Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音

A City of Sadness (1989) was the first Taiwanese film to win the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. It follows the Lin Family in a coastal town near Taipei from 1945 to 1949, between the end of 50 years of Japanese colonial rule and the establishment of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Government in Taiwan.

It was a time of chaos, with 2.2 million military personnel and civilians fleeing from the Chinese Mainland to Taiwan. The island’s population of 6 million at the time mainly consisted of descendants of early Chinese settlers who had lived there for more than 300 years and who now identified themselves as Taiwanese.

In the film, the Lin Family is headed by the eldest son Wen-Hsiung, while the second son was conscripted by the Japanese as a military doctor but disappeared in the Phillipines during the war. The third son becomes involved with gangsters from Shanghai and is imprisoned and tortured, suffering brain damage as a result.

The fourth and youngest son Wen-Ching is a deaf photographer who communicates with others in writing. It is from the perspectives of Wen-Hsiung and Wen-Ching that the Nationalist Government’s authoritarian rule and economic mismanagement are examined.

Also through the eyes of the brothers, the film tackles the background and legacy of the February 28 Incident. The infamous event marked the beginning of the 40 year-long “White Terror”, the political repression of Taiwanese civilians and political dissenters under the rule of the Kuomintang (KMT).

As Wen-Hsiung says: “This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese, then the Chinese. They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.” It is heart-wrenching seeing the brothers being torn out of their small world and assaulted by the cruel reality where people are executed and their livelihoods destroyed by the government that is supposed to take care of them.

With that said, this is a very subtle film, with our understanding of the traumatic regime change gradually deepening as we observe the characters’ actions and emotions. There is a strong contrast between the Taiwanese, who have thrived on the island for generations, and the Mainlanders, who are portrayed as decadent and indulgent.

But there is no criticism – and it feels there is an artistic distance deliberately kept between the characters and the audience – as we are invited to witness the profound impact of political, social and cultural turmoils on ordinary individuals.

In this regard, Wen-Ching’s silence is particularly deafening, as it adds to the considerable divide between his inner world and the horrific events occurring around him. There are multiple languages used in the film, but Wen-Ching’s silence reflects the voicelessness enforced upon the Taiwanese people.

A remarkable masterpiece, the film encourages and enriches our reflection of the past and how it influenced our present life. In this sense, how the violence and oppression of the “White Terror” led to the emergence of the Taiwanese identity and particularly the island nation today as a true democracy.

Note: This film review was originally titled “A powerful historical drama” and published under the title “Powerful historical drama” by Ranges Trader Star Mail, June 10, 2025, P.10.

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There’s Something More I Want to Say…

As a second-generation “Mainlander” born and raised in Taiwan, both my parents and their respective families came to the island at a young age and have identified themselves as “Chinese” all their lives. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s when I grew up, things like the February 28 Incident and the struggles of Taiwanese and particularly the island’s indigenous peoples were not mentioned at school and in my family…

With the KMT in power, the consensus was that the Mainland was part of OUR territory that was “stolen” by the Communists. I grew up speaking Mandarin and knowing nothing about the Taiwanese dialect, learning about Taiwan’s past as part of Chinese history and culture. In other words, my identity was constructed, standardised and circulated only from the “Mainlander” perspective as the government designed it to be.

Then, at the end of the 1980s, with the Martial Law being lifted and the government increasingly relaxing various restrictions under the leadership of President Chiang Ching-Kuo (son of Chiang Kai-Shek), the Taiwanese identity started emerging. For those Mainlanders in Taiwan who had been separated from their families in China for 40 years, the biggest improvement was that they were now able to visit the Mainland via Hong Kong. (See the 1988 film People Between Two China, which was also written by Wu Nien-Chen.)

But for all the people in Taiwan – not just those identified as Taiwanese – the most profound change is that they now enjoy the freedoms of speech, travel and assembly, such as establishing political parties and participating in elections, organising political activities including demonstrations, protests and strikes, launching and managing media entities, publishing books, magazines and newspapers, etc.

Starting from the 1990s, I learned more about Taiwan’s history and culture, thanks to many of my university friends who came from all over the island and speaking Taiwanese. Things took a while to change, but by 1996 we had our first direct presidential election which produced our first Taiwan-born president. But I still had no idea about the “White Terror” until the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was overseas doing some serious research about the emergence of the Taiwanese identity.

So my considerable ignorance of my own country’s past traumas was a product of our times. Not only was I raised as a Mainlander, but I was constantly told to study hard and care for nothing else. I remembered participating in protests in Taipei about the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing (without telling my family, as they would have forbidden me to go), but I knew nothing about A City of Sadness being released and all the discussions and debates in that year. Neither was I aware of what Professor Michelle Kuo describes as the moment of “national awakening”: “Taiwan was on the cusp of freedom… Soon, activists who read Nelson Mandela in prison would be released and run for election – and win.”

When Taiwan-born politician Lee Teng-Hui was elected president in 1996, 24.1% of the people in Taiwan identified themselves as “Taiwanese”, compared to 49.3% as “both Taiwanese and Chinese” and 17.6% as “Chinese”. By the time I concluded my PhD studies in 2004, 41.1% of the people in Taiwan identified themselves as “Taiwanese”, compared to 47.7% as “both Taiwanese and Chinese” and 6.2% as “Chinese”. The most recent survey results, conducted by National Chengchi University’s Election Study Centre in 2024, showed that 63.4% of the people in Taiwan identified themselves as “Taiwanese”, compared to 31.9% as “both Taiwanese and Chinese” and only 2.4% as “Chinese”.

Having spent seven years studying the fluid nature of identity, I am of the view that one’s identity, as the result of long processes of sense-making, is established as a response to our political, economic, social and cultural circumstances. Because these circumstances are ever-changing, how we identify ourselves and are identified by others are constantly changing as well. Meanwhile, one’s identity often has a “binding power” over one’s emotions, thoughts, behaviours and actions. The nature and significance of identity can be conceptualised as a “site”, where those who are identified as belonging to it often feel refrained by its boundary, while those who self-identify as belonging to the “site” often feel the need to defend its boundary. Both identification and self-identification can exist at the same time, which explains why identify and its impact on our lives is such a complex issue.

More importantly, due to the fluid and complex nature of identity, one cannot and should not be identified merely on the basis of one’s ethnic, cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds. My research on the English-language writings by Australian and other authors with Chinese ancestry shows that one’s “Chineseness” and/or “Chinese” identity is often a construction exhibiting a great variety of characteristics for an equally great variety of reasons. This is despite the fact that people tend to simplify the identities of others in order to quickly “pigeonhole” them, or to mix together different types of identities for convenience’s sake.

In my case, I identify myself as “Taiwanese” even when I am a second-generation Mandarin-speaking “Mainlander”. When I identify myself as “Chinese”, it does not mean – and should not be assumed to mean – that I have any allegiance to the country known as the “People’s Republic of China” and/or its ruling political party. And when I identify myself as “both Taiwanese and Chinese”, it is my way to celebrate my rich cultural heritage here in Australia.

That concludes my rambling. One more note: I would highly recommend Formosa Betrayed (1965) by American diplomat George H. Kerr, as well as the review “Dare to Leave a Trace: On A City of Sadness” by the aforementioned Professor Michelle Kuo. As the film declared at its 1989 release: “There is no shadow, but only pride… Only a prosperous nation has the confidence to remember the poverties of its past. Only a democratic and free nation has the confidence to examine its own history.” Well said.