LatinosUSA

I.

That night, Sergeant Ma walked through the pineapple field, and the chill of southeast Taiwan took him by surprise. He folded his arms around his chest to stay warm, but it was useless. The cold wind gusts still penetrated his outfit, biting into his skin. Sergeant Ma tried to lift his collar, but realized he wasn’t wearing his uniform. Instead, he was wearing a tan shirt from his hometown in China. His military boots were also gone; worn-out cloth shoes now made walking the muddy path very difficult.

The moon hung low, intermittently shrouded by clouds. In the distance, screwpine trees stood like rows of skeletons, sighing in sorrow. Each step Sergeant Ma took crunched softly underfoot, the sound swallowed by the vast and oppressive silence of the night.

He tried to avoid the soft mud, but in the darkness, it was impossible to see where to step. From time to time, he nearly fell, and his feet grew heavier and heavier with the mud clinging to them. Sergeant Ma told himself to keep striving toward the hut lit by a kerosene lamp several yards ahead. He would be home soon, he reassured himself. Yet, no matter how hard he tried, the distance between him and the hut seemed to remain the same.

At this moment, Sergeant Ma realized that, heading toward the hut, he was actually walking toward where Tseng Hao-Tsai was buried. He quickly rummaged through his mind for any possible alternative route, but there wasn’t any. Between him and the hut lay nothing but the pineapple field and the mass grave.

It must be Tseng Hao-Tsai’s ghost dragging me back, keeping me from making any progress, Sergeant Ma thought.

But tonight, he wasn’t a sergeant in his uniform. He was just a poor youth Ma Yi-Wei, looking for his way home; perhaps Tseng Hao-Tsai’s ghost wouldn’t recognize him. Ma’s attempt to comfort himself did not work; he knew in his heart he was responsible for Tseng’s death. The image of Tseng shouting before he was shot, “I will haunt you down wherever you go until you go to hell,” was vividly printed in his mind. Though Tseng wasn’t addressing anyone in particular, since he wasn’t supposed to know who reported him, the guilt weighed heavily on Ma Yi-Wei.

Like Ma Yi-Wei, Tseng Hao-Tsai was also from mainland China and was supposed to have been awarded an Anti-Communist Warrior Field Distribution Certificate like Ma Yi-Wei. They both expected to return to their hometowns after all the communist villains were repelled. Once victorious, they would reunite with their families and restore their hometowns in China.

Unfortunately, Sergeant Ma’s report led to the death of Tseng Hao-Tsai. During the investigation into the prison uprising, their superiors insisted that a sixth man had been among the chief conspirators and pressed them to apprehend him as soon as possible.

Five chief conspirators of the insurgency had already been arrested. They had sought to overthrow the Nationalist government—which had fled to Taiwan after its defeat in the Chinese Civil War—and to establish a Republic of Taiwan, a notion that was the gravest taboo for the ruling party. The Nationalist regime had vowed to counterattack the communists and reclaim Mainland China.

The National Leader’s order had already set a date for the execution of the five “national traitors”, without trial at all, and issued an ultimatum to arrest the sixth man.

No one is sure there is a sixth man. Sergeant Major Huang complained one time.

But the National Leader is sure there is. Sergeant Master Dai said sarcastically.

Everybody knew, no matter how wrong the information the National Leader got, he could make no mistake. Thus they needed to make his decision right. 

At that time, with the Martial Law and the Temporary Provisions against the Communist Rebellion, no one dared to doubt the judgment of the National Leader. From today’s perspective, this National Leader undoubtedly was paranoidly murderous, especially with his belief  «It is better to kill one hundred innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake».

Under the pressure, Sergeant Ma had no choice but to pass on what he learned from Chan Tien-Jen, one of the five chief conspirators of the uprising, when he was pressed to turn in the sixth man: 

Ah-Tsai, they called him Ah-Tsai.

With a scapegoat identified, fabricating charges of treachery became effortless. Tseng Hao-Tsai, known as Ah-Tsai, a guard at Alapawan Prison, was branded the uprising’s inside man. He was accused of relaying messages between the insurgents and disclosing where to find the keys to the gates and the nearby ammunition depot, the latter a remnant from the prison’s former life as a military barracks.

Similar to the five chief conspirators, Tseng Hao-Tsai was locked up and brutally interrogated without any chance to defend himself. A fake confession was produced after he was tortured for days until he nearly lost consciousness. He also was executed without trial. The five men, deemed committed unforgivable crimes against the nation, were transported to Taipei for execution, while Tseng was conveniently killed nearby, among other men suspected of involvement in the uprising.

A shadow in front of him seemed to sway in the cold air. Ma Yi-Wei gathered all his strength to run away from it, but his body felt grounded. As his struggle became hopeless, a gust of warm, humid wind blew across the back of his neck. Ma Yi-Wei’s hair stood on end, and he rushed forward as fast as he could, but his feet were not moving. He fell face down, directly into the mud.

