Thu, Feb 08, 2001 page2

• Ex-Kinmen natives speak of loss

  LOOKING BACK For many of the returnees, the trip home to the Taiwan-held island has provoked memories of separation, loved ones lost and the Chinese Civil War

  • By Chuang Chi-ting / STAFF REPORTER
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  A group of senior citizens, all former residents of Kinmen, who returned to Kinmen for the first time in over 50 years on Tuesday, yesterday paid their first visits to their old homes and relatives who have remained on the Taiwan-held islands.

  Kinmen is located only 2km off the coast of China and approximately 280km from Taiwan proper. Transportation between Kinmen and Fujian-proper was frequent before 1949. But some Kinmen residents who traveled across into the mainland during the civil war between the KMT and communists were left stranded after the KMT withdrew to Taiwan in 1949.

  

  Little Kinmen resident Hung Si-fu, 75, walks by an air-raid shelter near his house yesterday on his way to a banquet for the visitors from Xiamen. The shelter was built in 1965 and bears the slogans, "Everyone fight" and "Subdue the enemy on all fronts" engraved on the gate.

  PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES

  Hung You-li (洪有利) from Xiamen is typical of those who have experienced such separation. Originally from Liehyu (烈嶼), an islet off Kinmen otherwise known as Little Kinmen, he left to visit his aunt and other relatives because his parents were dead and Liehyu was in a state of chaos after the KMT had taken over Kinmen in 1945. But he was not able to return for 52 years.

  

  Hung You-li, left, a Kinmen-born man stranded on China for 52 years, exchanges family photos with his older sister Hung Yuan, 82.

  PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES

  Hung Chuen-hui (洪春暉), a Liehyu resident, explained that the KMT troops at that time "were of poor quality," and had disrupted the lives of local people.

  "I could hardly recognize the surroundings. They have all changed greatly ? But yes, I know that temple, and that is her house ?" Hong Youli said, looking out of the window of the van on his way to see his sister. He recalled leading his sister to the house during a traditional ceremony following her wedding.

  Hung Yuan (洪怨), his 82-year-old sister who is hard of hearing, however, did not expect her only brother, who had not returned home in half a century, to appear on her doorstep until yesterday.

  Hung Yuan, looking very weak, met her brother at the house where she lives alone following her husband's death.

  "I can't recognize his face. He has grown old, and me too ? We haven't met for almost a lifetime," said the aged woman. She seemed hesitant to engage in conversation with her brother until he mentioned the names of people they both knew -- many of them now dead.

  "I have your picture," said Youli, taking out some photographs, before the brother and sister started chatting away about their family.

  Youli, unlike other returnees, looked at ease as he visited the sister who could only totter a few steps to see her brother off after the two-hour visit.

  "I will take her to stay with the rest of my family in Xiamen," said Youli slowly. Then, after a moment of silence during which he saw his sister wave goodbye while while wiping away tears, the 70-year-old spoke his innermost emotions.

  "I can't cry ? otherwise she will shed more tears, which is not good for her health.

  Moreover, seeing her cry will make it too difficult to turn my back on her and leave ?"

  "I have many concerns ? but I'm also considering moving back to my hometown," Youli said.

  "You know, people always feel like clinging to where they were born ?"

  Youli married in China, where he now has seven children.

  Despite the long separation from his family in Kinmen, Youli was not the most unfortunate of the returnees. Many did not survive for long enough to see their original homes again.

  "Your third uncle's wife visited me once in Xiamen a long time ago. I went to her house a few years later but was unable to find her," Youli said to Chuen-hui, as the latter accompanied him during the visit. Youli hadn't known that the woman had been killed during the civil war.

  Chuen-huei said his aunt, a very young widow, fell in love with a man who had come from China to Liehyu. Her lover was expelled from Liehyu because the KMT suspected everybody from the mainland of being communist spies.

  "She made her decision at the last minute to follow her lover to China. My aunt waded in the waters to catch the sampan that carried her lover back across the water, leaving her daughter for her lover," Chuen-hui said.

  "But the man died only a few days after arriving in Xiamen. Having returned from Kinmen, he was suspected by the communists of being a KMT agent and was tortured and died in jail," Chuen-hui said. His aunt also died from an illness shortly afterward.

  Hong Zhimin (洪植民), from Xiamen, was lucky. He was enjoying his second visit to his native Liehyu yesterday. In 1991 he paid 15 months' salary for a flight back home via Hong Kong. Tuesday's voyage had marked the first legal direct voyage from the mainland to Kinmen in over 50 years. But he had also endured the suffering of his generation.

  "I left for China to study when I was 12. When I was 15, transportation to Kinmen was suddenly cut," Zhimin recalled.

  "I had two sisters left in Liehyu. My parents, who were running businesses in Xiamen, and I, were worried about them," Zhimin said with tears in his eyes.

  "But we were having trouble taking care of ourselves because of the war. There were soldiers everywhere on the streets. They did not allow us to go out and used to steal from us," he said. "We often ran out of water and food."

  "We were unable to hear anything from them until 1989 when they came to visit me. I tried to transfer mail via Singapore but without success, as cross-strait postage was banned then."

  For your information

  Effects of the 'small three links' so far this year

  * Since Jan. 1, Taiwan allows residents of Kinmen and Matsu to sail directly to China. * On Jan. 2, Taiwan sent the first two boats to make an official trip to China in nearly 52 years. * On Feb. 6, former residents of Kinmen now living in China returned to Kinmen for the first time in over 50 years. Source: Taipei Times
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