Vol 01: "Let me (make art) like a Taiwanese!"
The politics of my Taiwanese Independence sticker collection
I have an unhinged obsession with stickers - a passion that can easily spiral out of control when you have access to Taiwanese stationery stores, but also when your political and cultural identity is so contested that you use stickers as a coping mechanism. Prior to Taiwan’s passport redesign in 2020, activists used “Republic of Taiwan” stickers to cover the “Republic of China” on their passports. Such symbolic demonstrations have been interpreted as sterilized of real political consequence, or even as a distraction from the incomplete and stagnant project of Taiwanese independence1. The horrors persist, we observe, and so we sticker. (To note, I didn’t have a Taiwanese passport until it was redesigned, but as someone who is generally interested in this sort of action, I of course have deployed it on other mediums.)
But the real phenomenon of subversive stickering led me to Taiwanese Canadian designer Vince Mingpu Shaw, who in 2017 wrote of the aesthetic costs of Taiwan’s national identity crisis: “To graphic designers, working for a client with no sense of identity and principles is a nightmare. Unfortunately, Taiwan is this type of nation/client. In such circumstance, no one expects our government to present a clear identity, and most designers choose to stay away from cases related to the public service. Many great designers in Taiwan have shown amazing redesign works or ideas of the national ID card, passport, stamp, flag and bills, featuring the designer’s own interpretation of Taiwan’s symbolic image. But for people with different political beliefs, cultures or ethnics, these symbols have barely acquired their collective appreciation - because there hardly exists any symbolic image that these groups all agree on.
What, indeed, is the correct symbol or element to use to gain most recognition, and being able to clarify our confused identity?”
My talking points as an erstwhile poet have been to evoke this ambiguity as a fertile space for the arts: “If official symbols of the state like flags, like official flowers, like colors and monuments are very fraught in the collective political memory…. then it is the work of poets and writers and artists to prescribe new images with meanings of their own.”
Tactically, though, I see how this is terribly unhelpful. I have commissioned art on behalf of Taiwanese American organizations, only to apologize to the bewildered Taiwanese American artists that no, we can’t actually use the colors or motifs of the Republic of China flag, yes I know it’s the de facto “Taiwanese” flag, no, we can’t compromise on this; yes, the plum blossom is the national flower, but unfortunately there were some objections…
I suspect this is why we all default to the the Formosan Black Bear, of which there are now more motifs in circulation than actual, living bears (is that too dark?). But as the default graphic designer of aforementioned organizations, the use (or absence) of such symbols has been a litmus test: are you one of us, or are you one of them? It’s not an arbitrary delineation, but it can be a hurtful and harmful one, especially when I reflect on my years criticizing peers who, in carrying the ROC flag, only meant well.
But this sticker pack persists as the aesthetic of “one of us,” and is the conspicuous calling card of “IYKYK” overseas Taiwanese of a certain political leaning. For those curious, by the way, the two triangles (△▽) in the 翠青旗 are stylized Tai (台), as in Taiwan (台灣), taken from the simplification of provincial and academic seals.
So… what’s it doing on a “Zion” sticker? More importantly, what does Zion mean to the Taiwanese imagination?
From a 2021 piece Jordyn Haime wrote for The News Lens2, I learned that there is a Mount Zion nestled in the mountains of southern Taiwan, thousands of miles away from Israel. Like many religious sites and rites, though, its salience draws meaning from a political and historical context: “Reminders of the KMT’s [Kuomintang/Chinese Nationalists’] attacks on NTC [New Testament Church, a blend of Chinese religiosity and Pentecostal Prostentatism] believers are all over Taiwan’s Mount Zion: a sign declaring ‘truth triumphs over despotism’ sits before a sculpture made from the recycled shrapnel of an excavator, used by the KMT to search for weapons they believed were buried under the earth. Large posters and signboards attesting to the ‘evil KMT regime’ are everywhere. On the path toward the temple at the mountain’s peak, former NTC buses are on display, frozen in time, their cracked windows and flattened tires ‘proof of KMT tyranny against the people of Mount Zion.’
