Nationalist China’s Old Soldiers Fade

Standing in his tiny room in a dank basement reeking of urine and rancid meat, Chang Kuan-chung strips off his yellowed shirt to show the tattoos that defined his life.

“Annihilate the communist bandits,” say Chinese characters across the old soldier’s chest. “Fight the way back to the mainland,” says a tattoo running down his forearm, the words now faded.

Chang, 74, and thousands of other veterans who followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan a half century ago are fading away, along with the goal of returning to the mainland to rout the communists.

Though they were once called “the glorious people” in Taiwan’s official propaganda, their lives are far from glorious now.

While most elderly Chinese live out their final years surrounded by family, these men are convinced that society and the government they sacrificed their lifetimes to defend have cast them off like worn-out combat boots.

“We’re broken things that nobody wants. Look at where we live. No one ever comes to see us,” said Huang Hung-chi, 82, Chang’s neighbor and fellow veteran.

The men are among several dozen elderly veterans who live in converted stockrooms in an abandoned subterranean meat market. Each room is barely big enough for a chair, table and simple bed.

They share a toilet, and their food sits out to rot because there are no refrigerators. Bath time means heating water in a kettle and sponging down on a cold concrete floor covered with newspapers.

Chang, Huang and an unknown number of other veterans without family in Taiwan get by on monthly pensions of 12,440 Taiwan dollars, or about $390--barely enough to survive in pricey Taiwan. Those still fit enough to work supplement their income as building concierges or scrap collectors.

“Some of these old fellows die and the only things they leave are their clothes and a few old lottery tickets,” said Sophia Lin, curator of a recent exhibition on the lives of Chinese who followed Chiang to Taiwan.

Chang and the others could retire to veterans’ homes run by the government. But the control they have over their lives gives them the will to keep going, and the companionship helps ease the loneliness, they say.

The old men rise early to exercise and talk deploringly of crime and what they consider the excesses of political liberalism and materialism of modern Taiwanese society. Some even express admiration for the mainland government’s notorious labor camps, although “communist” remains the worst insult in their vocabularies.

The military defined the lives of the 2 million Chinese who fled to Taiwan, even though many more were businessmen, scholars or government officials, says Lin, who works for a foundation promoting understanding between mainlanders and native Taiwanese.

Although society has focused on Taiwanese culture since nearly four decades of martial law ended in 1987, more interest is being shown in the refugee experience, Lin said.

“I think Taiwan is beginning to realize the sacrifices these old gentlemen made and the hardships they suffer,” she said.

In the retreat from Mao Tse-tung’s victorious communists in 1949, conscripts in Chiang’s Nationalist army boarded boats at Shanghai and other eastern China ports and sailed to Taiwan.

Others, like Chang, got here by different routes. Conscripted to fight the Japanese in 1943, Chang was captured by the communists and eventually sent to fight for the Chinese army in the Korean War. Captured by South Koreans, he opted to come to Taiwan after three years in a prison camp.

The Nationalist soldiers on Taiwan were promised cash and land once the communists were defeated, but rules discouraged them from marrying for fear of weakening their desire to return to the mainland. Few bought property.

In the late 1980s, veterans successfully pressured the government to permit visits back home. Thousands went, but while Taiwan had prospered, much of their home country remained impoverished.

Still, Huang said, “Who’s to say that I might be better off now had I never left China? I couldn’t do much worse.”