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

  I didn’t know what good I might do later. Later I would be overseas and away from the Civil Rights movement going on here at home. My guilt wasn’t assuaged when I read Dr. King’s letter from jail in Birmingham addressed to clergymen in the city who had issued a statement calling the nonviolent demonstrations “unwise” and “untimely.” Like that night at the rally in Dallas, his words seemed aimed directly at me, but now as an indictment:

  I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

  The certainty of the call to ministry I experienced that February Sunday night over seven years earlier was not in doubt, but where I was to exercise it was. Now, as I approached the end of years of waiting, I wondered if going to Taiwan was a way of avoiding the hard road ahead in my home country and a betrayal of Marshall and Dr. King. I never found any certain answer to those questions. From now on, the answers would never be certainties, only answers that seemed “best” among gray choices.

  Chapter Four

  Unwelcome Revelations

  The mind, once stretched by a new idea,

  never regains its original dimensions.

  — Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

  Images of China were at the top of my pictures of the world beyond U.S. borders. Though Americans had had a unique fascination with the Middle Kingdom for over a hundred years, when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1937 we were fed a steady diet of media images (newsreels, newspapers, magazines, and movies) showing the noble Chinese, led by their savior, Chiang Kai-shek, resisting the barbarian invaders. He led them with the support of his wife, Madame Chiang. In 1937 the two of them were Time’s first Couple of the Year. By the mid-1940s, those same Chinese were braving not the Japanese but clearly ignoble Chinese Communists, led by one Mao Tse-tung.

  For people called Methodist, the message was echoed by our agencies and in our periodicals. As early as 1929, the head of the Methodist Board of Missions hailed the Nationalists with the slogan “Christians Rule China!” For decades to come, that would be the board’s portrayal of the Nationalists.[8] My earliest memories of the Methodist mission magazine, World Outlook, which had graced the coffee table in our living room since before I could read, was of Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo on the cover. Soong May-ling, daughter of a Methodist minister and Chinese financier Charlie Soong, was herself Methodist. When she married Chiang Kai-shek, he promised her mother that he would convert from Buddhism to Christianity, but not until he was properly prepared.

  May-ling, so the story goes[9], tutored him in the faith with the notes in her Bible. Three years after their marriage, Chiang found himself and his forces surrounded by a warlord. Desperate, he came upon a small country church and went in to pray for deliverance, promising to acknowledge Jesus as his lord if rescued. Help came in the form of a snowstorm that slowed the enemy’s advance long enough for reinforcements to arrive from Nanking. In the face of certain defeat, he was victorious. “I feel the need of a God such as Jesus,” he was said to have confessed. On October 23, 1930, he was baptized at the J. Allen Memorial [Methodist] Church in Shanghai.

  The story spread like wildfire in China and the U.S. The conversion was compared to that of Constantine in the fourth century and seen by many faithful as a sign that China was being won by Christ. And the first family was Methodist!

  When in 1949 Chiang and the Nationalists were inexplicably driven from the Mainland by the Communists, they escaped to Taiwan as a last refuge with a government and army awaiting the right moment to counterattack and retake the Mainland. Although they had no previous work on the island, Methodist missionaries and institutions followed the Nationalists to Taiwan.

  If that is not all I thought I knew about China when Leo persuaded me that working with Chinese-speaking people was what I was being called by God to do, it was the core around which all other pieces of information were made to fit—that is, until the day I pulled a musty dark green covered book off the shelf in the Bridwell Library.

  In my last year at Perkins, having informed the board that as close to China as we could get was what Judith and I wanted, I decided it was time to read a bit about the land that seemed my destiny, and if not the land itself then people in Southeast Asia. There were a lot of books on China, but the one that caught my attention was one with a flyer sticking out the top. When I pulled the loose paper from inside the cover, I found it to be a letter from the publisher explaining how the U.S. State Department had hindered the publication of this book because of its criticism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government. Never having seen such a flyer in a book before, I thought it the place to begin my China reading.

  Thunder out of China, written by Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, challenged my total view of China. The authors made a convincing case that the Nationalists were losing on the Mainland because of corruption, not because of the strength of the Communists. The book was published in 1946, before the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, but White and Jacoby saw the outcome clearly and had said so in the introduction:

  In Asia there are a billion people who are tired of the world as it is; they live such terrible bondage that they have nothing to lose but their chains.... Less than a thousand years ago Europe lived this way; then Europe revolted... The people of Asia are going through the same process.[10]

  What happened during the war with Japan was bad enough, but what happened when the Japanese were defeated and left was worse.

  It is an axiom that the last attribute to wither in any governing group is its ability to exploit, to oppress, to misgovern.