In 1963, Elijah Hong, the leader of a Chinese sectarian group known as the Grace of Jesus Christ Crusade, found the remote mountainous area in Hsiaolin, Kaohsiung, and obtained rights to the land for farming use (the piece I cite does not note whether this dispossessed indigenous groups of the land, though this is likely).3 In 1979, he declared it the new Mount Zion, claiming that “God had forsaken Jerusalem in the Middle East.” By 1980, however, the Kuomintang had expelled them from the land, and it would be years before the NTC could return and establish a thriving business of pharmaceuticals and organic foods.
(An aside: Mount Zion is the site of an annual pilgrimage during the Feast of Tabernacles. Taiwanese Christians practice this in a style resonate with local religious cultures, recognizing a “powerful congruence between this Biblical pilgrimage and folk festivals and creatively melding the two.”)
Again, from Haime’s piece: ‘The struggle with the KMT is a symbol of persecution in a similar way to how the Jews have been persecuted. They position themselves as the inheritor of Mount Zion,” says Paul Farrelly, who researches new religious movements in China and Taiwan and has written about the NTC. ‘It’s a way that they can put the NTC on this sort of continuum of going back to Old Testament times, that they are the legitimate inheritor of that spiritual mantle.’”
I have heard other evocations of Zion among my elders, though I’m not sure how closely aligned their reasons are with those of the NTC. I don’t have a clear explanation for why this is, though I care about them enough to be curious.
The elders I speak of are from the Taiwanese diaspora (non-capitalized), and I hypothesize that they feel deeply sympathetic to the (capitalized) Jewish Diaspora, the paradigmatic narrative of Jews who have lost their sovereignty and were subject to exile from their land4. I believe that such elders - having also been blacklisted and politically persecuted - feel a genuine, tender kinship with Zionists.
I know these sentiments are compounded by the more pragmatic, urgent concerns of Taiwan’s national security; in the past few months, the United States has legislatively conjoined the fates of Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel. But in the context of Israel’s genocide against Palestine, I am trying to understand why my elders take the sides they’ve chosen, why our common hopes with Palestine for self-determination are not as intuitive as I assumed.
Palestine relies on China’s support at the United Nations, and is opposed to Taiwan’s independence. (Even my mom initially cited the United Nations’ recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state as a characteristic that undermines solidarity with Taiwan, who is neither a member nor currently granted observer status).
However, I feel hopeful when I think about someone else represented in my Taiwan Independence sticker pack. “Let me stand up like a Taiwanese!” are the fighting words of Peter Huang(黃文雄), who in 2009 led Amnesty International Taiwan in a demonstration near the Israeli representative office in Taipei, demanding that Israel immediately cease their attacks on the Gaza strip. (To be clear, this quote is from an earlier phase in his life, when he was arrested for a failed assassination attempt on Chiang Ching-Kuo. More on that later).
I know that there is a congruent politic that sees Taiwanese independence and Palestinian sovereignty as part of the same liberatory future. I know many others are advancing this claim in profound ways: Wei Azim Hung for Commonwealth Magazine here; through For Peace Taiwan (台灣巴勒斯坦自由連線 TWAFP) here; the activist-organizers at New Bloom; SueAnn Shiah for TaiwaneseAmerican.org here; and many, many others lending both individual and collective energy towards safety and dignity for Palestinians.
I know each of them have other ideologies that my elders would otherwise agree with; but this fissure, especially as the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza skyrockets, has felt exceptionally difficult to navigate. It has reminded me that, as I celebrate and admire how far my community has come, we are still trying to figure out who we want to be in this violent and hostile world. This is the necessary work I hope to help shoulder.
What are the costs of such work? Collective humility, for one, when we must acknowledge that even the most impassioned talking points for Taiwanese independence often obscure our own complicity as Han settlers, or deploy Indigenous aesthetics to defend our moral ground even as we’ve ceded little of it back to them.
