After helping her daughter settle down in the US, Fang returned to Taiwan and ran in the 1983 Legislative Yuan elections. "Everybody assumed that I was running on behalf of my husband (代夫出征) like other wives whose husbands were arrested in the Kaohsiung Incident," she says.
"I was the only one who knew for whom I was standing - my twin daughters and mother,"she says.
Fang ran an emotional campaign in which, in tears, she often explained to audiences what had happened to her family and how she hoped such a thing would never happen again.
It was a political campaign that came to be known as the “holy war of the mother."
Heartfelt letter
"Dear Liang-chun (亮均) and Ting-chun (亭均),"she wrote in a letter to her twin daughters on the eve of what would have been their 26th birthday.
"It has been twenty years since you left. Do you know that your sister Huan-chun is expecting her first baby this spring and that you two will become aunties soon? I have often remembered the way three-year-old Huan-chun held a bottle and tried to help me feed you two when you were still babies. If you were still with us today, would you return the favor by feeding Huan-chun's baby?" Fang wondered, during a memorial birthday party yesterday, what the twins would have looked like now.
"Would you still have kept that straight long hair and fringe covering your forehead?"she wondered. "Would you have been as brilliant a pianist as Huan-chun is? Would you two still be hanging about inseparably like always, or would you have separately fallen in love, enjoying the greatest gift that life gives you?" Two years ago, when Huan-chun needed a wedding gown for her engagement party but couldn't find anything she liked, Fang rummaged through some long- sealed clothing cases and found her own wedding gown - the one that she wore almost 30 years ago.
Surprisingly, it suited Huan-chun perfectly.
Looking at Huan-chun in her wedding gown made Fang ponder what she would have done if her other two daughters wanted to get married on the same day and both needed her wedding gown at the same time.
Photo album
Lin used to sort, clip and paste all three daughters?photographs on New Year's Eve every year, and try to make a family photo album for each of them as dowries. Huan-chun's has gone with her to her new family. But he has been unable to look at the ones he compiled for his twin daughters since they were killed.
"In the past 20 years, their father has never once brought himself to look at the photo albums again,"Fang says, looking at the faded yellow photographs and admitting that it was only recently that she herself could bear to look again the photos that traced the twins' lives from the day they were born to the day they celebrated their 6th birthday.
A set of twins, seven-year-old Liu Laing-chun (劉亮均) and Liu Ting-chun (劉亭均), named after Lin and Fang's girls, blew out the candles on a birthday cake in honor of the deceased twins during a memorial service at the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum yesterday.
There wasn't a dry eye in the room.
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