Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 10

  There weren’t many places in the world where Harry had not been. He was a much sought-after speaker and quite a storyteller, especially about where he had been and what he had done. He had a smile that radiated compassion, and within a few years, it would make him one of the best-known Methodists in the world. After dinner, we sat on the only three padded chairs in our living room and talked. We listened with growing excitement as he told us what the MCOR was doing around the world. My ears perked up when he began talking about what they were doing in East Germany.

  “We are not allowed into the country, but we have our ways of making a difference there,” he said. “The fates of families of political prisoners in East Germany are deplorable. The state treats them as though they were guilty, too. There are probably no hungrier people anywhere in Europe than the families of political prisoners behind the Iron Curtain.”

  “What are you doing about it?” I said, hardly believing what I was hearing.

  “We have found ‘creative’ ways to get money into the country and into the hands of these suffering people.”

  “Harry,” I said, “we have found a similar problem here in Taiwan. There are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of political prisoners here, and the government treats their families as if they were guilty, just like you describe in East Germany. Do you think it would be possible for the MCOR to provide some funds to help these families?”

  I could tell from the expression on his face frozen in a tight grimace that I had asked the wrong question.

  “Of course not,” was his unsmiling reply.

  “Why?” I had the temerity to ask.

  “It would be illegal.”

  “But, didn’t you just tell me that the MCOR was smuggling money into East Germany?”

  “They are godless communists!” he said with emphasis.

  That ended the discussion and the evening.

  “I’ve got to get back to the hotel,” he said. “I’ve got an early flight to catch in the morning.”

  We walked in silence to the street at the end of our lane. He hailed a cab, gave instructions to the driver in passable Mandarin, and closed the door without saying good-bye.

  I walked back to the house in shock, still not believing what I had heard. It was okay to take illegal actions to get MCOR money to the families of political prisoners in a communist country, but not in anticommunist Taiwan. My regret at raising the question quickly turned to concern about who he would now tell about our proposal.

  It would have been easy for me to be cynical about church agencies after that night. But we had another visit from another denominational representative. A man who identified himself as DeWitt Barnett called the house one day. He said that a mutual friend suggested he get in touch with us when he came through Taiwan. We had many such calls, mostly from Methodists; this was the first from a Quaker. We arranged to meet him.

  Tall with slightly stooped shoulders as if from a lifetime of getting down to the level of other people, he looked out at us from behind his beard and mustache. Looking like a shabby college professor in his worn tweed jacket, DeWitt quickly put us at ease by his open and easy manner.

  “I’m the black sheep of my family,” he said with an impish grin. “I’m the only Quaker in the family.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Oh, do you have time to write down this title?” he asked with a laugh. “I’m supposed to say that I am the Quaker International Affairs Representative in East Asia for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). I promise I won’t ever say it again. I am based in Japan.”

  DeWitt had been born to missionary parents in Shanghai in 1917. His father had been the head of the YMCA there. His brother, Doak, was a leading scholar and government advisor on China. China was in DeWitt’s blood, but he came to us to talk about Taiwan. Not much conversation was necessary for us to decide to give him a set of the papers. He said he would read them carefully, and he did. In a couple of days, we scheduled a secret meeting with Peter.

  We spent a long evening hearing Peter tell his story and offer his perspective on Taiwan again.

  “I understand you were in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped there.” he said. He knew about it because we had told him.

  “I was actually on the outskirts of town. I was a student and recovering from the loss of my arm in a bombing raid.” Peter patiently explained the loss of his arm and the devastation in Nagasaki.

  “You were recently in prison, weren’t you?” DeWitt asked, switching the subject back to Taiwan. “It must have been very difficult for you and your family.”

  “I was sentenced to eight years, as was Wei; Hsieh was sentenced to ten. In a magnanimous gesture on the centennial of Sun Yat-sen’s death,” Peter said with obvious sarcasm, “the Generalissimo ordered my release and reduced Wei and Hsieh’s sentences by half. Wei will be released later this year.”

  “I receive the Amnesty International newsletter and understand that there are a lot of political prisoners here,” DeWitt said.

  “No one knows how many, not even the government,” Peter said. “Those in prison are tortured and live in inhumane conditions, but many of their families suffer almost as much as they do.”

  “Isn’t there something that could be done for the families?” DeWitt asked.

  “We want to help them,” Peter said, “but the government won’t allow it, so if anything is done it will have to be done secretly and at great risk.”

  “I would like to help. I would like to make a contribution now,” DeWitt said, pulling out his wallet.

  “We don’t have a way to help them yet,” Peter said.

  “If I could raise money in the U.S.,” DeWitt said, “could you get it into the country and to the people who need it?”

  “We can get it into the country, and we think we can get it to families who need it,” Peter said.

  The American Friends Service Committee was known for both its pacifism and its concern for human need. Still, DeWitt surprised us with his readiness to do something, something he knew to be illegal. I also wondered if the AFSC would be willing to give money on the terms we would have to have.

