An edition of Identity Crisis performs at Lu Er Men Temple, 1992
L-R: Mark DeForge, Tom Vest (drums), Guy Taylor, Dennis ReaNext section | Dennis Rea Home Page
In April 1990 Anne and I left China for Taiwan on the recommendation of an American teacher we had befriended in Chengdu. Anne wanted to continue her Chinese language studies in a more comfortable environment, and we both hoped to find better-paying work as English teachers, having exhausted our paltry savings in China. Our salaries at Chengdu University of Science and Technology had amounted to a whopping US$125 per month; by contrast, foreign English teachers in Taiwan routinely earned US$20 per hour. We were also curious to see what direction Chinese culture had taken under a non-socialist system.
Conditioned as we were to the drab everyday reality of Mainland China, we found ourselves overwhelmed at first by the brightly lit, high-speed commercial culture that was Taiwan. Ever since the remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist forces had fled to and imposed their rule on Taiwan in the wake of the Chinese communist revolution in the late 1940s, the People's Republic and Chiang's Republic of China had embarked on radically different courses. While the PRC was wracked repeatedly by famine, political intrigue, and ruinous mass movements, the ROC survived for decades basically by U.S. fiat, its sovereignty protected by American warships and its economy propped up by U.S. dollars. Despite being left in the lurch by Jimmy Carter when he restored U.S. ties with mainland China in 1976, by the 1980s this sleepy island of pineapple and sugarcane plantations had joined the ranks of the world's economic success stories, with a staggering $80 billion in foreign capital and an estimated quarter of the globe's gold reserves. This impressive economic transformation led Taiwan to be dubbed one of Asia's "Four Little Dragons," together with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore.
Taiwan in 1990 was a nation of BMWs and Benzes, Madonna and MTV, computer whiz kids and import-export tycoons. The already overcrowded island, containing a populace the size of Canada jammed into a land area the size of Vancouver Island, was awash with new developments ranging from multilane superhighways to garish skyscrapers to sprawling high-tech industrial parks. Though this economic boom had its negative fallout in runaway environmental destruction and seemingly insoluble traffic congestion, there was no denying that the Taiwanese now enjoyed a far higher standard of living than their less fortunate cousins across the Formosa Strait in China.
Logo for a line of school supplies sold in Taiwan
But all was not materialistic bliss in Taiwan. The ROC was still officially at war with the PRC, and despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, the living fossils that made up much of the ROC legislature still doggedly insisted that the Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, was the rightful ruler of all China. Indeed, some of the aged KMT politicians were so oblivious to geopolitical reality that they still represented former mainland provinces like Chichihar and Jehol that had long since vanished from the map. But the government's stated aim to reunite with the motherland on its own terms was increasingly irrelevant to a younger generation of Taiwanese who had little tangible connection to the motherland, and who were understandably hesitant to trade the relative affluence and security they enjoyed in Taiwan for the uncertainties of a shotgun marriage with China.
Nor did the Taiwanese feel any great love for the Kuomintang, whose stewardship of Taiwan was distinguished by administrative corruption and the suppression of dissent and local culture. Taiwan had scarcely recovered from 50 years of harsh Japanese colonial rule when Generalissimo Chiang's fleeing nationalist forces descended on the island in the late 1940s and launched a campaign of cultural genocide against the Taiwanese, who over 400 years had developed their own unique dialect and traditions. Chiang's pogrom boiled over on 28 February 1948 when a street scuffle escalated into an island-wide purge that is said to have claimed the lives of an estimated 20,000 citizens, dwarfing the later death toll at Tiananmen Square. Although the incident was hushed up by the KMT for nearly forty years on penalty of imprisonment or worse, the indignant Taiwanese never forgot it. The people's simmering resentment toward their unwelcome KMT overlords, compounded by the ROC's precarious military standoff with mainland China, led Chiang Kai-Shek to impose a period of martial law that remained in effect until it was lifted in the 1980s by his son and successor, the moderate Chiang Ching-Kuo.