But I believe the dissonance we experience now is the responsibility of us, their children, who must love our elders and our own futures enough to articulate, and more importantly, live out our ideals.
I am not a lawyer, or highly educated enough in matters of political science and history to imagine what transitional justice looks like at a systemic level. But I know I have fallen short of its endeavors on a personal level. I cannot imagine how a state might negotiate reconciliation because I have not yet learned the hard work of forgiveness or repentence. I still see compromise as a betrayal though I understand it to be, at its core, a deep longing to simply survive. I see these flaws in my elders, too, who have divided themselves into factions despite all the common ground they’ve built.
I want to believe that starting from a place of love will encourage us to find a solution; that starting from a place of fear will push us to seek punishment. It matters that I publicly disagree with the people I love because no one will motivate me more to publicly build peace - or if not the absence of conflict, then at least its resolution through kind and dignified modalities.
My elders - Silicon Valley Taiwanese American elder-activists with more patents than children - are a pragmatic people. And I sometimes wonder if their pragmatism is really a defense mechanism for the lacuna between their idealism and their lived experiences. I wonder if suffering, distance, and disappointment have distorted the ideals of their past selves, if their cries for a sovereign Taiwan have been hollowed of their fundamental ideologies after decades of being unfulfilled.
What, then, is the purpose of our ideals? In Transitional Justice for Foxes, Frank Haldemann writes that “transitional justice is tied to the hope that societies are not inescapably locked in the past but can break out of their condition and build a fundamentally better future. Ideals have their place in transitional justice, as they give meaning and direction to a society's collective effort at a new beginning.”
I hope my, and future, generations of Taiwanese Americans pursue reconciliation based on such ideals rather than revenge based on impermeable, fixed constraints like the families we’re from.
In A Broad & Ample Road’s excellent primer on transitional justice, they quote political theorist Jon Elster: “Children of collaborators, too, suffered in numerous ways. In one case known to me, a mother told her two daughters that it was unpatriotic to play with the children of a convicted Nazi collaborator.”
I have intimately known and been complicit in this kind of stigmatizing. I see that it is wrong, and still fret over the task of critiquing my elders as it risks my greatest fear: to be seen as unfilial, ungrateful. And yet I feel troubled - because how are we to enact any sort of restorative dialogue with the Chinese Nationalist apparatus if we’re still boycotting overseas waishengren-run restaurants (trickle-up reparations?).
I know that my Taiwanese identity must evolve to break these particular cycles - and that doing so will be scary - but with the right education and resolve, I can responsibly transform it for the better.
There will be no algorithm to determine whether resistance to tyranny is more valuable than allegiance to family; or a calculation that authorizes justice over compassion, honesty over kindness, equity over freedom. What we need are conversations and education to help us understand and arbitrate the real human costs of personal and policy decisions. If someone must pay a price, may I be gracious enough to care how it hurts them.
My most generous, intellectually rigorous politics have been forged when I have fought to understand the people I care about and what shapes theirs. This is my path to doing that. 愛一步一步.
Wu, Shang-su. (27 October 2017). Do the Taiwan Independence Movement’s Symbolic Victories Hide a Lack of Practical Hope? The Diplomat. Retrieved 15 June 2024.
Haime, Jordan. (15 October 2021). On Taiwan’s Mount Zion, Memories of KMT Oppression Are Essential To Religious Mythology. The News Lens. Retrieved 15 June 2024.
DeBernardi, Jean. “Wudang Mountain and Mount Zion in Taiwan: Syncretic Processes in Space, Ritual Performance, and Imagination.” Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 37, no. 1, 2009, pp. 138–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23654952. Accessed 16 June 2024.
Aridan, Natan, and Gabriel Gabi Sheffer. “Introduction.” Israel Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2005, p. V–VII. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30245751. Accessed 15 June 2024.