Where Alcatraz Meets Acapulco (pt. 2)

Nightmares on Taiwan’s Prison Island

Contents:

Part I: On Navigation

Part II: On Nightmares

Part III: On Nostalgia and Nation

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On Nightmares

Even inside the prison, the sense of holiday revelries did not immediately dissipate. Just through the front gate, we encountered a large-ish tour group taking photos on their way out of the building. We arrived at the end the session, just in time to see the “finger heart” photo (ubiquitous enough in these parts that it warrants its own article on the Cathay Pacific website).

The smiling photographees were starkly at odds with the grim surroundings. Faded propaganda paintings and slogans on the concrete walls, a barren exercise track area (presumably blisteringly hot during the Taiwanese summer), and turreted watchtowers are not exactly a prelude to a picnic or the opening salvo to a day of beachside sunbathing.

A fading mural of a soldier on the interior wall of the New Life Correction Center, next to the slogan, “Steadfastly oppose communism” 堅定反共. To the right, a pair of rhyming slogans warns, “Taiwanese independence equals Taiwanese poison; communism [common property] equals common suffering” 臺獨即臺毒 共產即共慘.

Before going on, I should point out that “the prison” is in fact two prisons. The first prison, composed primarily of very rudimentary wooden structures, was known as the New Life Correction Center 新生訓導處—this was the prison that opened in the 1950s to house political prisoners, including many intellectuals who were rounded up in the wake of the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan. The second section, a more modern concrete structure built in the early 1970s that is euphemistically named “Oasis Villa” 綠洲山莊, houses the museum’s main reception area. It was in this “Oasis Villa” that I spent the entirety of my first, brief trip to the Green Island prison.

I say that Oasis Villa is “more modern,” and this is true. This does not make it any less forbidding. Heavy steel doors block off sightlines within the prison, and layers of gates and bars keep the wings of the main prison building separated from one another. Deep inside the prison, in the solitary confinement area, small rooms with a single barred window face into a tiny courtyard with the character qing 清, meaning “to purify,” inscribed in the middle. The doors and walls of several rooms in this area are swathed in thick padding abundantly splattered with rust-brown stains.

The windows of the solitary confinement cells look out into a dim courtyard filled with pine trees. On the ground, a rusting metal inscription stating simply qing 清, “purify,” can be seen from the windows facing into the courtyard.

The next morning, I returned to the museum for a guided tour (highly recommended for all, particularly if you speak Chinese). Like everything else at the museum, the tour is constructed thoughtfully, guided knowledgeably, and is completely free of charge.

One of the reasons I recommend the guided tour is that it takes you into certain locked areas of Oasis Villa with special exhibitions. These include glimpses of a staged version of the prison store, where inmates lucky enough to have access to cash could purchase extra food, paper, cigarettes, and even some Chinese medicine. Elsewhere, a larger cell contains a reconstruction of the barbershop where inmates could earn some money cutting the hair of prison wardens. (Prisoners, on the other hand, received no such customized treatment. They were unceremoniously shorn in the central atrium of the main prison building.)

Cell doors were left unlocked in minimum-security areas, with only the main gate at the end of the hallway keeping inmates locked in. This enabled prisoners to move between rooms during the day. Nevertheless, conditions were extremely trying. Little air circulates in the brutal heat, toilet facilities were primitive and completely un-private, and there was only infrequent access to bathing facilities. Meanwhile, life-sized cardboard cutouts of prisoners in a cell attest to how overcrowded conditions would have been, with a single small cell housing upwards of a dozen inmates.

Lifesize cardboard cutouts of prisoners at Oasis Villa give an idea of both how crowded and how spartan conditions would have been for inmates.

The walls of the hallway outside the cells hold more personalized stories of prisoners, particularly those who were held mistakenly.¹ These stories are largely the product of oral history projects conducted by employees of and researchers affiliated with the Human Rights Museum, including the docent for our tour.

One former inmate with whom our guide has worked is a Malaysian national, Chen Qinsheng, who originally came to Taiwan as a graduate student in engineering. Imprisoned based on a false confession extracted under torture by Taiwan’s secret police, he ended up spending over a decade in prison. Throughout much of that time, his family members in Malaysia were unaware of whether or not he was still alive. This uncertainty was made worse when Chen’s mother made a trip to Green Island to track down her son. Possessing only limited Chinese, the mother mistakenly went to the wrong prison, where she was told that her son was not there.

Even after Chen’s release, he found himself stranded in a semi-stateless condition. His identity papers had long since vanished and, lacking the means to prove his identity to the Malaysian authorities, he was neither able to apply for work visas in Taiwan, nor able to leave the country. Ultimately, he stayed in Taiwan as a human rights activist. As recently as 2022, Chen remained actively engaged in human rights advocacy, serving as Nancy Pelosi’s tour guide at Taiwan’s Human Rights Memorial during her highly combustible visit to the island nation.

A propaganda slogan and the flag of the Kuomintang carved into a hill outside Oasis Villa are still partially visible under the encroaching foliage. Ironically, the only character visible to inmates inside the prison would have been wu 毋, meaning simply “don’t.”

The tour also covered the New Life Correction Center, built about 20 years before Oasis Villa, immediately after the KMT decamped to Taiwan. This original space is far more expansive than Oasis Villa, and speaks to the scale of detentions undertaken in the early days of Taiwan’s White Terror. This would have been the facility that held many of Taiwan’s leading intellectuals, including possibly literary scholar Yeh Shih-Tao 葉石濤. In the 2022 documentary Yeh Shih-Tao: A Taiwan Man 台灣男子葉石濤, Yeh’s friends recall that his time as a political prisoner cast a shadow on much of the rest of his life, and Yeh’s lifelong fear that he would be sent back to prison.²

The New Life Correction Center features several powerful exhibitions. One of these was the enormous scale model of the earlier prison, plus the surrounding hills. Today, these hills are covered by the dense, lush greenery that can be seen throughout Taiwan. The scale model of the complex, however, reveals that this forested area was cleared during the peak of the prison’s operations, giving way to agricultural plots, as well as massive carvings of political slogans. While a couple of the giant boulders along the coast still carry visible slogans, the hillside exhortations in the camp model have long since been reclaimed by forest.

The massive scale model of the New Life Correction Center reveals what the prison complex would have looked like at the apex of its operations. In the hillside are carved more characters, meaning “Loyalty and benevolence” 忠孝仁愛 and “Faith and peace” 信義和平.

This model provides a much clearer idea of the scope of internment on Green Island, even more so when we consider that it only provides a model of one half of the prison complex. It also hints at the ways in which the lines between voluntary and involuntary labor blur in situations of total disenfranchisement. On the one hand, the trek up the steep hills to clear land, plant and harvest crops, and to painstakingly carve and paint slogans into the hillside would clearly have required intensive physical labor. On top of the physical demands of the work was the added psychological pressure of the fact that the agricultural plots were, apparently, a key food source for prisoners. On the other hand, our docent argued that, for many prisoners, the opportunity to leave the walls of the compound was enough to make even this kind of heavy labor appealing.

Elsewhere, there are tantalizing hints of artistic activity in the compound. Prisoners were paid criminally paltry sums for delicate seashell art that was sold at a profit back on the main island. In a dormitory filled with wax figures representing inmates, a man stands on the top bunk of a bed playing the violin, while another inmate plays the guitar. A display of artworks by inmates prominently features a violin made of driftwood, lovingly crafted by a prisoner over the course of many years. Elsewhere, a cheerfully honky-tonk performance by the prison’s drama club seems to bring a certain levity to the exhibition, until one reads the sign indicating that this was forced frivolity: actors and audience members were compelled to participate.³

Although the museum displays are well curated and compellingly presented, some of these musical sideshows drift perilously close to rosy narratives of art overcoming adversity. Or maybe, after a series of conservatory degrees, I’m just predisposed to seeing triumphalist narratives lurking behind any old wax effigy or driftwood violin. Whatever the case, I am glad that some sort of artistic release was available in the midst of inhumane conditions, but this should not detract from the fact that the New Life Correction Center and Oasis Villa were, for all intents and purposes, concentration camps.

A creative exhibit entitled “Compelled Performance” 壓迫的演出 uses real set pieces and cutout figures made from photographs of performances. Although few details are available at the museum, it is clear that participation in these drama troupes was not necessarily voluntary.

To be clear, I’m intentionally using the term concentration camp here. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

All of these conditions apply in the case of the New Life Correction Center and Oasis Villa: extrajudicial arrests; lack of legal recourse for prisoners; dormitories so overcrowded that prisoners were forced to alternate the direction they faced on the communal beds because the space allotted for each individual was too narrow for sleeping shoulder to shoulder; and significant amounts physical labor, at best performed under dubiously voluntary circumstances. According to our tour guide, there was even a program in the early 1950s that sought to forcibly tattoo prisoners with propaganda slogans. Although the program was quickly abandoned due to the unsurprisingly vehement protests of prisoners, this flagrant violation of bodily autonomy clearly has no place in any constitutional democracy.

Over the 30-plus years that the Green Island concentration camps were in operation, thousands of prisoners passed through the New Life Correction Center and Oasis Villa. Many of the incarcerated had been arrested on the flimsiest of grounds. Furthermore, the museum compellingly documents the systematic human rights abuses that were carried out on the island.

Despite a body of evidence that strikes me as quite compelling, however, local memories make room for an odd sort of nostalgia for the zenith of the prisons’ operations.

1. Here, I am not just referring to the fact that many if not most of the prisoners at Green Island were held on charges that were dubious at best, and spurious at worst. Rather, I am referring to inmates who were held, sometimes for decades, simply because of bureaucratic mistakes that shunted them into a prison system from which they were unable to extricate themselves.

2. Everyone mentions Yeh Shih-Tao’s imprisonment and its lasting effects on his person. After some fairly extensive digging, however, I have only found a couple of direct references to his being sent to Green Island, and these come from journalistic reports rather than scholarly sources. Nevertheless, the timing is correct for Yeh to have been imprisoned on Green Island, and articles such as Yang Ya-Hui’s “Whereabouts Unknown: White Terror and the Identity Track of Taiwanese Intellectuals in the Post-War Era—An Oral History of Yang De-zong in Tainan’s Case” 行方不明:白色恐怖與戰後台灣知識分子的認同軌跡──以台南案楊德宗口述歷史為例 (Taiwan Literature Studies, no. 5, Dec. 2013), strongly links Yeh Shih-Tao to “thought reforms” of the kind that were carried out at Green Island. Thus, although it is entirely possible that Yeh was incarcerated at a different political prison, I have chosen to reference him here. This is partly due to the fact that longtime readers will remember Yeh from previous blog posts, and partly because the Green Island prison has taken on a certain iconic status in remembrances and memorializations of Taiwan’s White Terror period.

3. The book Liumagou No. 15 流麻溝十五號, the source material for the recent film Untold Herstory, contains similar tantalizing accounts of inmates’ artistic activities.