Mr. Wu

Appears in
top 1000Seductions of Rice
Seductions of Rice

By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Published 1998

  • About

I first met Mr. Wu in the Botanical Gardens in Taipei, Taiwan. I was sitting on a bench when he asked if he could bother me for some help with a few words in English that were giving him trouble. Sure, I said. He sat down, opened a book on ornithology, and asked me more than half a dozen words. I had no clue in the world what any of them meant.

But we ended up chatting. He was a mainlander, having arrived in Taiwan in 1951, as a teenage soldier with the retreating army of Chiang Kai-shek. In the late 1940s the Nationalist Army had come through his village looking for “volunteers” and away he was taken, fifteen years old. It was the last time he ever saw his family and friends.