Jonathan Swift didn’t make Lemuel Gulliver a hero in Taiwan’s Lilliputian war between the Big-endians and the Small-endians.Chuang Kuo-yung, Ministry of Education chief secretary, was.A better job description of Chuang’s is, at least in English, chief of staff to Tu Cheng-sheng, minister of education.
Our Lilliputian emperor on Taiwan decreed that all public places should drop mention of Chiang Kai-shek.One of them was a memorial in the heart of Taipei dedicated to the long-deceased president whom the emperor has proclaimed as public enemy number one.The education minister, who believed an egg should be broken at the big end, came up with a magnificent plan.Well, he said, it’s easy.All it takes is to rename the memorial.
So the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial – there was the word “Hall” at the end of the officially translated title, but it’s better to drop that word to read more likable in English – was renamed the awe-inspiring Taiwan Democracy Memorial.The renaming, however, hit a little snag.The opposition-controlled parliament, where Small-endians abound, contested the renaming.They said the renaming had to be legislated.As no such legislation was possible, the Big-endian minister downgraded the management of the memorial to bypass the recalcitrant Small-endians to get his promised work under way.
At this point, another Small-endian joined the fray.Hau Lung-bin, mayor of Taipei whose father is a former minister of defense (I take the liberty to drop the word “national’’), made the memorial a municipal cultural heritage site, where no change can be effected in appearance as well as to or within all the structures therein without his permission.So far as Hau is concerned, the site is the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in its entirety.
Such defiance couldn’t be tolerated, of course.Thereupon the leading Big-endian got the emperor to have the Council for Cultural Affairs designate the Taiwan Democracy Memorial as a national cultural heritage site to overrule the Taipei municipal authorities.With his authority thus established, he called his chief of staff to battle.
Chuang had only one mission to accomplish: To change the name plaque atop the front door of the memorial and the four huge Chinese characters that form the title of the main gate to what has been renamed Liberty Forum.Incidentally, the premises for the memorial are elongate and do not look like a square; I therefore prefer to call it Forum – like the one in ancient Rome – rather than Square.
It’s relatively easy to replace the plaque with a new one bearing the name of Taiwan Democracy Memorial.All Chuang had to do was to take the old one down and put the new one up.But to make sure there would be no opposition, he ordered the site, which is one of Taipei’s top tourist attractions, to be cordoned off and closed to the public to maintain order in his battlefield.
There was disturbance outside the main gate, however.The four ideograms, each 1.72 meters high and 1.7 meters wide, are Da Zhong Zhi Zheng or Great Mean/Perfect Uprightness.“Mean” in this case is the Confucian course of moderate action between extremes in the development of virtues of temperance and prudence.As a matter of fact, the quartet has nothing to do with Chiang Kai-shek, save the fact that its second and last characters combined correspond to his preferred given name.He called himself Jiang Zhong-zheng, though he had a literary name, Jieshi (Hard Rock), which was transliterated “Kai-shek” in Cantonese.That English name was given him, while he was commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton, which is now known as Guangzhou, in the early 1920s.
Cherry pickers had to be sent for to lift workers high up enough to unscrew Da Zhong Zhi Zheng from their stone base above the lintel of the pailou-like gate and crane them down onto the ground with the gentleness required of archeologists doing their fieldwork at ancient ruins.No damage to any of the foursome, not even a dent, can be condoned, for they are items of cultural heritage in the eyes of the special municipality of Taipei and the Council for Cultural Affairs.A willful damage is a criminal offense, according to the Cultural Heritage Conservation Act.
When the memorial was staked out as the battleground, protesters rallied in front of the gate, demanding that the gate be kept intact.These Small-endians were matched by Big-endians who came to root for their new war hero commanding a campaign to eradicate their hated name of Chiang Kai-shek.Then a pickup rammed into a group of press workers covering the trading of abuse across the wide city street separating the memorial from the National Central Library.Five journalists were wounded, one of them seriously.
Big-endians and Small-endians alike condemned the traffic accident as an act of political violence, and little disturbance occurred when the four giant characters were taken down and their replacement was screwed in place.The battle royal was over.
But it’s the time for the hero to show his true grits.
Before Hau threw the book at him, Chuang had dared the mayor to appear in court.“If he had guts,” Chuang challenged Hau, “he should appear with evidence and I would send him back home to his mother to cry ‘Mama.’”As if that was not badmouthing enough against the Small-endians, the new hero of the Lilliputian war launched a sneak attack on Kuomintang standard bearer Ma Ying-jeou in a victory party celebrating his successful name-eradication campaign.“Chiang Ching-kuo is Ma Ying-jeou his Mama,” he told the press.
Some explanation is necessary.Chiang Ching-kuo was a son of Chiang Kai-shek’s.The first sentence was a literal translation.It’s not coherent and makes no sense in Chinese.On the other hand, everybody knows Ma served as an English interpreter for Chiang Ching-kuo who was president from 1978 to 1988.Did the new hero, carried away while he was enjoying the fruit of his victory, mean Chiang Kai-shek’s son is like the mother to the Kuomintang presidential candidate, who is still awaiting a Taiwan high court verdict on his corruption case?Did Chuang want to suggest that Ma would be sent back home like the Taipei mayor to Chiang Ching-kuo the mother to cry “Mama”? There is a coincidence: Ma is being tried for misusing his expense account while he was mayor of Taipei from 1998 to 2006.
The last part of the other sentence needs further elaboration.The Kuomintang chapter in Kaohsiung put up a huge campaign billboard in the center of the southern Taiwan port city a couple of months ago.A billboard slogan read: “His Ma de loves Taiwan.”“Ma” is the family name of the presidential candidate as well as a homophone of “mother.”“De” must be pronounced in Hoklo to mean “want to” or “will” or “also.”The slogan in effect advertised “Ma Ying-jeou (a mainlander Chinese) loves Taiwan.”But “His Ma de (an equivalent of an apostrophe followed by the letter S, ’s , in English to make a possessive case)” in Mandarin is the most commonly and frequently uttered obscenity.It’s an abbreviated form of “His mother’s (private parts).”That billboard, regarded as obscene, was torn down at once.The triumphant hero fired a dirty Parthian shot at Ma Ying-jeou, who wasn’t involved in any way in the Lilliputian war over the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial.Probably Ma was singled out as the target for the sin he has committed by running for president against his Democratic Progressive Party rival Frank Hsieh.
Like Frank Hsieh and President Chen, Chuang was graduated from prestigious Taiwan University with a law degree.He went on to study at Munich University in Germany.After obtaining a doctorate, he came back to Taiwan to start a teaching career at Chengchi University.He was an assistant professor of public administration when he was handpicked by the education minister as the latter’s chief of staff.With the twosome heading the education ministry, few schools can effectively teach students what common decency is.What befits Chuang most is to share the job of spin doctor cum publicity chief for the president with rap-dancing Government Information Office director-general Shieh Jhy-wei, who is a fellow returned student from Germany.
（本文刊載於96.12.10 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
