Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. xiii, 314 pp., [16] pp. of plates. (Illustrations.) US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-295-99364-5.
Lü Hsiu-lien is East Asia’s first female vice president as well as Taiwan’s grassroots feminist activist. My Fight for a New Taiwan: One Woman’s Journey from Prison to Power is her English-language autobiographical book. with Ashley Esarey’s introduction and epilogue as well as Jerome A. Cohen’s preface.
An American reporter with Taiwanese experience, Ashley Esarey begins with what Taiwan is and how Taiwan changed from the ancient Chinese feudalist era to the twenty-first century. His epilogue reports almost all the crises Lü Hsiu-lien and Chen Shui-bien faced after they were elected as vice president and president, as well as Lü Hsiu-lien’s life after her retirement. Jerome A. Cohen is not merely Lü Hsiu-lien’s Harvard University law school professor, but also one of the Americans who helped release her from prison. In his foreword, he highlights Lü Hsiu-lien’s exceptional experience moving from prison to Presidential Palace.
This book covers Lü Hsiu-lien’s childhood, teenage years, adulthood, college life, legal training, overseas graduate studies, early career, feminist and political social movements, prison life, political jobs, and retirement. In the first chapter, “Dreams Come True,” Lü Hsiu-lien accentuates the ironic contrasts between her experience as a defendant in the courtroom on March 18, 1980 and her status as Taiwan’s vice president on March 18, 2000. Chapters 2 to 10 are Lü Hsiu-lien’s chronological memory of her life stories. Chapter 2, “Taiwanese Daughter,” mentions Lü Hsiu-lien’s Taiwanese self-identity, family, and educational background, especially her college-level legal training. Chapter 3, “Lifting Half the Sky,” includes Lü Hsiu-lien’s American post-graduate studies of comparative law at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, her cancer, and her Taiwanese women’s movement to promote gender egalitarianism. Chapter 4, “A Moth Flying toward Flame,” delineates Lü Hsiu-lien’s Harvard experience, her friendship with Jerome Cohen, and her return from Harvard University to Taiwanese political movements. The US government’s discontinuation of its official friendship with Taiwan indirectly resulted in the cancellation of the election, in which Lü Hsiu-lien was supposed to participate, and paved the way for her involvement in the Dangwai activists’ Formosa Incident. Chapter 5, “Human Rights Riot,” touches upon how and why Lü Hsiu-lien was arrested. Chapter 6, “Patriotism Imprisoned,” describes Lü Hsiu-lien’s prison experience. Chapter 7, “In Search of Destiny,” shows how Lü Hsiu-lien restarted her political movements after she was released from prison. Chapter 8, “Knocking at the Gate of the UN,” demonstrates Lü Hsiu-lien’s efforts to help Taiwan reenter the United Nations. Lee Tung-hui valued her hard work and invited her to serve as a presidential advisor after his presidential inauguration. Chapter 9, “Political Trash,” starts with Chungli’s trash issues when Lü Hsiu-lien was the Taoyuan County chief executive, and ends with her acceptance of Chen Shui-bien’s offer to run for vice president. Chapter 10, “The Glorious Revolution,” records Lü Hsiu-lien’s triumph in the presidential election as Taiwan’s first female vice president.
Throughout Chinese history, it seems to be a pattern that the male elite felt free to single out women, as if women’s gender issues were their easy scapegoat whenever their political or military failure created crises for the nation-state. For instance, Tang Dynasty women’s second or third marriages were acceptable and frequently seen in princesses’ life stories, but Chinese women’s chastity was singled out and highly emphasized in the Song Dynasty after the male ruling class faced foreign invaders.
Lü Hsiu-lien was one of Taiwan’s local feminist pioneers to overthrow this thousands-year-old pattern. Her women’s and political movements demonstrate that the male elite’s use of women as their easy scapegoat should be terminated. She proved that women like her can do as much as the male elite can to do to help their homeland tackle national crises when foreign countries threaten the nation-state.
Although some non-academic people in English-speaking or other non-Asian areas mistake Taiwan for Thailand, Taiwan’s self-identity is discussed in various English-language academic books, such as William Campbell’s Formosa under the Dutch, Tonio Andrade’s How Taiwan Became Chinese, Melissa Brown’s Is Taiwan Chinese?, Alan M. Watchman’s Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization, Denny Roy’s Taiwan: A Political History, Bruce Herschensohn’s Taiwan: The Threatened Democracy, John Franklin Copper’s Taiwan: Nation-State or Province?, and Murray A. Rubinstein’s Taiwan: A New History. However, English-language academic books focusing on Taiwanese gender issues could probably be counted on one’s fingers. The most influential reason lies with most English-speaking feminists or gender scholars; although they do not mistake Taiwanese gender issues for Thai gender issues, they frequently place Taiwanese gender issues under the huge umbrella of Communist Chinese or PRC women’s studies. In other words, most of them are China-centred and lack Taiwan-oriented feminist voices. This inadvertent “big China bias” hinders a more complete understanding of Taiwanese women’s past, present, and future. Shanshan Du, for instance, was so afraid of threats from the PRC government that she requested Murray A. Rubinstein’s chapter about Lü Hsiu-lien be replaced by a chapter about Li Ang and asked me to add my paragraphs about Xie Xuehong, a Taiwanese communist feminist, to it when she and I coedited Women and Gender in Modern Chinese Society: Beyond Han Patriarchy. Exceptions in Harvard University Library’s current online catalogues include Cal Clark, Janet Clark and Bih-er Chou’s Women in Taiwan Politics, Catherine Farris, Murray A. Rubinstein and Anru Lee’s Women in the New Taiwan, Chen Pei-ying’s Acting “Otherwise,” Doris Chang’s Women’s Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, Lydia Kung’s Factory Women in Taiwan, Hans Tao-ming Huang’s Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan, and some of Ya-chen Chen’s books. However, most English-language academic books that touch upon Taiwanese gender issues do so because they unconsciously regard Taiwanese aspects as nothing but a byproduct when talking about the giant vista of Communist Chinese women’s, gender, and queer studies—not because Taiwanese gender issues are their only key points.
While most English-language academic books about Chinese-heritage women sound like an orchestra featuring the “big China,” Lü Hsiu-lien’s English-language autobiographical book adds one more valuable Taiwanese volume to English-language publications.
Ya-chen Chen
Columbia University, New York, USA
pp. 704-706