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Back alleys: the creative journey of Chen Yingzhen

Chen Yingzhen was born in Zhunan, Taiwan in 1937. Later he registered his residence in Yingge, Taipei County. The 228 Incident occurred in spring 1947, when he was ten years old. His twin brother had passed away a year earlier, and Chen was often seen playing by himself, lonely and listless. He remembers that there were five or six Taiwanese men who had served in the Japanese army in the village. They resumed their military march in the small alley with closed doors and windows, wearing tattered, incomplete sets of imperial military uniforms and chanting Japanese military marching songs. Slowly they marched away. Chen remembers a waisheng merchant was beaten up and lay moaning on the ground in front of the Ying town train station. Blood was splattered on his ankles, between his long socks and black shoes. Chen also remembers the adults, their eyes filled with fear and sorrow, whispering about the Kuomingtang’s (KMT) twentyfirst battalion taking Taipei by storm. In the summer of 1950, Chen was in the sixth grade. During self-study, his head teacher was reading reports on the Korean War in Central Daily News. In the autumn, Mr. Wu, [the school teacher,] was taken away by the military authorities on a jeep in the middle of the night. Mr. Wu had fought in the war from Southeast Asia to China. His face was always pale from tuberculosis. In fifth grade, Mr. Wu slapped Chen on the face because of something the sharecropper’s son has done. After Mr. Wu was taken away, Mr. Wu’s grey-haired mother, who was a ceramics worker, was left crying by herself in a dark brick house. In winter, the waisheng brother and sister Lu, who were living in Chen’s backyard, were also taken away, one to Ying town and the other to the Tainan sugar factory. White terror had arrived. In 1951, Chen went to Taipei for junior high school. Every morning when he walked out of the ticket counter, he would frequently see a military truck parked in front of Taipei train station ticket counter. Two soldiers would jump off the truck to post large announcements on the station’s columns. The first line of the announcement was usually a list of names, and the names were always circled in bright, frightening scarlet ink. Chen remembers clearly that the main body of the text always had a paragraph like this: “... joined with the bandits of Zhu and Mao ... after investigation, sent over to the fourth army of the military police to be lawfully executed.” The crowd was usually quietly trembling as it approached the posters. Occasionally, he saw peasants who, recognizing the name of a family member, suddenly let out a cry and collapsed to the floor. His junior high school years were spent under the White Terror. In summer and winter vacations, he lived as a guest of his biological parents’ in Tao town, which was one station away from his foster parents’ house in Ying town. One time, he found a collection of Lu Xun’s short stories, Call to Arms, which his biological father was supposed to destroy to avoid trouble with the current regime but did not have the heart to do so. Chen secretly snatched it, and this dark crimson book became his companion for many adolescent years. The Taiwan police headquarters was on Qingdao East Road, right next to the school Chen attended. Before class and after class, he would see old peasant women from Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2014 Vol. 15, No. 3, 342–348, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2014.950479