My Fight for a New Taiwan: One Woman's Journey from Prison to Power

1. Dreams Come True

13 Chapter 1 Dreams Come True The wail of a thousand air horns, the crackling shower of fireworks, the undulation of a sea of banners greeted us as we left our party headquarters and approached the stage. A crowd stretched for half a mile in every direction, claiming streets and sidewalks, jamming intersections on Minsheng East Road. Bottle rockets shrieked from the windows of nearby apartment buildings. To an outsider observing the revelers on the night of March 18, 2000, the crowds in the streets could have been celebrating the Taiwan national team’s victory in some sort of world championship, but the pride of the Taiwanese was participatory, not vicarious: They had voted to remove the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) from the nation’s highest office after its fifty-five years in power and had stood up to China despite its threats to invade Taiwan if they dared vote this way. They had cast aside the successors of a regime that had ruled Taiwan by force and fiat, by threat and murder, by corruption and co-optation, by autocracy and exploitation. On March 18, the Taiwanese had, through their vote, peacefully “changed the heavens” in their homeland, as the saying went, and given birth to the feeling that Taiwan was experiencing its finest hour, that the wrongs of the past could be righted. What a coincidence it was! On the very same day twenty years before, March 18, 1980, I stood in a military courtroom as one of the eight main defendants charged with sedition for leading a demonstration on Human Rights Day. An intense man unknown outside legal circles, Chen Shui-bian, had been among our legal defense attorneys. 14 à Chapter 1 Even our lawyers’ valiant efforts had not prevented the court from sentencing us to lengthy prison terms on the basis of confessions elicited through torture. Who would have dared predict that two decades later, one of the defense lawyers and one of the codefendants would be elected president and vice president of the country at the crowning moment of Taiwan’s struggle for democracy? The hope that the Nationalists would one day be turned out of power had sustained me while I served five and a half years in prison for criticizing their authoritarian regime. I had been waiting for the celebration of March 2000 since my childhood, when I had denounced my schoolteacher for changing the grades of the daughter of a Nationalist official because the teacher wanted to ingratiate himself with the government. Since my recovery from cancer in the 1970s, I had sworn to dedicate my life to equal political participation for all members of Taiwanese society and for all ethnic groups. I had prayed for the replacement of the Nationalist government with a democratically elected opposition since my realization, in prison, that the shock of my incarceration had cost my mother her life. Although I had dreamed of such a moment, somehow I’d never imagined how victory might feel when it blossomed like a flower more fragrant than the evening primrose. Certainly not during the long months of campaigning in 1999 and 2000, when I’d appeared with Chen Shui-bian at six political rallies each night, speaking until my voice grew hoarse and cracked—​ I was too busy fighting to win the election. Yet the moment did come, with the decisiveness of nightfall in the tropics. From school yards and post offices across the island, election volunteers counted the votes signaling the Nationalists’ defeat. The Democratic Progressive Party had captured the presidential palace, formerly the bastion of power for Chiang Kai-shek and the symbol of authority for Japanese colonial governors. On the night of March 18, 2000, the specter of foreign dominance departed with the defeat of the Nationalists, a political party transplanted to Taiwan from China after World War II. For the first time in the history of Taiwan , a native Taiwanese man from a poor, landless family had become president. For the first time in five thousand years of Chinese history, Dreams Come True à 15 I, a woman from an ordinary family, had been elected by the public to serve the number-two position in an ethnically Chinese nation. Twenty-two years had passed since I had first taken the podium at a political rally, challenging, among other things, the Nationalist censorship of the news media. At that time, Taiwan lived under martial law; all media...