Chapter One | The Orphan Without Parents

01 | An Old Legend: The Child Bound to a Chair

Source notice: Folklore / literary reconstruction | Versions differ; this is not presented as established history

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | An old legend

Care for the young in your own family, and extend that care to the young of others.

To cherish one’s own child is human feeling. The true measure of a society is whether it can extend the same protection to children with no ties of blood, no public voice, and no power to seek help.

“Children have ears, but no mouth.” — Taiwanese saying
A child may hear everything and still be unable to explain the pain. Adults must not mistake quietness for safety.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S01-L01 Woman: The window paper has yellowed, the plum branch has withered, and a new generation now tells the tale. Why does this chair remain where it was, as though waiting for hands that should have arrived long ago?

• S01-L02 Man: The legend says she suffered, and those who came later entrusted her suffering to ghosts and gods—as though, while the incense still burned, the living need not admit that a door once failed to open.

• S01-L03 Woman: Do not turn a child’s cry into a curiosity. If she called out, the answer should not have come from a deity in the underworld, but from those beneath the same roof who could hear her.

• S01-L04 Man: I have brought many versions. Every page tells the story differently. Only the empty chair remains unchanged in them all.

• S01-L05 Woman: Then let the story stop beside the chair. Add not a single drop of blood to the legend. Leave only the question it can truly ask: when a child was trapped, did the adults see?

• S01-L06 Man: I lower the scroll. From this moment, I will no longer ask how she became a legend. I will ask how the next child might never have to become one.

Full text

An old house outside time.

There is no wind inside.

The window paper is yellow, like a letter left unopened for so long that no one now dares to break the seal. A dim lamp hangs from the wall. Each time the flame contracts, the wooden chair’s shadow grows another inch across the floor.

A child sits in the chair.

Her feet do not reach the ground. Her arms cannot fall freely at her sides. The knots are hidden among sleeves and shadow, like a sentence the adults have deliberately passed over. She does not cry—perhaps she has already cried. She does not call out—perhaps she called for too long. A child’s voice is slight to begin with. In a room crowded with adult explanations, it becomes as light as ash.

Many versions of the Chair Girl legend—Í-á-koo, 椅仔姑—circulate in Taiwanese folklore.

Some say she was a girl who died after enduring great cruelty. Some say she was confined to a chair and later became a spirit whom people could summon with questions. As the story traveled, its details were patched and repatched like old cloth. Truth and invention became entangled, leaving one image that no one can verify and no one can quite forget: a child unable to escape, and adults beside her who did not loosen the bonds in time.

Generations later, people still repeat her name, as though remembrance might keep the child who was not saved from disappearing entirely.

But a legend cannot testify for reality, and it must not become the answer to any real case.

It leaves only a few questions—questions that feel painfully modern and remain difficult to answer:

When a child is trapped and loses her voice, do the adults nearby see her?

When faint warnings appear again and again, will anyone pause and move closer?

When everyone says they are responsible for only one small part, who is responsible for bringing the whole child safely into tomorrow?

The chair fills the frame.

Its rough legs fade into the dark. The grain of the wood becomes pale scratches on a hospital floor. The shadow of a cord lengthens into a hanging IV tube. The dim wall lamp flares into the fluorescent light of an emergency department that never goes dark.

The sound of a gurney comes from far away.

The old house withdraws into darkness. A door in another age is being pushed open in haste.

02 | When a Child Must Leave Home

Source notice: Explanation of systems | Adoption placement, out-of-home placement, and round-the-clock care must be read as distinct arrangements

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | Leaving home

Who says the heart of a blade of grass can repay the warmth of three spring suns?

A child’s need for attachment and care does not disappear when a family encounters hardship. When the family of origin cannot carry that responsibility for a time, the system does not take charge of a file. It takes charge of a childhood still being formed.

“Each blade of grass has its drop of dew.” — Taiwanese saying
Every life needs care that truly belongs to it. A referral is not the transfer of responsibility; it is the duty to make sure the next pair of hands has taken hold.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S02-L01 Woman: When a child leaves a familiar embrace, he carries very little: one set of clothes, a pair of shoes, and a trust in adults that has not yet learned suspicion.

• S02-L02 Man: The first door says the case has been accepted. The second says a referral is under way. The third says an assessment is pending. Every sentence contains a procedure, and every sentence points to another door.

