Many of the soldiers and civilians who fled to Taiwan with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime in 1949 after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dreamed of returning home.
Kao Ping-han (高秉涵), a 78-year-old former lawyer, is one such person, but Kao’s dream is no longer about himself and his own family because he has taken it upon himself to repatriate the remains of those who died in Taiwan before getting to go home.
“Brother, I am here to take you home, don’t worry, I’ll get you home safely when I visit our hometown in September. Before that, you can stay with me for a while at my place, but don’t worry, everything is going to be fine,” Kao says before removing an urn containing the ashes of former soldier Yang Chin-wu (楊金五) from a rack in a room filled with urns at the veterans’ cemetery in Shulin District (樹林), New Taipei City (新北市).
Photo: Loa Iok-sin, Taipei Times
Kao carefully carries the urn into another room with an altar where religious rites are performed to inform Yang that his ashes will be returned to his hometown in China.
“I’ve been in touch with your younger brother back home, he is waiting for you to go home,” Kao said.
He also speaks to the ashes of other soldiers, telling them that Yang is leaving and thanking them for being such good company.
“He is a kind-hearted man, he comes here quite often to pick up urns that contain the ashes of people from his hometown and takes them back to their relatives for free,” a clerk surnamed Liu (劉) at the cemetery said as Kao filled out paperwork in the office.
“This is something I feel obligated to do because these are the people who held my hand and brought me to Taiwan during the war. Without them, I probably wouldn’t be alive today, because I was a 13-year-old child who had just graduated from elementary school in 1948 when I fled home to escape the war,” Kao said. “This is the least I can do for them.”
“Yang came from my hometown, he was a solider in a military division [with the KMT army] that defended my hometown of Heze in Shandong Province,” Kao said.
“We didn’t know each other back home, but we met on the way when everyone was fleeing to the south [of China]. Yang was 12 years older than me, but he treated me as a little brother and looked after me,” he added.
Kao’s parents were loyal KMT members and his maternal grandfather, Sung Shao-tang (宋紹唐), was one of the party’s founding members and an official in Shandong -Province when the Republic of China (ROC) was founded in 1912.
As the war between the KMT and the CCP intensified, Kao’s mother thought it would be safer for him if he attended school in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China at the time, especially as Kao’s father had been executed by the communists in 1947 for being a KMT member.
Kao recalled that on the morning when he left home in 1948, his grandmother gave him a few pomegranates. As he jumped on the back of a cart and started eating the fruit, a classmate told him his mother was waving at him.
“I quickly raised my head and looked in the direction my classmate pointed,” Kao said. “But it was too late, the cart turned a corner and I didn’t see my mother waving goodbye. I never saw her again — or ate pomegranate.”
When Kao arrived in Nanjing a few days later, he found there was no school and the city had descended into chaos.
As CCP troops closed in, he decided to flee south because his mother had told him to make “survival” and “going to school” his priorities when he left home.
“I was too little at the time, so my mom told me to follow the soldiers with a ‘Sun’ emblem on their hats — which was the emblem of the KMT — and to avoid soldiers with a ‘star’ on their hats — which were the communists,” Kao said.
As a child, the soldiers treated him well and often gave him things to eat at a time when food was scarce. However, he sometimes fell behind, unable to keep up with the pace of the soldiers and on such occasions encountered the CCP troops in hot pursuit of the KMT forces.
“I knew they were chasing the KMT soldiers and that if I followed them, I would eventually catch up with the KMT troops, so I followed them,” Kao said. “At first, I did so at a distance because I remembered my mom’s warning and was afraid, but gradually I found that communist soldiers were also friendly to me and gave me food, because I was only a kid.”
When he arrived in Taiwan in 1949, Kao, who was born to a well-off family, was homeless and penniless with no parents to look after him. He slept at Taipei Railway Station and searched through garbage cans to find food until he was hired as a vendor at the station.
While working as a vendor, Kao ran into several acquaintances from his hometown, who helped him attend night school at Chien Kuo High School — the best high school in Taipei at the time — and he was later admitted to law school at National Defense Management College. He became a military judge and later a lawyer.
During his service as a military judge in Kinmen during the Martial Law period, Kao recalled a case when he sentenced a young soldier to death for attempting to swim from Kinmen to China’s Xiamen — which are only about 2,000m apart.
“The young man swam all night and thought he had arrived at Xiamen when he reached land, but he was back in Kinmen. He was caught and according to the military law, capital punishment was the only possible sentence,” Kao said.
“In court, he told me he tried to swim to Xiamen because he missed his mother,” Kao said. “He was a fisherman in Xiamen who had been press-ganged by KMT troops on his way to buy medicine for his sick mother. On a clear day, he could actually see his home village — and sometimes even make out his house — in Xiamen.”
Kao said that when he heard what the young man said in court, he thought to himself — “I miss my mom, too — it should not be a crime for a son to miss his mother or for a man to miss his home.” However, he had no choice but to sentence him to death.
Today, at a time when traveling across the Taiwan Strait is commonplace, Kao remembers the people from Heze who always wanted to go home, but never made it.
“Honestly, I don’t remember how many urns I have taken back to China, because I didn’t really count, but I think there has been about 100 so far,” Kao said.
It often takes him months and even years to get in touch with the surviving relatives of those who asked him to take their ashes back home, Kao said.
They are often so moved by his act of charity that they sometimes kneel in front of him or burst into tears, he added.
When no relatives in China can be found, Kao takes the ashes back to the home village and spreads them in the surrounding fields.
“When that happens, I tell them: ‘Brother, you are home, rest in peace,’” Kao said.
At first Kao’s family were -opposed to him carrying the ashes of the dead back to China, especially when that meant keeping them at home, sometimes for months, before the journey.
“I told my family that these were the ashes of people who helped me when I was little and that without their assistance I might have died long ago,” Kao said. “Now they accept what I do and my daughter sometimes lends a hand.”
Although Kao has been back to his hometown several times and met his sisters and a younger brother, he is still deeply saddened by the fact that he was unable to return soon enough to see his mother one last time.
“I first got in touch with my family in China in 1977 through a friend in the US, and learned that my mother had passed away two years earlier,” Kao said. “Sometimes I even regret getting in touch with my family, because if I hadn’t, I would be able to tell myself that my mom was still alive.”
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