When it comes to the foreign community in Taiwan, not many individuals are as well known as Linda Gail Arrigo (艾琳達).
Arrigo has been in Taiwan on and off for more than four decades since first arriving as a 14-year-old in the early 1960s. She is instantly recognizable to a generation of middle-aged Taiwanese as the ex-wife of former political prisoner Shih Ming-teh (施明德), and as one of the dozens of foreigners who helped Taiwanese in their struggle for democracy and human rights against the martial law-era Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
Becoming a human rights activist might seem an unusual path for the daughter of a US army major, but Arrigo says it was her father’s military connections that enabled her to come to Taiwan in the first place.
Retired from service, he returned here using military transport to be with his Chinese girlfriend — with young Linda in tow.
As well as being the last bastion of dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) “Free China,” Taiwan at that time was also one of the major recreational destinations for US troops in Vietnam, and this brought a curious and impressionable Arrigo up close and personal with the grim reality of US foreign policy. This, along with her first-hand experience of the repressive nature of the Chiang regime, gave rise to rebellious feelings.
Attending Taipei American School, with its classes full of “military brats” and spending time with the cream of the privileged Chinese class — seeing “how they treated or viewed the local population” — further fueled Arrigo’s opposition to injustice in her adopted homeland, she says.
Marrying “a native Taiwanese” in 1968, she returned to the US, where she learned more about Taiwan’s history and the gruesome truth of the White Terror through books and meetings with dissidents and Taiwanese-Americans fighting for freedom and justice.
It wasn’t until she returned in 1975 to begin fieldwork on Taiwanese factory girls for her doctorate in sociology, however, that she became deeply involved in the fledgling human rights movement, swept along by a circle of new friends and acquaintances.
Asked what she rates as her greatest single achievement during her decades here, Arrigo says her “most important role was at the time of Formosa magazine,” a dissident publication, and during the aftermath of the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident. In the first half of 1980, her work helped to focus attention on the situation in Taiwan and pressure the government into throwing the trials of those arrested open to international scrutiny. This “kept people from being executed and changed the course of Taiwan’s political development,” she says.
But her life was not as romantic as it sounds. She does have regrets, the major one being that “I definitely did neglect my son, from an early age,” when she left him behind in the US with his father, her first husband, to become a full-time activist.
“When one enters into a struggle like this it is really overpowering,” she says.
But despite the damage done to her family, despite the fact that she has never been “economically well-off” and notwithstanding the lack of a personal life and career opportunities in her life-long involvement in Taiwan’s democratic movement, she still looks back on that period with a sense of satisfaction, saying that it was a “rare privilege to be a part of such an historic process.”
Once heavily involved with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Taiwanese independence circles, Arrigo has now left all that behind, saying she became “jaded” and “bored” with the battle between independence and unification, which she believes is driven entirely by economic forces.
Her honesty also made her unpopular in DPP circles after she published an expose of its murky financial dealings based on information she and some colleagues discovered during their time working for the party.
Once close friends have now become distant, she says, as they are reluctant to share confidential information with her. Her disappointment with former husband Shih is also apparent, particularly following his involvement in the campaign to depose former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) a couple of years ago. Arrigo calls Shih a “washout, traitor and betrayer.”
Despite her disappointments, Arrigo is most enthusiastic about human rights and historical research, although with a full-time lecturing job, she now sees her main role these days as one of collecting and documenting precious personal accounts of human suffering during the White Terror era in an attempt to educate younger generations — so many of whom know little or nothing about this important and tragic period.
Part of her work includes taking her university classes on tours of several White Terror grave sites discovered in Taipei’s public cemeteries around 15 years ago. Exposure to the physical remnants of that era helps give her students a grounding of the nation’s tragic history.
Arrigo and another stalwart of the Taiwanese human rights movement, Lynn Miles, recently released the book A Borrowed Voice, which details the efforts of those who worked to publicize the human rights abuses committed by the KMT government between 1960 and 1980.
In the small amount of free time that she has, Arrigo says she likes nothing more than escaping from the concrete jungle to the tree-covered hills near her apartment in Taipei County’s Shenkeng Township (深坑), more famous for its “Tofu Street.”
But even then she finds it hard to stay out of the limelight, as “Linda Road,” a walking trail that she personally hacked out of an old farmer’s path in the hills near her house several years ago, has achieved semi-cult status, with several Web pages dedicated to it and the name now spray-painted on a wall near the entrance to the trail.
As to the future, Arrigo says she is not one to get homesick, and has no plans to return to the US. Being part of Taiwan’s history makes her feel right at home here.
Besides, she enjoys watching what she calls the “soap opera” of Taiwanese politics far too much to leave — even more so, one presumes, now that she is no longer part of it.
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