A new novel on Taiwan’s political activism has been published. Titled “Taipei at Daybreak,” the book tells the story of a Taiwanese American’s coming-of-age, as he drifts between social movements in the U.S., Japan, and Taiwan.
On this episode of Zoom In Zoom Out, TaiwanPlus reporter Rik Glauert sits down with author Brian Hioe, who is also an independent journalist and researcher. We first zoom in on his real-life experiences that inspired the novel, then zoom out to look at how Taiwan’s activist scene has changed in the past decade.
On this episode of Zoom In Zoom Out, TaiwanPlus reporter Rik Glauert sits down with author Brian Hioe, who is also an independent journalist and researcher. We first zoom in on his real-life experiences that inspired the novel, then zoom out to look at how Taiwan’s activist scene has changed in the past decade.
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00:00Welcome to Zoom In Zoom Out, your global look at news from Taiwan. I'm Rick Lowat. Now,
00:18it's been three decades since Taiwan started on taking its steps towards democracy, and
00:23it's now a place of massive social movements and political demonstrations. Most recently,
00:28the so-called Blue Bird Movement has been flocking across the island to protest several
00:33bills that were proposed and passed by a legislature now dominated by China-leaning lawmakers. It's
00:39the biggest protest in Taiwan since the 2014 Sunflower Movement, when hundreds of thousands
00:45of protesters rallied in Taipei to support student activists who are occupying the legislative
00:50building. Now joining us today is independent journalist Brian Hu, who was present at Sunflower
00:58and has been writing about Taiwan's social movements ever since. He's just published a
01:02novel called Taipei at Daybreak, a coming-of-age story of a Taiwanese American drawing upon Brian's
01:08own experiences from Occupy Wall Street to an attempt at breaking into Taipei's executive
01:13urine. Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So Brian, before we start talking
01:18about recent protests, let's zoom in on your book. It's a fictionalized account based on your
01:24experiences, but just so we're all clear, where does the fiction end and the reality begin? How
01:29much of this book is your story? Yeah, so that's often a question I get because quite a lot is
01:34based on my life. Many characters are composites, they're not exactly one person, but the historical
01:40events are all real ones and they are ones that I participated in. And so I think part of the
01:44attempt was to really capture this moment in time with the experiences I had in those years because
01:49we live in a time more than a decade later now and I think it's really worth remembering those
01:53times. And so it draws very heavily from my life. And what does the book express? Could you just tell
01:59us a little bit about the story? What could we expect? Yeah, absolutely. So it is a coming-of-age
02:03novel in some form, or maybe that's how I just package it as, but then it focuses on participation
02:08in social movements from a very young age. Occupy Wall Street in New York, the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear
02:13movement in Japan, and then the Sunflower Movement. And so the series of social movements in the early
02:182010s, and I always like to be a young person, as a young Asian American participating in those
02:22movements and being caught between different identities and navigating that, but also this
02:26kind of feeling of youthful rebellion and trying to find oneself in the midst of these large-scale
02:31protest movements that are often very tumultuous and chaotic. The book has your first person
02:36accounts of some of the big political moments over the last few years in Taiwan, but it also
02:42includes quite a lot of intimate relationships. Why did you want to include those two things
02:49alongside one another? Yeah, I think in many ways the personal is the political, and a lot of the
02:54personal stories then feed into the politics that we see and hear about on the news. And so in regards
02:59to the Sunflower Movement, it's all these individual micro-level stories. For example, something I did
03:04was I interviewed a hundred Sunflower Movement activists to document their oral histories,
03:08and it really got at that subjectivity of how and why they'd participated and took so many risks
03:12in movements. And so this was regarding my own experiences. And quite a lot of the book is also
03:18set in New York and Tokyo. Why was it important for you to include those locations in the book
03:23alongside what happened in Taipei and Taiwan? For one, I think it's because those were the first
03:28large-scale social movements that I cut my teeth on in New York, in Occupy Wall Street in 2011,
03:33in Japan with the anti-nuclear demonstrations after the Fukushima disaster in 2012.
03:39But it's interesting too because some of the other writing on Taiwan's Sunflower Movement that I've
03:43seen that is fiction also deals with this experience of experiencing and participating
03:47in transnational social movements. In those years, the Occupy Movement had a very large impact on
03:52global social movements. That was also the time of the Arab Spring when you had these
03:55very social media-driven movements. And so I was also trying to capture that feeling of that moment,
04:00I think. I noticed that emptiness is quite a recurring theme in the book, and the narrator
04:07talks about filling the void or this emptiness with political activism. Could you tell us a little
04:12bit about the relationship between activism and this feeling of emptiness for you?
04:18Yeah, absolutely. I think part of it is a sense of emptiness or social isolation is something I
04:23think that pushed me into activism to begin with, from when I was a teenager effectively.
