Formosan Moon

By Mike Rowley

From the beautiful island of Formosa comes a romantic tale of a young Japanese officer and a local Hakka woman. There is tragedy and hope as the story moves from Taiwan to Japan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Rowley
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540151513

Book preview

Part 1 - Formosa

Table of Contents

Formosan Moon

Part 1 - Formosa

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part 2 - Japan

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Stay Tuned for Book 2 Titled Nippon Moon

Prologue

It was March 15, 2005. Lilly Clark was sound asleep in a plush business class seat on an EVA 747 from LA to Taiwan. She vaguely remembered the petite Taiwanese flight attendant adjusting her lounge seat into a more upright position a few minutes earlier before she fell back asleep. She was dreaming about a guy she had met in college, a relationship that had possibilities but went nowhere. The sudden jolt from their landing and the deceleration from the 747’s brakes woke her from her dream. She looked out the window at the terminals and cargo hangers.

Lilly was still half asleep and having trouble focusing when the attendant’s announcement came over the intercom.

Welcome to Taipei ladies and gentlemen, the time is now 5:30 PM. You may now use your cell phones and electronic devices. Please remain seated while the plane taxies to the gate and comes to a complete stop. She made the announcement again in Mandarin Chinese.

Lilly knew the plane had not landed in Taipei. The Chiang Kai-shek, CKS airport was in Taoyuan, more than an hour south of the capitol city but since Lilly would be headed further south to Miaoli City, located in the middle of the island it made little difference to her. She knew there WAS an airport in downtown Taipei named Sung Shan but it was built when planes still had propellers and could only accommodate a few dozen planes a day whereas the CKS airport could handle nearly a thousand passenger and cargo planes each day.

As the plane taxied down the runway Lilly could see no one had listened to the attendant’s announcement to remain seated. People were already in the aisle reaching up into the overhead bins to retrieve their luggage. The plane made a sharp turn into a taxiway and some items fell out of a bin onto a middle-aged Taiwanese man who was still seated as requested. He yelled at the lady in Chinese. Lilly thought he called her ben dan, or idiot, which was a fairly harsh term. It looked like the rude passenger’s husband took offense to his wife being called stupid and was going to start a fight but the attendant quickly hustled to his seat and something was exchanged between the two of them which seemed to calm him down.

One burley, determined middle aged Chinese man had the nerve to rush from the back of the Economy class section through the business class section toward the exit door. He was intercepted along the way by one of the male pursers and told in perfect Chinese to go back to his seat or else he would be the last one allowed off the plane. The purser looked like he had been a Taiwan Army ranger and not one to argue with so the Chinese man reluctantly went back to his seat at the rear of the plane, all the while saying it was unfair.

Lilly opened her small purse and looked at herself in the compact mirror. She was 29, had beautiful reddish brown hair that was in a bit of a tangle right then. She had a flawless complexion even without makeup, a model’s body... and those eyes. People had always reminded her that her dark brown eyes looked more like they belonged on a Samurai warrior. More than one potential boyfriend had given up on their relationship, totally intimidated by her looks. It was too bad they could not see the kindness and love behind her eyes where there was a little girl desperate for someone to hold and love her back.

Lilly thought of the events of the past year with sadness. Her mother Sonya Clark’s diagnosis of a rare type of leukemia at age 58 and her death within two months was like a giant weight on her heart.  She recalled the last trip they had made to Taiwan two years earlier, meeting her mother’s adoptive parents for the first time and beginning the search for her mother’s birth parents. 

They had found some letters in an old tin a distant uncle had written to her mother when she was a little girl. They also found a hong bao or red envelope that had contained money given to her mom for Chinese New Year. Unfortunately the only signature on either was bei bei or uncle. Her adoptive parents were keeping them for her mother until the time she decided to investigate her Taiwanese heritage.  It was sad that there had not been enough time during that last trip for her mother to locate the uncle and get some answers. They had planned to spend more time the next year but then came the diagnosis and the overwhelming doubt, denial, anger and finally acceptance of the inevitable. As she lay in her hospital room at Duke her mother made Lilly promise she would find the answers to her birth parents.

The 747 came to a stop at the gate and the business class passengers were the first to deplane. Lilly walked the half mile to immigration and was happy to see very few people in line. She knew most arrivals from the US mainland and Tokyo’s Narita arrived after 9 PM and the lines in immigration would swell with hundreds of people waiting to get through.

There were only 4 people in front of her in the immigration line and three of them appeared to be a family which would be processed together. She watched them approach the immigration officer from behind the yellow line and hand him their blue American passports. They spoke a little Chinese to the officer then he stamped the three passports and motioned them through. Lilly handed her passport and arrival document to the officer. He looked them over, stamped the passport with an entry stamp, stapled the arrivals form to a back page and motioned her through. Lilly wondered why the Taiwanese immigration officials were so much less intimidating and more accommodating than their counterparts in the USA.

