Most people who have joined the anti-nuclear energy activities in recent years will have no trouble recognizing a man on a wheelchair with that determined look in his eye.
However, few are aware of the bitter-sweet story behind the man, Yilan Charlei Chen Foundation president Chen Hsi-nan (陳錫南), a wealthy entrepreneur turned anti-nuclear activist whose life took an unexpected turn 17 years ago when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Chen had a difficult childhood. He lost his father, a sailor, at the age of eight to a shipwreck, a tragic accident that forced his mother to single-handedly support the family and her four children by doing part-time housekeeping jobs.
Photo: Tang Chia-ling, Taipei Times
“It was a really tough time for my family. I was forced to study in five different elementary schools. Most of the time, I had no idea where my next meal would come from,” Chen said.
Given his family’s financial predicament, Chen said his life was unlike that of an ordinary child. He had to collect waste tires everyday after school so that his family could use them to start a fire for cooking.
He also had to scavenge for fish heads discarded by canning factories near the Nanfangao fishing port in Yilan County and bring them home for dinner.
However, these hardships also taught Chen the value of determination and perseverance.
Dreaming of a better life, Chen’s family moved to Taipei when he was 11.
Chen first tried to make a living by selling blank tapes on the street. The job not only honed his sales skills, but also helped him later on when he founded a company selling motherboards and personal computers when he was 27.
By the time he was 40, his net worth had risen to hundreds of millions of New Taiwan dollars.
However, adversity followed success. While playing golf with his friends, Chen, then 45, found himself losing control of his hands.
He went to a doctor the following day and found out that he had Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system.
“If Chen had not been forced to leave the electronics industry because of his illness, [Hon Hai Precision Industry Co chairman] Terry Gou (郭台銘) would not have had the chance to become the man he is today,” one of Chen’s close friends said.
Gou first became the wealthiest man in Taiwan in 2005 with a net worth of US$3.2 billion. He was ranked the third-richest person in the country by Forbes magazine in March last year.
Despite his condition, Chen, now 62, has maintained a positive attitude in life.
“Fortunately, Parkinson’s disease is chronic and I still have plenty of time to change my life’s direction,” he said.
Recalling how he got involved in the anti-nuclear campaign, Chen said it was the sight of a radioactive cloud presumably caused by Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear catastrophe in 2011 passing over a building in Taiwan.
“I was thinking then: If the disaster had occurred in a small, densely populated country like Taiwan, it could have caused much more severe damage,” Chen said.
Despite sharing the same general goal as other anti-nuclear activists, Chen decided to take a different approach to raise public awareness of the potential dangers of nuclear energy.
In an effort to determine the real reasons why Taiwan is ill-suited for nuclear energy technology, Chen brought together a group of local and overseas nuclear experts to conduct studies on the problem of nuclear waste disposal, the production cost for nuclear-generated electricity and possible alternatives to nuclear power generation.
Chen also started an online newspaper featuring nuclear-related news that has been published weekly for the past three years, costing him nearly NT$70 million (US$2.32 million) thus far.
Although Chen now still goes to bed with a ventilator and an electrical stimulator attached to his limbs, he always returns to the frontline of the anti-nuclear movement the next morning with the same determination.
“Every detail of every day is a lesson for me. The most important task ahead of us now is to turn Taiwan into a nuclear-free country, where the next generation can live without having to carry the burden of radioactive waste,” Chen said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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