Written by Chee-Hann Wu
Image credit: Provided by author. The Jing-mei White Terror Memorial Park.
A church lies within less than a two-minute walk of the elementary school I attended in Taipei. For six years and many more after school, I have passed the always-brightly-lit church countless times. I enjoyed seeing people enter and exit the church with smiles, and occasionally peeping through the large glass windows to see what was inside. Yet, something has never left my mind. I vaguely recalled my parents mentioning that the church used to be someone else’s home, and something horrifying had happened that made them decide to turn it into a church. Used to adults’ preference for ambiguity about many things, my younger self was unbothered then, not to mention that I barely knew what a church was. The only thing I comprehended was that this church was different, unique. The memory of it then slowly blurred. The church was still there, but I rarely passed by again after entering junior high and later high school.
Fast-forward a few years, and when back in college, I began tutoring two siblings in English. They happened to live in an apartment close to the church. I gave them lectures twice a week at their home after school (the same elementary school I went to) and stayed until 6:30 or 7 pm. During winter, it became a bit depressing to spend all your energy on two kids and see the sky already dim by the time you got home. The always-brightly-lit church next door became a comfort. Nothing had quite changed – the outside of the church still looked clean and orderly as always, the porch lamp and lights coming through the large glass windows making the church the brightest presence of the quiet, dimly lit street.
I told my mom that I passed by the church one day. While making dinner, she responded nonchalantly, “You know that it is where the Lin family murders happened, right?” I was puzzled. Of course, I knew about the horrifying event, which remains unsolved. And certainly, I was more than familiar with the Gi-kong Church (義光教會) that had always been there. But I did not know.
I was, perhaps, like many of my generation and the ones before, who knew but also didn’t. I wrote about the amnesic and delayed response to the trauma of the White Terror in my dissertation a decade later. We rarely directly talk about what happened for the fact that the pain was both distant and yet too close. Many of us learn about the White Terror from literature, films, and other media. The second-hand, mediated, postmemory, or what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory,” often becomes our primary source of emotional association and civic knowledge about public history.
This is exactly why Taiwan’s upcoming film The Century Bloodshed (世紀血案) has flared distress, if not outright outrage, a feeling that soon intensified.
Based on the 1980 Lin family murders, The Century Bloodshed has sparked fury, first for the cast members’ too-cheerful demeanour in the face of a real tragedy and their problematic comments at the press conference, and then, more severely, for the film being made without the consent of the victims’ family.
Soon after the press conference, commentators, alongside the public, flooded in and condemned the production. The actors then called out the production company, which already had a history of misinterpreting political incidents, for deliberately concealing that it had never obtained authorisation, threatened to take legal action, and urged that the film’s release be blocked. The director, Hsu Kun-hua (徐琨華), apologised amid broader debates about historical sensitivity and his family background. There were other controversies surrounding the film, such as the commodification of other people’s trauma, the insinuation of a “true murderer,” which may involve distorting the incident, a misleading narrative, an attempt to depoliticise the incident, and unknown sources of funding, among others.
Despite the event’s complexity, I want to focus on the ethics of storytelling from the perspective of someone who has taught college students in drama and theatre. I explained the controversy to my students a week after the press conference while discussing ethical duties as artists and storytellers. Below is a selected assemblage of our thoughts. It is genuine and aims at critical engagement, without pretending to be comprehensive or scholarly.
We tell stories that matter.
It is undoubtedly true that every story is, to some extent, inspired by real life. Artists take inspiration from everything surrounding them, big or small. Through their unique lens, approach and interpretation, these everyday experiences and imageries magically transform into captivating stories and exquisite artworks. It will be too good to be true if this is the only thing that one needs to do to make art. There is not only a much more complex psychological process at work in the artist, but also a practical, technical one, in particular, a critical debate about why I am to tell the story, how it should be told, and where I see myself in relation to the story. Artmaking unfolds through the dynamic interaction of many intricately connected factors and concerns.
