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a-dancing-bear · 8 years ago

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He killed the one he loved the most

[Note: original article in Chinese here]

2016-10-31 20:49:13

Author: Zhang Juanfen

Ardent supporter of Taiwan's “Society for the Abolishment of the Death Penalty”, active for many years in social movements, closely follows gender and capital punishment issues.

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Gaoxiong Detention Facility was located in Gaoxiong county, Yanchao village. Like so many other small towns, the most lively place in Yanchao was one particular street, but of course the detention facility wasn't located there. Rather, it was on the outskirts, in a place where it wouldn't be an eyesore. I walked 15 minutes from the friend's house where I was staying to the Gaoxiong station and rode the northbound train for two stops up to Nanzi, then took a taxi to the detention facility. The trip took an hour.

The detention facility's visitor center was somewhat deserted, because morning visitor registration was only until 11am; all that was left was the last batch of waiting relatives. The counter on the left was the in-person meeting registration area, and the right was the gift inspection area. Both had already closed up for lunch. Only the counter at the center remained open; it was where relatives could purchase various items. This purchasing area was occupied by a white cabinet showing various food items and daily necessities; when you added the blue metal chair in front of the cabinet, the space looked like the psychiatric department of a hospital.

The purchasing area's prices were fairly reasonable: a large bottle of soda for 45 NTD (New Taiwan Dollars), instant noodles for 50 NTD, fruit for 70 NTD. There were also a few more fashionable items, such as green tea and some more expensive fruits. The most luxurious item was an eight-inch birthday cake for 400 NTD.

I thought, “I wonder when Deng Wugong's birthday is.”

I then promptly abandoned the idea. That wasn't necessary.

While copying down the prices at the purchasing counter, I suddenly caught sight of a cookie tin filled with many identical slips of paper. I figured they were receipts or applications of some sort, so without a word I stole a bunch of them and, acting as if I had done nothing out of the ordinary, retreated to a corner to examine them more closely. They were receipts for money brought by relatives. When meeting with the inmates it was not permitted to exchange any items or cash, so any money one wanted to give to an inmate would have to be recorded on these slips and surrendered at the counter. One receipt for 2000 NTD, two for 1000, and then one for 500. The receipts were printed on brown paper, thick and coarse. I sighed; how could this wife come to all the way to this desolate place to visit her husband and only give him 500 NTD?

At 12:10, the tenth batch of visits to the male ward began. All the relatives swarmed a small doorway; in less than a minute they poured out once again and mobbed the purchasing counter. Shut away in prison, so close to the outside world and yet so far away, the inmates were counting on their relatives to satisfy their needs.

According to the display case on the right, the inmates ate tilapia and pickled vegetable soup for lunch that day. The previous night, they ate diced curry chicken and fried banana fish with soup made from Job's tears and mung beans. The total number of visitors in a single morning was about 220 people. Based on what I saw, about 80 percent were female; their social status was apparent from their taste in clothes. None of them were dressed in a particularly ostentatious way, but many had a preference for sequins. Judging from the ashtray outside the building, these relatives smoked like chimneys and were habitual betel nut users.

The gift inspection area had a scale, basically identical to the ones in supermarkets, very Taiwanese in style. The weight limit for items was two kilograms, and a sign stuck to the counter warned, “Please do not conceal illegal items inside gifts. Inmates will be penalized upon discovery.” Most people brought food they made themselves, like soups and broths, so the gift inspection area also sold plastic bags for 2 NTD each. A woman with a harelip brought a package of food that happened to be a bit over the weight limit. In frustration, she walked outside and dumped some of the soup into a flower bed, remarking stubbornly, “How about I give these some flavor.”

Afternoon visits started at 2pm; as the time grew near, almost a hundred people came onto the scene, filling the air with restlessness. Workers shouted out numbers in hoarse voices; meanwhile, those in front of the counter whose numbers had not yet been called refused to budge. Everyone was crowded together anyway, they must have figured. I vaguely recalled that Taipei used to be like this in the old days, before it became civilized and emotionless. Those who had waited for a long time ceaselessly shuffled their registration forms, using the rustling sound to heckle the workers at the counter: hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.

