Representing Atrocity opens with the dramatic juxtaposition of two events. First, only hours after it had been dedicated, angry relatives of the victims of the 228 Incident destroyed a cenotaph meant to commemorate the victims. They were dissatisfied with its attempt to explain the causes and aftermath of the event. Second, after the publication of the Research Report on Responsibility for the 228 Massacre in 2006, a grandson of Chiang Kai-shek brought a defamation suit against the compilers. He disputed the report's contention that, since his ancestor had dispatched troops who arrested and executed people indiscriminately, the elder Chiang bore major responsibility for the massacre and its aftermath. Although the monument has been restored and the lawsuit was dismissed, the controversy about portraying the events of February 28, 1947 and the ensuing White Terror continue.
The basic events of this seminal incident in the formation of a Taiwanese identity are not in doubt. A native Taiwanese cigarette seller, some of whose wares were illegal, was roughed up by soldiers of the Kuomintang (KMT) government that had arrived two years before from the mainland. A crowd gathered to support her; the soldiers fired and killed an onlooker. This was the catalyst for demonstrations and riots against the mismanagement and corruption of the new government. Chiang Kai-shek's administration promised an investigation, calming the unrest. But when troops arrived from the mainland, they fired indiscriminately into the crowds assembled to greet them. The White Terror era began, during which tens of thousands of Taiwanese--there are heated disputes as to how many--died or disappeared forever.
Author Sylvia Li-chun Lin, an assistant professor of Chinese at Notre Dame University in the United States, has chosen to examine the 228 Incident and its aftermath through literary and cinematic representations of them, looking at the events and art in a larger context that transcends guilt or innocence or victim versus victimizer.
Lin's study poses the question of whether any historical event can ever be accurately described, and asks whether, when regimes change, victims who suffered under that regime can regain their voice and reclaim their history without resorting to hysteria and vengeance. How and what do people learn through fictional and cinematic explorations of traumatic and contested events of the past? Shifts in governance may enable a rethinking, rewriting and reinterpretation of historical events but, Lin opines, the process demands careful deliberation to avoid a reversal of tyranny.
Literary Representation
In the cases of the 228 Incident and the White Terror, very few stories were written about the events at the time they occurred, partly because of a government-imposed politically oppressive atmosphere. People were afraid to speak about what happened even to their children and close friends, much less commit their thoughts to paper.
Also, because the White Terror specifically targeted Taiwanese intellectuals, most of those who might otherwise have been expected to write were silenced forever. With the passage of time, some works appeared that made oblique or cursory references both to the incident and to the government's persecution of dissidents. But, with martial law still in force, their authors had to be careful of their allusions. In one case, Chen Ying-zhen's The Mountain Road, the incarceration and execution of intellectuals is mentioned as a means to advance the remainder of the story. In another, the author avoids explicit commentary by incorporating news reports. The envelope had been pushed, but very gently.
Martial law was formally lifted in July 1987, though writers remained cautious for a few more years until they could be sure that they were genuinely free from government censorship. While many works that discussed the events frankly began to appear, their creators faced the problem of accurately recreating events more than four decades in the past. The enforced silence had taken a toll: Memories had become faulty, and many of the dramatis personae had passed away. More recently, Lin finds, writers and filmmakers have begun to ponder the possibility that the past cannot be recaptured, nor a definitive truth arrived at.
Gender and 228 Events
The author explores gendered differences in the portrayal of the events of the 228 Incident, a prominent theme in both literature and film. A number of works symbolically present Taiwan as a female--the weaker half of a binary--being oppressed by a male representing the "mainlanders," who were backed with military power as well as the force of international recognition of the KMT as the legitimate government of the island. An early example, Intoxication, actually written by a mainlander and published in a left-wing Shanghai journal in 1947, features a young Taiwanese woman who nurses a mainlander man back to health after he is beaten by an angry mob on the fateful day of February 28. She falls in love with the man, who leads her to believe that he reciprocates her feelings. However, after fully recovering, he states his intention to go back to China, promising but not really intending to send for her later.
This binary opposition is reversed in Zhong Zhao-zheng's Angry Tides, published in 1993. A Taiwanese Hakka man falls in love with a woman whose family came to Taiwan from Beijing. Unlike Intoxication, the romantic feelings of Angry Tides are mutual. But an asymmetric relationship develops, symbolized by the man's learning Mandarin from his wife, while she learns no Hakka from him. The husband comes to realize that not only has his wife completely disrupted his family structure, but his entire family, including his parents, has also become subservient to her whims and desires. His father's submissive attitude even reminds him of how his father interacted with the Japanese during the colonial era. The wife's arrival in his family thus represents Taiwan's new colonial government displacing the old Japanese one. The woman becomes pregnant, holding forth the symbolic hope for future ethnic harmony. However, she decides to return to the mainland and later tells her husband that the baby is gone, not mentioning whether through miscarriage or abortion. The distinction is important here, since an abortion would represent a willful and violent termination of the vision of an ethnically harmonious future, whereas a miscarriage implies a situation beyond human control. Although the reader is not told which one occurred, the significance is that the opportunity for future ethnic harmony is irrecoverable.
Another interesting twist to this plot is the husband's decision to go to Japan to resume his studies. Before boarding the ship that is to take him there, he tells his relatives that one must find a place where one truly belongs and walk down that road to tomorrow. For him, that place is Japan. Symbolically, the 228 Incident has driven the colonized back to the former colonial power in preference to the current one.
Overlapping Differences
Ethnic differences often overlap with gender differences, as they do in both of the aforementioned stories. In Notes of Taimu Mountain by Li Qiao, published in the 1990s, the gender factor is completely absent. In a creative reworking of events that actually happened in 1947, a member of the Taiwan Communist Party is forced into hiding in northern Taiwan. With help from a friend who is a member of the indigenous Tso tribe, he seeks refuge on Taimu Mountain. The mountain is regarded as sacred by the Tso, and tribal elders caution the protagonist that it is guarded by poisonous snakes that will kill any trespasser. Soon, however, the protagonist finds himself pursued by a Chinese bounty hunter, an agent of the KMT government who forces him into a snake-infested area. Though bitten and dying, he is able to trick the bounty hunter into also being bitten. The story ends with its hero spreading seeds of the acacia, a tree native to Taiwan that is renowned for its hardy nature, around them both.
While this story does hold forth hope for the future--since the bodies of the fallen antagonists will nurture sturdy trees--it also portrays ethnic relations as a hierarchical order that places the mainlanders at the bottom of humanity and compassion.
Film director Wan Jen at work. Half of the budget for Super Citizen Ko was from the government--an interesting change since the days of White Terror. (Courtesy of Wan Jen)
As seen, writers devised a variety of strategies to evade government restrictions on the treatment of the 228 Incident and other proscribed topics. This was next to impossible for filmmakers. The cinematic barrier to portraying the incident and the White Terror was not broken until 1989, two years after martial law was lifted, with the appearance of Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness. Winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival of that year, A City of Sadness marked not only an important milestone in the development of Taiwanese film, but the beginning of freedom to portray Taiwan's past on the screen.
These accolades did not prevent Hou from being attacked by domestic critics. Since the action of the film centers on the rise and fall of the fortunes of a Taiwanese family, Hou's detractors questioned whether the film was really about the 228 Incident at all. Others questioned his representation of violence. They found particularly objectionable a scene in which Taiwanese beat up mainlanders, since it casts Taiwanese in a negative light, and were further angered by Hou's failure to include a dramatization of the massacre of the Taiwanese.
Lin notes that Hou's strategy, as well as that of another much-praised Taiwanese film, Lin Cheng-sheng's March of Happiness, is to indirectly depict the incident by emphasizing the individuals and their lives over the historical incident itself. This, the author points out, is a legitimate cinematic style known by its German name, Alltagsgeschichte or, literally translated, the history of everyday life. In essence, it is a form of micro-analysis of history from the perspective of ordinary people.
March of Happiness, which appeared a decade after A City of Sadness, has as its principal setting the Tianma Cafe, where the 228 Incident actually began. The cigarette seller, whose rough treatment at the hands of mainland soldiers sparked the violence, appears as a matchmaker. The young man and woman who are Happiness' protagonists meet while performing plays clandestinely in the cafe's back room, since the Japanese have banned such activities. After the war has ended, the members regroup at the cafe, but find that now the mainland government has banned their theatrical activities. The man and woman fall in love and, because of her father's opposition to the match, decide to elope. Unfortunately, they choose February 27 as the date. As the male protagonist is leaving to meet his beloved, he is shot by a soldier. The woman waits patiently at the pier, unaware that the object of her desires will never come. Happiness closes with a scene of Taiwanese throwing objects out of a building presumed to be the Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau; a text informs the viewer of the subsequent massacre and 40 years of martial law.
Author Lin interprets the male protagonist's death as a directorial meditation on what could have been and should have been. The lovers should have been able to elope, just as the cigarette seller should not have been beaten and the massacre should not have happened. In short, the central message of March of Happiness is that Taiwan could have been, and should have been, a much better place.
Changes Since Censorship
A third film, Wan Jen's Super Citizen Ko, explores the themes of guilt and redemption. Although Lin does not mention this, half of the film's budget came from the Government Information Office's film subsidy fund. It is an interesting commentary on how much things had changed since the days of censorship. Ko, the film's central figure, is an intellectual who was arrested in the 1950s for reading prohibited material. Under torture, he reveals the name of another member of his group, who takes the blame for being its leader and is executed. Ko is sentenced to 16 years in prison. To spare his family the humiliation of being associated with someone branded a subversive, Ko divorces his wife. Apparently feeling more humiliated by being divorced than by her relationship to a convicted criminal, the wife commits suicide, leaving their young daughter to fend for herself.
When finally released from prison, Ko's guilt and remorse prevent him from reentering society, which has undergone changes that are bewildering to him. Ko's memories also make it difficult for him to effect a reconciliation with his daughter, now grown and with a family of her own. The outside world appears to be just another prison as he roams the city aimlessly.
At one point, Ko visits a noodle stand, discovering that its owner is one of the soldiers who ransacked his home, terrorized his family and arrested him. The two eat and drink together, with the noodle seller even affably asking after Ko's wife, not realizing that she is dead and that Ko holds him responsible for the suicide. The former soldier explains that many mainlanders were also arrested and sentenced to long prison terms. The government's policy was that in order to make sure that not a single communist escaped, some of the innocent might have inadvertently been arrested as well. In any case, the former soldier points out, he was merely a small cog in the government's policy of oppression. At this point, redemption begins to replace revenge as a theme of the film.
Ko also suffers from nightmare flashbacks of scenes he could not have personally witnessed, including the chillingly graphic execution of his friend. Chains clank on the prison's stone floor; the condemned man raises two fingers of his left hand and one on his right, indicating the death sentence under article 2, section 1 of the martial law decree. Lin interprets these as creating memories of the past, as director Wan Jen seeks to show that one cannot accurately portray historical events that are long past. The flashbacks also serve a cathartic function for Ko on his path to redemption. Eventually, after a long search, which represents Ko's quest to find himself, he comes upon his comrade's grave. Lighting candles in the overgrown bamboo grove, he offers his abject apology.
In the end, memory brings deliverance for Ko. Arriving at his daughter's home after the candle lighting ritual, he collapses in the doorway, and she puts him safely to bed. The film ends with a sepia scene of the aging Ko walking in a breezy open field with his young wife and daughter on either side. Holding hands, they walk in slow motion, smiling at the camera. Then the frame freezes. The implication is that a shared memory of the past, even though it may never have actually happened, is at the same time a memory for the future.
Lin concludes her analysis by describing the literary and cinematic re-creations of atrocity as the sedimentation of a form of collective memory that integrates elements of memory with fantasy and invention. It can shift from attempts to portray the truth to a new role of creating meaning. Even making allowance for artistic license, it is profoundly unsettling that Lin seems to approve a new role that has evolved: meaning is being created by reworking actual historical events through fantasy and invention. That said, the author's closing sentence--that the search for information continues even as we have become aware of the incomplete nature of truth, facts, and knowable history--may be the best that we can hope for.
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June Teufel Dreyer, a professor of political science at the University of Miami, Florida, is the author of China's Political System: Modernization and Tradition, sixth edition.
Copyright © 2008 by June Teufel Dreyer