This complexity becomes particularly pronounced when artists engage with fictional or semi-fictional narratives based on or inspired by traumatic and painful historical events. Broadly speaking, there are many different approaches to storytelling based on real events, and I will focus on three here. The first draws on real historical conditions without explicitly referencing a specific event. If we take the White Terror as an example of historical references, the video game and its TV and film adaptations fall into this category. While many note that Detention (返校) is based on a real-life event at Keelung Middle School in 1949, the work makes little explicit reference to it. The second directly invokes traumatic history yet frames it as a collective experience rather than an individual life story, with implicit connections to the actual historical incidents and figures. The award-winning VR short film The Man Who Couldn’t Leave (無法離開的人) and the recently released film A Foggy Tale (大濛) can be examples. Finally, a story may centre on a particular person’s experience, with the artist working with the subject’s consent to translate that lived history into art. Flip Flops Theatre’s Lala: The Singing Bear and I Promised I Wouldn’t Cry are retellings of the White Terror victims’ stories, Tsai Kun-lin and Chin Him-san’s accounts of imprisonment, performed through children’s puppetry.
The Lin family murders are not like any other murder case. It is a cold case in which the perpetrators have not been brought to justice. The murders occurred during the White Terror period, when Lin Yi-hsiung was arrested following the Formosa Incident in 1979. On the day of the murders, Lin was at a court trial accompanied by his wife. Back home, his mother and two daughters were killed, and another daughter was found in critical condition. The lack of transparency in the investigation, the state interference, its unresolved status, and the many coincidences further complicate the case.
For stories about the White Terror, unlike other stories based on real events, more factors must be considered when shaping the narrative. Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇), the current member of the Control Yuan, Lin Yi-hsiung’s assistant at the time of the murder and the first witness to it, shared in an interview that many stories surrounding the family murder have been distorted. False information and rumours were spread under state surveillance during the White Terror to alter the public perception of this case. Even after the lifting of martial law, it is still difficult to “tell the truth” without being questioned.
Additionally, the White Terror is not only a recent history but also a reality that many people still suffer from and live with. Telling stories of trauma is never taboo; they deserve to be told and heard. For those like myself who were born after the lifting of martial law, we learn about the White Terror secondhand, mostly from the media, some fictional, some not, and some a mixture of both. This is why representations and interpretations – how the stories are told – matter even more.
Storytellers need heightened self-awareness when providing access to people who wish to know more about this past through their work. Involving researchers on the White Terror and transitional justice will also be central to contextualising the story and its telling. In my class, we often relate such an awareness to the carefully chosen “language” we use – the thoughts, narrative, and essentially, the spirit of a story.
Additionally, this responsibility lies with both storytellers and spectators, highlighting the necessity to educate ourselves regardless of our roles. The feeling of needing to know more about the past has been manifested in the emergence of the “make-up history class” phenomenon in Taiwan, which raises public awareness of engaging the younger generation in a dialogue with national history before it fades, after “The Century Bloodshed” controversy. People recognise the lack of sufficient knowledge on this horrific history, including the 228 Incident, the White Terror, and even the lingering struggles after the democratisation. Many start visiting memorials and museums and looking into relevant historical information in archives online and in person. The Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park reportedly received the highest number of visitors since its inauguration.
It is frustrating that public attention on this history is sparked by a heatedly discussed film on trending social media like “The Century Bloodshed”, but it is admirable that the public is taking the initiative to learn about the past, and it is also appreciated that we live in a time where many resources are already available, including official documents, reports and memorials, as well as other creative pieces that shed light on the traumatic past in a more ethical manner. In the second part of this article, I will continue to discuss the ethics of storytelling through a critical reflection on artistic storytelling.
Chee-Hann Wu is an assistant professor and faculty fellow in Theatre Studies at New York University. She is drawn to the performance of, by, and with nonhumans, including but not limited to objects, puppets, ecology, and technology. Chee-Hann has recently published two journal articles, exploring Taiwan’s White Terror memories through the video game Detention and children’s puppet theatre. Another contribution to an edited volume on the White Terror-themed VR short film, The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, is forthcoming. She is also a part of the crowd who have been taking “make-up classes” on Taiwan’s past history in recent years.
This article was published as part of a special issue on “Thirty-Nine Years after Martial Law: Fractured Truths, Silence, and Unconscious Forgetting“.
Taiwan Insight 