The Wind from the Pacific

On growing up with Taiwan, and the long farewell to a shared youth

Scene from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind

Late last year a friend asked if I wanted to go to Paris to see Accusefive (告五人) on their European tour. I said yes almost immediately, mostly because I wanted an excuse to go to Paris. We eventually went last week.

The band was everywhere on Chinese social media — the kind of omnipresence that makes avoidance impossible even if you aren’t paying attention — but I hadn’t followed popular music closely in some time and told myself I wouldn’t know much of their work. I had mentally prepared myself to spend the trip mostly sightseeing and eating, and to sit politely through the music like a well-behaved guest at someone else’s party.

On the bus to Copenhagen airport I looked them up. I was wrong about not knowing them. I had heard their songs many times; I simply hadn’t known whose songs they were. They had been playing behind short videos on my phone, threading through a comedy show I watched, attaching themselves to moments I had already half-forgotten. The music had arrived before the name did. By the time I found out what I was listening to, I had already been listening for a long time.

The venue was the Salle Pleyel, a concert hall in the 8th arrondissement that opened in 1927 and has the high ceilings and formal proportions of a place that considers itself serious. Walking in, I thought of the assembly hall of the factory compound where I grew up — the same blunt grandeur, the same sense that the architecture was asking something of you. The resemblance ended there. A few weeks earlier I had seen Omnipotent Youth Society perform in Berlin, in a venue that felt provisional, a little rough at the edges, entirely right for music that has always understood itself as a kind of testimony. The Salle Pleyel, by the time Accusefive took the stage, had been transformed into something else: lights that swept the hall in coordinated patterns, elaborate visuals, carefully prepared storytelling between songs, interactions with the crowd that had clearly been rehearsed many times and still felt warm. It was an excellent show. It was also, in some way I kept trying to locate, sealed.

The songs arrived exactly when they should. The hooks landed. I found myself mouthing words I had only learned on the bus, which was its own small embarrassment.

This fact — that I knew the music without knowing I knew it — kept pulling at me through the evening. There is something about the cadence of the Taiwanese accent, that particular softness, the way certain syllables are rounded rather than clipped, that carries its own kind of memory. The melodies too had a familiarity that went beyond having heard them before — a warmth in the rhythm, a willingness to linger on a feeling rather than move past it. For my generation, this texture was not foreign. We grew up inside it.

The first Taiwanese cultural product I consumed was probably My Beloved (妈妈再爱我一次), a 1988 film about a boy separated from his mentally ill mother. I saw it in the assembly hall of our factory compound, on a ticket distributed free to workers and their families. I was too young to remember much — only the crying, of which there was a great deal, and the theme song There’s No One Like Mom (世上只有妈妈好), which became so ubiquitous that decades later I can still recall every word. The film became an unexpected sensation in mainland China. By the end of 1990 it had been seen by over two hundred million people — a figure that, adjusted for today’s ticket prices, would represent something like ten billion yuan. Audiences who had almost no frame of reference for the island walked out having absorbed, without quite knowing it, a vision of suffering rendered with a particular tenderness.

Then came the Chiung Yao (琼瑶) dramas, their plots constructed almost entirely out of misunderstanding and tears. The child actress Jin Ming, with her big eyes and her preternatural talent for crying on cue, was as familiar to us as any neighbourhood playmate; her likeness appeared on cassette tapes in every household. Journey to the West (西游记), a homegrown classic from the 1980s, was already a fixture of summer television by the time I was old enough to watch it — every regional station replaying it annually as if by solemn obligation. Then, in 1998, came My Fair Princess (还珠格格), Chiung Yao’s imperial romance, and it joined the rotation immediately, as if it had always been there. Between the two of them, they soundtracked the long humid afternoons of an entire generation’s childhood.

By high school the delivery mechanism had changed. My Taiwan came mostly through earphones.

Jay Chou (周杰伦) released his first album when I was in high school and it was immediately clear that something unprecedented had happened — a complete musical intelligence arriving fully formed, dismantling everything that Mandarin pop had assumed about itself and rebuilding it as something stranger and better. We were still listening on cassette tapes. I wore mine out.

Jay Chou was for everyone. The literary-minded listened to Deserts Xuan (张悬), who now performs under her given name, Anpu (安溥) — fierce and philosophical, the kind of singer who made caring about ideas feel like a reasonable way to spend a life. I used a line from her song Like as my QQ status for a long time:

In all the scenery where the world has changed beyond recognition, what I like most is you.

在所有人事已非的景色里，我最喜欢你

I may not have had a specific person in mind. It didn’t matter. The feeling was enough; the feeling was the point.

Sodagreen (苏打绿) wrote about friendship in a way that Chinese music rarely attempted — the specific loyalty of young people who have decided to protect each other against everything:

You know, even if the rain turns the whole city upside down, I will hold you.

