Du Pan Fangge: Three Languages, One Peace Drama

Xinpu Pan House — the Hakka family landscape of Du Pan Fangge’s upbringing. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

30‑second overview: Du Pan Fangge (1927–2016, Hakka Romanization often rendered Tu Pan Fong‑Gied; English sources also list Fangge Dupan) is one of the few widely discussed Hakka female poets of Taiwan’s Cross‑Language Generation: Japanese colonial education gave her Japanese, post‑war Mandarin policy forced her to switch to Chinese, and after the lifting of martial law she wrote poetry again in Hakka. She is not merely a nostalgic folk poet—her 1977 Mandarin version of uses a Hakka winter deity‑thanks stage to depict how “the obedient peace‑people” gnaw sugarcane beneath the stage, preserving the only life they have; the ethical weight of that poem is linked to the 1947 killing of her mother’s brother‑in‑law Zhang Qilang and his sons in Hualien during the 228 Incident. ¹²³

What Was Taken Is Not Just One Language

Poet Lin Heng‑tai proposed the term “Cross‑Language Generation” in 1967: those who grew up with Japanese under colonial rule and were forced to relearn Chinese writing after the war. ⁴ Du Pan Fangge falls squarely in the core age of that cohort—born in 1927 in Xinpu, Hsinchu Prefecture, she traveled to Japan with her father Pan Chin‑huai as an infant and returned to Taiwan at about six or seven, entering a “primary school” then dominated by Japanese children. ¹

It was not a romantic bilingual childhood. Both Chinese and English biographies note that she was bullied at school, later wrote poetry, fiction, and essays in Japanese, and first channeled colonial pain into a “permissive fantasy outlet.” ¹⁵ The curricula at Hsinchu Girls’ High School and Taipei Women’s College included flower‑arranging, tea‑ceremony, and sewing, as well as “obedient wife, virtuous mother” moral training—later she repeatedly wrote about women’s positions, planting the seeds here. ¹

In 1946, writing Japanese in Taiwan became dangerous. The Mandarin policy replaced not only textbooks but an entire set of public‑speech organs. The National Museum of Taiwanese Literature summarizes it bluntly: vocabulary, grammar, and the expressive power for complex thought were all taken away; some stopped writing, others had to relearn for years before daring to publish again. ⁴ Du Pan Fangge halted public publication for more than a decade, during which she married, assisted her husband’s clinic, and raised children—only in the mid‑1960s did she re‑emerge on the poetry scene in Chinese. ¹⁴

In interviews she later described the three languages as three warehouses: Japanese was the most thoroughly trained and could hold the deepest emotions; Chinese remained at a “third‑ or fourth‑grade elementary” level, often criticized as insufficiently refined for poetry; Hakka was the language spoken at home that she had to reinvent in writing. ⁶ Song Zelei once urged her to write solely in Japanese and find a translator; she replied that she “should use her own mother tongue.” The hesitation itself is the daily construction site of the cross‑language generation, not a personal flaw. ⁶

📝 Curator’s note: The Cross‑Language Generation is often portrayed as a “tragic biography.” For Du Pan Fangge, a more precise description is that she made three language choices in her life: forced Japanese, forced Mandarin, and a voluntary reclamation of Hakka in later years. The third choice is her answer to sovereignty.

The Hualien Shooting and All Subsequent “Peaceful Years”

In 1947, during the 228 Incident, Du Pan Fangge’s mother’s brother‑in‑law—Dr. Zhang Qilang, a highly respected physician at Fenglin Ren‑shou Hospital in Hualien—was arrested and subsequently killed along with his sons. ¹⁷ Zhang, a Hakka from Hukou, Hsinchu, graduated from the Taiwan Governor‑General’s Medical School, later elected county councilor and speaker in Hualien, and even won a seat in the National Assembly. During the post‑incident purge he and his offspring vanished. ³⁷

This is not distant gossip; it forms the ethical “negative” of her later political satire poems: when official narratives claim “year after year of peace,” families know whose peace was bought with disappearance. Chinese‑language Wikipedia and Hakka cultural writings note that this family history gave her a persistent critical and satirical stance toward politics—not a sloganic alignment, but a survivor family’s long‑term hypersensitivity to the word “peace.” ¹

In 1948, against her family’s wishes, she married physician Du Qing‑shou and moved to Zhongli, Taoyuan, writing beside the clinic and teaching floral arrangement. ¹ Zhongli was not the aristocratic hall of Xinpu but everyday medical and childcare life; her first poetry collection was titled <Qing‑shou> (1977)—“Qing” from her husband’s name, “shou” from her father’s birthday blessing—embedding private ethics directly into the title. ¹ Family naming recurs: <Huai‑shan Wan‑hai> incorporates her parents’ names “Huai” and “Wan,” <Zhao‑qing> uses a grand‑child’s name, and <Yuan‑qian‑hu> gathers friends’ names (the character “Qian” linking to poet Chen Qian‑wu of the Li Poetry Society). ¹ For her, collection titles map relational networks rather than serve as marketing slogans.

