Green Island was a very neat place to go, even if the weather wasn’t the most cooperative. I’ve generally had pretty decent luck with rain on this trip, but my first day on the island was covered in the stuff. I wasn’t able to do much except soak in the outdoor saltwater hot springs, which admittedly was a pretty solid way to spend a windy, rainy evening. Once the weather cleared up, though, I was able to take my rented electric scooter and beetle around the island to my heart’s content. I think the scooter was running off a D-cell battery, considering how often I had to recharge it, but the little guy could get up to 50 clicks an hour. Combined with the mostly empty island roads, it made getting to places almost as fun as exploring them.
The history of the island is an interesting one. When Taiwan was run by a military dictatorship, the island hosted a prison for political dissidents – and, naturally, many people merely suspected of such. Prisoners alternated between ideological conditioning and hard labour, quarrying rocks from the nearby coast and cutting wood from the island’s forests. The prison is still still standing, although large parts have been overgrown, and the facility has been converted into a memorial and museum.
(On a side note, I don’t like Taiwanese museums. Museums in Asia can be very hit and miss, but Taiwan’s are uniformly poorly maintained, badly translated, and often reliant on gimmicks like wax figurines and dioramas. Green Island was mostly painless, although possibly because it was so small.)
The museum describes prisoners undergoing a re-education regime eerily reminiscent of Chinese Communist tactics, including lectures and group discussions overseen by political officers, making me wonder if this style of indoctrination has roots somewhere deeper in Chinese history. Theatre was also used, strangely, with prisoners being forced to write and perform anti-communist dramas on a stage by the coast – which, if the wind was as bad as it was when I visited, must have been quite difficult.
It’s eerie to walk the grounds of the former prison and try to imagine what it must have been like to be imprisoned there. It’s a surprisingly large complex, and yet imagining your entire world confined inside it makes it feel suddenly claustrophobic. Hundreds of people – up to 2,000 at its peak – held in close quarters, cut off from the outside world, performing physical and intellectual forced labour, suffering routine torture…it feels like a scar on a nation’s psyche.
I have no idea if the White Terror prison camps, or the autocracy they grew out of, have had that kind of impact on Taiwanese culture. Maybe, like the abandoned buildings of the camp itself, it’s something that Taiwanese are content to forget and let disappear into the forests of history. As an outsider I can only speculate.
Walking within the old walls made me reflect on the scars in Canada’s history. Ours is such a massive, spread-out nation that we have no shared experiences that would have been as intense and omnipresent as a thirty-year military dictatorship. Many of our scars are ones that we’ve inflicted, usually on the less privileged, and then swept out of sight. The attempted cultural genocide against the Indigenous peoples of Canada is the most obvious one, and one that we struggle to grapple with – one that we resist grappling with, in fact. But also I think of our government’s discrimination against Asians, Indians, and, well, non-whites in general. It’s a non-exhaustive list, but it makes me wonder: How much have those scars healed, if at all, and how do they continue to define us?
One last thought on Taiwan: I was surprised by how many Taiwanese I met that couldn’t tell I was part-Taiwanese. In North American I’ve had the full range of reactions to my ethnic background, from people telling me they had no idea I wasn’t fully white, to people literally walking up to me in the street to ask if I was half-Asian. My base assumption is that I pass for white, but I thought my heritage would be more visible to Taiwanese people.
I imagine it’s a product of limited interaction with Westerners. One Taiwanese girl I met thought that all Canadians had black hair, because both of the Canadians she’d met had black hair. So expecting Taiwanese to pick up on subtleties like mixed ethnicities might be asking too much.
It reminds me of an American girl I met in Malaysia. To my ear she had a very distinct and obvious North American accent – not anywhere specific, but without question somewhere in the US or Canada. When she asked ESL speakers to guess where she was from, though, they almost universally guessed the U.K. or Australia, or a non-English speaking country based on her appearance. So I guess the (possibly inane) takeaway here is how travel teaches you that things you think are obvious can be anything but, depending on your perspective.
Anyway, I’m posting this from Japan, where I’ll be spending the next three weeks. I’m glad I spent as much time as I did in Taiwan, but I’m happy to be moving on. I’ve never been to Japan before, so this is exciting.
Zai jian Taiwan, Konnichiwa Nihon!
Harmon Moon 