Author Chris van Laak
Photographer The Centural News Agency, Classic Kimen Travel, New York Times YouTube Channel, Chelsea Chen
It begins with a scene that looks unreal—so unreal that you might suspect it was created by an AI that’s not yet fully up to the task of fooling you into believing what you see.
A wrecked tank is partly submerged in a sandy beach. Forever trapped, it can no longer move, but its rusty, dilapidated cannon still aims at a target beyond the shoreline. In the warm evening light, the scene is eerily beautiful and, maybe to the surprise of the uninitiated, it is real.
Few at the Oscars, where S. Leo Chiang’s （江松長）Island in Between （金門）was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film, would have been familiar with what they saw. The sight, however, is familiar to those who have visited the popular spot where the tank got stuck many decades ago on Ou Cuo Sandy Beach （歐厝沙灘）, during their trip to Kinmen, an island that the film describes as permanently in between China and Taiwan, in between the past and present.
Chiang’s 19-minute film zooms in on the island, whose shores are just about 3km from the Chinese city of Xiamen, but about 200km from Taiwan proper. The film tells its story from a deeply personal perspective that might startle even the most well-informed geopolitics buff, precisely because it is so personal and refuses to look at Kinmen primarily through the wide-angle lens of geopolitics.
‘A mythical place’
Kinmen’s peculiar story begins during the Chinese Civil war, when the Republic of China government retreated to Taiwan and retained Kinmen as what the movie calls a “launching pad” for the re-invasion of the mainland. Historically Kinmen had little connection to Taiwan—instead of being a somewhat neglected, multiethnic offshore possession of the Qing Dynasty(清朝） that later became a Japanese colony, it had been integrated into the Chinese dynastic system for two millennia. But now, as part of the ROC and thereby tied to Taiwan, it was supposed to serve as “the cork in the communist bottle” in Asia, similar to Berlin’s role in Europe. It had to be defended against the People’s Republic at all costs.
Using footage produced by the US military not long after the retreat, Chiang’s film introduces Kinmen as the stepping stone that those who saw themselves as Chinese exiled in Taiwan would take to return to the mainland. For Chiang’s family, however, whom he introduces as ethnic Chinese Taiwanese with no connection to China, there was no dream of going back. They dreamed of going further instead, meaning to the US, where they eventually sent their son for his high-school and university education and where Chiang later became a filmmaker.
Shunning simple answers
By highlighting his own biography and his third-culture identity, Chiang breaks through the dichotomy that might otherwise have overpowered his narrative. Even though Chiang revisits some well-known tropes, he steers clear enough of the “the same narrative, again” trap.
In his movie, he shows that what’s at stake is not so easy to untangle. He doesn’t look at the issue at hand with the old question in mind of whether Taiwan should go further on the path toward independence or rekindle its close ties to China toward an eventual unification.
A personal Kinmen
Chiang visited Kinmen for the first time in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic on a family trip. International travel had ground to a halt, and Chiang and his parents chose their destination because his father had once served in the ROC military there, right on the front line of the Cold War.
Kinmen celebrates that part of its history, and Chiang’s film allows it to relish in it. There are scenes of mock artillery shells being fired to entertain tourists. There are the giant loudspeakers directed at China playing Teresa Teng’s (鄧麗君) Tian Mi Mi (甜蜜蜜, “Sweet Honey”), a 1979 song by the Taiwanese pop star that was at the time banned in China. This weapon of propaganda warfare, too, has lost its original meaning though. It has lowered its volume and is now another tourist attraction.
Speaking of tourism, there is also the oversized ferry terminal through which, at least from 2001 until the onset of the pandemic, thousands of travelers passed every day. In the years of warming cross-strait ties Kinmen had remade itself as a shopping destination for Chinese who wanted to experience the “forbidden,” republican version of their own county.
Few Kinmen residents took issue. Taiwan is so far away after all.
It could all be so nice if it weren’t for the actual threat that China might one day try to invade Taiwan, including Kinmen—perhaps even starting with Kinmen.
Mao and Tsai
Kinmen’s identity conundrum resonated deeply with Chiang. He had initially planned to shoot a documentary about people-to-people exchanges with China. However, ferry services did not resume even after the pandemic had ended, and he had to change his plan.
Earlier this month, the filmmaker described his thought process during the making of the movie on The Taiwan Take podcast. Chiang told podcast host Emily Y. Wu that after his initial plan was no longer feasible, he simply sought to focus on “vignettes of local life” in Kinmen and let the viewer connect the dots.
Visually, such vignettes take center stage in his movie. One of the most instructive scenes shows the interior of a shop. There is a fading image of Mao Zedong (毛澤東). It is unclear what the person who had placed it there had in mind when doing so, whether they intended the irony. Next to it in the cluttered shop hang photos of President Tsai Ing-Wen (蔡英文) and her predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), showing them shaking hands with an elderly woman during their respective visits to Kinmen.
‘Kinmen in your heart’
Chiang told Wu that he found a coherent narrative for the movie when his editor at the Times encouraged him to ask himself about “what it is in the deepest part of your heart that [makes] you feel like this is the story you want to tell.”
That is, as it turned out, that your status in this world can be contradictory to a degree that your very existence is on the verge of impossibility—but it’s an impossibility you have to live with and one that you can live with if you don’t let the conflict boil over. This is apparently true for individuals, such as Chiang himself, but also for an island that is home to about 100,000 people caught in between China and Taiwan.
S. Leo Chiang’s Island in Between is on the New York Times YouTube channel. As the first Taiwanese production nominated for an Academy Award since 2001, it “lost” to Ben Proudfoot’s The Last Repair Shop, but in making it that far, it made a remarkable contribution to helping the world understand Taiwan a bit better.
