CHINA & TAIWAN: Untold Stories of China and Taiwan

October 6, 2009

By VERNA YU

HONG KONG — When Ying Meijun bade farewell to her 1-year-old son at the train station in September 1949, little did she know that it would be 38 years before she saw him again.

The baby was crying so much that she decided not to take him onto the overcrowded train, so she left him in the care of his grandmother.

Thinking they were only leaving China temporarily, she promised: “We’ll be back soon.”

By the time she saw her first-born child again in 1987, he was a 40-year-old man wearied by years of hard labor on a mainland Chinese farm. Fighting back tears, he told his elderly parents how, as a young child, he used to chase trains that went pass their front door, shouting, “Mother! Mother!”, thinking that she would be on them.

Ms. Ying and her husband, Lung Huaisheng, who was an officer in the military police under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government, fled with his family to Taiwan a few months after the Communist Party declared itself the new ruler of China on Oct. 1, 1949.

Even in his old age, Lung Huaisheng often wept as he took out the shoe soles that his mother knitted and gave him when they saw each other for the last time at the train station.

These family memories are just some of the heart-wrenching stories told by their daughter, Lung Yingtai, a Taiwan-born author and University of Hong Kong professor, in her latest book “Da Jiang Da Hai 1949” (“Big River, Big Sea — Untold Stories of 1949”). The book is published by Taiwan’s CommonWealth Magazine and Hong Kong’s Cosmos Books.

Ms. Lung, who was born two years after the family moved to Taiwan, is a leading cultural critic, well-known for her sharp and candid writing. Her book of social-political criticism, “The Wild Fire,” published in 1985 when Taiwan was still under Kuomintang’s one-party rule, was seen as influential in the democratization of the island.

Her new book is a tribute to the tens of millions of people “who were trampled on, humiliated and hurt by the era.” It tells the story of the many Chinese families that were broken up by the civil war that ended in the Kuomintang’s defeat in 1949, with some two million escaping to Taiwan. Many, like her own parents, hastily said goodbye to loved ones in mainland China and would never see them again.

Apart from the stories of her own family and other Chinese people born in that era — including President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan — there are tales of elderly people who as young men fought for the Kuomintang, the Communist Party, or both, and even Japan (which ruled Taiwan from 1895 until 1945).

Many have not openly talked about their experiences. One 89-year-old man who was held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war told Ms. Lung he waited all his life to tell his story.

Ms. Lung’s book has become an instant best seller — more than 100,000 copies have been sold in Taiwan and 10,000 in Hong Kong since its publication in early September. Ms. Lung, who will be giving a talk at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Oct. 15, said the book did not have an English-language publisher yet. Although Ms. Lung had expressed a wish to publish it in mainland China, it seems almost impossible now, as the government has banned all Internet articles and discussions on the book.

Ms. Lung hopes to break down her readers’ preconceptions about events around 1949. Under Communist rule, many mainlanders regard Taiwan as a renegade province that should be taken back by force if necessary.

“I want to give them a different perspective,” she said.

As the Taiwan-born offspring of mainland refugees herself, she wants mainland readers, particularly political leaders like President Hu Jintao of China, to learn about the pain and sufferings of the people of Taiwan.

“When will there be no war? It’s when you can see your enemy’s wounds, then you won’t be able to pick up your gun,” she said.

She hopes the book will make people in China and Taiwan abandon long-held suspicions and prejudices regarding each other.

“If all that the leaders can think about are political negotiations” and economic interests “and there is no genuine understanding of emotions, then the foundation of peace would not be solid enough,” she said.

While researching her book, Ms. Lung discovered that residents of Changchun in the northeastern province of Jilin had not heard of the People’s Liberation Army’s five-month siege of that city in 1948, which resulted in between 150,000 and 650,000 people dying of starvation.

Instead, what they learn about in mainland Chinese history textbooks is the P.L.A.’s “great victory” when it “liberated” that city.

Mainland China is not the only side to edit its version of history.

The Kuomintang, which lost 470,000 troops in the northeastern battles and later fled to Taiwan, did not mention its defeat in the textbooks of Taiwan, either.

Ms. Lung wanted to tell this history through the tales or ordinary people.

She claims to make no political or moral judgment in her book. There is no “right side” or “wrong side” in the stories, she says. The Kuomintang troops, the People’s Liberation Army and the Taiwanese soldiers fighting for their Japanese colonial masters are given an equal hearing. To her, those individuals were just young people caught up in history.

“In this book I don’t care about who is on the right side, the victorious or the defeated side. I just want to show you that when you dismantle the apparatus of state, what’s inside are these individuals.”

Parts of Ms. Lung’s book also detail the stories of families amid wars and conflicts in the West, including the loving letters written by her German mother-in-law’s first husband before he died in a Soviet prisoner of war camp during World War II.

Ms. Lung said she included these because she wanted her Chinese readers to see their own history in perspective.

“Chinese people on both sides of the straits tend to see history from their own national scope,” she said. “But actually who is righteous or unrighteous? It’s a very complicated matter.”

“If we continue to be the unthinking cogs in a machine,” she said, “then how do you know whether these tragic misfortunes would not be repeated?”

Copyright 2009