Preface

 

Other foreigners have written about their lives in Taiwan and their discovery of the repression, murders, executions, and slaughter of the Taiwanese by the Nationalist government.

Few of them had known about Taiwan’s history before arriving. The Nationalist government under the Kuomintang (KMT) had carried out a massacre of Taiwanese in 1947, which resulted in martial law in Taiwan for the next forty years. United States government policy at the time complemented the imposed silence and censorship of this regime by keeping Americans living in Taiwan under surveillance as well. The recent film Formosa Betrayed portrays the viciousness of both the KMT regime and the complexity of America’s foreign policy throughout the era of martial law.

The title of Milo’s book is a quote taken from the derisive remark of an American State Department official one week after Milo and his family were deported from the island. The full text of the remark is provided on the first page of the memoir:

“There is no shortage of American graduate students, missionaries . . . with both ardent views on Taiwanese Independence and a willingness to conduct themselves as if they were fireproof moths.”

For almost twenty years, Milo was denied a passport and not allowed to leave the U.S.

Though now divorced for over thirty years, Judith read and commented on Milo’s memoirs as he wrote them. The book reveals how he and Judith successfully and secretly organized the escape of Peng Ming-min from Taiwan. Peng’s importance in the Taiwan Independence movement is seen on the island as a struggle similar to that of South African political prisoner Nelson Mandela. The Thornberrys were Peng’s closest foreign friends, and they met regularly with him and other dissidents. When they discovered that his life was in danger, they spirited him out of the country, which created an international incident.

Their role in this episode is now fully revealed in this book. It is a stunning and tense narrative of his and Judith's lives, and the risks they took living in Taiwan under martial law.

But Milo’s memoir is much more than the story of personal danger involving secretive escape and loss of the freedom to travel out of America to foreign shores. Like a Graham Greene novel, the plot is a vehicle for a philosophical and spiritual journey.

The first third of Milo’s book reveals how his pursuit of spirituality led him into a surprising life of missionary work. His appointment to serve in Taiwan was as unexpected as his knowledge of Taiwan was incomplete.

The book could have been called The Spiritual Education of Milo Thornberry. Milo’s journey through Taiwan’s political labyrinth made him aware of the suppression the local Taiwanese population suffered under Chiang Kai-shek’s martial law. Internationally, the Cold War focused American support on the anti-communist regime in Taiwan. The Methodist Church supported both the Mainlander Chinese who ruled Taiwan and America’s foreign policy goals. Consequently, Milo slowly and painfully began asking questions about the ethical and moral role of a missionary who was dedicated to Jesus’ commitment to humanity.

Throughout his multiple lives as a representative of the Methodist church, a teacher in two of the island’s seminaries, and a father of two children, Milo was also deeply involved in secret meetings with radical political leaders who represented the then illegal goals of Taiwan independence.

It is important to remember that the sixties and seventies were dominated by the ideas of liberation theology. Those calls to Christian action and sacrifice were suffused with Marxist theories of the human condition that required liberation over spirituality. Milo struggled to find a theological justification for protest based firmly in the tradition of Jesus’ opposition to Roman rule.

In the 1960s Taiwan was alight with arguments regarding efficacy and justification for violence. The effects of the massive killings by KMT troops in 1947 as well as the consequent White Terror drove many to consider retaliation. There were still internal political refugees hiding in the mountains. Some of the abused were considering violent uprisings. Others were peacefully advocating human rights. The government severely punished anyone who discussed the events of 1947 or government repression. Foreigners’ mail was regularly opened and read by government monitors.

Milo and Judith sought out reliable friends in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States to get them through their moral morass—abiding by church and government regulations and yet supporting the suffering Taiwanese community. The book is filled with thoughtful conversations and debates with both Taiwanese and foreigners.

Milo writes in detail of his search for direction and meaning. He orders books from abroad to his home in Taipei always aware of the looming threat of censorship. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had been important to Milo in seminary and even more so in Taiwan. Two other authors became especially important for him in Taiwan: Colin Morris, a fellow Methodist missionary in Zambia, and S.G.F. Brandon, an English New Testament background scholar.

The major issue in the works of Morris and Brandon was the justification of violence. And for Milo, the answer lay in asking what Jesus would do. But the message was not simple: “I no longer assumed that Jesus had to be a pacifist. . . . Despite Niebuhr’s dictum that the line between violence and nonviolence was not absolute, I personally sensed a chasm between them, one that if I crossed I would no longer be who I thought I was.”

As they became more involved with the Taiwan Independence movement, the Thornberrys entered into the dark realm of subversive culture that including money drops, false identities, and devious behavior.

Their greatest coup was the successful escape of Peng Ming-min, and though they were never discovered for this act of political sabotage and heroism, they were eventually accused and expelled for actions they never committed. It took them many years to know the cause of their arrest and expulsion. The answer to this is the surprise the reader will find at the end of the book.

Milo has created a document that should become a classic in both the realm of the missionary experience in repressive environments and the broader community of political activists. The narrative’s style is a combination of the detective thriller and the personal memoir. The characters’ conversations are unique to their personality and condition. Each chapter leads the reader into deeper domains of the mystery of the plight of the author and the terror among his friends. Throughout the narrative, there is a running theological and moral debate that gives the story universal meaning.

I was fortunate to have Milo and Judith Thornberry as neighbors living just a few doors down on Chi-nan Road, Section 2 of Taipei from 1965 to 1967. We both had an infant child to take care of, and we both became deeply involved in Taiwan politics and the issues of human rights.

It is thus with great respect and even greater memories that I read this story of how he came to dovetail his religious faith with the struggle of human rights in Taiwan.

 

Richard C. Kagan

Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies,

Hamline University