Like most Taiwanese people at that time, Yeh Te-chin (
"I was among those cheerful crowds welcoming the troops at Tamsui harbor," Yeh, now 75, said.
He expected the nation to thrive again under the KMT government although the soldiers coming down from the boats wore shoes made out of straw strings and carried their own pots and pans.
PHOTO COURTESY OF YEH TE-CHIN
However, things did not turn out as he had expected. Instead of protecting the Taiwanese, the troops became the enemy at home. Mainland soldiers looted Taiwanese homes and raped Taiwanese women.
"I was so sick and tired of their behavior that I decided to teach them a lesson," he said.
One day in 1947, Yeh met with five of his friends. The six put their hands in their pockets, went to the Tamshui train station, told the KMT guards that they had hidden pistols aimed at the guards and demanded that the guards hand over their guns.
The six managed to get three rifles, but a few days later they dropped the guns off at an auditorium at the township office and ran away from home.
Yeh hoped the incident would end there, but it didn't.
Five months after the incident, Yeh thought it was safe to come home, but was arrested when he returned.
He was later court martialed and sentenced to 12 years in prison for robbery.
Before he served his sentence, he was jailed in the basement of the Public Security Headquarters where they tied him up, blindfolded him and chained him to his cell with 10.8kg shackles.
Although he was 19, the avid jogger still had a hard time coping with relentless torture.
Sympathizing with his hardship, veteran cell mates offered him a folk prescription to endure the physical plight: to drink the urine of baby boys.
"Since we couldn't find any baby boys anywhere in there, I drank the urine of younger cell mates," he said.
Two years and eight months into his jail term, he was bailed out by a friend at the Keelung chapter of the KMT. The friend was one of the best friends of Yeh's uncle, who was a teacher at the time.
Because of his unique past, Yeh had a hard time finding a decent job. He eventually ended up working for a shipping company in Keelung guiding boats to enter the port.
"It was a dangerous job because it required a lot of skills and energy," he said.
He stayed on the job until the age of 42 when he moved on to work at a conglomerate, whose name he refused to reveal.
His family was shocked to learn of his past when in 1999 he was granted NT$2.9 million in compensation for inappropriate sentencing during the martial law era.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching