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

  What I found at the International Church was a collection of expatriates, mostly American, who were business people, U.S. government employees, and missionaries who didn’t have assignments that put them in Chinese churches on Sunday.

  Missionaries lived double lives—their lives working with the Chinese and their lives identifying with other missionaries and Americans. Rarely did these lives overlap socially. I observed that many missionaries spent a minimum of time with the Chinese and a maximum with other Americans. There were others whose whole focus was on the people they came to serve. They won my admiration, and I was determined to be among them.

  On my first visit to the International Church, I met Wayne and Jane McKeel, a couple about the same age as Judith and me who had come from Methodist origins in Tennessee. Wayne was a member of the USAID delegation. He was full of questions and not satisfied with half-answers. By the time we had had coffee after church a couple of times, I knew we would be good friends. Wayne talked freely about his frustrations dealing with both the U.S. and GRC bureaucracies. I found it easy to talk with both Wayne and Jane about my feelings of suffocation in the missionary community and not being free to talk about the things that concerned me. Exchanging ideas with people who were knowledgeable about the situation in Taiwan and U.S. State Department policies provided delicious fresh air in which I could intellectually breathe. In time, the McKeels became more than good friends; they became collaborators.

  More than these new friends, the supreme moment of exhilaration in those early months was the birth of our first child. On April 9, 1966, after a long labor at the Country Hospital on Hsin Yi Road, I saw first as she emerged tiny fingers and toes. The thrill was beyond description. We had already picked the name, Elizabeth Wayne—Elizabeth for her two grandmothers and Wayne for her mother, maternal grandmother, and great-grandmother. She soon had a Chinese name as well, “T’ang Li-hwa”—T’ang for our family name and Li-hwa, which means “Beautiful Flower.” It wasalso the name of a famous Chinese movie star.

  We had a family name because Dr. Stone, president of Soochow University, gave it to me. He told me that one of his jobs was to give Methodist missionaries their Chinese names. He thought about mine for a few days and then called me back out to the university.

  “Your surname should be T’ang for the dynasty regarded by historians as the high point of Chinese civilization.” He had written the character and the Romanization for it on a piece of paper, which he then slid across the desk for me to see.

  “Your personal name should be P’ei-li, which means “to nurture culture.” I give you that name because that is what you will do here in Taiwan,” the old gentleman said, writing the two characters after the first and their Romanization on the card.

  The teachers at the language school told me that I had been given an excellent name—one that had a good meaning and that sounded something like the English. When I told them who had given it to me, they oohed and ahhed, saying that he was known for giving good names. I hoped I could live up to the promise of the name and Dr. Stone’s high expectations.

  Chapter Seven

  Signs and Portents

  We are born at a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and season of which we are born.

  — Carl Jung (1875-1961)

  Astrologists look at the position of the planets when children are born to see what forces may shape them. It made more sense to me to look at what was happening when a child was born to see how these events might shape that life. It was not surprising that in those first weeks of Elizabeth’s life I thought about the current events that might affect her life.

  I confess, however, that the musings were not simply about Elizabeth. Her birth coincided with the beginning of my life in Taiwan. At the time of her beginnings, I saw my beginning a new life in Taiwan. As she snuggled in my arms holding my finger with more than usual interest, I wondered what “signs and portents” in the heavens or headlines were there for her and me.

  Since we rarely sense the importance of events as they happen around us—the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and the September 11 attacks being notable exceptions—it is usually in retrospect that we see meaning for us in the events that surrounded our births, or in my case a rebirth in Taiwan. Seeing from the present was a limitation, but no more than the sources of news available to me were. I was unable to read the local newspapers in Chinese; and the local English language paper, China Post, was hardly better than nothing. The China Post was the propaganda the KMT wanted foreigners to know. A surprisingly better source turned out to be U.S. Armed Forces Radio and the newspaper Stars and Stripes. I saw the latter on occasion, but both of them were so much less censored than any other source of news to which I had access that they stood out as beacons of reliability. We subscribed to the Asian edition of Time. For the most part, Henry Luce saw to it that there was nothing offensive to the Republic of China within the covers, but when I received my first issue I found where pages had been not so neatly removed by the censors’ razor blades.

  No media escaped the censors’ attention. One of the first movies we went to see was The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews. The film we saw lasted only forty-five minutes; we thought it was to be nearly three hours. We came out of the theater thinking the movie didn’t make any sense at all and wondered why it was receiving so many rave reviews in the U.S. We learned that the censors had removed all references to, scenes of, and songs about people escaping to the mountains.

  Despite the limitations for sources of “signs or portents,” I had begun to do what everybody else seemed to do—take kernels of information, compensate for their source, and imagine what might be the truth. With such filters in place, I put together a list of events I imagined might be important to baby Elizabeth and me.

