The Lost Garden

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WHAT SEPARATES US FROM CHINA is more than spatial, temporal, even cultural distance; it is more like a gulf between hearts.

My ancestors once lived in China, which they called Tangshan, a place with a highly developed culture, where people wore silk and satin and used fine china.

When I was a child, my father taught me in Taiwanese to recite Chinese poetry. When Taiwan was under Japanese rule, he called himself a Han; for a while he even admired Chairman Mao, whom he considered to be the savior of the laboring masses. But we were given a drastically different view of China from those who arrived in Taiwan in 1949. The tangled emotional ties, grievances, and resentment have never ceased to exist, even now.

In the oppressive climate of White Terror during Taiwan’s four-decade-long martial law era, we diligently worked at piecing together the history of Taiwan of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the island was frequented by competing merchants from Japan, China, the Netherlands, and Spain, all of which treated Taiwan mainly as a site for trading silk and silver.

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