Until 2006, Taoyuan International Airport had been called Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, after the great nationalist leader. A military man his entire life, Kai-shek first grew to prominence fighting in the 1911 revolution, in which the nationalists defeated the Qing dynasty and transformed imperial China into a republic. He then joined the Nationalist Party, or the Kuomintang, led by Sun Yat-sen, and worked tirelessly to unite a fragmented China and to fill the power vacuums left by the end of Qing rule. With Sun’s death in 1925, Kai-shek inserted his influence on the Kuomintang and took aim to curb the rising power of the communists in the countryside as well the warlords to the north. Yet the growing aggression of the Japanese army in the region caused Kai-shek to temporarily abandon his campaign against the communists, after the not-so-subtle goading from his fellow nationalists to unite with the Red Army and confront the common menace that imperiled the entire republic. (His own generals put him under house arrest until Kai-shek changed course.) Between 1937 and 1945, the nationalists, communists, and, eventually, the Soviets battled and then defeated the Japanese army. After eight years of bloodshed—the killing of fourteen million Chinese soldiers as well as laying waste to entire cities and communities—and after eight years of Kai-chek and Mao Zedong fighting tooth and nail together to blunt Japanese advancement across Asia, the two great Chinese armies returned to butchering each other. By 1949, the nationalists had lost mainland China and Kai-chek and his supporters fled to the island of Taiwan, across the Formosa Strait, only a couple hundred kilometres south of the Chinese province of Fujian. And on Taiwan, Kai-check established his own dictatorship and oversaw the modernization and industrialization of his tiny island, under the watchful, bellicose eye of Beijing to the north.
At the entrance to the Kai-chek Memorial Hall stands a sign reading “to prevent the outbreak of Wuhan pneumonia, the CKSMH will begin to implement a temperature measurement for tourists who enter the hall from now on. Visitors whose forehead temperatures are measured up to 37.5 degrees Celsius will be refused entry and suggested seeking immediate medical attention.” Erected in 1980, five years after Kai-shek’s death, the Memorial Hall is Taiwan’s most important landmark; octagon-shaped, the building rises 76 metres and visitors may access the hall by climbing one of two staircases of eighty-night steps, the age of Kai-chek when he died. The memorial faces to the north-west—to China—as in life, the great nationalist had also hoped to return to his homeland; in death, this was the next best thing.
The security guard aims the temperature reader to my forehead, waits a second and then waves me through. I press down on the provided bottle of hand sanitizer, clean my hands, and proceed into the hall. Kai-shek sits elevated on a chair, his arms resting to the sides. His sitting body is twice the size of a regular person. I know this because below him stand armed military men whose job it is to protect the bronze statue from any threat and to shield the lifeless general from any disparagement—to defend Kai-shek’s memory from any attack. Above him, in Chinese characters, are written the words “ethics,” “democracy,” and “science.” To the left of the statue, an inscription reads “The purpose of life is to improve the general life of humanity.” Another one to the right reads “The meaning of life is to create and sustain subsequent lives in the universe.” The inanimate Kai-shek wears a tiny smile on face—a little Buddha grin. Despite the rigidness of his marbled body, his posture seems languid, relaxed. The man appears at peace. He has an air of serenity and enlightenment about him. It’s as if after decades of waging war against perceived enemies both foreign and domestic, Kai-shek can finally relax in his abode, in his personal nirvana, and gaze over Liberty Square to the National Theatre and the National Concert Hall, those symbols of a robust and independent arts scene, characteristic of a free and creative people, and feel satisfied that his little Taiwan still survives under shadows the colour of blood.
Ketagalan Blvd. runs from East Gate, one of the four gates demarcating old, historic Taipei, passes both Peace Park and Urban Park, and terminates at an impressive nineteenth-century baroque building called the Legislative Yuan—Taiwan’s parliament. Having a parliament may seem odd for a territory whose statehood only seventeen countries recognize, including such notable geopolitical heavyweights as Palau and Paraguay. For fear of angering Beijing, the new command centre of the world economy, Western governments, those promoters and protectors of democracy and human rights, have universally backed the One China policy, which understands democratic Taiwan as only a renegade Chinese province, a naughty child who will inevitably return to the family fold. Yet only a few weeks ago on January 11, the country held its fifteenth presidential and vice-presidential election along with its tenth Yuan election. And despite the world turning its back on the island’s democratic intentions and despite China threatening war and blood if Taiwan ever declared independence, the Taiwanese overwhelmingly re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party for another four years and gave her party a clear majority in the Yuan—a political party that has unambiguously pushed for the island’s independence from China.
