Nostalgia

This engraving (?) in the stone of the Xing Tian Temple was done by Ke Mei, who taught me landscape painting 55 years ago. He was most famous for his flower and bamboo pictures. My mother auctioned off my landscape paintings for charity. I wish I still had them.
 

Mind you, I understand what it is to wax nostalgic over the past. After all, that’s what I’m doing here. I admire the sparkling subway, the sanitation, the safety, the beautiful modern buildings, and the democratic society (however divided). But I miss being able to ride my bicycle out of town and into the rice fields of the countryside in a half an hour. The shouts of “Watermelon!” on the alley. And even the smell of the sewer. The antiseptic today is less other, and doesn’t clutch at me. So I get that Sister still carries a torch for Chiang Kai-Shek and his visions of a united China (under his rule, of course). “He did so many good things for Taiwan,” she says. "Made modern, economically successful.”

   And after seeing a big piece of Taiwan’s seashore over the past couple of days, I can see why Sister says that China could squish the island like a bug. The country is only about the size of the state of Maryland and home to 23 million people. With almost all of Taiwan’s energy supply imported and most of its food, a naval blockade of the four major ports would quickly starve it out. Unless, that is, the U.S. got involved. Taiwan has long been little more than a bargaining chip between the two world powers. Also a semiconductor chip, since Taiwan makes more than half of the world’s supply. And the more I read about Trump’s developing (aka unpredictable) China “policy”—tariffs, national security—the less I can follow it.

China looms large in Taiwan. Even on the Pacific coast, hilltops are dotted with radar installations. “They are looking for China,” Sister says. 

    When I was here 55 years ago, there were gun emplacements on hilltops overlooking the rice fields that surrounded Taipei city. Now apartment towers have supplanted the rice fields, and high tech surveillance, the guns.

A radar installation on Yangminshan—the rounded object on the ridge. And what I believe to be radar on the Pacific coast of Taiwan.

 

Generalissimo

 “I couldn’t believe they did that!” Sister says. “And only fined $75!”

    We are in the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, and she is telling me about the 2018 incident when students threw eggshells filled with red paint at the giant statue of the Kuomintang Generalissimo. It was one among many defacements of the hundreds of such statues dotted around the island, fueled by rage against the 38 years of martial law when Chiang and his son ruled, killing and imprisoning more than a hundred thousand Taiwanese. They had already endured centuries of Dutch, Spanish, Chinese and, for 50 years, of Japanese rule. After Japan’s surrender following WWII, the island was again ceded to China.

   Chiang had removed to Taiwan in stages, with war-hardened soldiers and all the gold and art he could manage to take from the mainland. Apparently also intellectual capital. Sister’s father, as assistant professor of literature at the university in Beijing, was asked by the Minister of Education whether he was interested in moving to Taiwan. He agreed to go and check it out, leaving his wife and young son on the mainland. He sent for them in 1948, when it looked like Mao was winning and China was becoming dangerous for the upper classes. Sister’s mother arrived with only a suitcase, without the family valuables. By the time Sister was born in 1949 and it was clear Chiang was never going to prevail, they had received word: “Don’t come back.”

    Family members were later sent to the fields for backbreaking labor and “reeducation.”

    Sister bows in front of the massive statue. An honor guard marches past us, heels clicking on the marble floor, as we leave the hall. Perhaps in warning to future protestors.

     By the time I first arrived in 1971 (on the wrong day, due to crossing the International Date Line), Henry Kissinger, under President Nixon, was quietly trying to hammer out the Two-China policy, and Chiang, still claiming to be the ruler of all China, was trying to prevent Communist China being given a seat at the United Nations.

    I was often asked to sign petitions: “Strongly Oppose the Chinese Bandits Entering UN.” To which I recited my, “I don’t know anything about politics” mantra. It was true, but I couldn’t understand why a nation of 843 million people (while Taiwan had a population of 14 million people) was unrepresented in the world body.

   Repressive military rule was new to me. A man could be taken to the police station to have his hair cut if it was too long. Kissing on the street was forbidden. I myself had had experience of the Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist party spies. And a medical student friend confided that one day the cadaver he was supposed to dissect was the body of a friend who had been in the Taiwanese independence movement. The man had been in prison for more than a year and his body bore evidence of repeated torture.

    And as we left the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial the other day, it occurred to me that one of China’s first moves after taking over Taiwan would be the erasure of the effigy of their enemy.

    “That statue will be gone if China takes over,” I told Sister. “They will remove it.”

    “They wouldn’t,” she said.

