ESSAY
By WAYNE E. YANG
The radio frequency quality changes the slightest bit right before a typhoon, taking a strange and distant clarity. Conversation, car noises, telephone: their sounds become funneled and travel in straight lines.
The humidity rises sharply, barometric pressure drops, and the requisite inky clouds roll in with their rains, before the winds reach speeds up to 100 miles an hour or more. Chu Feng, Supreme Winds, they are called, and the worst will dump vast amounts of water as the 1968 Chu Feng did when it put Taipei under 115 feet of water, or batter the island, as the 1911 Chu Feng did when it reached speeds of 156 miles per hour. Three school children were swept out to sea during one of the last typhoons. They were exploring on the large rocks of the beach when a typhoon unexpectedly hit Taiwan.
A typhoon is not usually so violent. Its winds are usually milder, and it is often only like a strong thunderstorm, but the Taiwanese are not people to try their luck; the tallest building in Taipei is only 20 stories high.
Taipei has been called the Shanghai of Taiwan, but such a comparison implies that it is European in flavor. It is not.
It is like Tokyo, but in a Taiwanese way: an assimilation of pulsating neon, constantly honking car horns and black air. The rule of the road, for pedestrian, cyclist, train engineer and driver alike, is first come, first served. The rule of Taipei is breathe—but only when you have to.
The city centers on Shi Man Din, its downtown district. Shi Man Din is Taipei’s entertainment center, its gateway to Taipei’s best department stores and shopping malls. Snack peddlers set their stalls around buildings and along the street, setting chairs and beckoning loiterers to stop by for shaved ice, grass jelly or dried mackerel roe.
Thirty-foot signs provide the backdrop for the movement of cars and pedestrians through the Shi Man Din district. These movie advertisements, with their paintings of scowling Asians and brandished swords are everywhere. Thirty-foot artistic renditions of James Bond are not uncommon.
There is something strangely primal in these signs. There is something that clashes about them. They are strong in reds and yellows: blood and implied sex. The most popular Taiwanese movies usually have their heroes killing hordes of bad guys to win over women.
Lust is everywhere in Shi Man Din, from the newsstands and their pornographic magazines, to the amorous poses of the movie posters. Lust is practiced nowhere. Young couples in Taipei shyly hold hands; the more daring to peck each other on the lips when no one is looking. In Taipei, there is so much energy, and so much of it is repressed.
“I don’t care if they hear me,” a friend once told me at a party in the Jen Ai district. “They can’t do anything to me. I criticize the government freely, and they can do nothing to me.”
My friend, a businessman in Taiwan’s shipping industry, must have been very powerful, or very ignorant to believe his words true. In Taipei, like most of Taiwan, there is little that the ruling Kuomintang party cannot do.
Dissidents who were jailed in the 70’s still rot in the prisons of Green Island, the taste of gasoline or excrement still fresh in their mouths, and it is a common belief that the Kuomintang has unofficial relations with Taipei’s underworld. The KMT can slip into this guise when necessary, as they did when they slipped into the apartment of opposition leader Lin Yi-hsiung, and literally sprayed his mother and twin daughter over the walls.
It is this fear of the bogeyman that kept many Taiwanese from voicing dissent in the past. Taipei’s middle class satisfied itself with an occasional political discussion behind the red doors of their apartments, impervious to […] the KMT, while students at National Taiwan University, which has graduated many of Taiwan’s opposition leaders, could barely muster a whimper of protest. Today Taiwanese believe themselves more daring, turning out thousands to face the water cannons and barbed wire set by police to blockade them from the porcelain white walls and blue-tiled roof of the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, or marching out to the presidential palace to push against the rows of arm-linked military policemen. Taipei’s middle class, like most of Taipei, has changed.
Four years ago, to see a man sifting through the pornographic magazines at a Taipei bookstore didn’t always mean he was searching for smut. Often, he would reach under the stack of writhing, naked flesh to find a publication that was slickly produced, critical of the Kuomintang government—and banned. To circulate opposition magazines in Taiwan, dissidents had to hide them.
Running a dissident press subjected journalists to search and seizure, arrest, jailing and often torture. Freedom of the press? The Kuomintang had no concept.
Four years later, the death of Chiang Ching-kuo has swept the dictatorial stench from Taipei, and the strict, military-like mandates have disappeared. The hair of high school girls—[…] over the ear lobes, all done to make severe lines, now flows more loosely in shoulder-length style. The white collared shirts with the names, class numbers and school identifications sewn in on the lapels, are now more likely to say “Benneton,” “Izod,” or “Clavin Klein.” The black skirts, eight pleats in front, eight pleats in back, have given way to softer pastels. […]