Some Coffee Shop Oral History

I recently blogged an enjoyable chat with an elderly Korean gentleman that I had outside the national library in Seoul and shared some of his stories about life in colonial Korea and during the turbulent years that followed.

Today Sayaka and I are spending a leisurely afternoon reading in a Taipei coffee shop (chain) called QK咖啡. Although their motto is “ranQueen ranKing” which seems to explain the Q and the K in their name, we noticed the elderly Taiwanese couple sitting next to us talking about the name. The same couple had earlier taken notice of the fact that Sayaka and I were often using Japanese with each other. When they pointed the “QK” out to each other and read it out loud, our eyes met and I told them, in Chinese, that I just realized that the name is actually quite interesting. When you pronounce “QK” together you also get the Japanese word 休憩 or “kyûkei” which means “to rest” or “to take a break.” Since it isn’t unusual at all to see Japanese words in the names of Taiwanese stores and restaurants (For example, Sayaka lives very close to a coffee shop called 黒潮 (the Japan Current), which has the Japanese pronunciation for these characters, “Kuroshio” written next to it), we believe it simply can’t be a coincidence that the title of the coffee shop ends up a play on a Japanese word (the whole store name read in Japanese also makes a nice alliterative Kyûkei Kôhii, as it does in Chinese, QK Kafei).

Having thus broken the ice, the Taiwanese couple asked Sayaka if she was Japanese and started to speak to us in absolutely fluent Japanese. We complimented their Japanese and they said that they had both spoken Japanese as children through until they graduated from junior high school. If they graduated from junior high school in 1945, which at least the husband claimed to have, that would now make them about 75 years old. With this as an opening, we asked them all sorts of questions about their lives back during this time. As in my other encounters of this sort, they had lots of fascinating stories.

Neither of the couple seemed to come from backgrounds of poverty. The wife’s parents were involved in commercial activities of some kind in a town near Taipei but she said that during the latter period of the war, when food production became ever more important, her father was involved in developing farms in Taiwan’s mountainous areas. The husband came from Taipei too (which he interestingly pronounced “Taihoku” as Japanese from that period would have presumably pronounced it) but his father was apparently a researcher at some kind of “agricultural research center” and also taught agricultural techniques to farmers.

When the war ended and Taiwan reverted to the control of Nationalist Chinese forces, he finished his high school education in Taipei though all of his classes switching suddenly from Japanese to Chinese. The couple said that the switch was particularly difficult for elementary school teachers who had to study Chinese via the radio and change their materials from Japanese to Chinese, while junior and high school teachers came largely from China. After graduating the husband was accepted to and went to Zhongyang University in Nanjing after turning down an offer from Taiwan National University. The year was 1948 and within only a few months of starting college, he would be fleeing Nanjing with the rest of the Nationalist government and his fellow students as the Nationalist forces started crumbling in the face of Communist advances.

He said that he knew, vaguely, that there was a civil war raging on the mainland but didn’t think it was that big a deal before going. His first impression of China, when arriving in Shanghai by boat in early 1948 was the absolute chaos on the docks, where coolies were running around the arriving boats grabbing baggage for the arriving passengers. He later contrasted this with his return to Taiwan where, upon arrival, he was handed a ticket for his baggage which he used to retrieve it upon disembarkation, “Ah, that is why I like Taiwan.” 「だから、やっぱり、台湾がいい」

He took the train to Nanjing and only then realized how serious the civil war was. By this time it had turned against the KMT nationalist forces. When everyone fled the city in late 1948 (Nanjing was captured by the Communists in April 1949) he managed to get a 3rd class train ticket back to Shanghai and a boat trip back to Taiwan. 3rd class, he said, meant that one boarded the train through the window, and stood completely packed together with hundreds of other people.

When back in Taiwan he transferred to Taiwan National University (I think that what was left of his Zhongyang eventually became Nanjing University and some departments merged with what is now Nanjing Normal University). From 1956 he found work at the “United States Information Service” or USIS (Perhaps the predecessor of what is now IIP?) at the US embassy in Taipei and worked there for 36 years, through its switch to become the “American Institute” when official ties were cut with Taiwan. There he provided information to Taiwan about American, “culture and society.” I asked him, “Isn’t is pretty much an American propaganda office?” He nodded and said, “Yes,” but, “Unlike other countries, the things that America says about itself is true.”

