Wu He’s The Remains of Life has a meta-fictional elements that focuses on the Wushe Incident was happened in 1930, which reflects on the conditions and structures of discourse, such as the problem that arises when a person or event is textualized, that is, the writer’s point of view and attitude, and the way he faces otherness. In this paper, I had looked at these points in two things.
Taiwan indigenous people were Taiwanese natives who have lived on Taiwan Island since the Stone Age, but they were always treated as objects of observation and analysis by Japanese and Chinese who migrated from time to time. For successful colonization, Japanese colonial rulers not only forced indigenous people to migrate, but also tried to destroy traditional culture and modernize them as Japanese subjects. The Guomindang government, which took over from Japan after 1945, reorganized the history of indigenous people from the perspective of Chinese-centered Chinese nationalism and forced them to learn “Standard Chinese”. When martial law was lifted in the 1980s, a movement to restore the rights of indigenous people proceeded, but the indigenous people were given the legal term “indigenous people” and instead became the targets of “visual welfare”. So even after the 1990s, the active political and social participation of indigenous people was excluded, economically subordinated to welfare policy. In Taiwan society, it can be said that indigenous people at any time have been sacrificed to the logic of “the self-satisfying of the desire of the self”.
The “Wushe Incident”, which occurred on October 27, 1930, is regarded as a case in Taiwan’s history that resisted the deception and oppression of Japanese imperialism for 30 years. However, tribes who did not participate in the October Incident can be stigmatized as “traitors” even if the evaluation that it was a resistance for “tribal dignity” and “human dignity” was not intended. In addition, this view can not explain why the young people who experienced Incident of October, have served the Emperor of Japan volunteered to enlist in the Japanese army after 10 years.
On the other hand, let us pay attention to the position of the indigenous who celebrate Wushe Incident as “Anti-Japanese Struggle”. Mona Rudo, who led a tribal coalition in 1930 and resisted the Japanese police with force, has a history of headhunting the Atayal tribes in response to the Japanese police agitation 10 years ago. To the indigenous, Mona Rudo was just the head of the village of Mahepo. Therefore, the “Wushe Incident” in October is also just a “headhunting” caused by a tribe in Mahepo village.
Furthermore, the writer Wu He argues that it is worth paying attention to the Second Wushe Incident, which is not mentioned by indigenous people and historians. Japanese police agitated the tribesmen who did not participate in the first incident and ordered headhunting of 101 survivors in indigenous shelters. Commemorative photographs of human heads hunted by police and indigenous as loot still remain today. Based on this, Wu He draws the following conclusions regarding “the legitimacy and appropriateness of the Wuhe Incident”. This incident was not a “anti-Japanese struggle” to acquire “human dignity,” but rather a “headhunting” incident based on the “warrior ideology” of the tribal society. And “warrior ideology” is “violent” because mankind has been concealing the other side of war, such as cruelty, madness, and death, by interacting with virtues such as courage, honor, and protecting the community for a long time.
In this point, the writer Wu He differs from other Chinese writers who have romantically portrayed heterogeneous indigenous cultures. However, “individual independence” and “individual subjectivity”, which Wu He tried to emphasize while denying “warrior ideology,” are expressed through female sexuality. Therefore, Wu He also has limitations that cannot be free from charges of treating primitiveness as an exotic gaze in another way. Despite these limitations, his work The Remains of Life can be evaluated as a work that stands out from Wu He’s original perspective. This is because “the existence itself is more justified than dignity” for humans, based on “ the life in Chuanzhongdao after the incident(The Remains of Life).”