Review: Green Island: A Novel

Got a nice chair for you to curl up with this book

Green Island: A Novel
Shawna Yang Ryan
401 pages
Knopf

"Who won the war, Kane?"
"I did."
"You didn't win a thing, Kane. You only survived."
"It means the same thing."
"But there must be more to victory than just survival."
Kane nodded to the fallen as he carried her from the temple. "Ask them now. Ask me in a hundred years."

This book has been watching me.

A few weeks ago the writer's publicist sent me a copy so I could review it. It has sat on my desk, watching me, drumming its fingers on my table, dropping little hints that I was procrastinating.

I was, because this is a deeply personal book for me. I spent a lot of time crying while reading it, and only read it a few pages at a time. I have been listening to the story that Ryan tells since 1989, and especially since 1991, when I began working at the Center for Taiwan International Relations in Washington, DC, which was run by WUFI, one of the more "radical" independence groups. There Taiwanese in their 40s and 50s would tell me stories about Taiwan under martial law, how their parents had spoken Japanese to them and considered themselves Japanese. How they have been arrested, detained, tortured, just like the people in this novel. How they had come to America, run businesses or worked for the government or done science. How they were blacklisted and could never return to Taiwan. How they hated the KMT.

I was young then, and quite stupid. Now I am not young. Those stories were one thing I experienced, but I also experienced another thing in the movement, which I shoved into the past and try not to think about but have carried with me all these years: the bickering, the blithering, blinkered incompetence, the needless amateurishness, the lack of calculation, the short-termism, the constant infighting, the inability to set aside personalities and work together, the ruthless exploitation of fellow beings, the struggle for control, the lies and betrayals, and the demand from people above me that I tell lies and betray. That generation of the Taiwan independence movement in the US was full of... human beings.

All of this is in the book: Shawna Yang Ryan has captured these stories, presenting a kind of universal story of how these human beings in Taiwan lived and loved and endured. Their stories are not about triumph, but betrayal -- the terrible betrayal of 1945 engendered, like Zeus on Leda, a cascade of calamities, all betrayals, of everything from Allied promises, to democracy to friendship to marriage vows, bent and broken under the savage weight of martial law. In the end the Taiwanese, like the people in the story, did not so much triumph as survive.

The narrator of the story is born on March 1, 1947, her mother having gone into labor as the 2-28 revolt was beginning. Two weeks later her father is picked up by the police. The family loses everything. The narrator's life then takes her through the martial law era, the US in the 80s and the Henry Liu murder, and numerous other events that shaped the Taiwanese consciousness of that generation, so different from this one. It is also the tale of the Taiwanese encounter with the US -- from servicemen to American officials, and how that shaped them. If this is a tale of how the Taiwanese endured, it is also -- perhaps truly -- a tale of how the women endured, for each man who fought the regime and was taken into custody, betrayed his family by leaving them in poverty and uncertainty.

Green Island is powerful. The history is chronicled without romance. The prose is lyrical, full of concrete details. The dialogue is perfect -- so very Taiwanese, with more left unsaid than said. The tone is bittersweet. The lives are full to overflowing.

Read it.
_______________
REFS

• Interview with writer Shawna Yang Ryan at New Bloom
• Interview with Ryan at Bookish.Asia
• Ryan talking about the novel and the writing process on Youtube

_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Hong Kong Movie Star Contracted to Whack Hsu Hsin-liang?

The Taipei Times came out with an interesting report that a Hong Kong movie star, Jimmy Wang (Wang Yu), has claimed that he was contacted about a murder for hire by the KMT. The intended victim was Hsu Hsin-liang, the former democracy activist and DPP Chairman, who switched sides at the end of the 1990s and now works against the DPP.

In an interview published on Monday, Wang told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister paper) that the KMT had asked him to assassinate Hsu, who was living in the US at the time.

Hsu fled to the US in 1979 during a security crackdown on Taiwanese independence advocates and lived there for 10 years.

It might seem weird to some readers that the KMT would use a movie star for a contract killing. Oddly, for some reason the Taipei Times did not report the all-important back story. The fact is that Jimmy Wang is reputedly a notorious gangster with longstanding connections to the Taiwan gangs, and the period in which he says he was contacted was the period in which the KMT was using gangsters to carry out hits overseas, like the killing of Henry Liu in 1984. The Taiwan News has a much richer presentation:

Hsu, whose life is full of twists and legends, was a front-runner in initiating a series of democratic movements in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s. Wang [MT: they mean Hsu, it's a typo] joined the KMT when he studied at National Cheng Chi University. But the former KMT authority later regarded him [Hsu] as a political dissident after he insisted on running for Taoyuan County magistrate in 1977, which later triggered the Chungli Incident. Hsu was forced into a 10-year-exile in the U.S. since 1979, but he continued to push for Taiwan's democracy and anti-Kuomintang ideology by launching a weekly paper in the U.S.

Wang came into the media spotlight after his involvement in a bloody gang fight in the 1980s.

According to the Liberty Time report, Hsu's assistant on Sunday denied that he ever heard the story of the KMT giving orders to assassinate him during his stay in the U.S. But Hsu's brother, Hsu Kuo-tai, a former legislator, told local cable news station TVBS yesterday that he knew about the assassination mission. "We all knew that the KMT put Hsu Hsin-liang as the top target when he was in exile. But after the Chiang Nan murder case in 1984, the assassination mission of Hsu was canceled," Hsu Kuo-tai told TVBS.

The "Chiang Nan Murder Case," involved the political assassination of Liu Yi-liang, [MT -- Henry Liu] pen name "Chiang Nan," who published his thesis topic "The Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo" for his doctoral degree at Washington University. The publication immediately drew attention from the Military Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of Defense in Taiwan.

The bureau then came to Chen Chi-li, head of the Bamboo Union gang, and asked him to murder Liu, saying that the mission was a patriotic act. However, the KMT regime later betrayed Chen and sentenced him to life in prison after Chen successfully carried out the assassination mission.

Chen escaped to Cambodia to avoid life imprisonment and stayed there for 11 years. He never returned to Taiwan after the Chiang Nan murder case and died of cancer at the age of 66 in Hong Kong earlier this month.

Wang was quoted in the report as saying that the reason he disclosed the KMT's assassination of Hsu Hsin-liang to the media was because he owed Chen a debt of gratitude. Chen had helped Wang solve the bloody gang fight case during the early '80s.

Chen Chi-li died recently (ESWN discusses Chen's death -- scroll down to 009), and his body was returned to Taiwan amidst much gangster fanfare. Although it might seem odd that Chen Chi-li ran off to Cambodia, the country is in fact a site of operations for the Bamboo Union gang, the notorious pro-KMT gang that Chen Chi-li once headed.

[Taiwan]