Nearly four decades after being stranded by his father in the Canary Islands, a man from the Amis Aboriginal community in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) could be coming home.
Chen Chiung-ming (陳炯明) has a chance to reunite with his family, thanks to the efforts of his sister, Chen Hsiu-lan (陳秀蘭), who promised their late father that she would find him. Now, she must navigate the bureaucratic obstacles that keep them apart.
Financial hardship drove Chen Chiung-ming, at age 17, to work for their father on a long-haul commercial fishing vessel, Chen Hsiu-lan said in an interview on Dec. 12.
Photo: Huang Ming-tang, Taipei Times
In their months at sea, the two came into almost constant conflict. Finally, in 1981, the father ordered his son locked up in the ship’s refrigerator. He was eventually freed and helped ashore by his friends when the ship docked in the Canary Islands.
However, his still furious father allowed the ship to depart without him, taking his son’s luggage, passport and savings — all he would need to scrape together a livelihood in a foreign country or eventually find his way home.
When their father returned a month later, he regretted what he had done, but there was no simple way to find Chen Chiung-ming, other than to go out and search for him.
Chen Hsiu-lan said that her father signed a contract for another three years on the fishing boat, and then renewed it several times, working an additional 27 years before dying of stomach cancer in 2008.
She said that she had asked her father why he continued working at sea.
“Because I left your brother over there,” she recalled him saying. “It’s my fault, and I have to bring him back.”
Her father’s failure to find her brother was one of many misfortunes to befall the family, Chen Hsiu-lan said, adding that they also lost their mother, and the family home was destroyed by fire, scattering her siblings across southeastern Taiwan.
An Amis sailor later called her and said that he had found her brother and gave her the telephone number of the restaurant where he worked.
“It sounded like fraud,” she said, adding that she was so suspicious she used a pay phone to make the call.
The man she reached confirmed he was “Chen Chiung-ming, an Amis from Taitung,” she said, but he spoke with a mainland Chinese accent.
She decided to test him, asking him to say something in Amis.
“Nga’ay ho [hello],” he said, and she knew it was him.
Though he had forgotten much of the Amis language, and even spoke in halting Chinese, he told his sister that he remembered her.
Chen Chiung-ming told her that he has a wife and seven children, and worked as head chef in a restaurant where he had started as a dishwasher.
He said that he felt no bitterness and had forgiven their father years ago.
For more than a year after reconnecting with her brother, Chen Hsiu-lan sought assistance for him through various government agencies, but with little success, she said.
Eventually with the help of Chen Yun-ping (陳允萍), a legislative candidate and civil servant at the National Immigration Agency’s Taitung County Service Center, Chen Hsiu-lan received a new passport for her brother and helped him apply for the documents that he needed to settle his residency status in Spain.
Chen Hsiu-lan said her family hopes to soon be reunited with her brother.
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