Hi friendsssss,
I originally wrote a piece on third spaces / stepwells as part of my India & eco fellowship for my recent update, but in light of recent events, I yap about something else, and my visit to Kinmen Island. Enjoy, and a few photos here ~
You describe Kinmen as “stuck in time.” Not in a bad way, but you sound pretentious. It’s because it’s so different from the Taiwan you know: one that had transformed from a struggling, agrarian-based economy into a high-tech and industrialized “Asian Tiger.” A miracle influenced by rapid westernization and globalization. There are thousands of 7/11s in the country, and that one summer, your favorite ritual was stopping by the 7 underneath your home, even when you didn’t need anything 90% of the time. Even after years, you are still surprised by the cashier’s monotonous “欢迎光临,” which reminds you too much of “Convenience Store Woman.” It also reminds you how much more conscious you have become of work and labor — even in the place you saw as boundless. You are checking the candy aisle, the ice cream section, and then the snacks as if the unlikely incident of them being discontinued was a reminder of the end of a childhood you are still confused by.
In Taipei, every other person knows Fluent English, does not speak Minnan, and went to some international or IB school. You always compare it to the mainland, you say people are nicer, more polite, more “educated.” But you are disgusted by the white men who have come to work in Taiwan as English teachers and married a Taiwanese girl, because it’s essential for your credentials and foreign grade. You’re reminded that Taipei is sometimes more American than America, a series of contingencies marked by physical and immaterial wars. You continue to consume symbolic markers of your Asianess because you, too, are desperately trying to prove yourself. You have probably watched Millennium Mambo maybe five times, analyzed it, but you still lose.
In Kinmen, the streets are organically surrounded by temples. At the end of the street where we had pineapple cakes made by a local couple, we casually walked past one of the island’s main sites, The Chastity Arch for Qiu Liang-Gong's Mother. There are no tourist traps around, no daika (photo op) spots, and no overpriced street food you typically find in the mainland. Your friend McKenna pointedly questions you: Is there a city that does not “feel stuck in time” in Asia and that hasn't been developed/western either? You critique your own understanding of westernization, modernization, and of time. Was a city modern because it is developed? Is it not stuck in time if it has a 7/11 on every block? What makes a city modern, and moreover, what makes it worthy?
Were you only saying Jinmen felt “stuck in time” because it didn’t have the symbols of modernization you are so used to? A short flight away from Taiwan, and accessible by mainland China to the east through a 30-minute ferry ride from Xiamen (Fujian), it is a beautiful island that has become a visual embodiment of cross-strait tensions and a place marked by war. The PLA seized the islands of Dadeng, Xiaodeng, and Jiaoyu in mid-October 1949. Today, although the ROC continues to claim these islands, they are administered under Xiamen's Xiang'an District in Fujian Province.
Following the founding of the People's Republic of China by the Chinese Communist Party in October 1949, both the Nationalist and Communist governments claimed sovereignty over Kinmen County. On October 25, 1949, PLA troops launched an assault on Kinmen Island near Guningtou, triggering the Battle of Kuningtou, which the ROC forces won. And because the Americans love to intervene in everything, when the Korean War began in 1950, retired Admiral Charles M. Cooke Jr., who served as an advisor to President Chiang Kai-shek, argued against pulling ROC troops out of Kinmen. On July 26, 1950, a small ROC garrison of 298 soldiers on Dadan Island successfully fought off a larger force of 700 troops. The PLA continued to bomb Kinmen during both Taiwan Strait crises of 1954–55 and 1958. During these episodes, American military and political leaders, including General Douglas MacArthur, backed the ROC's efforts to hold the island and seriously considered deploying nuclear weapons against the PRC. Nathan F. Twining, an Air Force General and Eisenhower’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to President Eisenhower that all necessary force, including atomic arms, be used to prevent a “Communist takeover.”
