by Milo L Thornberry

Fireproof Moth is a mystery worthy of fiction. That the memoir is true makes it hard to put down or to forget. When convinced that the secret police were going to arrange an “accident” to kill his friend, the missionary decided he had no choice but to help well known human rights leader Peng Ming-min escape from Taiwan. So successful was the getaway that when President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai met in Beijing two years later and wanted to know how Peng got out, neither of their vast intelligence systems could tell them. Even Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who presided over Taiwan’s Stalinist-style police state, went to his grave without knowing that a group of non-government novices managed to get Peng out undetected.

Milo Thornberry believed God called him to be a missionary to teach history and live the faith he professed. Taiwan wasn’t his choice, but it was where the Methodist Church sent him at the end of 1965. "Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan’s White Terror" is a 65,000-word account of how becoming friends with Peng led to a double life, one in which Milo taught church history at Presbyterian seminaries, and the other in which he and his wife secretly collaborated with Peng and two of his former students in a variety of human rights activities, all of which were illegal and some of which were considered capital crimes under martial law. The constant threat of discovery by Chiang’s secret police gave Milo his own taste of the White Terror. When police showed up at their door on March 3, 1971, Milo and his wife became the first missionaries arrested since the Nationalists took over the island in 1945. Although the Kuomintang leaked a panoply of charges to explain the arrest and deportation, Peng’s escape and the Thornberry’s other activities were not among them. Instead, officials in Taiwan reported them as terrorists. The line in Beijing was that they were CIA agents.

Although Thornberry did not suffer torture and imprisonment like Wei Ting-chao and Hsieh Tsung-min, nor Peng’s twenty-year exile from his homeland, Milo was blacklisted by the U.S. State Department and denied a passport for nineteen years. Not allowed to resume his vocation as a missionary outside the United States, he completed his doctorate at Boston University, trained missionaries, and served as a pastor in Alaska and Oregon. His role in Peng’s escape was not revealed until 2003 when Milo was invited back to the newly democratic Taiwan to be recognized for his human rights activities. Only in 2009 did he and Peng uncover the true reason for Milo’s arrest thirty-eight years earlier. As a personal story, Milo’s conflicts of conscience between ideals of justice, breaking the law, and being a guest in the country were not theoretical questions, but the daily cauldron in which he made his fateful decisions. As a political narrative, the author’s portrayal of life in the White Terror casts an eerie shadow on contemporary relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

REVIEW:

Fireproof Moth is an autobiographical account of a Methodist missionary’s stay in Taiwan in the late 1960s, but it reads like a thriller. Thornberry first describes his personal journey to becoming a minister in the mid 1950s and the pursuit of spirituality that led him into life as a missionary. In 1965, the Methodist Church decided to send Thornberry and his wife Judith to Taiwan, and the couple went through preparatory sessions at Drew University and Stony Point Missionary Orientation Center north of New York. During this time, he did read some critical works such as George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed and Mark Mancall’s Formosa Today, which had just been published at the time. Upon arrival in Taipei on New Year’s Eve 1966, they settled down, started language school, and gradually came to experience the suffocating hold which the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-shek had on society in Taiwan. They also got to know Prof. Peng Ming-min, who was under house arrest at the time for publishing a document titled “A Manifesto for Self-Salvation” in 1964. Gradually, they became more immersed in life in Taiwan, continued language training, and learned about the lack of political freedoms and human rights on the island. They also started to help channel support from overseas to families of political prisoners, with the help of Peng’s two courageous students, Hsieh Tsung-ming and Wei Ting-chao. They also started to produce mimeographed information sheets to inform visiting friends and colleagues overseas about the repressive political atmosphere in the island. Together with other foreign friends in Taiwan they approached American and European reporters, gave them background information on developments in Taiwan, which would then be published in the news media. Fox Butterfield and the New York Times and Selig Harrison of the Washington Post were among them. When in September 1968 Professor Peng Ming-min told them that he had received indications from the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice, one of the main secret police organizations at the time, that Peng might have an “accident”, a plan was devised to smuggle Peng out of Taiwan. After more than a year of preparation, the plan became a reality, and on 3 January 1970, Peng left Taiwan on a doctored Japanese passport, disguised as a Japanese musician. He safely made it to Sweden, where he received political asylum. Eventually, Peng made it to the United States, where he became a senior research scholar and visiting professor at the University of Michigan. Oddly, the Kuomintang authorities never discovered the role played by Thornberry and his wife in Peng’s escape. They surmised that he had been helped by the CIA. The matter even came up in the February 1972 discussions between Kissinger and Nixon with Chinese Premier Chou Enlai. Chou accused the Americans of aiding Professor Peng in his escape, but Nixon responded with “We had nothing to do with it.” However, Taiwan’s secret police agencies kept an ever-tightening watch over Milo and Judith, and on 2 March 1971 – more than a year after Peng’s escape – they were arrested and expelled from Taiwan. A witness who came to their home after they had been put under house arrest was Selig Harrison, who wrote a front-page article about it in the Washington Post (“Taiwan expels US missionary”, 4 March 1971). It wasn’t until December 2003, at a reunion of human rights and democracy activists organized by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, that Milo and Judith – as well as the Japanese counterparts who also played a crucial role—disclosed their involvement in Peng’s escape. The book reads like a spy thriller and fills a key void in the written history of Taiwan’s very recent transition to democracy. Highly recommended.—Gerrit van der Wees, George Mason University. Published in Taiwan Communique no. 132, May/June 2011.

Page Count: 196 
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Publish Date: February 10, 2011
Imprint: Sunbury Press
Genre: History