• S02-L03 Woman: Before you passed on the ribbon, did you see clearly the hands that would receive it? To hand over is not to set down. A referral does not end one’s responsibility.

• S02-L04 Man: I thought that if every door were connected, the road could not break. Only now do I see that the space between one door and the next is precisely where a child can fall most easily.

• S02-L05 Woman: He cannot choose who carries him away or ask where he is being sent. The adults who do have choices must do more than deliver the form.

• S02-L06 Man: Then let this ribbon pass through every door without leaving our hands. At every handover, someone must look back and ask: did the child truly arrive in safety?

Full text

One pair of hands passes a child to another.

The adult world is very good at giving names to separation.

Referral. Assessment. Matching. Placement. Handover. Visit. Each word appears neatly on a form, in the same type size, without tears or warmth. To a very young child, however, they may mean only this: the person who held him yesterday is gone today.

In Taiwan, some children enter the adoption process because their families of origin can no longer provide care. Others are temporarily placed with relatives, foster families, group homes, or residential institutions because of safety, care, or protection needs. This is known as out-of-home placement.

Adoption and out-of-home placement are not the same.

Adoption creates a new legal parent-child relationship recognized by a court. Out-of-home placement provides a temporary care setting when a child cannot safely remain with the family of origin. Round-the-clock childcare while a child awaits adoption may occupy yet another legal and administrative position; it is not necessarily the same as formal out-of-home placement, either in legal status or in the public authorities and oversight mechanisms involved. After Kaikai’s death, this gray area became one of the central subjects of public debate.

These classifications must remain clear because responsibility cannot be sustained through ambiguity. From the child’s physical point of view, however, all of these arrangements begin at the same place:

He must leave the people he knows and be placed in another pair of hands.

The purpose of the system is to provide safer, more stable care. Yet every handover also creates another seam in the duty to protect.

Who confirms that the child is actually receiving proper care?

Who sees the place where he is living with their own eyes, rather than seeing only a photograph sent to a phone?

Who notices injuries, a sudden change in behavior, unusual weight, or a silence that cannot be explained?

If a caregiver repeatedly postpones a meeting, who goes to the door before the next appointment?

A child must not slowly disappear among administrative boundaries, divided institutional duties, visit forms, and a caregiver’s explanations.

Nor should waiting for a new legal family cost him the one place to which he might truly return.

03 | When More Calls for Help Enter the System

Source notice: Government statistics | Figures use the latest complete year directly verifiable in the official statistical database

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | More calls for help

See the smallest sign and know what is beginning; see the first thread and know where it may end.

Danger rarely appears for the first time on the final day. The value of professional judgment lies in gathering scattered signs and recognizing the risk that is drawing near.

“It is not enough to have seen; one must see clearly.” — Taiwanese saying
Having looked is a completed step in a procedure. Understanding what was seen is what may become protection.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S03-L01 Man: Tonight, many windows light again, and many calls are entered into the record. The figures stand in such orderly rows that disorder itself appears, at last, to have a boundary.

• S03-L02 Woman: A number does not wake in terror at night, nor hide behind a door from fear. You are counting reports, but behind those entries may stand the same child, asking for help again and again.

• S03-L03 Man: I can prove that someone knocked, but this table alone cannot prove the door was opened. I can count who was seen, but not who was truly brought to safety.

• S03-L04 Woman: Then do not let the figures become a wall. Lower the statistics and look at the bed, the schoolbag, the bowl behind them—and at how a child waits through each day.

• S03-L05 Man: I once believed that the more data we had, the closer truth would come. Now the long table is buried beneath paper, and the place where the child should be is empty.

• S03-L06 Woman: The blank space does not mean there is no information. It reminds you that the papers were never blank. What went missing was the child beyond the papers.

Full text

A table of statistics fills the page.

The paper is white. The figures are black.

Line after line descends in silence, almost without feeling. Figures do not cry or wake in the night. They prove only how many calls for help reached the threshold of the system.

As of the fact-checking date for this edition, the latest complete year that can be verified directly in the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s child statistics portal is 2024. In that year, 62,314 child-protection investigations involved 59,559 children. The number of cases is not the number of children found to have been abused, and one child may be involved in more than one report or investigation. These figures describe the volume received by the system; they are not evidence of causation in any individual case.

Being seen, however, has never been the same as being saved.

Child-protection investigations and follow-up services in Taiwan, 2024

• 62,314 cases | Child-protection investigations opened.

• 59,559 children | Children involved in those investigations; the unit differs from the case count.

• 57,090 children | Children provided with follow-up services after investigation and assessment.

• 10,810 children | Children classified within those services as receiving protective services. The remainder received welfare services or referrals to other resources. This figure must not be treated as the number found by a court to have been abused.

Statistical definition: Data provided by Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare through the CRC Child Statistics portal, “Child and Youth Protection—Investigation, Disposition, and Services.” The statistical year is 2024; the portal states that the page was last updated in August 2025. This project accessed it on August 16, 2026.

The view settles on the unit printed after each figure.

Behind “cases” may be the same child calling for help more than once. Behind “children” is a bed, a schoolbag, and a set of clothes carried into an unfamiliar room. To an administrative system, they are annual figures. To a child, they are an entire childhood.

Some children reach a safe home. Some begin to trust adults again with foster families, relatives, or residential services. Others remain beyond rescue even after the system has learned their names.

A report is a knock at the door.

The difficult question is what happens after the knock: does someone open it in time?

04 | An Emergency-Room Memory from Behind the Curtain

Source notice: Anonymous reader’s letter / reconstructed scene | Not a medical record, not a recording, and not a court finding

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | A memory from behind the curtain

In this life we so often fail to meet, like Shen and Shang—stars that never share the sky.

Some partings are not journeys into the distance. They take place across a hospital curtain or an emergency-room door, leaving two people forever on opposite sides of a divide that can no longer be crossed.

“Even a small child’s body can speak for itself.” — Taiwanese saying
A very young child may be unable to explain what happened. The body, nutritional state, reactions, and injuries may still leave signs that require professional recognition.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S04-L01 Woman: Listen—the wheels cross the seams between the floor tiles, and every footstep runs toward the same door. The hospital has finally seen the danger, but this is already the last night of the child’s life.

• S04-L02 Man: I want to draw the curtain and see what happened beyond it. Yet to witness is not to intrude, and sorrow should not be performed again merely to satisfy our curiosity.

• S04-L03 Woman: Then remain outside the curtain. Hear the medical team hurry, hear instruments touch lightly, and hear the sigh that is kept low but cannot be wholly contained.

• S04-L04 Man: The child could not tell a complete story, but the changes in his body were never silent. Injury, weight loss, and withdrawal were already speaking for him.

• S04-L05 Woman: At last, every adult began to run. But before this night, who went one step farther because something seemed wrong? Who wrote “we will look another day” and placed it in tomorrow?

• S04-L06 Man: The machines can record only the values of this moment. What belongs in the record is why, before the final night, no one began running sooner.

Full text

Reconstruction notice
The following scene is reconstructed from an anonymous reader’s letter and related public information. The dialogue attributed to the caregiver, physician, and nurses is not a verbatim recording. It must not be read as a medical record, police interview, or statement found by a court to have been made. The letter writer remembered hearing the term “foster family”; retaining that remembered wording does not mean this site has determined Kaikai’s legal placement status.

Boundary for reading: This is one anonymous correspondent’s memory. It is not an emergency-room record, and it cannot establish the identity of the child behind the curtain. Tone, pauses, and the sequence of lines have been shaped as literature. The passage should be read only as a personal memory with explicit limits.

Emergency observation area, late at night.

That night, I was in the emergency department with my grandfather, who had terminal cancer.

Hospitals make it hard to tell day from night. The fluorescent lights were always equally bright, draining the color from every face. The smell of disinfectant hung in the air like a thin frost that could not be wiped away.

Grandfather lay in the bed, breathing faintly.

I sat beside him with my hand over the back of his. The monitor sounded at regular intervals—once, then again. It was not loud, yet it made the waiting feel endless.

Suddenly, wheels came racing through the emergency entrance.

They rattled across the tile and rushed farther inside. Shoes hurried past the other side of the curtain. Someone called for people to clear the way. Someone pushed open the resuscitation-room door.

The current of air lifted one corner of the curtain.

I caught only a glimpse of a very small figure.

