Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 7

  If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint... With a little common sense you could have made a statesman.

  — Cardinal Wolsey to Sir Thomas Moore,

  — A Man for All Seasons

  Don sat on the little bench by the door, replacing slippers with his shoes. So tall and thin was he that when he stood up, he looked like a ladder unfolding. Judith and I were trying to recover from the shock of the invitation.

  “I’ll come by to pick you up,” he said as I held the door open for him. “It’s probably best if you don’t tell anyone else about this.” Then he was gone.

  At church Sunday, it was hard not telling the McKeels. Judith and I could hardly wait for Friday night.

  Don arrived at our gate promptly and held the taxi while we gathered our things and came out. Taxis, most of them Datsuns, were replacing pedicabs. Don folded himself into the front seat while Judith and I got into the back.

  “The Pengs live in National University housing about ten minutes from here,” he said as the taxi lurched out into the sea of pedestrians, bicycles, pedicabs, and other taxis on the street.

  “Does he teach at Tai-Da?” I asked.

  “No. The authorities won’t allow it,” he said. I think he could see the confusion on our faces. “Dr. Peng was released from prison just before you arrived at the end of the year.”

  “Why was he in prison?”

  “I guess I should have told you the other day. He and two of his former students were arrested in 1964 for printing and attempting to circulate a document they called ‘A Manifesto for Self-Salvation.’ It was a kind of attempt to do what Martin Luther did when he posted his ‘Ninety-five Theses’ on the door of the Wittenberg Church, except that Luther wanted to provoke a discussion within the Catholic Church while Peng and the others wanted a national debate on the legitimacy of the Chiang government. The government wasn’t amused, and under martial law they could have been given death sentences. Peng and his friends received eight- and ten-year sentences. Peng was released but the two students were not.”

  “Why not?” I asked as the taxi slowed down and stopped in front of a Japanese house with a wall around it much like the one we lived in.

  “Dr. Peng was probably released—with this regime one can only guess—because he was so well-known in international academic and government circles that his imprisonment was too much of an embarrassment for the government.”

  One of the things that Don hadn’t tell us was how he had made pastoral visits to Mrs. Peng during the time Dr. Peng was in prison because their Taiwanese friends were too fearful to do so. He also hadn’t told us how he continued the visits to both of them after Peng was released, even though a military jeep was parked at the end of his street.

  Don paid the driver and we rang the bell at the gate. I noticed a squatter hut outside the wall a few feet away much like the one on the corner near Number 9 and, as I was finding out, all over the city.

  A slender man with a broad smile opened the gate and gestured for us to come inside. He introduced us to his wife, who was standing behind him. Both exchanged greetings with Don in Taiwanese and then introduced themselves to Judith and me in English. We removed our shoes and ascended the two steps to the tatami floor of the house.

  “So, you are studying Mandarin,” Dr. Peng said.

  “Yes, that’s the policy for Methodist missionaries who work here.”

  “What will you do when you finish language school?”

  “I came to be the chaplain at Soochow, but the position has been filled. I may teach at one of the Presbyterian seminaries.”

  “We’re doing our best to convince the Methodists,” Don said.

  “What would you teach?” Dr. Peng asked.

  “My field is the history of Christianity in the non-Western world. I would probably teach church history,” I said. “And Judith plans to teach English.”

  There was such a sense of ease and lack of pretension in the man that I had difficulty believing that he was only recently out of prison.

  “I understand your field is political science, but the government won’t allow you to teach,” I said.

  “It is true. I guess they are afraid that I might contaminate the minds of students with treasonous thoughts,” he said. “Since they won’t let me teach here, I’ve requested permission to go abroad, but they won’t allow that, either. I guess they are worried about those students too,” he said with a laugh.

  “You did have quite an influence on at least two of your students, the ones who were with you in writing the document that landed you all in prison.”

  “Wei and Hsieh were very good students,” he said as his smile momentarily disappeared. I imagined his thinking of them still in prison when he was not. The smile reappeared and he said, “They didn’t need me to get in trouble with the government. We did it together.

  “Both were graduates from the law school. Hsieh Tsung-ming is the son of a wealthy family in central Taiwan. Although not finishing at the top of his class, he presented an outstanding thesis on constitutional law. Wei Ting-chao was ‘Hakka,’ the son of a farmer. Wei had been a good student in law school but upon graduation chose to work in a coal mine for several months so he could ‘gain experience of real life.’ Then, he took a job as a research assistant at the prestigious Academia Sinica.

  “We spent many hours in the evenings in this room talking about the illegitimacy of the present regime. Instead of fearing what the secret police might hear, we thought that the people of Taiwan should be discussing important questions publicly. What is the ‘government of China,’ which has lost China forever? Whom does it represent? How long is one going to continue to accept the fiction of Nationalist government as ‘government of China’ and the myth of ‘recovery of Mainland China by this government?’

  “We got tired of talking and decided to do something. We wrote what is translated in English as a ‘Manifesto for Formosan Self-Salvation’.”

