Where Every Ghost Has a Name

Where Every Ghost Has a Name offers readers a gripping tale of Taiwan’s road to democracy through the lens of one family’s sacrifices. This memoir recounts the story of Thomas Liao, a Taiwanese Independence leader after WWII that advanced the cause of democracy, whose fight for freedom tore his family apart and changed the history of Taiwan. In 2010, Kim Liao traveled to Taiwan to learn the truth about her family. After WWII, her grandfather Thomas Liao became the leader of the Taiwanese independence movement, his land was seized, his relatives were arrested, and his nephew was sentenced to death. With their lives at stake, Thomas’s wife Anna brought their four children to America to start a new life—never speaking a word about Thomas again. When Kim arrived in Taiwan six decades later, she was shocked to learn that the KMT government had erased much of the story of Taiwanese independence from the official historical record. For years, Taiwanese citizens were kept in the dark about the violence that transpired during four decades of martial law, with the silenced voices of the White Terror Period mirroring the silencing of the Liao family’s story.Despite this suppression, she learned that former independence leaders had preserved this history in their memories and personal archives. With their help, Kim discovered two stories: her family's story of love and loss, and Taiwan’s fight for freedom.