I lined up with everyone else to wait for a “normal visit”, but my form and ID were automatically transferred to the neighboring counter for “television visits”. When I went to the gift inspection area so they could approve a book I brought, the worker wanted me to write the inmate's name and number on it, so I quickly wrote this information on the title page. The worker growled, “Where did you write it?”

“The first page.”

“Write it on the outside.”

In that moment I understood that I had entered a world with no sense of aesthetics. I picked up the thick marker on the counter and crudely wrote on the cover of the book. It was like the book itself was barking out: 405, Deng Wugong!

Now it was my turn to walk through that small door, which as it turned out led me to a room in the basement of the place. After passing through a corridor that had never seen the light of day, I arrived at another, iron-barred door and once again turned in my registration form and ID. This was a long, narrow room with two rows of people lined up back to back. On one side was the “normal visit” section, which had about 12 windows; the other side was the “television visit” section with roughly five seats. There were not many people waiting for a “television visit”. It seemed that for the most part friends had been moved to that section, though the person next to me was here because the inmate they were visiting was ill.

There was a roll-up metal shade over each window. As each prisoner arrived, the shade was pulled up, but there remained three metal bars in the center of the window, as well as a type of forest-green window screen I hadn't seen since I was a child. The “television visit”, on the other hand, consisted of facing a 15-inch computer monitor. A video camera was positioned about three feet overhead, and you spoke into a phone receiver, just as if you were video chatting with a friend online. The only problem was that because the camera was so high up, every person looked like a big-headed dog. But at any rate, if you got a “normal visit”, every person's face was tinted green and had three black lines on it, so relatively speaking, looking like a big-headed dog wasn't half bad.

A bright dot blinked on the center of the monitor and Deng Wugong appeared. After the usual pleasantries, I asked him why he didn't want any help. He said it wasn't that he didn't want help; it was just that he wasn't good at expressing himself, so he hoped I could go see the director of their ward and have him set up a special visit so he could talk with me face to face and explain his situation.

I felt a little awkward; it seemed that asking the director to set up this visit was his only desire and an overly optimistic one at that. But he continued, “This is a democratic age; our director is good to us, and he really cares about us. Last time he visited, he asked how things were for us here, and I told him we were all doing well.” Then he repeated his plea for me to go meet with the director.

His green-tinted face filled the screen before me; there were three wrinkles on his forehead. As I looked at him, I imagined I smelled the scent of betel nuts. My Minnan language wasn't terribly fluent, but this was actually for the better. The fact that I spoke so poorly made him less nervous. Actually, I felt he seemed not the least bit nervous, nor was he introverted or shy around strangers. He asked and answered questions glibly, his tone even eager at times.

I explained to him that our association could help him make a special appeal or request a “pardon”. He felt there was no hope of a “pardon”, and I was just grasping at straws. I started to feel a little nervous myself; if he didn't show repentance, what could I do?

“Haven't you still got three children? Where are they? With your older brother in Yunlin?”

“I don't know where they are. My brother told them to come back and they didn't come. Do you know the terrible things they said about me in the police investigation records? The way I see it, I sacrificed so much for this family, I raised you, and then you do this; well, enough is enough, I give up. So I had my brother tell them to forget about coming here.”

“So how are they going to survive?”

“My wife had an insurance policy. It was originally supposed to be divided among four people; now it's only split among three, over 700,000 each. Their uncle got the money out for them.”

I got the sense that my earlier feeling of foreboding had been proven true. Maybe his attitude wasn't self-righteous in itself, but he appeared to believe he had no choice but to do what he'd done. He had written a memoir in which he described his case, and although I had not yet read it, I could guess that it was mainly explaining how he had no other alternative. It was like he was anticipating the day when his children would know better, read it, and thereby understand his suffering. He was still full of hatred, and still proclaiming to the world that his hatred was justified.

