By Jesse McGonigle ‘I had to hide right here, otherwise they would have killed me’, ninety-two year old Zeng Rong Zong told me, pointing to the ground, as we sat in a Family Mart in Nankan eating bao zi and drinking coffee. ‘This used to be a barn, on a farm I worked on, many years ago…’ his words trailed off and his mind wandered further into thought. By ‘they’ he meant the soldiers associated with Chiang Kai Shek’s ‘White Terror’, a period of martial law which involved the purging of perceived dissidents, officially lasting from 1949 to 1987. Rong Zong told me that many friends of his had already been murdered, and he knew that his life was in the balance as he heard gunfire and ran for the barn, seeking refuge from those looking to kill him.
Rong Zong was born in 1924 and was the youngest of four children, with two elder brothers, and one elder sister ahead of him. Today, he is the only surviving member of that family. After receiving elementary and secondary education, he attended a farmer’s school at the age of sixteen, and it is his firm belief that the soldiers that day in Nankan came after him because of his relatively good education, ‘They believed that young educated people were a threat to Chiang Kai Shek’s authority’, Rong Zong said to me. A threat they sought to eliminate. In 1950 Rong Zong was arranged to be married with his eldest brother’s wife’s cousin, and a party was held to celebrate this union. However his siblings didn’t plan on what happened next. At the party Rong Zong met a girl two years his junior by the name of Tsung Huang Ming. ‘I remember her dancing on the floor,’ he told me, ‘and she was very outgoing. Unlike any of the other women I had met.’ Rong Zong was quickly taken with Huang Ming, and called off the arranged marriage. He started courting Huang Ming, and within the year they were married. ‘He was quiet,’ Huang Ming told me, ‘different to me. We were opposites. However he worked hard and was kind, but most important of all he was tall!’ Huang Ming and I sit in her living room, me drinking oolong tea and her a cappuccino in a strange reversal of roles, a cappuccino which she mixes with five spoons of sugar. ‘[Rong Zong] and me share this in common, our love of sugar. He has drunk two litres of cola a day since he was sixty. It gives him energy to go for walks in the park’ she laughs. The two seem to have embraced modern culture, as Huang Ming recently learned to use an iPad after being hospitalised with a broken arm, and Rong Zong enjoys watching dramas on his huge television. Huang Ming was born into a relatively poor family, and had three siblings: one elder brother, one elder sister and one younger sister, who is still alive today. ‘I was forced to move away to Taipei at a young age, maybe five or six, as there were too many mouths to feed. I went to live with my father’s sister and her two children. It wasn’t the nicest of experiences as I was treated as an outsider, not really a part of their family.’ Huang Ming felt isolated, yet she found solace in her education, as she was lucky enough to attend elementary school, which was a rarity for girls at the time. ‘I enjoyed math as it made sense to me.’ However Huang Ming tells me that it was at school that she started to notice the difference between Taiwanese citizens and Japanese citizens. ‘We were segregated and treated differently from the Japanese. Chinese was not taught at all, only Japanese, the only language of the time, and we were disciplined often, especially when we forgot to address each other by our given Japanese names.’ Punishments and beatings were a regular occurrence at elementary school, and have affected Huang Ming to this day. ‘I feel as much a Japanese as I do a Taiwanese’ she confides in me. Her polite straight bowing and dress code certainly back up her assertion that she possesses more than one identity. ‘The Japanese treated other Japanese better. We were made to feel like second class citizens in our own country’ Huang Ming says, while adding that she always had to wait in line behind other Japanese in shops, as well as adhering to Japanese cultural practices and surrendering Chinese and Taiwanese lifestyles and education. At the age of twelve Huang Ming moved in with her brother and his wife. Her older brother wanted the best for his sister, and arranged for her to take an entrance exam to a secondary school in Taipei. She passed it and became the first woman in the family to attend secondary school. ‘My brother was a good man. He ran a tea company and conducted business with a lot of Japanese in order to provide both me and his wife with a better life. His good relationships are the reason why I was able to attend secondary school.’ Huang Ming’s older brother pushed her academically, furthering her knowledge of maths as she worked part-time looking over his accounts. He secretly taught her Han characters so that she could read Chinese, and gave her a taste of the world as he would regularly make trips around Asia on business ventures. ‘He gave me an adventurous spirit’ she recalls. However her older brother was very strict; if she didn’t do a good job with her homework he would throw it away and make her start again from scratch. ‘There were times when the business wasn’t doing so well, so we had to sell the furniture and do all of our work on the floor.’ Not just content with being a housewife, Huang Ming later put her education to good use, as she became an accountant for her farmer husband. ‘I don’t remember much about that day,’ Huang Ming states, referring to the shooting, ‘but the time in general was treacherous for both of us, given our age and educations, so we always had an escape route planned.’ ‘After the shooting I intentionally let certain fields become overgrown to head height. I also built another barn as a decoy’ Rong Zong remembers. ‘The soldiers could wander through there thinking we were hiding. Thankfully they never came back.’ As I interview them together, a small argument breaks out. ‘Taiwan was safer under Japanese occupation’ Huang Ming asserts, believing it was better than Chiang Kai Shek’s unnverving period of ‘White Terror’. Huang Ming is representative of the identity crisis felt by many on this island. Rong Zong strongly disagrees with his wife, stating that the struggle was worth it for the freer Taiwan of today. ‘We could never have preserved our identity under Japanese rule’ he argues. We sat in their home, surrounded by four generations of family, ages ranging from ninety-two to four years old, all of whom communicate in Taiwanese. Perhaps Rong Zong is right, and that he and his wife’s survival is somehow an allegory for Taiwan’s continuity and preserved identity. a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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