  The KMT returned to the coast from its retreat in west China and proved the axiom, the officials of Chungking returning to “fatten” on the liberated cities and provinces. Not able to put the book down, I read how the people of Shanghai reacted when they learned the nature of the government returning in triumph.

  With a feeling of nausea the people of Shanghai watched the government they had welcomed back sell licensees, sell privileges, mismanage foreign relief supplies, and condone hording. They witnessed the printing presses spin off reel after reel of worthless money while prices soared and bureaucrats danced at night clubs and wined at fine hotels. Shanghai’s labor organizations watched the Kuomintang hold its first general meeting of labor at a dance club within the first week after victory [and] saw the old opium rackets flourish again under the guidance of some of the Kuomintang’s most powerful men. They had watched the government retreat, bleeding but glorious, from Shanghai in 1937, to be replaced by the Japanese and the traitors of the puppet army; now the same government returned to accept some of the most odious of the traitors back into its fold.[11]

  I searched out reviews of the book by looking through the thick volumes of periodical indexes and then looking up the articles themselves. I was surprised to find so many respected reviewers giving credit to White and Jacoby for the truth of their observations. Once White and Jacoby detailed how “the king had no clothes,” people who had long known this now felt free to acknowledge it publicly. An exception was Henry Luce, founder and publisher of Time, for whom the authors had once worked. Born in China to missionary parents, Luce could take much of the credit for the view of China that dominated the U.S. landscape and shaped my own images. But he wasn’t the only one. Our State Department held up the Nationalist Government on Taiwan as “Free C
hina.” So did the Methodist Church.

  “It’s all politics,” Leo said when I told him about the book he had no intention of reading. “Don’t worry! You’ll be fine in Hong Kong.”

  “But what if I’m not sent to Hong Kong? If I get sent to Taiwan, I’ll probably get into trouble.”

  “Mike, look. I tell you, don’t worry! Say to New York that you want to go to Hong Kong. That’s where you will be! With me!”

  In my next letter to the board of missions, I made clear the order of our preferences: (1) Hong Kong, (2) Singapore, and (3) the Philippines. Taiwan was no longer on the list. I didn’t talk about Thunder out of China but said that I didn’t think Taiwan was a good fit for us.

  While finishing my exams in Boston, a year away from being ready for appointment, Mel Williams wrote that the one place projected to be open when we were ready to go was Soochow University, a Methodist university named for one in Jiangsu province in China, Williams’ old place of service. I would later learn that members of the Soochow Alumni Association who had fled to Taiwan with the government had established a shadow university to make up for the one lost on the Mainland. Williams didn’t once mention my having said that Judith and I had concluded that Taiwan was not a good fit for us. Instead he waxed eloquent about the honor of being appointed chaplain at the university and Judith teaching English there.

  “What is this?” I said in disgust, “This is the way decisions are made in the army.”

  “Not just in the army, it appears” Judith said.

  Chapter Five

  Another Kind of Preparation

  There is nothing so practical as a good theory.

  — Kurt Lewin (1890-1947)

  Becoming proficient in interpersonal dynamics requires that we do much more than simply read a book or attend a lecture. Increased awareness of self and others can be better accomplished through facilitated group dialogue, the signature element being the “T-group,” an small intensive training group in which participants received feedback from both peers and an experienced facilitator. The man some consider to be the father of modern social psychology, Kurt Lewin, established the National Training Laboratory (NTL) around this theory in 1946. Demand for the services of this group based in Bethel, Maine, grew as its effectiveness gained it credibility. Clients included organizations like the American Red Cross, Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Department of Health in Puerto Rico, and the Missionary Orientation Center at Stony Point, New York.

  Up the Hudson River, Stony Point seemed a different world from New York City. Unlike the nearby the bedroom communities, Stony Point appeared to be a sleepy little village from the midst of which it was hard to imagine New York City only thirty miles away. Eighteen miles north was Bear Mountain State Park. Stony Point was a town where one might imagine having a retreat center, where one could get away from the busyness of the world and reflect. For almost ten years, a Presbyterian retreat center had been turned into the Missionary Orientation Center, where selected men and women of Presbyterian, Methodist, Reformed, United Church of Christ, and other persuasions were sent to receive a four-and-a-half-month orientation for their lives as missionaries.

  Having completed my field exams and general theological exam at Boston in the spring of 1965, Judith and I were deemed almost prepared to be sent to Taiwan. We attended a six-week field studies and language orientation program at Drew University in the summer. I continued my readings about the political realities in Taiwan in the just published Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr and a collection of scholarly essays edited by Mark Mancall in Formosa Today, both of which confirmed that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were the same brutal and corrupt government they had been on the Mainland.