Lilly went down the escalator to the baggage carrousel indicated for her flight and waited for the belt to start. Once it did her bags came out quickly so retrieved her luggage and walked through the large doors out to where people were waiting for friends and relatives in the arrivals area. She walked to the ticket counter to buy a one way shuttle ticket to the Taoyuan rail station just as she and her mom had done two years ago. She located the shuttle stop outside the terminal just as the shuttle bus was arriving. The driver got out, opened the luggage compartment and placed Lilly’s bag inside. He took her ticket stub and she got on the shuttle bus.

The trip to the downtown Taiwan Railway station took less than 10 minutes. Lilly departed the shuttle, retrieved her luggage from the driver and entered the old terminal. She bought a one way ticket with a reserved seat to Miaoli from the ticket counter and walked down to the platform for the southbound train. There were numbers painted on the platform for each railroad car and she located the one for her ticket class and waited. On the northbound track behind her she heard a whoosh and saw a blur pass by. It must be an express train she thought, possibly from Taichung to Taipei.

There were 20 or so other passengers waiting for the southbound train but most of them were waiting at the rear of the platform for the cheaper, open seated tickets. She had only been waiting a few minutes when she heard something that sounded like a giant motor winding down. She saw a bullet-shaped orange and white train enter the terminal and come to a stop at the platform. The doors opened and a few people got off before the attendant motioned those in line to board the train.

Lilly boarded the train, located her assigned seat and placed her luggage on the overhead luggage rail. She retrieved her iPhone from her purse, placed the ear buds in her ears and selected Pink Floyd’s Is there Anybody Out There from The Wall album. She hummed along to the tune and settled back in her seat for the 45 minute trip. The train ride was so smooth it felt like she was gliding on air except for the occasional click, clack of the wheels when they crossed a road or track junctions.

She gazed out the train windows as small towns flew by, marveling at the hundreds of little gardens neatly planted by the side of the tracks with small concrete houses situate towards the front of the lots. At each intersection she noticed dozens of scooters waiting at the crossbar but few cars. She saw huge wind turbines being built in one section near the China Sea and others already completed that were churning away making electricity.

Lilly noticed the train was decelerating slightly as it approached an area that was more developed than the small villages they had passed and knew they were close to Miaoli. The old train station and concrete platform came into view and Lilly could see dozens of families waiting to board. The automated onboard announcement broadcast on the train’s speakers and shown on the LED in both Chinese and English indicated they were approaching Miaoli station.

Lilly thought Miaoli was one of the most beautiful and diverse areas she had ever visited. She enjoyed going on picnics and hiking to the waterfalls at Nanzhuang especially during the late spring when the fragrant Tung trees were blossoming and walking through the tunnels at Miaolishan or Miaoli mountain.  On her last visit she, her mother and her grandparents had visited the strawberry museum and picked a basket full of the sweetest berries she had ever eaten.  They had sampled the strawberry wine produced in the region but it was too sweet for Lilly’s taste.

The majority of the population of 90,000 inhabitants in Miaoli was comprised of Hakka people whose ancestral homes were in the Yellow River area of China. Lilly’s great grandparents had migrated in the late 19th century from Hunan in mainland China. The Hakka people spoke a language with many different dialects which was entirely different from modern Mandarin spoken by most Chinese.

Lilly’s mother was Taiwanese so she was one half Asian and one half western European from her father. Her mother had raised her to be an independent woman, to make her own, sound judgments and for the most part in her life she had made good ones. She never fell in with the bad crowd in high school, never had done drugs and had never even drunk beer until she was over 21.

Lilly knew her mother had a much stricter upbringing being raised by Hakka parents who imposed their rules rather than allowing her to make her own. Perhaps that was one reason her mother had chosen to go to the USA for graduate school at Duke where she met Lilly’s father, had gotten married and raised her family far from the interference and control from her Hakka parents.

With a master’s degree in engineering from Duke and acceptance to Duke medical school Lilly had also done OK, in fact she had done quite well for herself.  It had probably helped that both her mother and father were at the top of their class in the prestigious Duke Engineering graduate program.

Chapter 1

It was late spring of 1943 and Lieutenant Sato Tageuchi, 24, of the Imperial Japanese Army was riding in the rear of a second class car aboard an express train from Taichung to Taihouku, the Capitol city of Japanese Formosa. He was idly chatting with a middle-aged businessman sitting next to him and daydreaming about his luck at being able to work in Formosa for the past year. His engineering degree had earned him a post working on the electrical grid in the middle of Formosa, far away from Midway, Saipan and the Philippines where the