“Winnie the Pooh will never let Taiwan be independent,” our tour guide Christine tells us the dozen or so of us who have taken this guided walking tour through some of Taipei’s more historic parts. It is Feb 28 and warm. The sun is shining.
Referring to Xi Jinping, China’s president, as the beloved children’s character Winnie the Pooh—the portly, small-statured, and youthful bear who loves nothing more than to eat honey from his favourite jar—has become a favourite way for critics of the repressive Communist Party of China to mock its authoritarian leader. The fun began in 2013 when a picture appeared online of Xi walking next to then President Obama; a shrewd netizen soon noticed the remarkable similarity between Xi and the fabled Pooh, especially in terms of gait, arm swing, height, and the famous gut, and posted a meme of two photos side by side: one of Winnie and his more slender, energetic, and animated friend, Tigger the tiger, strolling together and the other of Xi and Obama. It’s impossible to know whether Xi took more offense to the suggestion that his physique resembled that of rotund, stout, honey-licking bear or that next to Tigger (i.e., Obama), he looked rather innocent and inept—a political novice looking for advice from a bigger, wiser brother. In any event, Xi did not take the joke in stride—a universal theme among dictators or want-to-be dictators is that they possess incredibly thin skin—and by 2018, and after many more unflattering pictures of the powerful Xi appearing next to the husky Winnie, Chinese censors banned Disney’s new Winnie the Pooh movie Christopher Robin. Winnie the Pooh had suddenly become as egregious to Chinese authorities as discussion of what exactly happened at Tiananmen Square.
Christine calls Mr. Xi Winnie the Pooh as naturally as someone would call the sky blue. She understands better than most what uttering such a statement represents to a young person perpetually living under the threat of having her political freedoms stolen by a hypersensitive autocrat. She is young and unapologetically anti-Beijing, a representative of the younger generation that respects LGBT rights as much as freedom of speech and that views itself as unquestionably Taiwanese. She is a member of a vibrant and dynamic civil society that critiques and questions the direction their country travels and the shape it takes, a constellation of voices that long ago ripped the island from the trajectory of the mainland, away from those itchy censor fingers rendering black and obsolete even the most minute of criticisms, and far away from the opaqueness and nothingness that pass for intellectual discourse on the mainland, where every subject and verb stated or printed must, without question, reaffirm and restrengthen the apparatus of the Communist Party.
“Winnie the Pooh is always watching us,” Christine says again, referring to the network of spies and infiltrators Beijing has released upon the island in hopes of undermining its nascent yet robust democracy. But the way Christine lathers her pronunciation of the pronoun “us” with venom and menace indicates, to me at least, that she includes her tourists—we travellers from Canada, Austria, France, and the Philippines as well as our governments—within that group perpetually examined by Beijing. “Are your countries recognized by the international community?” Christine asks, rhetorically, since she knows the answer is in the affirmative and that neither Canada nor Austria, France, or the Philippines has ever had to justify its existence to anyone. “Do you know who recognizes us? … the Solomon Islands.” She smiles and glances at the Yuan across the street. “On the weekends, in the clubs, I see students from the Solomon Islands partying and dancing, enjoying the 1,000 euros a month our government has given them to come to study in Taiwan, an agreement that means the Solomon Islands will support our independence.” She surrenders a small laugh and then another. “Do your governments pay other governments to support your independence, your sovereignty, as well as your right to determine the future of your own country?” She already knows the answer.
“We even have trouble protecting the health of our people because of Winnie the Pooh,” she says. “We are not a member of the United Nations. We are not a member of the World Health Organization.” She controls the volume and rhythm of her anger with the skill of a conductor, always controlling its rise and fall and never letting it spillover into a cacophonous crescendo. “How can we co-ordinate a response to a virus when we are shut own from international discussions?”
Despite the inherent limitations of co-ordinating a response to a virus when only recognized by seventeen countries, Taiwan’s response to, as well as success against, COVID-19 has so far been miraculous. The country had had an intimate, violent history with another severe respiratory virus—SARS—which, too, spread from mainland China to Taiwan, infecting 346 people and killing 73 in 2003. So when officials heard in early January that a mysterious form of pneumonia had surfaced in Wuhan and could pass between people with the ease of a gentle breeze, Taiwan took the hard lessons learned from SARS and implemented a series of measures that not only contained the virus relatively well but also allowed life to proceed almost as usually as before January 2020.
