Taitung is not actually all that far away from Taipei, just three and a half hours by Puyuma Express, but when Hsu announced her intention to “emigrate” to Taitung while coming back to Taipei two days a week to look after her 90-year-old mother, friends in Taipei threw her one sendoff party after another as the moving date approached. There were some weeks when she had four farewell gatherings to go to. She came to realize that Taitung was quite far from Taipei after all. For most Taipei residents, trips down to Taitung come years apart. Places like Wulu Gorge, the Coastal Mountain Range, and the Puyuma Archaeological Site sound more exotic to Taipei denizens than a lot of overseas destinations.
Five years passed before Hsu’s first impulse to head south crystallized into a firm intention. Then another five years went by and a lot of careful thought took place before the dream became a reality.
In 1981, as a recent graduate of Tamkang University’s Department of English, Hsu joined with some friends in founding The Mother Earth magazine. It was her first job, and a considerable departure from the career path she originally had planned. Going abroad to get a degree in something like cultural studies or comparative literature had been on the horizon. Never the shrinking violet, however, she became acquainted as an undergraduate with several present and future notables, including Lee Yuan-chen (her teacher, and a veteran women’s rights activist who has recently published a memoir on her career as a feminist) and Wang Jin-ping (a noted social and political activist). And the campus folk musician Lee Shuang-tze also affected Hsu’s thinking with his famous call in the 1970s for everyone to “beat the drums loudly and make your voices heard.” All these factors steered Hsu toward the dangwai movement despite the fact that her parents were mainlanders, which was rather “ethnically incorrect” at that time. She was especially involved in the movement where it touched upon cultural and social issues.
And so she decided to stay in Taiwan and start up a magazine. Over the next couple of years, she and her cohorts turned out ten issues at irregular intervals. She descended into debt, and at age 24 had to accept a rescue by Antonio Chiang, who offered her a job as an editor at The Eighties, a magazine published by the dangwai movement. It was during her time at The Eighties that she spoke for the first time at a political rally. While everyone else on stage spoke in Taiwanese, she stood out as the lone person speaking Mandarin as she asked: “Why can’t our parents go back to their hometowns to see friends and family members they’ve been separated from for 40 years?”
1986 saw the official establishment of the Democratic Progressive Party. The following year, martial law came to an end. When the ban on new mass media publications was lifted, The Journalist weekly hit the scene with a huge splash, and Hsu was brought on board as general manager. To meet the challenge, she learned how to write a business plan, and how to read a balance sheet.
But Hsu left The Journalist after just three issues. Buried under a mountain of administrivia, she felt like she was just wasting her time, and longed to return to the front lines to focus and report on cultural and social issues. Friends arranged a job interview for her with the Independence Evening Post. During the interview, publisher Wu Feng-shan asked why she hadn’t stayed at The Journalist. She replied: “I want to find myself.”
The Post hired her, and on the long road to “find herself,” she and co-worker Lee Yung-te became the first two journalists from Taiwan to report from mainland China before the ROC government officially announced that citizens would be allowed to travel to the mainland to visit relatives. All of a sudden, she was being asked for interviews, and eventually the newspaper sent her at its expense to do nine months of research at Columbia University in New York as a visiting fellow. The idea was to brush up her skills enough to work as an overseas correspondent.
When the government issued its first batch of new broadcasting licenses in 1993, Hsu’s venturesome spirit got the best of her once again as she and several friends established Hit FM radio station. The new station was breaking even after just three months in business, and by the end of its first year had already earned back its NT$50 million in capital.
In 2000, the year when Taiwan experienced its first ever orderly handover of ruling power between political parties, “friend of the Democratic Progressive Party” Hsu Lu joined the Chinese Television System (CTS) as its vice president. Two years later she took over as company president. But why do such a thing? Was it to fight for the goal of reforming the media? Was it for the satisfaction of being a company president? Or did she simply need to work to fill the void left in her life by a year of voluntary unemployment after leaving Hit FM? Was she trying to get back her lost mojo? Hsu asked herself those very questions, and decided it was probably mostly the latter.
Four years later, upon resigning as president of CTS and walking out of the CTS headquarters building, she knew for sure that she was leaving the media and politics for good. This was her goodbye to time-wasting meetings, endless social commitments, annoying structural reforms, and mind-numbing financial statements. Goodbye, also, to high heels and the fancy designer labels in the armoire.
Indeed, the designer labels and high-powered job title inspired only melancholy, for Hsu couldn’t help thinking that the “self” she had once set out in search of, and the mojo she had been meaning to rebuild, had only gotten more and more distant over the years.
The day she left her job, good friend and renowned dancer Lo Man-fei picked her up by car, and the two went for a coffee.
Hsu suddenly announced: “I want to leave Taipei.” But she was only half certain about it. Lo simply nodded and said, “Okay!” She knew her friend well, and believed her. Two years later, Lo left the world peacefully after lung cancer spread to her brain.
Life is short, and can change in an instant. Hsu recalled the words that the veteran newsman Adam Chang had said to her from his sickbed: “Listen, kid, you’re not the iron lady type. Go do your own thing, and live for yourself.”
Hsu Lu took the post of chief executive of the Lovely Taiwan Foundation in order to use Taitung as a starting point for showcasing the beauty of Taiwan’s culture. Shown here is Hsu (center) and some of the high-spirited staffers at Tiehua Music Village.