  Most of our time at Drew was spent on language learning—not Chinese but how one learned a second language. It seemed to me that the program was geared for persons going into places where they would not have formal language training available and would have to depend simply on native speakers. That wasn’t the case with Taiwan, where we were going into a highly-regarded saturation program, so I gave less attention to that part of the program and more to reading about the political reality we would face when we arrived.

  The most important thing that happened in those weeks was that Judith became pregnant. That our first child would be born outside the U.S. was of some concern because we didn’t know what kind of medical facilities there would be, but we were assured that they would be quite adequate. More than anxiety, however, we felt excitement and pride that our child would be born in the land to which we believed God was leading us.

  In early August we packed the few belongings we had with us for dorm living and drove fifty miles north to Stony Point. After almost ten years of getting ready, I was anxious to get over the last hurdle. Before I could be approved for work in Taiwan, I would have to win the approval of the staff at the Missionary Orientation Center in Stony Point.

  What I had heard from missionary candidates at Drew who had been to the spring session at MOC made me uneasy.

  “The whole focus is on interpersonal relations. Don’t expect to sleep any during IGR [intergroup relations] week,” said one who was about to go to Africa.

  “Yeah,” chimed in another. “All they want is for you to spill your guts and then they take you apart for doing it. We called it ‘Hell Week.’”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” said the first. “They just wasted a lot of time we could have better used studying the Bible and missions, or at least area studies.”

  Whatever the program was, I was ready to get through it and go on to Taiwan. Once I learned that the reason Paul Yount had ceased to be our contact at the board was because he had been made the first director of the Missionary Orientation Center. My curiosity about the program there was piqued. I don’t know what I expected him to look like, but he was sandy-haired with freckles, a mustache, and a goatee, and always wore a wry smile, suggesting to me that he didn’t take anything too seriously, especially missionary pretensions. I came to regard him not only as good an educator as I had known, but also with a sense of integrity that made his letter to me years before seem quite natural.

  We were among sixty other participants in that fall session preparing for appointments in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Living quarters were arranged in six different housing units. Alpha consisted of three separate buildings, each with bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchenette, and a common living room with a fireplace. Beta was one building with three separate wings and a large living room and fireplace in the center. We lived in an Alpha unit. Our meals were taken in a dining room in the main building, which also included offices, a library, classrooms, and a small auditorium that doubled as a chapel. The participants did the setups and cleanups, but a crew of local Stony Point women did the cooking. We ate well!

  The program was intense, including sessions throughout the day and many evenings. Experiential learning built around the NTL model made this definitely not another semester of academic studies. Early in the four-and-a-half-month program, we had IGR Week, led by NTL trainers from Bethel, Maine. Little time was spent in large group sessions; most was in T-groups. The schedule had us going from early morning to nine o’clock at night. The parents of small children protested to no avail. It helped that the center had an excellent child care program. By the end of the week, we were exhausted from emotional exposure and receiving candid feedback about our how our behaviors were seen by others.

  Although the NTL staff was there for only a week, the center staff had been trained to continue the program. T-groups of seven or eight persons—husbands and wives had to be in different groups—stayed together for the entire four and a half months and processed whatever was going on. Nora Boots, a Bolivian native who, with her husband, Wilson, were on the staff as trainers, was the leader on my small group.

  There was formal theological study, worship every morning, and cross-cultural adaptation training. Cross-cultural training aims to develop awareness between people where
a common cultural framework does not exist in order to promote clear lines of communication and better relationships. The latter had been developed in cooperation with the training given to volunteers in the Peace Corps, which had been established in 1961, only two years before Stony Point. Also built around the NTL learning model, there was already good evidence to suggest that the experiential approach in cross-cultural training, through the use of critical incidents and other tools, worked. This training continued through the whole term.

  In addition to the formal program, Stony Point played a part in what would happen later in Taiwan in at least three ways. First, there were the friends made there. We first met some of our best friends and most trusted colleagues in Taiwan at Stony Point. In the fall a number of the participants were going to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Bud and Millie Carroll were Methodists on their way to Hong Kong by way of language study in Taiwan. Judy and Rowland Van Es were Reformed Church missionaries on their way to Tainan. Judy and Sid Hormell were Presbyterians on their way to Tainan. This meant that when we got to Taiwan, we not only already had colleagues with whom we had shared an experience, considering what it meant to be missionaries, but also colleagues with whom we had freely discussed the politics of Taiwan.

  In one case, we learned of a person with whom we would not freely share once we got to Taiwan. Ann McCurdy had been to Taiwan before on a special three-year program. Her friends were among Methodist Mainlanders, and Ann was loyal to her friends. She was our good friend, too, but we never asked her to be a collaborator in any of our endeavors. After we were arrested, however, she would demonstrate what a good friend she really was to us.