Written by Chun Chia Tai.
Image credit: 228 by Li Jun/ Wikimedia commons, license: public domain.
In February, I saw a text message in a Taiwanese group chat promoting a concert commemorating the 228 massacre caused by the Kuomintang dictatorship in Taiwan on February 28th, 1947. The concert was called The Spiritual Day of Taiwan: 2-28 76th Commemorative Concert and was hosted by two Taiwanese American organisations: the Taiwanese United Foundation and the Taiwan Elite Alliance, since 2007. The performers were mainly Taiwanese. Many of them were not professionals but members of local Taiwanese church choirs. Most of the audience was familiar with the songs being performed; therefore, they sang along with the performers.
In the past year, the Taiwanese American community lived under a heightened fear of violence: the violence of anti-Asian Hate, the shooting at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, which highlighted the conflict between pro-independence Taiwanese and pro-Chinese and Kuomintang Taiwanese, as well as the increasing tension between Taiwanese and Chinese Americans due to the intensified military threat from China. Because of the violence and the severe weather on that day, I did not expect to see many audiences, but I was wrong. Inside the church, about a hundred Taiwanese Americans, mostly first-generation elders, sat whispering to each other like they had known each other for many years.
“Thank you for coming to this concert in such bad weather. I can tell you all love Taiwan, and you all have a strong Taiwanese spirit,” said the host at the concert’s start. I realised; this event is never just a concert; it is an annual reunion for Taiwanese Americans experiencing the aftermath of the massacre. For them, the Taiwanese spirit represents a collective identity intertwined with their pursuit of freedom. Affirming this shared identity in this concert is a confrontation of their fear of colonial oppression, both from the Kuomintang dictatorship and China.
The Haunted Colonial Fear in the Diaspora
Participating in such a highly political space during this sensitive moment demonstrates Taiwanese Americans’ determination to sing out their Taiwan spirit to release themselves from the haunted colonial fear, which I take inspiration from Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting to describe the ongoing influence of the colonial violence and to emphasise Taiwanese Americans’ confrontation toward this fear. My usage of haunting also echoes the novel of the Taiwanese author Chen, Shih-Hung, Ghost Town (2022), which calls his home village a haunted town to capture the ghost of the national-colonial violence present in our unspoken memories. This haunted fear describes how the ghost of colonialism suffocates Taiwanese people’s bodies, and this idea helps us to see how singing aloud in this concert relieves ourselves from the control of the colonial ghost.
Since the 1950s, the Kuomintang dictatorship and the military threat from the People’s Republic of China pushed Taiwanese people to emigrate to the United States. Despite having migrated into the country of freedom, the haunted fear from the Kuomintang followed Taiwanese migrants. To suppress overseas pro-democracy movements, the Kuomintang government sent spies to report the actions of Taiwanese immigrants. These reports resulted in Taiwanese activists being murdered, threatened, or blacklisted. The blacklist policy separated many Taiwanese from their families by forbidding them to return to Taiwan. Fear was instilled in Taiwanese bodies and memories. Voicing a Taiwanese identity was dangerous.
This fear, mistrust, and trauma kept haunting the Taiwanese American community despite repealing the policy in 1992. Since the political tension between China and Taiwan has increased nowadays, the rumours about spies have increased, and many would say that Kuomintang spies have become China’s spies. A few months ago, at a Taiwanese elder’s karaoke club, a participant pulled me to the corner and whispered, “Don’t tell me too much about yourself to that person. Listen to her Chinese-Mandarin accent, you can tell she was a Kuomintang spy, and now she is probably China’s spy!” This indicates multiple temporalities at play here with the fear of spies at this club.
Stories of Songs at the 228 Commemorative Concert
This concert epitomises the politics and the history of the Southern Californian Taiwanese American community. It strengthens Taiwanese identity and chases Taiwanese Americans’ colonial fear away by singing the history aloud. The theme of the concert this year was music censorship during the White Terror, a period when songs were prohibited because of their political message, the political affiliations of the composers, the interpretations of the listeners, or even simply due to their popularity.
The censored songs performed in this concert mainly represented Taiwanese people’s rage, pain, and disappointment toward the political violence after WWII. By banning these songs, Kuomintang shut down the space for Taiwanese people to breathe in the colonial pressure, silenced our voices and incarcerated our bodies. Self-censorship was instilled in Taiwanese bodies. The Taiwanese always joked, saying, “There is a little police chief in my heart.” This police chief kept many Taiwanese alive but broke their spirit. To reclaim their spirit, the Taiwanese in this concert sang these censored songs to overcome the fear of expressing themselves. While the trumpet player soloed another censored song, “Repair the Torn Net”, composed by Wang, Yun-Feng, numerous voices arose from the audience to sing for those who could not sing seventy years ago. This song expresses Taiwanese people’s disappointment in Kuomintang by singing the pain of being unable to repair the torn net because “Net” is pronounced as “Hope” in Hokkien. While these Taiwanese Americans were singing this song, I heard their determination become stronger as their voice became louder.
