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

  Second, I met Joe Mathews. Joe had been a professor at Perkins before I went there, and before that he had been the controversial head of the Faith and Life Community at the University of Texas in Austin. I had heard stories about Joe when I was at Perkins. He was a true “eccentric.” Once, when he was asked to introduce a bishop at Minister’s Week at SMU, he simply stood in silence at the podium for a couple of minutes and then asked, “When are we ever going to get honest?” Then he sat down. On another occasion, when he was the speaker at an undergraduate assembly of more than a thousand students and was having difficulty stopping the noise so that he could begin, he leaned over onto the podium and whispered into the mike, “Masturbate!” He then began his address to a quiet assembly.

  He came to Stony Point for a week of lectures. With a large head of bushy white hair and a habit of wearing sneakers with suits, Joe was the charismatic director of a religious community in Chicago, where members of the community shared their incomes. His theology took society and politics seriously and appealed to us would-be missionaries to take the first year of our service to get to know persons outside the church.

  “If you don’t do it when you first get there,” he said, “you’ll be swallowed up by the church folk and you’ll never get to develop the relationships with people outside the church who will make possible your doing anything significant while you are there.”

  What Joe said made sense to me, and I resolved that for the projected eighteen months of language study in Taipei, I would make it my priority to establish relationships with persons outside the church. And I did. Joe’s advice at a point where I could hear it was worth the four and a half months at the MOC.

  Third, I had a boost in my self-confidence. Even after getting honors on my field exams and theological examination at Boston, I thought that I had just slipped by and that had my professors really known the great gaps in my knowledge that I would never have been allowed to take, let alone pass, the exams. I seemed always to be asking questions about faith and life that put me on the margins of Christianity in graduate school and even more at this program for “missionaries.” Not only wasn’t I orthodox, but my questions seemed to some as coming from one outside the faith. That proved troubling for some of my fellow participants and even some of the teaching staff. At one point, I wondered if they would decide I really shouldn’t be a missionary.

  I later learned that there was considerable discussion of that in the staff sessions. However, when it came time for the final evaluation, what was written was that my questions came because I saw issues others didn’t see, including the staff, and while that might make some uncomfortable in the long run, it was good. That affirmation did wonders for my ego and self-confidence.

  After the pressures of graduate school at BU, the four months at Stony Point provided the kind of “retreat” Judith and I needed. We left the program before Thanksgiving in 1965 instead of when the term ended in mid-December because of Judith’s pregnancy. According to mission board policy, we had to get to Taiwan before she hit the six-month mark, making it necessary for us to fly instead of going by freighter with our colleagues. Leaving Stony Point early gave us time to go to Texas to say good-bye to our families and visit our supporting church, First Methodist in Fort Worth. We were scheduled to begin language school in Taipei immediately after the New Year in 1966.

  Chapter Six

  Arrival at Last

  Culture shock is precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse.

  — Kalervo Oberg (1901-1973)

  Soon after arriving in Taiwan, I discovered that the distance between exhilaration and suffocation is short. At Stony Point, we had learned about the five stages of culture shock and did critical incident exercises imagining what we would experience and how we might react. We were warned that everyone didn’t experience culture shock in the same way or in the same sequence. But it is one thing to know all that in your head and another to experience it.

  The first stage is euphoria and excitement with everything new. That’s why it’s called the “honeymoon stage.” On the first night in Taiwan, I was too numb to feel anything. After a night in Hong Kong and the day before that the long flight on a Pan Am 1 from Honolulu, I was both exhilarated and exhausted.

  Leo and his new wife Christina met our plane in Hong Kong. Leo saying over and over, “Mike, you are here! You are here! See, I told you!” neglecting to mention that “here” was supposed to be Hong Kong and not Taiwan. Aside from his delight in receiving us as old friends, I suspect that he was also proud that he had recruited a couple of missionaries for the Chinese people.

  When we arrived at Sung Shan Airport Friday evening, the Methodist missionary community showed up to greet us. Out of the blur of faces and handshakes the face of one who seemed to take charge appeared.

  “We’ve got to get you to Number 9 so you can get some rest,” said the shapely, dark-haired Beth Ury. Her husband, Bill, dressed in a blue suit and a head taller than the rest of the missionaries, extended his hand and led us through the crowd of well-wishers to their car outside. Bill and Beth were “port hosts” for the Methodist mission. They were the official greeters for Methodist visitors, and in our case they had an additional assignment as the “host family” for us during our first weeks on the island.

  They drove us to Number 9 Chi Nan Road, a Japanese house owned by the mission and used primarily by new personnel doing language study. It would be our home for the next eighteen months. Beth rarely stopped talking, but she and Bill told us only what we needed to know for the immediate time. They gave us a tour of house, gave us their phone number, and said that when we were up and about on Saturday they would take us to breakfast.

  I saw them out, locked the gate as instructed, and started back inside. I noticed that the house was surrounded by six-foot walls with broken glass imbedded in the top, like the houses across the street and on both sides. The gate was only six or eight feet from the two steps that led up to the front door.

