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

  Peter spent the last twenty-four hours at the Heaths’ apartment. We and the Hoovers went home to sleep but were with Peter most of the rest of the time.

  Late Friday night, probably early Saturday morning, Peter made one trip back to his home. He had not told his wife or his teenage son and daughter that he was leaving—that knowledge would have made them culpable. He spoke of going into his children and wife’s rooms while they slept and saying his silent good-byes. When he returned to the Heaths’ apartment and told us, he cried. I think it was the only time I ever saw Peter cry. We cried with him.

  By Saturday morning, everything had been done that could be done. With time on our hands, we played Oh Hell, an easy-to-learn trick-taking card game that Judith had learned years before. Unlike bridge, the object is to take exactly the number of tricks bid. Through the day we had a continuous game going on the dining room table with four of the seven of us rotating in and out.

  When we gathered around the table for our last dinner together, we presented Peter with a cardigan sweater purchased by Judith and Dot as a sentimental going-away present.

  “You are going to need this in Sweden,” Judith said, handing him the unwrapped sweater.

  “Thank you,” Peter managed to get out. “Thank you all for what you’ve done.”

  Peter got up from his place at the table and walked over to his bag. For the second time in twenty-four hours, there were no dry eyes in the room.

  DeWitt arrived on the flight from Japan Friday night. Peter wanted to go to the airport with him. We didn’t think it was wise, but it seemed important to Peter. The Heaths’ apartment was only about fifteen minutes from the airport. DeWitt arrived at about nine o’clock. While the rest of us greeted DeWitt and said our last good-byes to Peter, Dot and George left to get a cab so that they would be at the airport when Peter and DeWitt arrived.

  When Peter and DeWitt arrived at the airport, they separated. The Hoovers had gone directly to the visitors’ observation area. Apprehensive about their experience at the empty airport a week before, they were shocked and relieved to see a large group of Japanese tourists get off a bus and get in line to check in for the last flight of the night. Immediately behind them, Peter came in with his wig, beard, and bandaged arm carrying a guitar case. He was a Japanese musician in Taipei to play for the New Year’s festivities and had burned his arm. Peng fell into line with them and went through customs and out to the plane.

  The Hoovers were ecstatic about their good fortune with the group of tourists. When Peter went into the customs area where they couldn’t see him, they moved over to where they could see him emerge and walk out to where the plane was waiting. Just as Peter was about to ascend the steps of the plane, an official ran out of the terminal and led him back inside. George and Dot could see Peter looking up at them and thought it was over. Frozen in shock, they couldn’t move.

  Before they could leave, they saw Peter emerge by himself and head back to the airplane. The Hoovers didn’t know why he had been taken back or why he was now boarding the plane. We later learned that in his nervousness Peter had left some of his documents on the custom official’s counter. The official had come to get Peter to identify and collect his documents.

  Hearts pounding, they watched the plane taxi all the way to the end of the runway. Then, it turned and taxied back to the terminal. For the second time, the Hoovers concluded that Peter had been discovered. Officials and airport personnel went in and out of the plane, but Peter didn’t come out.

  At the Heaths’ apartment, we also believed that something had gone wrong. In the weeks before, Mike Heath had determined that this last flight of the night went almost directly over their apartment. Almost forty-five minutes after the normal departure time, there had been no takeoff.

  “It hasn’t been more than five minutes late since I’ve started checking,” Mike said.

  “Do you think we could have missed the sound of it taking off?” Judith asked.

  “If you hear it,” Mike said, “you’ll know we didn’t miss it.”

  No one said it, but all of us were thinking the worst.

  The plane remained at the terminal for twenty minutes or so. Finally, those who had boarded the plane exited. No passengers got off. The plane’s doors were closed and it taxied to the end of the runway. This time it took off.

  “You’re right about the sound, Mike,” I said, raising my voice to be heard as the plane took off.

  “We don’t know what the delay means,” Judith said.

  And we fell into a nervous silence.

  When the Hoovers finally arrived, they were so drained of emotion they could hardly speak. Then, the whole story tumbled out. Judy got out glasses and a bottle of wine; we had a toast.

  After the celebration, we had one more task before going back home at the seminary. Before he left, Peter had given us a nine-by-thirteen-inch manila envelope and asked us to deliver it to his brother’s house after the escape.

  With few street lights, the streets were dark; the walls shielded most of whatever light might have come from the houses. Since it wasn’t far, we walked. It was after midnight when we found the gate and rang the bell.

  “Peng Ming-min asked us to give this to you,” Judith said as she stepped into the small area of light that appeared with the opening of the gate and handed the envelope to Peter’s sister-in-law.

  In the shadows behind Judith, I don’t think the sister-in-law was aware of my presence.

  “Thank you! Thank you!” she said, taking the envelope without hesitation.

  “It is very late,” Judith said. “We apologize and won’t disturb you longer.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” the sister-in-law said politely, dismissing the apology. “Thank you!” she said again as she closed the gate.

