Yang Ju-men, known as the "Rice Bomber" for planting 17 rice-filled explosive devices in Taiwan between 2003 and 2004 to protest the government's neglect of farmers, once went through life experiences not unlike those of the Latin-American revolutionary Che Guevara, which the latter chronicled in Motorcycle Diaries. In his first-ever book, Rice Is Not a Bomb (Rice), Yang offers up his own reflections on what he saw, heard, thought and felt on his own journey.

What is different is that Guevara's book became the most widely read of his works after his execution at age 39 in 1967, which resulted in his subsequent vilification (by those in power) and mythologization (by other revolutionaries). In the end, Guevara became an empty vessel, a romantic symbol for rebellion. How did Yang, still alive and active today, gain that kind of image? The reason is that he has always been a solitary, romanticized hero figure, even if he himself says, "That's impossible! To me, there are no heroes in the world, just scoundrels who step through others' blood to scrabble to the top." (p. 134)

Yang Ju-men, the "Rice Bomber," recently married Chiu Yu-hsin. Chiu is the eldest daughter of Yang's stepmother. On December 12, the two were congratulated by friends and family after a civil ceremony at the district court in Keelung.

Birth of a romanticized hero

After Yang surrendered to the authorities in November 2004, Yang Tsu-chun, former folk singer and now assistant professor of mass communication at Chinese Culture University, offered some material on the "hero/heroine" in his translation of H. O'Sullivan's Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. There, the common trait of such figures is their goodness in times of tribulation, which reveals everyone else's insufficiencies. Heroes tend to be shaped by dualistic oppositions in contrast to the morally corrupt.

Indeed, Rice works to display Yang's goodness in contrast with the insufficiencies of others. Reviews of Rice mostly praise Yang's sincerity, zeal, and goodness, by the same token lamenting societal mores and neglect. Rice features numerous narratives framed in terms of dualistic oppositions, all of which work to highlight the merits of the hero. In Yang's real or imagined journeying, we find the following kinds of oppositions:

Strong v. weak: Yang vs. the Naughty Child, farmers, children.

Good vs. evil: Yang vs. the Motorcycle Man, the media, special interest groups, the World Trade Organization.

Caring vs. neglect: Yang vs. the Disturber, society at large.

Rebellion vs. conformity: Yang vs. ordinary people, the mainstream.

Truth vs. hypocrisy: Foresight, Yang vs. the Bystander, hopeful society.

In these dualistic oppositions, vague concepts stand in for reality. For example, the Naughty Child, one of the most important characters that Yang encounters, is almost impossible to decipher. We can only speculate that he may be an Aboriginal, that he grew up in a single-parent home as one of three children, and that he was supported by his alcoholic father, who was a coconut vendor.

Actually, the Naughty Child is a phantom-like presence in the book. All of his dialogues with the author revolve around Yang's fascination with antique jade, his pranks, and the suggestion that Yang, who has served in the military's special forces, may be a highly trained expert. The Naughty Child's philosophical ruminations, surprising since he is a middle schooler, confirm this character's status as a vehicle for Yang's own soliloquies. From this character, we learn more about Yang than about the Naughty Child himself.

Of the Naughty Child's bizarre end as a heap of ashes, Yang writes only that "he was sick and could not afford a doctor." We are left with Yang's grief and compassion, a contrast to the well-off yet heartless character of the Disturber. Both these characters, never fully fleshed out, serve only as fillers for Yang's heroism.

Yang Ju-men chats with his grandfather Yang Yung-tu, a lifelong farmer.

Villagers and farmers as props

Though the book contains some mention of farming villages, such as the extended description of the Hsiluo Fruit and Vegetable Market (pp. 137-138, Yang can only offer up widely held impressions of rural life. He writes of "hopeful and hardy country folk," "the young and the old left behind," and the "bargain-basement produce of the farms." Due to the nature of his passing depictions, we have no way of further knowing what local people think about their lives or what hopes they harbor. After all, "hopeful and hardy" is Yang's own rosy description, and may not be how the old woman at the vegetable stand would describe herself.

In other words, the sections that deal with the Hsiluo Fruit and Vegetable Market, or any other section describing the countryside for that matter, reveal more of Yang's own ruminations than the realities of rural life. We hear what Yang says in passing judgment on the individuals he meets, but do not hear the voices of the individuals themselves. Silent and passive, the villages and their villagers have become props for Yang's rants about the tragic state of rural life.

In the ideal of the hero we see the hero-worship as well as hopes of a particular era. Ours is characterized by mass replication, production, and a stifling lack of individuality. Who would not like to live with passion, rebelliousness, sincerity, and goodness? Who would not like to be in a position to mete out justice and help the common people? The Yang Ju-men that is revealed in Rice is just this kind of hero towards whom the people gravitate. He is a figure who fights authority figures (like the Motorcycle Man) and has cultivated an inner toughness (eating fish, fasting, not afraid of being jailed, unafraid of death). Add to this his legendary qualities (like having been in the special forces) and his coarse, pranksterish ways, and one gets a hero who has been reshaped from the traditional figure who is gifted and morally upright into one that can meet the demands of today's marketplace. Yang appears as a Robin-Hood-like figure, a romanticized persona that seems to contain both good and evil elements.

"Lately there has been much talk of anti-heroes and anti-heroines. Strictly speaking, such characters are also marked by flaws, corruption, and even cruelty, and thus bear affinities to villainous figures. The anti-hero seems to occupy a middle ground between hero and villain. We might wonder why there has been such recent interest in the anti-hero. One reason may be that the market for heroes is saturated, and that people have become bored with traditional heroes, who have been gifted, morally upright individuals." (Yang Tsu-chun, 1997: 176-177)

Cut off from humanity

In November 2003, Yang placed his first "bomb" along with his demands to "stop rice imports," and that "government must take care of the people." Numerous concerned organizations and individuals organized agricultural associations and local networks. After Yang's surrender and imprisonment, even more organizations and individuals began to hold hearings, visitations, and demonstrations to respond to, clarify, and concretize Yang's message.

In June 2007, Yang was pardoned by President Chen Shui-bian after serving a year and a half in prison. On the day of his pardon, Yang played hide-and-seek with the media, refusing to discuss the agricultural issues that he had professed concern for. His supporters, now in an awkward position, could only respond that Yang was "silent by nature," and avoided any responsibility for a direct discussion or critique of Yang.

Yang has in fact been something of an unexpected phenomenon for Taiwanese social activists, as he was not someone that they cultivated or produced. In recent years, activists have been unable to mount any sort of sustained movement to accompany Yang's activities. Only a few voices in the public sphere have tried to link the rice bombs with discussions of farming issues. Most discussions, however, have ended up focusing on Yang's personality. After the publication of Rice, even fewer people associate Yang with discussions of farming issues. They focus almost exclusively on his unusual personal qualities or, as if in a return to 2004, on whether his tactics are too extreme and hence negative in their overall effect. A passage from Rice, full of an existentialist feel, illustrates this point:

"Caring what others said, or how I appeared before them, I strove to live up to a 'me' that others would like. Every action I took was under the gaze of others. In every little thing that I did, I feared I would arouse their pity or ire. I dug and dug, but could never discover the real me. This was the one who could cry, laugh, joke around, be mischievous, show compassion, be respectful.... This pure me was a real human being, no longer a cog in society or someone grouped among the lower classes. Instead, I was unique, independent, and irreplaceable. Without me, the world would no longer be complete, spring would not come around, and life would whither, shatter, dissipate, and lose its center of gravity. All would revert to confusion." (p. 70)

This passage expresses the main point of Rice: Yang's discovery of what is "real," and "pure" about himself, as if the world itself arose with and was circumscribed by his sense of himself. This preoccupation with self is the reason why Yang has been unable to truly listen to others or discern real-life suffering, and why he has been unable to join together with others to investigate and solve common problems. He can only emit intermittent, politically correct declarations:

"People are always too self-confident and subjective. They take themselves as the standard for measuring the world. Have they been empathetic and placed themselves in others' shoes? Does a child see the world from the same vantage point as we do? Do the disadvantaged, who live outside the mainstream, have enough to live on? How do they feel? Does society grant each individual an equal right to exist and pursue life? Nowadays society is dominated by the few. The rest just follow blindly, their simplistic thoughts forming a kind of collective violence of so-called mainstream values. If anyone in the herd opened their eyes, stopped, refused to go along, or raised any kind of questioning that would set them apart from the rest, that person would face pressure and criticism from all sides and be accused of disrupting order. But has anyone ever asked who constructed this order? If what we call justice and fairness cannot help those who need it, then fairness and justice may in fact be a sham, and not exist at all." (pp. 199-200)

Yang raises a contrarian critique of how "people are always too self-confident and subjective. They take themselves as the standard for measuring the world." But even when moving beyond self-preoccupation, he can only offer "empathy," and merely criticizes the way that if "justice and fairness cannot help those who need it, then fairness and justice may in fact be a sham, and not exist at all." Yang never asks why so many people have ended up needing help and in such dire straits.

Yang was talking about "empathy" and "helping those who need help" back in 2003, and even prior to that. He gave charitable contributions to World Vision, donated his blood. While these are praiseworthy actions, even after the trials of the past few years and his pardon and release from prison, all he can say is, "The government should help the children and the farmers." He has continued to place himself first; others simply must accommodate him. Yang has not endeavored to stand together with his comrades in adversity.

Yang Ju-men has always been a solitary figure, a lone romanticized hero. Rice represents his self-absorbed soliloquies. Just as the promotional language on the book jacket says, "He has listened to the cries for help from behind the smoke... he cares about the weight of the ears of rice." Readers of Rice have no way to deeply feel the force of those pleas for help; all they know is that Yang Ju-men has allowed them to listen to him. Likewise, readers have no way of feeling the heft of ears of rice; all they can know is that Yang Ju-men has been thinking about these things.