Zachary Lin

Ms. Lange
Advanced Placement Language and Composition
7 May 2015
The Threat of Freedom
What is more frightening than freedom? This question would be trivial
to most everyone in the world, because to them having rights is a blessing.
However, for the people who are trying to take these rights away, any liberty
given to others is power taken away from them. In a recent interview, ChingHuei Lin of Des Moines, Iowa spoke of her experiences with Chinese people in
Taiwan. Lin is a member of the North American Taiwanese Professors
Association (NATPA), an organization aimed towards speaking out for
Taiwans independence; her late husband, Tsung-Kuang Lin, was the
president of the association. From her experiences with the initial Chinese
invasion, the loss of her esteemed father-in-law, her disheartening childhood,
and the modern day, Lin exposed the horrors that have plagued the
Taiwanese peoples lives.
To begin the interview, Lin started with her earliest memory of the
Chinese invasion. Prior to the invasion, Japan had ruled over Taiwan for 50
years and had treated the Taiwanese as an inferior race, and so, naturally,
Taiwan spoke out against Japans rule. Thus, when World War II drove Japan
out, Taiwan rejoiced, but they were in for more troubles. Lin was around five
when the Chinese army came: boats arrived on the shores of Taiwan, and

men resembling bums, as she put it, got out. These bums that were
showing up were not the real Chinese army but the defeated Kuomintang
(KMT) army led by Chiang-Kai Shek. Retreating from a defeat in a civil war in
China, Chiang-Kai Shek needed a place to keep his army. The Taiwanese
people invited the men with open arms, because, frankly, most of the
Taiwanese people were descendants of Chinese who immigrated to Taiwan
and thus felt Chinese themselves. They did not know the terrors they let into
their homes.
At this point, Ama switched her focus to Lim Bo-Seng: her father-in-law.
She voiced that he was a famous scholar, that he was deemed a child
prodigy at four, and that he became the first Taiwanese ever to graduate
from the Tokyo Imperial University. Lim Bo-Seng went to the University of
Columbia from 1927-1929, during which he earned his Masters and PhD (He
was also the first Taiwanese to hold a PhD). He spoke many languages
including German, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese. She referred to him as
amazing multiple times, but the irony is that she never met him. Of the
people who had welcomed Chiang Kai-Sheks army, Lim Bo-Seng was
probably the most inviting; he almost immediately realized his mistake in
doing so.
The aforementioned terror came in February of 1947; Lin
remembered hearing about a woman who was selling cigarettes without a
license. KMT soldiers came and beat the woman, confiscating all her money
and cigarettes. Apparently, that was everything the woman had, and so, she

resisted. When people saw what was happening, they helped her. This
sparked a riot, and soon the soldiers began shooting, thus beginning a
massacre that would last for months. Lin vividly remembered seeing dead
bodies littering the streets and hearing news that many leaders and
important Taiwanese people were being dragged into trucks and never heard
from again. On March 11th, 1947, some men came for my great-grandfather.
They snatched him up, and he was never heard from again. No one knew
where the men took him; they only knew that Lim Bo-Seng had no hope for
rescue or survival. His body was never found.
After she spoke of her father-in-laws death, Lin moved on to growing
up under Chinese oppression and stories of her husband. At one point, she
said, They [the Chinese] took over everything: the TV, the schools. You had
to speak Chinese. They punish you if you speak Taiwanese. Because of
Japans 50-year occupation of Taiwan, the Chinese felt that the Taiwanese
people were inferior to them, so they were always taking money and produce
from Taiwan. Backwards is how Lin described the government, because the
KMT would arrest people for no reason and then take their money. Hence, Lin
was compelled to leave. She and her to-be-husband were fed up with their
lives in Taiwan and wanted to go to America for college, but the KMT
government would not issue her future husband a passport because of his
father: they thought he might be a dissenter like his father. After a while, he
was finally granted a visa. Once he left, the KMT/Taiwanese government
would not let him back in until 1977 for his mothers funeral, and even then,

he was required to periodically check in with the U.S. embassy to make sure
he was safe. At the funeral they buried his mothers ashes and a PhD gown
for his father. The night before he was set to return to the U.S, He received a
call from the secret police inviting him to breakfast. He refused to go by
simply saying, I dont have time. This most likely saved his life, because
four year later, a Taiwanese professor at Carnegie Mellon was killed by the
secret police when he returned to Taiwan. The professors body was found
dead by a university library, fingers broken and bruised as if he was tortured.
The police covered it up saying that it was a suicide and that he had jumped
from the building. For many years, Taiwan was awash with government
corruption.
Lin then swung her interview towards NATPA. Later on in the 80s,
there was a protest in Kaohsiung, Taiwan at which many people were
arrested. The Taiwanese community in the U.S. was appalled and decided to
start an association that would serve as an outlet for their views towards the
Chinese oppression. Lins husband apparently spoke and wrote the best out
of all the members and was elected as the president. Around that time, my
grandfather began realizing that Taiwan was sending professional spies to
colleges in America whose jobs were to put Taiwanese people who spoke out
against the KMT on a blacklist. The families of the people on the blacklist
were generally arrested, maybe killed, as a way of intimidation. Lin
remembered when her middle child and husband would go up to Iowa State
University and play basketball with college kids. One time, some very old-

looking college students challenged them to a game, and the two realized
that these students were actually spies. The spies would threaten Lins
husband by saying that they would have his family arrested back in Taiwan.
Lin said that her husband would always tell the son to play dirty: Shouldering
the men in the gut or hurting them in other ways. Lin and her husband
returned to Taiwan many times, but up until the last time that he went, he
was always harassed by the secret police.
Today, the government of Taiwan is less oppressive. There are not any
more useless killings, and they just the Taiwanese President was just let out
of prison. However, Lin remarked that the government still treats the
Taiwanese people unfairly by trying to force them to be Chinese and by
taking their money. Lin believes that after all the madness that China put
Taiwan through, the major powers should take a stand and contend for
Taiwans sovereignty. Howbeit, because of Chinas major position on the
globe, Lin does not know if Taiwan will ever receive its freedom.