TAIPEI, Taiwan — It took Faith Hong about a half-hour to blast through a century of history and a lifetime of propaganda.

That is her mission as a volunteer at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum, where she guided her visitors from mainland China through the somber displays, describing the events that set off the killing in 1947 of as many as 28,000 people.

The perpetrators? Troops dispatched to the island by the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, the man whose face is stamped on Taiwan’s coins and whose political party, the Kuomintang, still governs Taiwan. Lest that fact be lost on any visitor, large copies of the written orders he issued are prominently on display.

“They were very evil,” Ms. Hong said of the Nationalist troops.

When it comes to facing history, East Asia has issues. In China, the bloody crackdown on the student-led movement that occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the spring of 1989 is a forbidden topic, the subject of state-sponsored amnesia. Any mention of it on China’s Internet is quickly deleted.