In the past few weeks, friends gave me key leads for a couple of places to continue my search for blue nostalgia. (For those of you who only recently joined this blog, I give a brief explanation of blue nostalgia in the second section of my post from a few weeks ago.) Because both of these leads just happened to be in Taoyuan 桃園, I decided to take a field trip out of Taipei for the day and go on the hunt for more blue nostalgia.
Outside of Taiwan, Taoyuan is probably most famous as the home to the country’s main international airport—it is to Taipei as the Wayne County Airport is to Detroit, as Gatwick is to London, or as Narita is to Tokyo. (Taoyuan itself seems to take this in stride, even adopting the tongue-in-cheek slogan, “First stop in Taiwan.”) Taoyuan’s reputation as a place you go through rather than to even extends to public transit; my bus driver tried to warn me off the bus with the (apparently self-explanatory) statement, “This bus is going to Taoyuan.”
Undeterred, I struck out to see the Taoyuan that lies beyond the airport. My two destinations for this trip were another blue nostalgia restaurant, followed by a trip to a public park. Things got surprisingly wild, surprisingly quickly.
The Three Faces in The Army Diner
My first stop was a blue nostalgia restaurant, The Army Diner 陸軍小館. The first thing I noticed upon arriving was the exterior. The façade touts many of the same slogans as Taipei’s The Village Mouth 村子口 (e.g., “Soldiers and civilians are one family” 軍民一家), as well as some that were new to me, like the eight-character slogan “The rise or fall of the nation is everyone’s responsibility” 國家興亡匹夫有責. More immediately obvious is the fact that the left-hand side of Army Diner gives the same roadside food-shack vibes as The Village Mouth. Meanwhile, the clapboard siding of both restaurants is clad in the same teal-bordering-on-spearmint-green paint that I’m rapidly coming to associate with blue nostalgia.
But there were also major differences, and this is where things get wild. First of all, there’s the fact that this place isn’t afraid of a well placed pun. For example, at Army Diner, “Resist communism, defy Russia” 反共抗俄 becomes “Resist work, defy hunger” 反工抗餓, a pun relying on Chinese homophones. Both phrases are pronounced fan gong kang e; by changing the tones, the meaning of the two phrases changes quite drastically, a result that may spark flashbacks for many a Chinese language learner.
Then there’s the first thing that my eyes latched onto after adjusting to the dimly lit interior of the restaurant. Rather than try to describe it … well, see for yourself.
Yes, folks, that is a commemorative Mao plate. Sitting on top of the luwei 滷味 cart. Which is lit with a pink underglow worthy of a Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛 mise-en-scène. And which stands spitting distance from a portrait of Sun Yat-Sen with a Taiwan flag backdrop. (I cannot explain the butterflies.)
Elsewhere, things get wilder. Looming over my seat (the awkward photo angle will give you a feel for the amount of neck-craning that was necessary to take in this vista) was yet another likeness of “Comrade Mao Zedong,” this time in the form of a large poster. In the center of the top shelf to Mao’s right (too blurry to make out clearly, for which I apologize) is another commemorative something-or-other bearing the face of Sun Yat-Sen, while Chiang Kai-Shek beams down on guests from several products placed on the shelf’s far right (an unintentional visual pun, perhaps?) There to keep the peace between the three unlikely shelf-fellows (or so I assume) are a dozen or so collector’s edition “Tatung boys,” mascots of the iconic producer of rice cookers.
As with The Village Mouth 村子口, the collection on the walls of Army Diner bears all the hallmarks of a personal archive. The owner’s military ID card and regimental patches are proudly framed on the wall; an old military weapon, gas mask, and boots are literally locked safely behind bars; and magnets ranging from Taiwanese “national language” (guoyu 國語) campaigns, to Maoist kitsch, to Hello Kitty collectibles (earnable several years ago at 7-11) decorate the various fridges scattered throughout the establishment.
Unlike The Village Mouth, however, the memorabilia on the walls at Army Diner gives off a sense of curation. Part of this is due to the fact that dedicated spot lighting highlights every single display. Clearly, these decorations aren’t just filling wall space, they’re meant to be looked at.
There’s also the question of whether or not all of this is satire. To be honest, it very well could be. But if it is, it’s not lost only on foreigners like me. One review of the restaurant in an online publication quotes a customer who grew up on a military base, who says, “The white lettering and blue background of the anti-communist slogans, the national flags, and the pictures of Sun Yat-Sen and General Chiang—just add a few old waisheng men,1 and it would feel just like home” 白底藍色反共標語、國旗國父蔣公像,再多幾位外省伯伯,就有回家的感覺了.
My initial read of the restaurant based on my single visit is that the blue nostalgia at The Army Diner is mixed with a true desire for better cross-Straits relations. And although this combination leads to a dizzying mashup of iconographies, there are still some constants. Most importantly, the vast majority of the restaurant’s images still point us towards the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, a time when the Taiwanese military held a privileged place in society, and when waisheng citizens lived under a shared myth of return to the Mainland—something that even many of the most devoutly blue descendants of waisheng Taiwanese no longer hope for.
