On June 5, 1950, when I first entered the front yard at No. 25 Fuxing Road in Taichung, the tree outside the vestibule was in full bloom, as if it were festooned with lanterns to welcome us. The approximately 120-square-foot tatami-floored house was divided into two small rooms. Beyond the portico was a spacious garden, at one end of which was a large banyan tree with air roots that descended to the ground. I fell in love with the new house at once.
I was six months pregnant at the time. I bore my first son on September 9 at Zhang Yaodong’s gynecology and obstetrics clinic. Owing to the protracted labor, which lasted into a second night, I fell into a coma. My mother, who was by my side, cried in fright and called my name, just as my uncle had done for her at Hankou. She snatched my life back from the hands of death. The doctor used obstetric forceps to deliver the eight-pound baby. I couldn’t walk for about twenty days.
When my baby was about three months old, my mother had to return to Taipei, because my brother’s wife had had her second child at the end of December.
One evening, several days after my mother left, Yuchang still had not come home. The house was dark and cold. I dared not stay inside, probably because of debility, so I took the baby and sat on a stool outside the door. The house faced the street—Fuxing Road was large, and there were many pedestrians and people on bicycles passing by.
Thirty Railways Administration houses stretched from the switching yard to the sugar factory. I sat by the door until nine o’clock, when Liao Chunqin, a colleague of my husband’s in Communications and Signal, passed by. He had no idea that I was sitting outside because I was afraid, and told me, “Today the division chief took us to the Fazi River, which was swollen, to make some emergency repairs on the electric line. Half of the bridge foundation had been washed away, so the division chief tied the electrical wire to his waist and took several of us crawling out over the ties hanging in the air to prop up more wires. One by one, inch by inch, we climbed, and got out with our lives!”
Shortly thereafter, Yuchang’s tall, thin frame appeared out of the darkness beneath the first streetlight. I wept with joy, and the hungry baby also cried. He trotted across the street and with a hug pulled us inside. He too was crying and said, “I’m back. That’s all that matters. Quick, prepare some formula for the baby.”
My married life was filled with all sorts of railway disasters until 1985, when Yuchang retired. In nearly forty years, with all the typhoons, mountain torrents, and earthquakes, he had to rush to disaster scenes and direct emergency repairs. Midnight phone calls still quicken my heartbeat. I often had to shake him awake and watch as he put on his heavy raincoat and rushed out into the stormy weather. Then I would be worried all through the night until he called to say he was okay.
Actually, before Yuchang retired, he was rarely at home after a natural disaster or a railroad accident. The railroads that served all of the ten major development projects were his responsibility. In his office were clean clothes and a travel bag so that if a call came in, he could rush off to Kaohsiung or Hualien. How long would he be away? No one knew. When the Su-hua Line was being expanded, he sat on a bench in the engineer’s car so he could see the work on the railroad bed. If a tunnel collapsed, it had to be excavated, so he wouldn’t be home for days at a time. During holidays, he was even busier and couldn’t rest. Chen Denian, our neighbor on Lishui Street in Taipei, was also an electrical engineer and in the five years he served as director, he was never once home for the New Year. On New Year’s Eve, he would take a slow train along the line to express his sympathy and solicitude for the railway workers who couldn’t be at home for the holiday. Just before his wife fell ill and passed away, a key juncture in the electrification of the railroad occurred and he had to be on site to bolster morale instead of by his wife’s sickbed. I am filled with sympathy and respect for all engineers in the world.
MY FOREVER WANDERING FATHER
Twenty days after we moved to Taichung, dramatic changes suddenly occurred in the world outside: the Korean War exploded. U.S. President Truman announced that the Seventh Fleet was being dispatched to help defend Taiwan, to check any potential attack on the island and maintain its neutrality. Following this, the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and land forces joined the war (Seoul had already fallen) to keep North Korean troops from crossing the 38th parallel and attacking South Korea. At the end of July, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Asian Allied Forces, visited Taiwan and received an enthusiastic welcome. A year later, he was dismissed and returned to the United States, where the great American hero was welcomed by seven million people in New York. President Chiang, after retreating in defeat to Taiwan and several difficult years, once again rose to a partnership in the nations allied against communism; not only was security safeguarded but also counterattacking the Communists was being considered. Taiwan at that time had a population of about 10 million (in 1946, statistics from the Department of Civil Affairs put it at 6,330,000); the population of mainland China in 1954 was 656,630,000. How was there to be a counterattack?