  “What did you hope to achieve?” I asked.

  I suspect that Mrs. Peng knew that his answer would take a while, so before he had a chance to answer, she invited us to the table.

  “We wanted to affirm that return to the Mainland is absolutely impossible,” Peng continued once the conversation resumed, “and by unifying the island population, regardless of place of origin, to bring about the overthrow of the Chiang regime, establishing a new country and a new government. We wanted to have the constitution rewritten, guaranteeing basic human rights and obtaining true democracy by establishing an efficient administration responsible to the people. We want to participate in the UN as a new member, establishing diplomatic relations with other countries striving together for world peace. We did not think this unreasonable if the people were given an opportunity to discuss the issues openly.

  “We found a printer who we thought we could trust. He printed ten thousand copies. We took them by pedicab to a hotel room in Manka, which was our base of operations. Manka is one of the oldest and most disreputable sections of Taipei, and the hotel was one that usually rented its rooms by the hour. Quite suitable for our project, don’t you think?” he said, smiling.

  “Hsieh had taken the completed copies by pedicab to the apartment of a university student who didn’t ask any questions about what she was storing. The next step was to prepare address labels and mail them to Taiwanese all over the island.

  “We didn’t get to make the labels. There was a loud banging on the door. Before we could open it, eight plainclothes police, revolvers in hand, burst into the room and arrested us. As the room was searched— we knew this would be the last time we would see each other before trial and after that not for years—we agreed that we would simply tell the truth about what we had done.”

  Peng grew silent as if lost in thought. No one else spoke.

  “We weren’t members of organized crime, which is said to run Manka, or revolutionaries. We were campus intellectuals undone by our underestimation of the poli
ce state against which we were protesting,” Peng said.

  His striking candor and lack of pretense continued throughout the evening as we left the table and returned to the living room with the conversation shifting from the arrest and imprisonment to the political situation in Taiwan. We even talked about the Cultural Revolution and the fear it was generating in the United States.

  “Most Taiwanese are not interested in communism. There are persons accused of being Communists in prison here, but nearly all of them are Mainlanders. Most are falsely accused. For the Taiwanese, our distrust of Mainland Chinese is primary. We distrust Mainlanders as much as Marxist ideology. Most Taiwanese will tell you, ‘We don’t want Chiang and we don’t want Mao.’”

  At eleven o’clock, the party began to break up. Before we could leave, Don shocked us by saying that in June he and his family were going on furlough. He doubted that the government would allow him to return. He said the words and it hit me: Don had arranged the evening in the hope that the contact with Dr. Peng passed by George Todd to him would now be maintained by us if he were unable to return in September.

  We persuaded Don that we could hail a cab and get back home on our own. He was still there when we left. As Dr. Peng watched us to the gate, my mind went to the American Academy Awards Best Picture film of 1966, A Man for All Seasons. Robert Bolt’s play, on which the film is based, is about Sir Thomas Moore in sixteenth-century England, the true story of one man’s refusal to swerve from his spiritual and intellectual convictions even at the insistence of King Henry III. It was a play about conscious and a steadfast heart. I saw the movie before leaving for Taiwan. As he bid us good night, I felt I was shaking the hand of another Sir Thomas Moore.

  We hailed a taxi, got into the back seat of the little Datsun, and started down the street. Perhaps a little nervous after what we had heard, one of us looked out the back of the window to see a man who had been walking along in front of the house suddenly break into a run and go around a corner. Within seconds, a military jeep came from around the corner as if it had been shot from a gun.

  “We can’t go home,” we said to each other. “They will follow us.”

  We told the driver to take us to the East Gate district downtown, far away from Chi Nan Road and home. We thought we might lose the jeep or at least be able to get out and get lost in the crowd in the movie district. The jeep roared right up onto the tail of our cab, the bright lights almost blinding us and the driver. I don’t know what the driver was thinking; we didn’t say anything to him, except where to take us. For a couple of miles the jeep rode our tail. We could have been stopped, but weren’t. That was some comfort because at first we thought the jeep might just run over us.

  Our hope to get lost in the movie crowds was dashed when we arrived and found the movie district deserted. All we could see open was a coffee house. We paid the driver before he stopped, jumped out, and hurried inside. The cab sped away, but the jeep stopped just short of the coffee house. We went inside and upstairs to a balcony from where we could see the street. Terrified at the prospect of whoever was in the large jeep coming through the door and grabbing us, we ordered coffee and tried to talk rationally about what had happened and what to do next. There was no one we dared call. What would Don or Dr. Peng do? Finally, the jeep left. We waited until after midnight. It looked as if the coffee shop was about to close. In any event, we didn’t want to be the last customers out. We stepped out onto the street and wondered if we could find a cab or if the sinister jeep would reappear and run us down. Fortunately for us, several taxis came around the circle and we hailed one. We watched through the back window, but it didn’t appear that anyone was following us.

