“Warmth” in the heart is very important to the people of the northeast; it is a place of severe cold where the people are extremely warmhearted. It is also a place where people will fight with their lives and be bathed in blood for the sake of justice. After Zhang Xueliang and the Xi’an Incident of 1936, Chiang Kai-shek did not trust people from the northeast and relied upon Xiong Shihui from Jiangxi to handle the return of the region. The government, lacking foresight in administering the northeast, ensured that the military might of the Communist army far surpassed that of the Nationalist Army. One of the three greatest decisive battles between them in the northeast was the Battle of Western Liaoning (also known as the Battle of Liaoning and Shenyang). In fifty-two days from September until November 1949, the fighting cost the Northeast Field Army of the Communist People’s Liberation Army fewer than 70,000 casualties to annihilate and reorganize more than 470,000 Nationalist troops, as well as to occupy the northeast. Winter came during the course of the battle, so was it any wonder that troops from Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hunan should suffer? Wasn’t the one condition left after victory to save your skin and hightail it home? Had the soldiers who garrisoned many places in the vast, sparsely populated lands of the northeast, which grew colder by the day, ever dreamed of such a day? Not one soldier’s grave was to be seen in the boundless land of white snow and black soil, because they became “enemies” of the usurper.
The northeast fell in November 1948. My father sent a telegram to his comrades in the anti-Japanese underground telling them to get out and not stay in a Communist-controlled area, as there was no future there. However, most of his comrades were unable to get out, first of all because they had no place to go, and second, because many had fled their homes after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and had been away for fourteen years. Having tasted the bitterness of exile combined with the difficulty in returning home, they were not willing to undergo the same thing a second time. Formerly, when someone from the northeast crossed the Yellow River, they already felt too far from home, and if they crossed the Yangtze, they felt as if they would never get home. Third, there were no planes flying south from their remote areas, so even if they were willing to leave, there just wasn’t the means. What happened to those who remained in their homeland? After all communications were cut, someone wrote a letter and said: “We have spent half our lives dying to recover our country. In those days you encouraged us by saying that with us there would be China, but having abandoned us despite the consequences, do you have peace of mind?”
My father followed the central government to Guangzhou and then went to Chongqing to attend a meeting of the Legislative Yuan. On November 28, 1949, a meeting of the standing members of the Party Central Committee was convened. Two tables of food were prepared for afterward. A somber mood prevailed as everyone ate because it felt as if they were disbanding. The following day, my father took the last plane to Taiwan. Just after arriving, he spent some time in the hospital due to lung problems. After surgery, he awoke from a nightmare in which a bloody head hanging on the city wall opened its mouth and asked him, “Who is going to take care of my wife and children?”
After twenty years of struggle, my father was now in his fifties. Disillusionment in his ideals filled him with sadness, but like a man, he refused to weep. After he settled peacefully in Taiwan, I could finally be certain that he would be around and there was nothing to keep me apart from my parents. Two years before he passed away, I was hospitalized due to a traffic accident and he came to see me, and actually cried when he saw me, injured like a wounded soldier. After that, his tear banks collapsed. I then understood the weight of his tears, the tremendous remorse and deep suffering in a man’s tears.
SWEAT AND TEARS SHED ON TAIWAN
The situation in Taiwan gradually stabilized in the 1950s, and the government in its early stages was able to improve life on the island (although the slogan for retaking the mainland was shouted for many years, few actually held such illusory expectations), and modernization of railway transportation was extremely important. During the Japanese occupation, all midlevel workers and above were Japanese. Before they were repatriated after the war, they told the 17,000 Taiwanese workers that Taiwan’s railroads would come to a standstill within six months. In those days, when a train arrived at or departed from a station, flagmen brandishing red and green flags had to be relied upon; between stations, the conductor’s skill and dexterity had to be relied upon in proper order. They were the heroes in the minds of all children. Electrical research and scientific technology aimed at replacing human labor were to be developed under the administration (in those days even traffic signals on city streets were not very common), but no one knew where to start. Chen Shuxi, a graduate of National Chiao Tung University and head of the transportation section, was a proud character whose most common expression to his subordinates was, “Do you understand?” He mentioned the central traffic control (CTC) system used by some Western railways, but no one had ever seen it. The meeting ended and everyone dispersed in silence.
The matter was perpetually on Yuchang’s mind after he returned to Taichung. CTC was a new concept in telecommunications engineering, and the only materials were available in the United States. I knew that Yang Junxian’s elder brother was teaching in the United States; perhaps he could help us acquire some materials. Few people had friends or relatives in the States in those days, something hard to imagine now.
I wrote a letter to Junxian in Taipei to ask if her brother could help us. Two or three months later a large, heavy parcel arrived at our door at 25 Fuxing Road. It brought the future employment prospects for Yuchang.
Junxian’s parcel contained the manual American Railway Signal Principles and Practices in more than ten volumes, published by the America Railroads Association. The fourth section included a detailed explanation of central traffic control, with charts and diagrams in 177 pages. Inscribed on the flyleaf was: “To Yuchang and Pang-yuan and our Nephew Siji on his third birthday. From Yilie and Junxian. August 14, 1953.”
