Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Read online

  In my head, the question about the morality or immorality of the use of violence was still not resolved. Peter had rightly pointed out that we had important work to do that didn’t require an answer to the question. Because one man listened and brave people were willing to take risks, that important work could now go forward.

  Chapter Thirteen

  An Impossible Project Born

  If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

  —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

  After the trip to Ali Shan and the assassination of Dr. King, I was content doing, as Peter called it, “the work we can do”—the occasional distribution of packets, arranging meetings of visitors with Peter, and making the final arrangements for the distribution of aid to families. Part of the work I could do was to teach at the seminary, and I was discovering how I loved to teach. Each day in class seemed to validate my sense of the call to be a teacher. For the most part, my students and the non-missionary faculty were Taiwanese.

  The fact that I was teaching in Mandarin rather than Taiwanese—the language used in most classes, worship, faculty meetings, and student gatherings—was a bit of an anomaly. Chiang’s government had declared Mandarin to be the official language of the island; it was the required language of educational institutions. The Presbyterian church was engaged in a running battle with the government on its insistence on using Taiwanese. There were periodic raids by security officers at churches and the denominational headquarters to confiscate and destroy church material in Taiwanese. The PCT refused to acquiesce. It was a continuing struggle and was not just about pride, I sensed, but also about identity. The students seemed to give me a pass because they knew I was Methodist, and Methodist missionaries were required to learn Mandarin; they were less forgiving toward a couple of older Presbyterian missionaries who had earlier experience on the Mainland and didn’t speak Taiwanese.

  The first class I taught at the seminary was New Testament Greek. The regular teacher left to study abroad, and I was assigned to teach the class. After all, on my resume there was that year of teaching Greek at SMU six years earlier. When I thought about it, the prospect was almost laughable. I was teaching Greek in Mandarin to native-speaking Taiwanese using an English text.

  In the summer of 1968 I was not only preparing to teach a full load in the fall—ecumenics, history of Western civilization, and the history of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—but I was also sent as a delegate by the seminary to a month-long meeting in Hong Kong with church history teachers from seventeen other seminaries throughout Southeast Asia. We enjoyed a seminar with the dean of mission historians from the University of Chicago, R. Pierce Beaver, but our main purpose was to organize a professional society of church history and begin the organizational work for a Southeast Asia graduate school of theology with courses to be offered in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia.

  The month was a heady experience that made me even more excited about teaching. When I got back to Taiwan, some sober realities diminished the exhilaration. Judith had suffered a miscarriage and had been taken by the McKeels to their home to recuperate. And now they were leaving for Wayne’s new assignment in Bolivia. Our house was ready at the seminary, and the principal was anxious for us to get moved in. We needed to make the move before the semester started in mid-September.

  One night in early September of 1968, Gene Ethridge was at our house in Shih-lin for dinner with Peter. Had they not been good friends and regulars at the house, we wouldn’t have been entertaining guests. The house was in chaos with boxes everywhere as we prepared for the move up the mountain. But these two were more like family than guests. Gene was a missionary of the Presbyterian Church U.S. from Georgia who was assigned to work with university students. His irreverence toward most things “missionary” and the propaganda of the KMT drew us together. What he lacked in Taiwanese—he was assigned a short term and worked in English—he made up for by his identification with the students. He was open, and they trusted him. Soon after we became friends, he began distributing packets and helping plan the family aid project.

  “I had dinner out two nights ago,” Peter said as we ate. “I was entertained by an official from the Investigative Bureau at a special house they have for such affairs.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “After the dinner, the one in charge smiled and said, ‘You know, you could have an accident any time and be killed.’” Peter paused and then went on, “I think they are planning to kill me. I have a friend with connections in the Investigative Bureau who says that they actually have a plan for me to have an ‘accident.’”

  We didn’t speak and waited for Peter to go on. Peter had told us of other encounters and veiled threats, but this time he seemed to take it more seriously. He tried to lighten the mood by changing the subject, but the rest of us were stuck on the threat.

  Gene had an evening English class on the other side of Taipei, so at half past seven he excused himself, mounted his Vespa motor scooter, and headed down the lane. Not five minutes later there was an urgent knock at the gate. Gene pushed his scooter inside the gate, looked back down the lane, and then he motioned me to lock the gate. He said nothing as he pushed me back inside the house.

  In the light I could see that his face had gone pale.

  “When I got to the end of the lane,” he said, almost gasping for breath, “there were seven or eight gray suits [secret police]. I turned right to go up to the main road, and there were eight or ten more.”

  “Did they stop you?” I asked, feeling a little breathless myself.

  “No, I didn’t have my helmet on because I was about to light a cig. I think they saw that I was a foreigner and didn’t stop me. They must be here for Peter!” he blurted out.

  “No one followed me here. I’m sure of that,” Peter said with less confidence than usual.

