Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror

by Milo Thornberry

  When she told me what had happened we knew that things had moved into a new phase. Late that night, Mr. Yén Yen showed up at our door in a Ttee-shirt perspiring heavily, and as nervous as we had ever seen him. He reported that Abe had been arrested and that Yen 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 Yen 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 Yen’s 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. YénYen. Whatever was going on, we knew that there would be little delay. We would be arrested 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 speaking 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. Dr. Dale

  Say, “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 Yen 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 of 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. YénYen’s role? Not inconceivable to us was the possibility that under pressure from something the government might have had on him that Yen 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 Rowland Van Es and Dan Beeby

  Use “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 U.S. 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 that 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 saidasked, 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 that the police would 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 aAdministration building not twenty-five feet from where I stood. There was a dim light at the corner of the building that was 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 were had been arrested. Because of the Yén Yen affair, we were concerned, but not panicked. Rounding up potential trouble-makers 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 observe 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.

  Leave as is

  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 cChief 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, the 27thFebruary 27, but would make sure we were not followed to the restaurant. We met Selig 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 re-crossed the street to make sure, and each time he crossed and re-crossed 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 said asked the surprised man in Mandarin to the surprised man.

  “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.

  We hailed a cab, changed a couple of times, and then went on to the restaurant, where we met our Taiwanese friend. Peter had introduced us to the aAssemblyman a couple of years before, but we knew him mostly for his reputation as a thorn in the side of the KMT. He answered all of Harrison’s questions in Mandarin, which we in turn translated into English. On the question of whether Taiwan should be reunited with the Mmainland, he repeated the refrain that we heard so often over the years: “We don’t want Mao and we don’t want Chiang! Communism or anti-Communism has nothing to do with it. We are Taiwanese, not Chinese, and should be able to govern ourselves.”

  We were impressed with Harrison’s knowledge and sensitivity; so when he asked if he could see us again to get better acquainted, we invited him to dinner at our house on March 2nd, three days away. He would come to the house on Tuesday, but we would be unable to serve him dinner.

  Chapter Nineteen: Arrest and Deportation

  “Thus hath the candle singed the moth.”

  — William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (1600)

  We were preparing to sit down to lunch with David Chen, principal of the seminary, when three men in plain clothes and a fourth in the a black Foreign Affairs Police uniform of the Foreign Affairs Police came to the door and asked us to accompany them to headquarters to hear some “advice from Colonel Wang, head of that office.” We asked them to wait until we finished our lunch, and they agreed, seating themselves in the living room not six feet from the dining room table. We mostly just looked at but didn’t eat the the food in front of us, engaging in a nervous banter, words to fill the pall that had fallen over the room with the arrival of these uninvited guests. David was Peter’s cousin, but as far as we knew, he was never involved in any sort of political activity. He didn’t seem rattled by the presence of these officials. We wondered if he had been invited or ordered to be present to witness the arrest.

  Elizabeth was at nursery school and our amah had Richard in the kitchen. David said he would see that both would be cared for until we returned. We were taken in an unmarked police car to the main fForeign aAffairs pPolice station, next to City Hall. Upon arrival, we were ushered up two flights of stairs to the third floor, where Colonel Wang and two other men awaited us.

  The five of us then went into a large, green-carpeted room. Overstuffed chairs lined three of the walls; coffee tables were placed at intervals in front of the chairs. We sat down in one corner, and a Colonel Wang proceeded to read a brief statement in English. In essence it said that we had violated the regulations controlling aliens in the Republic of China and had committed “unfriendly actions against the government of the ROC.” Because of this, we were being expelled from the country and must leave within forty-eight48 hours. During that period our “movements and living” would be severely restricted. Wang then presented me with a single typed copy of the statement and asked me to sign at the bottom, where there was a sentence indicating that I had read the statement and understood it. I said that I would be glad to sign it if I could have a copy. Wang said there was only one copy and if I didn’t wish to sign it I didn’t have to. I didn’t.

  The cColonel went on to explain that a representative from the Yangmingshan Bbureau (controlling the district where we lived) would explain answer any further questions we might have and who

  Delete “who”

  would be waiting at the house when we returned. I pressed him for an explanation of the term “unfriendly actions,” and he replied that he didn’t have time to explain it to me. We asked if the American Embassy had been notified of our deportation order. Wang said that it had and that a representative would come to see us that day.

  We were driven directly back to our house, accompanied by a man and a woman in plain clothes. Awaiting us at home were another man and woman, also without uniforms. From then on we had the two men and two women in our living room at all times. Several men in gray suits milled around outside the door while jeeps, motorcycles, and men encircled the house. The representative from the Yangminshan bBureau never showed up, and any further explanation of the charges or our exact limitations was never madegiven. We soon learned, though, what was meant by “severe restrictions on our movements and living.”

  As we entered the house, the phone rang. Selig Harrison was on the line. He was calling to ask what time he should arrive for dinner. Judith managed to blurt out to him that we were being deported just before one of the two men in the room— – a man as tall as I was and much larger— -- snatched the phone from her hand and pulled the line out of the wall. We were completely cut off from the outside.

  We made several requests to our guards to allow us to ask Bishop Nall in Hong Kong where we should go and to make flight arrangements. The requests were all refused. They were especially anxiously worked to keep that no word of our deportation be from spreading. One of the guards later told us that they feared that our friends might rally and stage a riot on our behalf.

  We
asked again to see a representative from the Eembassy. We were assured that they knew about our situation. One of the guards said that had the eEmbassy not consented to our deportation, it wouldn’t have been ordered. We wondered about the right of a foreign embassy to approve the deportation of one of its nationals. The guard maintained that he was telling the truth. We would later learn that the eEmbassy knew two days before our arrest.

  Over In the next hours that followed, we tried to get organized andfor packing, but it was hard to concentrate. We wondered if anyone knew what was happening and what the people on campus were thinking about the massive police presence there. Five-year-old Elizabeth seemed unaware that anything special was going on. Since she was allowed to go and come freely from the house, we wrote a brief message to Bob Montgomery, a Presbyterian missionary on campus whose daughter played with Elizabeth. We wrapped the message around a piece of gum, replaced the tinfoil wrapper, and put it back into the paper sleeve, and back into an opened pack. We told Elizabeth to go directly to the Montgomery’s house and give it to one of her friend’s parents, and to please not offer a stick to one of the guards on her way out. She did what we asked of her. While the campus was abuzz with speculationng about what was happening at our house, Elizabeth delivered the first message to the missionary community.

  The combined living room/dining room was not large, perhaps only twelve by sixteen feet. When four guards, one of which was quite large, were seated on the sofa and chairs, the only other places to sit were at the table. When the Taiwanese woman who worked for us put dinner on the table, Elizabeth asked why the guards did not eat with us. I suggested that she ask them. I don’t know if she did or not, but she certainly provided entertainment for them. They were amazed at her fluency in both Mandarin and Taiwanese and spent a lot of time chatting with her, and for her part she liked the attention.