4 ideas
Lin Wang was an elephant the Japanese army used for hauling in the Burma campaign. Chinese Expeditionary Force troops captured him in 1943, marched him across China, and shipped him to Taiwan with Sun Li-jen's army in 1947.
In 1941–42 Japanese infantry advanced down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore largely on bicycles, many of them taken from local people along the way. This let them move faster than the British expected through jungle roads and plantations. When tires wore out, soldiers kept riding on the bare rims, and the clattering noise was reportedly mistaken for approaching tanks.
A restored vintage bicycle is rarely one original machine. It is assembled from frames, badges and parts taken from many bikes, each with its own owner and history. Remembering a family or national past works the same way: the whole you recover is a reconstruction built from other people's fragments, not the lost original itself.
Colonial Taiwan sent men into the Pacific War as Japanese subjects. Later, mainland soldiers who had fought Japan in Burma arrived as the new ruling army. As a result, Taiwanese families hold war memories from opposing sides of the same battles. Any single official narrative has to silence part of that inheritance, so private stories and objects become where it survives.