Thank you for that highly illuminating personal history. It certainly helps us who value your insights.
But…. I couldn’t help but notice how little mention there is of Taiwan, even though both your parents took refuge there, went to school there through the college level - and it sounds like at least half of your grandparents stayed there to live out their lives. I would think you’d also have cousins there - cousins that you could have developed a radical empathy for as well, perhaps? But from your account, it doesn’t sound like you had any meaningful contact with family and friends in Taiwan during this period through 1989, though I’m sure you must have.
Ironically, my personal experience - as a white American who studied Chinese in Taiwan in 1977-1978 while pursuing a masters in East Asian Studies at Stanford - has led me to have much more Taiwan-centered “priors” than you apparently do, even though I don’t have a parent who actually graduated from 台大 and grandparents who stayed there.
What left an indelible impression during my stay in Taiwan was getting to know a few political dissidents in Taiwan (Shi Mingde and others), watching them go in and out of jail, and then doing what I could to support them. Later on, long after I returned to the US, in the 80’s and 90’s, these dissidents became leading figures in a newly democratic Taiwan. Something I could hardly imagine when I was there. Today, Taiwan is a rich, pluralistic and democratic nation. It’s one of the most inspiring stories of our time, but I don’t see even a hint of that “prior” in your personal story - I’m fully aware that Taiwan in the 70’s and 80’s was not a functioning democracy - but it was also a *Chinese* reality that was, by any measure, more economically successful and much more respectful of human rights than Maoist China ever was (I saw that with my own eyes when I traveled from Taipei to Guangzhou twice in 1978. The contrast could not have been starker in terms of both economic development and economic freedom.)
My impression is that your “priors” see Taiwan as something like an unpleasant, awkward sideshow, while your focus and interest, not to mention sympathies, lie elsewhere. If that sounds unfair to you, I apologize. But that’s what I see in Installment One.
Hi David, and thanks for the note. I had a long section planned about Taiwan which I was going to include in the second installment, in the context of how I came to really appreciate the place and revise and jettison the many deeply-held prejudices that I had prior to spending any time there. But that was much, much later than the point I had reached in the first installment, which took us up only to the early 90s.
Hopefully you can see from my account thus far — already too long — that my parents, up until the time I had any real agency in things, were pretty ardently anti-KMT. I mentioned their joint rebellion, their leftist politics, and their pro-Mainland stance after the Nixon opening. They rarely traveled to Taiwan before the 90s; indeed, my maternal grandfather's funeral was the first time I can remember either of them going, and that was around the time I was taking my qualifying exams. I didn't go. In fact, I never went there once before 2007, and then only on a brief business trip in which I avoided seeing any relatives.
Yes, I had relatives in Taiwan. All but some second cousins were on the distaff side. The ones I was close to had all come to the States by the early 70s. I was close to one uncle for a while, but only because, as a teenager, he had vowed revenge on Chiang and was removed to the States and remanded to my parents' care. He was a long-haired hippy, an artist and independent filmmaker, and left a bunch of great records at my folks' house that I listened to a lot. But in the early 80s he married into a Taipei banking family, and I couldn't stand his wife or her family. Visiting him in Southern California once in high school — I drove out from Tucson with some high school friends — I was shocked to learn he had voted for Reagan and planned to again. We lost touch until much, much later. His older brother had spent time in prison for his politics, which only made my mother (who came to the States at 18) hate the Taiwan government more. He had reputedly been brilliant, but was, in hindsight, suffering badly from PTSD. I met him a few times in California, but we never connected.
My mother, through her lefty Chinese circles, was also friends with Liu Chiang-nan, who was assassinated in Daly City in the late 70s. She told me later that she herself was PNG in Taiwan. Part of the reason that we moved from New York to Tucson was to get her away from that whole scene, my father once confided to me.