On August 4 of the same year, Chen Lifu, who had been in charge of Kuomintang (KMT) Party affairs since Nanjing was named the capital after the Northern Expedition, was ordered to attend the annual World Conference for Moral Rearmament in Switzerland in 1950. After the conference, he went into self-exile in America, where he raised chickens on a farm in New Jersey (until 1970, when he retired to Taiwan). At the meeting of the Central Reform Committee of the KMT government, convened two days after he left, the cadres unanimously expelled the brothers Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu, replacing them with people from the Political Study Clique or the China Youth Corps and choosing Chen Cheng to serve as premier in the Executive Yuan. Chiang Ching-kuo appeared officially responsible for the discipline and training of cadres and other loyalty and intelligence work. In the process of reviewing and discussing the military defeat, it was determined that the main reasons were betrayal by the military and dissatisfaction among the people incited by the Communists, and that a rigorous anti-Communist and antiespionage network had to be developed to consolidate President Chiang’s power as leader.
In the early days on Taiwan, the biggest organization of Legislative Yuan members was the Reform Club, with around 170 members (more than thirty members of the Legislative Yuan came from the northeast), convened by Chen Lifu, Xiao Zheng, Zhang Daofan, Cheng Tianfang, Gu Zhengding, Shao Hua, and Chi Shiying for the promotion of democracy, rule of law, human rights, and freedom in the hope that the KMT might take the path of democracy. After Chen Lifu went into exile and lived abroad, some people entered Chen Cheng’s cabinet and became full-time members of the Reform Club of the Legislative Yuan, occasionally criticizing the administration of the martial law system.
In the Legislative Yuan, Chi Shiying openly opposed increasing the price of electricity in order to increase military expenditures at the end of 1954. President Chiang was furious and had him stripped of party membership. This was a huge story at the time and the Taiwan media naturally had misgivings, but the Hong Kong World News, which had more of an international impact, printed a story with the headline “Chi Shiying Expelled from the KMT?” that held that since the KMT could not tolerate a legislator who had served loyally for twenty years, it was no more than an ignorant dictatorship. Furthermore, if Chiang Kai-shek couldn’t tolerate Chi Shiying, it was not solely due to his opposition in the Legislative Yuan but because, as editor of Time and Tide, he had more of an international perspective and his words were infused with free thought and respect for the individual, and he had no respect for martial law as a way of ensuring Taiwan’s security.
On New Year’s Day 1955, the Taiwan Power Company, as directed by the Legislative Yuan, raised the price of electricity by 32 percent. Naturally, the Legislative Yuan would approve the increase, and the political life of Chi Shiying, who had opposed it, was like the head of a revolutionary in the old days—it was chopped off and hung on the city wall!
At home, my fifty-five-year-old father read a
nd entertained visitors unperturbed, and when the visitors became fewer, he read more. When he had to attend a meeting, he would energetically catch the bus for the office. Laughing at himself, he’d say that the smaller his house became, the bigger the buses grew. For more than ten years, the people who kept him under surveillance were regularly outside the door, never giving thieves a chance to break in. My father never used his position to do business or buy an estate. Fortunately, he still had his salary from the Legislative Yuan, so didn’t have to worry about household expenses. My mother stuck with him through all the ups and downs, living a simple life. She never owned a single piece of jewelry.
Leaving the KMT in this way was a kind of liberation for him. At the age of twenty-eight, he had entered the party because of common interest and purpose, and he had devoted all his energies to it throughout his best years. At that time, he had expanded his love of home to encompass the country and the people, fighting the Japanese to save the nation. Who could have foreseen that in three short years after victory he would lose everything? How could the Zhejiang politicians at the side of Chiang Kai-shek understand the unique pain of the northeast? How could Chi Shiying’s lifetime of ideals exist amid the honor, wealth, and position of this little capital?
