【北橋序】此文乃好友德州大哥近作，追溯其父的政治腳踪。所述雖家族滄桑，但也是中國現代史中的一個有意義的切片。

人間事一籮筐片段的組合，無法呈現真相，除非我們將片段有機地串接起來，成為歷史。所以歷史永遠是故事、永遠攜帶某種教訓。

故而歷史的書寫，不僅是被動記錄，更是主動完成。歷史的記述決定了一個共同生活群體的文明高度，從文明的積累中萃取典型、創造意義、推敲因果、想像方向，因為所謂典型、意義、因果、方向，不是實存之物，純粹是心智的昇華、意志的延伸。

作者本人，也經由歷史的書寫，告訴前一個世代說：我接上了這個環節。因此，我為吾友感到欣喜。

此文將分段發表。

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Myths as History or Myths of History?

《神話之歷史，歷史之神話》

作者：德州大哥

中文註腳：北橋客

Having learned about the most recent corruption case in Taiwan – reported repeatedly by all the place’s Henny-Penny medias seemingly expecting their politicians to be any different from the rest of the world’s - I couldn't help thinking of my father, a loyal KMT partisan who remained till the very end of his life faithfully clueless about how his beloved KMT Party had dumped him like a bad habit long ago. As the three-year anniversary of his death approaches I am suddenly seized and mesmerized by the idea of reconstructing the time-line of my father’s political life out of fragments that I  have never thought about picking up and piecing back together until now. Perhaps what drives me on is my own mortality anxiety, telling me that I need to write them all down now because I owe my father that much. Who knows? Maybe I owe myself that much as well.

[1] the most recent corruption case 指林益世貪瀆案（假設沒有更新的案子）
[2] Henny-Penny media 捕風捉影的媒體
[3] KMT partisan 國民黨員
[4] my own mortality anxiety 蘭亭集序曰：“修短隨化，終期於盡”； 如此達觀，幾人能夠？進入中年，生命之必朽愈來愈觸手可及，這個認知帶來焦慮不安。
[5] I need to write them down 作者被莫名的“使命感”所催逼而寫作。

The Step - No one knows the exact birth year of my father. We had always assumed it to be 1919 based on what was stated on his national ID card. But according to his last surviving sister who stated during her 105th birthday banquet held in 2006 that my father was born the same year she turned 15 and married out to a distant village three days' journey away by foot. Her testimony would have pushed my father's birth year back to 1916. Now, do I believe her? Certainly more than I do the official date recorded down from an era when 60% of the population national-wide were illiterate, and pushing probably as high as 90% near my father’s hometown. Despite that uncertainty, we do know my father was born the third son to a land-owning gentleman whose family had been there for at least 3 generations, all the way back to the days of Chinese Catholic Rebellion. The family had always enjoyed the prestige of being the only 'Du-Shu-Ren’, the ‘man who read’ or simply the intellectuals, of the entire county. This I derived from the photocopy of an essay written in classical Chinese by my grandfather in 1900, shown to me 100 years later in 2000.

[6] land-owning gentleman 地主士紳，屬於所謂的士大夫階級。士大夫階級扮演朝廷與農民的中介，為地方上的領袖與實際管理者。
[7] Chinese Catholic Rebellion 太平天國之亂
[8] Du-Shu-Ren 讀書人
[9] classical Chinese 文言文

The respect my father's land-owning family once commanded was demonstrated to me in person when I was 16-year old in the summer of my high school freshman year. One day, rather out of nowhere, my father asked me if I wanted to dine out with him and I said, 'sure', thinking we would be eating at one of the local Cantonese restaurants frequented by our family. But instead of the main street he took me through some back alleys leading to the levee banking the Shin-Dien creek from the south side, and finally to an apartment. We ascended to its second floor and knocked on one of the doors. A middle-age man, some 10 to 15 years younger than my father, answered the door and he bade us to come in earnestly. A few other people were already sitting around a large round dining table temporarily set up in the middle of the living room, and they all stood up to greet my father in reverence. After we had all sat down the mistress of the house began to serve the meal, starting with several cold-cut plates followed by an endless train of entrees. Whenever a course was brought in everyone would hold his chopsticks by my father's leave but other than that they all conversed with him at ease in a dialect totally alien to me. It was a Cantonese variation much different from the Hong-Kong (or Guangzhou) style of Cantonese that I grew up listening and having got used to. On our walk back home my father told me these were the village tenants who once farmed his family estates. Somehow this particular group had survived the 1949 civil war and migrated to Taiwan. Apparently to them my father still assumed the role of a clan leader, but by that time how symbolic a status that particular role might have degenerated into is really anyone’s guess.