My mother's only sister, to whom my family was always close, came to the States in the early 70s for college, lived for a while in Philadelphia and Boston, then settled in California. Her kids were both born in the U.S. Her older son, my first cousin Arvin Chen, has made a successful career in Taipei as a filmmaker, with a few delightful features under his belt. We're close. We've mused that the two of us represent two alternative career paths: both ABCs, both Cal graduates, but one went to Beijing after college and speaks Chinese with that accent, and the other went to Taipei, and still speaks Chinese with that accent. My aunt and her husband, an architect who had quite a number of projects in China, owned a place in Beijing as well after about 2000, and I saw them frequently in China.
My mother's youngest brother I genuinely loathe: he's a dissolute playboy, a brand-conscious showoff, and an embarrassment. He drifted and grifted his way to Beijing, to my horror, trading on my name: he would move into my aunt's very nice apartment when they weren't in town, and tell people it was his — as well as the Benz in the parking garage. I don't speak to him. Unfairly or not, I suppose I associated his horrible traits — his flashiness, his constant mooching of money from his siblings, his general sleaziness — the Taiwan of the 90s, when I knew him.
As I mentioned, I never met my maternal grandfather, who died, I think, some time in the early 90s. My mother and him were basically estranged. In most of the stories I heard about him, he sounds like a cad. He was a bigamist: those half-sisters of my mom's in Wuhan at the beginning of the story? They were the daughters of his first, overlapping wife.
My grandmother, 宋慢西, came and lived with us at various times in the 1980s in Tucson, and then again in Beijing in the 2000s. But by then she was suffering from dementia, and though I never really got to know her well, when I was young (and rather stridently atheistic) I didn't much care for what I took to be her hypocrisy and grab-bag of absurd pieties directed at conflicting deities. I regret not having tried to understand her better: She was quite a force of nature. She founded a prominent private music school, 光仁小学 in Taipei, had been a minor star in early martial arts films, and still practiced Tai-chi sword in the 80s when she lived with us. I suppose she fared poorly, though, by comparison to my paternal grandmother in my eyes: My Nainai was humble and scholarly while my Laolao was haughty and aristocratic; Nainai was wise and infinitely patient, while Laolao was snappish and could be a scold. My paternal grandparents had, in any case, left Taiwan only a few years after my father. My grandfather's books weren't being published in Taiwan, politically problematic as they were, and he had gone to the East-West Center in Hawaii, and thence to the Harvard-Yenching Center, and finally to Columbia. Their stories were still very much centered on the Mainland, and not on their years in Taiwan.
The whole point of my piece was to honestly tell where my influences come from, and the fact that I've left Taiwan out of the story is part of the truth of my upbringing: Taiwan didn't figure in, except negatively. They were the "bad guys" when I was a child: The KMT figured in the stories I heard as the side that was corrupt, that had to be coerced before it would fight the Japanese, that squandered the aid money provided by the Americans, that persecuted the heroic revolutionaries, broke the dikes of the Yellow River and killed millions for no real strategic gain, that stood for the landlords and the compradores, that were responsible for the hyperinflation. I realize this is unfair, and either much more complicated or flat-out wrong now that I've been able to study the history on my own. But I'm not writing here about what I think now: I'm writing about my priors. Taiwan, to me as a child and an adolescent, always seemed materialistic, grossly stratified (my parents told me about the shabby way that the 外省人 treated the 本省人 — practically colonialist), excessively superstitious, too fawning on both the Japanese and the Americans. Again, I realize now how one-sided this all was, but one doesn't pick one's parents.
You write, "My impression is that your “priors” see Taiwan as something like an unpleasant, awkward sideshow, while your focus and interest, not to mention sympathies, lie elsewhere. " That's close to correct, though before college, it was much worse than that: I actively disliked what I thought it stood for.
The only period of my life when I've spent a lot of time in Taiwan was 2013 and 2014. On a family trip there — my parents had made peace with the place, and had many good things to say about it by the mid-90s — my father took ill, just after Christmas 2013. He spent months in 荣总医院 and, as direct flights were affordable, I spent many weeks across eight or nine visits during January through March that year, before he was finally well enough to first come back to Beijing, and then to return to the States where he passed in July that same year. I came to really like Taiwan, and found it to be a very high-trust society, admirable in pretty much every imaginable way, and of course I'm deeply embarrassed at the prejudice I had formed.
I'll incorporate a lot of this into the next installment, next Wednesday, but I didn't want to wait to answer your indictment.
Thanks so much for your response. I regret that you saw my post as an “indictment” - after posting it I wondered if I should’ve just put it in the form of a simple “but what about Taiwan?” In any case, thank you for responding with your characteristic honesty and good faith. I look forward to the rest of the story….
You're amazing, Kaiser. My parents were just a few years behind your dad at Berkeley. My dad was in civil engineering so they must've been acquaintances, at least. Thank you, for all that you do - you're bringing such tremendous thoughtfulness and sophistication to the entire domain. And of course, only someone of your type of background would be able to do it, all inclusive of your introspective skepticism. Keep going! 加油！
I really wish my dad were still around to ask him whether he knew yours! Of course they would have known each other. That community was super tight. Was your dad a 台大 alum?
Thanks so much for your super kind words and for your support of my work!
Both 台大 and my mom was a Green Shirt (北一女). And my dad started going back w Prof Pian (MIT prof - https://news.mit.edu/2009/pian-obit-0702) back in the day, working on reforming engineering education in China. You are honoring that entire generation with everything you're doing. And maybe now that our generation is a little more established, people have the time to dig deeper, to hear your soulful voice and find their own place in the larger narratives that you're sharing. So thank you- it means so much!
If you're up for it, email me — would love to chat. I thought about a book on that amazing generation. They're incredibly inspiring. kaiser.kuo@gmail.com
Thank you for that highly illuminating personal history. It certainly helps us who value your insights.
But…. I couldn’t help but notice how little mention there is of Taiwan, even though both your parents took refuge there, went to school there through the college level - and it sounds like at least half of your grandparents stayed there to live out their lives. I would think you’d also have cousins there - cousins that you could have developed a radical empathy for as well, perhaps? But from your account, it doesn’t sound like you had any meaningful contact with family and friends in Taiwan during this period through 1989, though I’m sure you must have.
Ironically, my personal experience - as a white American who studied Chinese in Taiwan in 1977-1978 while pursuing a masters in East Asian Studies at Stanford - has led me to have much more Taiwan-centered “priors” than you apparently do, even though I don’t have a parent who actually graduated from 台大 and grandparents who stayed there.
What left an indelible impression during my stay in Taiwan was getting to know a few political dissidents in Taiwan (Shi Mingde and others), watching them go in and out of jail, and then doing what I could to support them. Later on, long after I returned to the US, in the 80’s and 90’s, these dissidents became leading figures in a newly democratic Taiwan. Something I could hardly imagine when I was there. Today, Taiwan is a rich, pluralistic and democratic nation. It’s one of the most inspiring stories of our time, but I don’t see even a hint of that “prior” in your personal story - I’m fully aware that Taiwan in the 70’s and 80’s was not a functioning democracy - but it was also a *Chinese* reality that was, by any measure, more economically successful and much more respectful of human rights than Maoist China ever was (I saw that with my own eyes when I traveled from Taipei to Guangzhou twice in 1978. The contrast could not have been starker in terms of both economic development and economic freedom.)
My impression is that your “priors” see Taiwan as something like an unpleasant, awkward sideshow, while your focus and interest, not to mention sympathies, lie elsewhere. If that sounds unfair to you, I apologize. But that’s what I see in Installment One.
Hi David, and thanks for the note. I had a long section planned about Taiwan which I was going to include in the second installment, in the context of how I came to really appreciate the place and revise and jettison the many deeply-held prejudices that I had prior to spending any time there. But that was much, much later than the point I had reached in the first installment, which took us up only to the early 90s.
