Fireproof Moth is an autobiographical account of a Methodist missionary’s stay in Taiwan in the late 1960s, but it reads like a thriller.
Author Milo L. Thornberry first describes his personal journey to becoming a minister in the mid 1950s. In 1965, the Methodist Church decided to send Thornberry and his wife Judith to Taiwan, and the couple went through preparatory sessions at Drew University and Stony Point Missionary Orientation Center north of New York. During this time he read some critical works such as George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed and Mark Mancall’s Formosa Today.
Upon arrival in Taipei on New Year’s Eve 1966 the couple settled down, started language school, and gradually came to experience the suffocating hold that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) had on society in Taiwan. They also got to know Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), a professor who was under house arrest at the time for publishing a document titled A Manifesto for Self-Salvation in 1964.
The couple started to help channel support from overseas to families of political prisoners, with the help of Peng’s two courageous students, Hsieh Tsung-min (謝聰敏) and Wei Ting-chao (魏廷朝). They also began producing mimeographed information sheets to inform visiting friends and colleagues overseas about the repressive political atmosphere in the country.
Together with other foreign friends in Taiwan they approached American and European reporters and supplied background information on developments in Taiwan. Fox Butterfield of the New York Times and Selig Harrison of the Washington Post were among the reporters they communicated with.
When in September 1968 Peng told the couple that he had received indications from the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice, one of the main secret police organizations at the time, that he might have an “accident,” a plan was devised to smuggle him out of Taiwan. After more than a year of preparation the plan became a reality, and on Jan. 3, 1970, Peng left Taiwan using a doctored Japanese passport and disguised as a Japanese musician.
He made it safely to Sweden, where he received political asylum. Eventually Peng made it to the US, where he became a senior research scholar and visiting professor at the University of Michigan.
Oddly, the KMT authorities never discovered the role played by Thornberry and his wife in Peng’s escape. They surmised that he had been helped by the CIA. The matter even came up in the February 1972 discussions between then-US national security adviser Henry Kissinger and president Richard Nixon with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來). Zhou accused the Americans of aiding Peng in his escape, but Nixon responded with indignation: “We had nothing to do with it.”
However, Taiwan’s secret police agencies kept an ever tightening watch over Milo and Judith, and on March 2, 1971 — more than a year after Peng’s escape — they were arrested and expelled from Taiwan. Selig Harrison visited them in their home while they were under house arrest and wrote a front-page article about it in the Washington Post (“Taiwan expels US missionary,” March 4, 1971).
It wasn’t until December 2003, at a reunion of human rights and democracy activists organized by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, that Milo and Judith — as well as the Japanese counterparts who also played a crucial role — disclosed their involvement in Peng’s escape.
The book reads like a spy thriller and fills a key void in the written history of Taiwan’s very recent transition to democracy. It is highly recommended.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,