Before the outbreak in Hubei province, there were daily flights between Wuhan and Taipei. Trade and travel between Taiwan and China was immense. And even though the two territories have had an icy and fraught relationship over the years, the two are still well integrated and connected in terms of cultural commonalities and, importantly, in terms of how families still live and communicate across the geopolitical divide, with extended members calling both China and Taiwan home. So when news broke of the novel coronavirus, Taiwanese officials knew that the little island had a better chance than most to be the first territory outside of China to import the first case of COVID-19. But instead of immediately suspending all flights between Wuhan and Taiwan, officials took a more pragmatic, cautious route and would board all incoming flights and inspect and screen all travellers for symptoms. Three weeks later, though, when Taiwan recorded its first case of COVID-19, authorities banned all flights from Wuhan and then from Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, and Chengdu.
For those individuals who had recently travelled to Hubei or who had interacted with someone who had, authorities instructed them to self-isolate, to effectively quarantine themselves in their home, and to not visit medical facilities for fear of overburdening the medical system. And for those who did not take self-isolation seriously and did self-quarantine in their homes, risking further spread of the virus and threatening the lives of the elderly and those with underlying health issues, the authorities imposed fines of thousands of dollars. Events and religious services were suspended or cancelled; schools were closed (but only for two weeks). Everything came to an organized standstill. Authorities displayed important health messages everywhere as if they were re-election signs: wash your hands, avoid crowded places, and wear a surgical mask if coughing and sneezing. Such actions have resulted in only fifty confirmed cases and one death.
What was even more remarkable about Taiwan’s early success was the extent to which citizens adhered to their government’s orders. And perhaps no greater indicator of the seriousness that the Taiwanese granted the virus was the surgical mask that each wore in an almost religious fastidiousness, as if the surgical mask were a crucifix, kippah, or hijab. I had read mixed reports about the level of protection the surgical mask provided against the virus; some sources had cautioned that it offered zeros defenses against such a small strand of RNA, which could easily slip and slide through the small, unguarded crevices between the fabric and skin; others said the mask was better than nothing. More to the point, however, were those voices recommending that surgical masks only be worn by those already sick—to protect those around them from infectious droplets let loose by a sneeze or a cough—and by medical professionals, the doctors and nurses, who work on the frontline and are exposed to COVID-19 on a near never-ending basis. Walking around Taipei then and seeing the thousands upon thousands of people wearing such masks and going about their day as if it were any other and not one stuck in the middle of an epidemic, one could be forgiven for thinking that such a country-wide obsession with the mask was an overreaction, an indulgence, an example of group-think hysteria, which could result in shortages for those who actually needed one. Yet no such shortages were evident, as reports emerged that the government had stockpiled surgical masks and had directed manufactures to make one.
And the more I thought about all of these faceless faces walking by me—entering and exiting shopping malls, subway stations, 7-Elevens—the more I realized that the mask could also act as symbol of solidarity. The mask, then, becomes less a medical device and more an avenue through which people may broadcast their common destiny. It makes visible the refrain “we are in this together” and renders unambiguous the sentiment of collective action. A virus knows no nationality, nor does it adhere to a particular political orientation. It cares neither for your sexuality nor your gender. Whether you believe in a god or not is of little consequence. It is remarkably equitable its treatment of folks. Since if COVID-19 were slightly too fastidious in whom it chose to infect—picture a finicky child picking at its vegetables or turning its nose up at that perfectly roasted chicken—the virus would sputter to a halt in a matter of hours. Instead, in its embrace of justice and equal opportunity, COVID-19 has marched and paraded triumphantly across the world—an army that never encounters resistance.
In response, then, to such a woke menace, an equally socialized and cohesive plan must be laid. And nothing captures the spirit of collective action better than a symbol—think the jersey of your sports team or the flag of your country—and nothing mobilizes a people better than their sense they have a legitimate, feel-in-the-bone stake in the outcome of the plan. The mask symbolizes a collective response to a collective threat. The mask says never has my health been so dependent on your behaviour and vice versa. The mask says never has my wellness been so dependent on yours.
For Taiwan, COVID-19 has represented nothing less than the country’s independence. No longer can anyone doubt the territory’s capacity to defend its citizens from any threat, nor can any political body doubt how different the territory is from the mainland. The two’s respective responses to COVID-19 reflects such a divergence; China was brutal and draconian in its response; Taiwan was measured and restrained. And whereas China ignored initial reports of the virus’s spread and censored those doctors who warned of its potency, Taiwan reacted swiftly and transparently. COVID-19 has shown that Taiwan is not China.