Hopefully you can see from my account thus far — already too long — that my parents, up until the time I had any real agency in things, were pretty ardently anti-KMT. I mentioned their joint rebellion, their leftist politics, and their pro-Mainland stance after the Nixon opening. They rarely traveled to Taiwan before the 90s; indeed, my maternal grandfather's funeral was the first time I can remember either of them going, and that was around the time I was taking my qualifying exams. I didn't go. In fact, I never went there once before 2007, and then only on a brief business trip in which I avoided seeing any relatives.
Yes, I had relatives in Taiwan. All but some second cousins were on the distaff side. The ones I was close to had all come to the States by the early 70s. I was close to one uncle for a while, but only because, as a teenager, he had vowed revenge on Chiang and was removed to the States and remanded to my parents' care. He was a long-haired hippy, an artist and independent filmmaker, and left a bunch of great records at my folks' house that I listened to a lot. But in the early 80s he married into a Taipei banking family, and I couldn't stand his wife or her family. Visiting him in Southern California once in high school — I drove out from Tucson with some high school friends — I was shocked to learn he had voted for Reagan and planned to again. We lost touch until much, much later. His older brother had spent time in prison for his politics, which only made my mother (who came to the States at 18) hate the Taiwan government more. He had reputedly been brilliant, but was, in hindsight, suffering badly from PTSD. I met him a few times in California, but we never connected.
My mother, through her lefty Chinese circles, was also friends with Liu Chiang-nan, who was assassinated in Daly City in the late 70s. She told me later that she herself was PNG in Taiwan. Part of the reason that we moved from New York to Tucson was to get her away from that whole scene, my father once confided to me.
My mother's only sister, to whom my family was always close, came to the States in the early 70s for college, lived for a while in Philadelphia and Boston, then settled in California. Her kids were both born in the U.S. Her older son, my first cousin Arvin Chen, has made a successful career in Taipei as a filmmaker, with a few delightful features under his belt. We're close. We've mused that the two of us represent two alternative career paths: both ABCs, both Cal graduates, but one went to Beijing after college and speaks Chinese with that accent, and the other went to Taipei, and still speaks Chinese with that accent. My aunt and her husband, an architect who had quite a number of projects in China, owned a place in Beijing as well after about 2000, and I saw them frequently in China.
My mother's youngest brother I genuinely loathe: he's a dissolute playboy, a brand-conscious showoff, and an embarrassment. He drifted and grifted his way to Beijing, to my horror, trading on my name: he would move into my aunt's very nice apartment when they weren't in town, and tell people it was his — as well as the Benz in the parking garage. I don't speak to him. Unfairly or not, I suppose I associated his horrible traits — his flashiness, his constant mooching of money from his siblings, his general sleaziness — the Taiwan of the 90s, when I knew him.
As I mentioned, I never met my maternal grandfather, who died, I think, some time in the early 90s. My mother and him were basically estranged. In most of the stories I heard about him, he sounds like a cad. He was a bigamist: those half-sisters of my mom's in Wuhan at the beginning of the story? They were the daughters of his first, overlapping wife.
My grandmother, 宋慢西, came and lived with us at various times in the 1980s in Tucson, and then again in Beijing in the 2000s. But by then she was suffering from dementia, and though I never really got to know her well, when I was young (and rather stridently atheistic) I didn't much care for what I took to be her hypocrisy and grab-bag of absurd pieties directed at conflicting deities. I regret not having tried to understand her better: She was quite a force of nature. She founded a prominent private music school, 光仁小学 in Taipei, had been a minor star in early martial arts films, and still practiced Tai-chi sword in the 80s when she lived with us. I suppose she fared poorly, though, by comparison to my paternal grandmother in my eyes: My Nainai was humble and scholarly while my Laolao was haughty and aristocratic; Nainai was wise and infinitely patient, while Laolao was snappish and could be a scold. My paternal grandparents had, in any case, left Taiwan only a few years after my father. My grandfather's books weren't being published in Taiwan, politically problematic as they were, and he had gone to the East-West Center in Hawaii, and thence to the Harvard-Yenching Center, and finally to Columbia. Their stories were still very much centered on the Mainland, and not on their years in Taiwan.
