Taiwan by Any Other Name....

Two summers ago, in the throes of a Salman Rushdie obsession, I began working on an epic novel about Taiwan based on the idea of spirits and narrated by the Goddess Matsu, a fly on the corpse of Chiang Kai-Shek, and a camphor tree, among others. I wrote about 300 pages before deciding it was too narratively insane. I love the book, but I don't think it would survive outside my own little Taiwan-obsessed mind. Right now, I'm seeing if I can turn parts into short stories or novellas, so I thought I'd excerpt this tiny chapter here....

A Brief History of Names, According to the Goddess Matsu (4,000,000 BC to Present)

A sleeping island, shaped like a yam, or perhaps a leaf of tobacco, with a black spine of dark mountains and a knobby string of twinkling lights cascading down the center sits amid deep black water. On this night when, despite the lambent orange haze sent up by millions of lights in millions of homes, the island sleeps, I am awake. My head hurts.

I have introduced myself as Matsu, but I am known by so many others: Matsu-po, Tian Hou, Tian Fei—the Daoguang Emperor even christened me the Holy Mother in Heaven. And like me, this island has been known by a ledger full of names.

A planet amid deep black space. Still cooling from whatever blast or collision or universal hand that has created it. This planet is not just a lump of dumb rock; it is alive; it moves, shakes, slides. Two plates collide. Not knowing point zero, we cannot count forward, and so we count time backward from today. Four million years ago, two plates collide and an island erupts.

Millions of years pass in which grass grows and dies and grows, water flows, freezes, melts, animals born, mate, birth, die. But the island, some argue, does not really exist until people arrive, scatter across the plains, settle in the mountains, call the island by a dozen names, each according to a tribe.

But, some argue, the island does not really exist until it is made useful when the Chinese, in junks, cross the strait and build an outpost away from the iron fist of the Emperor and call the place Taiwan and sometimes Greater Loochoo.

But, some argue, the island does not really exist until the name is recorded in the salty, damp logs of Portuguese ships by men who glimpse it through spyglasses and, dazed by the garlands of soft fog around the lush jade peaks, murmur Ihla Formosa, Beautiful Island.

And then come the Dutch, hoping to expand the Dutch East Indies north and then, between Dutch and Chinese, there are two islands: Formosa and Taiwan, setting a precedent: forevermore, the island will never be a fixed place of a single appellation.

In the 17^th century, as the Manchu Tartars take over China, one of the palaces they besiege houses a Japanese woman who kills herself rather than surrender. Her grieving son—like the future Taiwan: of both Chinese and Japanese blood—vows revenge against the Manchu Tartars. He, like the island to which he eventually retreats hoping to regroup his forces to retake the mainland from the Tartars, goes by many names: Cheng Gong, Tei-seiko, Koxinga!

The pirate-warrior Koxinga, with 25,000 soldiers, claims the island as his kingdom and demands the Red Hairs leave. Fort Provintia surrenders while Fort Zelandia resists and Koxinga begins his blockade, intending on drawing thirsty, starving Dutch from the fort. Meanwhile, those unlucky enough to be caught outside the fort, in the villages they have inhabited for years and years, are beheaded or crucified, nailed through wrist, ankle and torso on crosses in the pirate-warrior’s response to these Christian colonialists. The Dutch eventually yield and Koxinga reigns for twenty years.

For almost two hundred years, the island is known as Taiwan to one half of the world and Formosa to the other (“other” in a Saidian sense: foreigners, who know it on one hand as a barbaric island with treacherous shores where ships are wrecked and survivors beheaded or enslaved; and on the other as a critical link in a trading chain—the Americans, who nurse colonial hopes until the Civil War draws their attentions away, and the British and French who make liberal use of Formosa’s treaty ports); a game chip to be traded at the whim of countries, as it was between China to Japan in 1895 in the Treaty of Shimonoseki.

The most recent century is always the one measured in a more modest concept of time, the human life, where generations seem to be parsed out in days, like the lives of flies, and so we see island names dealt out briskly in the 20^th century. After the Japanese left their colony in the defeat of World War II, the island was again, for a brief, uncertain moment, Formosa, and then the Kuomintang, losing the Chinese Civil War and reasoning that the Communists had no navy, fled to the island and wah! it became the new home of the Republic of China. Yet it wasn’t enough for the West, locked into its own Cold War, to distinguish between the ROC and the PRC—China’d been one monolithic place for five-thousand continuous years, as the myth went, so how could it suddenly be two?—and ROC and PRC were clarified into Free China and Red China and any red-blooded American knew immediately which China to love, even though the closest thing to a panda the island could boast was the Formosan Rock Monkey.

But humans are fickle and as the century went on, the West, who was now deciding such things, came to love Red China as much as Red China loved the red bottles of cola sent in by their new slavering admirers with renminbi twinkling in their eyes, and Red China received the privilege of being just China and, as we noted, there could be only one China, which left our slumbering little tobacco-leaf island a nameless orphan, nose pressed to the bakery shop window.

At which point, the people of the island began to look backward, further than their own meager personal memories could manage, to an island called Formosa, and sometimes Taiwan.

But though orphans may remake and rename themselves, the truth of their birth usually lies on a yellowing slip of paper in some drawer that sticks at the corners and it is always at the denouement that the maid runs into the room waving this piece of paper. So too with the island, a volcanic little Cinderella country, which could come to the few world events to which it was invited bearing only a name decided by others worn on its lapel: Chinese Taipei.

I don’t have to tell you how the name—not even a country but an adjective describing a city!—burned upon the breast, but the name was borne with a clenched smile, a muttering of appreciation while the stomach roiled.

And this is where we find ourselves, as the sun rises over the island and glints off the high rise windows, off the dewy leaves, off the hot streets of Taiwan.