If anything, it’s Taiwan’s battle

Regional tension is escalating and many are worried China may attack Taiwan in the coming years.

The story of 72-year-old Hernando Guanlao, aka Mang Nanie, who turned his home into an informal library, appeared on several news outlets in the Philippines.

The Reading Club 2000, as Mang Nanie calls it, was established in Brgy. Dela Paz in Makati City by himself 24 years ago with only 50 books he found in his cabinet.

It is fascinating how Mang Nanie, despite being broke and having three children to feed at the time, started the project and remained committed to it to this day.

Mang Nanie told the media, “We’d have problems financially, but if you do not eat for a day, that will be only for a day, not forever.”

Another lesson Mang Nanie teaches the world is that it is true that where there is a will, there is a way. It is never too late to chase your dreams as long as you really want it to happen.

S. Leo Chiang, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary short film “Island in Between,” is another example.

According to Chiang’s self-description in The New York Times: Op-Docs, he was born in Taiwan, grew up in the US, worked extensively in China and now lives in Taipei.

The mix of experiences has given him a front-row seat to the complex, decades-long relations between these nations.

In “Island in Between,” Chiang tells the story of Kinmen, a group of islands governed by Taiwan that were the front lines of the first and second Taiwan Straits crises decades ago, which most foreigners never heard of but even for Taiwanese and mainland Chinese, it is not something they often discuss or care about.

Kinmen Island is only about two kilometers from China but 210 kilometers from Taiwan. That is the main reason after Kinmen and Xiamen in China’s Fujian province reopened limited postal, regular ferries and trade links in 2002, people in Kinmen and Xiamen are in close in touch.

In the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election, the presidential candidate of Kuomintang, which supports Taiwan’s unification with China, won 61.4 percent of the votes in Kinmen while the ruling, pro Taiwan-independence party candidate only got 10 percent of the votes.

Nonetheless, almost every Taiwanese learned about the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis in their textbooks, called the Kinmen Artillery Battle in China to conquer Taiwan.

American author and history professor Todd DePastino described that, in 1958, Communist China attacked Kinmen with heavy artillery and tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers waited in the wings for an amphibious landing.

The artillery barrage on that day was ferocious. In the first two hours of the battle, over 25,000 artillery rounds rained down on Kinmen, followed by another 32,000 rounds. By the end of 23 August, some 200 defenders had been killed.

Today, regional tension is escalating and many are worried that China may attack Taiwan in the coming years; some people argue that China is less likely to attack Kinmen but, instead, the Taiwan main island is considering better relations between China and Kinmenese.

S. Leo Chiang’s parents met each other in Kinmen when his father performed compulsory military service there. Chiang’s family later moved to the US and majored in electrical engineering, ultimately becoming an engineer at Apple.

To pursue his dreams of becoming a movie director, Chiang eventually left Apple and attended the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. That is how he ended up directing the film to tell the story of Kinmen to the world.

Chiang once jokingly told reporters that the only thing he regretted about leaving Apple was that he had not been working there for a longer time so that he could save more for his movie dreams.

Chiang: “Taiwanese voices are often drowned out by Chinese and American narratives, overshadowed by the global power plays going on around us. Few people outside the region understand what life is actually like for the Taiwanese people caught in between two superpowers.”

Through the documentary, he hopes to show life in Taiwan through the eyes of the people who live there, and let the film “play a small part in advocating for peace.”

Taiwanese voices are often drowned out by Chinese and American narratives, overshadowed by global power plays.