This thesis consists of four chapters. In this introductory chapter, I review existing approaches to the 228 Incident, White Terror, and transitional justice in Taiwan. Among existing scholarship, most put emphasis on revealing historical facts, naming the perpetrators and compensating the victims. From my perspective, these approaches attempt to draw a clear line between perpetrators/victims, victims/non-victims and guilty/not guilty, which forces people to fall into an oversimplified knowledge structure. To avoid such simplistic binary opposition, I bring into
discussion Yoneyama’s theoretical texts, which investigate the post-1990s transborder redress culture and the concept of re-politicization of justice. Yoneyama’s framework provides a transpacific perspective which helps me perceive the foreign countries’
impacts on the 228 Incident and White Terror. Besides, her framework heralds a more comprehensive view of the postwar situation of Taiwan. This thesis project aims to
explore a transnational view in the case of Taiwan and also reconceptualize the idea of justice beyond the victim/perpetrator binary opposition.
In chapter two, I explore the literary representation of the 228 Incident and White Terror in Ryan’s Green Island. In the first section of this chapter, I draw attention to Ryan’s vivid portrayal of the U.S. government’s complicity with the Chinese
Nationalist government during the post-World War II period and the Cold War era. In Green Island, Ryan expressly manifests the U.S.-Chinese Nationalist alliance and reminds her readers of the United States’ presence in the White Terror period. I
contend that, by rendering visible such complicity and re-examining the U.S. injustice in the postwar period, Ryan brings in a transpacific perspective and opens up a view for us to perceive the foreign countries’ impacts on the 228 Incident and White Terror.
In the next section, I borrow the concepts of “acting out” and “working through”
proposed by Dominick LaCapra to examine the characters’ experiences with trauma in Green Island. By portraying how the narrator “works through” her traumatic
experience, I infer that Ryan provides a future-oriented view for readers to look at historical traumas.
Chapter three extends my discussion to the cinematic representation of the White Terror in Detention (2019). I divide this chapter into three sections. In the first
section, I make a comparison between the narrative strategies adopted in Green Island and Detention. I spotlight on Hsu’s symbolic representation of the persecutors and past atrocities in contrast to Ryan’s more realistic method. In the second section, I focus on the storyline of the main female character Fang. I contend that, by shaping Fang as a victim-victimizer, Detention blurs the distinction between perpetrators and victims and reminds its audience not to fall into a simplistic binary knowledge structure when they confront historical trauma. I conclude this chapter by analyzing
how the two main characters Fang and Wei “act out” and “work through” their traumatic experience. By presenting the two main characters’ process of “working through” the trauma, Detention opens up possibilities for the future and foregrounds a future-oriented view of historical traumas.
In the concluding chapter, I reflect on a few recent events happening in Taiwan, which are related to the issues of transitional justice and development of Taiwan’s democracy. These events include National Taiwan University’s disapproval of setting up a task force on campus to promote transitional justice, the enactment of the Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), and National Communications Commission’s (NCC) refusal to renew the broadcast license for CTi News (中天新聞). Through a brief discussion of these events, I hope to connect my research to current concerns and propel readers to reexamine Taiwan’s democracy. The thesis ends with an appendix of my interview with the writer and White Terror victim Lieh Chen (陳列).
Chapter Two: Green Island
In 1999, after finishing her undergraduate degree, Shawna Yang Ryan had a plan to move to Taiwan and lived with her relatives for a year. When she left, her writing professor told her, “You are going to come back with a book.” At first, Ryan thought the professor meant she would write many words in Taiwan and would end up writing a book. However, that was not what happened. What happened was that, at the end of her journey, Ryan paid a visit to the National 228 Memorial Museum and
unexpectedly encountered George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed (1965). Ryan told Brian Hioe in an interview for the New Bloom Magazine that she was astonished by
Taiwan’s dark history—The 228 Incident, March Massacre, and White Terror because she “did not know anything about it” (Hioe, par. 5). Since perceiving her “ignorance”
of the dark pages of Taiwan history, Ryan started to have a strong desire to learn more about the history of Taiwan and trace her origin from Taiwan.
