Had it not been for the fact that the United States was ablaze with controversy over the Vietnam War, the assassination attempt might have been bigger news. But ten days later, when four students were killed in an antiwar demonstration at Kent State by members of the Ohio National Guard on May 4, little more was heard about the incident at the hotel. Within five days of the shootings at Kent State, over one hundred thousand held demonstrations in Washington D.C. Windows were smashed, tires were slashed, and fires were set. Nixon’s chief speechwriter, Ray Price, said, “That’s not student protest. That’s civil war.” Nixon himself was removed to Camp David for his safety for two days. The Eighty-second Airborne was installed in the basement of the executive office building. Four million students protested or went on strike. Nine hundred universities were closed because of violent and nonviolent demonstrations. The U.S. was culturally and politically polarized to a degree not known since the Civil War.
In a country that many thought was on the brink of civil war, the point was lost on most that the attempt on Ching-kuo’s life was the first high-profile incident of violent resistance by the Taiwanese to Chiang’s Nationalist government since he had retreated to Taiwan in 1949.
Mr. Yén, our friend and the head of the printers’ union, had a ready explanation for the failure: “The Taiwanese do not know how to fight; they don’t know the first thing about using guns.” While the story was quickly relegated to the back pages in the United States, shock waves of even tighter government control rippled across Taiwan.
I was not altogether surprised when I received a letter through Hong Kong from a friend in the U.S. who suggested in an almost offhand way that since Nixon seemed to be moving toward rapprochement with the People’s Republic, what was needed in Taiwan was “a bloody incident” that would call attention to the situation.
“That’s a damned easy thing for him to say,” I said to Judith as I read the letter to her. “He’s not here.”
“Nor is he Taiwanese,” she added.
The next time I saw Tony, I shared the letter with him.
“Dr. Peng used to say that people outside were always quick to suggest the shedding of our blood,” he said with a laugh.
I don’t think the friend was suggesting that we orchestrate an incident, but rather observing what he thought would be required to mobilize world opinion. He was not alone in his suggestion that violence was necessary in responding to violent regimes. During that spring, I ordered a book that had been published in 1969 by Abingdon, our denominational press. The author, Colin Morris, was a part-time British Methodist missionary and part-time advisor to Kenneth Kaunda, President of the Republic of Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia). Morris’ book[19] was written in response to a question about whether a Christian could take up arms in Africa’s anticolonial struggle.
Yes was Morris’ unequivocal reply. The world, he said, is ruled by the unyoung, uncolored, and unpoor; only violent revolution could overthrow them and provide a decent future for the majority of the world’s population. Christians, Morris argued, have both the right and responsibility to take part in this struggle. I was surprised and pleased to see the question so important for me was being addressed by a fellow missionary and that my own denomination’s press saw fit to publish it.
In the chapter “The Sacred Cow of Nonviolence,” Morris said,
Passive resistance depends for its success upon the creation of public opinion which will be shamed or angered into giving justice to those who choose to match official power with self-sacrifice…
Ruthless modern despots do not play good-natured games with their critics. It is hard to imagine Hitler or Stalin blanching at the prospect of Gandhi fasting to death. They would have helped him on his way, exterminating him secretly so that there was no mark of his passing except for a bloodstain on some cellar wall… People who vanish without a trace do not make effective rallying points for freedom..[20]
Morris was saying what Peter had said and what I had concluded about the efficacy of nonviolent resistance in Taiwan. But as I read on, I wished for Peter’s presence to discuss with him what Morris said was determinative for him: “As a Christian writing to another Christian, my argument stands or falls by [Jesus’] attitude to violence.”[21]
In the chapter “What Would Jesus Do,” Morris makes the proper caveats about what we don’t know about the historical Jesus but reminds the reader that in spite of the claims made about him as an advocate of nonviolence, the one thing corroborated about him by the non-Christian historians of his time was that he was executed for the crime of sedition against the Roman government. The Gospels attempt to prove the charge false, and that has become the commonly accepted Christian interpretation. Not so for Morris:
The Gospel portrait of Jesus is comparable to a biography of a German churchman of the 1930s which makes no mention of his attitude toward the Nazis… If Jesus was oblivious of all the violence around him, or regarded it as unimportant, then our efforts to make him relevant to the life of our time are futile because he was irrelevant to his own time. And what is more, he was a dangerous, blundering fool, doing ambiguous acts and saying provocative things that invited bloody retaliation upon his followers, all the while protesting that he was being misunderstood. [22]
While Morris was speaking to questions that I had had since the seminary, I learned that he had help. As he was struggling to make sense of Jesus and violence, he learned of S. G. F. Brandon’s book Jesus and the Zealots, published while Morris was working on his book.[23]
I ordered Brandon’s book at once and read it during the spring of 1970. Brandon was a well-respected specialist in New Testament background, at least until he published this tome. In painstaking detail he documented how Palestine was aflame with the guerilla war waged by Zealots against the Romans during Jesus’ lifetime and how there are only oblique clues in the Gospels to what was happening. He argued that since Mark, the presumed first Gospel, was written in Rome as the Jewish War was reaching its climax, Christians were especially vulnerable because of Jesus’ execution on the charge of sedition. Their lives could have depended on Mark’s showing Jesus’ death was a tragic mistake. The explanation, became the orthodox view of the Christian Church.