I asked him the address of his home in Pingdong county, and he replied, “Jiuru town, Sankuai village...Sankuai village...I forget. I've just been trying to forget these things. I'll look it up tomorrow and tell you.”

I exited the detention facility into the fresh air of the southern Taiwan afternoon with a heavy heart. I thought back to that woman with the harelip. Nobody would bring home-made meals to Deng Wugong, would they? Nonsense. The only person who might bring him food had already died by his hand.

I really wanted to read the memoir Deng Wugong had written. The 30 minutes allowed for a meeting were limited indeed; perhaps his memoir would allow me to more fully understand his mental state. It wasn't necessarily factual, but it could still serve as a map of his mind. I decided to seek out the director and see what I could do.

The director's last name was Zhong. He was tall and powerfully built, with a large ring of keys at his wrist. He said that when Deng Wugong first arrived he had violent tendencies; he would often fight with his fellow inmates—the word they used was “classmates”—and he was always trying to kill himself. Now, he was much more stable. Nobody ever came to see him.

“I saw that the purchasing area has fruit and things like that. If no relatives come, what can he do?”

“He depends on me for that.”

Deng Wugong had already been here for three years. “What about you?” I asked.

“Me? I've been here five or six years. In this time my hands have sent off ten death-rowers. It's really kind of sad to talk about it. I never treated them like they were on death row; I never treated them like criminals. They all like me, but I will be leaving next month. I've been promoted, so I'll be moving to central Taiwan. Now they're all nervous because they don't know what the next director will be like.”

His choice of words shocked me. What did he mean by “my hands”? I asked, “What role do you play in the process of carrying out the death sentence?”

“Psychologist, consultant, and executioner.”

I was stupefied. I had asked him a simple, concrete question, and he had given me an abstract response!

Director Zhong explained, “Every afternoon I go down to chat with them. Sometimes I only get notified after 3pm that I have to carry it out on that day—but I just talked with that guy! It really gets to me.”

“You find out at 3pm?”

“Only I know, because I have to do a lot of things in preparation. We bring the guy out from his cell; they don't want to come out, so I have to go in and bring them out myself. At their last meal, they don't want to eat, so I have to urge them to eat. Once they've eaten, they don't want to stand up, because once they stand up an officer will lead them out, so I have to make them stand up. When it's time to carry out the sentence, the warden has to be there, as well as the deputy warden and the managers of the general affairs and the personnel office. There are more than 20 people at the scene, but in the eyes of the convict, it's just him and me.”

All this time, this “four-star” police officer had not relaxed his guarded attitude towards me. I inquired about how Deng Wugong would be moved from his cell when it came time for his execution; he evaded my question with the excuse that he had business to take care of, standing up from his chair. When I started to walked back out to the visitor area, he muttered as if to himself, “So you're going to make a special appeal for him...very well then, see if they can commute it to a life sentence...” I turned back to say goodbye and found that he was already standing in front of a gleaming silver door, turning one of the keys on that large keyring at his wrist in the lock.

The taxi that took me back was driven by a grinning man named Ah Bai. He was just like the one who brought me here; the drivers always tried to pretend that I had come to do something else—do I have a friend who works here? Am I here for a meeting? Anything was better than coming to visit a criminal. I was dressed rather shabbily, not “Taiwanese” enough, so I didn't look like a relative. At any rate, this well-intentioned misunderstanding proved that the family members of criminals were a target of discrimination. This cheerful Ah Bai brought passengers here every day, so he must have seen a lot—I planned to test his cheer.

“I just went to see someone on death row.”

“Huh?” In the rearview mirror I could see Ah Bai's benevolent air vanish; after a moment's shock, his face seemed to darken, and his speech became cautious. “What's he in for?”

“Murder.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

Ah Bai was silent for a moment, then asked, “Who is he to you?”

“I don't know him.” Ah Bai seemed relieved to hear this, letting down his guard towards me.