The book was difficult to acquire. The new technology had been developed during World War II and was not available in Taiwan. Older Brother Yang had managed to purchase a copy for the purpose of academic research.
Overjoyed, Yuchang glanced through the first part. Excited, he jotted down some notes, and in order to further pursue research, he decided to translate the manual into Chinese so as to understand it more conclusively and comprehensively in its entirety. He believed that I would surely help him, so he gave me the introduction, the sections on the purpose of the new equipment, and the necessary conditions for the work to translate into Chinese; he took responsibility for the technological explanations, electrical circuits, and important diagrams relating to operations. Every day after work, we’d take care of household matters, get the children to bed (our second son, Sixian, was fifteen months old), and then discuss the translation for at least an hour. In approximately six months, we translated the book, including the more than 100 charts and diagrams, into 166 pages of Chinese.
Yuchang attended a meeting at the bureau and learned that they had already purchased the set of books about CTC from the American Railroads Association. However, it had not been determined who was to do the research, nor had a plan been drawn up. Of the twenty or thirty people in charge of the Communications and Signal Division, not one had been educated in fully automatic signaling. No one had heard of it before. It was said that after the war, the Japanese National Railway had installed a semiautomatic system with the assistance of the American occupation forces. After the start of the Korean War, Taiwan was paid to supply provisions, and the shipment of material goods from inland to the coast increased dramatically. The importance of the Railroads Administration also increased greatly, with a pressing need for modernized equipment.
The administration first sent Yuchang and others to Japan, which was followed by a fact-finding trip to the United States, led by Chen Denian, for observation and further study
. After 1954, plans were drawn up to install a CTC system based on the actual situation of Taiwan’s railroads, the first phase being the single-track line from Changhua to Tainan, a stretch of 142 miles, for the switches and signals at 27 stations, as detailed by Yuchang. The control section invited international bids. Ericsson of Sweden won, and the installation work commenced in 1957, starting in Changhua. One year before the start of work, the administration sent a number of those in the Communications and Signal Division to Sweden for training. Central Traffic Control, translated by Yuchang (published in 1959), was originally prepared for his own research interest and printed as a simple manual; it became required reading for all engineers. He went to Sweden to pick up the equipment to be installed. Those in charge at Ericsson found that Mr. Loh [Luo] had a thorough understanding of the system, was “able to carry on dialogue,” and was confident about the start of work on Taiwan’s railroads. Both sides were happy working together.
However, for the Swedish, Taiwan in 1956 was probably a mysterious as well as backward and undeveloped place, a jungle in Asia. They sent an engineer to Taiwan by the name of Mr. Jocobsson. While he was saying good-bye to his family at the airport before flying from Stockholm to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan, his mother cried as if she would never see him again. After having been in Taichung several months, he felt he could make a go of it and then sent for his wife. He said he could travel the world with only four hundred words of English. His wife knew more English than he did, and when she arrived in Taichung and found that I knew even more and could help them with everything, she was greatly relieved.
In those days, no one in Taichung (or all Taiwan, for that matter) used coal gas (or gas), but still used coal cakes with a diameter of seven or eight inches, in the tops of which many holes were drilled and which were placed in an earthen burner over which food was cooked. More well-to-do people cooked and heated water on charcoal stoves. Staffers at the Railroad Administration rented a small, newly built concrete Western-style house for the Jocobssons and hired an “English-speaking” maid, and bought the necessary furniture for them. They were taken to their new house in one of the pedicabs that had just recently replaced the rickshaws. I pointed out the pedicab stand at the entrance to the lane and even wrote my address on a slip of paper so that they could come to my home if they needed anything (that was in the days before phones were installed in the city).
That very evening Mr. Jocobsson took a pedicab and came to knock on our door. He asked how could he ever sleep with so many mosquitoes? The maid said they could not drink from the tap, but the big kettle of boiled water was too hot to drink and several bottles were needed to hold cold water. I gave him the mosquito nets from the guest rooms, along with several clean, empty rice wine bottles.
A few days later, it was Mrs. Jocobsson’s turn to take a pedicab and come to visit me. Shortly after sitting down, she started to cry. She said that every morning her husband set off for Changhua to work and didn’t get back till very late, and that she was terribly homesick. I found a lovely kitten and gave it to her, thinking the very cute little thing might be able to dispel her homesickness. I often went to take her for a walk, but the differences in culture and climate between Taiwan and Sweden were just too immense. For her it was a case of not having a single relative or friend around. She returned to Sweden after about six months.