A light beam pierced his eyes. Sergeant Ma opened them and realized he was in his dormitory bed. The walk around the mass grave at night had been a dream, and he had not fallen into the mud. But his thoughts of Tseng Hao-Tsai were real.

Who knew if he was involved in the uprising or not? Sergeant Ma had expected further investigation into Tseng Hao-Tsai, but they were not given any time by the National Leader.

I should burn some paper money for Tseng Hao-Tsai later. Sergeant Ma told himself.

As he sat up from his bed, Sergeant Ma saw a man sit in the only chair of his room. He was surprised, but in the light of dawn, he wasn’t so scared as last night, or, in his dream.

I need you to do me a favor, sir. The man said, in a very polite, even humble manner.

Go ahead.

I need you to correct my name in the archive.

Why is that?

My name is Chao Guang-Lian, I went to mainland China when I was twenty-one years old. I worked for an itinerant opera group from Zhangzhou, helping move, install and dismantle stage props. We performed on community stages, usually next to the temples the community people worshiped. We were hired by people whose wishes to the gods had come true and must reward the gods with grand gestures. The greater the wishes, the bigger and longer the performance would be. I was paid very little by the opera group, as it wasn’t really a profitable business. But I had free shows to watch, and we traveled around.

I got married, had children, and my wife also worked for the opera theater. We had a dream that one day, when our daughter grew up, she would study the performance and become the heroine of the shows. Unfortunately, the Cultural Revolution destroyed everything. Old, traditional things were to be eradicated, our theater was dismissed, and performers were purged. Without any means to support my family, I became desperate and ill. I wanted to return to Taiwan, but my personal information did not match. In China, they use simplified characters, and my name “Guang” became a very different word. I need to change it in my old file so they can find me and take me back.

Sergeant Ma rubbed his eyes, catching the keywords “Cultural Revolution” that he knew had caused tremendous damage to traditional culture in China. Thus in Taiwan, a Cultural Renaissance was initiated to preserve what was condemned by the communist regime. Seeing that the man, Chao Guang-Lian, was persistent, Sergeant Ma stood up reluctantly to fetch his uniform and the key to the abandoned archive room next to the dormitory.

Everything in the archive room has been untouched for decades, the air was thick with the musty scent of mildew. The light did not work, so Sergeant Ma lit the place with a torchlight, and immediately saw cobweb-draped corners where spiders have spun their intricate traps over the years.

Two rows of old wooden chests lined the walls, their surfaces worn and scarred. Several drawers creaked open to reveal yellowed, brittle papers, delicate to the touch and threatening to disintegrate at the slightest provocation. The faded ink on these documents told stories of a forgotten era, slowly succumbing to the ravages of time.

Sergeant Ma compared the note he had written down according to Chao Guangi-Lian, detailing how his name was written in Taiwan and in China, and where he had lived before, along with the names of his parents and siblings. But he did not know where to start without a basic understanding of the logic of the documentation.

After pulling out around a dozen of the drawers and flipping through the almost broken papers, Sergeant Ma lost his patience. He considered going back to tell Mr. Chao that he needed more time for the search and that he was going to have his breakfast first.

I wish I could return home to mainland China, and he longs to come back to Taiwan. Why have we been torn away from home, forced to drift so far from where we belong? Sergeant Ma sighed, frustration simmering beneath his thoughts.

As he walked out of the archive room, Sergeant Ma’s eyes were pierced by the same light beam that had woken him up earlier. He felt dizzy. Blinking to regain his bearings, Sergeant Ma realized that this, too, was a dream.

He was still in his bed, not in the dilapidated archive room, and the figure of Chao Guang-Lian might never have existed at all—perhaps only a ghost conjured by mismatched records, a phantom villager said to have worked for an itinerant theater across the strait, forever barred from returning home.

But Tseng Hao-Tsai, like him a son of mainland China and once his colleague in law enforcement, was condemned to bear a name left unredressed in history—he was the one who could never go home.

II.

Sergeant Ma was finally able to make a trip back to his hometown in China in the 1990s, after the Nationalist government lifted the ban on travel to communist China following the end of Martial Law in 1987. He went to a travel agent to purchase his plane tickets from Taipei to Shanghai, and a train ticket from Shanghai to Huaiyin in Jiangsu Province.

By then, Sergeant Ma was no longer a sergeant, he had retired many years earlier. He was once again simply Ma Yi-Wei, an old man in his seventies. He had been away from home for more than forty years, and before 1979, due to the complete severance of communication between Taiwan and mainland China, it was almost impossible to obtain any information about family members on the other side. He knew that some people would first send their letters to relatives in the United States, who would then repackage and forward the mails to China—the same route used for letters traveling from China to Taiwan. Ma Yi-Wei had considered trying this method long ago, but as a soldier, he was strictly forbidden from making any contact with China. Also because the postage to the U.S. was expensive, and no one knew whether the letters would ever reach their intended recipients.

