Moon Men

In the years when the economy took off, the moon men were there at the tallest building (Taipei 101), in the deepest mines (Haishan colliery and others), far out at sea in the deep-water fishing fleet, and in the most marginal places abroad as migrant workers before the 1980s. They were never absent from any piece of ground on which the country’s major construction stood, and they were indispensable to Taiwan’s economic achievement. What they carried, nobody knew: those were years that cost them their health, their families, and years of youth, culture and mother tongue they could not get back.