  We were relieved to get back to Number 9 and find Elizabeth sound asleep in her crib. Su-ching woke up and reported that the evening had been uneventful. The adrenalin rush over the last couple of hours increased our weariness but prevented sleep from coming easily. We had said we wanted to find out about the political reality in Taiwan. We had our first lesson.

  Chapter Nine

  If They Only Knew

  We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

  — Eli Wiesel (1928- )

  While we had been thoroughly frightened, we were not deterred from seeing Peng again. Before we left that evening, we had invited him to come see us, and he assured us he would. A day or two later in the late afternoon, we received a phone call. “I can be there in fifteen or twenty minutes. Are you sure it is convenient?”

  “Of course, we are anxious to see you. Can you stay for dinner?”

  “Oh no, I don’t want to impose on you. Maybe I should come another time.”

  “Please come. It won’t be like at your house the other night. This is our amah’s night off and we are having leftovers, but there are plenty of those,” I said, not considering what cultural faux pas we might be committing by such an invitation to eat leftovers. In discussing it later, Judith and I sensed that with this man it would be okay.

  “We are anxious to see you. Can Mrs. Peng come? She would also be welcome.” Extending the leftover invitation to Mrs. Peng was stretching the limits of even a westerner’s informality, but I felt it would have been more impolite not to invite her at all.

  “No, she will not be able to come. I will explain when I see you. I will be there in a few minutes.”

  To say that we were anxious to see Peng was a considerable understatement. We wanted to know if he knew anything about what happened after we left his house. Don had gone south and we had been unable to talk with him. We had both been captivated by Dr. Peng. Knowing who he was had something to do with the attraction, but his seeming openness to us made us want to get to know him better.

  “Oh, I am so sorry you had to go through that,” he said as we ate and explained what happened on Friday night. “I didn’t know.”

  “From your description of the jeep, it sounds like it was the Garrison Command, one of several secret police agencies of the regime, and headed by Chiang Ching-kuo, son of the Generalissimo.”

  “Do you think they have been watching your house?” I asked, prompting a chuckle from Peng.

  “Don may not have known that I am under watch twenty-four hours a day. They use the little squatter’s house outside my gate as their post. When I come out, one or two men follow me wherever I go,” he said.

  “Did they follow you today?” I said, wondering if they were waiting outside.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Although they are not supposed to, the guards go to sleep at night. I go out after midnight and they never know I’m gone.”

  “Have you been out since last night?” I asked.

  “Yes, I will go home before five in the morning and they’ll think I’ve been in the house for the last twenty-four hours.”

  We spent the evening talking about politics, our families, and the culture. I even confessed my uneasiness about inviting a guest to eat leftovers.

  “Your invitation means that you did not treat me as a guest, but as a friend,” he responded.

  Peng became a regular visitor at our house, albeit sometimes at strange hours. He visited us on an average of once a week for the next four years. While the different secret police and security agencies would find out about a lot about our activities, there has never been any indication that the Nationalists or the U.S. government ever learned of these visits. Had they known, I’m sure that our sojourn in Taiwan would have been much shorter.

  Peng, it seemed to us, was a lonely man. At first we simply became friends. He seemed to enjoy our company as we did his. He was also grieving because Hsieh and Wei were in prison and he was not. But at the same time, he was creating a communication network among like-minded Taiwanese around the island.

  “Would you be willing to help?” Peng asked one day after another one of our long conversations about the problems in Taiwan.

  “There are things we could do that if done by u
s would likely result only in our deportation, but if done by the Taiwanese could cost their lives.” I said, not as a question but a conclusion we had already drawn.

  “Because this regime is brutal and unpredictable, you can’t be sure of what they might do to you,” Peng replied, “but you are right that, whatever the case, the risk to you would be less than that to a Taiwanese.”

  In a flash, I remembered all of the warnings about how missionaries should not become “politically involved,” a message regularly sounded in the Methodist missionary community. Those who gave such warnings did not consider their kowtowing to the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang as political involvement.

  The more I thought about it, the more embarrassed I was for the missionary community and my identification with it. Since my graduate work had involved the history of Christian missions, I should not have been surprised at what I found in the Methodist mission in Taiwan. While the history of missions contains many noble exceptions, by and large missions and missionaries either acquiesced to the colonial policies that made their presence possible or actively supported them. While it might be pointed out that the Republic of China was not a “colony” of the United States, the Methodist mission, of which I was a part, turned a blind eye to what was happening on the island and curried the favor of both the ROC and the U.S. in order to retain its position on the island. The difference to me seemed semantic and not substantive.

  I was surprised to discover that the problem was not limited to missionaries. I discovered that Dick and Leigh Kagan were also embarrassed that more of their fellow graduate students in Chinese studies from universities in the U.S. studying in Taiwan were not more concerned about the political situation.

  We met Dick and Leigh out on the street in front of our house as we each pushed our babies in strollers. They lived at Number 20, a few doors down the street from us. Both of them were in Taiwan on fellowships—Leigh from Harvard and Dick from the University of Pennsylvania. Their little girl, Rachel, was eight months older than Elizabeth.