[10] levee banking the Shin-Dien creek 新店溪堤岸
[11] cold-cut plates 冷盤
[12] village tenants 佃戶
[13] clan leader 族長

I am pretty sure that my father received his first education either directly from my grandfather, who was also a registered county scholar (known by its official title the 'Shiu-Tsai'), or from a private tutor specifically hired-in from somewhere else for that purpose. His solid knowledge of ancient Chinese scripts and highly elegant and formal calligraphy-style handwriting could only have come from that kind of training. He was then sent to the district town to attend a ‘modern’ school for another few years. My father told me to get to that town from his home village would require a full day's journey on top of a wheelbarrow pushed by a family servant along a winding and muddy road. This story was later confirmed by one of my kinsmen who had traveled back to the home village a few times since 1990. He told me, during my father burial service in 2009, that even as recently as 2007 it would still take him a few hours ride on the back of someone's motorcycle to get to that fishing village of my father's, along the same path perpetually muddy.

[14] Shiu-Tsai 秀才
[15] private tutor 塾師
[16] modern school 新式學堂

A highly exaggerated story about how one evil steward had seized all the family assets and driven the entire family into despair upon the unexpected early-death of my grandfather was fed to us the children to spice up the story a bit. I believed the tale far-fetched as the family's eldest son, an elder brother senior to my father by 10 to 15 years, was already a well-established man of fashion living in Guangzhou and Shanghai, rubbing shoulders with the Chinese movie stars and the local warlords of the 1930s. No provincial housekeeper would be that stupid to mess with someone like my eldest uncle. The boogieman steward, if he ever truly existed, was probably no more than a long-term contract labor or some apprentice accountant running away with a handful of silver nuggets back to his even more remote and poverty-stricken village never registered on any human map.

[17] steward 管家
[18] silver nuggets 銀子

The Walk - The death of my grandfather did lead to my father’s moving up to Guangzhou and spending his adolescence years living with his eldest brother, a French-speaking gentleman of fashion. My father must have lived there for a significant duration, judged from the love toward French cuisines he had shown all his life; the type of detail understanding and appreciations of Indochina-Parisian cooking he had demonstrated could only have been accumulated over a long period of time. It would be during this same period that my father began to develop his characters and build his human capitals for his future political career - however short-lived it might turn out to be. Though missing the prime time of the Crescent Club by a few years, he could still have been under a lot of its influences in his journalist writing, which saw certain publishing success. He also befriended quite a few young men and women of letters of his own age but more established than him. One of them, a Mr. Q, would one day become the chairman of Chinese Writers' Association. But that honor came only after he had survived the Cultural Revolution in the 60s, where legend had it that Mr. Q had to pan-fry and serve 200-kg of fish to the proletarian farmers every day at the collective farm where he received his re-education for a couple of years.

[19] human capitals 人脈
[20] Crescent Club 新月社；民初文學社團，成員有胡適、徐志摩、聞一多、梁實秋等

Exactly how and when did my father joint up with the KMT and why not the Communist Party, which was by then far more appealing to most of the young Chinese intellectuals, remain a mystery to me. He told me many years later, when I was in my twenties, that he had once thought seriously about joining the Communist Party and had actually gone the distance of making the travel plan all the way to Yen-An, then the last communists stronghold blockaded in and under the watchful eyes of the KMT army. But an acquaintance of his returning from there advised him to call his plan off because, quoted here through my father’s mouth, 'the place is too damn cold and has nothing tasty to eat.' All his life my father had an incurable Bourgeois trait in him, which passed down to me through both genetic and environment influences. The incident he told me should be true in spirit, though I doubt the friend coming back from Yan-An was real.

[21] Yen-An 延安