For many years now, the question I have been asked most often is whether or not I have felt hatred toward others in my life. I always candidly admit to having felt it.
Then, as if they were already sure of my answer, people ask what have I hated the most. I can tell that the people asking me this are sure I will say former dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), as it was they who incarcerated me for half my life, ruined my family, left me penniless and made sure I suffered.
However, I have to honestly say that, as somebody fighting a foreign regime and trying to overthrow a dictator, their retaliation and persecution was no greater than I had expected. After all, nothing in life is for free.
As somebody opposed to the government and given a life sentence, I never felt hatred for my oppressors; I merely thought of them as trash, while I continued to adopt whatever methods I could from behind bars to deal with them. At the same time, I refused to enter an open prison and decided to read and study as much as I could while I was locked up.
In 1973, after I had been in prison for more than 12 years, although I was serving a life sentence without parole, I never gave up hope because I deeply believed that the Chiangs’ regime would collapse one day, or that at least they would die of old age. I believed things would change when Chiang Kai-shek died.
Entrusting one’s life on somebody’s death is indeed a sad thing, but these are the sort of things that happen under a dictatorship.
At that time, I had a girlfriend, Chen Li-chu (陳麗珠), who had already given birth to my first child by the time I was in prison. She waited for me for 12 years. She was from a very wealthy family and I gave her all the money my family made from selling our land. For those 12 years, I depended on her greatly. She came to visit me in prison every month and our love continued to grow.
Prisoners do not have much room and their spiritual space is even smaller. Chen Li-chu and my daughter were my only consolation. I met prisoners who had served 12 and 15-year sentences and was starting to gain a sense of what life in prison would involve. At that time, almost no political prisoner who had served their term and been released would try to resist the authorities again because all they wanted was to regain the nicer things in life, like a house, a car and a wife, to make up for all the years they had suffered in prison.
Secretary-general of the Taiwan Association for the Care of the Victims of Political Persecution During the Martial Law era Tsai Kuan-yu (蔡寬裕) was in prison with me and we were cellmates for a while. After he was released, he started to pursue Chen romantically. They lived together and had children, moved the whole family to Taichung and stopped having anything to do with me.
This is when I became desperate. I received no visitors and even the letters from my daughter stopped. Nobody was able to offer me financial or material assistance, and I did not even have toothpaste or soap. I had a mouthful of false teeth, which I was able to clean with a toothbrush, but bathing became a problem. All I could do was ask for a bit of extra rice porridge at breakfast every morning, wet my body, apply the rice porridge and then wash it off once it had dried. I washed myself in this manner for more than a year.
This was the first time that I really felt what hatred was. Back then, I was just like the Count of Monte Cristo, continuously thinking about how to get back at Tsai after I got out of prison. The power of hate helped me get through rough times and strengthened my will to survive.
In the daytime, I could take my mind off things by reading, but at night after the lights went out and we could not read, the excruciating pain caused by the hatred hit and stabbed at me. Hatred is a double-edged sword. It can give you magical powers, but it also cuts directly into your heart and creates an intense visceral pain.
Day after day, during the daytime, I armed myself with hatred and refused to give up. At night time, I turned into an animal that was tied up and swallowed by hatred.
The more I struggled, the more I could feel I was being cut up inside.
Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 and I had my sentence reduced to 15 years. The next year on Christmas Eve, while still in prison, I started to think about how, when I felt hatred toward people, I also became a victim of that hatred.
I realized that regardless of how much I hated those who had wronged me, there was no way they could feel my hatred for them and all that hatred would do was keep on twisting my heart.
If I really did try and seek revenge after I was released from prison, I would never have ever been able to put my ideal of bringing an end to the colony that Taiwan was into action. That night, it became clear to me that only by letting go of hatred could I really start to live again.
Hatred is a prison that locks up one’s heart, and forgiveness is the best way to put an end to all the suffering it causes.
Shih Ming-te is chairman of the Shih Ming-te Foundation and a former Democratic Progressive Party chairman. He resigned from the DPP in November 2000.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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