Wednesday, June 24, 2009

"Can you help me find my father"

It is so easy for people from other countries to view Americans in a different way we see ourselves. Our country has been so involved with sorry dictators, coups that were not good for the country (Take Iran in 1953 for example).

Soon after moving to Pingtung, Taiwan, to begin a church (which began 50 years ago last month and is still going, thank God) our landlord ask once if I were with the CIA or FBI? I said no, and wondered why she ask. She thought I might be able to help her find what had happened to her father?

As a teenager in Taipei when the China mainland Nationalist government took over Taiwan from the defeated Japanese, she saw lots of trauma. The Chinese sent a ignorant leader to Taiwan and she saw a communist under every leaf of grass. They took the well educated and leadership of the Taiwanese first. Her father was one of them In the dark of night the police came and took him. When they went to the police station the next day they ignored the family, telling them there was no such person picked up. Our landlord, now a mother of teens and wife of a doctor, never saw her father again.

This was why she thought I might could help as an American government agent help her find the truth of what happened to him. This happened all over Taiwan in the late 1940s. If a professor at college was suspected, all his students were put under arrest and when released told to check every week with their local police station.

It is happening in Iran today. The lovely young woman who was shot on the streets there last week is the same. The government denies it happened. Then blamed the demonstrators. Then would not allow the family to have a memorial service. Sad, the insecurity of so many incompetent leaders of so many lands today.

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