The Challenges of Writing and Surviving During World War II

Writer Wu Zhuoliu 吳濁流 (1900-1976), sadly, never saw Taiwan blossom into a democracy. But he left us with some of the most important works ever written about 20th-century Taiwan. Among these is the autobiography “The Fig Tree”, whose early chapters mirror the events in his acclaimed novel “Orphan of Asia.” In S2-E29, we covered Wu’s younger years as in Japanese colonial Taiwan, his grandfather’s tales of a cultured, ancient China and the influence these ideas had on Wu. We told the story of Wu’s time in “the Motherland,”  where he discovered that the China of his imagination was simply that – imaginary. Today, we pick up his story as WW2 comes to an end and the Chinese Nationalists arrive. Wu describes how Taiwanese jubilation soon turned to despair, and how this exploded into riots and killings known collectively as the 2/28 Incident.

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