We quickly settled into a surreal normalcy. The board of missions was moving ahead with its new policy of distancing itself from the Methodist Church in Taiwan, a policy I wholeheartedly endorsed. In addition to teaching my classes and doing my work as registrar, I was also involved in the now-approved major restructuring of the curriculum as well as negotiating team to merge the two seminaries, a merger that was foundering on the rivalry between the northern and southern Presbyterians.
I mused about two questions. First, how was it possible to live and work as a missionary, a seminary teacher and administrator while wondering when I would be arrested? I now had some sense of what it was to live two different lives. Thankfully, there were some missionary friends who knew at least part of my two lives, and when we were together, I didn’t have to pretend to be one or the other.
The second question was why the government allowed us back into the country after the furlough. Given what some in the government must have suspected, it is a marvel that they allowed us back into the country. Perhaps the competition between the different security agencies—the Foreign Affairs Police, the Investigative Bureau, and the Garrison Command—kept them from sharing what information they had. What I had learned from my Taiwanese friends was that the KMT’s system of fear-inducing brutality exercised through multiple security agencies was at the same time a tangle of corruption that guaranteed inefficiency. The question for me, though, was not if I would ever be found out and arrested, only when.
As I resumed my duties at the seminary, I felt a growing sense of sadness that at some point this would end. I loved teaching and when I arrived in Taiwan in 1965, I could think of no better future than teaching in this place. I knew there was no turning back.
Another part of the sadness, however, had little to do with politics. I knew that as long as the board of missions paid my salary, the seminary didn’t have to hire or train a Taiwanese who could do my teaching job much more effectively than I could. My presence without costing the seminary anything except housing was a barrier to that important step being taken. At the same time I realized that what I had been doing politically were things that only I could do at a relatively minimal risk.
In the midst of this double life were Elizabeth and Richard. When we returned to Taiwan in September, Elizabeth was four and Richard was one. Elizabeth was in Chinese kindergarten at Mu-Ai Tang (Church of the Good Shepherd in Shih-lin). Her best friend was Teddy Loh, who lived across the road from us at the seminary and whose parents were my best friends at the seminary. Elizabeth was fluent in both Taiwanese (from her friends at the seminary) and in Mandarin (from her nursery school). Judith and I spoke only English to her so she wouldn’t have bad models in Mandarin. Richard had such a calm disposition that I regularly put him in a backpack baby seat and did my work in the study. He would sleep there, but if he was awake, he would quietly amuse himself.
Although in the history of parents who adopt children not at all exceptional, in September we were surprised to learn that Judith was pregnant. We were delighted but fearful because the doctor told us that bearing another child was a considerable health risk. We were not sure that she could carry the baby to term. As fall gave way to winter, Judith passed the early critical periods.
One day in the fall, Mr. Yén called and invited us to dinner at a downtown restaurant with him and two guests from Japan. He said he would be grateful if we would help him entertain them. Except for the Japanese guests, the invitation was not unusual; he often invited us out to eat. Mr. Yén was always entertaining and sometimes a source for news from inside the government.
The evening was unremarkable. We met Mr. Yén and the two men in one of Taipei’s many Japanese restaurants. The men were dressed in suits and ties and looked to be in their thirties or forties. We went through the usual drinking ritual toasting each other with sake. Mr. Yén interpreted the conversation for us in Mandarin. The conversation went from the tourist sites they were visiting to the speculation that the U.S. was moving closer to an attempt at establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. When the tea was served, signaling the end of the evening, we shook hands, caught a taxi, and went home. Only in retrospect several months later would we suspect that the purpose of the meeting might have been more than we imagined.
Tensions within the KMT about Nixon’s overtures to China reached a fevered pitch when, on October 5, 1970, President Nixon was quoted in Time, regarded as the most pro-KMT magazine in the United States: “If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China.” To the Chiangs, Nixon was groveling in order to get an invitation to visit China. A week later on October 12, the library at the United States Information Agency in Tainan was bombed. No one was hurt and little damage to the building was done. News reports in Taiwan suggested that it was the result of widespread unhappiness with the United States. When we read the story, we laughed. The only “widespread unhappiness” with the U.S. in Taiwan we could see was the near hysteria within the government. We assumed that the bombing had been staged by the KMT. When Bank of America was bombed in Taipei on February 5, 1971, we made the same assumption.
On Thursday, February 18, 1971, we received a call from Mr. Yén, member of the National Assembly and head of the Taipei printers’ union. He said that one of the two Japanese men we had helped him entertain, a man named Abe, was back in town and had a gift for us. Since we had only been guests at a dinner with them and had not discussed any of our activities, we couldn’t imagine why one would be bringing us a gift. We speculated that they might be part of the independence movement based in Japan and perhaps had been part of facilitating the Japanese end of Peng’s escape a year earlier. We didn’t know that, nor did we know whether Peng had sent them to us. We assumed that this was merely an act of Asian hospitality, albeit from folks who knew where our political sympathies lay.
