When I was a child, I liked to make paper boats and see them float away on the Hsuchuan Canal, which passed in front of our home in Keelung. I would follow it to the mouth of the canal, which opened into the Keelung Harbor. My grandmother often said that the harbor area east of the canal was a dangerous place and warned me to stay away.
I remember how one year, this area — which used to be full of driftwood — was filled in with soil and turned into a parking lot, although a lot of people were unwilling to park their cars there because it was not “clean.”
It was only then that I found out that countless corpses had floated in that area many years before, and that the body of one of my uncles was among them, sinking to the bottom of the sea with two other bodies tied to slabs of stone with steel wire.
I learned that, during this time, my father had been detained by the police, the military police and the military headquarters, and that every time he had to pay a large ransom wrapped in a big tablecloth before he was released. I also found out that my grandfather had disappeared for more than three months and only reappeared after writing a confession. During that time, our tutor, physician and city councilor belonged to social groups that were being persecuted. This was the crackdown in March 1947 that is part of the 228 Massacre.
Every March since then, my grandmother could often be heard hiding in the dark, crying. We still feel pain in our hearts, pain that there are always people who want to hide the truth, pain because it takes time for the wounds to heal. It has been 69 years — a long time. Despite that, social justice still has not been properly served, as the government seems to think that everything is fine because it has paid compensation and holds memorial services. Is that all?
The main culprit behind the 228 Massacre is still venerated in an impressive building, looking out over Liberty Square in Taipei. Authoritarian symbols are still seen everywhere and even the government of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), which claims that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) cares a great deal about the 228 Massacre, simply goes through the motions, treating it as a soap opera.
The Ma administration is taking the same approach to the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum and the National 228 Memorial Museum as these institutions try to figure out their purpose, by first destroying the work that has been done and then weakening their function and significance. It is the same ruthlessness and ineptness with which they are running the nation, and there is no transitional justice to talk of.
We have never really hoped that the KMT, the gang that oversaw the 228 Massacre, would come to its senses, but we do pin our hopes on promises of transitional justice made by the incoming government.
However, we are not so narrow in our approach as to only care about the 228 Massacre. We have long felt that a new definition of the 228 Massacre is required: It can symbolize the various clashes and the grief that have occurred in Taiwan over the past 400 years.
We must look at the 228 Massacre from different perspectives in order to build a platform for ethnic reconciliation and create dialogue between the different ethnic groups that live in Taiwan.
Together, people must look at the suffering and pain that has taken place over the past 400 years and reach a common agreement on protecting the nation. This is the only way to bring redemption from the evils of the 228 Massacre.
Yang Chen-lung is a former executive director of the 228 Incident Memorial Foundation.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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