Grandpa Fu wasn’t a particularly good storyteller. Almost all his stories were about Ah-Chuan, his friend in youth. What was unusual about Ah-Chuan? Ah-Chuan was unlike anyone Grandpa Fu had ever known. According to Grandpa Fu’s stories, Ah-Chuan was a man of many talents and endless curiosity.
First, Ah-Chuan was a sci-fi writer. He wrote wonderful stories about outer space. He wove tales of distant galaxies through fantastical adventures. We were surprised that Grandpa Fu, an old school man, would appreciate the genre of sci-fi. But when we looked up Ah-Chuan’s formal name, Lai Yu-Chuan, and any fiction about outer space of his time, we found nothing related to Ah-Chuan or Lai Yu-Chuan. Perhaps he used a pen name? Sci-fi was a relatively new genre in the 1950s, even in the West, not to mention in Taiwan.
And while the puzzle was not solved yet, Ah-Chuan’s identity changed again in another story. This time Ah-Chuan became a brilliant astronaut working for NASA, unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. We tried to trick Grandpa Fu to talk more about NASA. He admitted that he knew very little about NASA, “Wait until Ah-Chuan comes back, I will ask what had happened over all these years.”
Amidst all the inconsistent details of Ah-Chuan’s life stories, there was some background information about Ah-Chuan never changed. He was from Kaohsiung. He majored in English literature in the Taiwan Provincial Teachers’ College, which was where Grandpa Fu met Ah-Chuan. Grandpa Fu majored in chemistry, but they were roommates of the student dormitory.
In another story, Ah-Chuan was an actor. What? What did he play? He played Lawrence of Arabia, Anton Chekhov, and China’s last emperor… he acted in a lot of roles. Did he act as an astronomer? No, at that time there were no astronauts. We told ourselves that Ah-Chuan was Grandpa Fu’s imaginary friend, because when a person gets old, he could become a child again.
A Story: Grandpa Fu and Ah-Chuan Meet
Lai Yu-Chuan was my first close Taiwanese friend. I am from Mainland China. I came to Taiwan with my parents after the Communist insurgents raged and occupied the whole of China. My father worked for the government, so we could settle down in Mid-Taiwan and resume our life in the provincial capital. After months of study, I was luckily admitted to Taiwan Provincial Teachers’ College in Taipei, majoring in chemistry, a subject I began before we were forced to leave our hometown in China.
Lai Yu-Chuan called himself Ah-Chuan. He was in the Department of English Literature, so many of his books were in English. However, to my surprise, the books he carried with him most of the time were not by Shakespeare, but were science fiction. He had magazines with very colorful and figurative covers, like Astounding Stories of Super Science from America. He said his relatives in Japan bought them from American soldiers. Ah-Chuan was particularly excited about those stories set in other galaxies.
“What? There are humans living on other planets? That is impossible,” I said.
Ah-Chuan just smiled, “It’s fictional. But who knows?”
“It’s called science fiction, but it’s not scientific.”
However, when Ah-Chuan interpreted the stories in our dormitory room, we were all infatuated.
“One day, humans will really be traveling in outer space,” he said with great confidence.
Grandpa Fu in Rehab
When Grandpa Fu was 83 years old, he suffered a stroke. Whenever we had time, we spent it with him in rehab. For a man in his eighties, his recovery was not bad, but slow. It could be frustrating, for him and for all of us. Grandpa Fu stopped telling us Ah-Chuan’s stories, whether he was an astronomer or a sci-fi writer, or an actor, or any imaginative identity.
Once when we felt exhausted trying to help Grandpa Fu walk, I thought it might be clever to ask him, “Do you wish Ah-Chuan to visit you?”
Grandpa Fu blinked his eyes, then he turned his head away to the dimming sun glow in the rehabilitation center of the hospital. After several moments that felt as long as a century, Grandpa Fu said without turning his head back, “He never returned. My roommate never returned. Ah-Chuan never returned.” Then Grandpa Fu began to cry. His effort to repress his agitation made his silent choking even more miserable, and we were stunned. What a stupid question I asked. Ever since that time, Grandpa Fu never mentioned Ah-Chuan, no one dared to mention his name again.
A Story: Ah-Chuan Disappears
An early summer night of our last year in college was the last time I saw Ah-Chuan. I was already in bed in the dormitory when Ah-Chuan unexpectedly came back. He was away much of the time. At first, I thought Ah-Chuan went home every month, sometimes more than once a month.