By the 1990s, KMT veterans and their descendants made up only 20 percent of the island's populace, the rest of whom were so-called Taiwanese with roots extending back before the KMT era, plus a few hundred thousand non-Chinese shandiren (“mountain people”) who are thought to have migrated to Taiwan from the Pacific islands in prehistoric times. Ironically, the shandiren were themselves conquered and decimated by Chinese settlers who colonized the island following the breakup of China's Ming Dynasty in the seventeenth century.
With the end of martial law in the 1980s and the subsequent lifting of the ban on opposition parties, new political entities emerged that raised the once-unthinkable prospect of independent Taiwanese nationhood. The efforts of popularly elected representatives to force a pro-Taiwanese agenda on geriatric KMT lawmakers regularly led to actual fistfights during parliamentary sessions, much to the amusement of the international news media. Yet despite the strong-arm tactics of veteran KMT politicians who feared for their dream of a united motherland, and despite increasingly bellicose broadsides from PRC leaders that any moves toward Taiwanese independence would be suppressed with force, opposition to KMT rule grew steadily. In Taiwan's 1992 election, opposition Democratic People's Party (DPP) candidates overcame rampant KMT bullying, vote buying, and ballot box stuffing to capture nearly 50 percent of the popular vote. By the end of the decade the Taiwanese would elect their first-ever non-KMT president, in defiance of a threatening display of Chinese military force in the Formosa Strait.
Only in Taiwan: culinary oddity
Taiwan and Mainland China were worlds apart culturally as well as politically. Where China's disastrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 had produced a generation of emotionally scarred and undereducated paranoiacs, Taiwan's strict neo-Confucian educational system had created a thriving middle class of well-disciplined scholars and savvy entrepreneurs. In China, countless irreplaceable cultural artifacts were destroyed by hysterical Red Guards in the rush to bury the nation's feudal past; across the strait, the Chinese of Taiwan took great pride in preserving their ancient cultural heritage. And while Mao and his cronies ruthlessly stamped out religion and "superstitious" folk practices, Buddhism and the traditional arts continued to flourish in Taiwan.
Yet for all the emphasis on culture, and despite the people's newly won freedom of expression, Taiwan was curiously bereft of innovative music. Unlike China, where grinding poverty and suffocating government censorship paradoxically engendered a furtive but vital musical avant-garde, prosperous Taiwan produced a generation of musicians whose creative edge was dulled by their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. With a few notable exceptions, Taiwanese musicians were content to produce shallow, escapist pop fare and little else.
The Taiwan music scene of the early 1990s made the slick L.A. record industry seem downright bohemian. The hottest act going was the Little Tiger Team, a sickeningly cute trio of adolescent boys that was like a Chinese version of Menudo. The airwaves were filled with the strains of comely starlets chirping syrupy love songs, accompanied by faceless studio hacks. "Sensitive," bespectacled folksingers crooned well-worn hits like "Hello" ad nauseum in pricy steakhouses. And not content with afflicting the poor people of Mainland China, that paragon of musical virtue, Richard Clayderman, had also blanketed Taiwan with his vapid pianism. One of his tinkly tunes was even used as the theme song for Taiwan's sanitation department, spewing forth daily from distorted loudspeakers atop the island's garbage trucks.
Fortunately, not all of Taiwan's contemporary music was this banal. Among the more compelling Taiwanese musicians was songwriter, political activist, and all-around cause celèbre Hou Dejian, the embodiment of China's post-1949 split personality. Hou emerged from the island's so-called "coffeehouse folk" movement, which flowered under the relatively benign regime of Chiang Ching-Kuo in the 1970s. He was soon catapulted onto a larger stage with the release of his huge 1979 hit, "Descendants of the Dragon," a ringing statement of pan-Chinese nationalism that made Hou a lightning rod for the contentious issue of Chinese reunification.
In the ancient East there is a dragon;
China is its name.
In the ancient East there lives a people,
The dragon's heirs every one.
Under the claws of this mighty dragon I grew up
And its descendant I have become.
Like it or not—
Once and forever, a descendant of the dragon.
Hou created headlines and reversed a trend when he defected to the mainland in 1983 to reassert his Chinese roots. Welcomed at first by a PRC government that viewed him as a useful propaganda tool, Hou became a popular performer and important influence on the nascent Chinese rock music scene. He eventually grew disenchanted with Communist rule and in 1989 acted as a highly visible spokesperson for pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. The following year PRC authorities forcibly repatriated him to Taiwan, where he was arrested and briefly detained.
