WEBVTT

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This place is

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the former site of “Tung Hai Garden.”

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Currently, this is

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the cemetery of my family.

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My family is not very traditional.

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We didn’t really think about

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things like epitaph before.

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Because usually epitaphs

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were about praising or tributing.

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But later, my father

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decided to take my grandfather’s Declaration of Peace

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as the epitaph of our family tomb.

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His reason was that

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the Declaration of Peace

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not only decided the fate of

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Yang Kui’s incarceration of 12 years in Green Island;

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also,

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it had determined what the lives would be like

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of his offsprings.

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To engrave the Declaration of Peace

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on the family tomb,

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symbolized a mark of our lives

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in our family.

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My grandfather

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in 1961

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finished his prison time in Green Island and returned.

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I was born in 1962.

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I felt like the birth of me

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probably mean quite a lot to him.

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Because of the Tung Hai Garden

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that he built,

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he named me with the word

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“Cui” (green),

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saying that Tung Hai Garden was going to be full of greenness.

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Actually, my grandfather

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had always been in a straitened circumstance.

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Sometimes,

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when the business was not very good,

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and we didn’t have enough money for rice

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or food,

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he’d make me bring a basket of flowers

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and sell them around Tung Hai University.

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My sense of identity of victim’s family came quite late.

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Because I actually

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grew up alongside my grandfather.

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And Yang Kui himself

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was very optimistic.

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I have a deep impression that he said

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he wrote a Declaration of Peace with about 600 words

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and the KMT government locked him down for 12 years for it

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which was the world’s most expensive royalty.

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So, he should be

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written into the Guinness World Records.

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And then he would laugh about it.

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Until I got older,

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and I started to reassess

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my own parents with different point of view

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that I realized

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they had been living their lives

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with traumas.

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My father rarely smiled.

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He’d barely had a real smile in his whole life.

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And my mother, in 1999,

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she’d been suffered from PTSD of the political violence,

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so, she had some mental disorder since then.

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Until then, I understood about traumas

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and how long these things could incubate.

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This is

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the name lists

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of victims of White Terror.

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Some of the elders in here

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I can still remember them clearly.

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This one, Mao Fu Zhen.

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Mr. Mao was an elder Mainlander

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that I had contact with

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when I was in

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the Transitional Justice Commission, and also before that.

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Right.

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I thought he was really adorable.

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But his life was…

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Many parts of him were taken away,

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but he strived hard to survive.

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Every single one of them was subject-of-a-life.

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Each and every one

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had their own life story.

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Actually, I have been

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working on some oral interviews

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about White Terror continuously.

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And some on 228 as well, of course.

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Transitional Justice Commission came to me then…

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I felt like

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the works on transitional justice was really important

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while they were started too late.

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I had only one thought then

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that I needed to really

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work with all I could to push it.

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And try the best

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to resolve and carry the contradictions

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both inside and outside,

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so that the work of transitional justice could be done

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and would not collapse.

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Otherwise, I’d feel like I was a historical sinner.

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Transitional justice

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is a consensus internationally already.

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After the end of the ruling of

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an authoritarian regime,

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in the democratic process,

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we need to review what had happened

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in the past during the authoritarian period of time.

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Only after we clarified the wrong deeds

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and acknowledged the past,

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that we could move toward

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a real democracy

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clean and innocently.

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We’d once received a petition.

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From Bukun, Wu Jin Shan.

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When he was very little, about 2 years old,

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or maybe not even 2,

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his father was taken away.

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They’d never even knew if he was dead or alive,

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but Bukun was given a bad name

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“son of a spy” for that.

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He’d carried this stigma ever since.

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After we did lots of research into the documents,

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we found out that his father

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died of disease in prison.

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Our members found at Liuzhangli

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the tombstone of Wu Bao Zhong

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which was really really tiny.

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Right at the first sight,

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Bukun fell on his knees

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and held his father’s tombstone and said

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“dad, I’m here to bring you home.”

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Wailing.

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That scene had imprinted in my heart

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even till now.

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I believe there are many others like Bukun

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who’re eager to bring their fathers back home.

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They need this country

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on this path of transitional justice

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to give them a confirmation

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saying that their fathers are innocent.

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So that they could really

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bring back the soul of the fathers innocently.

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Transitional justice is not about

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short-swing profit,

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nor about revenue.

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We can’t measure it

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in a sense of

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quantification.

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The importance of transitional justice is that

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it’s a project about people.

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It’s about letting people to understand each other.

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It’s about the traumas in the past,

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including the victims

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and their families.

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To bring these traumas

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some understanding and comfort.

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Even it’s small,

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one’s trauma in the heart,

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big or small,

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we need to pay attention to that.

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So, it’s a very long journey,

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and we’ve made our first step

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which is very crucial.