  “There’s no other reason why all of them would be down there. It’s the only way in here and the only way out,” Gene said.

  “What do we do?” I asked the others. “Maybe they followed him to the area but lost him before he came down the lane,” I continued without waiting for an answer. “If that’s the case, they will simply go house to house until they get to us.”

  “I will leave,” Peter said. “If they don’t know which house I’m in, maybe you won’t be arrested, too. If they knew of your relationship to me, they would have already been here.”

  Peter reached for his coat, but Gene stopped him.

  “Our only chance is for you to ride out on the scooter with me,” Gene said. “They didn’t stop me before. Maybe if you wear the helmet and your raincoat, they won’t stop us.”

  “I can’t allow you to take that kind of chance,” Peter said.

  “It’s not up to you this time, Peter,” Gene said looking to Judith and me for confirmation.

  “He’s right,” I said. “It’s our one chance and we’ve got to take it.”

  I picked up Peter’s raincoat, which he hadn’t worn because it wasn’t raining, and helped him put it on. We said good-bye not knowing when or if we would see either of them again.

  “If I don’t call you within an hour,” Gene said, “you’ll know that we didn’t get through, and then you can…hell! I don’t know what you do then. Whatever it is, do it.”

  Before opening the gate, Peter put on the large plastic helmet with the visor down. Gene cranked the scooter and the engine made its putt-putt start. Peter threw his leg over the back and sat behind Gene, who took Peter’s arms and pulled them around his waist. As soon as they were through the gate, I closed and locked it, not daring to peek to see what would happen at the other end of the lane. That would have been a foolish risk. If they were stopped, there was nothing we could do.

  Although the night was cool, I was drenched in a nervous sweat waiting for another knock at the gate. In low voices, we talked about what we would do if they didn’t get through and they didn’t fi
nd us. We would call the U.S. Embassy, we said, to file a report about Gene. We would find a way to get word to Mrs. Peng. If Fox was still in Taipei, we would call him. But we knew if they were stopped, there would be no fix for Peter.

  We talked for what seemed like hours, but twenty minutes after they left, the phone rang.

  “It’s okay!” Gene said when he recognized my voice answering the phone. “We’re fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And he hung up.

  I don’t think either Judith or I had ever been as emotionally spent, not even after that night at Peter’s house. I couldn’t even imagine what Peter and Gene went through.

  “We’ve got to get him out of the country!” one of us said, but it was what both of us were thinking. We weren’t the only ones.

  “I don’t know why they didn’t stop us,” Gene said the next day when we met in town. “We passed within five feet of several of them. They just looked at us through those damn dark glasses that some of ‘em wear at night—the dumbasses. I waved at them while I was trying to keep from peeing in my pants.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t followed?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so, but I guess you can’t be sure.”

  “What about Peter?” I asked.

  “He had me drop him off in front of a large hotel on Chung Shan North Road where there were a lot of people going in and out. He said he would take a taxi from there. I didn’t think he was going to stop shaking my hand thanking me.”

  “We’ve got to get him out of Taiwan!” Gene said with almost the same words Judith and I had used the night before. “I don’t know how we can do it, but we’ve got to find a way.”

  A couple of days later, I was chatting with a Mainlander neighbor whose kids often played in the lane with Elizabeth.

  “There were a lot of men in gray suits around here a couple of nights ago,” I said, fishing for information.

  “Oh,” he said, laughing, “they were special security people charged with guarding the president. There have been some burglaries in the area and since we are so close to his residence it was a major security concern. They caught the burglars.”

  That knowledge did nothing to diminish the determination we made that night to get Peter out. It occurred to me how the woman who accused us of hubris on the papers project would fall down laughing at the thought that a couple of missionaries with no relevant experience might attempt to engineer the escape of one of Chiang’s chief threats from this locked-down state. I didn’t have time to think about our audacity; convincing Peter he had to leave was the first problem.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Making It Happen

  Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

  — St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226)

  The next time we met, I told Peter about our conversation with Gene and how we were in agreement that he needed to leave Taiwan. We recalled how he had received invitations from both the University of Michigan and McGill University to come and teach in their institutions, only to have the authorities warn him not even to apply for an exit permit. To do so “would only embarrass our government,” they told him. We knew they would not let him leave legally.

  During the fall of 1968 we often discussed the possibility of his escaping the island. Sometimes he would say that he wasn’t willing to leave Taiwan. He had a responsibility to his country and he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving his family behind. At other times he would allow us to make the case for why he should leave—pent-up as he was, he couldn’t exercise leadership and, most important, they were likely to kill him, in which event he would be no good to his country or his family. Although we had known Peter now for more than two years and saw each other almost weekly, I suspected that he harbored doubts that these well-meaning friends of his were capable of such a feat. If he did, he was not alone. Sometimes I would wake up at night and wonder what kind of fantasy I was having to think we might actually create a plan that could be successful. The awful reality, I would remind myself, was that if we didn’t get him out, he was going to be murdered.

