Fighting Against Elimination: Countering the Atrocity of Surveillance in Shawna Yang Ryan’s Novel Green Island
Green Island counters the violence of elimination and exclusion with inclusion and connection, which creates a sense of belonging that embraces the complexity of lives under surveillance, rendering the novel more encompassing.
1. INTRODUCTION
Green Island (2016), written by the Taiwanese American novelist Shawna Yang Ryan, is a fictional story that traces after the timeline of major political events that happened between 1947 and 2003 in Taiwan — an island located near the south-east coast of China and officially known as Republic of China (ROC). Before and during her writing of Green Island, Ryan had researched extensively and collected a variety of materials concerning the tragic events that marked significance in Taiwan’s modern history, namely the 228 Incident/Massacre (1947) and the episodes that broke out during the following 38 years under the Chinese National Party’s, Kuomintang’s (KMT), authoritarian rule, known as the White Terror (1949–1987). The 228 Incident was a conflict between the KMT government and the local Taiwanese, which resulted in an island-wide massacre carried out by the government. Afterwards, during the period of White Terror, the KMT government imposed intensive surveillance on the Taiwanese citizens to secure its sovereignty over the island against its cross-strait enemy, the Communist Party of China (CPC), and to eliminate political dissidences. The political oppression resulted in countless lawless arrestments, false accusations, imprisonments, and murders of the Taiwanese, rendering the whole generation of people inactive and silent about social political issues. It was not until Taiwan transited into a democracy in the 1990s that the discussions on the 228 Incident became possible. The characterizations in Green Island are loosely based on the actual lives of Taiwanese people who had struggled through the years while the whole island was tightly under governmental surveillance.
In an interview on Ryan’s writing process of Green Island, Ryan expressed that she attempted to reconstruct how the reality of living under ubiquitous surveillance was perceived by the survivors of the 228 Incident and the witnesses of the White Terror era — in her words, she wished her writing could “capture that nuance in the feeling” (Farrelly 2). During those years, as the lives of the characters in Green Island exemplify, the influence of governmental surveillance permeates into every aspect of people’s lives, as if it was a ghost that never ceased to haunt them. The impacts that surveillance imposed on society are multifaceted; in this essay, I narrow down my discussion to the aspects of elimination and exclusion, and I would analyze how these aspects are represented in Green Island. I contend that Green Island counters the violence of elimination and exclusion with inclusion and connection, which creates a sense of belonging that embraces the complexity of lives under surveillance, rendering the novel more encompassing.
2. SUMMARY OF GREEN ISLAND
In Green Island, the anonymous narrator’s life is closely intertwined with the fate of her homeland, Taiwan. She was born on the exact day when a Taiwanese widow selling illegal cigarettes was beaten publicly by an KMT agent and was seriously injured. The violence provoked outrage among the Taiwanese, and it intensified the conflicts already existed between the KMT government and the locals. The next day, the narrator’s father (whom she referred to as “Baba”), Doctor Tsai, joined the protesting crowd. He spoke out publicly against the governmental violence and advocated for a transition toward democracy. The government, however, deemed the protesting crowds as traitors or were in collusion with the communist China. Soon after, the government conducted an island-wide armed repression, randomly shooting in the street. That was the beginning of the 228 Incident.
Several days after the shooting, three men came to knock on the Tsai family’s door and then drag Baba away without a word. Together with a group of other arrested men, Baba was taken to a suburb place where they were interrogated by three government officers. Baba insisted on his innocence, but the officers accused him of being a traitor for speaking out against the government. Other men were accused of being communists or sympathizers of communism, and they were murdered the next day of the trial. Baba was exempted from death sentence, but he endured an 11 year-long imprisonment on Green Island, a tiny island outside of the south-east Taiwan.
After 11 years had elapsed, Baba came home as a stranger to the narrator, who was an 11-year-old young girl knowing nothing about her father and the 228 Incident. 11 years of imprisonment turned Baba into a mean, taciturn, eccentric, and paranoid man. He never mentioned to anybody what had happened during his long disappearance. One day, two officials came to his house, demanding that he wrote a letter to invite his best friend, Su Ming Guo, who was a political dissident on the KMT government’s blacklist, to come back from abroad to Taiwan. Su trusted Baba’s words and end up arrested by the KMT government after he came back. The narrator had witnessed her father’s betrayal to his friend and its consequence, and she despised him for that.