Because I was tied up at the seminary with exams and meetings, we agreed that Judith would meet Mr. Yén and Abe for lunch. When she got back to the house that afternoon, she had quite a story to tell. When she arrived at Mr. Yén’s apartment, he told her that although the guest had called earlier in the morning saying he would be there for lunch, he hadn’t arrived. Judith waited for an hour. Mr. Yén called the man’s hotel room and reported to Judith that someone sounding like the police had answered. Mr. Yén hung up, reported to Judith, and she left for home.
Judith was concerned about the failure of the friend to appear, as was Mr. Yén. As she came out of the narrow alley that led to his apartment, she saw that a woman was following her. Instead of taking a taxi right away, she walked down the street, stopping to look in the windows of shops. Whenever she stopped, the woman behind her stopped. She continued down the street for a couple of blocks until she was certain that the woman was in fact following her. She hailed a cab but didn’t come directly home. She changed cabs several times before finally coming up the mountain to the seminary.
When she told me what had happened we knew that things had moved into a new phase. Late that night, Mr. Yén showed up at our door in a T-shirt perspiring heavily and as nervous as we had ever seen him. He reported that Abe had been arrested and that he had been taken in for questioning. The police told him that the “gift” he had was a cake containing potassium chlorate, which had multiple common uses in labs but was also a substance from which bombs could be made. He said his suspicions had led him not to give the gift to Judith when she was at his home earlier in the day. Abe had my name and phone number in his pocket. Since Mr. Yén was a member of the National Assembly, he did not think he would be arrested. He did not know about us.
We assured him that we didn’t know Abe apart from Mr. Yén’s introduction months earlier and that no one had ever suggested that we would receive material for making bombs. I thanked him for not giving the gift to Judith. We said a hasty good-bye and realized that it would probably be the last time we would see Mr. Yén. Whatever was going on, we knew that there would be little delay. We would be arr
ested and deported, or arrested, tried, and imprisoned.
We collapsed into chairs in the living room and tried to make sense of what was happening.
“The net is closing,” Judith said with a nervous laugh.
The adrenaline was pumping and the strain must have shown on both our faces.
“I guess we won’t have to wait long now,” I replied without asking the question that was really on my mind. What was this was going to mean for Judith’s pregnancy? At five months, she had successfully passed the early critical period. But she had been suffering from severe headaches ever since we returned in September. Our family physician had done some tests and decided that the cause was stress. The diagnosis made sense to us because we knew in a way that the doctor couldn’t know what pressures we were under. Now I worried that the pressure of an imminent arrest would increase the stress level to a point where both Judith and the pregnancy were further threatened.
We tried to put the things Mr. Yén said together as if they were pieces of a puzzle. Somehow, because we knew that we had no part in a plan to make and use explosives, we thought we had been set up. Our experience with the effectiveness of the people in Japan with Peter’s escape convinced us that they would not have been party to such an ill-conceived plan. The only thing that made sense to us was that we had been set up by the KMT to provide undeniable proof of our guilt in a crime for which they could arrest us. Were the two men from Japan KMT agents, or at least hired by them? What was Mr. Yén’s role? Not inconceivable to us was the possibility that under pressure from something the government might have had on him that Mr. Yén participated in the trap. We had never been clear about how he met the two Japanese men and why he wanted us to “help entertain” them.
The more we talked about it, the less plausible his knowingly being party to the set up seemed. It didn’t square with what we thought we knew about him, so we moved on to assume that he had been unknowingly used to set us up but that he suspected something about the man and his “gift” for us. If he had had the package at his house when Judith was there, as he said he did, he could have placed the smoking gun in our possession.
We talked about what ifs until nothing we thought we knew made complete sense. Emotional exhaustion allowed both of us a few hours of sleep. When morning came, taking care of the kids and getting ready for classes provided momentary distraction from the thought that the police might show up at the door at any time. But they didn’t.
Days went by and nothing happened. I had a meeting scheduled in Tainan to continue negotiating the merger of the seminaries. In an air of unreality, I took the train down for the meeting and came back the next day. While there I was able to tell the principal of Tainan Theological College and also a confidant, Dan Beeby, what had happened and that our arrest seemed imminent. Being able to share the uncertainty with good friends was comforting.
The day I arrived back in Taipei, Bud arrived from Hong Kong. I had forgotten that he was coming. Once I told him what had happened, I suggested that he might not want to stay with us. He said that since he was already at the house, he might as well stay the night and return to Hong Kong as planned a few days later. When he came back from a taxi trip to Taipei to do some missionary business at the Methodist office, he said that he had been followed from the seminary.