你知道 就算大雨让整座城市颠倒 我会给你怀抱

When you need a summer I will fight with everything I have. I know you will cover for me when I am running away.

你知道当你需要个夏天 我会拼了命努力 我知道你会做我的掩护 当我是个逃兵

And Mayday (五月天). In the sun-filled afternoons of high school, a boy who sat at the desk next to mine and had no particular interest in studying would put his head down and sing quietly to himself —

Shed the mask of the long day, run toward the realm of dreams, at midnight the pumpkin carriage, step into the glass slipper of the fairy tale.

脱下长日的假面 奔向梦幻的疆界 南瓜马车的午夜 换上童话的玻璃鞋

He sang it the way people sing things they have no idea they are singing, the way a song becomes the inside of a mood rather than the description of one. Mayday understood something about that age that I couldn’t have articulated then: that the intensity of feeling was the point, that being young and caring too much was not embarrassing but necessary, and that the knowledge that it would not last was not a reason to feel it less.

There is a lyric of theirs I have not been able to shake for twenty years:

I know that true love doesn’t always last. I know that one day you might simply walk away. I know all of this. I know everything. I just can’t stand it.

而我知道那真爱不一定能白头到老 而我知道有一天你可能就这么走掉 而我知道我知道这一切我全都知道 我就是受不了

What I loved about those lines, and still love, is their refusal to resolve. They do not say it will be all right. They say: I understand everything completely and still find it unbearable. That is a different, more accurate thing.

These were the songs we sang at KTV on weekend afternoons, passed around on cassette tapes and later mp3 files, learned by heart without quite intending to. The intimacy of them — the willingness to sit with a feeling and examine it honestly, without deflection or false comfort — felt almost foreign to what we had grown up with. That careful attention to private experience was what we were hungry for, and Taiwan kept providing it.

There is a quality that runs through the best of Taiwanese cultural production, and I have spent some time trying to name it. The closest I can get is this: it puts large things inside small containers.

Hou Hsiao-hsien made films about Japanese occupation and the mainlanders who arrived in 1949 and the decades of martial law that followed, but his camera rested on a face eating a meal, a train passing through a tunnel into sudden subtropical green, the damp Pacific wind you could almost feel through the screen. Edward Yang made films about the spiritual cost of Taiwan’s economic miracle, but he set them in a middle-class living room, around a dining table, in the particular silence of people who have stopped being able to speak to each other. Their films were political in the way that all honest art about ordinary life under extraordinary historical pressure is political — not through argument but through attention, the radical act of looking carefully at a person and refusing to let history make them small.

This ran directly against the grain of what I had grown up consuming on the mainland, where the prevailing mode was the opposite: small things placed inside very large containers, individual experience given meaning only by its relation to the national story, the collective, the march of history. There was nothing wrong with this exactly. But it left certain things unnamed. The feeling of being seventeen and not knowing what to do with yourself. The specific texture of a friendship. The gap between what you were supposed to feel and what you actually felt, sitting in a classroom on a Tuesday afternoon while someone at the next desk sang quietly to himself.

Taiwan gave those things a name. Or rather, it gave you permission to believe they already had one.

Partly this may be the result of being an island — small enough that the camera is forced to come in close, that the story cannot sprawl into epic. Partly it is the particular history: artists who had lived under authoritarianism and emerged on the other side into something that permitted, however imperfectly, a reckoning with what had been done and what had been lost. The tenderness in that 1988 film about a boy and his mother — a tenderness that moved two hundred million mainland viewers who couldn’t have explained why — came from somewhere. It came from a culture that had learned, at some cost, to pay attention to suffering without flinching and without inflating it into something larger than it was.

For a generation of mainland Chinese young people, this was quietly revolutionary. Not politically — we were not thinking in those terms yet. But personally. The message, absorbed without quite knowing you were absorbing it, was that your interior life was real and worth examining. That the things you felt, the friendships that seemed to mean everything, the heartbreaks that seemed unsurvivable, the sense that caring about ideas was a legitimate way to be alive in the world — these were not self-indulgence. They were not, as the Chinese phrase has it, 不务正业 — neglecting your proper work for frivolous pursuits. They were your proper work. They were what being a person consisted of.

This was, for many of us, the first time anyone had said so.

In university I found Lung Ying-tai.

Wild Fire (野火集) was a collection of essays she had published in a Taiwanese newspaper in the 1980s, addressed to a general readership, asking uncomfortable questions about Taiwanese society with a directness that the times had only just begun to permit. They were not academic essays. They were the work of someone who believed that a writer’s job was to speak plainly to her neighbours about the things nobody wanted to say out loud, and that this was not a political act so much as a civic one — the kind of thing a society needed in order to remain honest with itself.