The narrator began a new life in the USA after she married a Taiwanese American, Wei Lin, who was a professor at the university of California. She became mother of two daughters, and proceeded to earn a bachelor degree in literature. In the USA, she gradually discovered about the tragic history of the 228 Incident, which had been largely covered up by the KMT government. Wei was an underground activist for advocating Taiwan’s democracy in the USA, and unsurprisingly, he and his family were closely watched by the secret agents that the KMT government sent overseas. One of these agents, Mr. Lu, turned up to the narrator and persuaded her to become an informant of her husband in exchange for securing her family’s safeness. She made a partial complicity. Her situation became more precarious after her husband offered their house as a temporary shelter for Tang Jia Bao, who was an outspoken political dissident that fled from Taiwan because of the KMT government’s persecution. Mr. Lu again turned up to asked her to hand over Jia Bao’s manuscript of the book he was working on, which was a testimony on the 228 Incident and the White Terror. It was an “exchange of safety for information” (281), but the narrator’s choice to be complicit in the KMT government’s surveillance web soon resulted in Jia Bao being murdered in front of his own house. Through all those incidents and difficult force choices, the narrator gradually understood how decades ago Baba struggled when he was made to choose between protecting his family and betraying his friend.
3. SURVEILLANCE AS ELIMINATION AND EXCLUSION
Extracting several of the basic characteristics of surveillance from Lyon’s definition of the term, surveillance is to “watch over” human activities with focus, “systematic,” routinely, and to my argument more crucially, “purposeful” (Lyon 19). In my interpretation, purposeful surveillance indicates that the surveilling agent would take subsequent moves after new information about the objects of surveillance is gathered, whether the consequence is immediately returned onto the surveilled object or not. In another way of understanding “purposeful,” perhaps also more straightforwardly, conducting surveillance is not the ultimate purpose in itself but a means of facilitating other more important ones for the agent of surveillance. In practice, as depicted in Green Island, the KMT government took on surveilling measures for the purpose of eliminating political dissidences and maintaining the society under control. The more essential motivations looming behind could either be a desire to secure the Party’s power and ideology, or a fear of losing them, or more plausibly, both. I consider the surveillance measures conducted by the KMT government is in its essence a means of elimination and exclusion, which I would discuss more thoroughly in the following paragraphs, concerning both historical facts and fictional representations in Green Island.
In the modern history, Taiwan had been colonized by the Japanese Empire from 1895 to 1945. After the Empire lost in World War Ⅱ and surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Taiwan was taken over by the Republic of China (ROC) ruled by the KMT Party, which at that time held sovereignty over most of the territory of China. However, later in a civil war fought against the Communist Party of China (CPC) in-between 1945–49, the KMT party lost its dominance in the Chinese mainland, and the government subsequently retreated to Taiwan at the end of 1949. Since then, the actual territory under ROC’s control consisted of only Taiwan and a number of small islands scattering around.
In the four decades that followed, the KMT Party set reclaiming mainland China with military force and eliminating leftist ideologies as the major guidelines for all other national policies in order to secure its sovereignty over Taiwan. Institute of secret police was established, and the force of governmental surveillance was reinforced after the outbreak of the 228 Incident. The secret police were in charge of surveilling the activities of the common citizens, and especially those of the Taiwanese intellectuals. The government also encouraged citizens to tell on anyone suspicious of colluding with the communist China. Other opinions or activities that could potentially obstruct the KMT Party’s control of Taiwan were also suppressed, such as advocations for democracy or Taiwan’s independence. Overall, free speech was suspended. Citizens who opposed to or disagreed with the government’s policies could be easily accused of being a traitor of their country or sympathizers of the communists, regardless of they in fact were or were not. These alleged crimes were to be punished by torturous interrogations, decades-long imprisonment, or executions. The KMT Party claimed that these oppressions imposed on its citizens were proper measures for the sake of ROC’s security.
