An exhibition that opened on Wednesday in New Taipei City is focusing on the lesser-known stories of women during the White Terror era, a period of political persecution in Taiwan that lasted from 1949 to 1987.
Titled “A Jail Beyond the Prison Walls,” the exhibition features displays such as letters written by political prisoners to their families, and video interviews with White Terror victims, their wives, daughters and sisters. Also on display are photographs, artworks, personal notes and court verdicts, all pertaining to political prisoners during the White Terror era.
“For many years, the discussion on the White Terror era was focused on the political victims themselves — how and why they were imprisoned and their lives after prison — but we cannot exclude the stories of their families if we wish to gain a comprehensive understanding of the collective pain and suffering of our society,” National Human Rights Museum Preparatory Office director Wang Yi-chun (王逸群) said.
Photo: Weng Yu-huang, Taipei Times
Among the items on display is a seashell painting that political prisoner Tseng Meng-lan (曾夢蘭) made in prison for his daughter Tseng Yu-pin (曾玉霦). The painting features two white cranes on a tree and is signed “from father.”
In a written account, Tseng Yu-pin said her father’s imprisonment had deeply affected her family and her relationships with men.
She once turned down the attentions of a young man because she did not want to get him into trouble, she said.
“Ten years of imprisonment had damaged my father, body and soul. How could he start over again?” she said.
Meanwhile, Ho Ying-hung (何穎紅) spoke of his mother’s enduring love for his father Ho Chuan (何川), a school teacher who was executed during the White Terror period.
“Each year, before the anniversary of my father’s death, my mother would spend over a week writing a letter to him, telling him about our lives and how the children were doing at school,” said Ho Ying-hung, whose father was killed on June 17, 1951.
“If all of those letters had been kept, they would’ve been a great collection of work,” he said.
Last month, the National Human Rights Museum Preparatory Office and Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History jointly published the oral history collection A Jail Beyond the Prison Walls: Untold Stories by Female Family Members of White Terror Victims.
Through the exhibition and publication, Wang said, he hopes young people can learn more about the painful period in Taiwan’s history and safeguard the country’s hard-won democracy.
“Only if every young person and visitor is willing to understand their own history will these same mistakes be prevented,” he said.
The White Terror refers to the suppression of political dissidents in Taiwan following the 228 Incident, an anti-government uprising in 1947 and the subsequent brutal crackdown by the then-authoritarian regime of the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). During the White Terror period, many people were killed and 140,000 to 200,000 people — many of them intellectuals and social elites — were imprisoned. The White Terror era lasted until the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987. The exhibition will run until Dec. 30 at the Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park.
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