Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 14

  He was full of sayings and always had a new one for us when we were with him.

  “When you see someone on the street, can you tell if he is a Taiwanese or a Mainlander?” he once asked me.

  “Can you tell by the way they speak?” I asked.

  “No, you can tell before you talk to them. If they are standing up straight, you know they are Mainlanders. Taiwanese are all a little bent over,” he said, demonstrating with his posture and his head bent down. “It is a physical condition resulting from all the bowing and scraping they have done in the presence of the Mainlanders over the years,” Mr. Yén said, laughing at himself and his own people.

  “Do you know how to tell the difference between a rich man and a poor man?” he asked on another occasion.

  “No, I don’t know,” I said, preparing for another lesson.

  “Because the rich have more money, they eat more and so have to spend more time on the commode. Rich people shit more; that’s the difference between them and poor people.”

  Mr. Yén didn’t have any wise sayings tonight. He had a more serious demeanor than that to which we were accustomed. At dinner, he reported a conversation he had had with a Chinese newspaper reporter in the afternoon.

  “The reporter said that Peng was in America!”

  “He couldn’t be serious,” Judith said.

  “The KMT has issued a denial, saying that Peng is in Taiwan, but I think they are blowing smoke,” he responded. “I went directly to Peng’s house and asked Mrs. Peng. She said that two men from the Investigative Bureau had come at three o’clock and asked where Peng was. Then, they informed her that he was in America. No sooner had they gone than a New York Times reporter and someone from the Associated Press came asking the same thing. I told her I was going to come to see if you had heard anything. She didn’t say not to come, but she said to make sure I wasn’t followed.”

  “Were you followed?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I lost them by changing taxis a couple of times. Cost me about $180 NT to get here,” he said with a laugh.

  “We haven’t heard anything,” I said. “We haven’t heard from him in a few weeks and thought he had gone to Kaohsiung to visit his mother.”

  “I don’t think the United States would welcome him,” Judith said.

  “Do you think it is possible that he has been arrested and that this is the government’s cover story?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Mr. Yén said, seemingly thinking about the possibility. “I think he’s gone, and if he is, I say good for him. Let’s drink a toast!”

  “We don’t have any alcohol,” I said. “I guess we’ll have to celebrate with coffee.”

  Peng’s escape created a nightmare of public relations for Chiang’s government. They denied that he was gone and had egg on their faces when they learned that the rest of the world knew it before they did. They compounded the problem when they changed their story; the date they said he had escaped was three weeks after the actual event.

  When we met Wei T’ing-chao to give him funds for the families that had come in, he filled us in on what was happening behind the scenes.

  “They didn’t believe Peng was gone because the security team assigned to follow him had been submitting expense vouchers for following him all around the island during the weeks when he was in fact already gone.”

  “I guess Ching-kuo and his daddy weren’t amused by their security team, were they?” I said, almost giggling.

  “When they learned that the team filed false expense vouchers for these three weeks, it didn’t take long—using their usual methods—for the guards to confess that there were weeks and months when they hadn’t seen Dr. Peng but continued filling out false reports about following him. None of this, of course, has been reported publicly. It would be too embarrassing for the government.”

  “Do you know what’s happened to those in charge?”

  “Many senior officers in the Investigative Bureau lost their jobs. The department chief who had so viciously threatened Dr. Peng became the scapegoat and is already in prison.”

  “What about the guards who filed the false reports?”

  “They are missing,” Wei said.

  The government finally had to acknowledge the escape and allowed the newspapers to run small stories about it suggesting that he had escaped with the assistance of the CIA. That seemed reasonable to many because they couldn’t imagine how anyone could escape from the island without the aid of such an agency. Peter, of course, insisted that he had not received any government aid except when he was received in Sweden.[17] And he was telling the truth. It still tickles me when I think about it.

  What the government knew about Judith and me or how interested they were in us was not clear. We speculated that they didn’t know a lot about our relationship with Peter, our connection with the aid going to political prisoners’ families, or Peter’s escape. We imagined that there were many more likely points that would have been brought to their attention: the situation at the language school, my reports to Principal Chen on the pressure for the PCT to withdraw from the world council, lectures in my ecumenics class when I addressed the issue of the WCC, reports about my feelings about the political situation generally from informers at the seminary or elsewhere, or public contacts with Yen and other dissident Taiwanese. Any or all of these would have been sufficient to attract the attention of security agencies.

  Almost daily, I wondered if I was being paranoid about the importance of the reports that I was “being watched.” I shared this with Hsieh Tsung-min the next time I met him. Hsieh was still gaunt and thin from his years in prison, which made his bushy eyebrows stand out even more than usual.

  “Thousands of people are being watched all of the time, aren’t they?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but some are watched more than others,” a phrase reminiscent of a statement in Animal Farm about some pigs “being more equal than others.” If I hadn’t been fairly certain Hsieh had not read the book, I might have thought he was making a pun.

