Keeping the Flame--Huang Ching-jung, Lighthouse Keeper

Of the 34 lighthouses Taiwan has built on its coasts and nearby islands, Huang Ching-jung has been a keeper for 27, more than any other person in the country. Forty-five of the 75 years of his life have been spent among the lighthouses. Although he has been retired for ten years, Huang has still not lost his feeling for the lighthouses. He uses discarded pipes to make models of the lighthouses that he puts in his home, and in many dreams late at night he is still connected to the lighthouses.

Huang Ching-jung was born in 1928 on Gulang Islet across from Xiamen. Reminiscing about his childhood, he says happily: "It turns out that the Xiamen port was right across from the front door of my home. When I was a child, as soon as it got dark I could see bright lights on the horizon, out on the water. Stupidly, I still thought they were stars. Only when I was growing up did I hear my teacher say that they were lighthouses. That light, bright as a star, is what I have been chasing after my entire life."

In 1946, after the resumption of Chinese rule in Taiwan, the Central Daily News published an announcement from the Xiamen customs agency that an exam would be held for lighthouse keepers in Taiwan. At that time Huang Ching-jung was only 18 years old, still studying at the Yinghua High School on Gulang. Thinking only of giving it a try, he registered for the exam, and did not imagine that he would garner the second spot out of over 300 people who took the exam, becoming one of 16 lucky youths accepted for the job. After reporting for the job, he was sent to Tungchu Island for a year of training. For the first three months he watched how to maintain the main light and the building, and then learned how to do it on his own: climbing the lighthouse, getting rid of rust, even tightening the screws, writing out forms to record the weather, recording the passing of ships, how to command and lead people, and how to divide work assignments.

After a year of training, Huang Ching-jung served on such islands as Tungchu, Xiyang Island in Fujian, Chingyu, and Tungting near Kinmen. After serving for a year, he could take a four-week vacation. At the end of his vacation in August, 1949, Huang Ching-jung was sent to the Nanpeng lighthouse in the waters off of Shantou. The area near Nanpeng Island is abundant in squid, but when the seasonal northeastern winds pick up every year around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the fishermen move away and wait for the next year to fish again. That year, not long after the fishermen had left, Xiamen fell to Communist forces, and the lighthouse's supplies were also cut off because of this. Thinking back on that time when he had little food or water, Huang Ching-jung cannot help but get tears in his eyes.

"It was very strange in the lighthouse-regardless of how many people there were, they all provided food for themselves and cooked food for themselves to eat. The state gave each person 100 jin (about 60 kilos) of firewood a month, and everyone washed their own clothes and cooked their own food. During the day, everyone pretended they were strong, but no one knew that we wept at night. The island is so big and dark, and in the night you have to continuously take care of the lights, and on top of that, no matter how frightened you are, you still have to hang in there. After the food was cut off, all we could do was go down to the water to look for seaweed. There was a kind of sweet potato up in the mountains, but after two weeks all of the sweet potatoes were eaten up, roots, leaves, and all. After that, we went to the sea to catch crab and conch-we were living just like in Robinson Crusoe.

"Every day I went down to the water with another lighthouse keeper to wait for the supply ship to come, and sometimes we would see the stars on the horizon and imagine that the boat was coming. The boat is coming! It didn't come in the end. The light of hope rises up like this, and then goes back down, and then rises up again. We even wrote our wills out, hoping that someone would cremate our bodies after we died; it would have been fine with us if they had scattered our ashes on the sea or next to the lighthouse. We waited for four months, and at the end of December a customs boat came from Taiwan. That day we were down by the water, with our heads down, looking for conch. While looking down at our feet, we saw a supply ship in the distance that was drawing closer, we jumped for joy...." With Huang Ching-jung's tearful, smiling memories, it is like watching a documentary come to life before your eyes.

The supply ship brought six months' worth of food, and the supply officers hoped that the two lighthouse keepers would continue to work at their jobs, but Huang Ching-jung, so thin that you could wrap your hands around his waist, demanded that the supply officers let him go back with the boat to Taiwan to recover. The officers on the boat all said they were against it. Huang Ching-jung opened a cooking pot to show to the supply officers: "Look here, all I have been eating is grass, yet I have done a good job of maintaining the lighthouse-and now I have no right to see a doctor?" Yang Feng-pin, an engineer on the boat, summoned up the courage to write a request on Huang's behalf to the boat's British captain, requesting that he allow this child, so thin that he could be blown into the sea by the wind, go back on the boat to Taiwan to recover.

