"The beginning of our displacement": Guest essay by Jordyn Haime
Hello dear readers!
We’re so sorry for being out of touch for a little bit. We both had a hectic month of battling Covid, persistent coughs, and a fractured arm. We also just returned from a trip to Busan, South Korea, where we met a wonderful utopian organization, Indigo Seowon, which teaches kids to care about literature, philosophy, and ecology. But we promise we’ve also been working hard to bring you a few fresh pieces in the coming months.
We’re so proud to bring you an essay from journalist Jordyn Haime today. She has devoted her reportage to expand coverage of Jewish communities in Asia, such as this article on the Bnei Menashe community in India. She has also written several pieces deconstructing common narratives about Jewish history in China and Japan. Additionally, her article for The China Project last year about Pingpu language revival is relevant to this body of work. In all her work, she find herself repeatedly coming back to themes of popular historical narratives and how those are used and abused by various actors for political means and have delayed reparation or justice. As she puts it she seeks to look at things “through a ‘solutions’ lens rather than just writing about how horrible everything is.” We admire Jordyn’s warm and open spirit. Thanks for reading.
"The beginning of our displacement": Guest essay by Jordyn Haime
Most international observers of Taiwan know that 2024 was a significant year in Taiwanese politics, marked by the election of a new president. But there was also a blockbuster artistic event in Taiwan: the unveiling of the opera 1624. Years in the making, it was highly anticipated and funded in part by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, which reportedly spent over USD $2.6 million on the production. Performed on a massive outdoor stage, it featured some of the nation’s most famous opera performers and was broadcast live on public television.
The opera opens with an ensemble dressed as Siraya, one of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. A shaman leads them in a piece sung in Siraya. Wondering about their broader relationship to the world, they sing, “Does the ocean isolate or connect us?”
We then see a brief hunting scene. The Siraya chase after deer as they sing of their connection to the wildlife: “You gave us your body so that we may eat and dress.”
Then, in a confusing and apparent attempt at reaching younger generations, a slain deer stands up, his face covered by a VR headset. “Wow!” he exclaims. “This VR game is truly an immersive experience!” From there, this player’s awe at events functions as a sort of Greek chorus that interrupts the performance. (“So cool!” he’ll say, or “Please, just tell me how to get past this level!”) While the opera has been relatively well-received by the Taiwanese general public, I found the framing distracting. Some Taiwanese critics agreed, complaining that it suffered from its own ambition, leaving characters and plot points unresolved.
The opera’s title, 1624, references the year the Dutch arrived in Taiwan and colonized the southern port of today’s Tainan, then known as Tayouan, as a base for the Dutch East India Company. It also happens to be the birth year of Koxinga, the Ming loyalist pirate-turned-folk hero who expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in 1661.
The opera’s premiere in February kicked off a yearlong series of special events celebrating what they termed “Tainan 400.” The city sought to showcase its proud history and culture not just to Taiwan, but to the world. Years of consultations with institutions, scholars, and performers have given way to an impressive stream of lectures and exhibitions. Other special events seek to reorient Taiwanese history as anchored in 1624, the year the Dutch turned Taiwan into a crucial hub for the Euro-Asian trade networks. And the victory of President William Lai Ching-te, who once served as mayor of Tainan (2010-2017), provided the perfect opportunity for Tainan to make the claim that it continues to occupy an important place in Taiwan’s history. Together Tainan engages with the world is a rough translation of the event’s Mandarin slogan; in English, the official slogan is Tainan, where you belong.
For some people in Taiwan, the framing of 1624 as the “beginning of history” remains a transgressive idea. Until recently, Taiwanese people grew up with a China-centered history. To describe the origins of Taiwan as a multi-layered encounter between Han Chinese, the Dutch Empire, and Indigenous peoples shifts the attention away from China. To do so paints Taiwan’s history and inhabitants as diverse and unique. This view of history has grown alongside the nation’s development of a distinctive identity after democratizing in the 1990s—and it’s accelerated by recent escalating threats of absorption by neighboring China. In “Transcending 1624,” one of the festival’s main exhibitions at the National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH), Taiwan is no longer “positioned based on the worldviews of other countries.” Rather, the exhibition organizers have sought to present Taiwan “from the perspective of the seas surrounding it.” Their hope is to “flip” our conventional notions of Taiwan’s place in the world. Rather than an island always thought of in relation to the continent of China, Taiwan is a gateway to a broader oceanic world.
