Tsai Kun-lin, a Taiwanese man born under Japanese rule, was sentenced during the White Terror to ten years on Green Island for having belonged to a student reading group the regime labeled subversive. His life spans the island's handover from Japan to the Kuomintang, so the same person is schooled in Japanese, then punished for insufficient loyalty under Chinese Nationalist martial law.
A single colonized population can be forced to abandon and relearn its public language within one lifetime: Taiwanese raised to speak and read Japanese were, after 1945, required to operate in Mandarin, making their prior education a liability. Identity and competence are repeatedly reset by whichever power currently governs, not by the people's own continuity.
Under the White Terror the offense prosecuted was often membership or reading, not any concrete deed, so suspicion of thought substituted for evidence of crime. This makes ordinary social ties (a club, a friendship, a borrowed book) into the grounds for a decade of imprisonment.
Reading a country's 20th-century political history through a single ordinary citizen's chronology makes abstract eras (colonization, war, martial law, democratization) legible as concrete personal consequences. The individual life becomes a measuring instrument for state power, showing where macro-history actually lands on a body.