The infamous Blacklist LP
A handful of controversial Taiwanese rock bands like Double X and Blacklist made waves in the 1980s, but their noisy tirades failed to catch on with audiences whose tastes ran more to Debbie Gibson. In a move more apropos of the PRC than Taiwan, the government even banned a Blacklist album because it contained an irreverent take-off on the ROC anthem. A few musicians even went so far as to espouse Taiwanese nationalism in their songs, most notably activist singer/songwriter Chen Ming-chang, who ruffled KMT feathers by singing exclusively in the Taiwanese dialect. Unfortunately, innovators like Chen had few outlets for their creative energies on an island where Air Supply were still hugely popular. I seriously doubted that there would be any place for my own music either.
Following up on a job lead from our former colleague in Chengdu, Anne and I took up residence in Tainan, Taiwan's former capital and most conservative major city. Located at the seaward edge of the coastal plain in the island's tropical south, Tainan enjoyed balmy weather year-round and a much more relaxed lifestyle than frenetic Taipei. About 100 expatriate Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and Australians lived in Tainan at the time, many of them language students at National Cheng Kung University. The rest of the foreign residents were largely slackers indulging in a sort of permanent Spring Break of round-the-clock partying and the endless pursuit of impressionable Tainan girls.
Anne and I showed up in Tainan with all of $700 between us and a single job prospect, but soon settled into a routine of teaching English to rich kids in the city's ubiquitous bushibans—private "cram schools" where college hopefuls studied math, English, music, and other subjects after regular school hours until they were ready to collapse from fatigue. I got off to a rocky start with my first teaching job, at a children's bushiban in the nearby countryside. I'd been assured that the woman who operated the school would be there to help translate and keep the students in line, but when I showed up, a neighbor explained that she was in the hospital because “her uncle broke her leg.” Inside the classroom, I found a motley assortment of kids aged 5-15 who were hell-bent on anarchy in the absence of the wounded schoolmistress. Objects sailed through the air, toddlers bawled, and fights broke out as I tried in vain to teach the unruly mob a phrase or two of English. Faced with this mayhem, I eventually gave up on teaching them altogether and spent the next two hours playing a spirited game of keep-away with the shrieking students. I never showed up for the next week's class.
Fortunately, classroom debacles like this were the exception. I went on to teach English to hundreds of students ranging from preschoolers to collegians to factory owners, forming a number of lasting friendships in the process. The money was good, the hours flexible, and my students showered me with gifts and delicacies to the point of embarrassment. Still, after the exhilaration of my musical adventures in China, the life of a foreign teacher in Tainan was decidedly anticlimactic, and I soon grew impatient to launch a fresh music project.
An opportunity materialized in summer 1990 when I was introduced to Mark DeForge, a longtime expatriate who had played bass in hardcore punk bands back in his hometown of Albany, New York. Mark was something of a legend in Tainan, not least because of his impressive Chinese language skills, and his English classes at the loftily named Cambridge Language Center were perennially filled to overflowing. A prolific songwriter with a subtle, razor-sharp sense of humor, a penchant for the macabre, and a gift for the deft turn of phrase, Mark was similarly chafing at musical inactivity and looking to form a band. He had already recruited Dave Matthews, a singer and guitarist from Invercargill, New Zealand, and Skip Nagel, a drummer who had played in a punk rock outfit named Dissent in South Dakota. When I came aboard as lead guitarist, Lost Weekend was complete.
Lost Weekend—named for the 1945 film that depicted a writer's grim descent into alcoholism—was an unlikely mélange of musical styles and approaches, reflecting its four members' widely divergent tastes, influences, and levels of ability. The band did manage to find enough common ground to produce some respectable original music, leavened with a few hip cover tunes. More importantly, Lost Weekend was apparently the first Tainan-based band to write its own material, and the first to perform rock concerts in local pubs and other informal public venues. Up to that time, the city's handful of college rock groups were content to play wobbly versions of "The Final Countdown" and "I Hate Myself for Loving You" in the privacy of their practice rooms. (Because Taiwan was far from the established international touring circuit, any foreign rock bands that took the trouble to play there instantly attained superstar status, hence the huge popularity of such unlikely artists as Joan Jett, Lobo, and Richard Marx, all of whom had played concerts in Taipei.)
