Orphan of Asia

4 ideas

1. Hu Taiming rejected in three places

   Hu Taiming is taught the Chinese classics by his grandfather and then educated in Japanese schools. As a teacher in colonial Taiwan he is paid less than his Japanese colleagues and cannot pursue the Japanese teacher he loves. In Tokyo, Chinese students treat him warily once he says he is Taiwanese, and in Nanjing he is arrested as a suspected Japanese spy; later, drafted as an army interpreter in Guangdong, he watches the execution of Chinese resisters, breaks down, and on returning to Taiwan loses his mind after his younger brother dies under forced labor.

2. The orphan position between two powers

   A colonized subject can belong administratively to the colonizer and ancestrally to a rival nation. That subject then carries the suspicion of each side toward the other: the colonizer treats him as a native who might be disloyal, and the ancestral nation treats him as the colonizer's agent. Because both sides read him through their conflict, no action he takes counts as proof of loyalty to either.

3. Assimilation removes return without granting entry

   Read assimilation policy by what it takes away as well as what it offers. Schooling a colonized elite in the colonizer's language and norms separates them from their parents' culture. It does not grant them full membership in the colonizing society, so they end up stranded between the two rather than moved from one to the other.

4. Detached neutrality collapses under political pressure

   Hu Taiming tries to stay out of politics by retreating into study, teaching and private life, and other characters criticize this as evasion. Wartime conscription, arrest and his brother's death force the conflict on him regardless of what he chooses. The novel shows that when a state can conscript you, refusing to take a side does not keep you out of the conflict.

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