Taiwan in Turmoil

By Cathy Erway - Cebrena holds my arm as I scurry to keep up with her, Leah, and their three friends amidst a huge crowd. I am following Leah’s bright red jacket. We channel a path through the crowds of plastic-coated bodies swinging flags of the Republic of China in their fists – Taiwan’s flag, not to be mistaken for the People’s Republic of China. It is a misty Thursday in Taipei, and hundreds are gathered at the Palace to protest the presidential election of 2004. We mingle into the crowd; I catch a faint smell of incense lingering overhead a moment, as if ensconced in the general Taipei air.

This is only my fifth week in Taiwan, and it feels like a bomb has been dropped. That may be insensitive to say, since the international news headlines are filled with stories on the presidential debate in Taiwan, concurrently with reports on the Middle East, where bombs have been killing for years. I am blessed as a fortunate traveler caught up in a political hotbed of warring visions, rather than actual armies.

The first sight to greet us as we exited the polished subway was a stash of new rain ponchos of thin plastic. A woman wildly gestured toward them for all those departing the subway. The next thing I heard was a middle-aged man’s enthusiastic prompt of, “Go for it!” in Mandarin. My friends all cheered back in unison, then burst out giggling. They had never been to a political rally.

The Taipei Presidential Palace had been holding protests for most of the week since the elections held last Saturday declared Chen Shui-bian a second-term president with a winning margin of 0.2 percent of the votes. The people that were gathered were bereaved and angry, unable to accept it. On a large bandstand, a misty black-and-white propaganda poster hails a vague, duel slogan: “We want truth. We want justice.” The stage’s frame is rather gaudy and appears to have served many purposes in the past – from pop concerts to Barney and Friends – as its borders are frilled with carnival-esque lights in shapes of boats. Across the wide stagefront, another stand overlooks the vast audience. It is from this stage that a speaker emanates strong words of encouragement and defiance; an enormous cluster of televisions covered by a thin layer of plastic provide a close-up of the speakers on this stage. Their voices are showered over the crowd through amplifiers planted in the back of the arena. We felt as if we had walked into a hard rock concert.

Yet walking into center view of the stage where the speakers stood, the tall dark façade of Taipei 101 glowed in the background with characters drawn from blue-lit windows. The slightly tapered shape of the world’s tallest skyscraper loomed beyond the speakers’ stage, creating a peak not unlike the simplistic Chinese character for mountain, in artful, moving symmetry.

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