Spanish priest falls in love with a beautiful girl in Paiwan, leaving a sad story (Figure)
Pan Mingfu (right) and his biological father Father Su Shilang (left) both have the handsome appearance of European men with straight noses and heavy eyebrows.
Lai Guihua, the mother who fell in love with the priest, was a beautiful woman in the tribe at that time, with a delicate face and a slender figure and a height of about 160 centimeters.
BEIJING, March 19 (Xinhua)-Pan Mingfu, the curly and tall principal of Wutan Primary School in Taiwu Township, Pingtung County, Taiwan, decided to unlock the heart lock for half a century. He said: "I am the crystallization of love between the Spanish priest Su Shilang who came to Taiwan to preach and Lai Guihua, a girl from Paiwan."
According to Taiwan Province’s United Daily News, The Thorn Birds, one of the top ten best-selling novels in the United States in the 1980s, described the story that Father Ralph fell in love with a woman Maggie and gave birth, and it was made into a movie. Pan Mingfu, 53, said that the plot of his life is more tortuous than that of The Thorn Birds.
Church priests can’t get married. In the remote mountainous area of Pingtung, the love story between Su Shilang and Lai Guihua not only touched church taboos, but also made it difficult to accommodate closed ethnic tribes.
"The times have become more open, and my life topic has to be lifted." Pan Mingfu told his life story yesterday. He opened his notebook and said that his biological father Su Shilang was a Catholic Dominican priest. He was only thirty-four years old when he was sent to Jiaping Village in Taiwu Township in 1953. According to records, Su Shilang was the first priest in Taiwan Province Mountain area.
The older local people still remember this priest: Su Shilang can speak fluent Minnan and Paiwan dialect. After a year of missionary work, she fell in love with Lai Guihua, a female missionary, and gave birth to Pan Mingfu privately in 1955, when Lai Guihua was only seventeen.
This love story violated the church precepts and shocked the Paiwan tribe. Zhang Xiuzhen, the eldest daughter of the big boss Liu Bihuang, recalled that at that time, through her grandmother Liu Chunmei, she secretly resolved the local dissatisfaction with the authority of the big boss and arranged for Lai Guihua to marry Pan Keji, the then leader.
Lai Guihua married Pan Mingfu, who was about two or three years old, and suppressed this relationship until she died. Their stories still secretly spread mysterious and beautiful colors; It’s just that the people don’t want to touch the sad past of the parties and avoid talking about it.
Su Shilang later left Taiwu Township and went to Majia, Laiyi and other mountainous areas to preach. Until Pan Mingfu was eleven years old, Su Shilang could not resist the pressure of tribes and churches, and left Taiwan and returned to Spain. Later, he was sent to Argentina again. In 1985, he died in a foreign land, and Taiwan Province, the father and son, never met again.
Su Shilang once wrote a letter to Pan Mingfu from Argentina, writing in Latin, and he asked the staff to assist in translation. "Although I don’t know much about it, I believe that many feelings between father and son should be hidden between sentences." His mother and adoptive father died one after another more than ten years ago, and the mystery of his life has been hidden to this day.
Editor: Wang Yuxi