by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo credit: Book Cover
HEAVEN DOES NOT BLOCK ALL ROADS is an elucidating and well-written biography of Huang Chin-tao, a member of the resistance army Troop 27 and later dangwai activist. As such, Huang came to be known as Taiwan’s so-called “Eternal Warrior” before his passing in 2019.
Written by freelance journalist Anna Beth Keim, Heaven Does Not Block All Roads manages to tell the many twists and turns of Taiwan’s past century through Huang’s life. Huang, after all, like many Taiwanese of his generation, lived through the Japanese colonial period, the KMT’s eventual retreat to Taiwan, and the White Terror that followed–then the course of Taiwan’s democratization.
Keim’s accomplishment, then, is to tell the story of this span of history through Huang’s life, without coming off as overly didactic. The book is not a hagiography, because it is able to be critical of its subject. Instead, the book is simply the story of a life, one that was wrapped up with many of the telling episodes of Taiwan’s past one hundred years.
Keim does a good job of balancing the different time periods of Huang’s life. The focus is not entirely on Huang’s youth as a resistance fighter against the KMT, for example. The emphasis is not only on Huang’s close to two decades behind bars on Green Island, either.
Indeed, the pacing of the book is brisk, without becoming bogged down in the details of any specific period in Huang’s long and storied life. The book also manages an admirable job of delving into Huang’s perspective, in this sense, while tying it back to the larger history.
Keim’s depiction of Huang’s youthful time–as a Japanese colonial soldier, then as part of Troop 27, and his stint hiding from the KMT in the KMT–is arguably the strongest element of Heaven Does Not Block All Roads. Namely, Keim is attentive to how this episode in Huang’s life made him a symbol of resistance, and how this later was why Huang came to play a powerfully symbolic role in the dangwai movement.
The complexities of Taiwanese history are many, and so it may still be somewhat hard to follow the book’s narrative without some prior knowledge of Taiwanese history. But Heaven Does Not Block All Roads is a useful and necessary look at the life of one of modern Taiwan’s most storied historical figures.