During that year, with society in disarray because of the war, it was always very difficult for most folk to find a means of subsistence. Because Huang Ching-jung was from the Xiamen customs and had not been ordered to withdraw to Taiwan from the mainland, he would be demoted to the rank of technician if he were to serve in Taiwan's lighthouses. At that time it happened that there was a rare opening for a technician at the lighthouse in Keelung. Because he needed to recover from his illness, and because he loved working in lighthouses, Huang had to accept the demotion.

After he recovered, Huang was immediately sent to Pengchiayu, offshore from Keelung. Pengchiayu is full of steep mountains and cliffs, and each barrel of oil to supply the lighthouse held 20 liters; each time Huang carried two of them to the top of the mountain, by the end of the trip he was spitting up blood.

In 1964, he was transferred to Mutouyu in Penghu to serve as director of the lighthouse; this would be the most stable period of Huang Ching-jung's life. Mutouyu, located at the northernmost part of the Penghu islands, is comprised entirely of rocks, with reefs on all sides. It is strategically important terrain, but not one inch of grass grows on the entire island, and every time strong winds and waves rise up, it seems like a salty rain is falling. Every day the island is covered in a salt fog, with salt getting into your clothes and hair, making it very uncomfortable. The building materials for the lighthouse on Mutouyu all came from other places. 39.9 meters in height, it was built by the Japanese in 1899, and is the tallest lighthouse built from cast iron in the Far East. Because the area is frequently covered in thick fog, the body of the lighthouse is covered with an eye-catching pattern of black and white paint. Before the lighthouse was built on Mutouyu, over 50 ships sank in the surrounding waters, perhaps making it one of the maritime areas in Taiwan with the most shipwrecks.

During his time at the lighthouse on Mutouyu, Huang Ching-jung personally saw the tragic scene of a shipwreck. He will always remember New Year's Day, 1968, when the wind and rain rose up, and a freighter struck a reef in the vicinity of the lighthouse. The hull of the ship was badly tilted, with its stern sinking into the ocean. As the crew pushed and shoved to get to the bows, some of them, with no place to stand, fell into the sea. Because the lighthouse lacked wireless equipment, all that Huang Ching-jung could do was to raise alarm flags on to the flagpole to request help from the police station on nearby Chipei Islet. In the end, because of the bad weather, by the time a helicopter landed the next day, he already had looked on helplessly as seven or eight people had fallen into the sea and died. The pain of being powerless to save others is something he has never forgotten.

In the summer of 1966, a typhoon delayed his colleagues' families from going back to Penghu to give birth. Huang Ching-jung, whose daughter had been to nursing school, used the common-sense medical knowledge he had learned from her to deliver babies for the wives of two of his fellow lighthouse keepers. Because the island lacked basic medical equipment, the first time he delivered a baby, the child died of jaundice a week after birth; the second time he delivered twins, but they also died ten days after birth. Even though he followed proper disinfection procedures for both deliveries, the lack of medical equipment took away any guarantee for the health and safety of the crew members and their families who lived for long period of time on the barren island, making for an unbearable situation.

To this day, Huang Ching-jung is the lighthouse keeper who has served at the most lighthouses in Taiwan. Huang has served for both short and long periods of time at different lighthouses. The shortest time he has spent at a lighthouse was five days, at the Santiago (Santiaochiao) lighthouse on the northeastern tip of Taiwan, while the longest period of time was for a full seven years on Mutouyu in Penghu. Frequent transfers have severely limited the time he has spent with family. Huang Ching-jung says that, aside from his parents, the person for whom he has the most gratitude in his life is his wife, Hung Hui-ying, who has worked hard to maintain their home and helped him to adjust to the changing and uncertain work of keeping lighthouses and to give all of his energy to seafaring people. Now, in old age, the time he dedicated to tending lighthouses is the source of his most cherished memories.

Huang Ching-jung on Chamu in 1992. At the time he had been on the job for 46 years. When he retired the next year, he had set the national record for the most years in service as a lighthouse keeper.

After spending his whole life as a lighthouse keeper, even in retirement Huang Ching-jung has not lost his feeling for them. He uses discarded plastic pipes to make models of lighthouses, and their exact scale and lifelike appearance makes people love them.