Imagine sitting with a colleague and her 85-year-old mother and brother in their family’s favorite seafood restaurant. A couple of blocks down the street is the vocational high school where her late father taught English and Japanese for over 40 years. Imagine feeling wrapped up in the neighborhood where she grew up and will always love. That’s the sacred experience the Rev. Dr. Fennie Hsin-Fen Chang arranged in her home town of Keelung on Monday for her fellow Taiwan pilgrims, the Rev. Katherine Feng, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Ni, and me.
Licheng Huang, Fennie’s mom, is the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor and church planter. She told us she taught Sunday school in the churches her father served. She still plays the piano every three months in the church that formed Fennie, the ninth founded in Taiwan by the legendary Presbyterian missionary, George Leslie Mackay.
Fennie showed us a commemorative plaque with a scene of an angry monk confronting the famously bearded Mackay as he got services underway in Keelung in 1875. In keeping with Taiwan’s spirit of religious tolerance, the monk served George tea the very next day.
To serve as co-leader of our whirlwind tour, Fennie put the squeeze on her brother, Hsin-Shi “Stephen” Chang, who took the day off as director of New Taipei’s social welfare department. They showed us the city’s largest folk religion temple and the breathtaking geological park on Heping Island, where the centuries’ waves have worn shapes that fun-loving park curators invite visitors to behold as their favorite animals. Fennie remembers visiting as a girl, before the whole section of Pacific-facing coast was closed for preservation’s sake.
On the way back to Taiwan we saw the ruins of a gold and coal mine, closed since the eighties, whose ferrite deposits have permanently discolored the water hundreds of feet out to sea, creating what’s now called the Ying Yang Sea. Stephen’s New Taiwan City colleagues turned the miners’ mountainside village into a delightful warren for shopping and feasting called Jiufen Old Street, reminiscent of Jersualem’s Old City and ancient shopping districts everywhere.
As the far edge of a typhoon brought gusts of afternoon rain, Fr. Thomas bought us coffee for the ride back to town. But I kept thinking of Fennie’s mom, walking back to their apartment with her caregiver, Ani, after a family lunch to remember.
