Comic Break Through

 

Chiang Kai-shek more like Chiang Kai-shit amirite fellas???

As many of you know, I was drafted in the Taiwanese military last year and I am currently making a comic about my experience there. 

What I've been really struggling with is that I don't have a take about all this. Or at least not one that I feel confident and comfortable sharing. Not only because I am not that well read about any of this, but also because there are some obvious tensions between the Marxist me and the Taiwanese me.  

Now you might say "Justin, you don't need to have a take on this." And until today I was begrudgingly following that advice, making the comic primarily as a documentation of my short time in the barracks. I was taking a lot of inspiration from Hideo Azuma's Disappearance Diary, covering a pretty serious subject matter through comedic and light-hearted anecdotes and letting the readers draw their own conclusions. But even though it works well for Azuma's subject (his experience with alcoholism and homelessness), I feel my subject matter is much more tied up with history and politics, and the omission of that context feels somewhat avoidant in a way Disappearance Diary's ommission was not. (It is less so that homelessness is not political. It obviously is. I think it's just easier maybe to speak of homelessness as if it is not part of larger society, as it is an experience of being violently cast out by it; whereas the draft is a mandatory inclusion of the individual into society... idk.) If a US soldier in the Iraq war make a story about his time with the boys in Iraq while totally omitting the politics of the Iraq war, it would be very odd and obvious to anyone reading. 

My boyfriend says it might be okay because compared to the US military the Taiwanese military is less obviously evil and less of a hot button issue, but I think he just doesn't know the history that well. I also think it is not really true, as every time I bring up my comic to someone, they'd say "wow that is important work especially in today's political climate." A military comic probably cannot work without explicit politics.

 

I talked to my mom this morning and because it is recently the anniversary of the 228 incident –– a campaign of mass incarceration and murder of Taiwanese intellectuals, activists, and suspected communists carried out by the US-backed dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party (KMT) ––we talked about state violence and civil repression when she was little. 

After the KMT lost the Chinese civil war and retreat to Taiwan, it declared martial law on the island that lasted for 38 years, the longest a country has been under martial law at the time of its repeal. During this time, the KMT disappeared, assassinated, executed, and imprisoned whoever they want for no more than mere suspicion. My mom had a first grade friend whose dad got kidnapped one night and no one knew what happened. This is known as the White Terror. Many families of the victims still don't know what exactly happened to their family, 30 years after Taiwan's democratization.  

I feel this has to be what the comic is about, yeah? A parallel narrative about a society under military rule and one of the last pockets where that culture lives on, ossified and refusing to change. I also think this is one of the places where Marxists and progressives in Taiwan can begin a dialogue. A dark history where the influence of US imperialism and the global interest of capital is undeniable. 

 

I think I will interview my grandparents, and the parents of a prof whose parents are White Terror survivors. Maybe I'll try to find some Taiwan independence activists and Marxists. 

This is going somewhere!!!