  “Wei and I are now watched twenty-four hours a day since Dr. Peng escaped. They can’t believe that we didn’t have something to do with it,” he said. And, as if to reassure me, he added, “They are not any better at following us than they were with Dr. Peng.”

  “I am not surprised that you have more attention. Judith and I have had several reports within the past weeks of being watched.”

  “There is a way you can tell how your mail is being checked,” he said. “I met a man in prison who used to work for the postal security branch. He had stolen money from letters and had been caught. He explained to me the postal code on the cancellation stamp on every letter that is mailed in Taiwan. From it, you can tell if your letter was checked.”

  “Wow!” was all I could say. “And you know this code?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s easy.”

  He pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket and sketched the cancellation stamp on the back.

  “You can see the post office where the letter was processed. The date and hour is a way to keep track of the postal employee who processed your letter so that he or she can be held accountable if they let something important get through.”

  Then he pointed to the parenthesis at the bottom of the stamp with a single character inside.

  “There are three different characters that can be in this parenthesis,” he said as he wrote. “This character means that the letter wasn’t checked. This character means that it was checked by the postal security system. And this character means that it was checked by the Garrison Command. If you start receiving many letters with that character, you know they are really interested in you. All of the mail I receive has the Garrison Command character on it.”

  Hsieh handed me the piece of paper and I tucked it into my billfold.

  “Thanks!” I said twice as we parted, in awe of what Hsieh and Wei had been able to learn while they were behind bars but also a little fearful about the p
iece of paper in my billfold. Although we didn’t use the mail system for any sensitive matters, I wondered at what level my mail was being checked.

  As soon as I got back to the seminary, I went in to the office where the day’s mail was spread out on a desk for people to pick up. As I went through the pieces looking for ones addressed to me, I looked at the cancellation stamp on different letters. Most had the “not checked” character in the parenthesis, and a few had the “postal security” check. I didn’t receive any mail on that day. But over the next few days, when I received letters, none of them had the “not checked” character. Several of them had the “postal security” character, and a couple of them had the “Garrison Command” character. Over the coming weeks, more of my letters had that mark on them.

  I thought about what Hsieh had said about some “being watched more than others” and his last words that day before we parted.

  “If the threat is real,” he had said, “it is not paranoia.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  What Would Jesus Do?

  I want to join the Freedom Fighters but my religion worries me. Can a Christian take up guns and sticks against his fellow man?

  —Daniel M. N. in a letter to Colin Morris (1969)

  In the wake of the violence inspired by religious faith in the 9/11 attacks and how, at least in less xenophobic minds, the memory of Christianity’s blessing of violence in earlier centuries has been painfully recalled, I raise the question of a Christian’s legitimating violence in the pursuit of justice with some reluctance. However much one may recoil at the notion of religion-inspired violence serving just ends, are we not compelled to admit that the acquiescence of religious people to state-sponsored violence, whether in the case of the Vietnam War or the U.S. invasion of Iraq, constitute de facto legitimizations of its use? Niebuhr’s dictum of 1932—“once the factor of coercion is ethically justified… we cannot draw any absolute line of demarcation between violent and nonviolent coercion”[18]—seemed particularly apt as the events of 1970 unfolded.

  Even before Peter’s escape, we had been rethinking our furlough plans. Our original arrangement with the board of missions was to serve five years in Taiwan and then take a year’s furlough in which I could complete my dissertation. In the fall of 1969 and the spring of 1970, two things happened to change that plan. Having what we believed to be reliable information that we had gotten the attention of the government and were sometimes actually being watched, we believed that if we left the country for a year and had to apply again for a new residency permit that we would not be allowed back into the country.

  Our current residency permits would not expire until December 1970. We decided to request a three-month furlough in the summer of 1970 and return for a three-year term, after which time we would take a full year and do my dissertation. Since I had completed my residency requirements and exams at Boston University in the spring of 1965, I was pushing the time limit I had to complete my dissertation. BU agreed to extend the time for me according to the schedule I proposed.

  We considered not leaving Taiwan at all, but that possibility was preempted by the need to get Richard naturalized as an American citizen. We could not do it from outside the country. Getting the adoption done in Taiwan was not a problem for the government there, but it had been a problem for the officials at the U.S. Consulate. Because they gave us such a hard time about the way Richard had come to the home in Taichung, we didn’t know if we would encounter difficulties in the U.S. We just knew that we needed to get him there and naturalized.

  Having a current residency permit would not keep the government from refusing us reentry after three months outside nor would it keep us in the country if the government decided it didn’t want us there. At this point, however, we didn’t know what the government really knew about us, so we decided on the three-month furlough.

  What would happen to the distribution of funds to families of political prisoners during the summer? Hsieh and Wei needed a contact to pass them the funds that came in through Hong Kong. We didn’t want to risk having Hsieh or Wei in direct contact with whoever the courier might be. The Hoovers and Heaths would have been happy to do the job, but they were completing their year of language school and scheduled to assume their responsibilities in Singapore and Sarawak that summer. We decided to recruit a missionary couple who had not been involved in anything else we had done.

