Page 6 of Taipei Story

This was catchier in Chinese.

THERE WAS A LOCAL ELECTION COMING UP. WE SAW CAMPAIGN posters all over the city, inspiring headshots and big block slogans, but we couldn’t make out which parties were more democratic, or which were for or against independence, or even whether pro-independence was the politically correct opinion to have. For a long time I had been fuzzy on the geopolitical status of Taiwan, in large part because none of my teachers had ever given me a clear explanation. Everyone spoke about it in such loaded euphemisms. They always asked sideways questions to determine my affiliations: Was I born on the mainland? Where on the mainland? Did I have family in Hong Kong? Were any of my family in the Party? Then shouldn’t I know how I felt about Taiwan?

But after a semester of Introduction to Chinese History I had finally gotten a grasp on things, and these were the essential facts one needed to know about Taiwan, as I understood them:

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War. This was good or bad depending on whether you were a Communist.

The Nationalist Party, who were not the Communists, then promptly fled to Taipei, which they declared the temporary capital of China. This was good or bad depending on whether you were a waishengren or a benshengren. Simply put, there were many people already living in Taiwan—some ethnically Chinese, some not—who felt they had been getting along fine before the Nationalists took over.

2a. This too was contested history, given that before the Nationalists arrived, the island was under Japanese colonial rule. But that was a separate conversation.

Once in Taiwan, the Nationalists pledged that they would regroup and take back the mainland, but they never did. The Americans, their closest allies, did not want to commit resources to a sustained civil war in China. They were too busy with all the other wars going on during the Cold War.

Stuck on the island, the Nationalists established a repressive regime of martial rule. This was bad for everyone.

During the Cold War, China persecuted suspected capitalists and Taiwan persecuted suspected communists. This was bad for everyone who found themselves on the wrong side of the strait. It was also bad for everyone else, who got caught in the crossfire no matter what they did.

As the Cold War went on, mainland China broke from Russia, opened up to the rest of the world, and convinced the UN to let them replace Taiwan in the General Assembly. This was good for mainland China, and bad for Taiwan.

Martial rule was lifted in 1987, and Taiwan transitioned to a democracy. This was good for everyone.

And this was the state of affairs today. China counted Taiwan as part of its territory, but Taiwan had its own government and held its own elections. America had made security promises on Taiwan’s behalf. All this was good or bad depending on how you felt about American imperialism, Chinese authoritarianism, and Taiwanese self-determination. From one perspective, Taiwan was the last bulwark of democracy against China, an island that represented what a free China could have been, to be protected at all costs. From another, Taiwan was a stronghold of imperialist sympathizers, held hostage by the empire, longing to be rightfully returned to the motherland.

But I had learned that things were not so simple. Taiwan was not that democratic, and China was not that communist. In fact, you couldn’t even be a proper Communist in China anymore. We had learned this from Rayer, our language teaching assistant at Yale last spring. Rayer was an organizer for the graduate students’ union. She had skipped a third of our sections that semester because the union was on strike, but we still liked her, because she thought grades were neoliberal propaganda—she told us at the start of the semester that we were all getting A’s. Rayer said that the Party had forgotten its promises to the laboring class, and labor organizers were being jailed and harassed, and some of them had in fact fled to Taiwan, which had paradoxically become a safe haven for the true leftists. You couldn’t divide the world into ideological categories, Rayer said. Communist and capitalist nations were the same exploitative hellholes; there was no difference. Halfway through the semester, she told us someone had filed an anonymous complaint that “TAs should be less political,” and then our sections weren’t so interesting anymore.

“HOLY SHIT,” SAID ANNA.

“What?”

“Your legs.”

All morning I had been mindlessly scratching an itch on the back of my leg. I twisted around, looked down, and gave a little scream. At least a dozen quarter-size red welts were scattered across my legs, from the ankles up to the thighs. Anna lifted her skirt. They’d gotten her too—there were lumps all over her butt cheeks. She moaned.

“Is this an allergic reaction?” I asked. “Are we going to die?”

We consulted the internet. Anna took out a gel pen and drew some circles around the bigger bites. Within a few hours, the welts were double the size of the circles. That scared us—but we weren’t dizzy or having trouble breathing, so we decided not to visit the emergency room.

The mosquitoes here had to be a different species, their venom chemically different. Mosquito bites never bothered me this much in the States. But these bites hurt like a motherfucker, and the itching never stopped. You couldn’t even call it itching. It was a sharp, bone-deep pain. When I closed my eyes, I could see in my mind’s eye a dozen hot knives digging into my flesh.

Why had the mosquitoes targeted us? Why did all the locals have such smooth, unblemished skin? Was it our burger-fed American blood?

