Taiwan’s Object Impermanence

Yesterday, the north of the country shook as a series of earthquakes hit fault-lines just east of Yilan bay. Since Taipei is a city built on a basin of an ancient lake and, in contrast to Taichung, relatively soft soil (which is why so many MRT lines can be built underground so quickly), the five point five magnitude quakes were felt with a local intensity of three on the seismic scale. At my office later in the day this conversation occurred:

Co-worker: Did you feel those earthquakes! They were so big and very scary! Me: I wouldn’t go that far (還好啦). Co-worker: No, it’s true they were really big! Me: Really though? The local intensity was three. In Yilan it was six. Now that’s scary. Co-worker: It felt so big and scary though. Me: Compared to 9-21 though it was nothing right? Co-worker: Oh yeah, now you mention it I guess so. 9-21 was really scary. Me:

Now, aside from perhaps illustrating a Taiwanese linguistic penchant for using the same five adjectives to describe their reactions to everything (恐怖, 吵, 方便, 慢, 忙), the conversation raised an interesting question: to what extent do Taiwanese use historical comparative yardsticks when evaluating their experience of something in the present? If they use these comparative yardsticks, how far into the past do they go? Do Taiwanese mostly ‘live in the now’ and if so why? Has a kind of object impermanence become a feature of contemporary (post 1945) Taiwanese culture?

Object impermanence is the perception that objects do not continue to exist when they cannot be immediately observed or sensed in any way. This is a phenomena that is typically found in babies and animals but it can also be seen in some non neuro-typical adults with diagnosed psychological conditions.

The idea of whether Taiwanese culture has developed a form of object impermanence came to me this week after a short discussion with a Taiwanese friend. We were talking about generation gaps and she explained that she regrets not having had the opportunity to learn more Hoklo as a child because her grandmother speaks Hoklo as a first language and Japanese as a second and not a lot of Mandarin. My friend on the other hand can mostly only speak Mandarin, and this has meant an inter-generational communication barrier. Such a barrier is likely to severely restrict the transmission of culture, knowledge, and experience between generations. She then asked me what I thought were the biggest changes I’d seen in Taiwan since I arrived some sixteen years ago. I replied that for me it was transport and communications - the physical manifestations of it like the HSR, new motorways, and internet access and speed. The physical development and transformation of Taiwan has been so fast however that it threatens to sever the ability of succeeding generations to relate to each other.

I gave an example. Where once a grandmother sat and played as a child under a huge tree that was a landmark feature of her home town, that tree is now probably gone, and has since been replaced with a car park or a road, or an apartment complex, or a factory. Not only has the tree gone, what has also been destroyed is the ability of the grandmother to point it out to her children and grandchildren as part of the story telling of her experience and the history of their shared town. Succeeding generations cannot share that same feature and experience it in a similar way - development has driven a permanent gap of experience between as little as two generations. Their experiences of what it means to be Taiwanese, and to grow up in that town are utterly different. Without an experiential legacy to pass onto later generations, the elderly are both alienated from the environment that they used to know and from their own extended family. Rapid development then might be source of alleged object impermanence as a cultural phenomenon.

Colonisation and assimilation via education are others. When Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) unilaterally appropriated Taiwan in 1945, and then fled here to set up the Republic of China in exile, he and the KMT both knew that in order to make a nation, you needed to physically build it into the environment, the language, and law. If there’s one thing that conservatives and traditionalists know very well it’s that traditions (a form of cultural object permanence which plays a critical role in reproducing shared identity and social status and stratification) are not best maintained by accident of culture, they are mandated and systematically reproduced. Hence, much like the Japanese before them, the KMT set about making sure that the education system produced a generation of children who identified with the ROC and The Party. It mandated that Mandarin, not Hoklo or Hakka or Aboriginal languages, be the sole lingua franca and imposed punishments for using other languages. The first inter-generational division was created - alienating largely Japanese and Hoklo speaking elders from their Mandarin speaking children.

Secondly, the KMT literally plastered Taiwan with statues and pictures of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙). This act of nationwide hagiography was intended as a physical stamp of national Chinese identity and the State on the built environment, from parks to schools to mountaintops. The removal of many of these statues post 2000 then induced an anguished wailing from loyalists who knew all too well what it meant - decolonisation of Taiwan from the KMT Party-State would have the same impact on its attempts to maintain Taiwan as a solely Chinese entity, in the same way as its own reforms had sought to erase Japan’s cultural and physical impact on Taiwanese and their environment. The renaming of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall during the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) administration as an act of transitional justice was reversed days after the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) became President in 2008. In turn the Ma administration quickly became synonymous with efforts to ignore, resist, impede, and reverse any attempts to change the physical and symbolic landscape of Taiwan in ways which sought to decolonise a Taiwanese history the KMT had spent fifty years shaping in its own image, largely by destroying and building over Japanese era edifices which might contradict its narrative on Taiwan’s Chinese identity.