  “The money would have to come into Taiwan in U.S. currency,” I volunteered because we had already talked this through with Peter. “We will not be able to provide any kind of a paper trail for the use of the money. Records would be too dangerous to expect the courier to keep. The AFSC would only have our word that the money was actually getting to families.”

  “I think they will understand,” DeWitt said. “I’m going back to Philadelphia in a couple of weeks, and I will see what I can do.”

  After he left that night, we tried to restrain the excitement we all felt. In the back of my mind was the worry that, whatever DeWitt’s intentions, he might run into a bureaucratic brick wall in Philadelphia. But each of us felt there was something about the man that inspired confidence.

  Within a few weeks, word came from DeWitt through Hong Kong that the project had been approved and they were beginning to raise money for it. How and where should funds be sent?

  Chapter Twelve

  Idealist to Realist

  An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count.

  A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter.

  A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

  — Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986)

  Had the American Friends Service Committee heard some of the discussions I had with Peter, they might have questioned my commitment to nonviolence. Two years earlier, when we told Peter that we would do things that might get us arrested or deported, Judith and I had said that we would not be party to anything that would result in violence. I regarded myself as a spiritual child of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement wherein, as Dr. King often said, “the center of nonviolence is the principle of love.” As much as I wanted to believe that, I could never completely embrace pacifism. I often confessed the inabi
lity as a failure rather than a principle of conscience.

  My most important mentor in the seminary, albeit through the printed word, Reinhold Niebuhr, created that seed of doubt I could not shake, no matter how much I wanted to be true to Dr. King. Pointing to the reality of the coercion in nonviolence in how Gandhi’s boycott of British cotton resulted in the undernourishment of children in England, Niebuhr argued that “once the factor of coercion is ethically justified… we cannot draw any absolute line of demarcation between violent and nonviolent coercion.”[15] No matter the number of qualifications he put around it, and he put a lot, ultimately the line between violent and nonviolent coercion was not absolute.

  Each week, it seemed, brought new bad news about people being arrested or disappearing and new stories of torture from inside the prisons. What could end Chiang’s charade of Taiwan as “Free China” and the justification of martial law by the claim that the civil war was not over? With Taiwan’s growing importance to the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, the chances that the U.S. would be morally torn over supporting this dictator in Taiwan diminished.

  As 1968 unfolded, we continued with our plan of nonviolent actions, giving packets to interested visitors and arranging meetings with Peter and other dissident Taiwanese. We worked on a plan to receive and distribute money to the families of political prisoners. The more detailed the plan got for getting money into the country and distributed on island, the more it was clear that to make the plan work, others (foreigners and Taiwanese) would be at considerable risk. It was one thing to have a post office box in Hong Kong and put letters with people going to and coming from Taiwan; it was yet another to involve them in smuggling money.

  In the spring, a trip south to Ali Shan, an old Japanese resort high in the mountains in southern Taiwan, in the cherry blossom season sounded like the break we needed. The McKeels had suggested it. On April 2 Judith and the McKeels took the train south from Taipei. I taught my Monday classes in Tainan and headed north. We met in Chai-yi, where we boarded a small train on a narrow-gauge railroad built by the Japanese in 1912 for logging the area’s giant cedars.

  After several delightful days, on April 5 our party boarded the narrow-gauge railway for the trip back. We sat on hardwood benches for the six-hour trip down through three climate zones to reach Chia-yi.

  Somewhere approximately halfway down, there were two sets of tracks where trains coming up could pass those coming down. When the two trains stopped, the morning newspapers available in Chia-yi were distributed on the train coming down. I could manage speaking Chinese but my reading skills were limited. The only papers on the train were in Chinese, so I didn’t try to buy one. As people around me opened their papers to read, I saw that the front page consisted of one huge Chinese character I recognized as “wang,” the character for “king.” I wondered why the front page of a major newspaper would be covered with this character. Was there some important news about a king somewhere? My curiosity overcame my embarrassment at having to admit that I couldn’t understand the headline.

  “Please, sir,” I said in Chinese to a man sitting in front of me beside his wife and two children, “I do not understand the headline. Did a king die?”

  He turned around and looked at me.

  “It is your country’s Dr. King. He has been assassinated,” the man said.

  Then he opened the inside of the paper and pointed to two articles on page two.

  “Can you read?” he asked politely.

  I nodded my head. I could read the headlines well enough to know that there were race riots all over the United States. The second article was about an elementary school class somewhere that cheered when the teacher told them the news. The man shook his head as if he found the stories as hard for him to believe as they were for me to decipher.

  I shared the news with Judith, Jane and Wayne. Jane and Wayne were both from Tennessee. We all wept.

  At Chai-yi we boarded the tourist train for Taipei. There wasn’t much talk. The exhilarating beauty of the cherry blossoms at Ali Shan faded as I was preoccupied with thoughts about Dr. King. I wondered if the death of King was also the beginning of the death of the movement to bring about change by nonviolent means. Before his death, the voices of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale through the Black Panther Party had pronounced King’s nonviolent campaign dead and embraced violence as a means to get equality.

