A US Vietnam War veteran, now in his 70s, is searching for a son he fathered with a Taiwanese woman in the late 1960s, but never met.
The black American man, Harvey Woods, said he has been trying for many years to locate his son and the Taiwanese woman, with whom he had a relationship when he was stationed in Taiwan from 1966 to 1967.
His daughter, Leah Woods Newton, has enlisted the help of Facebook users to help find the man.
Woods served as a US Airman 2nd Class in the 2165th Communications Squadron at Chingchuankang (清泉崗) Air Base in Taichung.
It was during that time that he met a Taiwanese woman named Ming Ying-chi (or possibly Chi Ming-ying) who lived in the same building where he was residing in downtown Taichung.
Woods said romance soon bloomed and he gave her the nickname “Kiko,” while she reciprocated by affectionately calling him “Mr Woods.”
He wanted her to live in the US with him at the end of his tour in 1967, but she could not do so because of government bureaucracy.
Before he left for the US, he learned that Kiko was pregnant and he promised to find a way to bring her to the US and provide support in the meantime.
His last memories of Kiko were a goodbye hug and kiss at the airport and her nonstop waving as his military plane took off.
Back in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, Woods received his first letter from Kiko and he responded immediately, telling her he hoped they would be reunited soon.
In 1968, Woods’ mother intercepted a letter from Kiko announcing the birth of their son.
Woods’ mother promptly destroyed the letter, including the return address, and refused to reveal the child’s name, which made it almost impossible for Woods to directly contact Kiko or find his son.
In the following years, Woods said, he placed many advertisements in Taichung newspapers, trying to locate Kiko and his son, but to no avail.
Having received no response to his advertisements or any further correspondence from Kiko, Woods decided to move on and later married an American woman.
After nearly 50 years, he one day told the story to his daughter Leah and her siblings, and asked for their help to find Kiko and his son.
“I want to apologize to Kiko from the bottom of my heart and to make it known to her that I never forgot about our son... and that I have never forgotten about her,” Woods said, when asked what he would say to Kiko if he found her.
A Web page — www.facebook.com/mytaiwanson — has been set up to coordinate the search, and people with information about Kiko or her son are asked to directly contact Boston Paul or Shaun Bettinson through the site.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
RSS