Other censored songs being performed in this concert, such as “Hometown at Dusk” and “Mama Please Take Care,” are Hokkien-covers of Japanese enka songs. Unsurprisingly, covering Japanese-enka songs also reveals the spectre of colonial oppression. The trend of covering Japanese-enka songs in Hokkien in the post-war era was seen as a way of revisiting Japanese culture and recalling the memory of the Japanese occupation. This nostalgia for the Japanese occupation and the preference for the sorrowful tones of Japanese-enka were viewed as intentional acts of resistance against the Kuomintang dictatorship.
“Mama Please Take Care” is extremely popular among the Taiwanese American community, especially among blacklisted Taiwanese people, because singing this song implied their nostalgia and guilt about their families in Taiwan. The host explained that this song was forbidden because the government believed it would evoke soldiers’ homesickness. Then, she raised her voice and said, “These songs are so beautiful; why can’t we sing? Thus, our performer, Chiu, will sing them aloud for everyone.” Maybe because most of the audience was very familiar with this song and the intimacy of guitar and harmonica was more approachable than trumpet, many audiences moved their bodies, sang, and clapped along after the singer Chiu started to sing. Even though they initially sang this song with a sense of sorrow and guilt decades ago, I felt relief in the audience as they joined in the chorus. The colonial ghost faded away.
In addition to the prohibited songs, the concert included three compositions by the blacklisted composer Hsiao, Ty-Zen. Performing the songs of Hsiao, Ty-Zen affirmed their Taiwanese spirit as well. During the dictatorship, Taiwanese Americans in Southern California navigated the politics between Kuomintang and the United States to protect Taiwanese activists. Hsiao was one of the exiled and blacklisted Taiwanese in Southern California. Spending years in Southern California, Hsiao composed music for pro-democracy movements and Hokkien hymns for Taiwanese Presbyterian Churches that still circulate in the Taiwanese Christian community in Southern California. Singing Hsiao’s songs honoured the contribution of himself and the Southern Californian Taiwanese community to democratisation. His song “Taiwan the Green” was performed during the last part of the concert and sung in unison. The song originates from a poem written by the Taiwanese Presbyterian pastor John Tin. Hsiao set the poem to music and turned it into a choir section in his orchestral piece, “1947 Overture,” composed to memorialise the massacre.
Before singing “Taiwan the Green”, the host said, “We all hope Taiwan can be a real, normal country, so we sing this song standing up.” I stood up. Standing up shows respect towards the Taiwanese Americans who fought against oppression in the past and fear in the present. I was reminded of what the Taiwanese activist Peter Huang said when he was arrested for trying to assassinate the Kuomintang dictator in New York in 1970. He said, “Let me stand up like a Taiwanese”. Once the music started, I saw smiles appear on the faces of the audience, and their bodies swayed with the melody. Suddenly, colonial fear disappeared from our bodies. The Taiwanese spirit filled the space. Although “Taiwan the Green” is considered the underground national anthem by many pro-independence activists, this was the first time I heard many people singing this song together, as if it was the national anthem of Taiwan. By signing this underground national anthem out loud, Taiwanese Americans confronted the ghost and turned this bravery into their Taiwanese spirit.
Finale
This year, the last concert song was not “Taiwan the Green” but “America the Beautiful,” a patriotic song with a Christian origin. This choice surprised me. The host explained, “The reason why we can be here to do the things we want to do and sing the song we wanted to sing is because of this beautiful country.” Many Taiwanese Americans converted to Christianity to acquire social networks from churches and assimilate into the Christian-influenced United States society. From my observations in Taiwanese American churches, the support from the pro-democracy Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in the Southern Californian community was essential to forming the Taiwanese identity in the diaspora. For many first-generation Taiwanese Americans, Christianity is tied to the American dream, freedom and safety; however, all that China could deprive.
Although this American dream does not mean that Taiwanese Americans ignore the racial violence in the US or do not identify themselves as Asian, this dream does explain the conservative stance of many first-generation Taiwanese and reveals how Taiwanese approach Asian American racial politics differently. Indeed, the anti-Asian hate creates another haunted fear of Taiwanese Americans. However, resisting this haunted fear in American racial politics means, to some degree, compromising the Taiwanese spirit of fighting the colonial fear they have endured for so long. Several close Taiwanese friends told me their confusion while attending to the Asian Americans’ narrative to fight against anti-Asian Hate because they are classified under the category of Chinese Americans, and the internal conflict between Taiwan and China are invisibilised in such a political field. Simultaneously, this paradox also urged Taiwanese Americans to form another Asian alliance with Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Rohingya, and Uyghur immigrants, the Asian communities who experienced similar colonial oppressions in Asia.
In this 228 commemorative concert, Taiwanese Americans resisted the colonial ghost in the diaspora through music and performance, which responded to Asian/Asian American politics and colonial history. I aimed to open the conversation about the haunted colonial fear of Taiwanese Americans to empower them. I also want to draw more scholarly attention to this internal tension in Asian America. This response to multilayered oppressions from China and the United States has impacted their self-determination and perception within American racial politics. After the concert, the haunted fear still remains. Living in Southern California, I can see that the tension between Taiwanese and Chinese will soon intensify in America. Still, I cannot foresee the result when conflict, anger, anxiety, and fear continue to escalate.
Chun Chia Tai is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Music, University of California, Riverside. She can be reached at ctai004@ucr.edu.
This article was published as part of a special issue on One Year After the Laguna Woods Shooting Tragedy.
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