In fact, Kinmen, alongside Xiamen and Matsu (an island close to my home city of Fuzhou), entered the discourse of the 1960 televised debate so well-known in American presidential history and culture between Nixon and Kennedy. They both agreed that American military force should be used if necessary to defend Taiwan itself, but they disagreed sharply over whether that commitment extended to the offshore islands. While Kennedy argued that Xiamen and Matsu, situated only about 9 kilometers from mainland China and over 170 kilometers from Taiwan, were neither strategically viable nor essential to Taiwan's defense, Nixon insisted on the principle that no territory within the "area of freedom" should be conceded to Communist control. Nixon said, “In the Truman Administration, 600 million people went behind the Iron Curtain, including the satellite countries of Eastern Europe and Communist China. In this Administration, we have stopped them at Quemoy and Matsu, we have stopped them in Indo China, we have stopped them in Lebanon, we have stopped them in other parts of the world.” He still lost lol because we are all obsessed with the #attractive man we see on television.
Indeed, there is a unique sense of nostalgia baked into Jinmen’s streets. We had gone to the island partly because we were interested in its history, but my friend Natalie, whose mom is Chinese, traced her family lineage back to Kinmen. Her grandfather was born and raised in Malaysia, but his grandfather had left Kinmen for Singapore. Before COVID, Natalie’s gong gong arranged a family reunion, and now, 7 years later, his granddaughter was studying in China and decided to make a trip of her own. As a history major, I always say the best way to understand historical methodologies is to study your own family; you learn to tend to the discipline a little more gently. And especially because of the gaps in the archives for most of the world’s families, because of history’s own marginalization that you are forced to accept, you learn to treat the act with more intention because now the “subject” of study has become something you are intimately perplexed by.
I say history is a labor of love, but tracing your own is the true act of love. It is also a love you inherit. Many of my friends know I study history because of my evening walks with my grandpa, who, despite being known for his stoicness, never laughed or disciplined me for my audacious questions about history and our family’s. Though Nat and I never fully articulated it, I think it’s a beautiful thing to see this in her relationship with her grandfather, too. This trip was started by her grandfather, but she was continuing: meticulously re-tracing his hastily written family map with her aunt, in making sense of the different lineages, and filling in the gaps.
With our friends, we called as many relatives as we could, before realizing many of them had left, before finding Mr. Li. None of us had any idea if his invitation to give him a call when we arrived was just being a type of careful politeness that only Chinese people could discern, but we were reminded during our stroll through the old town. After we explained we had arrived in Kinmen, he asked us to meet him at his store the same afternoon and gave us an address. We had essentially been sitting on his doorstep, and he was just three minutes away. In between Mandarin and the Minnan dialect, they were welcomed with the warmth you often associate with homecoming. In fact, Mr. Li and his wife reminded me so much of my own grandparents. The Minnan dialect sounded similar to the Fuzhounese dialect my grandparents often spoke in, so I was able to understand what they were trying to say: their persistence in staying warm, eating dinner with them, and coming back tomorrow. It all felt extremely familiar.
For the rest of the trip, we moped around the island, visited the military sites, and Natalie's old town, which had been the site of the Battle of Guningtou. This time, nostalgia wasn't from a place I knew and had childhood memories of, but an experience I was scared would happen again and again - sometime in the future.
I write this a few weeks after the United States bombed Iran. I’m curious how much this will change the world. What it will mean to be Chinese American in a few years. Indeed, there is a nostalgia in Kinmen because there are signs of war everywhere; its people, its land, its streets are simultaneously reminded of war, of being left behind, but also of of resisting Western development. It’s all so confusing.
James Baldwin says you love America so much that you feel the need to perpetually critique it. “The American earnestness I love so much is tinged, these days, with a touch of resentment and desperation.”
It's often said that history is only for the victors of war. For now, if going through the archives feels meticulous, and there are only two seconds of joy in finding the right document, the act of tracing family before realizing they are a 3-minute walk away is a joy you keep for as long as you can.
Warmly,
Wena
03.26