Written by Wen Liu.
Image credit: 07.02 副總統出席「陳文成博士紀念晚會」 – 50068877552.jpg by 總統府 / Flickr, license: CC BY 2.0 DEED.
Wendy Cheng’s Island X is a new classic study on Taiwanese American lives that bridges between Taiwan Studies and Asian American Studies. In this essay, I want to highlight three major contributions that the book has made, including 1) The importance of understanding Taiwan through the US-China-Taiwan as well as an internationalist stance, 2) the need for Asian American Studies to incorporate diasporic perspectives and geopolitical analysis, and 3) situating Taiwan as a critical epistemological site in Asian American Studies.
An Internationalist Perspective
Since the end of the martial law period, more and more archives have been open to the public. More books have discussed the Cold War period in Taiwan through the triangulated relations between the US, China, and Taiwan. For instance, Hsian-ting Lin’s Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan uses the US’s recently declassified archives to describe the dictator’s internal turmoil in making modern Taiwan in contested geopolitical time. Chen Tsui-lien’s Revisiting the Political History of Post-WarTaiwan: The Triangulated Tug-of-War between the United States, the Kuomintang Government, and Taiwanese Civil Society also took the comparative approach. All these books on Taiwanese history—along with Wendy’s Island X—disputed the myth that the possibility of a modern democratic Taiwan was neither made magically through one leader’s hand (e.g., the common depiction of Chiang Ching-kuo as “the Father of Democracy” rather than an authoritarian leader who executed many tangwai movement leaders) nor simply through the Cold War US imperialist influences that manipulated Taiwan as its subaltern proxy state (as often articulated by Anglophone or American Studies). Instead, it is a result of the triangulation of forces between the US, the Kuomintang (KMT), the tangwai movement in Taiwanese civil society, and the diasporic Taiwanese students’ movement, which is the central focus of this book.
The death of Chen Wen-chen is particularly illuminating in the book. Professor Cheng argues that far from being neutral or benevolent, the instances of Taiwanese students spied on by other Taiwanese on US campuses illustrate the role of US educational institutions as critical sites of Cold War battles. We often understood his death as a critical event that drove the US to take seriously the issues of authoritarian surveillance since Chen was a US citizen, and the Taiwanese American communities took the chance to challenge the KMT surveillance on US campuses. This event not only pushes policy changes in the US but also adds additional pressure on the already heated democratization demands from the Taiwan side.
Chen Wen-chen’s case—along with many other historical examples and live narratives in the book—complicates the political biography of Taiwanese student activism in the US at the time. Usually, the overseas Taiwanese movement is often portrayed as singularly pro-independence and, thus, conservative and anti-Communist. The book shows a much more complicated picture. For instance, as Wendy writes, while in Pittsburgh, Chen Wen-chen became particularly interested in the ideas of the left pro-independence group, Taiwan Era, which took a Marxist-Leninist line and elaborated more profoundly and in a more explicitly internationalist stance, along with an earlier diasporic left publication headquartered in Toronto, Taiwan Revolution. These diasporic groups are not without their internal intellectual and ideological debates, reflecting the US activist political spectrum in the 1970s and 1980s.
An Asian Americanist Perspective
This brings me to my second point; another significant intervention of the book is how it takes on an Asian Americanist approach that also centres on Taiwanese history and voice. One of the reasons that Taiwan and Taiwanese Americans are often erased from Asian American Studies or history is that the field of Asian American Studies emerged in the 1960s at the peak of internationalists’ left politics. Up to today, it continues to skew toward a specific working-class and left politics that is more concerned with US hegemony and the critiques of racial politics domestically. Yet under what Wendy calls the “infrastructure of surveillance,” Taiwanese immigrants were often framed as the “good” and “middle class” immigrants who are also ideologically seen as blinded pro-US. The lack of differentiation between the nation-state, the KMT party, the US influences, and the civil society in Taiwan results in the fact that Taiwan is merely understood as KMT’s “Republic of China” in the Cold War binary framework. It misses the opportunity to see how this group of Taiwanese immigrants calls the present nation-state, the ROC, in question and organizes creatively to achieve human rights and democratization.
Moreover, the centrality of race in Asian American Studies is often eager to create racial politics against assimilation yet neglects how racial politics can also be produced globally, out of the US. In fact, both Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been the hegemonic forces in East Asia to create different ideologies of racial superiority or racial victimhood to counter US influences. By focusing on the US empire and the US only, the field misses the opportunities to engage with the complexity of inter-Asia dynamics on how ethnonationalist forces are forged. And how the Taiwanese subject is, in fact, caught between white assimilationism, Chinese ethnonationalism, and Han settler-colonialism, where some of the key players in the book attempt to rearticulate a new kind of national imagination.
Taiwan as a Critical Epistemological Site in Asian American Studies
Lastly, the book argues how Taiwan can serve as a critical epistemological position in Asian American Studies. As Shu-mei Shih stated provocatively in the 2018 North American Taiwan Studies Association conference, “Taiwan Studies is American Studies,” the book shows how American Studies is also a part of Taiwan Studies. By examining Taiwanese American politics in relation to global politics, multiple state regimes, and Cold War conditions, we can see a fuller picture of how political changes occurred during this period. It is never just the influences of Western abstract liberalism of human rights of democracy, nor one great leader who gave authoritarian rule, but the complex debates and struggles over difficult material conditions across the transpacific that allowed movements to happen. As Wendy states in the concluding chapter, while Taiwanese Americans are often essentialized as the “model minorities,” the state-centric logics observe the historical conditions and hierarchies of power that “deny Taiwanese Americans our full historical subjectivity and complex subjecthood.”
Island X is a timely book articulating how Taiwanese American identity is deeply historically grounded and influenced by multiple transnational forces. The book opens doors for scholars to pursue this understudied subject. In the so-called “Golden Era” for Taiwan Studies, we need an interdisciplinary approach that expands the usual horizons of researching Taiwan through the superpower struggles between the US and China but focuses on the untold lives and stories that complicate the existing narratives.
Wen Liu is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is the author of Feeling Asian American: Racial Flexibility between Assimilation and Oppression (University of Illinois Press, 2024), which investigates Asian American identity formation via its flexible racial status and the psychic narrative of racial injury.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Student Migrants, Campus Spies and Island X‘.
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