Fireproof Moth is an autobiographical account of a Methodist missionary’s stay in Taiwan in the late 1960s, but it reads like a thriller.
Author Milo L. Thornberry first describes his personal journey to becoming a minister in the mid 1950s. In 1965, the Methodist Church decided to send Thornberry and his wife Judith to Taiwan, and the couple went through preparatory sessions at Drew University and Stony Point Missionary Orientation Center north of New York. During this time he read some critical works such as George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed and Mark Mancall’s Formosa Today.
Upon arrival in Taipei on New Year’s Eve 1966 the couple settled down, started language school, and gradually came to experience the suffocating hold that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) had on society in Taiwan. They also got to know Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), a professor who was under house arrest at the time for publishing a document titled A Manifesto for Self-Salvation in 1964.
The couple started to help channel support from overseas to families of political prisoners, with the help of Peng’s two courageous students, Hsieh Tsung-min (謝聰敏) and Wei Ting-chao (魏廷朝). They also began producing mimeographed information sheets to inform visiting friends and colleagues overseas about the repressive political atmosphere in the country.
Together with other foreign friends in Taiwan they approached American and European reporters and supplied background information on developments in Taiwan. Fox Butterfield of the New York Times and Selig Harrison of the Washington Post were among the reporters they communicated with.
When in September 1968 Peng told the couple that he had received indications from the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice, one of the main secret police organizations at the time, that he might have an “accident,” a plan was devised to smuggle him out of Taiwan. After more than a year of preparation the plan became a reality, and on Jan. 3, 1970, Peng left Taiwan using a doctored Japanese passport and disguised as a Japanese musician.
He made it safely to Sweden, where he received political asylum. Eventually Peng made it to the US, where he became a senior research scholar and visiting professor at the University of Michigan.
Oddly, the KMT authorities never discovered the role played by Thornberry and his wife in Peng’s escape. They surmised that he had been helped by the CIA. The matter even came up in the February 1972 discussions between then-US national security adviser Henry Kissinger and president Richard Nixon with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來). Zhou accused the Americans of aiding Peng in his escape, but Nixon responded with indignation: “We had nothing to do with it.”
However, Taiwan’s secret police agencies kept an ever tightening watch over Milo and Judith, and on March 2, 1971 — more than a year after Peng’s escape — they were arrested and expelled from Taiwan. Selig Harrison visited them in their home while they were under house arrest and wrote a front-page article about it in the Washington Post (“Taiwan expels US missionary,” March 4, 1971).
It wasn’t until December 2003, at a reunion of human rights and democracy activists organized by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, that Milo and Judith — as well as the Japanese counterparts who also played a crucial role — disclosed their involvement in Peng’s escape.
The book reads like a spy thriller and fills a key void in the written history of Taiwan’s very recent transition to democracy. It is highly recommended.
Taiwan’s English education system is being pulled apart by three opposing forces. Bilingual Nation 2030 pulls students toward English and global communication. Artificial Intelligence (AI) readiness pulls them toward digital judgment, verification and AI-mediated work. But Taiwan’s old exam culture pulls them back toward memorization, grammar drills, timed reading and correct answers. If the education system keeps using old exams to define success, it risks producing graduates who are neither genuinely bilingual nor genuinely AI-ready, but trained for tasks machines can already perform. The first force is Bilingual Nation 2030. Launched in 2018, the policy aimed to “help Taiwan’s workforce connect
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
June 1 to June 7 "If all Taiwanese were as afraid of dying as you, then what would happen?” Physician Shih Chiang-nan (施江南) reportedly said this to his wife Chen Chiao-tung (陳焦桐) after she urged him to stop intervening on behalf of Taiwanese soldiers stranded overseas after serving in the Japanese Army during World War II. Shih had clashed with high-ranking officials over the issue, engaged in several heated arguments with Taiwan governor-general Chen Yi (陳儀) and allegedly shouted at general Ko Yuan-fen (柯遠芬), chief of staff of the Taiwan Garrison Command, over
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
RSS