Taiwan was my “ground zero” for learning about China. It was kind of like experiencing snow for the first time or maybe even a first kiss. One has all sorts of notions about what one might feel, but the experience itself is different in a multiplicity of ways. Lots of huge events occurred while I was in Taiwan. Chiang Kai Shek died on my birthday in 1975. The USA recognized the People’s Republic of China as the official government of China on January 1, 1979. A new word was coined for relationships in Taiwan: “denormalization.”
One story I was totally ignorant of when I arrived, was that of the two million mainlanders who descended on the island of Taiwan at the end of the 1940’s. Many of these KMT soldiers, government officials, and others who supported the Nationalist cause set up house in military dependents’ villages called 眷村 juàn cūn. These villages were poorly constructed on public land with building materials scavenged from the neighboring communities. They were built as temporary shelters, since the KMT had every intention of returning to the mainland. Soldiers would reunite with their families and live out their lives in their ancestral villages. But sadly, that never happened. They were mostly men. Most of those who were married had left their wives and children behind. Young men left their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Many never saw their mainland families again.
In 1985, my friend, Stan Lai (賴聲川 Lài Shēng chuān) wrote an amazing play called “Peach Blossom Land” (暗戀桃花源 Ànliàntáohuāyuán). It was really two plays within a story. The play starts as the story of young love between two students, one a young man from Manchuria, and the other, a beautiful young lady from Yunnan (1st played by Bridgit Lin (林青霞 Lín Qīng Xiá). As they walk along the Bund in Shanghai, they sadly reminisce on the toll the war has taken and cheerfully plan meeting up again after both paying a final visit to their families. The moment is shattered when the audience becomes painfully aware that they are actually watching a play, “Secret Love”, being rehearsed.
It turns out that the umbrella story which frames the rehearsal of Secret Love, also frames a second play, a slapstick comedy based on the Eastern Jin Dynasty story, Peach Blossom Land. The play rehearsals were double booked to rehearse in a theatre in Taiwan. Secret Love jumped forward 50 years when it resumed. The young man was an old man dying in a hospital in Taiwan. Although he had married a Taiwanese woman once he understood that he would not return to the mainland, he never forgot the love of his life. The bittersweet ending of the story is that of many mainland refugees in Taiwan. Once they were finally allowed back into the mainland, many found that their wives had remarried, their children didn’t know them, and that their parents and siblings were gone. They were happy, of course to meet again, but sad for all they had missed out on.
30 years after “Peach Blossom Land” was first released in Taiwan, it still resonates with people of all generations and remains one of the most popular plays in all of China.
Another play Stan wrote which dealt with this fracture between the “two Chinas” was called “The Village” 寶島一村 (宝岛一村 Bǎodǎo Yīcūn). It took place in one of the military dependents’ villages in Taiwan. The audience was able to watch as the young KMT soldiers scrounged to set up their temporary accomodations. We heard the struggles of people attempting to communicate in Chinese dialects as different from one another as are French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. We saw leaders emerge from the groups, marriages happening between mainlanders and Taiwanese, and strong women who made the most wonderful dumplings ever, step forward. As anyone knows who has ever lived in Taiwan, nothing brings a family or community together better than “bao”-ing jiaozi (making dumplings). Still there was a constant yearning for China by the first inhabitants of the village that succeeding generations never really understood.
Shakespeare said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Li Bai likened saying good-bye to the setting of the sun in his well known poem, “Taking Leave of a Friend” (送友人). Parting from the mainland in 1949 was more like hunkering down in an emergency before a big storm. One always expects to return home.
Chinese Odyssey 15
’til one day while eating
some stinky doufu,
I saw something strange
which was certainly a clue:
In an old woman’s cart
was the same bowl I’d found
as a nine year old kid
digging holes in the ground.
The Panda in the Room PD 