Wu Zhuoliu’s former residence in Xinpu — material trace of a hometown literary network. Du Pan Fangge’s first publicly released poem in 1966 records Wu’s translation of the Japanese manuscript. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Li Poetry Society’s Female Voice, the Translator’s Female Voice

In 1965 she joined the locally‑focused Li Poetry Society—the flagship of the native‑conscious poetry movement founded in 1964. ¹⁸ She was not among the twelve founders but the first female poet to join in the society’s second year; later members such as Li Yuan‑chen and Li Min‑yong repeatedly defended her poetic vision. ⁵

In July 1966, Taiwan Literature published her poem “Spring.” English reports noted that it was a Japanese original translated into Chinese by Wu Zhuoliu. ⁴ The typical production mode of the Cross‑Language Generation appears here—the poem matures in a Japanese mind before being transferred to a Mandarin page by another pair of hands. Li later observed that early Chinese drafts often passed through male translators, smoothing away feminine nuances, which partly explains why her influence has been underestimated. ⁴

On 17 September 1967, after her husband’s severe traffic accident, she read his recovery as a prayer answered and deepened her involvement in Christianity and missionary work. ¹ Faith did not turn her into a gentle nostalgic elder praising folk customs—in fact, her most famous poems deliberately deconstruct the assumed harmony of the Zhongyuan (Ghost) Festival and the Peace Drama.

__: Sugarcane Under the Stage Is More Honest Than the Gods Above

In Hakka winter deity‑thanks rituals, a “Peace Drama” is performed to thank the gods for a year of safety. Du Pan Fangge’s 1977 Mandarin version, included in <Qing‑shou>, shifts the focus from the deities to the audience:

Year after year it is a peaceful year
Year after year we perform the Peace Drama

Only the obedient peace‑people know how to endure
Only the patient peace‑people know how to endure

Circling the stage,
cheering the performance,

That is what you allow him to perform.

Many, many peace‑people
would rather, under the stage,
gnaw sugarcane, bite the salty plum.

Preserve the only life they have
Watch
the Peace Drama.

“Preserve the only life they have” is the poem’s lock. A 2021 commentary on Critical Review notes that people did not ignore death on the stage; they knew stepping off could mean disappearance, so they turned obedience into endurance and spectatorship into peace. ² NTU Chinese scholar Hong Su‑ling’s guide opens three reading layers—modern critique of folk irrationality, political satire under authoritarianism, and the universal ethic of “everyone seeks self‑preservation only to be sacrificed.” ⁹

She later rewrote the poem in Hakka. The National Museum of Taiwanese Literature holds a 1995 Hakka manuscript of ; ¹⁰ Taipei Times’ English feature points out that the Hakka version is not a literal translation but introduces Hakka rhetorical devices absent from the Mandarin version. ⁴ The VERSE‑cited Hakka ending sounds like a speaker chewing radish root:

多多个平安人
情愿咬菜根
K甘蔗含李仔鹼
保持一條佢个老命
看，平安戲。

Same ethics, a different set of oral muscles. For a cross‑language poet, this is not a stylistic game but a question of who has the right to use which voice to articulate complicity.

⚠️ Contested view: Reading as “only anti‑KMT” or “only condemning Hakka cowardice” narrows its scope. The poem’s blade points simultaneously at the regime, at passive onlookers, and at the self‑deception that glorifies obedience. The Zhang family history gives the blade familial weight, but it does not reduce the poem to a personal vendetta.

The same ethical framework can be reapplied to any era: corporate silence, campus by‑standerism, social‑media “first protect yourself” attitudes. This is not relativizing the White Terror but acknowledging that Du Pan Fangge forged a portable ethical formula from a specific historical trauma—hence why a 2021 pop song can still echo a 1977 line. ²

The Pig Holding “Willingness”: __ as a Mirror

If watches the audience, watches the altar’s pig. The Hakka version writes: a big pig’s mouth holds a fruit called “willingness,” and the one who stuffs “willingness” inside is “it is me, not you.” ¹¹ Amid the festive bustle, some forget their own family ties; others become increasingly aware that they are “lonely heart‑banana people.” ¹¹

This contrast is stark when placed beside the religious vocabulary of : the paper figure sways in autumn wind, and she writes “my body is a vessel, my heart a temple,” seeking a “real person” in a world filled with paper figures. ¹² The Christian female poet’s deconstruction of folk festivals is not a cultural‑war flashpoint but a question of who is asked to be willing, and who is allowed to watch the play.