  Ceramic tiles covered the roof of the wooden structure sitting on blocks. Inside, the walls were paper and the floors bare wood. It was customary to remove one’s shoes at a bench inside the front door and put on slippers.

  We laid thick quilts on the bed and tried to sleep. Despite weariness, sleep did not come easily; and then we were roused at midnight by firecrackers. The fact that it was the Western and not the Chinese New Year made little difference. The night of firecrackers was almost as loud and continuous as it would be on the Chinese New Year a month or so away.

  The lack of sleep was more than matched by the euphoria we felt in our new surroundings. At about nine o’clock we called Beth, and they came to take us to breakfast. As we drove through the city, they pointed out various landmarks that would help us get around on our own. On Chung Shan North Road, Bill pulled up to the gate of a military installation and showed some kind of pass to a U.S. soldier, who waved us inside.

  “We thought we would bring you to the Officer’s Club, where you can get an American breakfast and not have to worry about what will happen to your stomach,” Beth said, grimacing at the thought of what might happen if we ate Chinese food for breakfast.

  Inside, we were served by Chinese waiters, but the food was definitely American. Over the next few days, while Beth was arranging for an amah to live at the house and cook for us, they brought us to the club for most of our meals. Part of our new environment was the U.S. military presence with as many comforts of home as possible in the middle of a non-American city. Since I had no previous experience with the U.S. military, being inside this base was as new as being in Taiwan.

  I ate these American meals gratefully, but I couldn’t help wondering how the people of Taiwan viewed these enclaves of privilege for Westerners. Most were doubtless grateful for the presence of the U.S. military shielding the island from invasion by the Communists, but what did they think about missionaries having access to these bases? Were
we seen as part of the U.S. government presence? Was our access to the base seen as a legacy of the extraterritoriality provisions that provided foreigners with special status forced on China in the hated unequal treaties of the nineteenth century and terminated only at the end of World War II?

  Those were my questions, but I did not ask the Urys. I didn’t want to criticize their gracious hospitality, and I suspected I might not like the answer I heard. I asked about Japanese houses in a “Chinese” country.

  “Oh,” Bill said as we drove back to the house, “these houses date back to the fifty years before 1945, when Taiwan was a colony of Japan.”

  “They were designed to minimize damage in earthquakes,” he went on. “Taiwan, like Japan, has earthquakes almost every day, but you rarely feel them. Several times a year quakes do extensive damage.”

  “How does the design help?” I asked.

  “Japanese houses are built with a lot of give. The top framework can move without collapsing, and the whole house can move on its block footings without breaking up.”

  “But there is a danger,” piped up Beth, “and that is getting hit by falling roof tiles if you happen to be outside. When there is an earthquake, it is safer to stay inside a Japanese-style house. Unlike both traditional and Western-style houses made of bricks and mortar, like the one we live in out in Shih Lin, in a serious earthquake you need to get outside.”

  The first earthquake Judith and I felt happened a couple of weeks later, the night Judy and Sid Hormell arrived in Taiwan. These Presbyterian missionaries with whom we had become friends at Stony Point stayed at our house their first night. We were all in bed when things began to rattle and shake. Sid came running out of his bedroom shouting “Earthquake! We’ve got to get out of here!” and ran to the front door. Luckily, he couldn’t get it unlocked. By the time he did, the quake had stopped, and he was spared of the possibility of injury by tiles sliding off the roof.

  Earthquakes I had expected; the cold I hadn’t. With no heat in the house in Taiwan and the temperature staying at fifty degrees day and night with humidity at 80 to 90 percent, the cold was bone-chilling, and there was no way to get warm except in bed under a lot of blankets. That was pretty much the weather pattern I experienced in January, February, and March in Taipei. Japanese houses were not designed to keep out cold. Air moved in from outside the house at will.

  Light bulbs were set on the closet floors with wire net around them to prevent a fire. Without these lights, within days a layer of gray mold was sure to grow on shoes and most anything else in the closet. Perhaps it was not so different from being in Key West, Florida, in the winter without any heat source. The Tropic of Cancer, which marks the boundary between temperate and tropical climates, cuts across the island, leaving the southern 40 percent of the island in the tropics. The same line runs between Key West and the northern coast of Cuba. I bought a Chinese quilted robe. When I sat at my desk in a room overlooking our front wall and tried to write or hold my Chinese language books open, sometimes my hands got so cold that I had to put them in my sleeves.

  In the first two weeks in the country, the Urys gave us a close view of the world of expatriate U.S. citizens living in Taiwan. After the second week, though, they no longer contacted us, but they responded to our calls for help.

  One of our calls for help was to interpret for a problem with our amah. Su Su-ching was an older woman from Nanking married to a retired soldier who lived in a wooden dorm with other retired military families a few blocks away. Every day it seemed Su-ching increased the amount of food she served. And being brought up to clean my plate, I ate the increase. Judith called Beth in frustration because she had asked Su-ching why she was serving so much food. We might have been able to ask the question in Chinese, but we were certain we didn’t have enough of the language to understand her answer.

