Tsai Kun-lin novel a link to history
Tsai Kun-lin’s (蔡焜霖) life was upended in 1950. Working overtime as a civil servant, he was suddenly taken to a jail, where he was wired up to a machine and electrocuted until he gave up the names of so-called “co-conspirators.”
His supposed crime was joining a “left-leaning” reading club in high school out of a love of literature and academic study.
Tsai, born in Taichung in December 1930, is one of a handful of people still alive who were subjected to political persecution in the White Terror era from 1949 to 1987, when the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government had imposed martial law.
He endured torture and years of imprisonment at a “labor reform” camp on Green Island (綠島) after he was found guilty of “rebellion and treason.”
Aged 92, he is a living witness to Taiwan’s evolution from authoritarianism into a “full democracy,” a description the Economist Intelligence Unit bestowed upon the nation in its Democracy Index for last year.
Tsai’s and Taiwan’s hard-fought road to freedom were documented in Son of Formosa (來自清水的孩子), a four-book Chinese-language graphic novel, the French version of which attracted local readers at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France in January.
The graphic novel was authored by Taiwanese writer Yu Pei-yun (游珮芸) and illustrator Zhou Jian-xin (周見信). Read More…
