Eye On Taiwan
Op-Ed¹
Date: June 14, 2016
By: David Wang
Some Taiwanese will actually have outsiders believe that Formosa (the nation’s Spanish name) has plenty to offer, with the title “Isle of Treasure” also bestowed upon it to show their pride of place.
But one’s mind was not ringing with the Coca Cola theme “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” nor “All we need is love” or any of the other memorable tunes to inspire advancement of peace and harmony in the world early on June 10, 2016 in Taipei.
One of the TV channels showed a video uploaded by someone in a park in Kaohsiung, the southern major city. A Taiwanese woman by the name of Hung, seemingly in her 50s, was yelping at a neatly-dressed, retired veteran using a walker easily 20 years her senior. She essentially scolded him to go “home,” that his peers have been in Taiwan for some 70 years leeching off the nation, and that the Taiwanese can no longer afford to support his kind, having also labeled him as a refugee.
She obviously discounts totally any contribution to Taiwan by the mainland Chinese GIs, who retreated to Taiwan around 1949 after being defeated by the Communists. These GIs actually helped to build, with back-breaking labor wielding pick axes, parts of the highway that snakes through the central alpine ridge in Taiwan.
This woman, later reported on TV to be a daughter of a mainland Chinese and Taiwanese mom, is technically of Cantonese descent. She would likely be against colonization, emigration, and any kind of interracial encounters.
She has also been exposed as a member of the Taiwan Civil Government group (http://www.civil-taiwan.org/mil-gov.htm) that has several offices across Taiwan. This group believes its proposed administration can resolve the standoff between China and Taiwan. But there are also people who believe in were wolfs, the Big Foot, Santa and earnest work plus a sound college education equal guaranteed entry to the C-suite with 7-figure paycheck. TV reports say the group is distancing itself from Hung in the wake of her outburst.
One can’t help to wonder if she is one of those who, like people employed by certain businesses that provide crowds on-demand, would be a paid pawn for any cause.
Hung also claims to be a reporter but is not affiliated with any news agency; while her phone number inexplicably is that of a travel agency. TV reports showed a staffer at the travel agency who complaint of receiving 1,000-plus calls from irate people who wanted to tell Hung where to go.
Another TV report showed Hung preaching her own political views at a school for pre-teens and has been fired as result.
Could it be that Hung is actually a Looney-Tune zealot playing with a short deck?
What a poster girl Hung would make for all the aborigines worldwide? After all the First Nation people across North America likely share her sentiment toward all the Caucasians who invaded and then colonized their newly adopted homeland. Ditto for the various aborigines in Taiwan who were on the island centuries if not millennia before any Taiwanese.
How do the Taiwanese aborigines genuinely feel about Hung, her compatriots and other later occupiers of the island? Does she care?
So far no aborigines in Taiwan have been reported in media to openly show animosity toward Taiwanese and other non-natives for taking their land.
So it’s settled. Taiwan does have it all, even ethno-racism or racism perpetrated against an ethnic group.
Isn’t it admirable? Taiwan in this respect is in the same league as other western, fully-developed nations as the USA, where racism against Afro-Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups is taken for granted, albeit frowned upon by politically-correct citizens.
This woman presumptuously categorizes herself among the Taiwanese to be patrons of retired mainland Chinese soldiers. One assumes Hung’s bugbear being all those tax dollars paid by Taiwanese supporting such vets. But is she not wearing politically-motivated blinkers? So she would also self-delusionally believe her compatriots’ tax dollars do not support the long list of Taiwanese who exploit, abuse the national health insurance plan, bureaucrats who are on the gravy train. And if she were lucid, rational and want to be taken seriously, then Hung would also point her guns at the endlessly long list of crooks of all stripes and sizes in Taiwan who not only have burnt tax dollars directly or otherwise, but also wreaked havoc on the nation’s international reputation. Such criminals also raise cost of doing business in Taiwan to boot.
Arguably at the top of that list is former president Chen Shui-bian. Look up http://star.worldbank.org/corruption-cases/node/19577 among many other links that would have Hung do a double take.
Hung was also shown in a TV video asking pointedly a man if he speaks the Min-Nan dialect to show irrefutable proof of his being “real” Taiwanese.
Many Taiwanese speak the Min-Nan dialect or Fukienese as do the mainland Chinese in the Fukien province across the Strait.
Former president Chen, among his other highly-publicized exploits and achievements, speaks the Min-Nan dialect perfectly, Mandarin (the official language taught in Taiwan and spoken by most mainland Chinese albeit with occasional accent) with a ghastly Taiwanese accent, and no other foreign language. But he is not able to be as proudly Taiwanese being technically behind bars or on medical parole.
Incidentally one can safely bet that millions of tax-paying Hispanics or Latinos as well as other ethnic-minority immigrants in the USA, Canada and Australia can barely speak English but are card-carrying citizens of those nations.
But such observation and its socio-political-economic significance would be irrelevant and incomprehensible to Hung, whose global view only extends from her door to the park where she harassed, insulted the elderly vet.
Now one of Taiwan’s explicitly patriotic citizens has shown the world that the island is an equal to the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany among other fully-developed nations, at least in possessing ethno-racism.
Fortunately Taiwan is not a twin to the USA, to which the tiny island often but unjustifiably compares itself, in other respects. For the NRA is not a force to be reckoned with in Taiwan, which also does not share the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution to protect the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Or the likes of Hung could be silenced pronto by other zealots and crackpots with redneck tendencies. Untold numbers of people of all colors in the USA have been killed for publicizing politically-charged, biased, bigoted voices and opinions at far lower decibels than Hung.
¹ Eye On Taiwan provides news and opinion articles as a service to our readers. Often these articles come from sources outside of our organization. Where possible, the author and the source are documented within each article. Statements and opinions expressed in these articles are solely those of the author or authors and may or may not be shared by the staff and management of Eye On Taiwan.
