Bald-Headed Bedeviled
In the last days of my 18-month stay in Taiwan, I went to Taoyuan to see the notorious Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Sculpture Park. The memorial contains the coffins of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-guo (unburied as they await the Chiangs’ aspired repatriation to China) and an odd collection of statues of Chiang Kai-shek turfed up from all parts of Taiwan. After the democratization of Taiwan, progressive politicians ordered the likenesses of Taiwan’s dictator (and mass murderer) cut down and dumped outside of the man’s resting place. Arranged around the coffins of the two men is a forest of statues almost all of which belong to the same historical figure. Wandering through them is eerie — at the center of an auditorium of grinning, bald-headed leaders of “free China.” The park is, for many, a joke. To others, it serves as a concentrated homage to a Taiwan that they understood more clearly.
I travelled to this park with I-chen, a precious friend who still commutes from Taoyuan to Taipei each day to work at Doublethink Lab. When I worked there with him, we joked about a day trip during which we’d visit this sculpture park and stop off at a nearby munitions factory. It was a perfect Sunday for “politics nerds.”
The moment we got out of his car at the park on that day, we heard the sound of reed pipes echoing over the grounds. In front of the visitor center was a circle of spectators and man dancing with fire. Shirtless, he hurled his burning staff into the air and the flames lit the faces around him. “Oh, this is indigenous music,” I-chen remarked.
The army guarded Chiang’s coffin with guns. Inside, the body of a man who chased a people across China and slew countless on the shores of this bedeviled island. Outside, a new class of Taiwanese with no visions of ethnic uniformity, admiring the music of a people marginalized under Chiang’s rule. New faces, new dreams, and a new country.
These pics make some serious kompromat:
