Kunta Kinte and Taiwanese Democracy

How "Roots" changed the history of East Asia... at least for a little while

Chiang’s unit was assigned to the lower decks. They were commanded to sit on the floor with their legs tucked under for days on end, except for the short intervals they were allowed above decks to get water. “It was hot and smothering… It was so crowded down there that every time someone tried to stretch his legs, he would kick the person in front,” Chiang recalls. Insufficient space accompanied by inadequate toilets meant that the floor was awash with urine, vomit, and feces. The filth and stench were unbearable. Asked whether he drew a parallel between this unpleasant journey and the slave ship scene in Roots, Chiang nodded and said, “certainly.” He later remarked “Of course they [Kunta and his fellow captives] had it worse than we did. Yet I thought we were just like them, only without the shackles.”

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, “Chiang Ssu-chang, Roots, and the Mainlander Homebound Movement in Taiwan”

At age 13, while walking home from middle school with friends, Chiang Ssu-chang was kidnapped by KMT soldiers retreating from mainland China in 1950 after losing the civil war to the Communists. One of his friends tried to make a break for it and was shot dead. The others were press-ganged into the Nationalist army and shipped to Taiwan.

After his arrival in Taiwan, the boy managed to escape from the army unit that had abducted him. He changed his name, but with no other options available, ended up serving a stint in the KMT air force. A few years later, after refusing to sign a “volunteer” form extending his military service, he deserted again, but was promptly caught and imprisoned for three years. After serving his sentence he went back to school, and eventually became a high school music teacher.

Then, in 1978, according to Dominic Yang, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Missouri, Chiang was one of hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese residents to watch a local broadcast of Roots, the epic American miniseries depicting a single Black family’s travails from enslavement in Africa in the seventeenth century to just after the Civil War. In a moment of striking cross-cultural solidarity, Chiang saw his own experience of abrupt abduction from a peaceful, happy life with his family reflected in the violence inflicted on Kunta Kinte, “the African.” He was also inspired to try to reconnect with his own family after learning more about the quest of Alex Haley, the original author of Roots, to seek out the truth of his own family history. But a longstanding ban on travel to mainland China was one of the cornerstones of KMT rule over Taiwan.

So Chiang set out to change that.

First, with the help of a friend in Hong Kong, he forged yet another false identity, and then took advantage of the relative liberalization being ushered in by the PRC’s Deng Xiaoping to sneak into the mainland and reunite briefly with his parents and siblings. After his return from China, he founded an organization in Taiwan called the Mainlander Homebound Movement with the goal of lobbying the government to allow military aging veterans who had been separated from their families for decades one last chance to see their loved ones before they died. After organizing several large protests, and raising the fearful – to the KMT -- possibility that these disaffected mainland veterans might start allying with the nascent democratic opposition led by “native” Taiwanese, President Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, finally relented. On October 15, 1987, the ban was lifted.

One man’s efforts, writes Yang, “ended the decades-long military standoff in the Taiwan Strait and opened the door to contemporary cross-strait interactions and negotiations…. Haley’s novel and the TV miniseries inspired one traumatized and oppressed yet determined individual in a distant land to take action against the structures of power. And the action not only made a difference but helped alter the course of history.”

“When this lengthy miniseries played on CTV, I left everything behind. I was glued to television every night when it was on. Tears streaming down my face watching every episode. Following the TV series, a translated version of the book in Chinese became available. I bought one immediately and read every word carefully. The book shook my heart deeply. It strengthened my resolve to take action to ‘repair the umbilical cord’ [between me and my native land].” Greatly touched by the story of Kunta Kinte, the retired veteran even purchased an English copy of the book. Not having much training in English, he labored over Haley’s thick text with a dictionary. After reading the original version, he reports, “I was moved even more profoundly. There were things I could not describe. It’s like [a fishbone stuck in the throat.”