He had heard stories of people wiring money to China through the U.S. to help pay for a parent’s medical treatment, to restore a dilapidated ancestral hall, or to repair ancestral tombs to improve feng shui and reverse misfortune. Years later, some of them discovered that the people they had been corresponding with were not their relatives at all. Imagining their despair—their initial joy at reestablishing contact, followed by the devastation of realizing they had been scammed—one can see that what they lost was far more than money. They lost hope for reunion, and their trust in others.

Were any of his family members still alive? Did his parents and siblings even know he was alive? At certain times, for political reasons, China allowed mail to be exchanged with Taiwan, but Taiwan continued to block mail from China for fear of communist infiltration. So British-ruled Hong Kong became the place where letters between China and Taiwan were repackaged and forwarded.

Ma Yi-Wei’s parents passed away before he finally made contact with his two brothers. Their shared memories and consistent accounts of their childhood assured him that they truly were his siblings.

In 1989, cross-strait telephone calls finally became possible, and Ma Yi-Wei could not wait to hear his brothers’ voices. By then, telephones were common household devices in Taiwan, but not in rural China. So Ma Yi-Wei would first dial the number of a community-shared telephone and tell whoever answered whom he wanted to speak with. The person would then hang up and go fetch the intended recipient. After about ten minutes, Ma Yi-Wei would call again, and this time one of his brothers would be waiting by the phone.

The first call caught him off guard. He knew they had all grown older, but he was still unprepared for the hoarse, weathered voices of elderly men. They were in their twenties the last time they had seen each other.

On the day of departure for China, Ma Yi-Wei got up at daybreak. He pulled his luggage to the bus hired by the travel agency bound for the airport. About a dozen gray-haired men had already arrived; they were all veterans of the Second World War or the Chinese Civil War. The staff members of the travel agency helped them load their luggage onto the bus and reminded them to keep their passports and the travel permits issued by China in a safe place in their carry-on bags. They had to fly to Hong Kong first, then transfer to Shanghai, for there were no direct flights between Taiwan and mainland China at that time.

The travel permit was called the Taiwan Compatriot Permit, issued by the Chinese Communist Party. Before this permit existed, travelers had to apply for paper passes that specified exactly where they were allowed to go in China. With China’s open policy and the introduction of the digital permit, it became much easier for people from Taiwan to travel to mainland China. The permit also reflected the fact that the People’s Republic of China did not recognize passports issued by Taiwan—the Republic of China. People in Taiwan noticed that their names on the permit were written in simplified Chinese characters, and once in mainland China, many of them had to relearn characters that, compared to traditional Chinese, appeared stripped of several strokes and components.

After landing, Ma Yi-Wei and the others were led by a tour guide to board trains bound for their individual destinations. At that time, Taiwanese travelers were given priority in reserving seats.

It was a ride of more than five hours. As the train slowed into Huaiyin Station, the scenery dissolved into fragments—gray-walled buildings, bicycles swaying past, vendors lining the streets with food.

When the military withdrew to Taiwan, Ma Yi-Wei believed he would return to his birthplace within a few years. But history carved its own paths, carrying him along. One year became ten; ten became twenty, then thirty, then forty. Now he stepped off the train an old man, his bones stiff, his hair white.

It was January, several weeks before the lunar new year. The cold air was damp with the river breeze. A faint mix of food and body odor hung over the station square. The lobby bustled with porters, families, and vendors hawking steamed buns, soy milk, and boxed meals for travelers. Amid the crowd, Ma Yi-Wei spotted a thin elderly man standing stiffly by a post. Their eyes met first—recognition blooming slowly, before his brother raised a hesitant hand. They approached each other with the awkwardness of strangers. When they finally stood face to face, neither spoke. His brother’s eyes were cloudy, his back slightly bent, but when he reached forward to take Ma Yi-Wei’s suitcase, his grip was firm.

Together, they walked on in silence.

Outside the station, the smells in the air changed to exhaust fumes and the faint brine of Huaiyin’s waterways. Taxis idled in a ragged line, their paint chipped, their drivers smoking and shouting for fares. Ma Yi-Wei’s brother waved one down, and he put his brother’s luggage in the front passenger seat. The two old men squeezed into the back seat. The city outside the windows was both familiar and foreign—low brick houses were replaced by glass-front shops, rattling rickshaws he had seen before gave way to bicycles and motorcycles. Yet every so often, a narrow lane or a stretch of river would tug at a buried memory. They spoke in fragments, as if testing each other’s voices. How many harvests had passed since they last shared a conversation? Too many to count.