But the announcement of large-scale events marking the 400th anniversary also sparked confusion and controversy among a portion of Taiwan’s public — especially its plains indigenous peoples who reside in the Tainan area and beyond. The Pingpu people (平埔族)—Taiwanese indigenous peoples who lived on the plains, rather than in the mountains—have questioned why the government should celebrate the beginning of centuries of colonization. Others accused the government of exploiting the anniversary for political purposes.
Alak Akatung, who helps lead several Indigenous advancement organizations, is a member of the Kabasua tribe of the Siraya people, a Pingpu group that once called modern-day central Tainan its home. He was invited to participate in the planning of Tainan 400 in its early stages and helped to advise the government on exhibits such as the aforementioned one at NMTH. He explains that initially he was “strongly against” the idea of celebrating “the establishment of Tainan” when indigenous peoples had already been living in the area for thousands of years.
I visited Alak on a hot spring day in the Kabasua village, now located more than 30 miles from its original location, having been pushed deeper inland by centuries of colonization. To the Siraya, says Alak, 1624 represents “the beginning of our displacement.” The Dutch establishment of Fort Zeelandia at Tayouan was “the beginning of our persecution; colonizers came and enslaved us, our land was occupied, we were killed.”
The ambiguous marketing of Tainan 400 reflects the delicate political line being walked, suggesting that it doesn’t appear to know exactly what it is. A festival? A celebration? An anniversary? These public criticisms have pushed Taiwan’s Culture Minister, Shih Che, to clarify that the “1624” opera is “neither a celebration nor a commemoration,” but a “retrospection and reflection on the progress of Taiwan.”
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Indigenous peoples were the sole inhabitants of Taiwan for thousands of years. Long before the Dutch first arrived in 1624, they traded regionally and welcomed a few Chinese settlers and fishermen. After they arrived, the Dutch traded and cooperated with the indigenous inhabitants, but their presence also deepened tribal conflicts. In the 1630s, the Dutch began inviting thousands of Han Chinese farmers to settle southern Taiwan. As historians such as Tonio Andrade have shown, Chinese and Dutch settlers began to dominate the market, pushing Indigenous peoples off their land and out of their primary trade, deer skin and meat.
Koxinga, a pirate loyal to the Ming dynasty, expelled the Dutch in 1662. His brief reign over southwestern Taiwan was followed by Qing Dynasty rule (1683-1895), which pushed plains indigenous peoples deeper inland and divided them into legal categories further refined by the Japanese (1895-1945) and the Republic of China (ROC) government (1945-). These colonial labels still carry weight today and stand in the way of Pingpu peoples achieving recognition of their Indigenous status by the state.
After losing the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the ROC moved its government to Taiwan, ruling it under brutal martial law for nearly four decades during a time called the “White Terror.” The government implemented a policy of Sinification that made practicing local language and customs a punishable offense, furthering the erosion of indigenous language and culture. Thousands of people perceived as dissenters were jailed or executed during this period.
The lifting of martial law and its limits on free speech in 1987 brought with it a new Taiwanese national identity consciousness. According to an annual poll conducted by Taipei’s National Chengchi University, more than 60 percent of people in Taiwan identified solely as Taiwanese in 2023, up from 25 percent in 1996, the year Taiwan had its first democratic presidential election. The birth of “Taiwan studies” in academia in the 1990s and the inauguration of museums like Tainan’s NMTH — the first to focus solely on the people and history of Taiwan — reflect this trend. Museum director Chang Lung-chih, in an interview I conducted for The China Project in 2022, referred to the museum’s ethos as a “bottom-up” approach to history, telling it through the eyes of the people as opposed to regimes, elites, or rulers.
“During the 1990s and the early 21st century, supporters of the DPP were very concerned with de-Sinicization,” says Lin Fang-mei, a professor of literature at National Taiwan Normal University. “In the last ten years, it's really more about knowing the existence of indigenous people and other people: the Dutch, the Spanish, the Japanese,” thanks to an abundance of new research, Lin said. “So more and more historical novels were published, which increased the general public's awareness of these different phases of colonial history.”