However, in a case of ruptured relations, a gentleman never uses abusive language. My father respected Chairman Chiang’s leadership during the War of Resistance and would support him to the end, and to the end of his days always referred to him as Mr. Chiang. In discussing politics in Time and Tide, he always focused on the issue, not the people. He still valued friendship, justice, and good manners in the political arena. Many of his students from Tongzhe Middle School in Shenyang, Whampoa Military Academy, the Political Academy, and the Police Academy, and quite a few students from the Northeast Sun Yat-sen Middle School came to Taiwan and worked in education, the party, politics, and the military. My father, along with Lei Zhen, Xia Taosheng, Li Wanju, Wu Sanlian, Xu Shixian, Guo Yuxin, and Gao Yushu, got together and planned to establish a new political party. In 1960, after Lei Zhen was imprisoned for the “Free China” case, several dozen senior members of the Reform Club of the Legislative Yuan publicly stated, “Please inform the authorities that if Chi Shiying is implicated, we will not keep silent.” This perhaps had the effect of keeping my father out of jail. Liang Surong, who was only thirty-four at the time, in an article titled “Chi Shiying During His Time in the Legislative Yuan” (in Interviews with Chi Shiying) stated that this action “expressed the close comradeship among early political figures, something that will never be forgotten.”
Liang Surong (1920–2004) secretly joined the KMT in Shenyang at the age of twenty-four and, under the cover of being a lawyer, engaged in underground anti-Japanese work. Jailed by the Japanese, he was released two years later after victory, and the following year he was elected to the Legislative Yuan as representative of the northern region of Liaoning Province. Soon thereafter, the northeast fell and he took the seven members of his family, including his aged mother and young children, to Taiwan. He and my father were very close, and he was deeply involved in politics. However, he was a man with a passion for justice and ideals and served as defense attorney in the Lei Zhen treason case, which put him in the spotlight at home and abroad. Although Lei Zhen was sentenced to ten years in prison, Liang had defended him with great composure on the principles of freedom and human rights before a hundred people, including Chinese and foreign reporters, in the courtroom, and wrote a new page in the history of Taiwan’s legal system. Later he served as defense attorney for Professor Peng Mingmin, who was not a party member, and assisted him in leaving Taiwan for the United States. He stood up for human rights in the legal system with courage, wisdom, and nobleness, displaying the incorruptible fortitude of an intellectual. Unfortunately, Peng Mingmin returned to Taiwan after the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party and denied that Liang Surong had provided him with any assistance, on account of Liang’s position of attempting to reform the KMT from within. After the start of the debate on reunification or independence, Liang became their enemy.
When Liang finished his term as speaker of the Legislative Yuan and retired and established the Council for Cross-Strait Peaceful Reunification under his own name, he was already seventy-five and had no thought of personal gain or loss. He was loyal to a lifetime of political beliefs to which he and his friends had dedicated themselves. There was no way he would believe the Communists, and he called for peace across the strait, even in illness, hoping to assist in establishing a peaceful world of democracy, freedom, and widespread enjoyment of human rights. This was also the great affection that evolved from a half century of longing for his homeland in the northeast. Whether it was his tall and robust body or his resonant voice, he always made me think of a heroic man riding his horse over thousands of miles of the open spaces of his homeland: “blue the sky, vast the land, the grass blown low by the wind and there to see the sheep and cattle.”
It takes more than one cold day to form three inches of ice. My father’s dissatisfaction with Chiang Kai-shek began with the crisis in the northeast after victory. The history and ethnic background of the length and breadth of the northeast is inextricably linked with China’s two-thousand-year history of vicissitudes. Around the time of the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century, Russia with a shared border of a thousand miles and neighboring Japan across the sea thought to take the land. Prior to launching the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1931, the Japanese knew that they had to kill Zhang Zuolin and his top generals if they were to invade and occupy the northeast, because Zhang’s power was based on the “wisdom” best understood by the feelings of the people and had preserved peace in the area for twenty years. Authority was concentrated in his person, and as long as he lived, the Japanese had no hopes of taking Shenyang, much less the entire northeast!