Is it nostalgia? Is it satire? Nostalgic satire? Satirical nostalgia? I don’t know, nor will I until I get back to Taoyuan and eat more delicious noodles (that is, do more fieldwork.)
But I can tell you one thing for certain. My second stop of the day was not satire.
The One Face of Chiang Kai-Shek—One Hundred Times Over
Now, I’m not going to say that many areas of Taiwan were eager to jettison images of Chiang Kai-Shek 蔣介石 after the end of 30-plus years of martial law. I’m just going to say that, given the option to donate lightly used bronze statues of the erstwhile autocrat to a large park in Taoyuan, many provinces, municipalities, and even public schools proved unstintingly generous. (Based on the random sampling of plaques I read, the southern city of Tainan displayed particular largesse.)
Cihu 慈湖 Park, where these statues were rehomed, occupies the site of Chiang’s final residence, which today also serves as his mausoleum. The park is free to the public, as is the small visitor center that provides some rather rosy interpretations of history, while the mausoleum only grants entry to authorized tour groups.
The park announces itself in advance with an enormous bronze of a seated Chiang Kai-Shek beaming out over the entrance to the parking lot. The park itself is idyllic, with beautiful landscaping nestled between lush green hills, bordered by a quiet stream.
Upon entering, it was immediately possible to spot the Chiang statues on the opposite side of the river. But it wasn’t until I drew closer that I realized the sheer density of the statues in the park. You practically can’t move for Chiang statues.
Faced with the quandary of how to organize hundreds of statues all depicting essentially the same thing (barring the one bronze of Chiang Kai-Shek’s son, and a couple stone statues of a rather disgruntled-looking Sun Yat-Sen), Cihu opted for a meta approach. The walking paths are lined by busts of the Generalissimo, while the larger statues are arranged in discreet rings. At the center of each ring is a statue of Chiang, usually seated. Around the perimeter are more statues of Chiang, artfully arranged so that they gaze approvingly at the central statue. If the dictatorial penchant for seeing one’s own image in various shades of bronze reflects a particular brand of narcissism, this park performs that narcissism a hundred times over. It is a giant ode to an autocrat staring approvingly at himself, a fact that no amount of exquisite landscaping can hide.
The rather bizarre experience of looking at Chiang look at himself at the site where people go to look at Chiang’s sarcophagus was highlighted by the incongruously carnivalesque atmosphere that greeted me upon arrival. You see, my Taoyuan trip coincided with the Double-Ten Festival 雙十節, Taiwan’s National Day. As a result, the park was full of food vendors, carnival rides (on my way into the park, one departing visitor remarked delightedly on the spinning teacups), and a performance stage (unfortunately not in use while I was in the park).
Based on my reading about the park online, it seems that the fair attracted a more upbeat crowd than the usual parkgoing set. In fact, you were just as likely to see children climbing on the statues, or large groups posing for silly shots in and amongst the forest of Chiangs as you were to see visitors engaged in solemn contemplation of the park’s bronze denizens. On the other hand, the unused pieces of merry-go-round that were littered artfully amongst the statues added to the park’s distinct field-of-broken-dreams aesthetic. And it certainly provided more food for thought about what blue nostalgia looks like, 35-odd years after the end of martial law.
The Many Faces of Blue Nostalgia
My day started in a personal museum to the KMT era (with some excellent noodles and a dash of Mao thrown in for good measure), and ended in a highly aestheticized dumping ground for statues from Taiwan’s authoritarian past.
It would be hard to describe a massive, unironically displayed collection of Chiang Kai-Shek bronzes as anything but blue nostalgia, even if this exercise in blue nostalgia simply arose from a brain-storming session about what to do with a heap of bronze-colored, larger-than-life white elephants. At the same time, the park has clearly become part of an effort to rebrand the KMT past, up to and including the cutely cartoonish bronzes of Chiang Kai-Shek and his son that sit outside the information center.
On the other hand, The Army Diner is a study in contrasts, both with itself and with the other blue nostalgia sites I’ve visited to date. The diner’s bafflingly eclectic iconography—simultaneously devoted to Taiwan’s armed forces and unwilling to let a good piece of Mao kitsch go to waste—calls into question whether this is a shrine to blue nostalgia or culinary satire. At the same time, it’s a reminder that nostalgia for a past era is never simple, never monolithic, and always deeply personal, even (or perhaps especially) when that nostalgia is married to fraught politics.
It’s dangerous to try and draw too many parallels between unlike cases. This can flatten out important differences and impede understanding of local experiences. But whether we’re talking blue nostalgia, China’s red revival, Brexit, MAGA, or Putin’s neo-Soviet hubris, nostalgia seems to be an integral part of the zeitgeist of the 2020s.
Everyday spaces like diners and public parks not only allow us to consider the ways that this nostalgia is constructed in the mundane spaces of daily life, but also allow us to observe how nostalgia is naturalized and normalized. For me, that’s more than worth the price of a bowl of noodles.
The idea of waisheng ren 外省人 and bensheng ren 本省人 is a holdover from the KMT era. The former were refugees from the Mainland who arrived in Taiwan after 1949, while the latter predate the KMT’s arrival. This classification persisted for decades after the KMT arrived in Taiwan, and affected everything from social circles and schooling to professional opportunities.