I told Ah Bai that I was part of a public interest group that came to visit inmates and see if they needed anything, because in many cases nobody else would come to see them.

Ah Bai said, “Huh. So you ask them if they want to donate their organs?”

The next day, I went to the detention facility to meet with Deng Wugong again.

“Did you know that I went to see Director Zhong yesterday? Has he told you?”

Deng Wugong smiled. “Yes, he laughed at me.”

“What was he laughing about?”

“Uh...he just was laughing at me, I guess. If our director is in a good mood, it's all good. He makes all of us laugh.” He spoke of Director Zhong in a tone full of reverence and gratitude.

Today's conversation was more relaxed than yesterday's; Deng Wugong was no longer as worried that nobody would understand his case. He said that when he turned himself in, he didn't want to be alive anyway, and it was in this state of total resignation that he was questioned and sentenced. It was only later, in jail, with the prison instructors and Director Zhong's constant guidance, that he stopped wanting to die so badly.

When I asked him how they got him to change his mind, he didn't know what to say. “I guess they...just helped me reason things out,” however, “right now I still have that idea, I feel there's no point; anyway, I was going to walk this road sooner or later. My family's broken; I don't have any reason to live.”

“Now, when you think of your wife, how do you feel?”

“I'd say my heart seems to 'harden'; it's very painful. I often think of how we were before. We married for love. From the time I met her when I was a soldier, to the time that the incident happened, that was exactly 20 years. I was so good to her...”

“What about the man?”

“Relatively speaking, I don't think of him much. He destroyed my family and brought chaos into our lives; he deserved to die. I didn't want him to die, though. At that time I was really pissed at my wife, totally 'out of control', I really wanted her to die, but I didn't want that guy to die. He died later after going to the hospital.”

“Afterwards you settled out of court with his family, right?”

“Right.”

“How much did they settle for?”

“1.57 million NTD.” I lowered my head to write down this number, and he automatically added, “Not paid.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it's not paid yet. They went and checked on the land I owned, it's my ancestors' property. They tried to auction it off, but it didn't sell, so they'll be trying to auction it again.”

“Who came to negotiate the settlement?”

“Lawyers. The relatives didn't come. It was settled in the first court hearing. I didn't have a lawyer, so it was just me representing myself.”

“Okay, I have one more question to ask. You previously had a case in which you were accused of intentional injury resulting in death, and you appealed that. But I see that you only appealed that case after you were convicted on this homicide charge. This seems really strange to me. Why would you go to the effort of appealing this injury charge when you were already sentenced to death?”

I had found his criminal history by searching online. 1995, drug offenses; 2002, interference with personal freedom; and then a few months later, this double murder. In the “interference with personal freedom” case, he had referred a drug dealer to a new buyer. The outcome of the meeting was that the buyer shot the dealer. Eager for revenge, the dealer sought out Deng Wugong to get people together. Deng Wugong had no choice but to go with them to strike back against the buyer. After stabbing the man a few times, they left him on the side of the road, where he later died. Deng Wugong was at the scene but he hadn't done anything, so he was charged with “interference with personal freedom”.

This case was a real can of worms, as it may have been a prelude to his subsequent crime of passion. One of the accomplices testified that after the attack, the dealer “invited” everyone to shoot heroin as a thank-you for their help, and nobody said a word about the man they'd left bleeding on the side of the road. Could it be that this experience showed Deng Wugong that human lives were worthless, and therefore, not long after, he decided to kill his ex-wife?

Deng Wugong's face was full of confusion. It seemed like he was making a great effort to think back to that time and see if anything was missing in his memory. This shook me a little. We had met twice, and he always answered questions quickly and lucidly. Didn't he just say that man deserved to die? This other affair was a simple case of interference with personal freedom, so why wouldn't he admit to that? Could it be that it wasn't him?

“Do you have any previous criminal offenses?”

