In 2010, Kim Liao traveled to Taiwan to learn the truth about her family. Her grandfather Thomas Liao was the leader of the Provisional Republic of Taiwan in exile after World War II, but she knew virtually nothing about his life and what had happened to him. What Kim did know was that Thomas’s wife Anna, her grandmother, moved to America with her four children to start a new life and leave Thomas Liao’s past behind.

During the year she was in Taiwan, Kim discovered that Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) government had erased much of the history of the independence movement from official and public memory. Luckily, she was able to track down former freedom fighters and other family members who had preserved this history in their memories and personal archives. Not only had Kim’s own family been silenced throughout the White Terror period, but so had the millions of lives and voices of those Taiwanese citizens who endured decades of martial law. 

By unearthing the stories of her grandfather Thomas and his brother Joshua, her grandmother Anna, as well as her Uncle Suho, who was at one point sentenced to death, and many others who were sent to prison, Kim brings to light an extraordinary story of grit and perseverance. Anne Hellman met Kim through their mutual writing group and recently interviewed her about the book. 

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Anne Hellman: I’ve had the privilege of reading earlier drafts of this memoir and am in awe of how you achieve such a high level of complexity as well as fluidity in its structure. What is key is the way you begin. In the opening pages you talk about the “silence” surrounding your grandmother Anna’s life and how this led you to find more and go to Taiwan on a Fulbright scholarship in 2010. You say, “Tell a child nothing and she will become obsessed with knowledge.” Do you feel far away from that self now, in 2024? How does it feel to “know” what happened to your grandfather Thomas and his movement?

Kim Liao: I do feel quite far from that self! I began this book in 2008, which is kind of horrifying in some ways, because if the book were a child of mine, he or she would now be old enough to drive. But this was definitely a coming-of-age process for me, and the book’s impetus was driven by my being in my 20s and not knowing anything about my father’s family’s origins.

Perhaps the joy and promise of youth is that this writing project was important enough for me to drop everything and go to Taiwan for a year and have an adventure to find the truth. I didn’t have a family or a partner or a great job keeping me chained to daily life — I was free to follow these questions as far as they led, and the rabbit hole just got deeper and deeper as I dug more and more. 

Ultimately, knowledge is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was so satisfying to meet long-lost family members, to interview freedom fighters who knew my grandfather Thomas and Uncle Suho, and to learn the truth. I’ve always been someone who asks a lot of questions, who is hungry for knowledge, and who wants to understand the truth about something fully. But with knowledge comes the sadness or the emotional heft of loss and difficulties. When I was 24, I wished that Grandma Anna had shared more of her memories with us before she died. But now, I appreciate that trauma is devastating, and she kept that silence because it was the only way she could survive.

AH: Not only do you integrate creative nonfiction, imagining scenes of family life in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and New York City, but you also weave in detailed historical information that helps readers understand exactly what happened in this period in Taiwan’s history. It’s quite a feat. Outside of the year you spent in Taiwan, how did you go about your research from a distance here in the United States?

KL: Oh gosh — the research was such a long and meandering process. Before I left, I read history books about Taiwan in English that gave a good window on the Japanese colonial period from 1895-1945 but very little insight on 1945-1987 (the White Terror martial law period). I also interviewed my family members, and the recollections of my Aunt Jeanne created a great framework for the story of the Liaos coming to America that helped me frame my research in Taiwan. 

Once I returned to the United States, there was a lot of trying to make sense of what I had found, reading translations and interview transcriptions, and trying to fill in the blanks. There’s a collection of George Kerr’s papers at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, which offered great global foreign policy information. I should also say that during my year in Asia, I took an extremely fruitful research trip to Hong Kong, whose libraries contained a number of writings by Thomas and Joshua Liao, articles from the 1940s and ’50s, and other books that had not made it to the United States or Taiwan (probably because of decades of KMT government censorship). Hong Kong libraries for the win!

AH: There is a fascinating uncovering in the book of the United States’ policy against communists in China and its support for Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT. You strike a tone here in the retelling of this history that is both personal and factual, and it totally works. How did you go about crafting the tone for this book?

KL: This is an interesting question, because it highlights a real pivot point for me when I was revising the book. I had originally taken a more expository approach of laying out the history — here’s everything that happened, chronologically, so that it can make sense for the reader and trace the trajectory of Thomas’s independence movement. But then, as I was revising, I made a conscious decision to turn away from this historical recounting and frame the events more as a narrative thriller.

Once I knew that I wanted to highlight the drama, this tone emerged as a way to highlight dramatic irony: the reader learns long before Thomas and Joshua do that the U.S. government is not going to support their would-be revolution. I was thinking about tragedy here, and in Romeo and Juliet or the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, the audience knows before the characters do that something has gone terribly wrong, and an important part of the catharsis is seeing it all play out. 