When the taxi pulled up to the small road leading toward the old family home on the outskirts of the city, the driver announced the fare. Ma Yi-Wei waited for his brother to reach for his pocket, but his brother waited too. After a few moments, Ma Yi-Wei understood: after decades of political upheaval and economic hardship, his brother simply could not afford a taxi. If not for Ma Yi-Wei’s return, he would never have taken one at all.

My money is in my suitcase, Ma Yi-Wei said. He opened his luggage, found his wallet, and handed the driver three one-dollar U.S. bills. The driver accepted the American currency gratefully. At the time, there was no direct currency exchange between Taiwan and China, so travelers from Taiwan were advised to carry U.S. dollars or Hong Kong dollars and convert them to Renminbi after arriving in mainland China.

So this was homecoming—not like the sentimental scenes, hugging and crying he’d rehearsed in his mind, but something simpler, rougher, and realistic.

They stepped out onto the narrow path toward the old house, where moss grew thick on the walls and the persimmon tree still stood in the yard.

You’re back. As they entered the building, his brother finally said softly.

Ma Yi-Wei expected to offer incense to the ancestral altar, but he found nothing there.

It was taken down a long time ago. His brother told him.

The slogan Destroy the Four Olds during the Cultural Revolution dawned on Ma Yi-Wei—old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits were all banned, including worshiping gods and ancestors. How do my parents in the other world know I am back? Ma Yi-Wei felt a sense of loss.

He was shown the room that would serve as his bedroom. Obviously prepared for his homecoming, several objects had been newly purchased. The bathroom was an outhouse, but it had a flush toilet and running water.

We raised money and built it together with our next-door neighbor, his brother explained. Although detached from the main building, it was quite convenient to use, and the neighbors did not occupy it very often.

In addition to the wives and children of his brothers, many relatives stopped by to greet Ma Yi-Wei. As for how each person was related to him—such as the granddaughter of his father’s sister-in-law or the son-in-law of his mother’s sister—he could barely keep track. One morning, a man who introduced himself as the Township Branch Office Secretary arrived. Although he behaved politely, Ma Yi-Wei could sense that everyone around him treated the man with a certain awe.

Just checking, the secretary said with a practiced smile, to see whether our Taiwanese compatriot needs any assistance.

Everything is all right, sir, Ma Yi-Wei’s brothers replied nervously, and Ma Yi-Wei nodded quickly, as if confirming the correctness of their answer. He realized he was under surveillance, and that was why everyone around him behaved more like cautious bystanders than relatives or friends.

The experience was not unfamiliar to Ma Yi-Wei; less than ten years earlier, surveillance had been ubiquitous in Taiwan as well. Before retiring from the military, he had been both a watcher and one who was watched. He looked around at the people standing nearby, imagining that some of them might even have to write reports about his activities.

There will be new highrise buildings next to our town, they are able to accommodate as many Taiwanese compatriots as possible who wish to settle down here. The Township Secretary pointed at the cranes in the sky, over the site where there was farmland when Ma Yi-Wei was a young man.  

And there will be new schools, modern hospitals, department stores… The Township Secretary lectured proudly. He added, Taiwanese compatriots who wish to settle down in their motherland won’t need to worry about the comfort of living.

As they all lifted their heads, watching the cranes move across the sky, a light snow began to fall. Ma Yi-Wei stretched out his palm to catch the flakes.

Good, the snow will bring down the dust kicked up by the construction, one of the bystanders said dryly.

Time to go, someone muttered, and people began to drift away from the scene where, only moments earlier, they had been nodding in agreement with the Township Secretary’s praise of the nation’s progress.

That night, Ma Yi-Wei dreamed of Tseng Hao-Tsai, his colleague from twenty years earlier, who had most likely been wrongfully accused as an accomplice in the prison break and the alleged insurgency to overthrow the Republic of China and establish a Republic of Taiwan. Both men had arrived in Taiwan with the Nationalist forces during their retreat, and both had once believed they would return home soon. But under the suffocating atmosphere of suspicion against espionage, many innocent people were wronged and executed.

Ma Yi-Wei still kept the Anti-Communist Warrior Field Distribution Certificate issued to them four decades earlier—a promise that every soldier who had fought for the Republic of China against communist China would receive farmland to cultivate once victory was achieved. Now Ma Yi-Wei had finally returned, only to find that communist China had grown strong and the farmlands had long since been developed into highrise buildings.

He was no longer an anti-communist warrior. In his own hometown, he was placed under strict surveillance, yet at the same time he was regarded as a “Taiwanese compatriot” the communist authorities hoped to pull closer, a living symbol for their One China policy.

Unable to fall asleep again, he sat up in bed; the snow was falling heavily now. Ma Yi-Wei realized that, having lived in subtropical Taiwan, he had not seen snow for more than forty years.