Abstract
This chapter has a threefold agenda. First, it aims at positioning Taiwanese American writer Shawna Yang Ryan and her literary work in the context of literary Taiwan, illustrating how identity policy, transpacific politics, and national desire intersect. Second, it demonstrates how the February 28, 1947 “impact event”—key to Ryan’s Taiwan-oriented novel Green Island—is charged with perceptual patterns that share at least three common features: a national trauma, a forced collective amnesia and, a history of betrayal. Third, it shows how Green Island employs family history to reanimate and interact with these cultural patterns by embracing and reconfiguring the traumatic experiences of the generation of witnesses/victims from a transgenerational and transnational perspective. Her ideology-oriented narrative not only formulates ethical concerns and builds a future-oriented historical consciousness, but it also creates a transpacific space from which the trans/formation of Taiwanese American identity can be negotiated against the background of trans/national history.
All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.
Susan Sontag (2003, p. 86)
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Notes
- 1.
Shortened to Locke in 1920, the story of Lockeport began as a swampland parcel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, deeded to founder, George W. Locke in 1883. In 1912 three Chinese merchants started to erect the first buildings, including a shop/beer saloon, a gambling hall, and a hotel/restaurant (the main settings fictionalized in Ryan’s novel). After the Chinatown of nearby Walnut Grove was destroyed by a fire in 1915, many Chinese immigrants resettled and further developed Locke. In 1990, Locke has been designated a national historic landmark district and become part of the US National Park Service. See Locke Foundation (2004).
- 2.
For an elaborate reading of the novel as a “spectral representation of Chinese diaspora in the context of Chinese America”, see Wu (2012, p. 39).
- 3.
Mark Lilla (2016) is but one example of liberal academics who blame identity politics’ “obsession with diversity” as catalyst for the rise of Trump and the American Right as well as the shift away from building solidarity and communality.
- 4.
Since long cultural memory studies have been engaged with the balance of remembering and forgetting, a connection that goes back to Ernest Renan’s lecture “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” of 1882. See Renan (1992).
- 5.
The delta swampland on which Locke was built had been home to Native American Miwok and Maidu tribes for hundreds of years. Tribal burial grounds still exist on the Locke parcel.
- 6.
This includes the Association for Asian American Studies Best Book Award in Creative Writing (2018), an American Book Award (2017), the Elliot Cades Emerging Writer Award from the Hawai ‘i Literary Arts Council (2015), and the UC Davis Maurice Prize (2006).
- 7.
In an interview with Hioe (2022) Ryan harshly disclaims the idea she is “another Amy Tan wannabe, white-washed Asian woman.”.
- 8.
Depending on its framing narrative and perspective, the denomination “February 28 Incident” is but one of the many signifiers for this event. Lin (2007) lists “Incident” (shijian), “Popular Uprising” (minbian), and “Revolution” (geming), as well as terms used in earlier government announcements such as “riot” (baodong), “political and military event” (shibian), “rebellion” (panbian), or “massacre” (can’an) (p. 10). Despite its implied euphemism, I will use the rather commonly employed term February 28 Incident throughout.
- 9.
I abstain from retelling the events surrounding the incident as they are well known. For a balanced summary, see Smith (2008) for primary sources, and see the website Memorial Foundation of 228 (二二八事件紀念基金會) (2017), a government established NGO “with the mission of keeping the memory of the 228 Massacre alive through education and cultural activities.”.
- 10.
On different occasions Ryan has explained that physical, mental, and emotional immersion into the local settings and historical sites along with witness interviews and explorative reading are vital parts of her writing process. When writing Water Ghosts, she moved into the historical town of Locke for some months; for Green Island she spent a couple of years in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar (Tsai, 2016).
- 11.
The film differs in large parts from the book, yet is inspired by two factual events: the murder of Taiwanese American professor Chen Wen-chen by Taiwan Secret Police during his visit to Taiwan in 1981 and the assassination of Taiwanese American writer and journalist Henry Liu at his home in California by a KMT-sponsored criminal Triad in 1984.
- 12.
Peng was a noted activist for democracy and Taiwan independence who took refuge in the US and returned after 22 years in exile to become the first presidential candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan’s first democratic elections in 1996. His path of escape (via Sweden) and his arrest are incorporated in Green Island at great length.
- 13.
This book had first been published in Japanese (1962) and then in Chinese (1980).
- 14.
The “memory boom” is generally diagnosed as starting in the 1990s. See Chang (2014).
- 15.
Originally written in Japanese (1945), the novel saw a number of Chinese translations (first 1962) and an English edition in 2006. Wu has in the meantime become an iconic figure in Taiwan with streets, memorial museums, and a Research Council dedicated to him and his work.
- 16.
For a succinct summary of the transnational Taiwan Independent Movement, see Fleischauer (2016).
- 17.
Interestingly enough, Hou always denied that City of Sadness was a film about the February 28 Incident. For a critical appraisal, See Tam and Dissanayake (1998).
- 18.
The Taipei February 28 Memorial Museum (台北二二八紀念館) is located in the February 28 Peace Memorial Park (二二八和平紀念公園) next to the February 28 Memorial Monument (二二八紀念牌). Detailed information is available at the government sponsored website National Human Rights Museum (2017). In the novel, the narrator pays a visit to these historical sites to reflect on Taiwan’s memory policy (Ryan, 2016).
- 19.
Quote from the plaque on the memorial.
- 20.
Quote from the book jacket.
- 21.
Similarly, the eldest daughter sees light of the day “the year Japan went to Nanjing [1937]” (Ryan, 2016, p. 13).
- 22.
Like others before, Ryan decontextualizes Huang’s widely quoted lines to support the novel’s nativist ideology. Huang’s lines were at the time directed against the cultivation of the Mandarin baihua and classical wenyanwen at the cost of Taiwanese baihua. As Henning Klöter (2012) confirms, “Huang Shihui’s role as an ideological trailblazer of a distinct Taiwanese cultural identity has been overstated in previous studies. Indeed, dichotomies like ‘pro-Taiwanese’ vs. ‘pro-Chinese’ do not apply to his sociolinguistic agenda” (p. 66). Huang’s article “Why not advocate nativist literature?” (怎樣不提倡鄉土文學) was published in 1930.
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Schweiger, I. (2023). Sketches on a Blank Slate: Shawna Yang Ryan’s Future-Oriented Memories of the Past. In: Wu, Cr., Fan, Mj. (eds) Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century. Sinophone and Taiwan Studies, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8380-1_16
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