ABSTRACT
America’s Founding Fathers are proud foundlings who turn their backs on British parentage. Historically and psychologically, to identify oneself as a foundling lays the foundation for the construction of one’s identity, an upward ascent from the lowest point of nobody-no family, no power. Some cast themselves in the role of foundling to declare independence, whereas others, alas, have that role thrust upon them. Compared to George Washington and his progeny, foundling Taiwanese, numbering twenty-three million presently, must play with an awful hand, having been possessed, exploited, and largely forsaken since the sixteenth century by the Ming Dynasty, the Portuguese, the Qing Dynasty, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), the Japanese, and the Nationalist. In the wake of the Nationalist (Kuomingtang or KMT) arrival from mainland China in 1949, the fate of the Republic of China (ROC) continues that of the foundling island with the loss of a continent, followed by growing isolation in the 1970s, a decade that opens with the United Nations’ replacing of Taiwan with China and closes with the United States’ recognition of Beijing. In the twenty-first century, China’s political and economic clout overshadows Taiwan, literally, when Chinese missiles flew over the Taiwan Strait in 1996. Disowned by all, each Taiwanese becomes, by default, a Founding Mother or Father, somehow free to play with the genealogy of orphancy, like a shadow by the water’s edge building sandmen in its own image. The Nationalist government has sought to turn the trope of foundling into
foundational consciousness to fashion solidarity. Possibly from my elementary school days in the mid-to-late 1960s, I remember the radio play Zhao shi gu’er (The Orphan of Chao),1 among others, that reiterates the importance of loyalty to the state, even to the extent of sacrificing oneself and loved ones. The supremacy of radio as mass entertainment gives way to the advent of television in the late 1960s, with the live broadcast of the Apollo landing on the moon and the Golden Dragon Little League baseball team from Taichung winning the championship in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Those “little” players, including many aborigines, embody Taiwan the little David beating a world of Goliaths. Caught in the inclement wind of the 1970s, the Chiang regime, Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-guo, seeks to
ratchet up the “passionate intensity” of a beleaguered orphan by requiring schools to read and discuss Richard Bach’s (1970) “inspirational” Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Wang yang zhong de yi tiao chuan (A Raft in the Storm, a 1976 memoir by Zheng Fengxi born with deformed legs), and others. Beyond the ROC’s political propaganda capitalizing on the found(l)ing duality, Taiwanese cultural expression has revolved around the destiny and potentialities of being a waif: Zhuoliu Wu’s aptly titled Orphan of Asia (1945), Xiangtu (nativist or home-soil) writers in the 1970s, New Taiwan Cinema by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang since the 1980s, and, in 2008, Wei Te-sheng’s melodramatic Haijiao qihao (Cape No. 7). A foundling identity, fraught with ambiguity and tension, inspires artists to search for Taiwanese-ness, one part of which flounders at the end of the Pacific Ocean, other parts strewn across the globe. The erstwhile Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier in service to the Cold War Commander of the United States has been retired, some servicemen and women having jumped ship, slept on, or carried on business-as-usual for selfpreservation. Like Lu Xun, some continue to shout inside the abandoned iron hulk, those compassionate artists such as Huang Chun-ming, Wang Chen-ho, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, or those more politically-minded such as Yang Chingtsu, Wang Tuo, and Chen Ying-chen. But these artistic expressions are sandwiched by two seemingly antithetical but fundamentally similar sentiments. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Nationalist political propaganda urges recovery of the Chinese Fatherland. In the millennial milieu of hari (idolizing Japan) in Taiwan, Wei Te-sheng cashes in on Taiwan’s regressiveness for the Japanese Okasan. Both impulses stem from foundlings’ search for parentage, one for the phallic power of the father, the other for the lulling insentient womb of the mother/lover surrogate. We have long ago awakened from the protracted Nationalist nightmare, only to drift now into another wet dream with the twin Tomokos in Cape No. 7.
