Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T02:31:58.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Narrating the Exodus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2020

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia
Get access

Summary

Not long after the mainlanders returned to Taiwan from their disappointing hometown visits in China, they experienced another form of shock and disorientation. Chapter 5 examines this “social trauma of the homecoming in Taiwan.” Following the island’s democratization, the previously suppressed local majority population, the native Taiwanese, began to denounce the mainlanders as a privileged minority group of “foreign colonizers” associated with Chiang Kai-shek’s military dictatorship. In response to this wholesale stigmatization and also in response to their earlier disillusionment with their Chinese homeland, the mainlanders began to openly promote their family stories of trauma and displacement related to the great exodus. This was done to present themselves as refugees escaping from a brutal war in China who later found home in Taiwan. Second-generation mainlanders played a critical role in constructing this new mnemonic regime that made their parents’ expulsion from the mainland into the “cultural trauma” of contemporary mainlander community. The chapter also goes back in time to explore how the exodus had been portrayed in selected state-sponsored texts and popular social texts before democratization. It identifies stories about the old soldiers and military families’ villages produced in the 1970s and 1980s as important precursors to present-day developments.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Great Exodus from China
Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan
, pp. 214 - 258
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×