In 2002, Ryan received a three-year Fulbright research grant to do her writing project in Taiwan, embarking on her journey towards understanding Taiwanese history. During her study period, Ryan visited historical sites and conducted abundant interviews with survivors of the 228 Incident, March Massacre, and White Terror. In an interview for The New York Times, Ryan depicted:
Most of the people I spoke with were of the generation who remembered 2/28 or who had lost family members. I also spoke to the generation after them, who told me about life under martial law and of their youth in the ’60s and ’70s. (Tatlow, par. 9)
After returning to the United States, Ryan continued to gather historical materials and interviewed first-generation Taiwanese Americans and their families. Overall, Ryan
devoted fourteen years to doing research and composing Green Island.
Naming the novel’s title after Green Island, Ryan elucidated:
“Green Island” works on a number of levels—it’s the prison where one of the characters is held, a prison emblematic of the period of the “White Terror” during which the book takes place. I think of Taiwan as “green island” as well—verdant and beautiful—but during martial law, it had become a kind of prison itself. (Tatlow, par. 7)
The title of her novel thus not only refers to the island which was utilized to
incarcerate the political dissidents who opposed the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Nationalist government during the martial law period but also signifies Taiwan under martial law in general, which was imprisoned and silenced by the government’s dictatorial rule and lost its vibrancy and freedom.
In her interview for Taipei Times, Ryan further stated that she wanted Green Island to be “authentic” to Taiwanese who experienced the 228 Massacre and White Terror and also “educative” to non-Taiwanese readers who have interests in the history of Taiwan (Ter, par. 7). Ryan intended to make the novel a vehicle for the 228 and White Terror memory, rendering visible the sacrifice made by Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans, martyrs and flawed survivors, for Taiwan’s freedom and democracy. Not only did Ryan bring into light Taiwan’s dark history, but she also emphasized her intention to think Taiwan’s history from a different perspective, rather than make it an “appendage of the Chinese world” (Hioe, par. 24). When asked about how to situate Green Island in contemporary Asian American literature, Ryan did not give a direct answer but remarked that “I’ve tried to write against [the] dominant narrative of China […] I want to give [Taiwan] its own place that is not within that bubble [of the Chinese diaspora]” (Hioe, par. 24). In Ryan’s view, Asian American
literature is not all about Chinese American literature. By retelling the 228 and White Terror history of Taiwan from a Taiwanese American’s perspective, Ryan wanted to present the diversity of Asian American literature and underscore the specificity of Taiwan’s history.
Published in 2016, Green Island unearths Taiwan’s hidden history during the period from the 228 Incident and the March Massacre in 1947 to the subsequent White Terror. Ryan captured how the state violence crept into ordinary people’s quotidian life, spotlighting on their life experiences, inner struggles, and remorse.
Green Island begins with the birth of the unnamed female narrator on February 28, 1947, the day that initiated the island-wide uprising known as the 228 Incident. Soon after the narrator was born, her father, Dr. Tsai, was dragged away from his family by the Chinese Nationalist (the Kuomintang or KMT) soldiers and became one of the men who disappeared during the White Terror period. After eleven years of
incarceration, Dr. Tsai returned home. He became cautious and enigmatic, haunted by his years in jail as well as his guilt of being the survivor. In his eldest son Dua Hyan’s words, “He is broken” (100). Shortly after his return, two secret police officers forced Dr. Tsai to write a letter to his friend Su Ming Guo to lure him to cease his exile and return to Taiwan. In order to protect his own life and his family, Dr. Tsai became a coerced accomplice of the Chinese Nationalist government and was mired in
unbearable suffering of his betrayal of a friend. In 1970, the narrator married Lin Wei and the couple soon left Taiwan for Berkeley, California. Not long after this, the narrator found that her family was under surveillance and threat. Even when they were in America, the Lin family still could not extricate themselves from the long arm of the state violence and the government’s practice of White Terror.
Starting the novel with the 228 Incident, Ryan claimed that the 228 Incident is
the “pivot point” for Taiwanese people to reflect upon their identity (Hioe, par. 11). In 1947, Taiwan had been released from Japanese colonial rule. After the Chinese Nationalist government took hold, Taiwanese people anticipated a higher level of autonomy and democracy. However, because they were ruled by the Japanese, the Chinese Nationalist government was suspicious of them and treated them as second-class citizens. In Ryan’s view, it is after the 228 Massacre that people of Taiwan started to reexamine their own identity.
The positive receptions and feedback Green Island has received since its publication bear witness to the broad interests in the historical memories of
undemocratic Taiwan. Discussing the fictional device (i.e. the unnamed first-person female narrative) utilized by Ryan in Green Island, Yi-huei Wang (王怡惠) in her book review asserted that “Green Island takes a progressive move beyond the legacy of history dominated by nationalists, historians, and authoritative discourse” (249).