“Today, February 28, is a national holiday,” Christine says, standing in front of sheet of glass with dozens of black and white headshots emblazoned upon it. “And this small park and museum,” Christine points to a nearby small and unremarkable building, “is a space to remember what happened that day in 1947.” The faces belong to mostly men with stoic, unfeeling expressions. Some wear glasses, others caps. All have short hair, trimmed to the ears. The men are young, primed for life—robust. They look to possess qualities and qualifications that all nations would want their young to have. They are ready to contribute and make good on the investments their governments made in them. They are to set upon the world with that youthful zeal for which the young are so famous. They are ready to give back and make their homes and communities—their country—stronger than how they found it. Yet these are not graduation photos, nor are they photos a family member would likely hang on a wall in a moment of pride, to be remembered in a spirit of all only happiness. No. These photos are mere traces of lives cut short. They are ghosts that haunt the memory of Taiwan, especially its fabled father, Kai-shek.
“These are some of the victims of the events of February 28 and its aftermath,” Christine says.
The park is a wonderful green, and the sun shines to a degree uncommon for late February. Laughter fills the air, and the atmosphere feels at odds not only with the epidemic gripping the nation but also with the brutality the park represents. Children, though, still chase one another around the playground, with the beautiful mischievous only children can perform. Their joy is completely at odds with the sombre picture display as well as with the series of letters family members have written to their killed or disappeared brethren. They flutter in the slight breeze next to the faces. Yet their behaviour should not be read as disrespectful, since children are renowned for their (momentary) obliviousness to the history they will inherit and live within. They will learn and absorb their history in due time; for now, let them play in the grass and enjoy the sun on their faces.
For us, though, Christine grants no such clemency.
The story of February 28 goes like this:
After its unconditional surrender in August 1945, Japan renounced its claim to Taiwan, which it had ruled over as a colony since 1895, and returned the island to the Republic of China. Even though the Taiwanese had had no previous interaction with the Nationalist government, suffering as it did for fifty years under the yoke of Japanese rule, they enthusiastically welcomed Kai-check in a spirit of pan-Sino solidarity. Yet the local Taiwanese population soon realized that instead of becoming equal participants in directing the future of their island with the Nationalist government, they would instead become (as they were under the Japanese) subjected to the Nationalists’ increasingly authoritarian policies and be blocked from possessing any real political clout. For one, the Nationalists simply replicated the political system of the occupying Japanese, in which all executive, legislative, judicial, and military powers were monopolized by one institution—the Taiwan Provincial Executive Office. And rather than finding themselves on equal footing with their brethren, and so-called liberators from the mainland, the local Taiwanese were relegated to the bottom of the heap, as all the perks and positions of power went to the mainlanders, who derided the locals’ lack of political panache and mocked their inability to speak Mandarin with the fluency of a real Chinese person.
Like their Japanese predecessors, the Nationalists’ controlled every facet of the economy. The Executive Office granted the Trade Bureau full power to dictate the sale of, and set the prices for, a great gamut of goods—matches, cigarettes, liquor, and agricultural products. With the increasing difficulty to procure items deemed essential even for a sliver of what could pass for a dignified, the local Taiwanese began to resent their new overlords as well as the impoverishment their policies inflicted upon them. Theft became a favoured way for the locals to level the playing. Yet instead of recognizing that stealing stemmed not from individual selfishness but a genuine desire to survive in the face of government-sanctioned destitution, the Nationalists’ armed forces, comprising mainly of soldiers from the mainland, reacted to petty theft with a particularly strong heavy-handedness. Violent confrontations between the public and the police force grew more common, and each had the real potential to blossom into a full-blown riot. And on Feb. 28, 1947 it did.
The day before, Feb. 27, agents from the Monopoly Bureau apprehended a middle-aged widow, Lin Chiang-mai, illegally selling cigarettes. Lin had not sold her product through the proper channel; she had not ensured the machinery of the Bureau was greased through her effort and ingenuity. As a result, those agents confiscated her cigarettes and the money she had earned, and when she begged them reconsider and screamed for mercy, they beat her with their gun barrels until her head bled, until she was knocked unconscious, until her screaming stopped.
