Author Description

<p> Kang-i Sun Chang is Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. In her memoir, Journey Through the White Terror, she tells the powerful story of her father Paul Sun (1919-2007). Along with numerous others, Sun was imprisoned more than 60 years ago during the “White Terror”, the decade following the withdrawal of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government from Mainland China to Taiwan in mid-December 1949. During this time, the Nationalist government implemented a policy of “better to kill ten thousand by mistake than to set one free by oversight,” and as a result, many innocent civilians such as the author’s father became victims of ferocious searches and persecutions. At the time of her father’s arrest, Prof. Chang was not quite six years old; when her father returned home, she was almost sixteen. Having witnessed the injustice of her father’s imprisonment and the freedom their family later enjoyed in America, she felt compelled to write this story. Prof. Chang’s account of how the family survived the White Terror makes her book one of the most intense and thrilling works on the subject. But the book is also about soul-searching and the healing of a childhood trauma. It is a true story about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Love and religion in such circumstances prove to be the ultimate deliverance. All this is described in considerable detail in this extraordinary memoir.</p>