I came to this amazing story via an odd path. I discovered Dominic Yang’s article on Chiang Ssu-chang while reading his masterful The Great Exodus From China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, an investigation of the experiences endured by the millions of mainland Chinese who, willingly or unwillingly, accompanied Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. But my reasons for reading The Great Exodus had nothing to do with curiosity about mainlander trauma. I just wanted to know whether Yang’s research included any references to one of the happier outcomes of the great exodus; the astonishingly flourishing Chinese food scene that resulted in Taiwan after emigrants from every region of China set up shop and started making a living by producing their own local cuisines. For several incredible decades, there was nothing like it in the world and there will probably never be anything like it again.

I first encountered “authentic” Sichuan food as a result of this diasporic culinary explosion in Taiwan in the 1980s, and I learned how to cook the cuisine, decades later, from a cookbook co-written by one of those emigrants. Even if there was just one footnote in The Great Exodus that would guide me further in search of research materials elucidating my quest, it would be well worth it.

I did not find that footnote. What I did discover was a bittersweet double-whammy that intersected my own lived experience from totally unexpected directions. Because I can recall with absolute clarity the day the ban on travel to the mainland was lifted. And I am also a member of a generation for whom watching Roots was a collective experience that, for a variety of cultural, technological and political reasons, is impossible today.

By October 15, 1987 I had been living in Taiwan for the better part of three years. I remember reading the article announcing the lifting of the ban in one of the English language dailies in Taiwan and immediately alerting everyone in my apartment. The girlfriend of one of my roommates -- whose mother was locally born and whose father had come over with the KMT -- simply couldn’t believe the news was real. But just a few months later, my own girlfriend was able to take advantage of the new rules to travel to the mainland with me.

Ten years earlier, I was a fifteen-year-old in Gainesville, Florida glued to the TV screen watching Roots along with everyone else I knew. The full extent of the Roots phenomenon may be difficult to convey to readers today who have grown up in an entertainment universe fractured into a zillion different niche audiences. Broadcast for eight straight evenings in early 1977, Roots was watched at least in part by 130 million people – 85 percent of every American household with a television. The finale alone was viewed by 90 million people. For many of us, it was the first visual introduction into the reality of enslavement we had ever seen. As reported in Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory, (the anthology that includes Yang’s article) within days of its broadcast, parents were naming their newborns after characters from the drama.

So why do I call these memories bittersweet? Well, in 1987, the end of the ban on mainland travel seemed just one more glorious datapoint in a year full of remarkable events in Taiwan, including the end of martial law, the end of press censorship, and the lifting of a ban on opposition political parties. The new era of “cross straits relations” pointed to a future where Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms would inevitably lead down the same path of political liberalization. And yet, here we are today, watching the PRC navy, for the second time in the last year, practicing a naval embargo of Taiwan, a step that is a clear dress rehearsal for prospective invasion. In 2023, imagining any kind of rapprochement between Taiwan and China is harder than ever. The modern state of “cross-strait relations” is a nightmare.

It is also impossible to imagine, in 2023, ninety million Americans watching anything in common except possibly a Super Bowl. Far worse, any kind of mass media treatment of slavery or racism is now dismissed, out of hand, by half the country as “woke” or CRT. Republican politicians are publicly demanding that schools stop teaching about racism.

These contradictions are baffling. The civil rights struggle that brought the country to a point where engagement with the legacy of slavery in America could be a massive ratings success is now the subject of an organized, visceral backlash that draws its energy from the outright refusal of large segments of society to contemplate the truth of our history. The free democratic society built by people like Chiang Ssu-chang in Taiwan is so powerful that its mere existence is an affront to a Communist Party terrified of its own citizens exercising similar freedoms. Watching Roots, or learning about the story of Chiang Ssu-chang, one could entertain the notion that progress was real. Watching the antics of Ron DeSantis or Xi Jinping, the only certainty is that all things decline and fall.

And so round and round we go. But I have to return to the amazing story told by Dominic Yang, and end up taking heart at the unveiling of this most unlikely of interconnections. The influence of Kunta Kinte on Chiang Ssu-chang is proof that the struggle against authoritarian oppression, anywhere, is everyone’s struggle. We have to keep making art that engages with that reality, and to hell with the censors.