Chen Ching-shan (陳清山), a Puyuma Aborigine, left home as a young man after World War II thinking he would work as a construction worker. Instead, he was sent to China by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to fight the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and could not return home until nearly half a century later.
Born in 1928 in a Puyuma village in Taitung County, Chen was recruited by the KMT government when he was 17, believing that he was to become a construction worker with a monthly salary of 2,000 old Taiwan Dollars — a very high salary at the time.
However, along with 20 other young men from his village, Chen was sent straight to a military camp in Keelung to begin one year of military training. After completing the training, Chen was sent to China in January 1947 to fight the CCP.
About two years after his arrival in China, Chen was wounded in battle, captured by the CCP and turned into a member of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Chen’s hopes of an early return to Taiwan gradually faded as years passed amid cross-strait political tensions. Finally, he married a Chinese woman and decided to make China his home — though deep in his heart, he still hoped to return to Taiwan one day.
The opportunity came after a ban on cross-strait communications and traffic was lifted in 1987. Five years later, in 1992, Chen decided to return home alone.
Then, about seven years ago, Chen ran into Puyuma writer Badai (巴代) at a traditional Puyuma festival.
“He handed me a 10,000-character autobiography and asked if I could do something about it,” Badai told a press conference during the release of his new novel Passing By: The Story of an Old Taiwanese Aboriginal Soldier (走過: 一個台籍原住民老兵的故事).
“At first, I wanted to write some sort of war memoir for Chen, but as I read more of his story, I found there was more than just war in his life,” Badai said. “The more I read and talked to Chen, then the more I felt his emotions and his sufferings, and sometimes I had to stop writing because I could not help breaking into tears.”
It took Badai seven years of research after receiving Chen’s autobiography before he could produce the 240,000 character novel.
Badai said that though many girls had shown their “interest” in Chen, “he never thought about getting married or dating them in the initial years because he only wanted to go home and thought it would be too much trouble if he had a family of his own in China.”
“He thought he could go home soon because the CPP would ‘liberate’ Taiwan in a short time,” Badai said. “But giving it a second thought, Chen said he would rather not go home if the PLA’s ‘liberation’ of Taiwan was the only way he could go home, because he had seen how much damage a war could do, and he would not want that to happen to Taiwan.”
Chen could not make it to the press conference in Taipei because of his age, Badai said.
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