Night was falling when sergeant Pa Wen-shan rode his motorcycle up the steep, narrow road that leads home. It had been a long journey. Four hours on the train from Chiayi, then another 45 minutes on the road from the station in Taitung, the only city on Taiwan’s remote south-east coast. Once the Pacific fell back behind him and he entered the valley where Jialan, his village, is located, a rush of cool air dried the sweat on his face. The village sits on a slim, slanted plateau. Well, then 25, passed the baseball field where he played as a boy. The cemetery where his father was buried a month earlier. On the final ascent to his family’s home, he saw that the neighbors had started drinking. Sitting around wood fires in front of their one-storey cement houses, they called out to him: ‘Galawas!’
That is his name, not the Chinese name on his uniform patch, which he, like all indigenous Taiwanese, was forced to wear until recently. These were his people, the Kaaluwan tribe. But the young soldier was in no mood to join them. It was September 2012, and he had reached the end of his road. It led him back to the poor, remote village he’d been in such a hurry to leave six years earlier.