04:27And I think in my experiences in social movements, large-scale ones such as Sunflower or Occupy Wall
04:32Street, even smaller ones, you find a lot of people are out there trying to fill a void through
04:36activism. And I think that's a side of activism we don't always look at. It's often neglected, I think,
04:41in this more glamorized depiction of it, or the kind of triumphalist narrative of the Sunflower
04:45movement that we sometimes remember a decade later. I think that's, again, often the case,
04:48that people are actually driven by a sense of not only contempt for society but for themselves. And
04:53I think people often forget in the years of the Sunflower movement how apocalyptic everything
04:57felt, how desperate people were, and the sense of outrage and disenfranchisement from young people
05:01that really pushed them to take risks because of the fact that they felt desperate in some sense.
05:06You look at a lot of the music, for example, produced around that time, a band like No Party
05:09for Cao Dong, and the lyrics are all about anger. And I think that is actually something else maybe
05:14this work reflects in some sense. Yes, so I actually wanted to take this moment to sort of
05:18zoom out and have a look at the present day. And we're in this space called Daybreak, which you
05:23created for your activism, for the work that you do. Could you tell us a bit more about the creation
05:28of this space? And what are your ideals behind it? Do they represent any of the ideals that are in
05:33the book? I think so. I think what's interesting is that, again, this book captures a moment in
05:38time. And some of the scenes are set in these various activist coffee shops. For example,
05:42Kafka on the Shore, the coffee shop that played indie music and was also an activist hangout,
05:47was one of the places we hung out in those years. And this table is actually from there.
05:50And so I think it's actually an attempt to really capture that moment in time because there was
05:56a time when there were many spaces like this, and there's no longer as many spaces that still
06:00exist today. And so when this started around four years ago, I think it was actually trying to
06:03recapture a moment that was fading already. I think young people, it's a space for them to
06:08politicize, but also find community. Now, the ones that have survived are usually concentrated around
06:13National Taiwan University, where there's a lot of students. And so having spaces that are not
06:18by the campus town or the college town, I think is important. But I think it's a place for people
06:22to really find themselves in that sense. As you mentioned, the book captures a moment in time
06:2710 years ago. Could you tell us a bit about how Taiwan's politics has changed since then? And
06:33how has your work changed? Absolutely. So things have changed a lot, even in the span of a short
06:39few years. For example, 2017, 2018, someone like Lin Fei-Fong was still out there in the streets
06:44protesting, and now he's on the National Security Council. You have people that are government
06:48ministers now that are part of the Sun Farm movement. And that changed very, very quickly. And so
06:53I never expected to see this kind of shift towards electoral politics by many activists, and then
06:58people enter government and end up in pretty high positions. Other people have stayed in social
07:02movements, but the scene is not as large, it's not as active. And so that's definitely changed.
07:06There's not as much protest as there were a decade ago, in the past eight years under the Tsai
07:11administration, and now under the Lai administration. And so with the Bluebird movement, more recently,
07:14we see a kind of resurgence for the first time in a decade. You spent time at the Bluebird protests,
07:20and obviously, there was a lot of comparison between them and the Sunflower movement. What
07:24were the differences you noticed? It was a much younger movement, in the sense that there are
07:28young people that had not participated in the Sunflower movement. But then in the backstage,
07:32it's all the same people, and the organizers are about the same. But the attempt was to make it
07:36the almost inverse of the Sunflower movement, not an intense occupation of a legislature,
07:41that is this act of storming and occupying a building for 23 days, and that occupation consumes
07:45so much resources, energy, and creates so much burnout. But having a protest that people go to
07:50after work, and they can go back home by 12am usually. So an attempt to preserve the energy
07:55of the movement for a later date, rather than to kind of spend it all within this
07:59once long period of time. And so I think it's actually in a way is reacting to this history.
08:05It's an echo of the Sunflower movement, but attempting to do a different thing,
08:08which is also interesting, because many of the people involved are in fact the same people.
08:12So the book depicts your experiences of protest movements in New York, but also in Japan and Taiwan,
08:19and you flag a difference in the styles of protest, talking about the kind of disruptive
08:25anarchic nature of Occupy in New York, compared to kind of a more regulated or formal form of
08:32protest in Taiwan and Japan, where people might come and then leave us an hour and organizers
08:38just decide the parameters. Could you just tell us a little bit more about the different protest
08:44styles you've seen and whether you believe one or the other is more effective?
08:48Yeah, absolutely. This is the thing I have a lot of thoughts on as one of my other hats is,
08:51of course, as a researcher of social movements, and particularly social movements worldwide have
08:56a tendency to perform activity in some form that, for example, playing for the cameras.
08:59But in Asia, it's often playing the civility. And that doesn't mean Asian protest movements
09:04are not more militant. I mean, we see 2019 Hong Kong was very militant, for example.