In all likelihood, the residents of Taipei had witnessed such savagery before; in all likelihood, they had watched police officers harass, arrest, or even beat others whose only crime was attempted survival. Yet, for some reason, today, the sight of Lin beaten bloody struck a nerve with the nearby bystanders watching the spectacle. Was it that they could no longer abide by such brutality, could no longer stomach the thought of another officer of the law go unpunished for their crimes? Whatever their reasoning, the bystanders attacked those agents and set upon them with the ferocity of a famished wolf; the agents fled but not before firing a few shots into the crowing crowd and killing a man. The residents besieged the local police headquarters, demanding the agents be held accountable for what they had done; the doors remained shut.
Then, on Feb. 28, crowds attacked the Monopoly Bureau—that detested institution—overwhelmed its security, and burst into its interior. There, the crowds released their pent-up rage. They destroyed documents, beat office clerks, and tossed other items out the window and onto the streets, where awaiting citizens quickly set them alight. By the afternoon, the crowds had amassed in front of the Executive Office to further voice their demands, yet, by now, the police had had enough of the protestors’ recalcitrance, their sense of self-determination, and did what autocracies the world over do whenever faced with a populace that they could no longer control through propaganda or selective violence, who were no longer cowed by their power: they opened fire.
While news of the police’s actions spread throughout Taipei’s neighbourhoods, more and more residents took to the streets and some even ventured into a local radio station to broadcast to the entire island about had happened in the capital—the bullets and bloodshed—and encouraged them, too, Taiwansese from Kaohsiung to Hualien, to rise up and join them. And with those heartening refrains, the island exploded in riots and protests; years of alienation and repression sparked a fire across tTaiwan. Riots were everywhere; mobs attacked police stations, government offices, or any symbol of a power that had long rendered the locals superfluous and irrelevant. A state of emergency was declared, and as the situation settled over the coming days, officials promised to release those arrested and to establish a committee to investigate the causes of the rebellion and to recommend solutions to avoid future, similar disturbances.
From Nanking, on the mainland, Kai-shek thought little of the residents’ uprising and even less of the committee’s efforts to placate the protestors’ demands; surely, he must have thought, such a menace to public order could create the perfect situation for the communists to infiltrate the island with their promises of workers’ rights and radical equality. Amid the battle for the mainland, such a show of impishness among the Nationalists would surely signal to the Communists that Kai-shek and his ilk were weak and gullible, unprepared to do what was necessary to secure and then govern a territory as vast and unrelenting as China. So Kai-check sent more military troops to Taiwan and upon their landing in Keelung on March 8, they set upon cleansing the island of any sentiment undermining the Nationalists’ cause. From the north, the military move south like a merciless locust storm; massacres and crackdowns were the order of the day. Soldiers summarily executed anyone suspected of participating in the riots; any newspaper or magazine unaffiliated with the government was shut down. Over the coming weeks, the military launched various campaigns to root out and destroy these subversive elements that implanted themselves across the once lush and verdant island. After the cleansing was completed and after an air of political purity had returned to the island, thousands of people had been killed.
Yet Kai-shek remained concerned with had transpired—the havoc a few ruffians had wreaked upon the island—and his alarm only amplified with the Communists’ victory in 1949 and his government’s shameful retreat to Taiwan. He felt perpetually anxious, forever under threat from real and imagined villains, which was why his brutal crackdown on Taiwan’s political freedoms—his strangulation of any dissidence—did not stop in 1947 or in 1957 or in 1967 or in 1977 or in 1987. Indeed, the events of Feb. 28 1947 unleashed the period in Taiwanese history known as “the White Terror,” in which political expression and civil liberties were brutally supressed in the name of stability and order. And even though martial law officially ended in 1987, the first free presidential election took place nine years later in 1996. The opinion, however, that Kai-shek only did what was necessary to protect the island from mainland attacks and only had so many disappeared or tortured or imprisoned to safeguard the wellbeing of the entire Taiwanese community has met serious revision, particularly from the younger generation, who view Kai-shek’s authoritarian underbelly not as not evidence of a man pursuing the greater good but of a man desperately trying to prevent the fate of the greater good from being placed in the hands of the majority.
“My parents still respect the man,” Christine says. “They feel Kai-shek did what needed to be done to protect Taiwan.” She shuffles her feet and fiddles with her hands, as if directing her discomfort with those words to her extremities, somewhere further away from her core, her centre. “I have a different opinion,” she says. “The younger Taiwanese who know this history also have a different opinion. We do not revere the great leader.”
I adore when the young critique the stories of the old. I adore watching them take the discourses held as gospel for so long and then refusing to perpetuate them any longer. I adore seeing them reinterpret the events of old through their own framework, nuanced by contemporary concerns of inclusion and equity, and work towards writing alternative histories for better futures. I adore viewing the old squirm in discomfort while trying to justify the unjustifiable, as they further bury themselves in the dirt of irrelevancy, as they further run towards their extinction, their own oblivion.
