Ruth Lin, a medical missionary who came to Taiwan half a century ago and settled here, passed away on Monday at the age of 95.
Lin was born Ruth Duncan in Lubbock, Texas, in 1921. After graduating with a nursing degree, she went to Qinghai Province in China, where she helped establish a hospital that provided medical services to Tibetan people and trained nurses.
Unexpectedly, she and other nurses working on the Tibetan Plateau — “the roof of the world” — were confined to the hospital for seven months by the Chinese Communists, after which she left China in a dejected mood and came to Taiwan.
Thanks to her faith, she firmly believed that God would set out a path for her to follow.
In 1952, she went to the Happy Mount sanatorium in what is now New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里) to care for leprosy patients. As fate would have it, she met Frank Lin (林澄輝), the son of a wealthy family in Tainan, and, after overcoming numerous difficulties, they became husband and wife.
In those days, most people were terrified of leprosy. One day in what is today Tainan’s Jiali District (佳里), Ruth Lin saw a leprosy sufferer in his 40s who was shut away in a little room with bars on the windows, like an animal, and could never set foot outside.
In 1956, the Lins established a special dermatological clinic in Tainan that was devoted to treating leprosy patients. For more than a decade, Ruth Lin took in and treated more than 1,000 leprosy patients in Tainan, while patiently spreading healthcare education in the hope of removing the stigma attached to the disease.
The Lins met each other, fell in love and lived together as husband and wife for half a century. Having no children, they depended on each other in their old age. In 2005, they selflessly donated their home and NT$60 million (US$1.8 million at current exchange rates) in savings to turn the building into a care center, and in 2011 they again donated land valued at more than NT$200 million, and NT$130 million in property, to build a center to provide elderly people with high-quality care.
Someone once asked Ruth Lin where she was from, to which she, with her high-profile nose, fair hair and blue eyes, replied in fluent Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) that she was Taiwanese through and through.
The Lins were industrious and frugal all throughout their lives, using their medical expertise to help people and care for the most needy patients, and they gave all their wealth to the nation.
In 2007, then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) presented the Lins with the Order of Brilliant Star with Violet Grand Cordon in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the development of the nation and Ruth Lin was given an award for her contributions to medicine.
There is only thing that can really heal physical and mental illnesses and pain, and that is selfless love. Taiwan, luckily, has never been lacking in loving people. Now Ruth Lin has left this world and gone to her home in heaven. Having traveled from the US to China and then to Taiwan, she devoted the golden years of her life to Taiwan and married a Taiwanese.
She was indeed a true Taiwanese — and perhaps she loved Taiwan even more than some Taiwanese do. She devoted her life to caring for the old, the weak, the sick and disabled people.
Taiwanese are proud of Ruth Lin and grateful for her life-long contributions to the nation.
Chang Chao-hsuan is a family physician.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats. The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption,
On Monday, a group of bipartisan US senators arrived in Taiwan to support the nation’s special defense bill to counter Chinese threats. At the same time, Beijing announced that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had invited Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) to visit China, a move to make the KMT a pawn in its proxy warfare against Taiwan and the US. Since her inauguration as KMT chair last year, Cheng, widely seen as a pro-China figure, has made no secret of her desire to interact with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and meet with Xi, naming it a
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) took the stage at a protest rally on Sunday in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei in support of former TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who has been sentenced to 17 years in jail for corruption and embezzlement. Huang told the crowd that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) had sent a message of support the previous day, saying she would be traveling from the south to Taipei: If the protest continued into the evening, she had said, she would show up. The rally was due to end
A delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) officials led by Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is to travel to China tomorrow for a six-day visit to Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, which might end with a meeting between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). The trip was announced by Xinhua news agency on Monday last week, which cited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao (宋濤) as saying that Cheng has repeatedly expressed willingness to visit China, and that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee and Xi have extended an invitation. Although some people have been speculating about a potential Xi-Cheng
RSS