Leave as is
In the fall of 1990, I applied for the renewal ofto renew my passport, which that had expired sometime in the seventies70s. Not being able to take another assignment overseas, I hadn’t bothered trying to renew it. When I planned a trip with Katy and Liz to spend Christmas with Richard in London, it didn’t occur to me that there might be a problem. It had, after all, been nineteen years since my arrest and deportation. Weeks went by after I should have received the new passport. After repeated calls to the agency I finally spoke to someone, who would saytold me that my request was denied.
Donald Stewart, a former U.S. sSenator from Alabama, was serving who served on the advisory board for the Mission Resource Center at Emory University, where I was the director,. He enlisted the support of sSenators Howell Heflin from of Alabama, and Senators Wyche Fowler and Sam Nunn from of Georgia. The next day, an aide from Fowler’s office called me and saidasked, “What did you do in Taiwan?” Her tone was not reprimanding, but incredulous. “There are so many ‘top secret’ flags on your file that I’m not sure the sSenator can help you.” I thought that was the end of the matter, but Stewart didn’t give up. Apparently, the combined efforts of the three senators made a difference. Sam Nunn’s heading the Senate Committee on Armed Services and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations probably didn’t hurt their efforts.
No one else contacted me, so I had already given up on getting the passport. On the day Katy and Liz were to leave for London without me, a black limo pulled up in front of my house in Atlanta. True to the stereotype, two men in trench coats, hats, and dark glasses knocked at my door. One flashed some kind of government ID—I know, I should have looked more closely, but I didn’t— and asked to see my driver’s license. I was fumbleding at getting the laminated document out of my billfold because it was stuck to the plastic window. His impatience was palpable. “Let me just see the billfold,.” he said. He showed it to his colleague and handed me a brown manila envelope. Saying nothing more, the two men turned around and left. Inside the package was a new passport, good for ten years. I packed my bags and made the evening flight with Katy and Liz.
I passed through Heathrow customs without incident. Maybe Taiwan is was behind me now, I thought.
Chapter Twenty-One: The Best Christmas Gift
“You were my father’s friend. I have heard about you from the time I was born.”
—- Wei Hsin-ch’i (2003)
“Someone named Michael Fonte who said he knew you in Taiwan called while you were in the meeting upstairs,” Jeni Earls called after me as I ran through the office on my way to the hospital to be with a church member before surgery. “He said he would contact you at home,” I heard her shout as the door closed behind me. It was September 25, 2003, some thirty-two years after we were had been deported.
On the way to the hospital, I remembered. Michael was a Roman Catholic Maryknoll missionary in Taiwan while I was there. We had only been Aacquaintances in the sixties‘60s,. I knew little more than that (at the time) his political sympathies had been similar to mine. When I got home, I had read an e-mail inviting me to return to Taiwan to be recognized for my human rights activities three decades earlier. Other foreigners who had been blacklisted by the KMT for their human rights activities were also being invited.
Sixty-nine days later, I was on my way to the “home” that in my wildest imaginations I had never expected to go see again. Judith and her husband Jerry were also en route, as indeed were Liz, Katy, and Richard. As the plane made its descent into Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, I thought back to the day I left thirty-two years earlier. How and by whom would I be received? I knew Michael Fonte would be there (but I couldn’t imagine who else.), and I wouldn’t be left to my own devices.
Michael’s was the first familiar face I saw as I cleared customs. He looked older than I remembered. How many times would I say that over the next week, and how many would think the same thing when they saw me? I heard my name called and turned to the mass of people around me. I didn’t see the face, but when I heard his laugh I knew it could only be Hsieh Tsung-min. We embraced and re-embraced so many times and so hard that I thought we might crack each others’‘s ribs.
“Come quickly!” he said, “There are others here to meet you.”
When we exchanged cards, I saw that Hsieh was “ the Nnational pPolicy aAdvisor to the pPresident.” Hsieh drove to another terminal and waved to a young man standing inside. “This is Mr. Wei’s son,” Hsieh said as we got out of the car. I had no idea that I would see any of Wei’s family. Only in recent days had I learned that I would not be seeing Matthew. On December 28, 1999, during his usual early morning jog on the playground at Hsing-kuo elementary school in Chung-li, Wei T’ing-chao’s great heart stopped beating.
Round faced with gold-rimmed glasses and broad shoulders, he looked like his father. We had never seen each other, and he didn’t know my English name;, but when Hsieh said, “This is T’ang P’ei-Li,”, Wei’s eyes lit up.
“You were my father’s friend,” were the first words out of his mouth. “I have heard about you from the time I was born.”
I told him how sorry I was to learn of his father’s death and that he was one of the bravest men I had ever knoewn. A dam of emotion broke and in a torrent of tears, I began to tell him of the times when his father came to the house, played with Liz and Richard, and helped me with my lectures.
