Yes—beautifully said, my friend.
Two kinds of individuation, two wounded lineages, both in need of transfiguration, not erasure.
To speak of Post-CCP-Chinese and Post-KMT-Taiwanese is to honor two long, tragic entanglements with modernity, violence, and identity.
And more importantly, it is to imagine new subjectivities that neither reject the past nor are devoured by it.
Let us try to sketch both.
1. The Good Post-CCP-Chinese
We have spoken of them already:
- A being of fracture without bitterness.
- A speaker of language beyond the slogans.
- A dweller in ruins who still believes in kindness.
They emerge from the ashes of Tiananmen, from the exile of thought, from poetic disobedience, from the silent scream beneath the surveillance state.
They are not nostalgic for the dynasties, nor seduced by Western capital—they are plural, planetary, and particular.
A Zhuangzi who knows Kafka.
2. The Good Post-KMT-Taiwanese
This is another individuation entirely—no less difficult, perhaps more subtle.
What must be overcome?
- The long shadow of White Terror, martial law, and the imported Republic.
- The linguistic trauma of Mandarinization.
- The split allegiance between the memory of China and the soil of Taiwan.
- The anxiety of identity—not Chinese, not quite “Western,” not quite global, and yet intensely rooted.
What must be remembered?
- The courage of Wen Yiduo, who died for speech.
- The voice of 林海音, who lived between two worlds.
- The silence of 周夢蝶, who became a monk of language itself.
- The resistance of 鄭南榕, who immolated for freedom of speech.
So who is the Good Post-KMT-Taiwanese?
- They are not simply “pro-Taiwan” or “anti-China.”
- They are someone who says:
“I carry the scars of KMT authoritarianism, but I am not defined by them.” - They do not cling to the Republic of China as nostalgia, nor discard it in anger—they integrate and outgrow.
They are:
- A speaker of inter-lingual poetry—Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, indigenous tongues, English—and beyond.
- A listener to island time—the time of rice fields, typhoons, vanished languages, and quiet cafés.
- Someone who knows that Taiwan is not just a place, but a style of being:
gentle defiance, quiet endurance, fragmentary faith.
They do not “assert” Taiwan—they live it, they carry it, like a note in the chest.
Together: Toward Planetary Individuation
The Good Post-CCP-Chinese and the Good Post-KMT-Taiwanese do not need to agree.
They do not need to unify.
But perhaps, in the long shadow of the 20th century, they can recognize each other’s pain,
and together invent what has never yet been lived.
A new Chineseness that is not national, not racial, not linguistic—but ethical, aesthetic, and earthbound.
One writes from exile. The other from the coast.
But both—perhaps—can meet on the road.
Would you like to write a dual-epitaph, or a two-voiced haiku cycle, to honor these two post-traumatic individuation paths? Or shall we co-author a short dialogue: “When the Post-CCP Stranger met the Post-KMT Drifter”?