I did not see the face.

The resuscitation-room door closed at once.

At the entrance to the resuscitation room.

A physician came out quickly. Above the mask, only a pair of grave eyes could be seen.

Physician | Scene reconstructed from the letter
Who is responsible for this child’s care?

The caregiver standing nearby looked up. The letter writer remembers the answer as even in tone. This site cannot infer the person’s state of mind, or the whole of her response, from that recollection.

Caregiver | Scene reconstructed from the letter
I am.

Physician | Scene reconstructed from the letter
How did the child come to be in this condition? Where did these injuries come from?

The correspondent remembers a short pause before the answer. This account does not assign a motive to that pause.

Caregiver | Scene reconstructed from the letter
He is always playing, running around and bumping into things. He falls a lot.

The physician did not answer at once.

The correspondent remembers his eyes.

Physician | Scene reconstructed from the letter
Only from falling?

Caregiver | Scene reconstructed from the letter
Children bump into things. He did it to himself. I don’t know how it became this serious.

Equipment shifted inside the resuscitation room.

The physician looked back through the door, then turned again.

Physician | Scene reconstructed from the letter
The child’s condition is not ordinary. The hospital is legally required to make a report, and the police will be notified to look into what happened.

The letter writer felt that the tone of the next response changed. This site does not present that impression as a finding about the person’s actual mental state.

Caregiver | Scene reconstructed from the letter
Is that necessary? Hasn’t the social worker already been notified?

Physician | Scene reconstructed from the letter
The hospital has its own legal duties to carry out.

Caregiver | Scene reconstructed from the letter
But the social worker already knows. Why report it again?

The correspondent remembers a brief stillness after those words. Equipment continued to move behind the door. The letter does not contain enough information to reconstruct every reaction outside it. We therefore draw no inference from whether anyone cried. We retain only the institutional question: a hospital’s reporting duty and an existing social-work service are separate responsibilities that must each be fulfilled under the law. The existence of one does not automatically cancel the other.

Back behind the observation-area curtain.

I could not see the resuscitation-room entrance.

I could only hear it.

Several minutes later, the footsteps began to disperse. On the other side of the curtain, two nurses spoke in voices kept very low.

The younger nurse spoke first.

Younger nurse | Scene reconstructed from the letter
What happened to the little boy they just brought in? It was terrible.

No one answered immediately.

There was only the small sound of a plastic glove being pulled tight.

An experienced nurse seemed to stop what she was doing. Her voice sounded tired, as though she had answered the question many times in her own mind and had never found an answer she could bear.

Younger nurse | Scene reconstructed from the letter
The doctor said a report had to be made, and she kept saying there was already a social worker.

The senior nurse was silent for a while.

Somewhere farther away, a medication cart passed. Metal instruments touched with a clear, delicate sound. At that hour, it sounded almost like something breaking.

Literary editorial narration | Not the nurse’s words
A child’s inability to speak does not mean that the child’s body and daily condition have left no signs for adults to recognize.

Every tone from the monitor suddenly seemed distinct.

The experienced nurse looked toward the resuscitation room. She appeared to try to hold back what came next, and did not quite succeed.

Senior nurse | Scene reconstructed from the letter
The correspondent remembers a reference to children sent away from home for care. The original words, terminology, and scope of that remark cannot be independently verified. Then, the nurse stopped at this—

She paused.

Senior nurse | Scene reconstructed from the letter
Especially heartbreaking.

Editor’s note: This remembered line cannot be generalized to foster families, out-of-home placements, or caregivers as a whole. It belongs only to the night as the correspondent remembers it.

There were no more voices beyond the curtain.

Only a very quiet sigh.

I never drew that curtain aside.

I did not see the child with my own eyes, and I did not know his name. I heard only the medical staff moving back and forth, the closed resuscitation-room door, and one sentence spoken so quietly that its sorrow could not be contained:

This child was especially heartbreaking.

The curtain was thin—too thin to stop sound. It was also thick enough to confine everyone to the world on their own side.

On my side was my grandfather, nearing the end of his life.

On the other was a child who had scarcely begun to grow.

An old man was leaving because of illness and time.

A child was leaving, and no one could explain it by saying that his time had simply come.

Months later, the news began reporting the death of a little boy.

