Contents:
Part I: On Navigation
Part II: On Nightmares
Part III: On Nostalgia and Nation
On Nostalgia
After wandering back from the museum, the guesthouse owners kindly drove us into town for dinner—I highly recommend the restaurant called Crazy Fried (named in Chinese with the delightful double-negative, “Cannot Not Be Stir-Fried” 非炒不可), followed by the surprisingly palatable seaweed mochi desserts sold at Master Tang’s 唐師傅. (You can’t miss it—not only is Master Tang’s located in the opposite half of the semi-detached in which resides the island’s only 7-Eleven, it is also advertised by a strangely buxom mascot whom I might best describe as the balletic love child of a turnip and Betty Boop, all topped off with a high-fiber fascinator to which Flounder from The Little Mermaid has been affixed.)
Upon arriving back home after dinner (once again courtesy of the guesthouse van), Ryan’s presence transformed my trip. As we were visiting before the start of the main tourist season on Green Island, we were the inn’s only guests. The guesthouse owners are a gregariously gabby pair, with an equally social tabby cat, and a teenage son who is well on his way to being a match for all three. Apparently having exhausted the conversational possibilities around my morbid fascination with the prison, the owner turned to the next available conversation source and asked if this was Ryan’s first visit to the island.
As it turns out, it was not—far from it. Ryan’s father, the youngest of nine children, was born and raised on the island, and part of the family still lives there. As such, growing up, Ryan came to the island once every few years to visit family. (Ryan’s familiarity with the island is, in fact, part of why he offered to accompany me.)
After a few more probing questions, our innkeeper not only corrected identified the neighborhood to which Ryan traces his paternal roots, but after learning the given name of Ryan’s father, he was able to correctly identify some of Ryan’s relatives.1 In fact, their grandmothers may be sisters? Or maybe it’s cousins? Anyway, Green Island is a small place, and they’re distantly related.
Having established some sort of insider status, the owners plopped themselves down at the breakfast table and settled in for a long natter. What unfolded was a remarkable narration of the role of the prison, as well as local perceptions of it, as told from the perspective of two Green Islanders who now work in the tourism industry. (Unlike the husband, the wife was not actually born and raised on Green Island, but she has lived there for decades now, and has clearly imbibed the local knowledge about the prison.)
Among many other things, we learned a bit more about the politics of the island, and the way in which they have at times been affected by national and even global political currents. The owner’s grandfather was a two-term mayor of Green Island Village, which under normal circumstances would have meant that he was in office for a total of eight years. However, the death of Chiang Kai-Shek during the mayor’s second term caused all elections to be delayed by several months. Our innkeepers were also quite certain that elections were postponed during the mayor’s first term, possibly due to Taiwan’s removal from the UN.
Whatever the reasons, the innkeeper’s grandfather served as mayor for a total of nine years. During this time, he was instrumental in overseeing the prisons. Allegedly, there is even a photo of him welcoming Chiang Kai-Shek to the island on one of the Generalissimo’s inspection tours. While many of my friends in Taipei would most likely have found this kind of family photo to be a source of extreme discomfort, it was clearly a source of pride in this politically deep-blue enclave.
Many of the stories my hosts told gave the impression of fond nostalgia. For example, in addition to the concentration camps, Green Island also hosted a large military camp during 1970s. Our host recalls the entertainment once provided by heavy artillery rolling up the street, and speaks fondly of pickup basketball games between military conscripts and the local youth.2 If there was any resentment toward the soldiers, it was for the fact that “they liked Green Island girls,” and many local girls were “taken away” by the soldiers they married.
Our hosts did not question that many people were wrongly held in the prison. In fact, they agreed many of the incarcerated were there on laughable grounds. That said, they questioned the harshness of the prisoners’ living conditions. Our innkeeper remembers as a child running in and out of the prison complex, grabbing meals in the canteen, and watching film screenings in the main hall with the prisoners, which he took as proof that the prison was not the sealed-off concentration camp it is often made out to be in movies like Untold Herstory 流麻溝十五號, a recent historical film that focuses on the plight of the female inmates at New Life. Husband and wife also also cited several examples of former inmates who chose to remain on the island after their release.
The fact that certain prisoners were free to walk around the island during the day, only needing to return to the prison at night, was also an important detail to our hosts. In fact, they relayed what they described as a commonly told local joke: from the 1950s to the 1970s, if you wanted the best education or medical care, you went to Green Island, since that’s where all of the top scholars and doctors were.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack in this “joke,” not least because there’s more than a grain of truth to the idea that the government sponsored mass roundups of academics and artists, particularly during the early years of the White Terror. (The owners also laughed that Green Island was the place to be if you were a fan of mob culture. Many of the most notorious mobsters of the era were imprisoned there and, according to my interlocutors, the island subsequently saw an influx of discreet black luxury vehicles to ferry family members from the harbor to the prison.)