“I don't. There was a car accident in Jiayi, but that was settled. I also sued someone in Jilong because he hit me when he was driving.”

“Huh? So the case I mentioned wasn't you?”

“It's not me! I've never done drugs. That wasn't me.”

It wasn't him! So I had to start from zero in my evaluation of him. He hadn't done drugs, he was never a middleman, he had never committed interference of personal freedom...I had to completely rethink this man, and erase the shadow of that other Deng Wugong.

This Deng Wugong was straightforward and honest; in our 30 minute talk today, he candidly admitted many negative things about himself, never trying to conceal the truth or evade my questions. For instance, he admitted the settlement wasn't paid, and that he wanted a victim to die. There was also the thing he'd said yesterday about his wife's insurance, that it was “originally supposed to be divided among four people; now it's only split among three”. It was as if he was imagining his own share of the payout. He wasn't tricky or clever; you could say he was a plain dealer.

When I received Deng Wugong's memoir from Director Zhong, that was even more of a shock. Deng Wugong was a big-headed, coarse, strongly built middle aged man, but his memoir was written in characters as small as grains of rice. The few sentences of formulaic pleasantries which Director Zhong said to me were as guarded as his words yesterday, and he didn't even sit down, departing in the blink of an eye.

Deng Wugong started dating Huang Jinling when he was a soldier. Family members opposed their relationship, but the two married anyway.

Deng Wugong was from Yunlin, while Huang Jinling was from Pingdong, both of which were rural areas. Deng Wugong thought the only opportunities were in the city, so he went to Taizhonggang and became a tow truck driver. After he had earned a bit of money he was able to become his own boss and started a small business. He also bought a house, which was registered in Huang Jinling's name.

He worked long hours, spending the whole day away from home. Meanwhile, Huang Jinling stayed at home taking care of their three children. She often suspected that Deng Wugong was seeing other women. Sometimes Deng Wugong would go to dinners or parties, but he said this was part of doing business, and he always did his best to get home as soon as possible. The parties had “hostesses”, but he did not have any dealings with these ladies, and the ladies had never spent the night with him. Basically, the couple were constantly fighting, so Deng Wugong ultimately decided to leave this line of work, moving the family to Jiuru village in Pingdong county.

That was Huang Jinling's hometown, and her two older brothers lived there. The oldest worked in the marble industry. The family rented a house from this brother and Deng Wugong started fresh, learning how to cut and process marble. He felt he had sacrificed a lot for his wife; he had been demoted from boss to inexperienced apprentice.

After a few years, they took out a loan and bought a house in Jiuru village. They also started their own independent marble processing operation, with both husband and wife working together. But the economy was unstable, and so was business; likewise, the couple's relationship had its ups and downs. Later, when it became apparent that their income wasn't improving, they had no choice but to close up shop. Deng Wugong went back to being a wage slave, driving an oil truck, while Huang Jinling went to work at the fish market run by her second-oldest brother.

Comparing their present situation to the past, Deng Wugong felt frustrated. If he had known it would turn out like this, he would have just stayed in Taizhonggang, where at least he had the connections he had worked for ten years to establish. Now he was back where he started, and it was like all his hard work had vanished into nothing. Moreover, he was surrounded by his wife's family members, which may have contributed to his sense of psychological imbalance.

The couple's old problem reared its head once more. He was driving more than ten hours a day, and his wife worried he was having affairs. A new problem also came into being: now, Huang Jinling was a career woman, and she experienced her own developments and changes. She started smoking, and her job at the fish market gave her the chance to socialize with male customers. Deng Wugong was angry and jealous, and he began to doubt his wife's faithfulness as much as she did his.

They had married young and their three children were almost grown up; the oldest daughter already had a job. Deng Wugong and Huang Jinling's earnings, added together, amounted to over 80,000 NTD, which in fact was more than enough to live comfortably. Around this time, Huang Jinling decided to get a second job. At the fish market she had met a customer named Chen Qinquan who was the foreman at the Guotai Leather Goods Factory, and he invited her to work the night shift there. Deng Wugong was furious. He was convinced this man had bad intentions. Furthermore, the family was not wanting for money, yet Huang Jinling insisted on taking the job; she was certainly interested in him as well.