  In March we approached Carlisle and Ruth Phillips. Carlisle and Ruth had been in Taiwan since long before I arrived; before that they had been among the last missionaries to leave the China Mainland after the Chinese Communists took power and had had some time under house arrest before leaving China. Their work in Taiwan had been with Mainlanders in the Methodist Church of Taiwan and, at the time, Carlisle was the pastor of a Methodist Church in Taipei. However, unlike most of the “old China hands” that I knew in Taiwan, the Phillipses were sympathetic to the Taiwanese. They were also people I thought I could ask who, even if they said no, would not betray me or the work I was asking them to do.

  Over lunch at a small dumpling restaurant, we explained what we were doing with Hsieh and Wei (and that for security reasons we now referred to them as “Tony” and “Matthew”) with families of political prisoners and our need to go back to the States for three months.

  “We need for you to be the liaison between couriers bringing in the money—most of the time the courier will be Jim Brentlinger—and Tony and Matthew,” I said. “Your meetings will have to be secret, but both of them are good at not being followed.”

  “Of course we will do it,” Ruth said without waiting for Carlisle to respond. Her hair prematurely gray, Ruth always seemed to have a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye. Carlisle was regarded as a bit eccentric; he rarely looked at you when talking. He usually took a little time before answering any question, but I had learned to pay attention when he spoke. After a few moments of silence, he nodded in agreement with Ruth.

  “When do we get to meet the two young men?” Ruth said.

  Their immediate agreement had surprised me. I heaved a sigh of relief knowing that the program could continue without interruption through the summer of 1970.

  “It is possible,” Judith said, breaking the gaiety of the moment, “that we will not be allowed back into the country in September. In that case, you will have to decide whether or not to continue.”

  “If it becomes necessary,” Ruth said, “we’ll decide. But we are not quitters.”

  Even though we had been reading about the polarization of the U.S. over the war in Vietnam, not physically being in the country limited our sense of what was happening. We had also been preoccupied with our own issues in Taiwan. When George Todd, then an executive with the United Presbyterian Board of National Missions in New York, heard that we were coming on furlough, he insisted that we spend significant time and energy learning what was happening at home. The expectations of our own board of missions were that we visit our supporting church in Fort Worth, be available for speaking engagements, and rest. Around the schedule arranged by the Methodists, Todd set up an itinerary and contacts for us from California to New York.

  The wisdom of Todd’s counsel became even more apparent as events unfolded in the months before we left Taiwan. In December of 1969, the first draft lottery since World War II was instituted. In February the mass murder of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. Army Forces at My Lai and My Khe was confirmed. In March, the U.S. began bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply routes in Cambodia. In April, U.S. and Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia. News of the massacre and the expansion of the war into Cambodia prompted unprecedented outrage from many parts of the world. Unable to manipulate public opinion at home, it looked like Nixon was losing control.

  Nixon decided to see if any kind of rapprochement with Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists was possible. In January of 1970 a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department referred for the first time to the “People’s Republic of China,” in
stead of the usual “Red China” or “Communist China.” The language was a signal to Beijing, and it wasn’t missed there or in Taipei, nor was the State Department’s announcement of the easing of travel restrictions to China in March. In April, Chiang Ching-kuo came to the U.S. to make the case for the Nationalists.

  The son of Chiang Kai-shek, Ching-kuo spent twelve years in the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman, who returned to China with him in 1937. When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan after the loss of the Mainland, Chiang appointed his son head of the hydra-headed secret police agencies. Given Ching-kuo’s background, modeling the Nationalist security agencies on Stalin’s was not surprising. To the Chiang family’s anti-Communist supporters in the United States, it was a reality unknown or conveniently ignored. In Taiwan, Ching-kuo’s name invoked fear—fear for the White Terror he directed, as well as fear that he might readily cut a deal with the Chinese Communists rather than allow the Taiwanese to shape the future of their island nation.

  The KMT was not the only party concerned about Nixon’s overtures to the People’s Republic. Advocates for an independent Taiwan were also concerned. In early 1970, the World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI) was organized to coordinate the efforts of a myriad of groups advocating Taiwanese independence. Operating out of the haven of other countries, Ching-kuo’s visit was made-to-order for protest. WUFI organized demonstrations against him wherever he went in New York City.

  On April 24, twenty-five protesters gathered outside the Plaza Hotel where “Little Chiang,” as he was not affectionately known in Taiwan, was slated to address a luncheon meeting of the Far East-American Council of Commerce and Industry. As he walked through the revolving door at the Plaza, WUFI member Peter Ng pulled a pistol out of his raincoat, ran forward, and pointed it at Ching-kuo. New York Detective James Ziede, part of the detail to protect Chiang, saw Ng and grabbed his arm. The shot hit the glass door but not the vice premier. Ng’s brother-in-law, T.T. Deh, was also arrested in the struggle as Ng shouted, “Let me stand up like a Taiwanese!” Both men claimed to be members of the WUFI.