The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [146]
Yet these primitive conditions were hardly the most pressing problems on their minds. The migration had been so swift and so immense that the natives of the island were stunned. Every day the émigrés had to contend with the smoldering hostility of the indigenous Taiwanese, who deeply resented KMT confiscation of their property and the brutal reprisals to their 1947 rebellion.42 Worst of all, the Nationalist newcomers lived in constant fear that the Communists would attack from the mainland.
During their early years on Taiwan, some mainlanders refused to accept the island as a permanent home and set their sights over the horizon. My own mother’s family, like many other mainland refugees, believed an invasion of Taiwan was imminent. In late 1949 and early 1950, my maternal grandfather, who had been a poet, scholar, and journalist in mainland China, anxiously pored over stacks of books, researching the culture and geography of other countries in which the family might settle. America was out of the question, because my grandfather believed only rich, well-connected Nationalists could go there, but the Philippines or perhaps Brazil might lie within their reach. A year after arriving in Taiwan, the family moved to Hong Kong, intending to proceed to another country, either in Asia or Latin America. Courageously—or perhaps naively—my grandfather attempted to support himself, his wife, and their five children in Hong Kong as a freelance writer. As Chinese American Anna Chennault would later write in her memoirs, Hong Kong in the 1950s was a “desolate place both in literary and in cultural terms. Writers could seldom practice their craft and make ends meet, and even well-known columnists could rarely hope to make more than ten dollars an article.” My mother’s entire family squeezed into a single room without a kitchen, and prepared meals over a charcoal burner in the hallway. They later moved to another boarding house where water for cooking or cleaning had to be fetched from a faucet in the street. While my grandfather diligently wrote editorials and political commentary for a local newspaper, my grandmother looked into the possibility of earn-ing extra money by frying beans for vendors or mending clothes. Decades later, my mother says her family was just one step away from being homeless.
Many, even some of those who stayed through the 1960s, saw Taiwan as only a temporary resting ground, a refugee way station en route to their next destination. By the time the first generation of Taiwanese Chinese children came of age, it was clear that starting a career on this island, just a few miles across a narrow strait from Communist-controlled China, could not promise a glowing future. With the encouragement of their parents, the best and brightest of them actively worked to leave Taiwan and start new lives abroad. The most popular destination turned out to be the United States, the former patron of the Nationalist government. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, about two thousand students were leaving Taiwan each year to pursue graduate degrees in America.
Those like my grandfather who were certain that mainland China was about to invade and annex the island were not simply pessimistic prophets of doom. The PRC had fully intended to deliver the coup de grace with a military assault on Taiwan, when the Korean War unexpectedly intervened, turning the PRC and the U.S. into deadly enemies. The American government, an ally of South Korea, threw its protection to Taiwan and used the island as a forward Pacific base. Most important, the United States continued to recognize the Nationalists as the sole legitimate government not only of Taiwan but of all of China. Only when it was clear that Taiwan had the unwavering support of the United States did my maternal grandfather have the confidence to leave Hong Kong in 1950 and move back to Taipei,