 

Spy Story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 With Sister and her mom at their old house in 1971.  I don't have many pictures from that time.  

 

The last time I saw Sister in Taipei was in 1998. She was living in Taipei with her husband and two boys and her mother. After that I saw her in the Boston area, where she moved with her two boys following her divorce.

     On that last visit, I was on my way back from spending more than a month in China, traveling down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai for a Life magazine story on the building of the Three Gorges Dam and to Suzhou for a story about American couples adopting unwanted Chinese girls. My problem with the authorities likely began with my name on the magazine’s masthead. And then the damage was compounded by my heading directly towards a sensitive area near the border in the Golden Triangle area. That’s where the photographer working with me and I were questioned by the police for the first time and had our passports taken away.

     We were actually in that neck of the woods—um rice paddies—to shoot a story about the women of one family for a National Geographic book. But clearly they feared I was doing a story about the drug trade. That or I was a CIA spy.

     I hadn’t focused on the history of Time Inc in China. The company was started by Henry Luce, a missionary’s son raised in China, who had connections with the CIA and close ties with Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Kuomintang Nationalist party in the Chinese Civil War. A war he lost to Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. Chiang and much of his army and many of his supporters, including Sister’s father, fled to Taiwan to regroup.

    So not only was the company I worked for suspicious, but the company I kept: I had studied in Taiwan and spoke a little Chinese, suspicious in itself. I was later to discover that Chinese who spoke good English then were mostly engaged in surveillance. And the better the English the higher the position in the Ministry of Public Security, also called the Foreign Affairs Police. They needed to keep an eye on me. And they did.

Sister and I in front of the modern apartment building where her house used to be.
 

 

   

Good morning, Taiwan

                                               Sister picks me up at the airport in Taipei

I woke up this morning in Taipei. It was evening in New York, and apparently he who will not be named had spent the day doing things I disapproved of in Ukraine and Gaza, erasing the T from the LGBTQ designation for the Stonewall Memorial in NYC (predictably leading to protests there), and mandating plastic rather than paper straws. To cap it all, he said he was planning to visit China for talks. Tariffs maybe? Hoo boy. Sister said he is completely crazy, so we agreed to call him Fengzi, or lunatic.

    She has no fears that the Chinese will invade Taiwan. “If they want it, they will take it in five days,” she says. She doesn’t believe they will harm anyone. “I am Chinese!” she says.   

   What about surveillance? Closed circuit TV following you everywhere? Replacing the government, making Taiwan subject to repressive internet control? Jailing people with independent views? Look what happened in Hong Kong.

    “I have a friend in Hong Kong,” she says. “She says nothing has changed. I’m not interested in politics.”

    “Well,” I said, “I hope the mainland doesn’t take over because if it does, I won’t be able to come here again. I am not welcome in China.”

    “I know,” she said. “You must be on the blacklist.”

    

Younger Brother

 

Younger Brother gets out of an ice cold shower. He is done with his morning calisthenics and is about ready to eat the oddest breakfast I have ever witnessed. Also huge. He’s been on a health kick lately, between trips to photograph the conflict in Ukraine. As a Taiwanese, he feels solidarity with Ukraine as it fights a mighty neighboring power trying to consume it.

   “So you think the Chinese won’t invade Taiwan soon?” I ask. I have been wondering how risky a trip there is right now, with our own government in such disarray, bestowing tariffs on China while supplying Taiwan with arms.

    “The Chinese have their own problems right now,” he says. “But if there is a threat, I am on the next plane home.” He lives in Austria, but Taiwan, where his mother and family are, is home. “I don’t know if I’ll shoot with a camera or a gun,” he says.  “Maybe I’ll mount a gun on my camera.”

    He has already invested in armored tactical gear to work near the front lines in Ukraine.  Indeed, he has bought more while in New York. He is staying with me while printing huge photographs for an upcoming show.

    Younger Brother and I met through a war correspondent friend from Life magazine some 25 years ago. We became friends partly because I had at least been to Taiwan, and we have become even closer as we watched our dear friend ail and die. Younger Brother and I have done stories and books together. I have written critiques and captions and intros. And he has taken me along to Taiwan and Singapore and Vietnam. Neither one of us is welcome in China any longer. Younger brother is one of my two close friends from Taiwan. And that is a conundrum.

 Taiwan, like the U.S. and so many other countries these days, is divided into camps, those who favor reunification with China, and those who favor, and fight for, an independent Taiwan. My friends are on opposite sides. Older Sister and Younger Brother.