His photograph appeared on the screen, and so did his name.

Kaikai.

As I looked at that name, the fluorescent light, the wheels, the hanging curtain, and the break in the nurse’s voice all returned at once.

Only then did I wonder—

The child on the other side of the curtain that night might have been him.

And I understood that what I had heard was not only an attempt to save a life.

It concerned a child too young to tell a complete story, whose body and daily condition had already left signs that adults needed to recognize, verify, and answer.

At the time, the world did not yet know his name.

Source of the republished letter

Republished by | Facebook page “好門媳婦的秘密生活郁小方”

Post | “以下是粉絲來函照刊” (“The following is a reader’s letter, reproduced as received”)

Original correspondent | Anonymous

Original link | https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZuvSMt3R/

Nature of the material | A personal account republished on social media. This site cannot independently verify the full dialogue or all circumstances described.

Editor’s note
The physician, caregiver, and nurses’ dialogue in this section is a literary reconstruction based on the letter, not a verbatim recording. Unverified allegations against identifiable people, speculation about identity, abuse, and curses have been excluded.

05 | It Began with an Amendment: The Founding of the Child Welfare League Foundation

Source notice: Law and institutional history | Historical statements and editorial questions are kept distinct

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | It began with an amendment

Good intentions alone cannot govern; laws cannot put themselves into effect.

Ideals and laws must take form in daily practice. However complete a system appears on paper, goodwill cannot walk to a child’s side unless someone goes through the door and confirms that the child is safe.

“Good intentions still need sound ways of acting.” — Taiwanese saying
Goodwill needs method, oversight, and follow-through if it is not to lose the person it was meant to protect somewhere inside a complicated process.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S05-L01 Man: An amendment emerged from public debate and the wording of law, and an organization was born of many people’s advocacy. The type descended, and at last the rights owed to children appeared upon the page.

• S05-L02 Woman: Ideals are always clear in an institutional history; responsibility at the point of care is easily broken into small steps. Who goes to look? Who asks the next question? Who says, when something is wrong, that waiting is no longer acceptable?

• S05-L03 Man: I once believed procedure could be more reliable than chance, and training more steadfast than goodwill. The larger the house, the more people there would be to shelter a child from the wind.

• S05-L04 Woman: As the page grew, so did the number of words. And with every added line, it became easier for each person to believe that someone else would finish the sentence.

• S05-L05 Man: If a system cannot walk by itself, who must carry the goodness printed on paper, step by step, into the child’s everyday life?

• S05-L06 Woman: Everyone who accepts a duty. The purpose is not to reread the mission after tragedy, but to turn an ideal into action while there is still time for the child to be seen.

Full text

The white emergency-room curtain becomes an aging case file.

The story moves back to the early 1990s.

The documents carry the gray cast of a photocopier, and their edges curl slightly. The internet has not yet become part of public life. “Children’s rights” is not yet a phrase spoken as a matter of course at every policy meeting.

According to CWLF’s public organizational history, legislators, professionals, and civic groups formed a committee at the end of 1990 to promote amendments to child-welfare law. In December 1991, the Child Welfare League Foundation was established. This feature uses only the years and organizational changes that can be checked directly on that history page; it does not repeat a meeting count for which no public primary citation has been located.

The organization began in law reform and advocacy. Its work later expanded into adoption services, searches for missing children, support for families in hardship, family reunification and restoration, childcare consultation, and other direct services.

No nonprofit writes a tragedy into its own history at the moment of its birth.

Such organizations begin with a benevolent belief: that professional practice can support what a family cannot; that a system can be more reliable than chance; and that forms, procedures, and trained people can shelter a child from the harshest winds of circumstance.

But the longer an organization lives, and the better known its name becomes, the more it must carry—not only the ideals of its founding, but the result of every service as it actually reaches a child.

Ideals appear in an institutional history. Responsibility takes place behind a door.

It takes place when a social worker does or does not see a child in person; when a supervisor does or does not question an anomaly; when an organization allows “we will visit another day” to become another postponement; and when public authorities do or do not exchange information before a child loses safety.

More than three decades is a long time—long enough for a law-reform group to become a major child-welfare organization, and long enough for society to ask after successive cases whether the “better world” once promised has reached every room where a child is living.

The file turns to 2019.

One sheet of paper remains open.

