Red Leaf and the Baseball Fever

On August 25, 1968, Taipei Municipal Baseball Stadium was packed. On one side stood the Red Leaf Elementary School team from Yanping Township in Taitung County — a dozen or so Bunun children from a mountain village that did not yet have running water. On the other stood a visiting Kansai all-star youth team from Japan. The final score was seven to nothing.

The newspapers reported it as a victory over the world champions. Strictly speaking, it was not: the Kansai side was one of several Japanese schoolboy selections, not the winner of the Little League World Series. But in the Taiwan of 1968 nobody examined that detail too closely, and nobody wanted to. What the press circulated instead was a different set of images: bats whittled from bamboo, balls made of stones wrapped in cloth, boys batting barefoot on a gravel riverbed because there were no shoes. A team of indigenous children, poor to the point of absurdity, had beaten a side from the former colonial metropole. The story might have been designed for the emotional needs of the moment.

Red Leaf's victory ignited a national obsession that would last more than a decade. The following year the Golden Dragons traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and brought home the Little League World Series title. Through the 1970s Taiwanese teams won repeatedly at the Little League, Senior League, and Big League levels, several times taking all three in a single year. The games were played in the American daytime, which meant the small hours in Taiwan; an entire generation's childhood memory is of being shaken awake, gathered around a black-and-white television set, and then firecrackers going off across the whole village afterward.

The fever was never only about sport. Its timeline overlaps almost exactly with the darkest decade in Taiwan's diplomatic history: expulsion from the United Nations in 1971, the severing of relations with Japan in 1972, the American announcement of derecognition in 1978. As the state was struck from one international register after another, the flag of the Republic of China was raised in the stands at Williamsport and the national anthem played. The government understood exactly what that footage was worth. It promoted the slogan of "dignity and self-reliance" relentlessly, and cast these teenage players as vessels of national honor. Baseball became compensation — the one arena still available for winning in a decade when winning was impossible everywhere else.

The other half of the story took far longer to be told in full. Late in the same year as the famous victory, investigators found that several Red Leaf players had competed under other children's school registrations and were over the age limit; the coach and the principal were convicted. Most of these boys came from desperately poor Bunun communities, and when the brief moment of heroism passed, no institution caught them. Few continued in school or in the sport. They spent their adult lives in manual labor and poverty, and a striking number of them died young. That seven-to-nothing afternoon turned out to be the brightest and the shortest stretch of light in their lives.

Seen from today, Red Leaf is a monument to two things at once. It records how a suppressed society found an outlet in a ball game, and it records how skillfully the state converted the talent of a group of mountain children into the political language it needed — and how completely it declined to look back once it was done.