  “Strange, it was almost as if she was expecting our visit,” Judith mused as we made our way down the dark lane to a street where we could catch a cab,

  It was well after midnight when we got back to our house at the seminary and began waiting for a call from Hong Kong.

  When no call came by two o’clock that morning, I began to wonder if something had happened. I slept for a couple of hours but awoke even more anxious that the phone hadn’t rung. We had agreed beforehand that we would not call Hong Kong but wait until Bud called us.

  We didn’t go to church. George called hoping to hear that we had news. When I said we hadn’t, he suggested that he and Mike come up and shoot some baskets as something—anything!—to do while we waited. Judith stayed at the house by the phone. We were on the court when Judith came to give us the good news. In our own coded language, around “the birth of twins”, Bud reported that Peter and DeWitt had arrived in Hong Kong safely, that they had stayed up all night talking, and that at midmorning Bud had put Peter on a plane bound for Sweden.

  We continued shooting hoops—running, grunting, jumping, and yelling— and began to release the nervous tension that had been building up for months.

  On Monday we received another call from Bud saying that Peter had sent a telegram from Copenhagen with the message that he was changing planes for the last leg of his journey and would soon be in Stockholm.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Aftermath

  If the threat is real, it is not paranoia.

  — Hsieh Tsung-Min (1934- )

  The ecstasy of success was short-lived. At midweek, I learned from a board meeting at the Taipei Language Institute that the Investigative Bureau had begun asking questions about Judith and me three weeks earlier. “Was one of us on the board?” “Did we make policy at the school?” “Where did we live?”

  As far as we were able to find out, the questions were prompted by our possible connection to a Taiwanese teacher named Wei (not T’ing-chao) at the school who was running for a local office as a nonparty (non-KMT) candidate. He had resisted government pressure to withdraw from the race. The director of the school had been under pressure to fire another Taiwanese teacher, George Wu, bec
ause of his friendship with Wei, and they had attempted to get Wei’s wife fired from her job as a primary school teacher. Judith had introduced Wei to Fox before he left for New York, and he had written an article about him in the New York Times. The Investigative Bureau wanted to know who had arranged the contact. Because of the bad publicity the article generated internationally, the bureau didn’t want the school to fire Wei himself, and they released his father, whom they had arrested to pressure Wei out of the race.

  We later learned that the bureau had settled on Jerry Fowler as the culprit. We were acquainted with Jerry because he was married to Sue, who helped arrange Richard’s adoption. In 1967, when we were going through the adoption screening process with Sue, we invited them to dinner at our house. Peter had heard that Fowler was on the staff at the U.S. Embassy and thought it might be good to meet him, so we also invited Peter. We later came to suspect that he was in the CIA and kept our distance. Since Fowler was the second secretary in the political section of the U.S. Embassy, there wasn’t much the bureau could do if they thought he had tipped off the reporter.

  The news that the Investigative Bureau was asking questions about us was disquieting, but in that same week we also received the news that our application for the renewal of our residency permit had been approved and would be good until the end of 1970. Had they known of our four-year relationship with Peter or our involvement in distributing funds to families of political prisoners, it is hard to imagine that they would have renewed the permit. Refusing to renew the residency permit was the most frequent way the Foreign Affairs Police dealt with undesirable foreigners.

  Wei T’ing-chao came to the house on Wednesday, January 6. He was excited to hear about what had happened. He didn’t ask us how we knew or what role we had in the escape. And we didn’t say.

  On Sunday, January 11, I went south for one of my regular visits to Tainan. I was able to celebrate Peter’s escape with Rowland and others there. They didn’t know any details of the escape, and I didn’t tell them.

  I was back in Taipei on Thursday for my classes there and began catching up on some of my work as registrar. On Saturday, January 17, two conversations undermined whatever ease I felt about getting our residency permits renewed.

  “Ah, Lau Meng,” I said as I opened the kitchen door. “Welcome! I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

  Lau Meng (“Old Meng”) was a forty-year-old dissident Mainlander with a long beard and a perpetual broad smile who looked like what his ancient Chinese philosopher ancestor, Mencius, might have looked like. I hadn’t seen Meng since the previous summer when he had been my Chinese tutor for several months. He glanced over his shoulder through the screen door that, despite the fact that it led into the kitchen, was the commonly used entrance to our house.

  “I’m sorry it has been so long,” he said, not following me into the living room. “I have not come sooner because friends had warned me that you and Judith were being watched.”

  “I don’t blame you for not coming,” I said. “Did they say anything more?”

  “No, only that some security agency had taken an interest in you,” he said. “I don’t know which agency.”

  Lau Meng seemed anxious to leave. In the months when he had been my tutor he regularly stayed as if he had nothing else to do.

  “Will you have a cup of coffee?” I asked. While Meng enjoyed coaching me on Chinese culture and manners, he was eager to learn about Western ways. I had learned that he didn’t want tea when he came to the house, but coffee heavily laced with milk and sugar. When he came several times a week for Chinese lessons, he would often stay for lunch. While we ate mostly Chinese, we occasionally made hamburgers. The idea of eating raw onions is abhorrent to the tastes of most Chinese people, but Old Meng insisted on having raw onions because that’s the way it was done in the United States.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I must not stay here too long.”