Changhua station was the construction site for the railway to install the CTC and was about a twenty-minute drive from Taichung. In those days the civil servants and engineers used the earliest model jeeps with a canvas top produced by Yulong Company. Every morning Yuchang would go with Mr. Jocobsson and Assistant Section Chief Chen Ximing and would return in the evening. After the work started, the Chens moved to the railroad dormitory in Changhua. Work never ceased, not even on Sundays. Our three boys and I would ride in the canvas-topped jeep to the Chens’ place. We liked going to the empty carriages lying idle in the Changhua switching yard most of all. My children grew up with the Chens’ two boys and two girls. Mrs. Chen, nee Zhang Qiongxia, became the best of friends, and over fifty years, we shared in the births of our children and in raising them, worried our young heads over our husbands, and saw the results of their work upon which they concentrated so much thought and to which they dedicated so much energy. She took us to see her ancestral home in Taichung, her sister’s place in Xiluo, and the homes of many of colleagues in the Communications and Signal Division to share in eating food offerings for deities in religious festivals, and in this way we really came to understand the local customs and practices of Taiwan.
I, who to this day have never understood the difference between the positive and negative poles of a magnetic field, feel honored to have seen a group of CTC engineers, who accepted the technical challenge night or day, properly arranging the maze of electric circuits, climbing mountains, wading waters … to set up the earliest communications network for the modernization of Taiwan’s railways, sharing in their failures and successes, large and small. It was like going back to the days of the War of Resistance when everyone helped out with everything they had.
In 1959, the work entered its most difficult stage. The steel bridge over the Dadu River between Changhua and Taichung was knocked down by a typhoon, the city of Changhua was flooded, and the CTC primary machine room was threatened. Fortunately Yuchang had stayed behind in Changhua to push ahead with some work that evening. The August 7 flood was one of the worst typhoon disasters in the history of Taiwan, with the Dadu River basin awash in a vast expanse of water. Only three days later in the morning did the banks of the river reappear, and groups of engineers who raced against time making repairs could be seen coming and going on small wooden rafts.
Yuchang called me and said that the situation at the primary machine room was serious, and asked me to go get Mr. Jocobsson and another Swede by the name of Andersson, who was a circuitry expert, at their homes and bring them to the riverside, where a colleague from the Taichung Communications and Signal Division would ferry them to Changhua in a small boat. Also, I was to buy some bottled water and crackers and bring a flashlight and a change of clothes, because they would stay in Changhua until the water receded. I had to take care of this, because I had to explain to them in English the situation they were facing and I was the only one who knew where to go and whom to meet.
That morning I rode in the Yulong canvas-top jeep with the two very uneasy-looking Swedes to a point on the Dadu River that had recently been underwater, stepped onto a still loose embankment that had recently been constructed, and handed them over to the person there to meet them. I watched as the two engineers set off in that small wooden boat as it danced in the turbulent, turbid flood; they attempted to cut across the surging current, finally arriving at a dry place on the opposite bank, where they disembarked. The first thing I wanted to do was tell their weeping wives that they had safely made it across the river.
July 25 of the following year (1960) was a memorable day in the history of Taiwan’s railroads. Following a grand launching ceremony, the provincial chairman, the premier, or an official of that stature turned a knob and a train set off from Changhua Station to Huatan Station, four miles away, becoming the first train to travel under fully automated traffic control in all of Asia. The train pulled into Huatan Station, which had been decorated for celebration. Returning home, Yuchang said, the engineers who stood on the railroad tracks (the platform being too small) behind the ranks of officials had shed tears of joy. That evening they all got drunk celebrating.
However, the happy times didn’t last more than a day. The next morning, the dispatcher and the engineer in the central control room shouted at each other and everyone’s hearts seemed pressed under the fingers of the dispatcher. One false turn would set off a disaster, and the control board, which was lit up like the Milky Way, was more complicated than they had dreamed. They seemed to run along with the train each mile it traveled. They scarcely returned home at that time, and if they did, the phone would ring immed
iately. I frequently heard Yuchang shouting into the phone on the wall for railroad business: “How can he be so stupid! Tell him not to push any buttons. I’ll be right there!” Then he’d grab his raincoat, rush to the jeep, and speed on his way to Changhua. The only cars on the road in those days were his and those of the Highways Administration. Often the Highways Administration driver would stick his head out the window and ask if my husband had a death wish.
I took care of our three boys, the oldest nine, the youngest five. I had to teach during the day, prepare the class lessons at night, and correct homework. I lived like a spinning top, and if there was time to pray, I’d pray there’d be no accidents, because the cars and trains always seemed to be speeding on the verge of a disaster.
As expected, shortly after the large-scale launch, traffic control had reached Ershui Station, and a typhoon again destroyed the banks of the Dadu River that had been ruined during the flood of the previous year. Changhua was again inundated by a vast expanse of water, and the railroad was washed out in many places, the CTC equipment was dead, and all the passenger and freight trains were behind schedule. One military train was forced to stop at Shiliu Station in Douliu City (thirty miles from Changhua). It was a small station used specifically for loading gravel and had been washed away by the flood. Stranded in such a desolate place, the passengers suffered under the scorching sun for half a day without potable water. Impossible demands to get under way came via the phone on the train, and one officer said if they didn’t start, they’d use artillery and blow up the dispatcher’s office. But safety came first, and only at dusk did the passengers arrive at their nearby destination of Tanzi Station.
The Great Flowing River Page 33