Taiwanese Writer Wu Zhuoliu

It is hard not to feel for the Taiwanese loss of identity during its colonization by Japan from 1895-1945.

Indeed, it can be argued that the loss, as well as the complex intermingling of Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese influences, still exert a profound bearing on the island's modern-day development.

In a novel by Taiwanese writer Wu Zhuoliu (吴浊流) titled Asia's Orphan (亚细亚的孤儿), the protagonist was said to have surveyed the "material hardship and spiritual decay wrought by colonial rule and the imperialist war."

"Unable to identity with the Japanese colonialists or to bear with his traditional family and regressive hometown, he smuggles himself to the mainland in the hope of finding succor, only to be disdained as a Taiwanese and suspected of being a Japanese spy. A similar fate awaits him when he returns to Taiwan. Disowned by the cultural metropole, the ancestral homeland and his native land, the distraught Hu Taiming eventually goes mad." (Angelina Chun-Chu Yee, "Constructing a Native Consciousness: Taiwan Literature in the 20th Century", in "Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View", Ed. Richard Louis Edmonds and Steven M. Goldstein)

The story ends with a poem the demented Hu scribbled on the wall:

"Willing to be educated intellectuals,
How could we stoop to be downtrodden people?
Where are the axes for slaying tyrants?
Dreams full of heroes.
Our Han soul shall never die,
Defiantly we shed this body.
"Foxy, foxy!"*
What do you want?
A slave's life is full of remorse.
When despots reign, what to do?
Together let's recover our ancestral land,
Six million people, rise!
Vow to die a righteous death!"

* A disparaging term the Japanese used on the Taiwanese.