8. April 7, 2023

What Do We Want History to Do to Us? 1991 part 2, WW2, 2023

Zadie Smith, in an essay about the art of Kara Walker that accompanied an exhibition at the Tate, in London, October 2, 2019–April 5, 2020, writes:

“What might I want history to do to me? I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist—and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind—and indelibly link—my history and me. I could want history to tell me that my future is tied to my past, whether I want it to be or not. Or ask it to promise me that my future will be revenge upon my past. Or warn me that the past is not erased by this revenge. Or suggest to me that brutal oppression implicates the oppressors, who are in turn brutalized by their own acts of oppression. Or argue that an oppressor can believe herself to be an oppressor only within a system in which she herself has been oppressed. I might want history to show me that slaves and masters are bound at the hip. That they internalize each other. That we hate what we most desire. That we desire what we most hate. That we create oppositions—black white male female fat thin beautiful ugly virgin whore—in order to provide definition to ourselves by contrast. I might want history to convince me that although some identities are chosen, many others are forced. Or that no identities are chosen. Or that all identities are chosen. That I feed history. That history feeds me. That we starve each other. All of these things. None of them. All of them in an unholy mix of the true and the false…”

It has been a big week for all of these questions posed so eloquently by Zadie Smith about history and progress, the influence of the dead over the living and the living over the dead. I’m going to interweave a big, kaleidoscopic narrative across continents, history, culture and politics in honor of many people’s memories whose meaning and purpose I take to be the prevention of war and seeking of peace.

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文, 2016 -2024) made a historic trip to the United States, meeting officials and seeking assurances of protection against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, while former opposition party president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九, 2008-2016) of the Chinese Nationalist, Kuomintang (KMT) made a historic visit to see his ancestors’ graves and Chinese officials in the People’s Republic of China. KMT party members, like Ma, who had accompanied Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government from China to Taiwan, or been born or lived under it in Taiwan in retreat during martial law from 1949-1987 and before democratization, but wrote letters to family in China where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had won the civil war against them, would once have been committed to prison for “the crime of colluding with the enemy.” During the martial law era, and to this day, China’s United Front propaganda towards Taiwan emphasizes mutual recognition between Chinese and Taiwanese, encourages Taiwanese to identify as Chinese, and advances the misleading, not to mention physical map and plate tectonics defying, narrative of Taiwan as a “province” that has broken away and must return to China.

In fact, Ma was born in Hong Kong in 1950 before the British returned the island to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1997. After the CCP cracked down on the Hong Kong people’s peaceful protests which lasted from 2019-20, seeking to maintain their freedom from the CCP’s legal, political system as promised to them through 2047 under a “One Country, Two Systems” deal agreed to by the British and the CCP, hope for democracy in Hong Kong was lost and a National Security Law imposed. Both Presidents Tsai and Ma testify in the film I will be sharing this year, to the fact that a “One Country, Two Systems” deal for Taiwan will never be accepted. 

Award winning journalist and Hong Konger, Louisa Lim, has written a book about Hong Kong, its people and the untold history they are claiming just as it is being erased, “Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,” released last year that I highly recommend. Further addressing collective trauma from China, which I touched on in the last post, I recommend NüVoices podcasts #91: “Tania Branigan on her book, “Red Memory,” and the lasting impact of China’s Cultural Revolution” and #84: “A Conversation with Sue-Lin Wong on ‘The Prince’ podcast (about Xi Jinping) & China’s 20th Party Congress.”

It is increasingly difficult to thread the needle Taiwan must thread to maintain its democracy and way of life in the face of the CCP’s desire under Xi Jinping to control Taiwan’s population and turn their island into a CCP military base either through a deal, through political influence operations to control the outcome of their 2023 presidential elections, through a blockade or by force. Founder and editor of “China Change,” Yaxue Cao has said, “if the Taiwanese think they would be exposed to greater risk of war if they vote for one party and safe if they vote for another party, they don’t understand the CCP and Xi Jinping. The CCP China wants Taiwan’s technology and a position to project power into the Pacific; Xi wants Taiwan for his political legacy, the crown jewel in his “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.””

It has been a big week for spring holidays about the influence of the dead over the living and the living over the dead. Happy Passover! Happy Easter! Happy Qingming, Tomb Sweeping Day! Happy Freedom of Speech Day!

Christians celebrate Easter as the freedom from corruption or sin. And it has been a big week for the United States on questions of corruption and sin with the indictment on thirty four counts of former president, Republican Donald Trump (2017-21).