Later came Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949 (大江大海一九四九) — the stories of ordinary people swept across the strait by civil war, soldiers and families and children who ended up somewhere they had not chosen, living lives shaped by a history that had never asked their permission. She interviewed survivors. She followed the threads. She let the people speak.

Reading her was a different experience from reading Chinese public intellectuals, of whom there were not many and who tended to operate in a register of either approved optimism or careful obliqueness. Lung Ying-tai wrote as if clarity were possible, as if a writer could look directly at a difficult thing and describe what she saw without the description being finished for her by someone else. The tradition she was working in — the writer as citizen, addressing the public not to instruct them but to think alongside them — was one I had encountered almost nowhere else.

It did not occur to me then to ask why this tradition flourished in Taiwan and not where I came from. I was busy reading.

But others were reading too. Lung Ying-tai’s essays circulated on the mainland in ways that were not always officially encouraged, passed from hand to hand, shared in forums, and discussed in university dormitories. The same was true of the films, the music, the aesthetic of the Simple Life Festival — the idea that doing what you love could itself be a form of seriousness. Gradually, and then quite suddenly, Taiwan had become something larger than a source of entertainment. It had become a projection. An image of what a Chinese society might look like if history had gone differently, if a different set of possibilities had been permitted to develop — more civil, more honest with itself, more willing to let ordinary people take up space.

In 2011, mainland tourists were permitted to visit Taiwan freely for the first time. People returned speaking carefully about what they had seen: the courtesy of strangers, the return of a lost wallet, a taxi driver who refused a tip. New Weekly (新周刊) sent seventy journalists to the island for a week and came back with a two-hundred-page special issue — Taiwan: the most beautiful scenery is people (台湾最美的风景是人).

The title was an observation, but it was also a longing. We thought the distance was closeable. We thought cultural affinity was a kind of infrastructure that it would hold.

The political tension was always there, of course. It had never not been there. But for a time it seemed possible to hold the tension and the connection simultaneously — to acknowledge the complication without letting it foreclose everything else. Deserts, who had by then become something close to a generational icon for mainland listeners, seemed to embody this possibility: a Taiwanese artist who spoke openly about where she came from and what she believed, and whose mainland audience loved her not despite this but in some complicated way because of it.

In 2013, she was performing in Manchester when an audience member unfurled a Taiwanese flag. She picked it up. She held it. She said: this is the flag of my home. From somewhere in the crowd came objections — mainland Chinese students who felt the flag’s presence as a provocation. The room was divided. She stayed with it. “No politics today,” she said, which was either a plea for calm or a quiet acknowledgment that politics had already arrived and there was nothing to be done about it. The act of not dropping the flag was itself political in the truest sense — the politics of refusal: I will not pretend this object does not exist.

The incident set off arguments online between young people on both sides of the strait. Beijing’s official response was measured: cultural exchange should not be disrupted by other factors; both sides should seek greater mutual understanding. As far back as 2008, Hu Jintao had drawn a distinction that the party found useful: “Taiwanese compatriots’ love for their home and their Taiwan consciousness does not equal a ‘Taiwan independence’ consciousness.” The framework was still, just barely, one of engagement — an attempt to separate cultural identity from political threat, to keep the door open while being very clear about where the walls were. After Manchester, officials called for calm. The language was the language of managed distance. But the underlying message was still, just barely, the language of engagement: we would prefer you talk to each other.

Deserts’ mainland concerts were subsequently cancelled.

Not long after, she began performing under her given name, Anpu. It is a smaller, quieter name — her birth name, which she had set aside when she became Deserts Xuan, and now reclaimed. Whether the cancellations and the renaming were directly connected she has never said, and it is not my place to speculate. But the timing lodged itself in memory the way certain dates do. Deserts Xuan had been, for many of us, the clearest embodiment of what Taiwanese culture at its best had offered: the belief that a person could be honest in public, could carry their identity without apology, could refuse to put things down when asked. When she stepped back from that name, it felt less like a rebrand than like a door closing — not slammed, but eased shut, carefully, in a way that made the click of the latch very loud in the silence that followed.

I did not know then that the silence would keep spreading. I think most of us assumed it was temporary — a chill that would pass, a door that might reopen. It did not reopen.

What replaced the conversation is harder to describe than an argument. It is more like the end of argument — the point at which suspicion has been rehearsed so many times it has hardened into something that feels like knowledge. On the Chinese internet, jokes about military unification circulate as casually as memes. Students abroad learn to file complaints against lecturers who refer to Taiwan as a country as a distortion of fact or an insult to China. On the Taiwanese side, the language purges itself of mainland idioms; people learn to identify the other by their syntax, to hear the enemy in a turn of phrase. The people across the water are no longer complicated strangers you are fighting to understand. They are simply the enemy, or the traitors, or the aggressors, depending on which side of the strait you are reading from. What was once an argument has become shelling. What was once a conversation has become targeting.