Later, I realized Ah-Chuan was very active in various affairs. He was a contributor to a newspaper’s supplement, and organized book readings from time to time. From our other roommates, I learned that some of the books were very sensitive. Before the Communist Party took over China, Ah-Chuan had contacts there for literary exchanges. I knew Ah-Chuan was deeply interested in modernism. He even organized a writers’ group for it. However, all communication between Taiwan and China was banned since we moved to Taiwan, and any contact with people there, regardless of the purpose, was a violation of the law.
The student protests a couple of months ago turned out to be related to the ban. Many students with connections to people in China were in trouble. I knew Ah-Chuan participated in many protests. He criticized the corruption of the new government. My father also worked for the government, but he worked really hard, so I did not know why Ah-Chuan and his fellow protestors thought the government was bad.
Ah-Chuan never stopped contacting his friends in China. He did it secretly and eventually ran into trouble. That night he asked me not to turn on the light and he hurriedly packed several things before taking off again. I kept asking where he was going, but he never answered me.
“If anyone comes looking for me, just tell them I never came back. I never showed up!” In the dimness of our dormitory, Ah-Chuan’s bloodless face looked like a ghost. Sensing something really bad was happening, I quickly retrieved the scholarship money I just received and handed it to him. At first Ah-Chuan declined my offer, but after thinking for a second, he accepted it and said determinedly, “I will return it as soon as possible.”
After Ah-Chuan’s departure, I nervously practiced saying, “Ah-Chuan never returned. Ah-Chuan never returned! My roommate never returned!”
I noticed I was trembling, making me even more suspicious for lying. Fortunately, no one came.
A Change in Grandpa Fu
Without Ah-Chuan in Grandpa Fu’s life, we had very few topics to share. I was bewildered as to why Grandpa’s imaginary friend transformed from a figure that greatly cheered him up to one that greatly upset him. I couldn’t ask.
Grandpa became less and less active, both physically and mentally. He only wished to go outdoors on sunny days, but even when we pushed him to a park in the sunlight, he sat in his wheelchair, his mind seemingly lost in the past.
A Story: Grandpa Fu Goes Back to School
After the suspension of classes, I returned to school. My mother opposed my return because of the turmoil caused by the student protests and the subsequent arrests. She feared I might get involved too. But my father believed that the government quelled the chaos, and I should certainly continue my studies.
Still, before I left, he gravely warned me, “Don’t get involved with those agitators. They are hired by the Communist Party, using students as a disguise.”
I also wanted to go back to school to see if Ah-Chuan was all right. But he never appeared. Throughout the whole semester, the upper bunk of my bed remained empty. I didn’t know where I could get information about Ah-Chuan’s whereabouts, and I didn’t dare to ask around.
As the end of my last semester in college approached, I packed my things and mailed some of my books home. Looking around the room that had been my home for four years, and seeing Ah-Chuan’s untouched belongings, I couldn’t resist opening the drawer of his desk. Like every young man of our age, his things were disorganized. He randomly threw things in there—notebooks, pens, letters, and some stationery.
On a pile of writing paper, I found Ah-Chuan’s handwritten poem:
When the piercing dart finds my heart,
My soul, unbound, prepares for distant shores.
To realms unseen, where stars in rapture play,
In endless dance, they hold an eternal wave.
With whispered words of grace, I bid farewell,
To soar beyond, where dreams and truths ensue.
Though earthly bounds may falter and decay,
My essence lives, in hearts that love’s light sway.
And ’tis I, amidst the starry gleam,
In cosmic seas, where dreams and visions teem.
For in that boundless expanse, wild and free,
My spirit roams, in timeless reverie.
I never understood poetry, but Ah-Chuan’s words looked beautiful to me. I inserted it into one of my textbooks, thinking I would return it when Ah-Chuan came back.
I never heard from Ah-Chuan again. I prayed that he escaped capture. Ah-Chuan was such a talented person. He would be successful in whatever endeavor he pursued. I wished he could travel to the other galaxy as he always told us. It was possible.
Epilogue
We moved to different cities for studies or for work. We saw Grandpa Fu much less, and he passed away four years after his stroke.
Sixty years after Grandpa Fu’s graduation from the Taiwan Provincial Teachers’ College, our youngest brother Lun-Hsiun enrolled there, the campus having become a university of education. When he returned home for spring break, Lun-Hsiun showed us a photo he took at an exhibition of the April 6 Incident in 1949, held in the university’s library.