  Beth came and talked with Su-ching. In a few minutes, Beth diplomatically explained that in Taiwan, if everything is eaten at the end of the meal, it means that there was not enough prepared and the cook loses face. Since I cleaned up the delicious Chinese dishes she prepared every day, Su-ching had no option but to cook more the next day. Once Beth explained it, there were knowing nods, slight bows, and smiles all around. Afterward, I changed my behavior and left some food on the serving dishes at the end of each meal.

  Beginning the Monday after we arrived, we walked four blocks to the Taipei Language Institute on Nan Ching East Road. We attended Mandarin classes from half past seven to half past twelve five days a week. In the afternoon and evening, there was homework. The walks back and forth to school provided unfettered access to our new environment.

  Coming out of our gate, we turned right to get to the thoroughfare that would lead us to the language school. In front of the wall of the house next door to ours and over the benjo ditch that ran along the wall was a shack no more than four feet wide and six feet long, where a family of four lived. I learned that they had a kind of squatter rights. Similar constructions could be found on most streets.

  Everything was so new that my senses were oversaturated, but none more than the olfactory sense. What Beth described as the “rich smells of China” were actually those of open sewers and smoke from the charcoal fires that every family used to cook on, as well as the smells of food cooking. These overpowering smells made us aware of how sterile, comparatively speaking, the environment was that we were used to in the United States. You knew when the “honey buckets” came by. Human feces were collected and used as fertilizer on the farms around the city.

  The only thing stronger than the smell of a pig farm came from the ch’ou tofu wagon when it came down the street. “Rotten” or “stinky” bean curd was fried in deep fat in a vat at the top of what looked like a pot-bellied stove on wheels. With a brown crust on the outside, the curd was then wrapped in old newspaper. If you wanted, a thick red fermented hot sauce put was served on the side. The smell was so overpowering that I walked on the other side of the street to get as far away from the wagon as possible. After months of hearing my language teachers extol this delicacy, I finally tried it. The fiery garlic-saturated sauce offset a little of what tasted like Limburger cheese. Unlike anything else I’ve ever eaten, the taste stayed with me for days.

  The newness was exciting, but with it came a feeling I can only describe as suffocation. Except for the English spoken by the missionary community and a few other expatriate friends, we totally immersed in a Chinese language learning situation. We were required to use whatever we had learned in school on the street—making purchases and giving instructions to pedicabs and cab drivers. At home we struggled to make sense of what callers would say after answering the phone correctly with “Wei!” Understanding little and the inability to make myself understood was a frustration that I knew was supposed to drive me to learn faster. But I felt as if I were in a linguistic vacuum.

  My pitifully limited Mandarin in an alien culture was not the only reason for feeling isolated; I also felt closed in by the atmosphere of the expatriate community on whom, like a baby to its mother, I was dependent. At missionary meetings, which never included Chinese leaders in the church, I learned that talk of politics was not permitted.

  One day, with a casual tone in which she might have been reporting a trip to the market, Beth mentioned that Su-ching had told her that she had been taken down to the police station and questioned for over an hour about Judith and me. At the next missionary I meeting, I reported the incident and asked no one in particular, “Is that standard procedure here?”

  Not answering my question, a senior missionary responded, “We don’t talk about such things. We are guests in this country, and guests don’t offend their hosts by getting involved in politics.” As the newest members of the missionary community, I assumed that he wanted to make sure Judith and I got the point. “One person can jeopardize our entire mission.”

  After a tense silence, Beth said, “Of course they question all of our amahs. It’s just the way they do things h
ere. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  There was a certain logic in the idea that it was inappropriate for foreigners to get involved in the politics of their host country. And over the years, I had agreed with it. But with my own government and church already supporting the government in power, I was beginning to see that the question was not nearly as simple as I had once imagined. I didn’t say more; it seemed I had already said too much.

  I reflected later that the senior missionary was right about indiscrete speech or actions threatening the entire mission. Methodists in Taiwan were almost exclusively made up of Mainlanders who had followed the Nationalist government in 1949, and there had been no serious effort to bring in the Taiwanese, who made up the majority population. It would have been a hard sell because the lay leadership of the Methodist churches and chapels were well-connected in the government, and most were members of the Kuomintang. As a board of missions report in 1967 admitted, since its beginnings in 1953, the Methodist Church in Taiwan had been a “chaplaincy” to expatriate Mainlanders. Given the close ties between the Methodist Church in Taiwan, the Chiang family, and the Nationalist government, the Methodist mission was especially sensitive about indiscrete speech or actions.

  There were, of course, other missionaries in the group who felt as suffocated as I did. They had learned to hold their tongues, as I had, at least in mission meetings.

  Because of the lack of language skills and a determination not to get involved in the local church while in full-time Mandarin study, I often attended the Taipei International Church that had recently moved from the Wesley Church to the Taipei Masonic Temple. The idea of worshiping in a masonic temple was a bit strange to me, but it was preferable to worshiping at the Wesley Church, the “mother” Methodist Church in Taiwan.