During the years of White Terror, the KMT government was eager to wipe out unwanted differences and oppositions from the society, in the hope of turning the society into a unified body against their common enemy, the communist China. For the government, it was allegedly easier and more efficient to rule over a more homogenous society, in which citizens hold similar ideology and therefore minimal opposing opinions. Intellectual elites like Baba in Green Island who possessed knowledge were often the targets of elimination; from the books and information they read, they conjured up a more ideal version of the current society and would set forth to pursue it. Before Baba was arrested and imprisoned, he was a professional doctor well-trained in Western medicine and an idealist who stood out and spoke for “the interest of the people” (Ryan 44), which he believed was the right way to rule a country. If one thinks of doctor’s profession in a metaphorical way, they are the ones who help the patient to recover from illness; ironically, the KMT government punished those who spoke of the illness of the country and considered them as “lepers” that would spread disease in the society (Ryan 366). As I reckon, the government must have secretly acknowledged that there was truth lying in what those intellectuals had pointed out, so true that the government feared the influence of their opinions and was desperate in extinguishing them. “For the sake of the nation’s security” is in fact a face cover for protecting the Party’s ideology from being contaminated (Ryan 63).
There was subsequently no space for judgements on what is the right way to tackle with problems, but only what the government believed, asserted, and had conducted were the unchallengeable truth. Truth referred not to what had actually happened, but what the government thought had happened. The distinguishment between right and wrong, true and false was a binary classification: whatever opinions that were aligned with the Party’s interests were truth, others were crime. The KMT government arrested those citizens who, like Baba, acted or spoke out against its principle and segregated them from the rest of the society by imprisonment or by execution to excluded them for good. In prison, prisoners were reeducated by the KMT officers, who forced them to “[recite]…anticommunist lessons” each day and memorized the Party’s principles (Ryan 59). The purpose of it was to cure the illness of their mind and to disinfect them so that they would no longer be contaminating to the society. Before those lepers were to be released back into the society (if possible), they were forced to acquire the discipline to watch over their own thoughts and behaviors.
After Baba was finally released from the prison, measures of surveillance from the KMT government were still strictly imposed on him, rendering it impossible for him to genuinely reintegrate into the society and therefore excluded from general citizens. For one thing, national law prohibited him to return to his previous profession as a doctor since he had a record as a criminal. The only jobs he was able to get were the ones that did not match his previous social status, such as a construction worker and an assistant to help clean the clinic (Ryan 107, 113). For another, no matter how long had Baba left the prison, he was never loosened from the government’s tight control and manipulation. Baba was obligated to go for secret interrogations every time the police summoned him, and every time he was unsure whether he was able to return from the police station or not. Besides, everyone he knew and people in his neighborhood knew for sure of his 11-year-long disappearance, but they refrained themselves from questioning him about it or mentioning about it at all. People avoided getting in touch with him: keeping a close relationship with a former criminal, who was constantly kept under close surveillance by the government, could brought themselves under the surveillance as well and caused them trouble. The record as a former criminal was like a stigma etched onto Baba’s face, which was invisible but inerasable, automatically keeping people away. 11 years of imprisonment left Baba with a broken character, and the surveillance that continued endlessly after he came out of the prison kept him a broken person, who was always suspecting that someone was watching him and unable to speak his mind out loud again (Ryan 105). He was alive, but was socially and spiritually dead, which was not so different from being eliminated from the earth.
A scene in which Baba was put on trial after his arrestment exemplifies the KMT government’s desperation to wipe out differences from the society and its fear that opposing ideologies would contaminate the minds of their men (Ryan 41–44). In this scene, three high-ranking KMT Party officials were in charge of adjudging Baba and three other men. Baba was despaired to discover that “what he said did not matter” at all to the officials who had already decided their fate before the trial began (Ryan 44). He and the three other men were condemned respectively as a traitor, a criticizer of the KMT’s plan, a sympathizer of the communists, and a spy of the communist China (Ryan 42–44). In fact, under what name were these men accused did not matter — they were simply all being classified into the opposite of what were right and true to the KMT government. Their defenses were useless. One of these dammed men, who indeed firmly believed in communism, no longer held back himself from spitting his mind out loud about the communist revolution, as he already knew his fate was doomed. His outburst came as a shock on the trial. The officers were mad but could not stop the desperate man, whose ideas they deemed as “poison to the Republic of China” (Ryan 43), from trying to influence their underofficers. It is also a great irony when a serious trial in fact carried out no justice at all.