09:08But there's often this emphasis on appealing to the public and cleaning up after yourself and
09:11coming off as good students. The role of students is considered very pure in many East Asian
09:16societies. And so this is often played up by the participants. Whereas in, let's say,
09:21Occupy Wall Street, it's very anarchic. It's a very horizontal decision making process compared
09:27to how it is relatively top down in Sunflower Movement. But then there's a lot of bohemianism
09:31that is very much present there, for example, people that are smoking pot or dressing weird
09:36costumes or getting into confrontation with the media. And it doesn't always reflect well on the
09:41movement in the public eye. And yet, I don't have an open verdict on that. I don't know which
09:46approach is more effective. Because when you do try to really play up this image of civility,
09:51that also limits the course of action you can take. And that dynamic actually played itself
09:55out in the Sunflower Movement between the conflict between some of the groups in the movement.
09:58Some of which did want a more bohemian or confrontational style of politics, such as the
10:03untouchable liberation area versus the leadership in the Legislative Yuan.
10:06And with the current set of movements that we see, the Bluebird Movement, it's also still
10:10the civility aspect that's much more present. The other groups that are more bohemian still
10:15show up from time to time, but not as often. Given that Taiwan still has these large-scale
10:20political movements and these big demonstrations, is there a political reality in Taiwan that just
10:26remains unchanged? I think what's interesting is that a lot has actually remained the same.
10:31And so we're seeing a recurrence of ideas that came up 10 years ago and were rejected, such as
10:35the cross-strait services trade agreement. When that was introduced as an idea in the last election
10:39cycle, it was quite strange to me that the KMT was still talking about this after seeing such a
10:43massive protest a decade earlier. Or that they would push through bills as they are doing currently,
10:48because look at 10 years ago, and that provoked the public in such an extreme way. And so the more
10:54things change, the more they stay the same, I would say. The main character in the book
11:00storms Taiwan's executive Yuan as part of the protest, which is your own personal experience
11:05as well. And in the book, it talks about the motivations or the decision-making to join this.
11:12If you remember back to that time when you chose to be part of that movement,
11:17and to do what some would call drastic action, do you think the change that you wanted to see
11:24then has occurred in Taiwan? I think so. And I think the thing that people forget is that
11:29the verdict on the movement changed very much over time. People forgot that the movement was
11:34still denigrated in many ways until after Taiwan, but even more recently in the current election
11:39cycle do people talk about so openly being former Sunflower activists. People just kind of knew that
11:43about them, but they didn't emphasize it as much. The executive Yuan too was originally viewed as
11:48unjustified by the public for many years, and it was only much later that that is viewed as an act
11:52of police violence. And I think people forget how long it actually took for that to occur, for that
11:56change in historical verdict on the movement, or the various events in the movement to actually
12:00shift. And so I think in that way, actually, it's quite surprising to a great extent that it has.
12:05Yeah, and on that note, two of the main themes of the book are kind of this
12:11hopelessness or futileness of existence alongside kind of a belief in a better world and affecting
12:19change. Now, looking back at what you did then and what you've seen over the last 10 years,
12:26do you feel hopeful or do you feel that life is futile?
12:30Not really. I think I'm still pretty hopeless in that sense. And I think what's interesting,
12:33particularly for me, a moment was 2019, which is five years after Sunflower, five years before the
12:38president. And I was basically going and seeing the insane level of desperation of, for example,
12:42high schoolers or middle school students in Hong Kong. And so I feel like I've seen this in so many
12:46contexts now, and it is always a sense of hopelessness, but also wanting something better.
12:50And it's still often desperation that pushes people into very drastic courses of action that
12:54may bring about social change, but may not. I think the verdict is still out on all of us in
12:58that sense. And so I feel it's kind of about the same, just maybe there's less angstiness about it
13:0310 years later compared to when I was in my early 20s. Looking back at your time as both an activist
13:09and a journalist, is there anything you would have done differently?
13:14I think part of the novel really deals with emotional outbursts in activism. And I think
13:18that is something that maybe when I look back, I could have done better there in terms of emotional
13:22regulation. But I look at every group, basically, and people in their early 20s, and we're just
13:27getting to all these arguments in the Muslim movement. And I think that's one of the things
13:31I think about even now, just for example, were there ways to have gone about certain decisions
13:35in the process of forming this publication or becoming a journalist or activist? I could have
13:39gone differently. Maybe I could have done things better or not freaked out at the person at that
13:43moment and so forth. And that's something I think you always wondered about. And I think what's
13:47interesting, particularly in activism, particularly seeing the same group of people active for the same
13:5110 years in activism, electoral politics, and as public figures is that same grudges, actually
13:56emotional outbursts and fighting from when we were young and then in the movement to later on
14:00electoral politics, that actually still persists in some way. And we still see the effects of those
14:05playing out now at the very national stage and in electoral politics, actually. And I think what's
14:09interesting is looking at Taiwanese politics, actually, for example, their politicians were
14:13activists 20, 30 years ago, and their grudges are still present in the legislature today.
14:18Well, with that, thank you, Brian, for joining us on the show today and for sharing your experiences
14:22both in your book and with us today. Thank you. This has been Zoom In Zoom Out. For more stories
14:28from Time Plus News, follow us on social media. I've been Rick Lowatt, take care and we will see you next time.