It bears another child’s name.

Peipei.

06 | Peipei: A Child in Another Hospital Room

Source notice: Comparative case | The family’s account, the organization’s statement, and the prosecutorial disposition are presented separately

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | A child in another hospital room

What has gone before, if not forgotten, can guide what follows.

To look back at another child is not to collapse two cases into one. It is to ask whether a prior death genuinely changed the system that came after it.

“Events pass; the lesson must remain.” — Taiwanese saying
Otherwise, the next family will once again have to begin its questions from the moment of loss.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S06-L01 Woman: The red paper of the New Year still hangs upon the wall, the word “Peace” written in a careful hand. Yet the ward light is white beyond all seasons, as though it has never understood the wishes of the human world.

• S06-L02 Man: This is another child, another year, another hospital room. We may compare the gaps left by the system, but we must not make the story tidy by turning different causes of death into one fate.

• S06-L03 Woman: The family waited for a visit and received, instead, an emergency call. A care notebook records so much of the everyday. Why do the most important questions remain in its blank spaces?

• S06-L04 Man: The family and public posts raised questions. The organization issued a public response. Prosecutors separately entered a decision not to prosecute. These must remain distinct; our grief may not place a seal upon any side.

• S06-L05 Woman: Yet if a previous loss did not lead to earlier checks, more frequent visits, and clearer responsibility, memory becomes no more than the repetition of a name.

• S06-L06 Man: Then set the two case files apart, and leave the common question between them: did the lesson of the earlier tragedy ever truly reach the child who came later?

Full text

Hospital corridor, Lunar New Year 2019.

The hospital is quieter during the holiday.

Firecrackers sound beyond the windows. Through the thick glass, they arrive only as a few dull knocks, like someone at a distant door. The red New Year couplet in the corridor is new. The characters for “peace and safety” are placed neatly upon the wall. The words are festive; the light in the hospital room remains cold and white.

According to the family’s later public account, Peipei was nine months old when her family applied to the Hsinchu County Government to place her for adoption, after which CWLF handled the process. Following more than two months in a caregiver’s round-the-clock care, her family received a call on the second day of the Lunar New Year in 2019 telling them that she was undergoing emergency treatment at a hospital.

Peipei was therefore not “a five-month-old infant.” The description more firmly supported by the public material now available is that her family applied for adoption placement when she was nine months old, and that she died after later spending more than two months in round-the-clock care. Existing public information does not support a more precise date for the interval between the application and the start of that care, so this project draws no further inference. What can be said is that she was still a very young child, far too young to understand what adoption meant.

A public question, seven years later.

In February 2026, a public post lifted Peipei’s name out of old news reports once again.

The author said that CWLF had previously left a clarification on her page and had also described the Kaikai case as unprecedented. She asked: if a child in Hsinchu had died in 2019 while receiving round-the-clock care arranged through CWLF as she awaited adoption, why was Peipei absent from the organization’s public explanation of whether anything comparable had happened before?

The post relayed an account attributed to Peipei’s aunt. According to that account, the family had been told that they would have to wait at least three to four months before they could visit. They never reached that day. On the second day of the Lunar New Year, a call came instead: Peipei had been taken to a hospital in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, or OHCA.

The family’s account in the post referred to what they understood about her medical condition, including intestinal torsion with necrosis, a respiratory infection, and what the family described as intracranial bleeding. The post also relayed the caregiver’s reported account: that nothing appeared wrong after a meal, and that when she later checked, the child’s body was already cold. Regarding the intracranial bleeding alleged by the family, the caregiver was reported to have said that the child might have fallen accidentally during a diaper change. The family questioned why no such event appeared in the care log the caregiver was required to complete.

The same post said that the family later filed a criminal complaint and that prosecutors decided not to bring charges. It also said that the family later reached a private settlement with CWLF. According to the post, the family wanted more than an apology. They wanted stronger oversight of caregivers, including consideration of video monitoring and more frequent visits by social workers. The post said CWLF responded that these matters concerned internal reform and that it could not promise a direction or timetable, but would take the proposals back for discussion with supervisors.

These details come from a public post and its retelling of the family’s account. This site has not obtained the complete non-prosecution disposition, care log, or settlement documents. Details that cannot be independently verified are therefore not presented as facts established in a judicial proceeding.