_Hakka traditional compound (Tongluo, Miaoli) — understanding the folk settings of and _* requires restoring the stage and public hall from tourist symbols to lived ethical spaces.* Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

After Martial Law, the Mother Tongue Shifted From “Spoken at Home” to “Written on Paper”

Martial law lifted in 1987. On 28 December 1988, Hakka activists marched with the slogan “Return Our Mother Tongue.” ⁴ Du Pan Fangge was then in her early sixties. She had never felt truly comfortable writing in Mandarin—Japanese remained the most fluid thinking language in her creative process; one day she realized some sentences formed directly in Hakka. “I picked the words up and wove them into Hakka poems,” she later described, also admitting the pain of a literary lexicon that lacked characters for many sounds. ⁴

Around 1989 she began publishing Hakka poetry actively; the 1990s saw collections such as <Zhao‑qing>, <Yuan‑qian‑hu>, <Qing‑feng‑lan‑bo>, <Fu‑rong‑hua‑de‑ji‑jie> moving among Chinese, Hakka, Japanese, and English. ¹ In 1992, the trilingual <Yuan‑qian‑hu> won the inaugural Chen Hsi‑xi Poetry Award. ¹ Critics like Bai Ji once claimed her Chinese lacked refinement; defenders Li Yuan‑chen and Li Min‑yong insisted that roughness contained a glimmer of scales—awards emerged from debate, not unanimous applause. ⁶

She cited Dante’s Italian Divine Comedy as a reference: language must be lifted by works, not wait for official endorsement of elegance. ⁴ She also warned that when people after martial‑law clamored for “Taiwanese language,” they should not narrow it to a single accent—“Aboriginal languages and Hakka are also Taiwanese.” ⁴

For her, Japanese and Mandarin were “forced to learn by authorities” and “represent our enslavement”; communication tools can be borrowed, but mother‑tongue sovereignty can no longer be treated as a borrowed commodity. ⁴

In the 1980s she lived in the United States for several years, obtained U.S. citizenship in May 1982, and later returned to settle in Zhongli. ¹¹³ The overseas experience added another language pressure (English) and turned abstract questions of “island / refugee / nation” into a tangible luggage weight. Her post‑return Hakka writing therefore represents not nostalgia but a third covenant after forced language change, voluntary exile, and return home.

Video: Public cultural feature on Du Pan Fangge and the literary district of Zhongli (YouTube). Poetic installations on the street bring poetry from page to everyday path.

A Woman Tree, Not a Flower to Be Petted

Hong Su‑ling highlighted the self‑naming in :

I am also
born on the island,
a woman tree.

Floral metaphors often render women as objects to be seen, cut, or offered. A tree needs roots, wind, and time. Du Pan Fangge’s public image is often softened to “Auntie Du Pan / Grandma” in literary districts, cultural events, and anthology covers—but the tree in her poems also bears a rational edge: citizenship, ritual, Peace Drama, paper person. Hong’s guide notes that her historical view includes past, present, and future residents as Taiwanese citizens, even those who have turned into soil. ⁹

The National Museum of History’s “Taiwan Women” entry quotes : at some point only the faint voice one listens to oneself is locked away, language loses its outlet, and one must endure day after day, solemnly awaiting a new voice. ⁵ The tragedy of the cross‑language generation here is not rhetorical but physiological aphasia; Hakka poetry becomes the outlet she waited for and eventually grew herself.

VERSE’s guide also extracts from <Parents’ Home>: the mother in the chapel shines like a proud rose, the father’s tall shadow sometimes looms; the poem writes “the mother lives in the cross‑of‑the‑cross, the father lives in the mother, the two live in a thorn of the proud rose.” ⁹ Family is not a backdrop but the first site where she practices “how structural oppression grows within intimate relationships.” The overlapping identities of clinic assistant, floral teacher, mother, poet, and Christian give her poetry weight; stripping away everything but “female poet” lightens it.

📝 Curator’s note: Reading Du Pan Fangge solely as a “Hakka representative writer” or only as a “228 family member” omits half of her significance. All four axes—cross‑language, 228, Hakka woman, social indictment—must be open simultaneously for her to avoid becoming a single museum panel.