  The National Organization for Women was chartered in 1966. President Lyndon Johnson saw to the passage of Medicare, and the Supreme Court issued its Miranda ruling, which would change the way police could arrest suspects. On May 30, the Surveyor was the first spaceship to land safely on the moon, preparing the way for the Apollo landing with humans aboard on June 20, 1969.

  In May, a song by Sergeant Barry Sadler was released and by the end of the year, his “Ballad of the Green Berets” would be the most popular song of the year. That song reflected much of the mood of the U.S. Early in the year there were twenty thousand U.S. combat soldiers in Vietnam. By the end of the year there would be over four hundred thousand, President Johnson having decided that he wouldn’t be the “first president to lose a war.” Antiwar protests were beginning in all major cities.

  On May 16, 1966, slightly over a month after the birth of Elizabeth, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, Mao Tse-tung, launched the Cultural Revolution. Alleging that liberal bourgeoisie elements were dominating the party and insisting that they needed to be removed through a post-revolutionary class struggle, he mobilized China’s youth around the country, who formed groups called Red Guards. What was not clear in those early weeks was how the Cultural Revolution would result in population dislocation and anti-intellectual persecution on a scale unimaginable in most of the rest of the world.

  While it was a field day for propagandists in the KMT and a distraction from reality in Taiwan, from its earliest days the Cultural Revolution frightened much of the rest of the world. In the United States, that fear would contribute mightily to its blindness toward the possibility of intervention in Vietnam and the reluctance to see Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist government in Taiwan as anything other than one more means to resist the Communist advance. That much seemed clear to me even in the early months. What this all meant to the Taiwanese I was not yet in a position to see.

  I knew from my readings before arriving in Taiwan the distinction between “Taiwanese” and “Mainlanders.” “Taiwanese” referred to the twelve million ethnic Chinese whose ancestors had come to the island in the seventeenth and eighteenth cent
uries, especially from Fujen province and the rest of southeast China. “Mainlanders” were the one to two million Chinese who had come after World War II, especially those who came with the Nationalists (soldiers, government workers, and people rich enough to flee) after their defeat by the Chinese Communists on the Mainland in 1949. The several hundred thousand “native” Taiwanese, people of Malay-Polynesian descent, were the first known inhabitants of the island.

  When I accepted the board’s assignment to Taiwan, I was supposed to be appointed chaplain at Soochow University. When I arrived I found that another Methodist missionary, Don MacInnis, had been appointed to the position. The university decided not to wait another eighteen months while I was doing language study. I was relieved. Soochow was a Mainlander institution for Mainlanders. When I learned that there was a need for a church history teacher at Taiwan Theological College and that they had tentatively been promised one by the Methodist Mission Board, I thought that was more to my liking. First, I would be able to teach in a seminary. Second, I would be teaching in a Presbyterian (hence “Taiwanese”) institution.

  Presbyterians had been in Taiwan almost a hundred years, and Roman Catholics before them. As a result of old comity agreements that assigned different denominations different parts of a “mission” country, British Presbyterians began in the south and Canadian Presbyterians in the north. The Presbyterian Church of Taiwan was the result of their efforts, and it was the Church of the Taiwanese. The first school, the first hospital, and the first printing press on the island were all established by the Presbyterian church.

  During the Japanese colonial period, in spite of strong pressure from the authorities to use Japanese, the Presbyterian church continued to use the Taiwanese language in its activities. When all foreign missionaries were expelled by Japan in the late 1930s, the church experienced complete independence of missionary control. Missionaries were welcomed back at the end of World War II, but they came back to a church that had survived the fire of Japanese persecution on its own and had confidence its own leadership. By the time I arrived in Taiwan, in addition to British and Canadian Presbyterian missionaries, there were also Presbyterians from the United States.

  In the separate but related histories of the British and Canadian missions, two Presbyterian seminaries had been established, one in Taipei and one in Tainan, in the southern part of the island. Further removed from the center of power in the north, Tainan Theological College had a well-deserved reputation for resisting government attempts—whether Japanese or of the GRC—to intimidate and control it. Taiwan Theological College, in Shih Lin outside Taipei on the road up to Yang Ming Shan, was a more conservative seminary reflecting the theology and political caution of the North Synod.

  An appointment of a Methodist missionary to either seminary was not without precedent. When I arrived, a Methodist missionary, Ted Cole, was on the faculty in Tainan. A few years earlier, an arrangement had been in the works for J. Harry Haines, earlier a missionary on the Mainland, to be appointed at the northern seminary to teach church history. The appointment didn’t work out because of his election to become general secretary of the Methodist Committee on Relief in New York. Within the first couple of months of my arrival, I was approached by both seminaries and invited to join their faculties. The offers were flattering, but I was mindful of a missionary reality. The seminaries would not have to pay my salary because I was a missionary; they would only have to provide a residence. That notwithstanding, I thought with no lack of presumption that either seminary would be lucky to have me.

