Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

By Monday, January 8, politicians had seized the stage. Chou Chuan, the whip of the opposition New Party, dropped in on Chin with a dozen reporters in tow. She also brought Chu Hui-liang, who at the time still worked at the Palace (and was the star of its badminton team), had recently earned her doctorate from Princeton (advised by Fong), and had just been elected to the Legislative Yuan. Chu suggested to Chin that he replace the originals with high-quality reproductions. “How can you, a museum-trained person, even suggest this?” asked Chin, but he got short shrift in the press. The same day, protesters gathered outside the Control Yuan, which monitors the branches of government. By now the Ministry of Education had been given responsibility for the Palace matter. In the Legislative Yuan, opposition party leaders banned the twenty-seven restricted items from export and called a public hearing for Wednesday, January 10, to consider how to proceed.

James C. Y. Watt, a Hong Kong–born Chinese scholar who works under Fong, dislikes confrontation. He had come to Taiwan to oversee the preparation of condition reports and the packing of artwork. Now he found himself in the middle of a scandal. At the public hearing in the Legislative Yuan, he was the first speaker. As he ascended to the podium, the lights of ten television cameras blinded him, and the protesters, who had packed the building, began screaming expletives as he tried to speak. “Shameless! Shameless! You’re crazy!” they heckled. He talked decorously about the Met’s commitment to cultural exchange. No one listened. When Watt stepped into the corridor, a reporter collided with a protester; they ended up in a fistfight from which Watt narrowly escaped. “I felt like I was stuck in an Ionesco play,” he said later.

By this time, de Montebello said, the museum had “a war room in New York.” He and Fong and Emily K. Rafferty, the Met’s vice president for development, stayed up most nights phoning Taiwan for news. Judith Smith, Fong’s special assistant, consolidated information and wrote up detailed daily reports. The team drafted letters to government officials and protesters—anxious letters, conciliatory ones. Some were sent and some were not. Every day Fong planned and canceled a trip to Taiwan; it was ultimately decided that his presence there would only further inflame the protesters. De Montebello reached Chou Chuan, the New Party whip, “but she had no sympathy for our cause,” he said. “For her it had become a matter of politics, the drama to be magnified for political ends, like [former senator] Jesse Helms on Robert Mapplethorpe, a populist stance that distracted voters from the real issues of the country.”

On Saturday, January 13, protesters gathered at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. They had written slogans on strips of gauze and tied them around their foreheads, and they carried huge banners. The politicians present included one independent presidential candidate, who suggested that the leaders of the ruling KMT were exploiting their control of the Palace collection to reflect glory on themselves. Some young people, to whom democracy was new, seemed drunk on the power of protest. A surprising number of angry young men and women burning with Chinese nationalism had shown up. “We won’t grovel before the West,” said one. “We get the work forty days every three years, and you get it for a year? And we pay half the expenses of the show?”

Aware of the growing anger, Fong declared in an open letter to the Ministry of Education that he would forfeit two of the top three paintings in the show, asking only for Guo Xi’s Early Spring because it was on the cover of the catalogue (which had already been printed). To Fong and Director Chin, all the fuss felt like politicized sentimentalism. “My grandmother or my maiden aunt would also say, to expose this is to destroy it,” Fong would later concede about the Palace collection. “But the time for such mawkishness is past.” The increasingly hostile Taiwanese press quoted him as saying, “quite arrogantly,” that he would cancel the show if more work were withdrawn. “It wasn’t a matter of my canceling,” Fong said, “but of there being no show with the cuts they’d proposed.”