The wife didn’t travel to China during the civil war but stayed in Taiwan to study public health at a technical college. Afterwards she worked in public health or nursing or something and would eventually spend a year studying in Detroit in 1953. She says that when her husband returned (I am not sure they were married at that time) as a “refugee” from China after the civil war, she had no idea he was coming. He suddenly just showed up on her family’s doorstep one day, pitiful and penniless. A number of years later she asked him why he came to her family to see her first when he arrived back in Taiwan. Somewhat to her husband’s embarrassment she told us that he replied, “Because I was completely broke and needed your money.”

When we asked if her English was good, she said it was, 「泥縄式」. Neither Sayaka or I had ever heard this Japanese word before, but she explained that it meant that she studied only a little English just before going (My dictionary says it means, “the eleventh-hour”). Like “taihoku” for Taipei, this was one of several moments where we felt their Japanese was using words from ages past. The husband also used the pronunciation はんねん or hannen instead of はんとし for “half-year” (半年) which I have never heard Japanese use before but Sayaka says she has seen it before somewhere.

We tried to ask them a bit more about the transition in 1945. I was hoping to stick the discussion to their personal experiences, but at this point, the conversation switched (in a fashion that I discussed in an earlier posting) to topics and areas where their personal experiences mixed heavily with material and narratives that were probably heavily influenced by things they had heard and seen. As the above quote contrasting the chaos of Shanghai’s docks and the orderly nature of Taiwan’s docks might have suggested, the couple had lots of anecdotes supporting the story of the transition as one of, “The dogs [Japan] going home and the pigs [China] arriving.”

I wasn’t able to get them to tell us any specific personal stories of their experience during this transition but instead they told us a number of stories that they had heard at the time and generalizations about colonial versus Nationalist rule in Taiwan which may be a heavier mix of things experienced, seen, heard, and read. I’ll just put as many of these kinds of things I can remember from their comments together below. I think anyone familiar with Taiwanese history and the two major competing narratives (which you might call the KMT and “Taiwanese” approaches) will find much they recognize here.

When the Japanese ruled here in Taiwan everything was very orderly. Whenever Japanese soldiers were stationed nearby we could leave our doors open at night and knew that we were even more safe than when they were not nearby. When the Japanese said, “Don’t steal,” then there was no theft. They protected us. In contrast, when the “pigs” arrived, they did nothing but “eat” and if there were Nationalist troops stationed nearby we would all have to lock our doors at night and live in constant fear of having our possessions looted by them.

The nationalist regime arrived from the mainland oppressed us in Taiwan. The Japanese had a cruel streak in them and committed many horrible crimes on the mainland but we lived fairly well as its colony. We were its food basket and provided it with many supplies without ourselves starving. The Chinese Nationalists were corrupt and they were a completely backward people. Through the colonial experience under the Japanese we had become their cultural superiors. They were so stupid that they thought that if they simply attached a faucet to a wall, water would miraculously emerge from it when they turned the screw. Once, when the KMT nationalist government were looking over the well-organized inventory lists left by the Japanese for their well-stocked warehouses they found one warehouse was labeled as being full of 金槌. They believed that they had stumbled on a huge treasure trove of golden hammers. Instead, when they raided the warehouse that night, they were shocked to find it full of regular metal hammers and believed that someone must have switched its contents (the Chinese characters for 金槌 can literally seem to mean “gold” “hammer” but it is the Japanese word kanazuchi, which simply means “hammer”).

We called the Japanese dogs in private because they “barked” a lot but overall our feelings are not that strongly against them. We have much sympathy for the Japanese even though we recognize the bad aspects of their rule. We are not like the Koreans who are emotional and always get into fights about everything. We had a tropical climate and had lots of food. The Koreans bordered with China and have a cold climate which helps explain some of our differences from them. Also, we Taiwanese are just more forgetful.

Japanese have a strong class-based consciousness. In the old days they had four classes, the samurai, the farmers, the artisans, and the merchants at the bottoms. Still today the Japanese are very class conscious. My Japanese friend showed me his family register and shared his pride with me that he is descended from samurai. We Taiwanese don’t have class consciousness.

America used to have a gold age in the 1960s. I visited them in 1961 and it was fantastic. There were few foreigners and people greeted me in elevators and were very kind to me. In 1972 Nixon and Tanaka Kakuei betrayed Taiwan. When I went to America again in 1976 it was like a different country. No one greeted me in the elevator and black people stopped me on the street to beg money for coffee. People used to dress nice in the 1950-60s but by the 1970s lots of people on the streets were dressed like you [I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt) and there were lots of different cultures being introduced.