I won't be getting a plum blossom tattoo

The many meanings behind Taiwan's national flower

A silly place my mind wanders to occasionally is the thought of what tattoo my husband and I could get to commemorate our time in Taiwan. A little shooting star, to represent the name of his restaurant, Ad Astra? The Chinese character people use to render star, 星星, which happens to look like two little people? Or a plum blossom, the official flower of the Republic of China? Plum blossoms look like cherry blossoms except they have round petals without notches and an explosion of long stamens, each with big polka dots at their tips. They also bloom earlier than cherry blossoms—they’re the first harbinger of spring, and their defiant demonstration of frilly beauty against the austerity of snow is a common motif of Chinese art. It’s a handy metaphor, too. When Ad Astra opened, one critic compared the Latin phrase its name comes from (per aspera ad astra, or “through adversity to the stars”) to the local proverb (something like “the plum blossom rises from the bitter cold”).

Plum blossom imagery is everywhere in Taiwan, from manhole covers to airline logos, the Olympic flag to the presidential seal. I just saw the first trees of the season blooming already, in a shivery pale pink. I’ve admired the flowers and their meaning since I got here, but this week I dug into the emblem the slightest bit, and felt dumb. The plum blossom was chosen as a national symbol in the 1960s and is thus associated with the Kuomintang party, with China, and with an authoritarian era of martial law. The plant isn’t even native to Taiwan, but southern China, and thus the flowers, like everything else here, are layered with political weight. In short, not something a white person stopping through should ink on their ankle like a numbnuts.

Snapshot: Just a few of the plum blossoms scattered across the New Taiwan dollar currency.