A small, free place called Taiwan
I sit at a restaurant table in the interior of Taiwan, where I have lived for a year. My wife and I were invited by a Taiwanese acquaintance of hers at the university to dinner. The tiny restaurant was opened by two former students, now married. The place is just one row of tables along a concrete floor, right by the road.
I marvel that a narrow tin shack like this can serve as a restaurant. 'It's their home too,' my wife's friend tells us. 'When the last customer leaves, they move the tables aside and bring out the bed. This is where they sleep.'
When the coffee came, it was better than any I had tasted. The meal was fit for a gourmet, too. The woman who brought the plates was a customer who got up from another table to help out. This is Taiwan. I do not know how else to describe it, except 'postmodern'.
The people seated at the tables around me tell me they are Taiwanese, not Chinese. They do not want their little democracy and thriving free-market society to be gobbled up by the same imperialist expansion that devoured Tibet.
Taiwan has deep historical connections with the west and Japan, as well as with the mainland. It is an amazing and vibrant little island, whose diverse cultural strands mingle and mix in a marvelously fertile way. This is not China. The people here do not want it to be China. They want it to be Taiwan.
The Dalai Lama tells how the first time he travelled to Beijing to plead with officials not to invade Tibet, he passed a point along the way where the Tibetan landscape and Tibetan houses, crops, animals and people abruptly gave way to a Chinese landscape with Chinese houses, crops, animals and people. He knew he had left one country and entered another.
Sitting at the table in the restaurant with us is a professor who tells of an analogous realisation she had of encountering a sharp national divide between Taiwan and the mainland. It came when she first arrived in Canada to begin graduate school and met Chinese students from the mainland.
My wife, a native Taiwanese, had the exact same experience in New York. She met no graduate students at New York University more foreign to her than those from the mainland. In the end, she found it impossible to talk to them about Taiwan, or anything else. The traditions, the background, the belief systems, the psychology - the nationality - of the Taiwanese and the mainlanders were so utterly different.
The mainland, though, would gobble up Taiwan like it did Tibet, and then try to obliterate what is indigenous here, like it has done there. Taiwanese do not want this. The democratically elected president, Chen Shui-bian, proposed a referendum to give the Taiwanese people a way to make their views felt. With characteristic audacity, Beijing warned of 'consequences', should this go through. Now, George W. Bush, the president of the United States, has seconded that warning: the functioning of Taiwanese democracy interferes, at this time, with America's global agenda - North Korea, Iraq and the war on terrorism.
Taiwan is little. It lies close to the mainland. But it is no more China than America is England. The US just happened to be big enough to defend itself, and far enough away. In the two centuries since, America has become steadily bigger. It seems that size has become more centrally what America is about today than freedom. Its big diplomatic schemes with Beijing are more important than the liberty of one little island.
I once read a science-fiction story about a glittering crystal city, in which life had reached absolute perfection. There were no flaws. There was no crime. There was no disease. Every inhabitant led a charmed life - except one. The price for all this was that one innocent little girl had to be locked in a dungeon deep beneath the centre of the city. No school for this little girl, no playmates, no books - and no hope. Dressed in rags, she huddled in the corner of her dank cell. I forget the premise of the story and its plot, but the image springs to mind now as an apt one for Taiwan in the new Pax Americana.
'Nobody cares about you,' the arrogant Chinese deputy snapped rudely at the Taiwanese representative who was trying to ask the World Health Organisation for help to combat Sars. Many died in Taiwan, which never did get admitted to the WHO, just like it is excluded from the United Nations. One of the few places that welcomes Americans with open arms, Taiwan leads a diplomatically buried existence. Only a handful of tiny nations officially recognise it.
What a heavy price to pay for this new world order, with America riding glorious and big at the helm. This may make sense to Mr Bush, but it makes me ashamed to be American, and proud that I happen to live now in small, free Taiwan.
William Stimson and his wife conduct workshops in the Department of Social Work at Chaoyang University of Technology in Wufong, Taiwan. His essays about his childhood in Cuba and his years in New York City have appeared in numerous journals and magazines