In this kind of air, culture stops being a bridge and becomes a liability. To come from the wrong place, to say the wrong thing, to be associated with the wrong set of symbols — these are no longer merely awkward. They have consequences.

Sometime in the years between Manchester and tonight, the Taiwan musicians I knew came to the mainland less, or came and said less, or came and were careful in ways they had not always been careful before. The mainland changed around them. They adapted, or they did not come at all. Either way the conversation thinned, and eventually stopped.

There is a phrase: 去政治化 — de-politicization. It describes the careful removal of consequence from cultural expression, the process by which a song about being alive in a complicated world becomes a song about being sad on a Tuesday evening. It is not dishonesty exactly. It is more like sanding every surface until nothing can catch. In the current climate, a Taiwanese artist who wants to reach a mainland audience — or simply not to be made an example of — makes this calculation automatically, the way you learn to breathe shallowly in a room where the air is thin.

Accusefive do not hold flags. They hold the audience with hooks.

This is not a criticism. The loneliness they describe is real, and they describe it honestly. But there is a finish to their work that belongs unmistakably to the present era. Their breakthrough came through short videos — fifteen-second clips of a melody arriving at exactly the right emotional moment. The music was made, one senses, to be clipped. What the algorithm rewards is the feeling of being understood without the discomfort of actually being seen. The loneliness in their songs is genuine, but it is a loneliness that has been made safe — sanded of anything that might catch on the world outside the song, filed down to a smoothness that can travel anywhere without causing trouble.

I think about the boy at the desk next to mine, singing without knowing he was singing. I think about the QQ status I kept for months, addressed to no one in particular. I think about sitting in a factory assembly hall, too young to understand the film but old enough to feel it. I think about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s train emerging from the tunnel into green, and about Lung Ying-tai writing as if clarity were possible, and about Deserts Xuan standing on a stage in Manchester holding something she refused to put down.

What Taiwan gave my generation was not a single thing but a sequence. First it gave us permission to take our interior lives seriously — to believe that what we felt, in all its embarrassing intensity, was worth examining rather than suppressing. Then, gradually, it showed us that the interior life was not a sealed room. That the same honesty you brought to a lyric about heartbreak was available to you when you looked at the society you were living in. That a person and a citizen were not different creatures. This was, I understand now, a form of enlightenment. It arrived through earphones and cinema screens and newspaper essays and the cadence of a singer’s voice, and it shaped the way I understood what it was possible to be.

I am not sure that enlightenment is still being transmitted across the strait. I am not sure the channel is still open. And standing in the Salle Pleyel, watching a show so perfectly calibrated that nothing is left to chance or accident or the particular electricity of a specific evening, I find myself wondering what it means that the Taiwan reaching young people now arrives in fifteen-second increments, already clipped, already safe, already sanded smooth.

The question I cannot resolve is whether what I feel is loss or simply age. Every generation finds in the music of its youth evidence that the world was once more alive. My parents probably feel this about singers I have never heard of. The feeling is not proof of anything except continuity. I know this.

And yet. The strait has widened — not by geography but by accumulated events, by suspicion rehearsed so many times it has begun to feel like knowledge, by an information environment so thoroughly managed on both sides that the complicated stranger across the water has been replaced by a simplified enemy. The musicians who once seemed to be reaching toward us now appear, when they appear in Chinese media at all, to be performing a careful neutrality. They smile carefully. They answer carefully. The carelessness — the good kind, the kind that comes from not needing to calculate — is gone.

Accusefive are very good at what they do. The songs are well-made, the loneliness portable, which is what the present moment requires. I don’t blame them. I am not sure there is anyone to blame. I am only noticing what has been replaced, and by what.

E.B. White once wrote about returning to a lake in Maine where he had summered as a child, finding everything there and everything different, and arriving at the unsettling sense that it was he who was the ghost. I think about this when a song ends and the crowd cheers with a completeness I cannot quite match. They are not missing anything. The show is exactly what it promised to be, which is a real achievement and not a small one.

I am the one standing here waiting for something the evening has not offered to provide — a moment in which the music might briefly fail to be perfect and reveal something truer underneath.

It does not fail. It is very good. The lights come up.

Outside, the Paris streets are indifferent in the way that old cities are to the ghosts of others. I walk among people who have no idea that somewhere, two societies that once reached toward each other across a strip of water are now rehearsing, daily and with great thoroughness, the reasons they cannot. The music those societies grew up sharing is still playing, somewhere, in rooms that are no longer shared. A boy is putting his head down on a desk and singing quietly to himself. A girl is typing a line of someone else’s lyric into a status field, meaning it for no one in particular and meaning it completely.

I don’t know if they can still hear each other. From this distance, the music sounds rather beautiful.

Which may be the problem.