  The decision was not mine to make, however. The power to place missionaries was in the hands of the area secretary in New York and the resident bishop, a U.S. bishop who was himself (and at the time they were all “him”) appointed by the Council of Bishops. The East Asia Area Secretary was responsible for missionaries in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The bishop was assigned to the two provisional annual conferences for the Hong Kong-Taiwan area for a four-year period.

  Technically, the bishop had the authority to make any appointment of clergy, but few were made without the approval of the Area Secretary for the board. I made my appeal to both. Margaret Billingsley came out of the missionary experience in Korea and was nearing retirement. In response to my letter to her in which I pointed out how the need for a church history teacher specializing in non-Western church history fit my qualifications, she wrote back,

  “Tainan Theological School has asked for every missionary we have. This seems to be their general procedure.”

  A paragraph later she gave me the news that Don and Helen MacInnis would be leaving Soochow University and said I would be needed there.

  “Also, I was hoping that you would teach some at the Theological School in Taipei so that they could have some fresh teaching and ideas brought into the school there,” she wrote.

  Bishop Hazen Werner agreed with Dr. Billingsley, but he opened the door wider to my teaching in a seminary. In my second year of language study, the two of them would agree on my being based at the northern seminary as well as teaching part time in Tainan, an assignment that worked well both for teaching what I was trained for and was better for what would become my non-seminary activities.

  When I arrived in Taiwan, Don Wilson was the Associate General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, a position usually reserved for a missionary. Don was a tall, slender member of the U.S. United Presbyterian Church serving under the auspices of the Canadian Presbyterians. Although I spoke no Taiwanese, I understood that Don spoke the language and understood the culture so well that when he spoke the language, if Taiwanese couldn’t see him, they would think they were hearing a native speaker, a level of proficiency few missionaries achieved. Don had been in Taiwan for ten years, but it was another person who made the contacts outside the church.

  In the early 1960s, George Todd of the Urban Ministries program of the United Presbyterian Church came to work for two years in Tainan. Because of his short term, he was not given language training. At his own expense, he hired a Taiwanese companion who went with him everywhere and translated for him. First thing every morning, George had this interpreter read the morning Chinese paper to him. George had been involved in creating the East Harlem Protestant Parish, a pioneering urban ministry in New York City. He was politically conscious with the mind of a community organizer. In his brief time on the island, George made it his business to get to know people at every level of society. That included Taiwanese who had resisted the heavy hand of the Kuomintang, something few other missionaries had dared do. Before he left Taiwan, he passed those contacts on to Don Wilson.

  Judith and I had met George at Stony Point before leaving for Taiwan. He talked with us about the ways he had found to move beneath surface appearances and understand often unheard perspectives among the people. He encouraged us to get to know Don Wilson. “He will introduce you to people who can help you gain a fuller understanding,” he said.

  One afternoon in the late spring, Don called to ask if he could come by. He knew me because of the possibility that I might teach at one of the seminaries, and at a social gathering, we had had a conversation about the situation in Taiwan. After he removed his shoes and exchanged pleasantries, he took time to ooh and ahh over Elizabeth. Then he came to the point of his visit. Judith and he handed Elizabeth to Su-ching and we sat down in the living room.

  “You told me you wanted to know more about the political reality here, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, we did,” I said, relieved that we were about to have a conversation I had been wanting for months.

  “Do you know who Dr. Peng Ming-min is?”

  “No,” I had to confess. Judith was also shaking her head.

  “Dr. Peng’s grandfather was the first Taiwanese Presbyterian minister on the island. His father was a doctor but is dead. His mother, who lives in Kaohsiung, is active in the church, but Peng has not been.”

  This was starting out like a church conversation
, and I wasn’t sure where it was going.

  “Peng was educated in Japan during World War II. He lost an arm in an American bombing attack in Nagasaki and was just outside the city a few months later when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city,” Don said.

  “A brilliant student,” he went on, “Peng later studied at McGill University in Canada and received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Taiwan in 1954. Peng became one of the most popular lecturers at Tai-Da, the National University in Taipei and head of the Political Science Department. He is said to be the youngest department head in the history of the school—almost unheard of because of his age and because he was Taiwanese. As a specialist in international law, he wrote a paper that laid the basis for space law. When Peng returned to Taiwan, he was at the peak of his career and recognized as a pioneer in space law. He was invited to seminars at Harvard University with Henry Kissinger. He became a part of the Nationalist Chinese delegation to the United Nations. Because the government wanted him to spy on Taiwanese independence groups in the United States, Peng said he began to be uneasy about his association with the Nationalist government.”

  Don had my full attention.

  “Later, Peng would say that the government made a mistake sending him to the United Nations because there he would be politicized and would turn against it.”

  Don looked at his watch and said he had to get to another appointment.

  “But how did he turn against the government? What did he do?” I sputtered.

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Don said as he stood to leave. “You said you wanted to know about the reality in Taiwan. I know of no one in the world who can help you understand that better than Dr. Peng. Would you like to have dinner with him next Friday night?”

  Chapter Eight

  Dinner and a Show (of Force)