Father Went to Taiwan. We Stayed in Hunan.

In 1949, Yim Mau-Kun was still a child.

Many years later, when he looked back on that period of his life, much of it had already blurred. The houses they had lived in, the order in which they moved from place to place—some details could no longer be reconstructed with certainty.

But one thing remained clear:

His father went to Taiwan, while the rest of the family stayed in Hunan.

In the life that followed, this was more than a family separation.

It changed almost everything.

His Father Thought He Would Come Back

When Yim Mau-Kun's father, Ran Peng, followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan, he did not intend to leave his wife and children behind permanently.

Years later, the family learned from the diaries he left behind that his plan had been to go to Taiwan first, settle his work and living arrangements, and then return to the mainland to bring his family over.

To him, it seemed simply a matter of sequence.

He would go first.

His wife and children would stay behind temporarily.

Once he was settled, he would come back for them.

But history gave the family no second chance.

After arriving in Taiwan, he discovered that he could no longer return.

What had seemed like a temporary separation suddenly became a boundary that could not be crossed.

The father remained in Taiwan.

The mother and children remained in Hunan.

No one knew how long the separation would last.

Those Who Remained Had to Find a Way Forward

After his father left, the family in Hunan suddenly lost its main source of stability.

Yim Mau-Kun's mother, Huangfu Dao'an, was left to find a way to support her two sons. Mau-Kun was still very young, and his younger brother Maoxin was younger still. The family moved from place to place, relying on relatives for help.

His mother's family was from Taoyuan in Hunan. The Huangfu family had once owned an old residence in the county seat and some land in the countryside, but by then the family's circumstances had already declined. The political and social order around them was also changing rapidly.

The structure of the life they had known was disappearing.

For his mother, the most immediate questions were not political, nor were they about what the future might bring.

They were much more practical:

Where would they sleep tonight?
Who would look after the children?
How would the family survive?

She took the children to stay with relatives.

Her elder brother, Huangfu Daoyue, lived in the Sanyanggang area of rural Taoyuan. Another relative from the Ran family, whom the children called Third Uncle, also lived in the countryside nearby.

Eventually, the two boys were separated and placed in different households.

Mau-Kun stayed with his mother at his uncle's home.

His younger brother Maoxin was sent to live with another relative.

And so a family of four was scattered in different directions: the father in Taiwan, the mother and one child staying with relatives, and the younger son living elsewhere.

Mau-Kun may not have fully understood what this meant.

He only knew that his father was gone.

His younger brother was no longer beside him every day.

The place he lived had changed.

The people around him had changed as well.

From the City to the Countryside

Around 1949, Mau-Kun had lived with his family in Changde.

But his memories of that period were already very faint. In his later memoirs, he wrote that his first truly clear childhood memories began only after he moved to Shigutan in rural Taoyuan.

It was an entirely different world.

From city life to the rolling countryside.

From the family home to a side room in his uncle's house.

From a childhood in which his father was still part of the household to one in which his mother alone was trying to find a place for them to live.

Shigutan was located in the Sanyanggang area.

A small river wound through hills and rice fields, pooling at the foot of the hills before continuing downstream. His uncle's family lived in a large timber-and-tile compound beside the water and the hills. Several households shared the compound. In front were a threshing yard, a granary, and a cowshed.

Mau-Kun and his mother had little choice but to squeeze into the household with his uncle's family.

For a six- or seven-year-old child, these became vivid images that stayed with him:

Wooden beds.
Rice fields.
The river.
The cowshed.
The courtyard.

And the cousins who suddenly became the center of his daily world.

The world connected to his father seemed to disappear from everyday life.

A Child Does Not Understand What “Unable to Return” Means

Looking back today, we know that 1949 marked a profound historical divide.

But a child at the time could not have understood that.

For Mau-Kun, his father's departure for Taiwan was not first experienced as a political event.

It was simply this:

His father was no longer at home.

Adults may have understood the government's retreat, the separation across the Taiwan Strait, and the larger political situation.

A child did not.

If he had been told:

Your father is going to Taiwan first. Once he settles down, he will come back for you.

Then what a child would understand was simply that he needed to wait.

Wait for his father to return.

Wait for the family to live together again.

But the days passed.

His father did not return.

His mother carried on. They moved to the countryside. The brothers were separated. Slowly, this new life became “normal.”

The idea of his father coming back grew more and more distant.

His Mother Became the Center of the Family That Remained

After his father left, the central figure in Mau-Kun's childhood memories gradually became his mother.

Huangfu Dao'an had also grown up in an educated family, but by then the life she had once known had changed completely.

Her husband was in Taiwan.

Her own family was in decline.

She had two children to support.

She had to depend on relatives, while at the same time finding a new way to support herself.

Later, she returned to Changde with her son. In order to find work, she attended training courses and sat for examinations, eventually becoming an elementary school teacher. Mau-Kun followed her to Changde's Lieshi Street Elementary School, where he lived and studied.

But that came later.

At the beginning, in 1949, she was simply a mother who had suddenly discovered that her husband could not come back.

She could not wait for a definite answer.

She could only settle the children first.

Find somewhere to live.

Survive.

A Boundary That Shaped the Rest of His Life

His father went to Taiwan.

Mau-Kun remained on the mainland.

The consequences extended far beyond the family's inability to live together.

In the years that followed, his father's identity—and the fact that he had gone to Taiwan—would become part of Mau-Kun's political record, a family background he could never entirely escape.

But if we return to the perspective of that child in 1949, it was much simpler.

One day, his father left.

The adults said he would come back.

But he did not.

So his mother took the children away from the life they had known and into the countryside of Taoyuan. The brothers were separated and sent to different relatives, and the paths of the family began to move in different directions.

Only many years later did Mau-Kun learn from his father's diaries that his father had always intended to come back for them.

It was only after arriving in Taiwan that he realized he could no longer return.

Perhaps that is the most poignant part of the entire family story.

No one sat down in 1949 and made a collective decision:

The father will go to Taiwan. The mother and children will remain on the mainland.

There was no such decision.

It was more as though history, in a very short span of time, closed a door.

On one side stood the father.

On the other stood his wife and children.

By the time they realized the door had closed, they were already living in two different worlds.

Mau-Kun would go on to spend his youth in Hunan.

He transplanted rice, harvested grain, caught fish, and worked a foot-powered waterwheel in Shigutan.

He studied in Changde.

He began to draw.

He entered his first art exhibition.

And step by step, he found his way toward the life of an artist.

Many years later, he would leave for Hong Kong and eventually go to Taiwan.

Father and son would finally live on the same land again.

But the separation of 1949 could never truly be erased from his life.

It became a dividing line in his childhood.

Before it was a family that was still whole.

After it was a mother and her children trying to begin again in a world that had completely changed.