Hsieh told me that Wei’s widow, Chang Ching-hui, was back in the arrival area, where she was meeting the flight carrying Judith, Jerry, and Liz. Through the large windows, I could see her escorting them past the cCustoms desks and then to where we were waiting. Standing beside her son, she looked tall. I could not see any identification badge, but she was obviously had some authority in the airport. Hsieh later explained that she was Cchair of the Board of the Taoyuan International Airport Services.
Although the hourit was late and there were no passengers around area emptied of other arriving passengers, our hosts didn’t rush to get us on our way to the hotel. It was a moment to be savored. Ching-hui arranged for an airport staff member to collect our cameras and take group pictures. I didn’t know when or if I would see Wei’s family again, and there was so much I wanted to know about what had happened to Matthew.
“Wei was in prison for much of the time that you were married and when your children were growing up,” I said not as an opening, inviting if Ching-hui wanted to respond..
“The children and I are very proud of Wei,” she said. “If there is such a thing as reincarnation,” she smiled, “I will gladly marry him again.”
Hsieh delivered me to the Ambassador Hotel and reminded me that I would meet Dr. Peng Ming-min at lunch the next day. Peter hosted a lunch for Judith, our families, and colleagues I had not seen for thirty years—Don Wilson, Dick Kagan, and Wendell Karsen.
Leave as is
As soon as I shook hands with Dick, he reached into his coat pocket and handed me some folded paper.
“I thought you might like to see this,” he said.
I opened it and saw that it was a recently declassified verbatim account of the Nixon and Kissienger meeting with Chou En-lai in 1972.
Since “lunch” was a twenty-five course Taiwanese banquet and I was seated next to Peng, there was time to talk. I had been a little nervous about meeting Peng again after all of these years. He insisted that we sit together, and as it must be with old close friends, no matter how long the physical separation, the warmth of the friendship we enjoyed years before seemed to pick up where we had it left offit. When we addressed him as ‘Dr. Peng,” he asked that we call him Peter, the name we had given him when it was not wise to refer to him by his real name. Hsieh sat on the other side of me.; Tthe three of us talkeding with ease.
In theThat evening we attended a banquet hosted by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, a non-profit organization established in 2003 during the exhilarating first months of democracy. The TFD was dedicated to the promotion of de
mocracy and human rights in Taiwan and abroad,, and was the first democracy assistance foundation of its kind in Asia. What we had been told would be a small party was a Taiwanese version of a surprise party, an awards dinner with over two hundred in attendance, including the heads of Foreign Affairs, National Defense, and the Legislature,
Leave as is – they are names of agencies
especially leaders who wereas well as members of the Democratic Progressive Party.
The thirty of us foreign guests were presented with plaques recognizing our contributions to the struggle for human rights in Taiwan. The presenters were men and women who had been political prisoners during the White Terror. After the name of a foreign honoree was announced, the name of the presenting former prisoner, along with the years he or she served in prison, was announced. The two then approached the stage for the presentation. Some of the former prisoners still looked gaunt, though all of them had been released from prison by 1988 or 1989, when martial law ended. A number of these came to our table to greet us personally. One old man showed me needle marks in the tops of his hands where, during the torture sessions, he had been injected with a substance he still couldn’t identify. Each announcement—““[(Name]) who was in prison for [number of years]”— was like the tolling of a bell for the real heroes in the movement to bring democracy to Taiwan. Peter made the presentations to Judith and me.
On December 8 we had a meeting with another former political prisoner; this one was the first democratically elected pPresident in the history of Taiwan. Chen Shui-bian had been imprisoned in 1985 for pro-democracy writings. While out on bail, he ran for mMagistrate in Tainan. He lost as most non-KMT candidates still did. After a post-election rally to thank his supporters, Chen’s wife, Wu Shu-chen, was run over twice by a truck and permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The KMT said that it was an accident, but most Taiwanese believed that it was an attempt to intimidate Chen. If that is was what it was, it didn’t work. Chen lost his appeal and went back to prison, but even though paralyzed, his wife ran and was elected to the Legislative Yuan. After the end of martial law, Chen was elected to the Legislative Yuan and later elected mayor of Taipei. In 2000 he was the DPP candidate for president, and, because of a split in the KMT, 39 percent% of the vote was enough for Chen to win the election. Although Chen was a democratically elected president, the KMT did not relinquish control of the legislature, the judiciary, or the huge bureaucracies.
Peter, who had returned from exile to Taiwan in 1991 and run unsuccessfully for president in 1996, was Chen’s sSenior aAdvisor. Peter received Judith and meI in his office before we went to meet President Chen, and then took us to a large parlor, where the rest of our group had gathered along with eight television crews. Judith and I started to take seats with our children in a large horseshoe arrangement
Delete “a” and substitute “seats arranged in a semicircle”
for the group, but we were directed to seats at the front facing our group at the front. The pPresident spoke about Taiwan’s road to democracy and freedom. He spoke interspersing Mandarin with Taiwanese, a practice we had noted among in others. One of the Taiwanese members of our group, who had also been in exile,. said that he saw the practice as linguistic evidence of an evolving Taiwanese cultural identity without the constraints of the one imposed by the mMainland
Use cap
er- dominated KMT.