Examining in great detail such incidents as Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem, his encounter with the money changers in the temple, and his response on taxation convinced Brandon that Jesus, while not a Zealot, was likely sympathic to their cause to free their country from Roman control.
I came to see that the attempt to present Jesus not as a threat to Rome was a reasonable act of self-preservation for the early church. I saw similar writing in the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan. As a Taiwanese church, they were always suspected by the government and under the threat of persecution. Their newsletters had a kind of doublespeak about all things political, but in a code that the people understood. I’m not sure but that was true in the earliest church and in the Gospels.
Brandon’s meticulous work validated questions I had about the Jesus of the Gospels and changed forever the way I looked the major events of Jesus’ life. This was no idle theological speculation; like Morris, my stance for what I was prepared to do in Taiwan was dependent on what I believed Jesus’ attitude toward violence was. While I agreed with Brandon that Jesus may have been sympathetic to the attempt to throw off Rome, I decided that Jesus’ association with tax collectors and his refusal to restrict God’s grace to the Jewish people would have put him at odds with the Zealots. Jesus’ mission, I concluded, included but was not limited to the struggle with Rome.
While I didn’t share Morris’ emphatic yes to the use of violence to fight against injustice, I lost forever the Gospel’s presumption of the pacifist Jesus. A pacifist he might have been, but he might also have assumed that when he came to Jerusalem to confront the religious and political authorities that the people would rise up and throw out the Romans as the people had thrown out the Greeks two hundred years earlier. Or, he might have believed i
n that confrontation God would unleash legions of angel armies that would come down from the clouds and vanquish the Romans. Or, despite Gospel claims to the contrary, I came to suspect he came to confront the authorities not sure what would happen, knowing only that he was doing the right thing as he understood it and that in all likelihood it would cost him his life.
I prepared to leave Taiwan for three months no longer assuming that Jesus had to be a pacifist. If I were allowed to return to Taiwan in September, I would have to decide what that meant for my work there.
The primary objective of the trip home was to complete the process of making Richard a naturalized U.S. citizen. The secondary objective was to visit our supporting church—First United Methodist Church in Fort Worth. This church had assumed our full support. Another objective was to try to learn what was going on in the United States. To that end, George Todd scheduled visits for us with people and groups from Berkley to New York City.
George wanted us to have a sense of the antiwar movement from the people in it. A meeting in Berkley had been arranged with a group of activists who had disrupted the 1968 Methodist General Conference with an antiwar demonstration. We were staying in a hotel in downtown San Francisco and were given directions to drive across the Bay Bridge to a house in Berkeley. With Elizabeth, who had turned four in April, and Richard, who wouldn’t be two until the next October, we set out in a rented car to find the house. The house was old and run-down in an old and run-down neighborhood. We were welcomed by about ten or fifteen young women and men sitting around a living room with only pillows on the floor. Some of them may have had earlier church connections, but I sensed that most had not and were organized to challenge the religious institutions. The person who had arranged our meeting had provided us with sufficient credibility that we were warmly welcomed. After we had been there for a while, one of the men opened a bag of what he said was peyote that he had gotten from Native Americans in Colorado a week or so before. I didn’t know what peyote was. They stuffed it into a pipe, lit it and passed it around the circle. Since I had been smoking my own pipe with tobacco since we got there, I declined. Judith thought it impolite, but I didn’t reconsider. The gathered folks seemed not to be offended by my lack of participation. Within the next hour or so our hosts began to fall asleep right on the floor where we were sitting. Finally, when everyone had gone to sleep but us, we gathered up Richard and Liz and returned to our hotel.
In New York City, Todd had arranged for us to meet with a group of returned Peace Corps Volunteers. We met this group on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I found much in common with these young people. They had been politicized by their experiences outside the U.S. like I had been in Taiwan. They were vigorously antiwar, but not as strident as other groups we met.
Todd had even arranged a meeting with the Black Panthers. In a slum section on the Lower East Side we found our way to an upstairs apartment where we met with two of the leaders of the movement in New York City. Again, our friend had given us sufficient introductions so that we weren’t met with overt hostility, which was pretty much the way Black Panthers viewed Anglos. That we were able to have such a meeting at all was testimony to the credibility George Todd—who was also Anglo—had with them. In low-key tones, as if we might be discussing directions to get back to our hotel, they dismissed the nonviolent approach of Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement and said that the use of force was the only way for black survival. They admitted that since the authorities had vast superiority in firepower, their ability to protect blacks was limited.