On Monday, February 22, making sure we weren’t followed, we met Tony at a coffee shop on Chung Shan North Road in Taipei. Bud gave him a thousand U.S. dollars that had come from the American Friends Service Committee for families of political prisoners. Tony said that he and Wei would take the train the next day and distribute the money in the south. We told him about the cake incident and said that if the story was true and Abe had my name as the recipient, we would either be arrested and tried or expelled. Tony said he knew nothing of Abe or a plan to use explosives, and he was certain Matthew didn’t either. Because they didn’t know anything about it, he wasn’t worried, he said with his usual confident smile. Tony had been out of prison only eighteen months and Matthew twenty-eight. Judith and I were near tears when the meal ended, not about what was going to happen to us but because we were likely seeing Tony for the last time and that we weren’t going to have an opportunity to say good-bye to Matthew. Bud shook hands with Tony. Judith and I hugged him. He sat back down at the table to give us time to leave the restaurant and get a taxi.
“You know,” I said to Bud as we sat in the living room after we got home from the restaurant and the kids were in bed, “we’ve got a trunk full of the articles in the closet of my study.”
“Having the government get their hands on those is probably not a good idea,” Bud said.
“Should we burn them?” I asked.
“Don’t you think whoever is watching the house will see the smoke from the chimney and think something funny is going on?” Bud asked, pointing to the perspiration showing through my shirt on the warm March evening.
“I don’t think they’ll see the smoke,” Judith said. “The outside lights are all below the roof level. I don’t think you can even see the chimney from outside when those lights are on.”
“Might as well take the chance,” Bud said.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” I said, heading down the two stairs in the narrow hall that led to my study.
I disassembled one of the packets, wadded up the individual sheets of mimeographed paper, and started a fire. It was quickly apparent how big a job this was going to be. It was like burning a steamer trunk full of magazines.
With the project taking so much time, Judith finally went to bed. Soon, the living room was like a furnace. Bud and I took off our shirts and continued to feed the fire. We were soaked with sweat. Near midnight, I put the last of the papers in and Bud went to take a shower. Throughout the evening both of us had expected the police to arrive and interrupt the burning. Were they not outside? Could they have not seen the smoke pouring from the chimney? Since there wasn’t a knock at the door, I assumed not.
I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water without turning on the light. I stood by the open window watching the lane that led up to the administration building not twenty-five feet from where I stood. There was a dim light at the corner of the building just across our driveway. My heart almost stopped as the figure of a man materialized out of the darkness. I froze in place. All I could see were the white cuffs and the white of his shirt behind his tie. I wasn’t imagining it; he was walking directly toward the kitchen door. At least the papers are burned, I thought. Will they arrest us tonight?
But the man didn’t come up to the door. Since he had been right outside, I dared not move. Everyone was now asleep in the house except for me. I don’t know how long I waited in the darkness, but I finally decided to go to bed. Sleep did not come. I have never been particularly afraid of the dark, but that night the darkness was terrifying. I pleaded for daylight to come: Take me and arrest me, I thought. Do whatever you want to do with me. Just do it after it is daylight. When the gray of the dawn was visible outside the window, I could feel the tension easing. I went to sleep and didn’t wake till mid-morning. The terror of that night would replay itself a thousand times in dreams I would have over the next ten years.
Matthew and Tony wouldn’t make the trip south to distribute the funds. On Tuesday, February 23, 1971, five days before 2-28, the police went to their homes and arrested them. The government didn’t announce their arrests. We learned about the arrests the next day when a Miss Chen, a friend of Peter, showed up at our door at the seminary and gave us the news. She knew only the fact of their arrests, not why they had been arrested. Because of the Yén affair, we were concerned, but not panicked. Rounding up potential troublemakers before February 28 as a measure to prevent any efforts to observe the massacre was not an uncommon practice, and we had already heard about people being detained in recent weeks. In years past, most were released after the threat to the anniversary had passed. Given the timing, we hoped that would be the case with Matthew and Tony, but
we knew such hope was a slender thread. It made more sense that they had been arrested attempting to deliver the money to families. And there wasn’t anything we could do to help them.
Three days passed, and they hadn’t come for us. Months earlier, we had arranged to meet Selig Harrison, the East Asia Bureau chief for the Washington Post, on his visit to Taiwan. Someone told him that we could arrange for him to meet dissident Taiwanese. We had arranged for a dinner with a member of the Provincial Assembly, who had a reputation of being independent and not intimidated by the KMT. We decided to go ahead with the dinner on Saturday night, February 27, but would make sure we were not followed to the restaurant. We met Harrison at his hotel and warned him that we might be followed. As we started down the street, we saw a gray suit tagging along behind us. We crossed and recrossed the street to make sure, and each time he crossed and recrossed behind us.
Thinking we had nothing to lose and perhaps emboldened because of the person we were with, we decided to confront him. When the light changed, instead of going across, we turned around and approached the man who was not five yards behind us.
“You are from what agency?” I asked the surprised man in Mandarin.
“No, no, no,” he said, waving his hands and stepping out into the street.
“Why are you following us?” Judith asked in her pure Mandarin, moving toward him while he frantically looked for an opportunity to dash through the wall of cars passing by. “Our friend from the Washington Post would be interested in knowing,” she shouted after him as he dashed between cars to get away from us. It would not be the last time we would see him.
Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 16