This more dramatic tone took the form of a roving close third–person narration: zooming in closely on Thomas’s perspective, Anna’s perspective, and even giving points of view to American diplomats. Ultimately, human drama is tracing the path of how people try to get what they want, and what they do when they encounter obstacles. It was definitely a delicate tonal balance to strike.

AH: You begin and end your year of research in the month of August, which is interesting because, in the Taiwanese tradition, August is the “Hungry Ghost Month” when one’s ancestors return to visit their living relatives. Likewise, you begin and end the book with your taking part in a ritual — the fortune ritual at Longshan Temple in Taipei in the beginning and the Hungry Ghost Festival at the end. Do you think these bookends represent a shift you went through in writing the book?

KL: That’s a great observation, and it was not initially intentional at all! During the revision process, I struggled with whether or not to include the temple scene. But it was important for me to emphasize this connection to the uncanny — the spiritual side of things, the idea of hungry ghosts, and the idea that I was accessing the legacy of my Grandpa Thomas and the victims of the White Terror period. I was not a spiritual person before I arrived in Taiwan, but I had always relied heavily on my intuition to help me make decisions and find the best way forward. There was something about all of these events falling into place and the immense generosity of the folks who helped me in my quest that made me believe in fate and trust in forces beyond rationality. Did my time in Taiwan make me believe in ghosts? Maybe. Yes.

AH: In many ways, by publishing this memoir and getting your grandfather’s story out into the world, you are finishing his quest and shining a light on Taiwan’s struggle for autonomy and the people who fought and died for that cause. What do you think this book says about Taiwan’s current state of democracy and its non-independence from China?

KL: I think at its heart, this book is about Taiwanese people who fought for freedom, and it tells their story on their terms, not on China’s terms. Taiwan as a place, nation, and people has been forever defined by others. I consider it a fairly revolutionary literary act to say that Taiwan is its own place with its own history, and actually, that history is entirely separate from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I hope after people read my book, they can start to think of Taiwan as its own nation, not as a renegade province of the PRC.

But then, in terms of global politics, it’s a nightmare. No one wants war or invasion from China (even China doesn’t want that). I think that the longer the status quo continues, the more Taiwan’s individual identity as a place evolves organically. This generation of young people is more likely than ever before to identify as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and I think that’s tremendous.

I think at its heart, this book is about Taiwanese people who fought for freedom, and it tells their story on their terms, not on China’s terms. Taiwan as a place, nation, and people has been forever defined by others.

AH: That is definitely a good thing. Your grandfather certainly had a vision! You admit how little you know about what your grandfather was like as a person. It must have been quite an experience for you to imagine yourself in his shoes. How did you do it?

KL: First, I tried to surround myself with as many of Thomas’s writings, articles, photographs, and other artifacts. Then, I interviewed as many people close to Thomas as possible. I read Thomas’s letters to George Kerr and to my father Richard, and this personal correspondence gave me a better sense of his voice and personality.

From there, I made the imaginative leap into his perspective, trying to imagine why and how he did what he did. But there are so many gaps — even as I turned Thomas into a character and shared his story, I had to acknowledge that there are still aspects of Thomas Liao that are a mystery to me. Sometimes, the truth lies in that negative space — in the shadowy abyss of what we cannot fully know or grasp.

AH: When you follow Grandma Anna and her young children to New York City and trace how they established their new life in the United States, it shows to the reader such a breadth of generations shifting location and lives across the globe. How do you think you have been changed by the history of Taiwan and by your search for your family?

KL: This search has changed me in so many ways. First, just the experience of going to Taiwan, muddling about in terrible Mandarin, and having so many people help me in such magnificent, generous ways. I would also say that the search gave me courage in my life. I had been so afraid to ask these questions, afraid of getting it wrong, of hurting my family members, afraid of the truth. Afraid to be my true self. When I got back to the United States after my 13 months in Taiwan, I was utterly fearless. I was fine with tackling very daunting challenges because at least they were in English!

Working on this book over the years changed me by making me into a writer, forcing me to grow up, to deal with my insecurities and self-indulgent early drafts and overuse of commas (my copy editor cut something like 75 percent of my commas, and I put 15 percent of them back!). But in all seriousness, I learned to take a book apart and put it back together. I learned to take breaks. I learned when to ask for feedback, and when to try to solve my own problems. I had to confront the possibility that the book might never get published and consider what that would mean. I had to grow up. And the book grew up too. I hope the next book has a shorter germination period!

AH: I certainly hope that for you too, Kim! But in terms of this book, you can most definitely be proud of the “child” you have raised. 

KL: Aww, thank you! It has been an era in my life, researching and writing this book. This is the culmination of that era, for sure.