For 73-year-old Tung Hsiang-ming (湯祥明), Lunar New Year is not a time for family reunions. Since he was sent to the Happy Life Leprosy Hospital in Sinjhuang, Taipei County, in 1951, Tung has spent each holiday with other lepers in the once secluded sanatorium. Still, hot-pot dinners and red envelopes brought some joy to Tung and his fellow patients. This year, however, was different.
Fears of relocation to a new hospital facility -- one with iron-barred windows -- has marred their happiness.
In 2003, Taipei County officials began demolishing the 70-year-old hospital community built under Japanese colonial rule to make room for the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system's Xinshuang Line.
Banyan trees were uprooted, elegant Japanese-styled houses were torn down, and old patients were moved from their homes to prefabricated sheds.
With negotiations with the government appearing less and less fruitful, the frustrated patients knew that soon the rest of the complex would be razed to the ground.
For Tung and other 300 lepers, the demolition of Happy Life was the most unwelcome news for the Lunar New Year.
"When the society turned its back on me and ostracized me in the 1950s, I found peace here at Happy Life. Happy Life is my home and the other patients are my family. I don't want to move," Tung said, sitting in a small pre-fab shanty crammed with a plank bed, TV set, tabletop gas burner and cooking utensils.
For many other lepers, the Happy Life is not just a verdant hospital complex. It is a place where they lived out the pain of parting with their families and where they survived the devastations of leprosy. It is home.
Since many of the older patients were cut off from society and their families decades ago, they now have few ties to the outside world.
Huang Jing-liang (
"I've lived here for more than 60 years without contact with my family. If Happy Life is not my home, what is?" the 75-year-old Huang said.
For these people, the new Huilung Community Hospital, where the Taipei County Government plans to relocate them, can never replace Happy Life.
For the government, however, the MRT project is crucial.
When the Vice President Annette Lu (
"If patients refuse to move to the new hospital, the hospital should improve its facilities and listen more to the patients," Lu said.
"However, the MRT is a nationally significant project. Once such an important project is delayed, the nation will lose a considerable amount of money. Who is going to pay for this?" she said.
According to the county government, changing the route of the Xinshuang MRT line in order to preserve Happy Life would cost more than NT$2 billion (US$63 million) and delay the project's completion by more than three years.
But are the MRT line and patients' rights mutually exclusive? Many city planning experts believe not.
"It is possible to preserve Happy Life as historical and cultural site with the MRT trains running past it. It could be a shared space for modern technology and historical heritage," said Hsia Chu-joe (
If the Taipei County Government and construction companies can move the power plant and water treatment plant from the original hospital complex, Hsia said, the 70-year-old hospital would not have to be dismantled and its patients forced to move.
To seek a solution, the Executive Yuan invited experts to study alternative plans for the MRT line and the hospital last October.
The panel of experts submitted its report to the Executive Yuan last month, suggesting the government both preserve the patient wards and continue construction of the MRT line.
"The panel said that it will only cost NT$300 million to change the route, instead of the NT$2 billion the government claims," said Wu Jia-zhen (
In Wu's eyes, the extra expense is a price the government should pay to redeem the wrongs made 11 years ago.
"The government was wrong when they failed to consider the 300 patients living at Happy Life and rashly mapped out the routes of the Xinshuang MRT line in 1994," Wu said.
"How could they decide to tear down Happy life without the patients' consent and an assessment of its cultural and historical values?" the rights activist said.
For the long-forgotten patients, the pain of being eaten away by their affliction has now long passed. Blindness, deafness, loss of fingers, above-the-knee amputations and wooden limbs do not bother them any more.
"We now only hope to live out our lives here," said Chen Zai-tien (
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