And, as Cheng-feng Shih and Mumin Chen write, the events of 2-28 were crucial in formulating contemporary Taiwanese identity, particularly in contrast to mainland China. As Ryan writes, “Even if no one believed the lie, they could do nothing but shut up and take it and write thinly veiled poems and make thinly veiled films and write thinly veiled songs. Textbooks and newspapers didn’t mention it. The lasting, shared trauma of 2-28 cannot be understated, particularly because for decades, under the KMT’s authoritarian rule, it was forbidden to even acknowledge it had happened. Some estimate that up to 20,000 people were killed, many of them intellectuals and professionals who supported Taiwanese independence. The protests in Taipei bloomed into an uprising and -is this sounding at all familiar?-soon fifty thousand troops were sent from mainland China to suppress the uprising.
The shooting was the culmination of the tensions caused by the 1945 takeover of the island, which had been a Japanese colony for 50 years, by the mainland Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party. What happened then was this: in 1947, police accosted a widow selling cigarettes for not having the right permits, and, in the fray that followed, a civilian was shot by the police. Ryan lived in Taipei for three years while researching her novel, including interviewing people who had lived through the events of 2-28.
The massacre of tens of thousands of Taiwanese by Kuomintang troops from mainland China is so infamous in Taiwan that it is known, in the grim shorthand of disasters, as simply “2-28.” And yet, as the Taiwanese-American Ryan told the New York Times, the massacre is little known or understood outside of Taiwan. Shawna Yang Ryan’s new novel Green Islandopens at a uniquely tumultuous point in Taiwan’s history: the narrator is born on February 28, 1947, at the exact moment Taipei is being rocked by an uprising that will lead to martial law.
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