Lost Weekend debuted at the Bushiban Pub in Taipei, a hangout for beery foreign slackers. All pumped up for our first gig in Taiwan, we traveled the 200 miles to the capital aboard the yejichi ("wild chicken bus") that plied the island's main north-south highway, with deafening kung-fu movies blasting from ceiling-mounted TVs the whole way. On arriving at the Bushiban we found that the owner had failed to come up with the promised drum set and p.a. system. He eventually gave in to our badgering and borrowed some drums, but foolishly insisted that we use the tiny bar stereo system as our p.a. Predictably, our big debut show was cut short when we blew out the “sound system” in the middle of our second number and had to call it quits.
Taiwanese toothpaste brand
The next Lost Weekend gig, probably the first rock show ever staged in a Tainan pub, was even more of a farce. We had persuaded the owner of a bar named Dirty Roger's to let us play there one Friday night. With his six-foot-plus frame and hair cascading down to his belt, Roger was quite the standout in provincial Tainan, where he ran a series of pubs frequented largely by foreigners. On a typical night at Dirty Roger's, a couple dozen expats and their Taiwanese friends would line the bar knocking back hefty liter mugs of headache-inducing Taiwan Beer as DJ Roger spun loud classic rock on his turntables. It seemed like just the place to launch a live music scene.
The show got off to a rocking start with a capacity crowd egging us on, happy to hear some live music for a change. Beer and sweat flowed freely as the night wore on, and we were happily cruising through our second set when the audience suddenly fell silent. Wondering what could have deflated the revelers, we turned to see a half dozen angry cops armed with machine guns at the side of the stage, ordering us to stop playing. Poor Skip was so lost in the music that he kept hammering away at his drums with his eyes closed until one of the cops yanked a cymbal stand out from under him. The music trailed off, the customers slunk away into the night, and a flustered-looking Dirty Roger was soon embroiled in a heated consultation with the police behind the bar. We assumed that there had been a noise complaint—something of an oxymoron in a city afflicted by swarms of buzzing motorbikes and other sonic assaults—but that wasn't the whole story. According to Roger, the police were angered at his failure to obtain their permission to host live music, in the time-honored tradition of paying off the cops up front. A wad of bills finally got rid of them.
Undeterred, we set up a second show at another foreigners' haunt, the Gemini Music Pub, where we were shoehorned onto a tiny stage festooned with floor-to-ceiling Budweiser ads. No sooner did we start playing than the cops turned up and shut us down again. The matter was settled with the usual payoff. After that the police backed off from closing down our shows, including a second Lost Weekend gig at Dirty Roger's where the well-compensated cops let us make all the racket we liked. However, the police did find other creative ways of hassling foreign musicians, as I'll relate later in the story.
Lost Weekend played just a handful of shows before evaporating when various band members moved on from Tainan. But more importantly, a live music scene had taken root in Tainan that continues to this day.
After the demise of Lost Weekend I was approached by Bryce Whitwam, a student of Chinese and keyboard player from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who had gotten the itch to play in a band again after hearing Lost Weekend at Dirty Roger's. Together we formed a more instrumentally inclined quartet, successively named Trade Bill 301 (a punitive economic measure sometimes leveled at the Taiwanese government by the United States), the Gang of Formosa, and finally Identity Crisis, a comment on our multinational and polystylistic makeup.
Misery performing at Café Africa, Tainan, Taiwan 1992
L-R: Bruce Culver, Mark DeForge, Dave Treanor, Tom Fris
The first edition of the band was rounded out by drummer Tom Vest, a wickedly funny East Asian Studies major from Virginia who was learning Chinese at the university, and local bassist "Jimmy" Luo Rende, a member of one of Taiwan's indigenous shandiren cultures. I first encountered Jimmy at one of Tainan's many faux-Western steak houses, where he performed for a modest living with his wife Nancy. Unlike the usual foppish college boys who sang weepy love songs in these places, Jimmy was an exceptional instrumentalist, yet modest to a fault. I was much taken with the flowing guitar improvisations he wove through the otherwise banal material, and a conversation between sets led to Jimmy's eventual membership in the early Identity Crisis. After years of playing bland pop songs on the restaurant circuit, it must have been a strange yet somehow liberating experience for Jimmy to play everything from Japanese movie soundtracks to math-rock with a band of foreign transients. Sadly, my friendship with Jimmy was also a window on the racism endured by the shandiren, whose gift for music affords one of the few possible escape routes from a life of dead-end poverty and alcoholism.