  The prospect of his assassination did not stop me from thinking about the long-term consequences if we were successful in getting him out. Outside, he would no doubt provide leadership for Taiwanese abroad who wanted independence, those who were a part of the different organizations advocating it and those who weren’t. But for how long could he be away from Taiwan and still expect to return as the leader he was when he left? Five years? The longer he was out of the country, the more remote the chances that he could lead the Taiwanese people would become. And then I would ask who the hell I thought I was asking these questions. I didn’t have a clue about the answers. Besides, for me and the others involved, the real possibility of his being murdered trumped all of those speculations.

  We didn’t talk about escape every time Peter came to the house. It was too heavy, especially when we didn’t have any good answers. But at every opportunity, I talked with foreign friends I could trust. In January 1969, Mark and Jenny Thelin came up with their toddler Karl to stay overnight with us at the seminary. Mark was a professor of sociology at Tunghai University in Taichung and had been there for many years. He had met Peter through George Todd in 1963. When Peter was arrested in 1964, Mark visited the Peng family whenever he came to Taipei.

  The purpose of our meeting was to brainstorm ways that Peter might leave Taiwan unnoticed. Since Peter did not arrive at the house until after midnight, the conversation took most of the rest of the night. We walked through what seemed like endless scenarios in which he would leave on a fishing boat from Kaohsiung or Taichung or on a freighter from Keelung. The problem with these possibilities was that neither Peter nor we had any reliable personal connections with the people who owned boats or were in positions to get him onto a ship. We had no doubt that there were people who could be bribed, but the search for those individuals seemed to expose the plan to unacceptable risks. Because of the level of security at the airports, we didn’t consider the possibility of his escaping by plane.

  Going out by boat seemed to be the only possibility. And if it was, then we had to find a way to make it work. We agreed to work on it. Mostly, that meant Peter had to try to think of any contacts he had with whom he dared to broach the subject. An hour or so before daylight, when we ended the evening, we congratulated ourselves on clarifying the possibilities. I wondered if we had not succeeded in convincing Peter of the futility of any attempt.

  Within days of the meeting with Mark, Judith or I read a story in a news magazine about how a man escaped from East to West Germany. This is the way it worked: A person from West Germany crossed legally into East Germany for a visit. While there he gave his passport to the person wanting to escape. The East German used the passport with his own picture inserted to go through the checkpoint to the West. That was on a Friday night. The West German then went to his embassy in East Berlin on Monday morning when the offices were opened after the weekend and reported his passport lost or stolen. He was given a replacement and returned safely to West Germany.

  For the first time since we started talking about the escape, I felt an excitement that this might actually work with Peter. When we next met, I thought I sensed a glimmer of excitement in Peter, too.

  Together, the three of us discussed what would be required to make this work.

  “The first and biggest question is who we can get to come into Taiwan and take this risk with their passport,” I said.

  “It has to be a nationality that you can pass for, Peter,” Judith said.

  “It would have to be a foreigner, not someone with a Taiwan passport,” Peter said. “Some Taiwanese independence activists in Japan might be willing to help. I can ask them.”

  “The second thing we will need,” I said, “is money.”

  “Once we hear back from Japan and decide if this is what we’re going to do,” Judith said, “we can contact our friends who are now back in the U.
S.—George Todd, Don Wilson, Dick and Leigh Kagan, Gene Ethridge, and Sid and Judy Hormell. I believe they can get the money.”

  “The third thing is a place for Peter to go,” I said.

  “I can’t go to the United States,” Peter said, “at least not right away. I don’t think they would guarantee me political asylum because it would upset their KMT friends too much,” he said, laughing. “Since I have been corresponding with people at Amnesty International in Sweden for several years, I can see if they can arrange asylum for me.”

  Over the next months, Peter corresponded with Japan and Sweden. We corresponded with our friends in the U.S. Since we had to send mail out by way of Hong Kong and receive responses once a month from there, the slow pace was maddening. Peter didn’t have to wait too long for a positive response from Japan. They would find a Japanese national who, in exchange for a ticket and a few hundred dollars for a weekend in Taipei, would come and “lose” his passport. In May, Peter received a letter from Sweden saying that they were sure he would be welcome there. In July he received another letter confirming that he would be granted political asylum if he made it as far as Stockholm.

  Before he completed his term and left Taiwan in the summer of 1969, Gene Ethridge promised that he would see that the money for the escape was raised. On October 3, I received a letter from Gene through Bud in Hong Kong saying that he had attended a meeting in New York that included the Kagans, the Youngs, Don Wilson, Feli Carrino, and the Hormells. Gene said he was not sure enough of the security of the mail system to write about what they had decided to do. He said they would get the job done.