Deng Wugong's bitterness kept accumulating. His job wasn't working out, he felt trapped among his wife's relatives, and his wife was quite possibly sleeping with another man. He placed the blame for all these things on Huang Jinling's head. Deng Wugong couldn't keep himself from imagining the Guotai Leather Goods Factory in the dead of night. Besides the security guard in the booth at the entrance, in that massive workroom it was only the two of them, Huang Jinling and Chen Qinquan. Chen Qinquan was the foreman; if the two did no work for the entire night, nobody would be the wiser. So what were they doing?

Deng Wugong was not a man with a good temper. It wasn't just his wife he was on bad terms with; his three children weren't close to him either. In the fights between husband and wife, the children were more likely to side with their mother. The oldest daughter once swore at Deng Wugong, which angered him to the point of grabbing a kitchen knife and trying to kill her. He was stopped by the leader of the village. Once, when arguing with Huang Jinling, Deng Wugong had also smashed the family's wine cabinet and used scissors to tear holes in his wife's clothing. His pent-up resentment would boil over in the form of violence. He tried to kill himself many times, each time prevented by relatives.

Huang Jinling was set on getting a divorce, and Deng Wugong felt like even more of a failure. The family was broken. It was like investing for years in a company's stock and then seeing its share price drop to nothing, losing everything you owned. He signed his name to the divorce decree on paper but not in his heart. Huang Jinling, for her part, didn't move out. Their life continued on much as it always had; a certificate of divorce did not bring any significant change. They had always fought among themselves anyway, and now they fought the same as before. They also continued sleeping in the same bed.

About 40 days after the divorce, Deng Wugong decided he would go back to his family's home in Yunlin to find an acquaintance who was a notary. He would sell his ancestral estate to this acquaintance and take the money to the mainland. After spending it all, he would just go somewhere to die. He gathered together some clothing. From the bathroom he could hear the sound of gurgling water. He opened the door and, to the familiar yet blurry figure amidst the rising steam, said, “This is the last time I will see you take a shower.”

The November night must have been cold as Deng Wugong drove off. By the time he got back, it was 8 o'clock in the morning. He was stunned to discover that overnight, Huang Jinling had taken all her things and left. Greatly upset, he rushed immediately to her parents' house to implore her to return, despite the fact that he had already gone three days without sleep. But Huang Jinling had had enough. Her twenty years of marriage ended here, and she wanted nothing more to do with him. Huang Jinling's oldest brother and sister were there; every word they said sounded to Deng Wugong as if it was full of thorns. Once again he found himself trapped; everyone seemed to be against Deng Wugong, and he felt like they had all ganged up to bully him.

All he could do was go home, but in his heart he knew he had no home anymore. He couldn't sleep; he stared blankly at nothing, crying, smoking, drinking. When his children came back at night, he explained to them matter-of-factly, “After today you won't see your dad anymore. You'll have to look after yourselves, plan for yourselves.” Then he went to the Guotai Leather Goods factory.

He was honest, but he wasn't trustworthy. What he recounted was Deng Wugong's version of the story, while Huang Jinling's version died by his hand. He said she was always “finding an excuse” to get on his case about inconsequential “little things”, but in Huang Jinling's version, those things may have been a big deal. On the other hand, the fact that she started smoking cigarettes, and was even brazen enough to smoke in front of Deng Wugong's relatives, was a big deal to Deng Wugong, but in Huang Jinling's version of the story this may have been trivial: my smoking is none of your damn business.

I maintained a guarded stance towards his interpretation of events, but on the whole I trusted the specific details he provided, because in the two interviews I'd had with him he had always given me one feeling: that he held nothing back. When I asked him the address of his family home in Pingdong and that of his wife's parents' home, he told me both of them, never once asking me, “Why do you want to know?”

