PJ Vogt

Because it's just like an intensely, intensely sort of nationally, socially traumatic event.

After that, everything is just different.

This is the part of the story where it goes from something tragic, colonial violence, to something very, very absurd.

A plot twist transpires that does not resemble the history of any other country I've learned about.

So the nationalists who'd been ruling Taiwan from mainland China, the first thing that happens is that in 1949, the nationalists suffer a huge defeat at the hands of the communist army.

Oh, because this is where they have to go because they're being forced off the mainland.

no longer the conquering young military leader, now a more tragic figure, the so-called leader of the Republic of China, exiled to a nearby island, claiming that any day now his nationalist armies will return to the mainland, sweep through, vanquish the communists.

He's talking shit.

I had never known this.

It's one of the things I learned from Dr. Rigger.

While I had actually known that Taiwan had often been ruled by a party called the Nationalists, what I'd assumed, of course, was that the nation in Nationalists meant Taiwan.

It didn't.

The nation the rulers of Taiwan were obsessed with was China.

They saw themselves as Chinese, deeply Chinese, as the true Chinese government, not the imposter one run by Mao and the people after him.

The tragedy they were experiencing, the feeling that something else should have happened, that it was all gonna get fixed next year or the year after, it's the kind of agony you only normally encounter in sports fans.

And what would happen next was even more interesting.

As the decades passed, the nationalists running Taiwan would live among the Taiwanese people, people who had been their colonial subjects, people they had treated with violence and subjugation.

That proximity would change both sides, would change the shape of the government, the economy.

The nationalists would not get what they wanted.

They'd get something that was maybe better.