Multiculturalism, wrote Ek-hong Ljavakaw, a historian at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, acted as a “common ground” binding the efforts of nationalist aspirations of both Taiwanese settlers and indigenous peoples. Indigenous people provided the new Taiwanese nation “with certain ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ symbolic elements of Taiwan that were perceived as having nothing to do with ‘Chineseness’ in order to counteract the émigré-centric ethnic and assimilationist Chinese nationalism.”
“[Remembering] colonial history in Taiwan,” Lin says, “means we want to have a new way of redefining ourselves as belonging to the entire world, not as a part of mainland China. We want to show that we are very active and important in ocean trade.”
This framework of a diverse and multi-ethnic Taiwan, born in part out of the trauma of martial law and Sinification, has become an important part of the construction of a distinct Taiwanese identity and national narrative. And it’s very much reflected in what I observed in Tainan 400.
The Fort Zeelandia Museum located at the former Dutch fort was updated for Tainan 400 to reflect new “Taiwan-centric” views of history. Previously featuring an exhibit about the 1661 battle between Koxinga and the Dutch, it is now replaced by an exhibition about the arrival of the Dutch and their interactions with Indigenous peoples. It features more extensive information on who those Indigenous groups are, how the Dutch ruled Taiwan, and how colonization altered the lives of the Indigenous peoples.
These updates reflect the spirit of a democratic Taiwan that is continuously working to understand its complicated history, says Sophia Lee, who oversees historical sites for Tainan’s Cultural Affairs Bureau. The events and exhibitions urge visitors to “reflect on the past to look ahead to the future, to ponder our future and the role we play in this global society. There is a very important cultural significance of Tainan 400.”
Tainan 400’s programming included several Indigenous-focused initiatives, among them exhibitions and government support for new archaeological research that will be presented later in the year.
But such efforts to tell a more dynamic story of Taiwan’s history fall flat when the government continues to romanticize colonial periods, says Jolan Hsieh, a Siraya activist and Indigenous Studies scholar at National Dong Hwa University. “They romanticize that period because they want to go against Chinese ideology,” says Hsieh. “However, the people who are in charge of this whole idea are still coming from a Han Chinese perspective.”
The continued reverence of Koxinga is a primary example of this, Hsieh continues. Indigenous people, who remember Koxinga as a tyrant who advanced Chinese settlement by slaughtering and displacing displaced indigenous peoples, have been trying for years to prompt a public reckoning on his legacy similar to Chiang’s, who is now widely viewed as a dictator.
Still, it’s worth saying that the image of Koxinga has changed in Taiwan since democratization; some progress has been made on this front. Research and advocacy have driven reexaminations of Koxinga in public life. Some have compared him to Christopher Columbus; meanwhile, pro-independence Taiwanese people—observing how China claims ownership of Taiwan because Koxinga was “Chinese”—have become more ambivalent about him. Tainan’s Koxinga Museum, for example, recently reopened its doors to the public in December under its old name: the Tainan City History Museum. The Museum no longer uses Koxinga’s name as its calling card.
“In the past 10 years, this figure [of Koxinga] has indeed faced a lot of public discussion. Actually, this discussion is good, because it helps people have more of a complete understanding. In past eras, we were only told one aspect [of him] as a national hero,” said Wang Shih-Hung, director of the TCHM.
Nonetheless, indigenous peoples tend to regard the public reverence of Koxinga in memorials, temples, and textbooks as evidence of a lack of progress. As part of the Tainan 400 events, descendants of a Dutch VOC governor of Taiwan attended an annual ceremony to honor Koxinga with Tainan city government officials in April. (Taiwan’s national government stopped sending representatives to the ceremony in 2017.)
Still, it’s worth asking why Taiwan tends to romanticize its earlier colonial periods instead of demanding apologies and the return of stolen artifacts, as its formerly colonized neighbors South Korea and Indonesia have done. There are many reasons for this, one of which is the comparative recent brutality of the Chiang regime, still a living memory for many Taiwanese. Under martial law, for example, symbols of the Japanese colonial period were censored, making the use of Japanese symbols a form of resistance. As for the Dutch and Koxinga periods, many Taiwanese today simply lack a connection to this traumatic history: 95% of Taiwanese are ethnically Han and just 2.8% are recognized as indigenous. As a result, many in Taiwan conceptualize decolonization as “de-Sinification” and resistance to a more immediate threat: China.