Wang explicated “Taiwanese history is either written by the colonialists or is
reconstructed by the Chinese Nationalists” (251). By retelling the history of Taiwan from a female narrative and demonstrating the unnamed female narrator’s life
experience, Ryan “undermine[s] the monolithic discourses of macro-history” (251). In Wang’s view, Green Island subverts the dominant male narrative in the 228 and White Terror writing, providing a different approach to rethink hi/stories from the
perspective of her-stories.
Fang-ming Chen (陳芳明) in his book review also attended to the female narrative in Green Island. Chen proposed that “the history of postwar Taiwan is actually the history of Taiwanese females” (150). He then elucidated “when men are facing the fate of being slaughtered by the Chinese Nationalist government, women undertake the responsibility of preserving the historical memories” (151). In Chen’s
view, Ryan captured crucial transitions in each historical period, successfully spoke up for women who were influenced by the White Terror, and voiced out their true feelings.
In his comment on Green Island, Shuo-bin Su (蘇碩斌) considers that this novel not only accuses the past atrocities but presents “femininity against revolutionary masculinity” (par. 13). Narrating from a female perspective, which is rare in the 228 and White Terror writing, Ryan interrogates the meaning of revolution and portrays civilians’ predicaments of pursuing ordinary happiness under the martial law.
Ryan in the Initium Media interview contended that “Green Island is absolutely a feminist novel” (Yi-ying Huang, par. 24). She observed that most political fictions regarding the White Terror are narrated from males’ perspective. Taiwanese women are marginalized from the White Terror discourse. As a result, in Green Island, Ryan portrays the life of the political prisoner’s wife and daughter, providing the voice for the silenced females during the White Terror period.
Yi-chen Chen (陳怡蓁)’s M.A. thesis is the first thesis on Green Island in Taiwan which investigates the quests of Taiwanese people for identity and
subjectivity. Chen foregrounded the necessity to reexamine how the trajectories of colonialism complicate the formation of Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese-centered subjectivity. She explored the relationship between “Taiwanese colonial experiences”
and “Taiwanese overseas experiences” (12) by comparing the storylines of Dr. Tsai and Lin Wei. Chen asserted that the two characters’ experiences of overseas studies, respectively in Japan and America, influence the way they resist against the colonial powers in Taiwan. In addition, Chen also compared the storylines of Li Min and the unnamed female narrator, investigating the gender resistance to colonial power in homeplaces.
Wei-chung Ting (丁威中) in his thesis approached Green Island from a different perspective. By borrowing Foucault’s and Agamben’s framework of biopolitics, Ting analyzed “how Taiwanese people are disciplined as docile bodies and turned into bare life” during the White Terror period (21). Ting then proposed that the state apparatus of the Chinese Nationalist government “obliterates Taiwanese subjectivity and
induces collective historical amnesia” through pervasive surveillance and a serious of disciplinary mechanisms (vi). Ting contended that the Tsai family’s three-generation postmemory serves as a medium to “awaken the narrator’s identity” and “beckon collective historical memory of Taiwan” (22).
While Green Island received mostly positive receptions, criticisms of this novel should not be ignored. Chi-an Weng (翁稷安) in The New Lens contended that “Green Island is full of stereotypical portrayals of the persecuted” (par. 4). As Weng puts it, the characterization in Green Island is too flat and the storylines of each character are predictable and monotonous. Nonetheless, rather than totally repudiating the novel, Weng asserted that Green Island could be considered as “necessary banality” (par. 9).
Weng’s point is that Green Island may be a good starting point for readers who have interest in but know little about Taiwan.
The book commentaries and scholarly works reviewed above provide different approaches to Green Island. Yet none of them address Ryan’s attempts to re-politicize justice and trauma. In this regard, my chapter focuses on Ryan’s Taiwanese American and young-generation point of view. And the uniqueness of Ryan’s perspective would become clear if we compare Green Island with works written by domestic writers themed on the White Terror, such as Mountain Road (1983) by Ying-zhen Chen (陳映 真) and Moon Reflection (1984) by Song-fen Guo (郭松棻).