  Newton and Seale weren’t the only ones challenging the premise that nonviolence was moral and violence was immoral.

  Peter and I had earlier talked about whether King’s nonviolent approach would work in Taiwan.

  “It will not work here,” Peter said over and over. “You have to have some semblance of the rule of law for it to work. Even Gandhi had to have it in India. Here, they would just shoot us.”

  “Is violent revolution the only alternative?” I asked.

  “When one side has all of the power, armed insurrection is simply suicide,” he said, not as a principle but as a reality.

  I had asked Peter if he had read Niebuhr, and he said he hadn’t. I told him about how important Moral Man and Immoral Society had been for me. He said he would like to read it. He took my copy and within a couple of days he returned having not only read it but also having made three pages of typed notes to use in our conversation. He called attention to a footnote reference to Robert Briffault’s Rational Evolution:

  No resistance to power is possible while the sanctioning lies, which justify that power, are accepted as valid. While that first and chief line of defense is unbroken there can be no revolt. Before any injustice, any abuse or oppression can be resisted, the lie upon which it is founded must be unmasked, must be clearly recognized for what it is.[16]

  That is what Peter, Wei, and Hsieh had been trying to do in 1964, and it is what he was continuing now.

  “There aren’t any shortcuts to justice, are there?” I asked with some resignation apparent in my voice.

  “We are doing the right things now,” Peter said. “We are unmasking the lie on which this regime depends for its power.”

  “And the aid to the families?” I asked.

  “We must do that because they are suffering terribly and because we can help them,” he said.

  In Hong Kong, Bud agreed not only to receive and transmit mail to us, but he also agreed to do the same thing with money. He received the checks, cashed them, and exchanged them for U.S. currency in ten and twenty dollar bills. It was one thing to ask someone to carry letters; it seemed another to ask them to bring in illegal money. On several occasions Bud found reason to visit Taiwan and bring money. At no small risk to himself, he would put the bills in a money belt around his waist and not declare it when he came through customs. The problem was that we could not count on getting money with any regularity and we didn’t have a way yet to get the money to the families.

  Both of those problems were solved in the fall of 1968. Jim and Mary Ella Brentlinger, a missionary couple from Oregon, arrived in Taiwan in 1967 to begin language study. In the summer of 1968, Jim was assigned the job of field treasurer in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. For a while he went to Hong Kong for a week each month. At the end of 1968, they moved to Hong Kong, but Jim commuted back to Taiwan on the same schedule.

  When his assignment was announced in the summer of 1968, I met Jim outside the Taipei railroad station where we were free to walk and talk. I asked him if he would be willing to carry some mail to and from Hong Kong. He immediately agreed but said the less he knew about what he would be carrying the better. From then on, each month Jim would take what mail we wanted to send out and bring mail back, some of it money in envelopes carefully packed and sealed by Bud. His regular trips meant that we were able to count on a continual supply of funds.

  The second thing that happened to make our project feasible was that on September 20, after four years, Wei was released from prison. Peter arranged for us to meet him within a week of his release. He was one of our first visitors after moving into faculty housing on th
e seminary campus. When we met him, Peter had already talked to him about the family aid project, and he had volunteered to be the courier.

  Round-faced with heavy black eyebrows over thick glasses, Wei was short and stocky, not fat but muscular. My impression the first time he came to our house was of a kind and gentle man, not what I expected from a thirty-three–year-old who had resisted his inquisitors at every point, even challenging the court and his guards to kill him. While in prison, Wei kept himself in peak physical condition, jogging every time he got into the prison yard and continuing exercises in whatever kind of cell he was in.

  He was out of prison but was still followed by a couple of agents wherever he went. At least they tried. Wei treated it like a game. He would often take to the mountains for several hours of vigorous hiking or running, putting the physical stamina of his surveillance squad to the ultimate test. With his own joyful perversity, he was known to begin these jaunts on the last hour of his followers’ shift, delaying their return to headquarters by hours.

  On that first visit, Wei greeted us and then spoke to our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter standing across the room behind a chair.

  “Is your name Li-hwa?” he asked in Chinese.

  She nodded. Before long, Wei was sitting on the floor talking with her in Mandarin. He might have snuck in a little of his native Hakka, but if he did neither he nor Elizabeth said so. Not many weeks after that, he would be assisting me in translating my history lectures into Chinese.

  Before he left that first day, he told us that he was ready to take money to some families who were in desperate need of aid. He and Hsieh had gathered as much information about the location and situation of families as they could from the prisoners.

  After the first distribution, he brought back a written record of those to whom he had given money. We talked about it and agreed that records should not be made. Wei had discovered what we feared. Many of the families had moved on from where the loved ones in prison thought they were. And their situations were usually worse than the prisoners knew. He found only half of the families he sought, and a couple of them were too frightened to take money from him. The others, he said, expressed their gratitude. I found it hard to believe that Wei was willing to take the great risks involved in the distribution, knowing that if he were caught he would go back to prison and perhaps never come out. That never seemed to be a consideration to Wei.