I posed these questions about romanticization and reconciliation to Hsieh, who explains that some Indigenous people, too, romanticize the Dutch period. The mass conversion of Indigenous Taiwanese to Christianity gave way to Indigenous writing systems and helped to preserve languages as they eroded.
“We’re still dealing with domestic apologies. Transitional justice and reconciliation is still an ongoing process,” Hsieh says. “In Taiwan, in terms of indigenous people, we haven’t really had political leaders lead that movement for the different generations of colonizers’ apologies.”
Efforts at transitional justice and reconciliation have advanced under President Tsai. She made a historic apology to Indigenous peoples in 2016, stating, “Indigenous peoples have been here for thousands of years, with rich culture and wisdom that have been passed down through generations … For 400 years, every regime that has come to Taiwan has brutally violated the rights of Indigenous peoples through armed invasion and land seizure.”
Tsai subsequently established historical justice and transitional justice commissions under the presidential office. Her administration has made strides on issues such as language preservation, education, and recognition of the Pingpu people. And in 2023, the Council for Indigenous Peoples and the Paiwan people made history by successfully requesting the return of ancestral remains to Taiwan for the first time.
But Tsai has also faced criticism for failing to follow through on her promises and making little progress on critical Indigenous issues such as self-governance and land rights throughout her eight-year tenure. Despite the announcement in 2016 that “the ideals of Indigenous self-government will be realized step by step,” Indigenous self-government has yet to be achieved.
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Yet most Taiwanese know little of the immense suffering and violence that Indigenous Taiwanese endured in the making of their nation. They have little interest in engaging with this difficult history and what it might mean for Taiwan’s future. To confront that history would challenge established historical narratives that serve as the foundations of the current state and its political parties. As young Pingpu people, in a 2016 social media video about contested memories of Koxinga, say about the act of forgetting Indigenous Taiwanese history: “This is the violence of nationalism.”
One exhibition at Tainan 400 shows that its people are thinking hard about these tough questions and how to address them. “Transcending 1624,” the aforementioned exhibit at the NMTH, attempts to challenge directly the very idea of an official historical narrative.
In its final section, the exhibition urges visitors to ask themselves important questions about history: what should be memorialized? How do museums deal with controversial and dark episodes of history? Are certain known figures heroes, or slaughterers? How has Koxinga been viewed throughout history? Visitors are invited to participate by drawing their own rendition of Koxinga or creating their own “monument” to any historical event they choose. Also included is a reproduction of an exhibition on Dutch slavery in its colonies.
Prompting viewers to ponder these questions is an important step forward. But it can’t be the final one. “The Tainan City government is only a small microcosm of how Taiwan handles indigenous issues,” Alak says. If Tainan wants to hold large-scale events for the 400th anniversary of Dutch colonization, “the mayor of Tainan should publicly apologize to the Indigenous Peoples,” and the memory of Koxinga needs to be “properly dealt with” by providing more Indigenous perspectives on his reign alongside public monuments and in public education.
Revisiting history necessitates a holistic approach, Hsieh says, that will require all Taiwanese people to reflect on Taiwan’s history before 1624. But it also means creating the opportunity for Indigenous people to engage with their past within their own education systems. It means reviving languages and cultures that have been lost. Even more radically, Hsieh and Alak argue that proper reconciliation with Taiwan’s painful past can only be achieved by restoring the land rights and calls for self-governance of Indigenous nations.
“That is the way we try to decolonize our history. Instead of just talking about, ‘We are Indigenous people, we want our status back, we want our rights back,’ we have the right to deal with the period of Dutch colonization and how that shaped us into our current selves,” she said.
A few related links
On the 2024 commemorations in Tainan, check out writer and philosopher Will Buckingham’s wonderful piece for the BBC.
Taiwan Insight on efforts to preserve indigenous language in Taiwan’s schools.
Oleksandr Shyn’s illuminating podcast on indigenous language diversity in Taiwan.
Book Club
For the coming book clubs, we’re reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse on Friday, September 27th, 6:30 PM EST (Saturday, September 28th, 7:30 AM Taiwan time). For Friday, October 25th, 6:30 PM EST (Saturday October 26th, 7:30 AM Taiwan time), we'll talk about Andrea Lee's Red Island House. For Friday, Dec. 13th (Saturday Dec 14th Taiwan time) we’ll read My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim. Reply to this email for the zoom link.