For Passover, a major Jewish holiday celebrating the Biblical story of the Israelites' escape from slavery under the Pharoah in Egypt, and for a fuller understanding of where I come from and how complex WW2 was, I am going to share my maternal grandfather, Walter Wanger’s German Jewish family member, novelist, playwright, and communist, Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958)’s story of escape from Nazi Germany to Hollywood. This is a story I learned from his nephew, Edgar Feuchtwanger, who I found, met and interviewed in London and Los Angeles beginning in 2017 when researching my podcast, “Love is a Crime,” because he had written his memoir, “Hitler, My Neighbor, Memories of a Jewish Childhood, 1929-39.” Edgar, I miss you and hope that you and your family in London are well.

Criss crossing continents and family lines, I am going to share my paternal grandfather, Republican, Winston Frederick Churchill Guest’s previously secret story of serving in the Air Ground Aid Section (AGAS), a top secret military intelligence organization, in China during WW2. Though U.S. forces worked with the KMT, Nationalist party, Winston met both Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Chairman Mao Zedong. My grandfather lead a joint U.S.-British mission to liberate Allied prisoners of war and civilians held in Japanese prison camps in Hong Kong! What!?

I only learned that secret history from writer Robert Kim in 2019, because Winston kept the secret to his death. My father, who died in 2021, was happy to learn more of his father’s story before his death. All we knew, as Kim writes, was that Winston was: “a second cousin of Winston Churchill who had been a New York figure, a world-class athlete as captain of the U.S. national polo team in the 1930s, the head of several family business ventures,” and that “Guest was sought after by the nascent U.S. intelligence services. In 1942-1944, he had done intelligence work for the U.S. Naval Attaché in Havana, Cuba, using his business connections to identify German agents in Latin America. (Hanging out with Ernest Hemingway). In 1944, he became an officer in the Marine Corps,” but what no one knew was that they “sent him to China as part of their contribution to AGAS in early 1945.”

His story has been on my mind since Japanese composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, died last week from cancer. Born in Tokyo in 1952, Sakamoto scored Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, “The Last Emperor,” about China’s last emperor Puyi (溥儀 1906-67) who was born the same year as my grandfather, Winston (1906 - 1982). Another film that was made in China and released in 1987, Steven Spielberg's “Empire of the Sun,” based on a novel by J.G. Ballard and set during the Japanese invasion of China during WW2, depicts the Air Ground Aid Section Winston served in. I rewatched both films and will discuss them and why they matter in China’s, Taiwan’s, U.S. and WW2 history.

It is Qingming jie (清明节) or Tomb Sweeping Day, a festival to remember and honor ancestors and feed their spirits in a Chinese folk practice dating back 2,500 years. You might remember seeing it portrayed in a comedic light in Lulu Wang’s film "The Farewell” when Awkwafina and her family visit her character’s grandfather’s grave with people paid to cry. That movie was produced by Anita Gou, a film producer from Taiwan whose uncle Terry Gou (sometimes referred to as the “richest man in Taiwan” and owner of Foxconn factories in China) announced his bid for Taiwan’s presidency on a KMT ticket this week. 

In Taiwan, Qingming is celebrated on April 5th, the date that KMT dictator Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975. One of the people to whom our film is dedicated who died this week on April 1st in 2018, is director Hong Weijian (洪維健) born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1950 to parents who were political prisoners. Hong’s mother, Zhu Yu, was only a few months pregnant when she was imprisoned. Hong told us that one morning after his mother witnessed her cell mate being dragged to the execution ground by armed guards and shot at the crack of dawn, she became so frightened and so sick from the overcrowding and malnutrition in the prison that she went into labor prematurely. Fortunately, his grandmother secured parole for his mother for medical treatment so Hong could be born outside of prison. Later, Hong returned to prison with his mother because of breastfeeding needs and lived in prison for 5 years. Hong would joke that he was “Taiwan’s smallest political prisoner.”

I was so lucky to have met Hong Weijian in 2017 and film with him in Taipei’s largest cemetery, where he showed us the graves of the wrongfully imprisoned, many his friends, that go unmarked so they cannot be worshipped on Qingming jie though he would visit and pay his respects, pray and offer food. Hong dedicated his life to recovering the truths of Taiwan’s most brutal years of “White Terror” when KMT dictator Chiang Kai-shek cracked down on the people of Taiwan from February 28th, 1947, (the “228 massacre”), through forty years of martial law and political oppression. Hong helped the families of the deceased, the unjustly murdered and surviving victims. His 2001 epic film, “Forgotten or Forgiven,” is cited along with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “City of Sadness” among the best on the White Terror period.