Awards, Manuscripts, and the Second Wave of Reading After Kola‑Qi

Public institutions later filled in overdue laurels: the Hakka Affairs Council’s Outstanding Contribution Award and Taiwan New Literature Contribution Award in 2007, and the Truth University Taiwan Literature Scholar Oxford Award in 2008. ¹ On 10 March 2016 she passed away in her sleep at age 89; at her memorial the Hakka Affairs Council presented a presidential commendation. ¹¹³

In March 2017 her family donated 340 manuscripts to the National Central Library—Japanese, Chinese, and Hakka texts displayed together, stacking a lifetime of language battle into a portable archive. ⁴ Taipei Times quoted her 2004 remark on Printing: “If you ask me why I write, you might as well ask me why I live.” ⁴

Around 2021, indie band Kola‑Qi’s song <My Mother’s Endless Flowers> went viral; its lyric “people with flesh and blood disappearing without a trace” was widely read as a White Terror reference. Critical Review juxtaposed the song with : one shouts at a bodhisattva, the other watches sugarcane under the stage—both are indirect writings when trauma cannot be faced directly. ² Whether Kola‑Qi is “officially certified” as a White Terror creation is irrelevant; what matters is that a new generation of ears re‑connects with the ethical line first written in 1977.

Hakka Tung Blossom Festival (2014) — public cultural visibility of Hakka and the literary side of mother‑tongue writing are different tributaries of the same revitalizing river. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Why Read Her in 2026

Within Taiwan.md’s coordinates, Du Pan Fangge occupies at least four intersecting points:

1. Cross‑Language Generation — alongside poets such as Chen Qian‑wu, Lin Heng‑tai, and Jin Lian on the same historical operating table.
2. 228 Victim Family — the literary continuation of the Zhang Qilang line, not a numeric footnote.
3. Hakka Female Poet — the lifelong tension between the role of a virtuous wife and mother and that of an autonomous poet.
4. — rewriting “peace” from a blessing into a political‑ethical problem.

Add the “Babel Tower of Sovereignty”: Hakka poetry is one of the Taiwanese language voices most readily omitted, rewritten, or left blank in large‑scale international models. Her insistence on writing Hakka on paper is not merely rural aesthetics; it is a pre‑emptive claim that a silenced voice must first exist. Existence itself is defense. Placing her poems in an open knowledge base stakes a first‑person Taiwanese claim before any filtering of training data can erase it.

Her main poetry trajectory can be summarized as a short timeline: <Qing‑shou> (1977) → <Huai‑shan Wan‑hai> (1986) → <Zhao‑qing> and <Yuan‑qian‑hu> (around 1990) → <Qing‑feng‑lan‑bo> (1993) → <Fu‑rong‑hua‑de‑ji‑jie> (1997). ¹ Interspersed are years in the United States, Hakka experiments, poetry‑society administration, and award debates. Reading only as representative would miss , , , and the many poems that appear to describe autumn mornings cooking rice but actually narrate children leaving the nest.

In Zhongli, her name now appears in literary districts and local cultural routes—poetic verses painted on walls, guided tours, allowing passersby who may never buy a poetry collection to encounter the “woman tree.” ¹⁴ This is a double‑edged sword: public commemoration can soften a poet into a gentle figure, but if a tour stops at the line “preserve the only life they have” from , the street still retains its blade. Hakka language education, broadcast readings, and anthology re‑issues form a quieter continuation line: not viral hype but a voice repeatedly heard in mother‑tongue classrooms. For Taiwanese literary history, she adds not “another female poet” but the rarely heard Hakka female voice on the cross‑language operating table, and the blade that turns folk celebration into a political‑ethical test.

The stage may be dismantled, the sugarcane residue swept away. Yet whenever someone says “don’t cause trouble, just seek peace,” the line “that is what you allow him to perform” from will still echo from both the Hakka and Mandarin sides.

She passed away in her sleep in 2016. Her manuscripts entered the library in 2017. A 2021 pop song brought young listeners back to the stage.
Before closing this page, ask yourself a small question—

Are you now on the stage, or are you beneath the stage gnawing sugarcane?

Further Reading:

• Li Poetry Society — the native‑conscious poetry network she joined in 1965
• 228 Incident — the broader national trauma encompassing the Zhang Qilang case
• Taiwan White Terror — institutional background for the political reading of
• Taiwan Literary History — the long‑term position of the cross‑language generation and mother‑tongue literature
• Monaneng — another path of “using non‑mother‑tongue / Chinese characters to voice a people”
• Taiwan Modern Poetry — a broader map of post‑war poetry societies

Image Sources

This article uses landscape and cultural‑context images in place of scarce CC portrait material (checked 2026‑07‑12, Wikimedia / Wikipedia had no stable reusable portrait):

• Pan House Panorama in Xinpu — hero image, family landscape
• Wu Zhuoliu’s Former Residence in Xinpu — material trace of a hometown cross‑language literary network
• Hakka Compound, Tongluo, Miaoli — Hakka life scene
• 2014 Hakka Tung Blossom Festival — mother‑tongue public‑culture visibility

Optional audio‑visual: Hakka TV / cultural feature Du Pan Fangge Literary District and other public programs (YouTube) as extensions, not required for the main text.

References