It was also Ryan’s genius to place the narrator’s birth date on the day of the outbreak of the 228 Incident, so by default she had no memory, therefore no knowledge, of the event. Under the government’s careful surveillance, discussions concerning the 228 Incident were taboos in either public and private realms. In school, the narrator was taught only of the principles and facts which the KMT government acknowledged, such as being loyal to the country, ROC was the legal sovereignty over China, and report to the police when found someone suspicious of being a communist spy (Ryan 64). The memory of the 228 Incident, in which many dissidents were once active and many had sacrificed, was in such a way eliminated from the whole new generation’s mind.
4. COUNTERING ELIMINATION WITH CONNECTION AND INCLUSION
With the various surveillance measures, the KMT party held tight control of the Taiwanese society and sought to eliminate dissidences that were unwanted in its version of a unified, submissive society. The narrative of Green Island counters this vision with creating a sense of connection, inclusion, and belonging, which is enabled by the author’s narrating techniques as well as genuine understanding and shared empathy between the characters.
“My mother Li Min’s labor pains began the night that the widow was beaten in front of the Tian-ma Teahouse” (Ryan 5).
This is the opening sentence of the novel, which directly bounds the narrator’s mother Li Min, the narrator (the still unborn baby), the woman who triggered the 228 Incident, and the fate of the Taiwan island closely together. The labor pain Li Min experienced echoes the bodily pain the widow endures, and later in the story resonates with all the pains the Taiwanese suffers under the KMT government’s inhumane suppression. This link drawn between the pains endured by different person, though across spaces but at the same moment, put all the Taiwanese in the same boat and each could understand the pain of one another, even though the cause of their pain might differ. A particular image in the trial scene also resonates with this idea of a shared pain and fate. Before the trial on Baba and the three other men started, they were being bounded together by a wire string that pierced through the skin of their hands — “like fish for market” (Ryan 40). The details of how the four men were strung together and the agony of each man when the cold wire pierced through them are carved delicately with effort. As Baba twisted his back due to unbearable pain on his hands, “[t]he others protested every time he twitched — each shiver echoed down the line” (Ryan 40). I consider the scene as a perfect reification of the situation of the Taiwanese: they were bounded together by oppressive governors, they simultaneously experience the pain of themselves and the others, and each of their actions would immediately reflect on another’s fate.
Blood is also a vital element relevant to the theme of connection in Green Island. It not only testifies governmental violence but connects the livings and the deaths. On the night of the narrator’s birth, the street outside was in chaos and no midwife would come to their house, so Baba used his own hand to deliver her wife of their daughter. The image of herself and the newborn drenched in her own blood remined her of the dead man’s bloody body in the downstairs, who was shot dead by the KMT military (Ryan 13). The same pair of hands in which Baba introduced his daughter to the world had been soaked with the injured man’s blood as he passed away. On that same night, when the narrator met the world in flood of her mother’s blood, countless of Taiwanese shed blood and died drenching in one another’s blood. On the one hand, blood declares that a new life is joining the world, on the other hand, it signifies that a life is passing away. Countless people died in the 228 Incident and the White Terror, but at the same time there were also countless people born onto the island. The atrocity had destroyed many, but the life of Taiwanese continued to prosper and outlive the years of oppression. In Ryan’s narrative, blood is simultaneously the outcome of destruction and the symbol of creation; it is neutral and all-inclusive.
The duality in the narrator’s point of view facilitates the coherence of storytelling, bridging the gap between the history unknown to the narrator and the life she lived. The story is told intermittently in the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective, however, all told from the anonymous narrator’s vantage point. Theoretically, the narrator could not have witnessed the events before her birth and how Baba was treated in imprisonment. The story of Baba and Mama (mother) and of the 228 Incident are however carved with intricate details, as if the narrator was there and had witnessed them all. An image of the narrator, as I had conjured up while reading, is a floating spirit that could freely switch back and forth in time and zoom in and out of other characters’ mind. When the narrative is told from the third-person perspective, the characters are not referred to with their formal titles or names but with the appellations used by the narrator. For instance, Dr. Tsai is always referred to as Baba, and his wife Li Min always as Mama. A sense of intimacy is enacted through such special naming design. It enables the vacancy of the narrator’s knowledge of the family’s past to be refilled by the stories of Baba and Mama, which are at the time unable to be told. Besides, it facilitates the spontaneous flow of empathy from the narrator to the readers. Naming the characters by Baba and Mama elicits in readers the love and intimate connections between family members. Under this narrative framework, the narrator witnesses how her parents had struggled under oppressive surveillance. She becomes the omniscient watchful eyes that gaze back into the surveilling ones.
