Boundary Revelation

They became mercenaries for the Thai government to get ID cards. And when they made it to Taiwan, the homeland they’d dreamed of they lived on the margins of society. In 1949, the Communist Party of China occupied the whole of mainland China, and the Nationalist Party of China, commonly known as the Kuomintang, retreated to Taiwan. But not all nationalist forces crossed the Taiwan Strait. Some went into hiding near the boundary between Thailand and Burma, waiting in the jungle for orders from Taiwan. In 1961, the United Nations demanded a withdrawal, but Chiang Kai-shek, the president of the Republic of China, as the government of Taiwan was styled, sent a secret order, telling the troops to keep hiding out in the jungle and wait until the time was ripe to "retake mainland China" from the communists. They ended up waiting for fifty years in northern Burma. Once a secret army, they became a lost army. They got no support from Taiwan. To survive, they turned mercenary. They helped the Thai government crush the Communist Party of Thailand. The soldiers in the lost army were strangers in a strange land, stateless persons living in northern Thailand. They had to put their lives on the line – even to bleed – in order to get Thai citizenship. Their story is a historical tragedy. A sense of displacement shaped their national identity, and their children, though born in Thailand, yearned for faraway Taiwan. They were passionate about ‘returning’ to the ‘ancestral land’ of Taiwan, but when they got there they were treated as "illegal aliens". They’ve been fighting this battle for fifty years. Maybe it’s hard to say who the real enemy is, and where their true country lies.