Letters | Living in China, watching Taiwan: coming of age in Xiamen
- My days of watching Taiwan TV may have been a long time ago, but the effects last forever. I still feel close to Taiwan, maybe also because I am a little nostalgic
Though I have never been to Taiwan, and I grew up in a communist country whose political system and ideology are totally different, I have always felt a strong connection to the island. This consistent and deep-rooted feeling was nurtured by watching Taiwan TV.
Xiamen is special in that it shares the same language with Taiwan (the Minnan dialect) which helps us understand their programmes better. Exposure to those messages over time should mean something, we tended to perceive the world through Taiwan TV’s angle. Predisposition formed by TV before we attended formal politics classes in Chinese schools was difficult to subvert. “Counter-attack the mainland” was a phrase I learned from Taiwan TV, although with the current disparity in military power it sounds more like a joke.
The entry of Chinese official TV channels and the later blocking of Taiwan TV signals left me very disappointed. Had my grandfather, who didn’t understand Mandarin, still been alive at that time, he would not have ever turned on the TV again. He would have been trapped in a situation where he understood nothing from the TV programmes.