In the leafy back blocks of a military cemetery in northern Taiwan, Liu De-wen strides through a room holding rows and rows of shelves. He stops and stoops to the lowest row, opening a small, ornate gold door. He pulls out an urn, bundles it into his lap, and hugs it.
“Grandpa Lin, follow me closely,” Liu says. “I am bringing you back home to Fujian as you wished. Stay close.”
Inside the jade green urn are the ashes of Lin Ru Min, a former soldier who was 103 when he died in Taiwan, far from his home village in China’s Fujian province. Lin is among hundreds of people whose remains Liu, a 58-year-old Taiwanese man, has helped return to China over the past 23 years.
Liu’s work operates in a complicated space at the heart of modern Taiwan’s history, navigating the nuances of family grief and separation, the complicated ties between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and the risks of it all being co-opted in Beijing’s demands for reunification.
Liu retrieves former soldier’s ashes to return them to Fujian – video
At the end of China’s civil war between the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communists in the late 1940s, Lin was a young fisher with a wife and five children in coastal Fujian, when he was snatched by the defeated KMT troops as they fled defeat on the mainland, his niece’s daughter, Chen Rong, says.
He was forced into conscription, and taken to Taiwan, not allowed to return home for almost half a century.
The KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, brought an estimated one to two million affiliated people – known as waishengren in Taiwan – when they fled, including soldiers, government workers, their families, and forced conscripts like Lin.
“Tens of thousands were literally kidnapped to Taiwan this way,” says Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, a historian of modern Taiwan, China, and civil war exiles, at the University of Missouri.
“In some of these unlucky coastal communities which happened to sit on the paths of the Nationalist divisions in retreat, a large number of male populations were taken away.’”
Chiang planned to regroup and replenish in Taiwan, and then retake the mainland for the Republic of China. But the comeback never happened, and for almost 40 years he ruled Taiwan under a brutal martial law. Travel and other exchanges with what had become the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland were banned.
Sansha Town in Fujian, China. The province is the destination for Liu De-wen and the urn holding the ashes of Lin Ru Min. Photograph: Xinhua/Shutterstock
By the time the bans were lifted in the late 1980s, and after three decades of Maoism in the PRC, it was no longer realistic for most of the hundreds of thousands of remaining veterans to return, including Lin. Only about 2% ever did.
“The homes that the old KMT soldiers left behind in the late 1940s changed dramatically during the three to four decades they were gone,” says ProfJames Lin, an expert in Taiwan’s history and international studies at the University of Washington.
“Most soldiers had already settled down in Taiwan with children and grandchildren, and despite their longing for their natal home in China, realistically their homes were already in Taiwan.”
In hospital before he died, Lin told Chen that he still wanted his final resting place to be in Fujian. So Chen found Liu, an energetic but quietly spoken man from Kaohsiung, who spends his time helping families return the ashes of waishengren back to their ancestral homes.
Liu’s work started in his 30s, after he moved into a village which had been built for the KMT soldiers, and he later became the borough chief.
“There were over 2,000 single veterans just in my community who had no wives or families here in Taiwan,” Liu recalls.
“They missed their parents deeply. Every Chinese new year, they would face the direction of their home town and sit there for two or three hours without moving, quietly missing home … they asked: borough chief, could you please take me home, help me fulfil my lifelong wish, so I can be filial to my parents and at least redeem myself in the afterlife?”
Liu’s work has sent him across Taiwan, sometimes scouring through overgrown mountain regions to find long neglected graves. (Not everyone had relatives like Chen in Taiwan.)
“Some were merchants or sailors who came to Taiwan for business or trade and never made it back,” says Lin.
“Regardless of whether they were soldiers or civilians, I help the families as long as I can find their relatives.”
Liu De-wen walking down stairs and moving down an escalator carrying a backpack on his front with an urn in it
When he finds the right grave, he takes care of the paperwork, and then personally picks up the urn and carries it to China. Liu’s social media accounts show him carrying the urn, usually in a backpack worn on his front as a sign of respect.
“It’s not a commodity, it represents an elder with a soul and a life,” he says. Other posts show the urn in its own seat in vehicles and its own twin bed in hotel rooms, while Liu speaks updates of their journey.
Liu does not charge people for the service, and frowns upon those who do. He says he does not receive any financial assistance from the Taiwanese or Chinese governments, but is coy about how it is funded. Taiwan’s veterans affairs council declined multiple requests to answer questions.
Liu’s work has been written about in Taiwanese outlets and extensively in Chinese state media, where he is praised as a “ferryman of the souls”.
“Many in the broader public in the PRC sympathise with the old soldiers who were cut off from their home villages,” says Prof Lin.
But the narrative also serves a propaganda purpose for Beijing, which often uses Liu’s work to emphasise the family ties between China and Taiwan as a way of promoting unification – a prospect that a large majority of people in Taiwan oppose.
Liu wraps the urn in red cloth before the journey to Fujian – video
More than 60% of people in Taiwan identify as solely Taiwanese but about one in three consider themselves to be also Chinese. Those who consider themselves Chinese, and support unification are usually found among older waishengren.
“It theoretically benefits Beijing to highlight the close familial ties that link together society across Taiwan and China, reinforcing a political phrase coined by Beijing that both sides of the strait are part of a same family,” says Prof Lin.
Many of these men, like the young fisher Lin, had little say in the politics and war that so irrevocably changed their lives. And Prof Lin says they felt that the “deeply traumatic” experience is often overlooked in modern Taiwan, because they are tied to what was at the time an authoritarian KMT state.
Liu says people in China and Taiwan are kin who “share the same origins and the same heritage”, but beyond that he just says he wants peace. He says he is not bothered about how his work is presented.
“What I care deeply about is building this kind of bridge for veterans to go home.”
After collecting Lin’s urn, Liu takes it outside and offers more blessings. He films a video for Lin’s family in Fujian, then wraps the urn in red and gold cloth and puts it inside a backpack, ready for the journey to Fujian.
Chen cries.
“We are going home,” she says. “I am asking Mr Liu to bring you home. Please bless us with health and safety.”
Additional reporting by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu
