Publisher's Synopsis
Taiwanese like to drink the way Native Americans do. As one Hopi told me, "We are the forgotten people." So it is true with the Taiwanese. The stigma "Orphans of Asia" has applied after every colonizer used up what they could squeeze out of Taiwan, and left. It happened with the Chinese. Taiwan was a backwater to them for centuries, a typhoon spoiler, a place where 'birds didn't fly and dogs didn't shit;' a land of barbarian headhunters. It didn't matter much to give Taiwan away to the Japanese in return for leaving China alone. The Dutch used Taiwan until a Chinese renegade warlord named Koshinga threw them out to take it for his own clan. The Portuguese threw them out, too. The French came, the British came, and then the Japanese stayed until the Americans came and gave Chiang Kai-Skek a lollipop while they waited for Mao to fail with socialism back home. There are some people who didn't come to Taiwan to loot it and didn't want to leave: the indigenous tribes of Taiwan, more than twelve of them. They were pushed off their lands into the mountains, massacred, but they remained in Taiwan because they had nowhere else to go; this is their homeland. Just like the Native Americans, the cholera of wandering spirits and destroyed holy land has left them broken and forgotten. And just like the Native Americans, alcohol is taken to help them forget that they are dispossessed and forgotten. After American capitalism imposed its democratic veneer over the KMT dictatorship, even the Taiwanese - shipped here by the Dutch from Fujian, China, to harvest their sugar and tea, or shanghaied by Chiang Kai-Skek to be his body guards - mixed with indigenous 'barbarians' over the centuries and became forgotten people, too. Everyone in Taiwan is forgotten now, even the ex-pats who drifted here from failed promises in their English-speaking homelands. Only the ruling class is safe here; the world is their oyster; they have no real home. These are the stories of Taiwanese indiv
