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Cross-strait reunions celebrated

As a child, Veterans Affairs Com-mission official Chang Chan-kuei (張占奎) didn't give much thought to why his parents brooded and got drunk while he and his siblings gorged themselves on "chicken legs" and other snacks and happily modeled new clothes during Lunar New Year celebrations.

As Chang grew older, however, he gradually became aware of the sadness and pain afflicting his parents -- a misery that reached a crescendo every Lunar New Year because of what the holiday symbolized to them: a separated family.

"We didn't know at first," Chang said yesterday at a ceremony marking 20 years of cross-strait family reunions. "My parents lived short lives; they didn't make it to the time when families on either side of the Strait could meet again."

Chang was joined yesterday by scores of long-retired Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) soldiers and other Mainlanders or waishengren (外省人) -- a term referring to immigrants who followed the KMT army from China to Taiwan after World War II -- to celebrate the two-decade anniversary of a movement that allowed families like his to reunite.

Countless Chinese families who retreated with the KMT to Taiwan in 1949 following a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were cut off from family members and friends in China until 1987, when Taiwan began to permit them to return, participants said.

Fed up with restrictions preventing them from seeing family in China, retired KMT soldiers took to the streets for months in 1987 before the restrictions were lifted in April that year, said National Taiwan University professor Wang Hsiao-po (王曉波), who helped to organize the movement.

Fearing retribution from the government, the former soldiers preferred to fan out in cities nationwide in groups of just three or four to hand out pamphlets, sing songs and otherwise spread their message, Wang said.

Fan Hsun-yuan (范巽緣), a former vice minister of education who called herself "a first-generation Taiwanese and a second-generation Mainlander," yesterday said the movement began on May 10, 1987.

Mainlanders who had taken part in the movement were out in force at the event, wearing shirts that read: "We Miss Home!" and waving pickets from 1987 that read: "You forced me to become your soldier, now let me go home!"

The signs refer to what Wang said was the KMT's common practice of "shanghaiing" young men in China and forcing them to fight on its behalf during the civil war.

The original proponents of the movement, mostly elderly men with combat experience, received plaques and awards for their contribution to cross-strait relations yesterday.

Hosted by the Association of Mainlander Taiwanese, the event also called attention to respecting the rights of both Mainlanders and benshengren (本省人), the descendants of Chinese who migrated to Taiwan before 1945. The two groups have a history of ethnic strife.

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