The strangest meeting of the summer was with Peter Ng and T.T. Deh, the two would-be assassins of Chiang Ching-kuo. Our meeting was only a month or two after the attempt they made on Chiang’s life. They were out on bail, made possible by many Taiwanese living in the U.S. putting up their homes as collateral. We had never met nor heard of either man before the assassination attempt. T.T. was then secretary general of the World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI) in the United States. Peter Ng was a thrity-three-year-old doctoral student at Cornell University. Ng was the one who fired the shots supposedly because he was single, while Deh had a wife and two children.
Since they couldn’t talk about anything related to the attempt or their upcoming trial, we soon ran out of things to discuss.[24] In retrospect, the decision to meet them at all seems foolish. The risk of the meeting becoming known to U.S. or Taiwanese authorities seemed hardly worth any other value it might have had. I may have agreed to the meeting because I wanted to meet and take the measure of the first two Taiwanese to “take up arms” against Chiang’s government.
The main purpose of the furlough had been Richard’s naturalization. Once accomplished, we boarded a flight in Dallas to return to Taiwan in time for the beginning of the fall semester at the seminary. Less clear was what I learned from our summer, except that there was a national atmosphere of animosity and a willingness to embrace violence unlike anything I had known. I was now less judgmental about those who chose violence to resist the war in Vietnam, Black Panthers to protect black communities, or Taiwanese to resist Chiang’s oppression. What Jesus might have done in his time mattered to me, but at the end of the summer I had to admit that I was on my own. Ethically, Colin Morris’ counsel to the young man in Africa made sense to me, and the Nationalist regime in Taiwan was no less brutal or intractable than the colonial governments in Africa. Although the innocent were suffering already, I knew I could not be party to violence in which more innocents would suffer. Besides, I couldn’t imagine any such act that would do a bit of good. Was my stance shaped in any way by a fear of consequences for me or my family? If that fear had the upper hand, I wouldn’t have done many of the things I had already done. Despite Niebuhr’s dictum that the line between violence and nonviolence was not absolute, I sensed a personal chasm between them, one that if I crossed I would no longer be who I thought I was. I was also convinced that my Taiwanese friends—who seemed immune to fear—resisted the use of violence because they didn’t want to increase the suffering of innocent people and couldn’t see any positive outcome of such acts.
I had no idea what lay before us in Taiwan, but as we landed at Taipei International Airport, I had a strong feeling that we would not spend another three years there.
Chapter Eighteen
The Closing Net
You have only the power to act;
You do not have power to determine the result;
So act without anticipation of the result;
And not succumb to inaction.
—Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita
As soon as we returned to Taipei in September, I met with the Phillipses to see how the distribution of funds to the families had gone. Carlisle kept careful records of all the money that came in and that they turned over to Hsieh and Wei, who had in turn distributed it. I was pleased to find that the foursome not only worked well together but seemed to have developed genuine affection for one other. Ruth talked about “the boys” as if they were family.
Although we met with Matthew and Tony regularly, it was always separately. All of us getting together seemed to be an unnecessary risk. Even though the two of them stayed in constant touch with each other, it was frustrating not to be able to talk with both of them at the same time. That wasn’t new. Even before Peter escaped, I don’t recall a time when the three of them were together with us or a time when Matthew and Tony were together with us. At different times in our relationship, all three had separately acted as my tutors in Chinese, helping me with my history lectures.
Looking at the mail that had accumulated for us in our absence, I could see from the postmark codes that more and more letters were making stops at the Garrison Command before arriving in our mailbox. Within weeks of our getting back, there were new reports that we were being watched. By which agency or for what reasons, we had no idea.
In separate conversations, I asked Matthew and Tony if they thought it wise for them to continue distributing money. Tony ans
wered by describing the great need of prisoners’ families for even the little bits of money he could put in their hands.
“We can distribute the money without the KMT knowing that we are the ones doing it,” Tony said. “The larger problem is finding the families who are always on the move. Getting money to them is critical, and Wei and I are the only ones who can do it.”
Left unsaid by Tony was the danger of families reporting him out of fear. He and Matthew had both encountered people in desperate need but too fearful to accept money. If the government used their usual means to get someone to talk, both Tony and Matthew were at risk.
“What are they going to do to us—put us in prison?” Matthew responded with a laugh when I asked him the same question. Not easily intimidated, eighteen years earlier when in his second year at Cheng-kong High School in Taipei he refused to join the Youth Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps (known popularly as the China Youth Corps and modeled on the China Youth League in the People’s Republic), quit school, and began tutoring illiterate children who were learning to read. Without a high school diploma, he took the university entrance exam, passed it, and entered the Department of Law at the National University. By late 1970, when we had the conversation, Matthew knew well what prison was like. He had challenged his guards to shoot him and challenged the court that sentenced him to give him the death penalty. He wouldn’t even entertain the question of stopping the distribution.
Carlisle turned his notebook with records of receipts and disbursements over to me. As soon as I got home, I destroyed it. I wanted no paper that could incriminate them, Matthew, or Tony. I also decided that I could no longer afford the luxury of keeping a journal. I did not consider destroying the trunk full of collated and stapled articles that we continued to give to foreign visitors. That would come later.
Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 15