His memoirs did not start with himself; rather, he began by writing about the time when he and Huang Jinling had met, and the focus was always entangled in the relationship between the two. It was like if one didn't mention Huang Jinling, there was no way to define Deng Wugong.

This was a love letter written too late, a dying testament written too early. Throughout it Deng Wugong was murmuring: I love her so much, I do this for her, and that, and that too; but she still hurt me like this! It was as if he had written it in a trance, forgetting that he had already killed Huang Jinling.

Deng Wugong's memoirs were his verdict against Huang Jinling, and killing her was how he carried out her sentence. Because he had never caught her cheating on him, he also used his memoirs to...prove her guilt:

--He told her not to take the job, but she didn't listen; something is fishy here.

--The job demanded long hours for little pay, but she still wanted to take it; something is fishy here.

--Night shift with only one man and one woman in the factory; something is fishy here.

--She bought snacks for the foreman to eat every day; something is fishy here.

--She always knew where the foreman was; something is fishy here.

--She wouldn't answer her phone or say where she was; something is fishy here.

--While on the road, she twisted her ankle and called the foreman, of all people, so he could come rescue her like a knight in shining armor. Obviously fishy.

--She asked for a divorce, and if that's not fishy, nothing is!

The last third of the memoir was verbose and depressing, because in it Deng Wugong was constantly imploring Huang Jinling to come back, incessantly calling her, going to her parents' house, running over to the factory to plead with her. This behavior seemed like obsession to me, but Deng Wugong saw it as him offering tolerance, giving her another chance. If he had read Ouyang Xiu's works, he may have learned one line: “I want to find a way for us to live, but I'm powerless.”

Deng Wugong was still immersed in his hurt feelings; regret had not yet arrived.

“Although you could say I took both their lives, maybe there was also some justification for what I did. After enduring stress and attacks for so long on my own, exhausting myself psychologically beyond repair, I had to go through still more humiliation. This was beyond what any person should have to bear; what should I have done to face it? With regard to what has already happened, of course it's not what I wanted, and even more so, I never wanted to walk this road. I always hoped we would grow old together, living a normal life, and now I'm grieving over her. This was fated to happen.”

What happened after the incident at the Guotai Leather Goods factory was this: Deng Wugong drove to Yunlin to find his older brother, to which he explained what had happened. He then went to his aunt's general store, grabbed two bottles of Gaoliang liquor, and got in his car to leave. His older brother told him he should turn himself in and not worry about anything. He shouted back at his brother, “If I turn myself in I'll get a lighter sentence. Don't worry about me, I'll take care of things myself.”

He drove into the mountains in Nantou, where he stopped and drank one bottle of liquor. He sliced his left wrist. When he awoke, he felt greatly disappointed; how was he not dead? He would have to go back and get the courts to hurry up and sentence him to death. It was in this state, only desiring his own self-destruction, that he headed back to Pingdong and turned himself in.

The police evidence records were quite thorough. The murder weapon was a 30-centimeter sashimi knife whose paper cover was also found at the scene of the crime. The blood on the knife was Huang Jinling's and Chen Qinquan's, and Deng Wugong's fingerprints were on the paper cover. Black gloves were left at the scene, as was a full-coverage safety mask. Huang Jinling died at the scene of the crime; her windpipe was almost completely severed. She was 38 years old. Chen Qinquan, severely wounded, had fled to the security guard's booth for help. He was taken to the hospital, where he later died. But before his death, he managed to get his testimony into the police records: the culprit was Huang Jinling's newly-divorced ex-husband.

After two retrials, Deng Wugong was convicted and sentenced to death. Some people came to the detention facility to teach introspection and meditation; Deng Wugong copied down a few of the scriptures, but when he thought of Huang Jinling who he had spent most of his life loving and hating, his heart still “hardened”. It was extremely painful for him; “I was so good to her; how could she do this to me?”