Victory over Japan came too quickly, and perhaps Chiang Kai-shek did not have enough time to think much about it before sending Xiong Shihui to be the head of the field quarters to handle the huge task of the handover of the northeast. In addition to being totally inexperienced in such matters, Xiong also lacked political style—even in the military, he was not a learned general—with his highest office having been chairman of Jiangxi Province, where he had helped Chiang Ching-kuo attack the Communists in the south of Jiangxi and thereby had earned the trust of the Chiang family. He had probably only seen the vast borderland of the northeast on a map, so because he had no knowledge about or feeling for the place, this hasty or selfish move planted the seeds of tragedy.
For those who knew the northeast, Chiang’s attitude toward disposing of the situation there at such a critical moment only spelled disaster.
When Xiong first started, he kept his distance from members of the anti-Japanese underground, who had been under the command of the Northeast Association of the Central Party Headquarters, to avoid any misunderstandings with the Russians who had arrived first to take possession from the Japanese. In the spring of 1946, Chiang Ching-kuo, in the position of special diplomatic envoy to the northeast, sent a telegram to Chiang Kai-shek privately from Changchun and reported that Northeast Party Headquarters could not be restrained in their anti-Communism, and that this was affecting Chinese-Russian foreign relations (signed “your son, Ching-kuo”). Chiang Kai-shek in a telegram ordered Command Headquarters to arrest all those who could not be controlled and send them to Chongqing. Command Headquarters turned the matter over to my father to deal with. The members of the underground who had for the past twenty years held to the Three Principles of the People and fought the Japanese to restore the country were entirely confused upon receiving these orders in their widely scattered and distant revolutionary bases. They didn’t understand why, after the bitterly awaited victory, they had to stand by and watch as the Russians took control of their homeland, even raping, killing, and taking prisoners. After the Russians left, the troops sent to the northeast by the central government had no sympa
thy for the long-suffering people.
In “An Interview with Chi Shiying,” the start of handover going sour is discussed in the following words:
I could see that Xiong Shihui was a petty bureaucrat and not a statesman, clever and tricky, with absolutely no understanding of the northeast. The troops sent to the northeast by the central government were all, with the exception of those of Sun Liren, cocksure and cruel. Xiong was entirely incompetent and incapable of cooperating with Du Yuming and Sun Liren. The civil and military officials sent to the northeast by the central government were all corrupt and, seeing how rich the northeast was, twisted the law to obtain bribes, distorted facts to serve their own ends, and even treated the local people as if they were colonial subjects, till discontent was widespread.… The biggest political shortcoming was being unable to take in the Manchukuo army, leaving them to pursue their own goals and giving the Communists the upper hand. Lin Biao was able to utilize the material and human resources of the northeast along with the Japanese and Manchukuo weapons captured by the Soviet military to form the Fourth Field Army, which fought all the way from the northeast to Guangzhou and Hainan Island. It is said that to this day (1968) many of the local officials in Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong, and Guangxi were in the Fourth Field Army from the northeast. We don’t use our own people but let others use them, which is kind of distressing. Our party affairs in the northeast in those days (mostly focused on anti-Japanese underground activities) were conducted admirably. I think if people such as those could have been summoned to serve locally, the Communists never would have arisen in the northeast. In the past, the organizational strength of the Communists in the northeast was trifling. Even as early as the days of the Zhangs, father and son, the Communists were never treated with leniency. In Beiping, Zhang Zuolin had raided the Russian embassy and killed Li Dazhao. Even the Japanese when they invaded China were against the Communists, and Manchukuo carried out Japanese orders.… Up until we recovered the northeast, the Communists had no strength there and only gained the upper hand with the support of Russia. The main reason for the fall of the northeast was no doubt the support of Russia. It must also be admitted that the government didn’t use the right people and adopted the wrong means. Especially after victory, all the people of the northeast, regardless of gender or age, all leaned toward the central government. If the central government had shown more warmth and utilized the locals, they would have been more than happy to work for the nation.
The Great Flowing River Page 32