Letters from Taiwan
After my father died in 1993 I started thumbing through a trunk full of old letters and documents that he had been storing in his office closet. I came across a folder containing letters that he had written (typed) from Taiwan while stationed there as a military advisor for a short time between the Korean War and the War in Vietnam. He was writing to his own father back in Connecticut, himself a decorated WWI and WWII veteran. I took the folder home and planned on reading the letters when I was in a quiet space without distractions. I was 32, engaged to be married, and life was busy. The other day, 33 years later, now retired, I found that quiet space and I read them.
I wasn’t expecting tales of bravery and heroics because he wasn’t that guy, and the letters were written in peacetime. I was mostly looking for anecdotes about the social or political situation there. During what I’ll call my college years I had developed more than a casual interest in eastern philosophies and the Far East, and was particularly fascinated with the Domino Theory and its’ effect on world history. So in 1993 when I took the folder home I thought these letters might offer some interesting snippets. And after all these years, I’ve been rewarded.
I had a heated argument with my father when I was around 22. He was an enthusiast of Ayn Rand, novelist and philosopher. I’d read her works and admittedly been influenced by her, but a sojourn had led to my discovery of the Buddha and eastern philosophies, which transformed my opinion of her works and philosophy. I was certain that Rand had a fundamental misunderstanding of mysticism. The argument with my father was memorable because it was rare, and because it centered around Ayn Rand and, you guessed it, mysticism. In all the years he was alive I never heard him discussing Buddhism or Taoism, the Yin and Yang, or any such thing. At the time of our argument he was focused in his business and I remember him saying that he wasn’t as current on the issues as perhaps I was, but he nevertheless defended Ayn Rand with a passion. The argument came out of nowhere, and we never discussed the topic again, but it has haunted me because he didn’t seem to want to understand. So my biggest reward came when reading these letters and in one he describes Taoism to his father. I was taken aback. There are other interesting snippets. In several letters he comments that the Chinese people in general were very backward, practically incapable of operating machinery, lost to world progress because of their 3,000 years of working on the land, and closing themselves to the world. This may have been the prevailing opinion, with some truth, but it’s very interesting in light of where China and Taiwan are today vis a vis their ability to operate machinery, among other things…. Other comments he makes are very prescient, and worth several reads, since the conflict in Vietnam had not yet happened, and Taiwan remains politically separated from mainland China, and protected by the USA. I’ve dropped one of the letters here for your enjoyment and placed the folder back into a trunk to be rediscovered and thumbed through by someone else, in a quiet space at some point in time.