His two daughters and one son had no sympathy for him; in police records, they always described him as a terrible husband and father. The son said he once beat Huang Jinling after drinking. Hearing this angered Deng Wugong to no end. He swore he had never hit his wife; in the worst fight they'd had, he wanted to get out of the house for a bit to cool his head, but Huang Jinling wouldn't give him his keys and refused to let him leave. After a struggle, he held her on the ground and grabbed the keys from her, then got in his car and zoomed off. It was possible that the son saw this and assumed his father had hit his mother. The more Deng Wugong thought, the angrier he got. His wife was disloyal; his children were disrespectful. To hell with all of it, why not give up! He told his older brother and sister to relay the message to his children: “Don't come to see me!”

But he still quietly wrote a 13,000-word memoir, using ruled writing paper and glue to assemble a handmade book. His writing was careful, neat, and very very small; if you divided each line of the writing paper into nine smaller lines, his letters would fill the center line exactly.

Deng Wugong was arrested in Pingdong county, Jiuru village; the place he was now being held, Yanchao, was just across Gaoping Creek. He committed murder on the eastern shore, and was imprisoned on the western one. He still had thoughts of giving up from time to time, awaiting the day death would come to bring him across the river. His life was not yet at its end, but the end had already been determined; in the words of Yang Zeshi, his “life was not worth living”.

He had already been held on the western shore for three and a half years. Director Zhong was his guiding light; he looked forward to their chats every afternoon, but he knew there would be a day when the director would have to lead him to his execution.

And on the eastern shore, things had already changed completely. Huang Jinling's two brothers were long gone; people said they were fleeing creditors. The son had gone off to be a soldier, while the two daughters never kept in touch; he didn't where they were now.

I was going back to Taipei soon, so I went to say farewell to Deng Wugong. I didn't want him waiting expectantly every day, thinking I might return.

Today I planned to ask Deng Wugong a few more penetrating questions.

“The police found the knife, the mask, and the gloves that day. Why did you wear gloves?”

“Because I was driving. When I drive for a long time, my hands get sweaty, so I always wear gloves.”

“You mentioned in your memoirs one time when you fought with your wife; she hit you and you hit her back. What was the worst beating you ever gave her?”

He used a Minnanese verb in his reply that I didn't understand. As far as I could tell, it wasn't “hit”, nor was it “strike” or “struggle”. I asked, “Did you say you 'pushed' her?” Deng Wugong explained that it was when the two of them were struggling and he snatched the keys from her hand.

“In the newspaper, it said you divorced because you had a girlfriend?”

“Miss Zhang,” Deng Wugong's tone carried a faint note of indignation. “Think about it. If I had a girlfriend, wouldn't I have left soon after the divorce? Why would I stick around that place?”

As I walked back through that underground hallway that had never seen the light of day, I wondered if there would ever be a day when Deng Wugong's children would come through this same corridor.

Seven court transcripts, 90 minutes of conversation, and a 13,000-word memoir. This is the sum of my knowledge of Deng Wugong. I can't, nor do I plan to, claim I understand him. There are surely many more things in his life that I know nothing about.

It was only after I returned to Taipei that I read Deng Wugong's “pardon” request. A presidential pardon seemed unlikely, but the Society for the Abolishment of the Death Penalty thought it best to try anyway. So, the Society prepared a draft of a message to the president, leaving the lower half blank so the convict could explain in his own words why he felt himself worthy of a pardon.

This is what Deng Wugong wrote:

“I want to fully understand, what is love? I love my children; I love my family. I spent day and night riding the highways, driving all over the country. I poured out my heart and soul to support my one and only family. A wise man once said: 'If a chaste woman goes astray, a lifetime of virtue is forfeited; if a harlot settles down, a lifetime of sin is forgiven.' How did someone who never harmed a soul become the disciple of evil? Why did a man who couldn't bear to kill a chicken end up a murderer? Do I feel sad? Do I feel regret? – 'Without knowing why, without feeling, the tears flow down.'”

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