by Emmanuele Silanos

Lin Kuai Min was 18 years old when his best friend died suddenly. “If friendship, even the finest friendship, is just an illusion destined to vanish,” he concluded, “then it is not worth being anyone’s friend.” So he decided to keep to himself, with his pain and his anger. He enrolled in the Faculty of Languages at Taipei University to study Italian, but he didn’t bond with anyone; he would sit in the last row and go home right after the lesson. This isolation went on until Andrea, a CL teacher, began to gain his confidence. One day, he invited him to School of Community. Lin Kuai Min began then to go to every meeting because there, he says, “they speak of friendship as something that never ends. And I have no interest in things that are destined to die.” He spent the third year of university in Italy, in Perugia, and kept in contact with people of the Movement, until the day Fr. Paolo Desandré, a priest of the St. Charles Fraternity, took him to visit Rome. When Lin Kuai Min saw Caravaggio’s famous painting, The Call of St. Matthew, he was silent for half an hour with his eyes fixed on that picture. As he left the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, this young man looked at Paolo and said to him, “I’ve understood: that light shining from Jesus to Matthew is our friendship.” Lin Kuai Min is now called Vincent. This is the Christian name he chose three years ago, in honor of another painter, Vincent van Gogh, the only one capable of transmitting in his paintings the same drama that he lived in that period of loneliness and delusion.
The first CL people to arrive in Taiwan were Maurizio (“Icio”) and Isa, in 1991. They began teaching Italian in the university in 1996. It was through them that Giovanna and Simona (these are their Christian names) came to meet the faith and Fr. Giussani’s charism. Then three more Italians arrived, Andrea, Cecilia, and Valentina. Then it was Marco’s turn, and thanks to him the lives of Julie and her daughter Penny were changed. Finally, in 2004, Carlo and Pina Corti arrived, with their two children. We, as the St. Charles Fraternity, have been here in Taipei since 2001. In these six years, our history has been a series of encounters with people who live on the Non-Existent Island, a country that cannot be recognized politically by the rest of the world and is continually at risk of military attack by China, the Motherland, which will not accept even the idea of a formal independence. It is a country where millenarian Chinese family traditions live alongside new ideals proposed by the Western consumerist world. We live in the suburbs, in a parish surrounded by a typical Chinese market, swarming with noisy people continually on the move, where the parish priest, Fr. Paolo Costa, has to start over and over again from the basics of the catechism. This is why we are present in the university, where two of us, Fr. Paolo Costa and Fr. Paolo Cumin, teach Italian. This is why I moved here, decided to start the long course to learn Chinese. And this is why we are finishing the tough task of translating Fr. Giussani’s The Religious Sense into the language of this people, so as to witness Christ to them, too–these people who are living on the threshold of the most mysterious and impervious country in the world. Christ is the answer to that question in everyone’s heart, present now in the sacraments and in the companionship of the Church. We are again and again surprised to discover how true this is. One month ago, at the School of Community at Carlo and Pina’s house, Steve, a man of 50 who has been our friend for more than two years, said he wants to be baptized, and Naomi, a young Japanese mother, lit up: “I want it, too, for myself and my two children, because my friendship with you has healed me, and this is the first miracle that Jesus has worked in my life.”