Like the prisoners who could volunteer for agricultural or slogan-carving duties, prisoners with academic qualifications could volunteer to teach in local schools. Now, on the one hand, the idea of a top physicist trying to teach basic numeracy to second graders is the stuff of pedagogical nightmares. But because leading intellectuals taught grade school classes on Green Island from the 1950s-1970s, students really did receive instruction from the most accomplished academics of the time. This also helps explain parental the nostalgia for that era. Today, students who want to pursue an education past middle school are forced to leave the island and attend boarding schools in other cities, a situation that prompted one of our guesthouse owners to describe childhood on Green Island as “really hard.”
The kinds of “freedoms” afforded certain prisoners sheds some light on the narrative, heard both from our innkeepers and from Human Rights Museum employees, that Green Islanders did what they could to make the lives of prisoners better. For example, the fact that local teachers were also prisoners in no way diminishes the respect accorded to them by average community members, at least in the telling of my interlocutors.
But we should also take this statement with a grain of salt. In the words of proprietors, most Green Islanders used to be “civil servants” 公務人員. Now, let me put this in perspective: Green Island is small enough that public utilities don’t keep offices on the island. Instead, they send somebody to the island once every month or two, and that person goes door to door to collect payment. If you’re not home, neighbors tell the utility worker where in town to find you. Local services like the post office are similarly sparsely staffed. So when the owners say “most Green Islanders” were “civil servants,” I can only assume that they are referring to work in the prison.3
It’s clear that some prisoners were afforded some limited degree of freedom. But despite the selective permeability of the prison walls, significant areas of the prison clearly maintained inhumane conditions. And, of course, all of these exceptions occurred within the context of flagrant human rights violations such as extrajudicial detentions, incarcerations based on flimsy suspicions about prisoners’ political inclinations, and forced confessions.
All protestations aside, it seems safe to assume that overall prison conditions were known to a non-trivial proportion of Green Island’s population. From this perspective, there are compelling to assume that Green Islanders have a vested interest in highlighting the subset of prisoners that was afforded some sort of limited freedom, including the “choice” to work in settings beyond the prison walls.
The issue of choice brings me to the final recurring theme of my brief stay on Green Island. Clearly, the prisoners on Green Island were deprived of anything even remotely resembling choice. But my tour guide at the museum and the proprietors of my guesthouse all pointed out that Green Island residents also had no choice. Green Islanders did not petition for the government to open its most notorious prison on the island. They did not ask for the area of the island once devoted to rice cultivation to be converted into a massive carceral complex, nor did they ask for policies that led to the decline of the island’s fishing industry.
With most traditional livelihoods vanishing, residents had little choice other than to fill the new demand for “civil servants.” These constrained economic possibilities also complicate any efforts to create a clear-cut metric by which to assign blame, at least on the local operational level. Our tour guide at the museum calmly yet forcefully detailed prisoners’ victimization. Yet even this individual, whose views about human rights violations on the island are clearly more liberal than those of our innkeepers, explicitly rejects a blanket label of “victimizer” for prison workers.
In many ways, my trip to Green Island provided a window into the conversations about national politics and identity that I frequently encounter in Taipei. This window, however, looked over the political and social landscapes from a very different angle, whether discussing the legacy of devotion to the KMT, complex associations with past injustices, changing economic and political circumstances, or questions about who is ultimately responsible for Taiwan’s democratization. As such, Green Island manages to be both a microcosm of Taiwan and hyper-local in its experience of national history.
On Nation
It’s hard not to compare my trip to Green Island with my time at the Gong Sheng Music Festival (GSMF) 共生音樂節 back in February. At the GSMF, the crowd skewed young, liberal, and activist. On Green Island, daytrippers skewed young, politically undisclosed, and lightly buzzed, while locals skew older, conservative, and content with—or at least reconciled to—the status quo.
On the activist end of the spectrum, people ranging from our tour guide at the Human Rights Museum to high-profile politicians like Miao Po-ya argue that the continuing lack of clarity about the whys and hows of the White Terror prevents full restitution for victims. They regard the government’s failure to unseal records related to the White Terror as a failure of accountability. And they argue that this lack of clarity and accountability makes it impossible to gauge if existing legal guardrails are adequate to protect against future human rights abuses.
On the reconciled end of the spectrum, my innkeepers are quick to point out that human rights monuments like Green Island’s White Terror Memorial Park were approved and funded by KMT leader Lee Teng-hui, not by his more progressive successors. To these two Green Islanders, the material conditions of daily life have vastly improved over the past few decades, and it seems inconceivable that one would risk all of that for the sake of something that is, in their minds, over and done.
And finally, we have the moped-riding revelers of Green Island cruising blissfully past the front gate of one of Taiwan’s most notorious prisons. Their ability to carry on with their spring-breaking, even in the shadow of the New Life Correction Center and Oasis Villa, reminds me of fears, stated repeatedly by organizers of the GSMF, that younger generations are beginning to forget about the atrocities of the past.
When attending an event like the GSMF, or the 228 documentary screenings I attended in Kaohsiung, it is easy to feel that memories of Taiwan’s 228 Incident, White Terror, and martial law era remain in rude health. On the other hand, Ryan and I composed between 50% and 75% of the visitors to the Human Rights Museum on two consecutive days. This in spite of the fact that accommodations on the island were almost fully booked weeks in advance of the island’s peak tourist season, which doesn’t begin until May. In the face of this kind of experience, it becomes easier to imagine how memories of the White Terror might be relegated to the more arcane corners of historical research.