The whole point of my piece was to honestly tell where my influences come from, and the fact that I've left Taiwan out of the story is part of the truth of my upbringing: Taiwan didn't figure in, except negatively. They were the "bad guys" when I was a child: The KMT figured in the stories I heard as the side that was corrupt, that had to be coerced before it would fight the Japanese, that squandered the aid money provided by the Americans, that persecuted the heroic revolutionaries, broke the dikes of the Yellow River and killed millions for no real strategic gain, that stood for the landlords and the compradores, that were responsible for the hyperinflation. I realize this is unfair, and either much more complicated or flat-out wrong now that I've been able to study the history on my own. But I'm not writing here about what I think now: I'm writing about my priors. Taiwan, to me as a child and an adolescent, always seemed materialistic, grossly stratified (my parents told me about the shabby way that the 外省人 treated the 本省人 — practically colonialist), excessively superstitious, too fawning on both the Japanese and the Americans. Again, I realize now how one-sided this all was, but one doesn't pick one's parents.
You write, "My impression is that your “priors” see Taiwan as something like an unpleasant, awkward sideshow, while your focus and interest, not to mention sympathies, lie elsewhere. " That's close to correct, though before college, it was much worse than that: I actively disliked what I thought it stood for.
The only period of my life when I've spent a lot of time in Taiwan was 2013 and 2014. On a family trip there — my parents had made peace with the place, and had many good things to say about it by the mid-90s — my father took ill, just after Christmas 2013. He spent months in 荣总医院 and, as direct flights were affordable, I spent many weeks across eight or nine visits during January through March that year, before he was finally well enough to first come back to Beijing, and then to return to the States where he passed in July that same year. I came to really like Taiwan, and found it to be a very high-trust society, admirable in pretty much every imaginable way, and of course I'm deeply embarrassed at the prejudice I had formed.
I'll incorporate a lot of this into the next installment, next Wednesday, but I didn't want to wait to answer your indictment.
Thanks so much for your response. I regret that you saw my post as an “indictment” - after posting it I wondered if I should’ve just put it in the form of a simple “but what about Taiwan?” In any case, thank you for responding with your characteristic honesty and good faith. I look forward to the rest of the story….
You're amazing, Kaiser. My parents were just a few years behind your dad at Berkeley. My dad was in civil engineering so they must've been acquaintances, at least. Thank you, for all that you do - you're bringing such tremendous thoughtfulness and sophistication to the entire domain. And of course, only someone of your type of background would be able to do it, all inclusive of your introspective skepticism. Keep going! 加油！
I really wish my dad were still around to ask him whether he knew yours! Of course they would have known each other. That community was super tight. Was your dad a 台大 alum?
Thanks so much for your super kind words and for your support of my work!
Both 台大 and my mom was a Green Shirt (北一女). And my dad started going back w Prof Pian (MIT prof - https://news.mit.edu/2009/pian-obit-0702) back in the day, working on reforming engineering education in China. You are honoring that entire generation with everything you're doing. And maybe now that our generation is a little more established, people have the time to dig deeper, to hear your soulful voice and find their own place in the larger narratives that you're sharing. So thank you- it means so much!
If you're up for it, email me — would love to chat. I thought about a book on that amazing generation. They're incredibly inspiring. kaiser.kuo@gmail.com
FanTAStic! I've known the general gist of your hero's journey but loved ingesting the full arc and delicious details in one sitting.
Make a graphic novel using AI to dig in even deeperer, puleeeez!