Baba came into the narrator’s life as a total stranger, the history of his existence before her is completely eliminated from her knowledge and is only told by the third-person perspective, which is by nature imaginative. The knowledge gap between the first- and third- person perspective of the narrator creates a gap between her and Baba, which is to be gradually bridged as the story unfolds by the mirroring of their difficult decisions made across decades. When the narrator was a young girl, she witnessed Baba’s betrayal to his friend, Su Ming Guo, and ever since loathed him and considered him as a morally defected man. It was not until later when she became a mother and found herself caught in similar moral dilemmas did she realized how she had misunderstood Baba. The officers from the KMT government came to Baba and forced him to decide whether or not to be complicit in their plot in exchange of his family’s safety. The manipulation crashed Baba’s last insistence on loyalty and morality, and he could only secretly persuade himself that his choice had saved his family (Ryan 119). The narrator faced similar dilemma when Mr. Lu turned up to her and asked her to hand over a set of important photos of Wei. In order to secure the family’s safety, she did, though she knew her betrayal would since then always gnaw on her conscience. The narrator went through still a couple of other similar dilemma, and each time she had no choice but chose to protect her family. Each betrayal to the ones she loved brought her agony, but each decision also brought her closer to Baba. As she stared at the moon after she went through a tortured secret interrogation by the KMT agents, she expressed, “I felt linked through the years to Baba by this moon, which had witnessed it all. Had he stood here too, under its gaze, thinking of his sleeping children? I longed to say to him: Baba, I understand” (Ryan 334). She could finally understand his situations and the choices he made.
The narration ends in 2003, the year serious pandemic, SARS, swept through many countries in East Asia, including Taiwan. Visiting her sick mother in the hospital, the narrator together with Baba were trapped in the hospital for several weeks since someone was infected by SARS and the government quarantined the hospital. The hospital quarantine mirrors and resonates with Baba’s imprisonment decades ago, but when comparing the two, there are significant differences. In order to prevent the contagious disease from infecting more healthy people, the government temporarily excludes the infected people from the rest, putting them under quarantine. The metaphorical image of opposing opinions and ideologies as contagious in a society is reified here. The people being segregated were upset and worried as well, but this time connections to the outer world was not entirely blocked. There were TV reporters that conveyed the anger of the people in quarantine; there were telephone lines that people in the hospital could reach out to their loved ones and informed them of the conditions in the hospital. The uncanny similarities between a quarantined hospital and a prison revived Baba’s memory of his own imprisonment. For the first time, he recounted his long years in prison to the narrator.
5. CONCLUSION
Green Island represents the pain and struggle of the Taiwanese who lived through the years when the KMT government took on tight surveillance measures. In order to enhance the efficiency of ruling the country, the government was eager to eliminate all dissidences. It carried out strict control on the intellectuals, who were the most likely to held opposing opinions, and once they were detected to have deviated from the Party’s norm, they would be severely punished. Even if some survived the punishment and returned to the society, they would still be excluded and marked as the lepers.
With the outstanding narrative techniques and structures, Green Island counters the eliminating force of the government by establishing connections within and between the generations. Pain, suffer, life, and death are linked together through the element of blood. The difficult choices made across decades by Baba and the narrator echoes with each other, and through those choices the narrator finally understood and forgave her father for his betrayal.
Works Cited
Farrelly, Paul. “Shawna Yang Ryan discusses her novel Green Island”. Australian Centre on China in The World. 2016.
Lyon, David. Surveillance studies. An Overview. 2007.
Ryan, Shawna Yang. Green Island. Vintage, 2016.
