Everywhere I went in Formosa I asked the same question. I was searching for an accent of self-delusion or, even, of hypocrisy. I never found it among any of the Chinese with whom I spoke, though granted they were, almost all, members of the official family who, presumably, harbor official thoughts. But I questioned, also, professional soldiers, who would not easily be hypnotized by a septuagenarian’s dreamy irredentism. Their answer was: it can be done, and we will do it. And then I put the question as pointedly as I could directly to Chiang Kai-shek: “In America,” I said, “practically no one believes that you subjectively intend to re-enter the Main land. What evidence is there of an objective kind that in fact your government proposes to do just that, and that it can be done?”
He smiled. (He always smiles—at least at visitors, I gather. He smiled also at a British bloke seated next to me, who asked the most asinine questions. I recalled sympathetically the Duke’s complaint in Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” . . .) He smiled, and said a word or two to the interpreter, who turned to me, “The President wonders where you are going after you leave Taipei?” That, I smarted, is a royal rebuff if ever there was one.
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