Shelley Rigger

They were snatched out of the rice fields in southern China to go be in the army.

So the Taiwanese were like, whoa, you know, the Japanese were all spit and polish.

You know, they knew about army.

What is this?

So it was kind of like a bad start to begin with.

And then from the nationalist perspective, okay, one, these people have been working for the enemy for forever.

50 years.

And a lot of them were in the Japanese army.

So, you know, from the nationalist point of view, we are taking over kind of enemy territory.

So we want to tell the folks that live there, hey, we're all Chinese, but also we're quite suspicious.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

And the next thing the nationals decide to do is kind of pillage Taiwan for stuff they can use on the mainland.

So they start taking apart factories and moving equipment to the mainland.

Because again, as far as they're concerned, this Taiwan thing, you know, that is like a sideshow that we can deal with later.

But right now, we've got to save...

the Republic of China from a communist takeover.

So stuff goes from bad to worse in Taiwan with this kind of tensions rising between these two populations.

And then February 1947, a Taiwanese woman was selling cigarettes

She was selling single cigarettes, just like some of the people who have gotten in trouble in the U.S.