Statues of Cecil Rhodes have fallen all over South Africa. Confederate monuments in the American South have come under increasingly scrutiny. Memorials to Canada’s Fathers of Confederation are no longer met with automatic respect and worship. The young, particularly the young of colour, will no longer stomach the sight of symbols celebrating colonialism, racism, genocide. The young of colour will no longer sit by in silence in the name of tradition while they feel the legacies of these statues—apartheid, structural racism, cultural genocide—reverberate across their lives and histories. Statues cast long shadows.
In a similar way, younger Taiwanese will no longer abide by a narrative that casts a Kai-shek as a hero worthy of thoughtless veneration. They will no longer wander through the ostentatious gallery devoted to the man’s life—located underneath the Memorial Hall—and unreflectively gaze at the man’s accomplishments, his pictures with famous world leaders, the notes about his military victories, his regalia, his favourite cars etcetera etcetera etcetera. They will no longer participate in the act of mythmaking, of making gods from human flesh. They will remember Kai-shek, oh yes; they will remember his dictatorship and the ones he silenced. They will remember how his iron grip still affects the marrow of this young democracy. They will remember him as they try to move beyond him. They will remember him but never worship him—remembered but never revered.
In the National Concert Hall, I find my seat. I am underdressed and look a little dishevelled. A traveller has little space to pack formal attire and little desire to spend hours in front of mirror perfecting his appearance. Tonight, amid the Coronavirus crisis, the hall is still hosting artist-in-residence LÜ and Brett Dean. I have little idea what that means or who these musicians are or what I should expect to hear. I bought my ticket on a whim, an example of a promise I made to myself to leave my comfort zone a little more often. I have never been to the orchestra, have never experienced classical music live.
I used to labour under the false assumption that classical music was for stuffy men in suits—uninteresting sounds reserved for the elites to blush and cry over. Perhaps my aversion to classical music stems from my failed attempts as a child to master the baritone, transforming, as I did, the instrument into a receptacle for my saliva instead of a maker of lovely sounds. Perhaps, my ambivalence is rooted in my upbringing fed exclusively on rock music and its more accessible and populist sounds of guitar, bass, and drums. In any events, the sounds of the orchestra remained alien and foreign to me—almost hostile. It was the soundtrack of the bourgeoisie, whereas I wanted to hear the songs of the proletariat, of the revolution. My taste in music, however, has evolved over the years, particularly as some of my favourite post-rock, and more adventurously sounding, bands started to incorporate instruments more typically reserved for the orchestra into their musical repertoire. Such artists gave me permission to like the violin, the piano, the trumpet, the harp. And as I became bold and daring in my own selection of music to sample, I discovered composers who seamlessly paired elements of classical music to the fundamentals of rock and pop music to create a wonderfully intoxicating mixture of sounds—a moving hybrid of previously desperate sounds. I became enchanted by the violin and equally alarmed that its notes could effortlessly move me to tears. So I decided to cast my classical musical net wider and wider and venture further and further into this unexplored realm until I found myself searching online for concerts in Taipei of all places and eagerly buying a ticket.
The musicians have begun to find their place onstage and to warmup with their respective instruments. They are all dressed in formal attire and look serious. I fix my eyes on the violinists, of which there are many, and examine them examining their sheet of music and how they move their bow across those tightened strings, how they know where the two should meet, how they know which note should sound. I watch them with a mixture of envy and awe. I find it remarkable that I can be so mesmerized by a piece of music without understanding how the notes and rhythms—the movement and language of music—have coalesced to create such a soundscape. I am wholly ignorant to the mechanics of music, the knots and bolts of its beauty. But it’s fine. Tonight, I’ll silence my more cerebral tendencies and focus instead on the feelings evoked. Let the masters play and let yourself be moved.
More audience members fill the seats around me; most are wearing masks. COVID-19 has not stopped their need for art or to collective share in the magic of music. Even in an epidemic, the sun still rises. Even in a crisis, the birds still sing. In whatever madness that follows, however long COVID-19 infects our collective wellbeing, the sun still rises and the birds still sing. We are still here. And we will still be here. And may that future be full of music and distance, a respect for each other’s instrument, a love for each other’s playing.
I should stop now.
The audience has gone quiet.
The conductor stands in front of his players.
A silence descends.
We are about to begin.