It was a young man in a prisoner’s uniform with his name stitched over his shirt chest. The name, Lai Yu-Chuan, made my heart twitch.
“Google it,” Lun-Hsiun said, and obviously he had done so.
When I typed Ah-Chuan’s full name into Google in my mobile phone, the same photo Lun-Hsiun took jumped up, with text provided by the Committee for Transitional Justice:
Lai Yu-Chuan (1929-1950), a native of Kaohsiung City. He enrolled in the Department of English Literature at Taiwan Provincial Teachers’ College.
In November 1947, he was introduced to the underground organization of the Communist Party of China by his classmate Chen Shui-Mu. In September 1948, he participated in a branch meeting of the Teachers’ College and served as a propaganda officer. During his time at school, he was mainly involved in activities such as the food committee, drama club, and consumer cooperatives.
Lai Yu-Chuan was also a frequent contributor of the “Bridge”, supplement of “Taiwan Shin Sheng News Daily.” He published poetry and fiction, as well as essays campaigning for the exchange between modern Taiwanese and Chinese literature, especially the emerging genre of sci-fi.
In early May 1950, after the arrest of leading cadres of the Chinese Communist Party, Lai Yu-Chuan was arrested at his home in Kaohsiung. In September, the Taiwan Provincial Security Command sentenced him to life imprisonment and deprivation of civil rights for life on charges of “conspiring to subvert the government by illegal means.” However, President Chiang Kai-Shek ordered a change in the verdict to the death penalty. On November 29, Lai Yu-Chuan was executed by the Fourth Military Police Regiment. He was 21 years old.
“What the hell?” was my first response.
No doubt this Lai Yu-Chuan was Ah-Chuan, Grandpa Fu’s imaginary friend. They were about the same age, and studied at the Teachers’ College about the same years. They shared the same room in the student dormitory. Ah-Chuan was not an astronomer, nor an actor, nor a sci-fi writer. He had no time to become any of them, although in his very short lifetime he had been exposed to these fields and accomplished as much as a young person could have.
Years went by, more and more secret archives from the White Terror period were released and digitized. Wronged cases were reinvestigated and studied, giving us a better perspective on what really could have happened during the large-scale arrests and student resistance.
I often wondered, did Ah-Chuan try to recruit Grandpa Fu into the Communist Party? Was Grandpa Fu also a member? On the other hand, didn’t Grandpa Fu and his parents end up in Taiwan because of the disasters caused by the Communist Party in China?
However, according to the disclosed documents, many arrests, detentions, interrogations, and unlawful trials went beyond the purge of the communists. They targeted students protesting governmental corruption at the time. There were also victims from the same background as Grandpa Fu, so how close was Grandpa to becoming one of the many victims?
Most of all, did Grandpa Fu know Ah-Chuan was dead at all? Why did he make up all the stories about Ah-Chuan?
In the unearthed photo of Lai Yu-Chuan, we could see that his hands were tied at the back. It was taken right before his execution, 21 years old in 1950. This image probably was one of the few for a young person at that time. Was he afraid? Did he regret what he had done? What he and his family had been through all these years? What would he have become if he hadn’t been killed?
“Ah-Chuan never returned. My roommate never returned!” Grandpa Fu’s hoarse voice echoed in my head.
Grandpa Fu must have known Ah-Chuan was dead, otherwise Ah-Chuan would have found his old roommate and told him he was all right. Not wanting to end Ah-Chuan’s life in his memory, Grandpa Fu revitalized Ah-Chuan with the hopes he had for him, a successful sci-fi writer, actor, or astronaut. And it was definitely a good thing, because Ah-Chuan lived on in our minds for a much longer time than he really did. We shared the joys and sorrows of his life, as well as the legacy he left us.
Author’s Note:
The April 6th incident in Taiwan originated from the arrest of two students in March, 1949, for alleged traffic violations, sparking protests from hundreds of students.
The Chinese Nationalist Party regime, then engaged in civil war with the underground Chinese Communist Party, asserted that the protests were instigated by CCP members. On April 6, 1949, police and military forces were ordered to enter the campuses to quell the students. Hundreds of students were arrested, and unknown numbers were imprisoned or executed.
Copyright © 2024 C. J. Anderson
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