Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence

Posted: November 6th, 2024 | No Comments »

Kim Liao’s Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence (Rowan and Littlefield)…

In 2010, Kim Liao traveled to Taiwan to reconstruct the lost story of her grandparents. But upon arrival, she found that four decades of Taiwanese history had been silenced by Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT Government during the White Terror period. As leader of the first Taiwanese Independence Movement after WWII, in 1947, her grandfather Thomas Liao became a fugitive: his family’s land was seized, his relatives were arrested, and his nephew was sentenced to death.

With their lives under threat, Thomas’s wife Anna decided to abandon their marriage and take her children to America to start a new life. She never spoke of Thomas again. For the rest of her life, Grandma Anna presided over a hushed silence about the past. No one spoke about Taiwan, and her youngest son Richard told anyone who asked that his father was dead, and never told his daughter Kim about her family’s story, since he himself didn’t know any of the details.

Six decades later, Kim arrived in Taiwan to search for the truth, and was shocked to learn that the KMT government had erased the story of independence from the official historical record—even in a now democratic society. Young Taiwanese citizens who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century were kept in the dark about their nation’s own violent history. The silenced voices of Taiwanese history mirrored the silencing of my family’s story, making her that much more determined to share it with the world.

Despite this suppression, the history of the Taiwanese Independence Movement was kept alive in the memories and personal archives of former independence leaders. Once Kim gained entry into this network, she discovered how the Liao family played a pivotal role in achieving democratic

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