The Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park in New Taipei City is from Friday to Sunday to stage performances of the play Don’t Cry (說好不要哭), which tells the story of White Terror era victim Chin Him-san (陳欽生).
Chin is a Malaysian of Hakka descent who studied at National Cheng Kung University in the 1970s and was wrongly imprisoned for 12 years over allegations of his connection to a bomb explosion at the US Information Service in Tainan.
Chin, who was 21 at the time, said that although intelligence officers found that he had nothing to do with the explosion, the government kept him locked up because it refused to acknowledge that it had arrested the wrong person.
Photo: Chen Yu-hsun, Taipei Times
The play is part of activities to mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the National Human Rights Museum said.
Chin came to Taiwan in 1967 for Chinese-language study and in 1968 entered an engineering program at university. Following his arrest in 1971, Chin was interrogated and tortured, including being hung upside down and beaten, and having needles driven under his nails.
Initially suspected of involvement in the Tainan explosion, Chin was later accused of being a communist and of plotting to overthrow the government.
Throughout his 12 years in detention, Chin was transferred between the Jingmei Military Detention Center (now the site of the park), Green Island (綠島) and a re-education camp in New Taipei City.
Chin, now a volunteer at the museum, was released in 1983.
In the Flip Flops Theatre version of Don’t Cry, the actors have no lines, with the spoken parts handled by puppeteers and ventriloquists. The authoritarian regime is represented by a white dragon, while death and despair under the regime is symbolized by the Grim Reaper.
In one scene, the protagonist — dolphin Tung Tung (東東) — meets his mother, but the two are held apart and unable to embrace. The scene represents Chin’s inability to embrace his mother when she visited him on Green Island.
“The perpetrators were afraid we would retaliate, but actually I have never thought about that,” Chin said.
Chin is unsure why to this day he has not received an apology from those who detained and tortured him, he said, adding that his wish has always been to sit down for a meal with members of the former authoritarian regime and ask why they had done what they did.
“I would certainly forgive them, and hopefully encourage more perpetrators to come forward and apologize to their victims,” he said.
Director Wu I-chen (吳易蓁) said that growing up she was told to “listen, but not speak” about things that happened during the White Terror era, which was the inspiration behind her use of ventriloquism.
Chin said that he feels he has a responsibility to teach young people to cherish freedom and democracy.
“Children are not just there to be raised, they are people with rights,” he said.
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