We hurried to Watsons, the drugstore. We scoured the shelves looking for spray canisters with insect labels but couldn’t find any. We went up to an employee. Neither of us knew the term for mosquito repellent, so Anna pointed at our legs. “We have a problem to resolve,” she said. “Ah,” said the employee, and led us to the front of the store, where bright orange cans of Off! were stacked up in a window display. They were on sale for the summer: three canisters for the price of two. We bought six.

BELINDA DISCOVERED THAT THE TAIPEI FILM FESTIVAL WAS STILL running that weekend and suggested we go to a screening. We all agreed. Film festivals seemed enriching, precisely the kind of thing you could get only in an immersive foreign language environment. But there were no films in Mandarin on Sunday’s program. Sunday seemed mainly dedicated to the French New Wave, with some German surrealism in between. All the Chinese films on the schedule were made in Hong Kong, which meant they were in Cantonese, which none of us could speak.

We decided on a film called Lost (迷), the debut of the Hong Kong director Fan Ho. The program informed us that Lost had in fact been lost: After it premiered at Cannes in 1970, all screening reels were destroyed or went missing for half a century. The program did not explain why. The sole remaining copy—a 35 mm print with German subtitles—had been located by the Reel to Reel Institute. We all felt a sense of awe learning this. But for fate, we never would have seen this film. We might never see it again—it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you could stream at home.

Lost was about a young man’s identity crisis in Hong Kong in the 1950s—after the Chinese Civil War, after the mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan functionally became different countries. The young man was trapped between two poles: China and tradition versus the West and modernity. These poles were represented by two women. At the beginning of the film, the man meets a young woman with long, uncombed black hair who lives in an abandoned castle. She is clearly not doing well, mentally speaking, but she is very beautiful and mysterious, so they fall in love. They do all sorts of traditional Chinese activities together: reading the classics, playing the zither, admiring the calligraphy on their fans. But tragedy looms. The young woman is afraid of forces she cannot name. She tells the man that someone is coming for her, that they’ll take her away and he’ll never see her again. He vows to help her escape from the castle before this happens, but when he comes back the next day, she isn’t there. He runs through the empty halls, shouting her name. The castle is abandoned. He realizes he’s all alone, in a ruin of forgotten relics. Perhaps he’s been alone all this time.

Despondent, the man then goes to a party, where he meets another woman, with thick eyeliner, big mussed-up hair, and Western clothes. She is dancing on a table. Her name is Beibei. He and Beibei go to an attic room somewhere and have sex. Afterward, he is repulsed by her: He sits against the wall and starts to cry. She asks him how he’s feeling, and he pouts and refuses to speak with her. The next day, he walks out in a field. Beibei appears wearing hunting gear. She misfires and shoots him in the head, and he winds up in a coma. That’s the end of the movie. We all sat a moment in silence, unsure of whether we were supposed to laugh. We didn’t know how to interpret the coma.

WE EMERGED WINCING INTO THE AFTERNOON—THE SUN AND HEAT were shocking after hours in the cool dark. Devin loved the film. He felt it was a brilliant exploration of cultural alienation, of the half-life of assimilation, the violence of British colonialism. I felt that the young man was being a bit of a baby, and Anna agreed. Anna felt that the director clearly hated women, and that if Beibei wanted to dance on tables and wear Western clothes and shoot guns, then that was her right. Why would the young man choose to sleep with her and then sulk about it? Why was Westernization so bad? We’d all grown up in America; did that make us so evil?

As we walked down the steps outside, I felt a sudden pressure against my hip. I turned. A boy my age was slumped against me. I tensed, fearing—what? I didn’t know. He collapsed to the ground: a soft, fluid motion, more a slide than a fall. For a moment nobody noticed. Anna and Devin walked on past me, and I shouted, “Guys—” They turned, looked at me, and it seemed an eternity passed before they saw the boy. By then several people were clustered around him—patting his head, feeling for his pulse. “Should we call an ambulance?” Anna asked. We all took out our phones, but no one made a call. We didn’t know the emergency services number in Taiwan. They had told us in orientation—something with nines, ones, and zeroes—but in that moment I could not remember, and I couldn’t look it up; my fingers were shaking too badly to type.

Someone shouted for water. Someone unzipped the boy’s jacket. Someone cradled his head, murmuring things in Chinese. His friends? Bystanders? I couldn’t tell. The girl cradling his head looked up. “Stop staring!” she snapped. “Don’t crowd him.” We backed away.

WE CROSSED THE SQUARE, AWAY FROM THE CROWD. I FELT VAGUELY criminal, though we hadn’t done anything wrong. I glanced back over my shoulder. The young man was sitting up now, eyes open, sipping from a bottle of water. “Probably heat exhaustion,” said JC. “He looks okay.” But I kept replaying how, when I first felt the boy’s presence, my instinct was to jerk away. The boy had fainted against me, he had needed help, and I had just let him fall.