Both short novels portray how Taiwanese people lived under martial law,
centering on the profound influences of the White Terror on ordinary people’s quotidian life. Mountain Road revolves around three leftists, Li Guokun (李國坤), Huang Zhenbo (黃貞柏), and Tsai Qianhui (蔡千惠), who shared the same dream of devoting themselves to building up a bright future for Taiwan. However, due to the betrayal of Qianhui’s elder brother, Guokun was executed and Zhenbo was
incarcerated. To make amends for her brother’s betrayal, Qianhui pretended to be Guokun’s wife, dedicating all her life to the Li family. Moon Reflection follows a self-sacrificing woman Wenhui (文惠), who devoted herself to taking good care of her weak husband Tiemin (鐵敏). After recovering from tuberculosis, Tiemin plunged into a leftist group and gradually alienated Wenhui. Driven by frustration and jealousy, Wenhui reported to the police that Tiemin had a trunk of banned books, which results in her husband’s death sentence.
Written in the first years of 1980s, Mountain Road and Moon Reflection made audacious attempts at the domestic White Terror writing and set a precedent in the political literature in Taiwan. Yu-li Tang (唐毓麗) stated that political fiction which had prevailed in Taiwan since the 1980s was a literary genre that should not be ignored. The rise and development of political fiction were closely related to the historical transformation that Taiwan underwent in the 1980s (par. 2). Since the 228 Incident broke out in 1947 and the martial law was promulgated in 1949, Taiwanese people were silenced and the literary works themed on the 228 Incident, political persecutions, and government’s malefactions almost vanished due to the Chinese Nationalist government’s close surveillance and scrutiny. Not until the Formosa
Incident10 and the homicide cases of the Lin family,11 Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成),12 and Henry Liu (劉宜良)13 successively occurred and raised international awareness did the KMT government gradually gave up its single-party dictatorship and change its official policy on arts and literature. As Ming-li Zheng (鄭明娳) put it, “since 1980, the government’s official policy on arts and literature became a no-policy policy which allowed various kinds of viewpoints and voices” (54). On account of the change in policies and the government’s gradual transformation from autocracy to democracy since the 1980s, local Taiwanese writers had a larger room to express their thoughts and opinions through literature. In his book Ruei-jin Peng (彭瑞金) also investigated the rise of the political literature in Taiwan. He regarded the Formosa Incident as the turning point, recounting that “the expansion of the opinion sphere after the Formosa Incident was crucial to the rise and development of political fiction in Taiwan” (220).
Published in 1983 and 1984 respectively, Mountain Road and Moon Reflection are considered as pioneering works in the political literature in Taiwan. The two
10 The Formosa Incident is also known as the Meilidao Incident or Kaohsiung Incident, which was a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations on December 10, 1979. At then, Taiwan was under martial law and single-party rule. Protesters were demanding an end to martial law and calling for democracy, freedom, and human rights. The Formosa Incident caused international keen attention, which pressed the KMT government to hold an open trial on the accused. The Formosa Incident is regarded as the seminal event on the development of democracy in Taiwan.
11 Lin Yi-hsiung (林義雄) was a politician and one of the major leaders of the democratization movement in Taiwan. In 1979, he was arrested for his involvement in the Formosa Incident. On February 28 in 1980, Lin’s mother and twin daughters were murdered, which is known as the homicide case of the Lin Family (林宅血案). There are still no suspects to this day.
12 Chen Wen-chen was a Taiwanese assistant professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.
He was known to criticize the KMT government and support the Formosa Magazine. On July 2 in 1981, Chen was detained and interrogated by the Garrison Command. His body was found on the campus of National Taiwan University the next day. The case remains unsolved until today.
13 Henry Liu, known by his pen name Chiang Nan (江南), was a Taiwanese American writer and journalist. He was a critic of the KMT and most famous for writing an unauthorized biography of
Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), then president of the Republic of China (ROC). Liu later became a naturalized citizen of the United States and resided in California. In 1984, Liu was assassinated in his garage by the Bamboo Union members who had been reported trained by the ROC military intelligence.
novels share the following features. First, both novels feature a mysterious opening.
Mountain Road begins with a scene in the sickroom. The main character Tsai Qianhui was hospitalized, weakly lying on the sickbed due to the rapid health deterioration.
Moon Reflection begins with a scene that the main character Tiemin was carried home on a stretcher. When reading the beginning of the two novels, readers are soon drawn
Moon Reflection begins with a scene that the main character Tiemin was carried home on a stretcher. When reading the beginning of the two novels, readers are soon drawn