The Taiwan Railroad brought us back from a
three-day vacation in Tainan. It takes two hours to get from Taichung to
Tainan, Taiwan's most picturesque city. The High Speed Rail would be faster but
it leaves you at a station more than five kilometers from downtown.
I sit in the Hotel
Rich dining room on the first morning of our trip to Tainan. I didn't
necessarily want to visit Tainan, even though I like the city, but it was as
good as going anywhere and much better than going nowhere during summer
vacation. My wife decided we would go there and made all the plans.
There was a typhoon predicted to be going towards Tainan with
major rainfall possible the next few days. We were prepared to cancel our
second night there if the weather deteriorated, but by the end of the first
night on the comfortable hotel bed, I was inclined to stay. The only drawback
to our room is there was no window to see when it was dawn or if it was raining
yet.
The day we arrived,
we walked from the 1936 Japanese built train
station in the North District a few blocks and checked
into the hotel at 114 Cheng-gong Road. Our luggage stowed, we left to walk
the streets of old town Tainan while the weather was still dry.
Initially, downtown
seemed like any other downtown area in Taiwan - a Family Mart, a jewelry store,
a pharmacy, a scooter repair shop - but then we started to notice some
differences along Zhong-yi Road.
Among the many
temples along Zhongyi Road is the shrine to Koxinga, the 17th century Chinese
military leader who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan, the Dutch and the seven
foreign European "companies," the enslavement and massacring of indigenous and
Chinese.
As I left the
shrine, I felt a thump on my chest. I experienced an itching sensation. When I
scratched it, I got a burning sensation as if from Szechuan chili
pepper under my nails; my wife said my chest looked reddened.
As the feeling
dissipated, we joked that Koxinga's spirit may have thought I was another red-haired
foreign invader and dealt me a warning. This is the undercurrent of our
Tainan-Anping visit is the violence and exploitation introduced to Taiwan by
Caucasian enemies. The story of Koxinga must be told. It doesn't make you
proud.
When we reached Jhong-heng
Road, we saw the Land Bank, originally Kangyo Bank built in 1928, its
Neoclassical architecture, the rows of grand columns shielding the enclosed
sidewalks from the Taiwan sun and rain. Catty-corner to it is the refurbished
Old Lin's Department Store, another Japanese structure damaged by American
bombing raids in WW II, though "American" was deleted from the
English translation to not offend anyone who couldn't read Mandarin. The five
story structure, with original elevator and rooftop shrine, are a must to visit
for a feel of 1930's pre-war Japanese Taiwan progress, the kind the Chinese
invading troops admired, but destroyed, in awe.
The American bombing
of Tainan is written all over the Hayashi (Lin) Dept. Store with each inch of
cement that was replaced. A number of buildings have been preserved in Tainan.
Taiwanese commemorate the bombing of Taipei by American planes; the
thousands killed and injured, the hundreds of historic buildings flattened; it
happened in Tainan, too.
It is not the
Taiwanese fault that Japan did more for Taiwan in fifty years of rule than the
KMT/DPP with America did for seventy years since. If the threat of Western
imperialism and colonization didn't force Japan into a "Hail Mary" in
World War II, Taiwan would be a happier annexation to Japan, an Asian democracy
with socialist undertones. Instead, the Taiwanese live deep in the bowels of
the beast and, like us in this hotel room without windows, have no idea how the
skies look in the real world.
People here know the
deep oppression that would slaughter them again if they flinched towards true
independence, from America or China. It is the biggest insult in Taiwanese
history. They don't want another "White Horror."
The Dutch, along
with Angelo-Saxons and other European marauders,
ruined indigenous world history for five hundred years. It will
be coming to an end, soon. When capitalism crashes and self-management
(anarcho-syndicalism) returns profit to the workers who earn it, we, the
people, can get back on track. The ruling class partners in stolen lands won't
give up their power easily; the killing will continue, but we must try.
You can see what the
Dutch West Indian Company did in Tainan by visiting Anping; the history
preserved so well. Koxinga caught the Dutch off guard, but was just another
Taiwan oppressor.
The preservation of
the history of imperialism and colonization in Taiwan is imperative to give
inquisitive youth an understanding of the current phony two-party
neo-liberalism, despite the attempts of revisionist history the KMT Chinese
want to revert to.
Would China protect Taiwan from further abuse or has Western
propaganda done damage so deeply to Taiwanese culture that the people would go
against their cultural identity and language cohorts to fraternize with the
enemy?
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