan from China, many of whom come over as spouses.