A total of ten players passed through Identity Crisis over its yearlong lifespan, with a core lineup of Bryce, Tom, me, and impressive bassist Andreas Vath, a language student from Munich. Other important contributors included multi-instrumentalist Volker Wiedersheim, who went on to be music editor of major German newspaper the Hannover Zeitung, and French violist Fréderic Eymard, an accomplished classical player who experienced a jazz epiphany while guesting with Identity Crisis. Disappointingly, the band only managed to recruit one Taiwanese player, the superb drummer "Spike" Tsao Hsin, formerly of island-wide battle of the bands champion Metal Fon. It was never clear whether the locals' disinterest was due to differences of musical taste or to discomfort with the cultural distance. Probably both.
To my surprise, Identity Crisis evolved into a genuinely interesting and unusually eclectic musical entity that was unlike any other group we had yet heard in Taiwan. The band developed a sizable repertoire of original instrumental pieces encompassing jazz, progressive rock, film soundtracks, adapted Chinese traditional music, even a revved-up version of the Tainan garbage truck theme song.
Now that Lost Weekend had broken the ice, opportunities to perform in public proliferated, and Identity Crisis played roughly thirty shows in the next half year at pubs, steak houses, and university events. Some of the most memorable gigs took place at nontraditional venues that only underscored the absurdity of our cultural displacement. It was exceedingly strange playing weird tunes like "Pock Market" and "The Heimlich Maneuver" at places like the venerable Lu Er Men temple, where we performed as part of Taoist holiday festivities, or on the front steps of the brand-new Liang Mei Department Store among throngs of bewildered shoppers.
Our ability to play these shows was greatly facilitated by the ready availability of high-quality musical equipment. No longer was I limited to the type of jerry-built, temperamental sound gear that I'd been forced to rely on in China, for Tainan boasted a half dozen music shops that sold and rented state-of-the-art instruments and sound systems. This was essential, as only Andreas and I owned instruments initially. The foreign musicians in Tainan formed a symbiotic relationship with a friendly music store owner named Mr. Ou who rented us fully equipped practice rooms for the equivalent of U.S. $4 per hour and supplied rental drums, amplifiers, and p.a. systems for our gigs at ridiculously low rates. In return, the foreign bands gave Mr. Ou face by taking part in many of the musical events he organized.
One such gig, and easily one of the more ridiculous gigs I played in Taiwan, was at the grand opening of a Sichuanese restaurant in the small town of Chiali. The owner had seen us play at the department store and thought that a foreign band would lend some cachet to his restaurant's debut. He contacted us through Mr. Ou and offered to pay us handsomely and provide equipment and dinner. When we showed up at the appointed time, we discovered that we would not be playing inside the restaurant as expected but outside on the sidewalk, where the equipment was already set up—facing a busy arterial. As the patrons dined on sumptuous Sichuan dishes on the other side of the glass, oblivious to the music, we played to a nonstop stream of whizzing motorcycles and belching trucks. Not one person stopped to listen. Afterwards, a lackey took us to a distant hot-pot restaurant and sat silent as we ate our repast; apparently the restaurateur didn't want a bunch of scruffy foreign musicians mingling with his guests.
Identity Crisis gained a small but appreciative following among expatriates and local musicians, but the Tainan public didn't really know what to make of our split musical personality. As it turned out, we found a far more appreciative audience when we received an unexpected invitation to tour China.
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© 2003 Dennis Rea/Nunatak
Dennis Rea Home Page | Preface | Chinese Elvis | The Gang of Formosa | Cui Jian
Identity Crisis | The Vagaries | The Beijing Jazz Festival and the Rise of Jazz in China
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e-mail: dennis at dennisrea.com
