The Road Home.docVIP

The Road Home 　　The haunting dreams of home finally come true four decades after these war veterans crossed the Straits. 　　 　　ZHANG Zhizhang lost contact with his father in 1949. The writer from Taiwan made his first trip to the mainland in 1992, cherishing the hope of finding him. Scanning the crowds as he wandered through Nanjing’s busy downtown, he wondered: “Could my father really be among them? Of the 1.2 billion people, how many families share a story like mine? Has anyone ever researched and calculated their number?” 　　No one can say for certain how many families were separated when the political tides that divided the Straits pulled and split people on either side. Some widely accepted data shows that from 1949 to the early 1950s, about two million military and civilian personnel went to Taiwan with the Chiang Kai-shek regime, 400,000 of whom were veterans of the war. Likewise, about 30,000 people from Taiwan were left on the mainland; they came after 1945 to serve in the army, make a living, or avoid political persecution. Each is a family separated by the fates of history. 　　 　　The Dawn of Hope 　　 　　On the last day of 1978, China Central Television (CCTV) made an unprecedented move by broadcasting a documentary about Taiwan. For the first time people on the mainland soaked up the picturesque scenes from the other side of the Taiwan Straits. The following day, the first day of 1979, the National People’s Congress published A Letter to Taiwan Compatriots. 　　This was not the first time that the central government issued an open letter to the Taiwan people, but the 1979 version was quite different. This letter used “Dear Taiwan compatriots” instead of “servicemen, civilians and other compatriots in Taiwan, Penghu, Jinmen and Mazu,” and it spoke of the goal of “peaceful reunion” instead of the term “liberation of Taiwan.” At the same time, it declared the termination of the routine, symbolic bombardment of Jinmen and explicitly put forward the hope