The impact of the KMT’s thirty eight years of martial law and murderous White Terror, along with its Kōminka style language, cultural, and built environment policies, ended up both suppressing and destroying physical and cultural linkages between past and present generations. This process so politicised, distorted, and crudely manipulated the historical record as to make history itself something that many Taiwanese became either afraid of, or uncomfortable discussing. Censorship also produced a largely historically ignorant generation. Many Taiwanese for example have no idea that the US, now assumed to be an ally, extensively bombed Taiwan during WWII. Ask random Taiwanese today between the ages of forty and fifty-five about a major milestone in Taiwanese history such as the Meilidao Incident (美麗島事件) or the persecution and death of Cheng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) and you may get blank stares or a sudden cooling of a previously cordial conversation. Though it has been almost thirty years (a generation) since the end of martial law, the psychological impacts of it are still palpable. Many Taiwanese don’t feel comfortable talking about the history of Taiwan because what to the outsider might appear as a simple statement of fact is for them an act of publicly airing a political opinion - a unnecessary risk which could have had, in the recent past, dire consequences not only for yourself but also your family. Today, loose remarks can still hurt careers. The battle over the Ma administration’s clumsy attempts to ideologically shape the history curriculum reflects how history in Taiwan is still a passionately contested political question. For many Taiwanese, especially those born before 1990, looking back is either potentially confrontational or painful. Better to just concern yourself with the present. One exception to this rule concerns the economy. Taiwanese will readily make comparisons between the economic strength and growth of their economy today with that of the nation in its heyday as one of the four ‘Asian Tigers’ - the 1970s and 1980s. That the entire basis and structure of both the Taiwanese and the global economy has shifted profoundly is a inconvenient truth that rudely imposes cognitive dissonance on otherwise perfectly decent sojourns into wistful nostalgia. Indeed President Ma himself is on record has having publicly stated his sadness at the passing of that ‘golden age’.

The rapid development of Taiwan into a full modernised economy & democratic nation partly explains how a cultural and physical object impermanence came to take root in Taiwan. That impermanence though has its ramifications. Aside from disconnecting Taiwanese from earlier generations by removing shared physical landmarks and experiential memories which can be passed on down to later generations, or inducing and encouraging an inability to make longitudinal comparative evaluations, it has worrying political implications. A generation that doesn’t want or can’t look back is more likely to end up repeating the errors of the past when confronted with similar challenges. On a simple level, if a population is collectively unable or unwilling to remember back even as far as four years ago it makes it very easy for a politician to get re-elected regardless of how many promises they have broken or failed to achieve. On a deeper level if Taiwanese are unaware of the crimes of a past Party-State they might not so easily be able to resist the emergence of another, or they might fall for disingenuous claims that a democratic administration is ruling by fiat. Transitional justice is not about political revenge but a process of healing in which a more nuanced and honest historical accounting is facilitated so that the nation can heal at the psychological and cultural level. Decolonisation is not about destroying the past but recognising and repurposing symbols that were installed to reproduce and maintain colonial power.

The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is a good example here. Built only in 1980 solely to venerate Chiang, for as long as it is named as such, and continues to feature a huge bronze statue of Chiang protected and served daily by an honour guard, it continues to send a clear message to Taiwanese that the act of criticising Chiang’s rule and impact on Taiwan is still essentially an act of anti-establishmentarianism, an unpatriotic slur against a symbol of the State and by extension, the nation. To keep Chiang there, then, is not only an insult to all those Taiwanese who suffered under his brutal cargo cult but also sends a State-sanctioned message that the Taiwanese history which concerns him is, if not to be celebrated, then respectfully papered over. That’s exactly the kind of controversial statement which drives Taiwanese away from thinking about or discussing the past, and in turn provides rationales to practice cultural object impermanence. Better to just ignore and forget about it and think about the Now. It might explain why most historical sites in Taiwan are better known for the local food specialities than for their histories.

There are signs however, that this state of affairs may be changing. The recent renovation of the Hayashi Department Store in Tainan serves as a more visible example that some Taiwanese are starting to see the commercial benefits (warning: link contains description of Tainan as a ‘Chinese city’ LOL) to resurrecting and respectfully restoring elements of the past physical environment that were deliberately neglected and abandoned. Sadly so much of Taiwan’s physical history has been destroyed that renovations are not possible and kitsch reproductions absent physical signs and links to the past are the best that can be achieved. And although attempts are being made to preserve historical sites, at the same time, careless destruction of historical heritage is still ongoing, as exemplified in the disgraceful and recent destruction of Japanese-era pottery mills and towers in Miaoli (again by a KMT led local government).

But it is not enough to just preserve sites of historical value if they only serve as context-less aesthetic curiosities encasing contemporary commercial ventures. It is important that sites are not just toned-down living museums or static displays with a few bland foot-notes that elide the wider symbolic and physical importance of them to local communities. It is possible to renovate and restore heritage sites for contemporary usage. One promising example of this is the old street in Sanxia. One place dying out for this treatment is Xihu whose high street is filled with run-down Japanese-era architecture. Restoring these buildings is not an act of celebrating the Japanese colonialism of the past but rather benefiting from a diversity of aesthetics that improves the quality of life for the community in the present, whilst providing physical fixtures of memory that can bridge the gap between resident generations. That would be an example of object permanence utilising history to bring people together and remind communities that there are wider longer term cultural and economic benefits to a careful urban development which respects and builds on, not destroys, the past.