President Chen thanked our group for the contributions we had made. Then, speaking directly to our three children and two others who had accompanied their parents, he said, “What your parents did for human rights in Taiwan took time away from you and changed your lives, and so I thank you for your sacrifice as well as theirs.”
I realized that the remarks were scripted and what any good politician who had been well briefed on his audience might say, but I was deeply moved. Few children have the opportunity to hear be thankeds from by the president of a country for what their parents contributed to human rights.
As we started to leave, President Chen stopped me, took my hand and said, “I’m sorry for what your efforts on our behalf cost you in your own country.” We bowed and I went out of the door, where after which we were led back to Peter’s office. Peter said that he had not told Chen about my being blacklisted in the United States and didn’t know how he knew.
Exhausted, but exhilarated and grateful beyond any words, I opened the door to my room at the Ambassador. At the window, the face of the balloon Santa outside stared at me. You old rascal! I thought. What I received this evening was the best Christmas gift ever!.
I turned out the lamp beside the bed and pulled up the covers. The only light was from the street as it highlighted the Santa bouncing in the wind. Then, I saw it again— the downturn at the corner of the mouth, probably caused by a the artist’s slip with of a the artist’s brush, but which that turned the kindly smile into a sneer. Instead of comfort, it I felt like the face was mocking me. I wondered if it was an omen, if that the wonder of these days would be sobered by a reality as yet unseen. You’re only a damn balloon! I thought as I turned away from the window and went to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Surprises Still
'Tis strange, -but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
—Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1823)
Nothing can take away the joy of those days near Christmas in 2003, but there have been events in the intervening years that took have taken me back to the expression on the face in the window. In 2008 President Chen finished his second term and Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT’s candidate, won the election.
I was bewildered by how that could happen to the newest and most vibrant democracy in Asia?. Charges of corruption made against former President Chen and, some said, a weaker DPP candidate, allowed the KMT to win. I could hardly believe what I read in the news, but, of course, the KMT was and is one of the wealthiest political parties not just in Taiwan but in the world. It never relinquished control of most of the government while a non-KMT President was in office;, and the party controlled much of the electronic and print media on the island. While I was there in 2003, a young KMT official said in response to my presentation, “We are not the same KMT we were when you were here.” “I hope not,” I said. But can a leopard change its spots? I thoughtwondered as I and walked away.
Invited back to Taiwan in the fall of 2008 to participate in a conference honoring Peng, Hsieh, and Wei on the forty-fourth anniversary of their arrests in 1964—an event many cite as the beginning of the democratization movement in Taiwan—I was asked to speak about my association with the three men. The conference was held in the old Jingmei Military Detention Center, a political prison south of Taipei that in 2007 was turned into the Taiwan Human Rights Memorial Park in 2007. A Taiwanese student took me for on a tour of the prison and explained how it was until martial law ended in 1989. He pointed to the roof where the clothes were routinely hung on a barbed wire fence to dry, making it clearly visible from inside and outside. The pants and shirts were hung upside down as —“a signal from those working in the laundry,” my guide explained, “that a prisoner had been executed.” Clothes were often hung upside down, the young man said.
A water feature
Substitute “water fountain”
and flowers in the stark center of the prison created an image of hope, but the news that the KMT was going to take over the park tarnished that image. Since 2008, the KMT’s Council of Cultural Affairs has begun a campaign to erase this memorial and other unpleasant reminders of their unsavory past. Instead of a museum honoring the victims of the White Terror, the old detention center is now an art center.
Hardly more than a month after returning from Taiwan, I learned that former President Chen Shui-bian was arrested and taken from his home in handcuffs. He was subsequently found guilty for of illegally sending money
out of the country. The truth of the charges against Chen may never be known because his trial was fraught with irregularities as acknowledged and protested by international legal scholars. Chen’s greatest sin as far as the KMT and Beijing are concerned, and that for which I am convinced he received a life sentence, is was his unapologetic advocacy for a free and independent Taiwan.
The conviction of Chen and what appears to be the not- so- subtle handing over of Taiwan over to Beijing by the current KMT government is not the only surprise I have received since I saw Santa’s smirk in the window on that December night in 2003.
With Ma as President and the KMT in full control of the government again, Dr. Peng is out of a job. At the age of eighty-eight, he is now retired with time to write his memoirs. Since my visit to Taiwan in 2003, Peter and I have stayed in regular contact. He has been kind enough to read and comment on this manuscript.
When drafting the account of the Abe affair that resulted in our arrest, Peter and I discussed at length whether it had been a set up by the KMT, or whether there had been a plan by supporters of Taiwanese independence outside to send Hsieh the potassium chlorate for me to pass on to Hsieh and the plan wasthat was discovered by the authorities. I discounted the latter possibility because I couldn’t believe that supporters of Taiwan independence would send me the material without mine or Hsieh’s consent.
Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 25