Purely by accident, a researcher uncovers the will left by her grandfather before he was executed as a communist traitor in 1953, thereby initiating a quest to understand the multi-generational trauma borne by her family under the shadow of the White Terror, and the influence it exerted over her fraught relationship with her mother.

The relocation of the government of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949 was followed by a series of campaigns to root out communist traitors among the island’s populace. Initiating the period known as the White Terror, which cast a shadow over Taiwan for four decades, these campaigns were marked by unlawful surveillance, detainments, trials, and executions, inflicting incalculable trauma on the victims and their families. Swept up in these campaigns, the grandfather of co-author Chang Yi-Lung was sentenced to death in 1953 for the crime of subverting the government. The execution of Huang Wen-Kung was more than the taking of a life, it marked an entire family as “enemies of the nation”. Until the lifting of martial law decades later, they faced countless difficulties, among them the loss of the opportunity to study abroad for Chang Yi-Lung’s mother.

In truth, the trauma of political violence doesn’t end with the first or second generation; it becomes a genetic inheritance that can be passed further. The first half of the book narrates Huang Wen-Kung’s involvement in underground communist organizations and his eventual arrest. Along the way, Chang Yi-Lung explores the political persecution experienced by her mother and her entire family. Using the analytical skills she developed as a biology researcher, she pieces together how this intergenerational trauma gave birth to her mother’s strict style of parenting, leading to an eventual breakdown in their relationship.

In the second half of the book, sociologist and co-author Lin Chuan-Kai adopts a scholarly perspective to fill in the picture concerning the operation of resistance networks under the White Terror, and the methods of surveillance and extra-judicial punishment employed by the autocratic government of the ROC. Simultaneously, Lin Chuan-Kai interrogates his own role as both an observer and facilitator in Chang Yi-Lung’s quest to uncover her family’s past through interviews and archival research.

Beginning as the story of a political criminal whose life was sacrificed on the altar of an era, A Chance Meeting in Spring transforms into the difficult quest of a third-generation inheritor of trauma to confront and heal her family’s wounds. Transcending the bounds of family history and archival research, the book is a deep meditation on the legacy of political violence and its profound impact on a mother-daughter relationship.