Trapped in history / Screen credit
Today: Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, co-founder of New Bloom, and author of Taipei at Daybreak; and Jack Pendarvis, an American screenwriter, author, and voice actor.
Issue No. 564
The Island Left Behind
Brian Hioe
Kent Goes to Chelmsford: Episode 6
Jack Pendarvis
The Island Left Behind
by Brian Hioe
A few years ago, a short documentary called Island Between won best documentary short film at the Academy Awards. Although I gave it an okay review at the time, something really stood out to me—and to many other Taiwanese viewers.
Island Between attempted to depict Taiwan’s outlying island of Kinmen, which is a mere two kilometers from China. It attempted to use Kinmen’s situation as a parallel for that of Taiwan as a whole.
But, well, the metaphor doesn’t really work. For Kinmen, the rest of Taiwan is a “mainland” and it is its own thing. It’s not a metaphor for Taiwan, but an entirely distinct entity. Its own place.
Kinmen has sometimes been referred to as a “Cold War island.” It was the site of some of the last fighting in the Chinese Civil War; the island was shelled for decades, every other day, by CCP forces, and major battles took place there—the 823 Artillery Battle and the Battle of Guningtou.
Well, I went to Kinmen the other week for the first time, along with a group of Okinawan activists, and it’s harrowing stuff. Immediately when I arrived, our hostel owner pointed to a nearby bomb shelter that had been turned into a memorial after the people there were killed—their remains were kept in the place where they died.
Keep us breathing fire!
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