Maybe I’m fretting over nothing. Maybe there is a point to the calls to look forward, move on, make a clean break with the past. Maybe my innkeeper was correct when he said, “As long as people can earn a living, that’s all that matters.” Maybe Taiwan’s erstwhile Culture Minister Lung Yingtai is right in citing her “deeply tanned farmer” friends to suggest that “accommodation with China” is the better part of valor. Surely it will all work out, just as it has for Hong Kong—just ask Missy Hyper, Vawongsir, or Fly. (Never mind that Lung Yingtai’s rather ambiguous position also conveniently aligns with the nascent platform of thelikely presidential candidate for the political party with which she made her career, or that this just happens to be the party that operated the political prisons on Green Island.)
And yet, living through our present moment, I can’t help but think this is just a means to kick the can with tooth-shattering force into the faces of those standing further down the road. Over the last few years, a partial list of societal relapses includes the reemergence of American white supremacy as a mainstream political force; the rise of jingoistic forms of Chinese nationalism; Modi’s Hindu hypernationalism; Putin’s unhinged expansionism; Britain’s disingenuous grounds for withdrawal from the EU and subsequent threats to unilaterally dissolve the very protocols that facilitated Brexit; and of course, a depressingly predictable front-runner in the primary race to represent America’s “party of limited government.”
If I may be so bold as to borrow from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel,4 it is hard not to feel like this Scheißsturm built on roughly the scale of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is partly the result of a failure to adequately address the past injustices of American slavery, China’s Maoist era, Russia’s post-Soviet resentments, India’s post-Partition religious traumas, England’s imperialist fantasies, or America’s recent trend of literal, actual insurrection. And before you @ me, I am fully aware that there are very complex social, political, and economic reasons for each of these developments. I’m also aware that this collection of examples isn’t just a case of apples and oranges, but is more like a comparative study of the various malodorous chunks of a massive, moldering fruit cocktail. Nevertheless, I stand by the idea that making a “clean break with the past,” rather than making a clean breast of it, has allowed emotionally powerful and democratically ruinous mythologies to persist in the face of all historical data to the contrary, contributing substantively to fecal firestorm by which we are currently inundated.
Last October, after attending Taiwan’s National Day celebrations, I wrote, “Soon, perhaps sooner than anyone had anticipated, it will be necessary for world democracies to decide whether or not they stand with Taiwan … not just as a homeland, but as a sovereign nation.”
Election cycles in the coming years will also require hard choices here in Taiwan. The kinds of choices that need to be made are not easy, the discussions will not be not happy, and the conclusions will never be unanimous. And yet, the way in which Green Island brings together the rememberers, the would-be forgetters, and the blissfully oblivious reveals the complexity of the fissures in contemporary Taiwanese society.
With these conversations coming to a head with ever greater urgency, I’m grateful for sites like Green Island. Here, a decommissioned concentration camp stands as a testament to the past, and a booming tourism trade has emerged as symbol of openness and prosperity for the future. Here, deep blue local politics and somber national memorials collide against a backdrop of hedonistic holiday-goers.
Ultimately, I hope that the difficult, fractious debates spurred by sites of remembrance and memorialization like Green Island can remind everyone that the conversations of the present will one day be the conversations of the past. And although it’s impossible to know how today’s conversations will be mis/interpreted and ab/used in future discourse, I hope that the enduring material and social legacies represented by Green Island will remind everyone that decisions made for the sake of expediency all too often come back to haunt us.
The question is, which specter do we hope will show up at the feast of future generations?
In some traditional Sinophone naming traditions, all family members share the same surname, followed by two-character given name, starting with a “generation name” which is shared by all members of the same generation, and then ending with a unique character. This “generation name” is how the owner made the connection to Ryan’s extended family.
Taiwan has almost always had mandatory military service for men. The requirements had been steadily reduced over the years to the current requirement of 4 months, largely in response to lines of communications between China and Taiwan that were reestablished in the late 1980s. However, in the face of rising uncertainty and decaying political relations in the region, this requirement will rise once again to a full year of service as of 2024.
Local population statistics as far back as the 1960s and 70s are very difficult to find (especially since I’m not going to travel to the National Bureau of Statistics archive for this blog post). The furthest back I was able to find was 1986, which is past the peak numbers of incarceration on the island. Nevertheless, at that time, Green Island Village was home to 3,106 residents. (Department of Household Registration, Ministry of the Interior, “03. 鄉鎮戶數及人口數,” 1986.) When we consider that I’ve seen multiple sites list more than 2,000 “civil servants” on Green Island, this suggests that well over half of the island’s total population may have been employed in the prisons at one time.
In reality, Merkel used the original English, which in turn caused its own Scheißsturm. Operating under the assumption that using foreign languages always sounds classier, even for unmentionables, I have opted for the German rendition of the word.