  We said good-bye and he disappeared down the lane in front of the administration building and chapel to the bus stop beyond.

  Meng had hardly gone when Lo I-jen knocked at the door. Rail thin with a full head of wavy black hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses, I-jen and his wife Lucy lived directly across the tiny lane from our house. Both had a Ph.D. from Princeton and had arrived back in Taiwan to take up teaching positions at the seminary about the same time I was appointed there. Their son, Teddy, was a little older than Elizabeth and they were best friends. I-jen taught the New Testament and also worked with the Bible Society on a new translation in Taiwanese. Lucy taught Christian education. Both had been born and raised in the Taipei area. Now they were back from having lived in the States for five or six years. They were our best friends on the faculty.

  “Have you got a few minutes?” I-jen said as he stood outside the screen door.

  “Come on in,” I said, still trying to process what I had heard from Lau Meng.

  We worked closely together on every seminary matter. I assumed that I-jen was there to discuss the curriculum and graduation requirement revision that he, Lucy, Judith, and I were proposing to the faculty. He came in and sat down in his usual chair in the living room.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” he said. “When I was talking with David this morning about our proposal, he said that he had learned you were being watched.”

  “Being watched” was a chilling message to receive, far more so for a Taiwanese or even Mainlander than a foreigner because inside me there was the sense that the worst that would happen to me was deportation. Taiwanese had no such illusions. They knew that people disappeared with some regularity, many of whom were never heard from again. The message that one was “being watched” was an escalation of the experience of the White Terror that Taiwanese lived with daily. The fact that no foreign residents had disappeared did little to minimize the emotional impact of I-jen’s words, which came only minutes after those of Lau Meng. I felt a physical chill run down my spine.

  “How did David learn that?” I asked.

  “He said that Chang Hsin-yi’s father told him yesterday.” Hsin-yi was one of my brightest students, and after graduating in June he would be off for graduate study at Boston University. His father was a prominent Presbyterian pastor in Taipei.

  “Hsin-yi came to see me some weeks ago letting me know his suspicion that Bing Shr-jye was a paid informer for one of the secret police agencies,” I said. Mr. Bing was a nonteaching staff person at the seminary. “Hsin-yi said that Bing has a brother who works for the Investigative Bureau, a brother who works for the Garrison Command, and a sister who graduated from the Political College in Beito.”

  “I’ve always suspected Bing,” I-jen said “and am careful what I say around him.”

  “Hsin-yi didn’t say anything about my being of any concern to Bing or anyone else,” I said, “and I think he would have if he knew.”

  “I can’t say that I am surprised,” I-jen said. “Since the government has started pressuring the church to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, I think several of us are under scrutiny because we’ve been advising David on this matter—you included.”

  Was that all that had attracted attention to me? I wished that I could have talked with I-jen about what other things there might be, including Peter’s escape, but I didn’t.

  Five days later, on January 22, we received our first letter from Peter. Jim Brentlinger brought it from Hong Kong. Peter reported that he had gotten to Sweden around midnight on January 4. When changing planes in Copenhagen, before the last leg of his trip, he sent telegrams to Bud in Hong Kong and to the people in Japan.

  Before landing in Stockholm, Peter said he went to the restroom, tore up his forged passport, and flushed it down the commode so that he could not be charged with traveling with false documents. When he disembarked, someone from Amnesty International who had been notified of his coming met him. He declared himself a person without papers and requested asylum. There would be no announcement of his escape or presence in Sw
eden until asylum was formally granted.

  On Sunday, Abe had gone to the Japanese Embassy in Taipei and reported that he had lost his passport. They said to come back on Monday to get his new papers. Peter expected to hear from Abe as soon as he got back to Japan. When a week went by and he heard nothing, Peter was frantic with worry that something had happened or that Abe had been arrested. After two weeks of worry in Stockholm, the word finally came that Abe had returned. After receiving his new papers on January 4, Abe decided to extend his “vacation” and visit the Philippines before going home.

  Peter also reported that DeWitt’s seat on the plane was one row behind his on the other side. When Peter boarded, DeWitt was in his seat. Their eyes met and DeWitt offered a half smile of recognition and then looked back down at the magazine he was holding. When the plane landed in Hong Kong, by prearrangement they did not speak or celebrate. DeWitt went his way, and Peter found Bud waiting for him.

  Exactly when the authorities in Taiwan realized that Peter had escaped is not clear. The day after we received Peter’s letter, when he had been out of the country for twenty days, Mr. Yén called and we invited him to dinner. Over two years earlier, Peter had introduced us to Yén Gèn-Chāng, head of the Taipei printers’ union. Mr. Yén had a storied reputation. He had been head of the union over twenty years earlier during 2-28. The union was so strong that they surrounded the union headquarters when the Nationalist soldiers were indiscriminately killing throughout the city, and the soldiers backed down. Years later, Mr. Yén was elected to the National Assembly. He was short and balding and always wore gold-rimed glasses. He drank too much.