April 7th marks the anniversary of “Freedom of Speech” day in Taiwan, inaugurated by President Tsai in 2017, the first event I was invited to film with her, a new holiday in honor of democracy activist Nylon Cheng (鄭南榕). I filmed with Nylon’s widow and daughter at the Cheng Nan-jung Memorial Museum, located in the old site of the Freedom Era Weekly magazine that he edited. A year after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, Freedom Era Weekly was outlawed for publishing “A Draft Constitution for the Republic of Taiwan” authored by Koh Se-kai (許世楷, 1934–), a Taiwanese historian and politician.

In early 1989, Nylon Cheng received a summons from the Supreme Court’s Prosecutors Office on allegations of “insurrection.” He refused to appear in court to answer questions, protesting the KMT government’s attempt to suppress the freedom of speech of the Taiwanese people and the independence movement. He locked himself in the office of Freedom Era Weekly and declared, “The KMT cannot arrest me; they can only get my dead body.” Seventy one days later, on this day, April 7th, in 1989, the KMT’s police arrived and began sawing the metal door to the magazine’s office. Nylon Cheng doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire dying at the age of 41. “Independence Is the Only Way for Taiwan to Survive” was his last article, his last words. Nylon’s life has come to symbolize freedom and bravery in the face of authoritarian repression for generations of Taiwanese.

The lead officer of the police who came to arrest Nylon Cheng in 1989, Hou You-yi (侯友宜), is the current mayor of New Taipei City and the favored KMT presidential candidate for 2024. Taiwan’s democracy is so young and so new, (less than thirty years since their first direct presidential elections in 1996), that the older, KMT dictatorship era generation are still alive and around and their political networks still impacting the country even as the KMT transitioned out of a one-party dictatorship to a multi-party system. The bias against native Taiwanese locals, reinforced by decades of KMT Chinese Nationalist party propaganda, is still present among many older generations in Taiwan and among the diaspora from Taiwan in the United States who came here largely during the KMT dictatorship.

I have learned so much about this since I began filming with President Tsai in 2017 working with people in Los Angeles, New York and Taipei, including team members in China, whose political biases are all over the place and hard to discern before building trust and understanding, and even then, often still kept secret! Film director, Raoul Peck, whose film “I Am Not Your Negro,” is one I’ve watched many times including in quarantine in Taipei last year, in advising our film, suggested we clarify the differences between the KMT and DPP parties, historically and today. Yes, and more on that here too.

Today Taiwan ranks as one of the freest countries in Asia and the 25th freest of the 195 countries and 15 territories evaluated in the 2020 Freedom in the World report published by U.S.-based nongovernmental organization Freedom House. How did the people of Taiwan achieve their highly functioning democracy?

I left off at the end of my last post with Bill Stanton, who from 2009 to 2012, (his last Foreign Service posting in a 34-year career), served as the Director of AIT (American Institute in Taiwan) — in effect the de facto U.S. ambassador. Most countries around the world shared a starry-eyed vision of China after Deng Xiaoping famously “opened up” to economic reform and engagement, and unaware that Jiang Zemin was revamping their nationalist education to make the West and its values the enemy, so while there was a temporary pause in many countries’ relations with China following the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, even the most liberal Western democracies were eager to get back to business as usual with China.

I want to examine what was happening at that time now in Taiwan and in what ways the U.S. was supporting and ignoring it. Chinese writer Yaxue Cao offers an interesting way in, “As someone who came of age at the onset of China’s opening up and reform, the years and dates on the trajectory of Taiwan’s transition to democracy are strikingly familiar: 1979, 1987, 1989, 1990…” he writes, “because they were also significant dates for my generation of Chinese, easily the most memorable landmarks of our life. But separated by the Taiwan Strait, China and Taiwan have walked two parallel lines, one remaining a tyrannical one-party dictatorship and a persistent threat to not only Taiwan but also the liberal world order, another a vibrant democracy with political pluralism and an open society.”

While the KMT dictatorship extended to the rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who ended martial law in 1987, after he died in 1988, his Vice President, Lee Deng-hui ascended to the presidency. But unlike his predecessors, Lee Deng-hui had been born in Taiwan and was native Taiwanese. Whereas in 1989 in Beijing, the student protests ended with a massacre; in Taiwan, then-KMT President Lee Deng-hui responded to student demands positively, taking increasingly significant steps to advance Taiwan’s transition to democracy.

More on that, and every other story I introduced in this post, coming soon…