Ghost Month

  MANDARIN:

  A Chinese dialect that was made the official language of Taiwan after the island passed to Kuomintang control at the end of World War II. From 1895 to 1945, the period that Taiwan was a part of the Empire of Japan, Japanese was the official language. Notably, under the Japanese and the KMT, the Taiwanese language, which benshengren spoke at home, was outlawed. The abrupt change in the official language caused problems for the islanders. My uncle told me that when he was a schoolchild, his supposed Mandarin instructor was learning the language at the same time as the class, and that they all read the textbook together and at the same pace. Chiang Kais-hek himself spoke Mandarin secondarily and was most comfortable with his native Ningbo dialect. There are major differences between Mandarin and Taiwanese, which are mutually unintelligible when spoken. Mandarin requires the speaker to sing words in four tones; Taiwanese, which is descended from the Hokkien dialect spoken in China’s Fujian province, requires seven tones. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates that as much as 15 percent of Hokkien cannot be rendered accurately with Chinese characters, and on top of that, Taiwanese includes borrowed and absorbed words from Austronesian indigenous languages, Dutch, Japanese and English.

  MAZU:

  Like many gods and goddesses worshipped by Taiwanese and Chinese, Mazu represents a mortal person deified for their perceived good works. Lin Moniang was a young woman who lived on an island off the Chinese coastal province of Fujian a thousand years ago. Her father and brothers were fishermen, and she would aid them in coming home from storms by both mortal means—lanterns—and supernatural means—plucking them from the sea and bringing them to safety while in a dream state. Supposedly she never died, having ascended to the heavens from the oceans while still in her twenties. The legend led to her titles as Goddess of the Sea and Empress of Heaven. As such, she has given safe passage to many Chinese traveling to Taiwan over the centuries. Grateful benshengren built temples to her after establishing themselves in Taiwan. The Tourist Bureau of Taiwan notes that Mazu, literally “maternal ancestor,” is Taiwan’s most popular deity. She is easily recognizable by her black skin and the beaded veil that hangs from her headdress. Taiwan’s Mazu islands are named after the goddess. Mazu sits at the forefront of the Taoist pantheon.

  RELATIONS WITH JAPAN:

  Taiwanese have much affection for Japan and Japanese culture, and Taiwan is Japan’s closest neighbor in terms of being cozy with one another. They do not have official relations, mind you, as China and Japan have formal diplomatic ties, and having formal ties with China means you can’t have them with Taiwan. However, according to Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, only 5 percent of Japanese surveyed in 2013 viewed China favorably. That’s not surprising, considering a dispute between the two over some islands in addition to some historical matters. Taiwan also claims ownership of the islands, known as the Tiaoyutai to Taiwanese, but it reached a fishing agreement with Japan that tables the ownership issue for now. Another Japanese island dispute, with South Korea, has soured relations with that country, and South Korea’s insane northern neighbor frequently threatens to turn Japan into “a nuclear sea of fire.” And what of Russia? Another islands dispute. So why was Taiwan the only country Japan was able to reach a pact with? Moreover, how can a former colony have warm ties with its former master? Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, Qing Dynasty China ceded Taiwan and other properties to Japan. Taiwan at the time was largely undeveloped, and the people of Chinese descent on the island had been treated as second-class citizens by Qing officials. The Japanese built the infrastructure that helped support Taiwan’s economic surge in the 1960s and 1970s, long after Japanese rule ended. Even more importantly, the Japanese introduced Taiwan to baseball, and the legacy of that has been world-champion Taiwanese Little League teams and the proliferation of Taiwanese players in Major League Baseball. Unlike Japan’s brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula, which seemed to be punitive in nature, its administration of Taiwan was motivated by a need to show Western powers that it could be a benevolent colonial power. Japan built up Taiwan as a showpiece colony and vacation destination for Westerners. Make no mistake, Japan brutally cracked down on insurrections and marginalized dissent. Many Taiwanese who lived through the colonization, however, say that what happened after was worse. These days, Taiwanese and Japanese people rate each other highest in polls that measure sentiment for neighboring countries, and Japan is Taiwan’s top source of imports—even higher than China. Visiting Japanese politicians throw out baseballs at Taiwanese games. The Taiwanese airline EVA Airways flies planes decked out with Hello Kitty characters. Japanese words (ichiban, obasan) live on in common Taiwanese usage, and Japanese underworld culture (tattooing, extorting companies at their shareholder meetings, disdain for guns) remains alive among Taiwan’s criminal groups. (For more on that, read Heijin: Organized Crime, Business, and Politics in Taiwan by Ko-lin Chin, which will leave you slack-jawed.) If this relationship still seems strange, consider the mutual affection that exists between America and its old colonial master, despite past enmity.

  ROMANIZATION:

  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.

  TAIWAN:

  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.

  228 INCIDENT:

  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 t
han 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.

  WAISHENGREN:

  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.