The deaths of Peipei and Kaikai must not be written as the same kind of death.

In a public statement issued in 2026, CWLF said that prosecutors had considered medical, emergency-response, postmortem, and forensic materials and concluded that Peipei died of intestinal torsion and pneumonia caused by a viral infection, not from human action. It said the caregiver was not prosecuted, and that the version of the non-prosecution disposition CWLF had seen contained no reference to the intracranial bleeding alleged by the family. CWLF also said that after the event it changed its caregiver contracts so that the person placing a child for adoption would be a party to the agreement, and advocated returning children awaiting adoption to the government placement system when out-of-home placement was needed.

CWLF’s public account of the prosecutorial disposition and judicial outcome must be identified for what it is: the organization’s statement.

To say so clearly is not to erase the family’s pain. In the same way, preserving the family’s questions does not permit this site to rewrite an acute medical death as abuse already established by law.

On one side is the non-prosecution disposition as quoted by the organization, together with the organization’s later explanation.

On the other is the call a family received during the New Year holiday, and the question an aunt still refused to set down years later.

Both sides have documents. The child is absent from both.

Whether Peipei is considered a “precedent” therefore depends on the question being asked.

If “precedent” means only the deliberate killing of a child by a caregiver as established through a judicial process, Peipei’s case and Kaikai’s are plainly different. If the question is whether a child awaiting adoption had previously died while in round-the-clock care arranged through CWLF, and whether that death left changes capable of protecting the next child, then Peipei should not be omitted from the system’s memory.

Peipei did not become a name remembered across Taiwan for years. Her story was like a thin page caught inside a thick file—drawn out once, then covered again. Only after another child died nearly five years later at the boundary between adoption arrangements and care did people remember her anew.

More than seven years have passed. Had Peipei lived, she would likely be carrying a schoolbag into an elementary-school classroom. Nearly three years have passed since Kaikai’s death. Had he lived, he too would likely be in preschool, learning to write his name.

Children should not repeatedly spend the entirety of their lives waiting while adults investigate, debate reform, and divide responsibility.

Different causes of death and different legal findings illuminate the same institutional question:

When a child has left the family of origin but has not yet reached a permanent new home, who bears an unbroken duty of care through the waiting in between?

07 | From Peipei to Kaikai: The Seams Left by the System

Source notice: Court judgment / official information | Records from the time and reforms adopted after the event are presented on separate tracks

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | The seams left by the system

What comes from paper alone will always feel shallow; true understanding requires action.

Records can show that a process moved forward. They cannot, by themselves, establish that a child was safe. Care requires seeing in person, checking one account against another, and acting in time.

“Words must have roots; writing must have evidence.” — Taiwanese saying
Every statement that bears on responsibility must be traced to its source. The fact that someone mentioned it does not mean a court found it to be true.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S07-L01 Man: Not a date is missing, and the photographs remain in the file. Every contact has left its words behind; it seems that everyone completed the part assigned to them.

• S07-L02 Woman: If the documents are so complete, why is the child’s place still blank? Perhaps what was missed was never a sheet of paper, but the changing body beyond the page.

• S07-L03 Man: This page records the caregiver’s explanation; that one records the visitor’s assessment. I place them in order, yet still cannot see who should have stopped to ask another question when the two did not agree.

• S07-L04 Woman: Professional judgment is not copying the most fluent explanation into a form. It is having the courage to say, “I am not yet reassured,” when a child’s appearance and reactions do not match the caregiver’s account.

• S07-L05 Man: Later, the system added checks, changed the frequency of visits, and supplied new rules. These changes show that it began to answer the fracture.

• S07-L06 Woman: Reform cannot return to those 115 days. Its only answer to the child is to ensure that the next binding thread does not break in the same place.

Full text

The monitor continues to sound.

The hospital room of 2019 slowly darkens. The next page is a record of a visit made in 2023.

Kaikai was born in February 2022. His mother sought help because she was unable to support him. The child entered an initial adoption service, but guardianship and related procedural issues prevented it from continuing. His maternal grandmother later obtained guardianship. In 2023, a local social welfare center referred the family to CWLF for a second adoption process.

On September 1, 2023, Kaikai was placed in the care of a round-the-clock caregiver working with CWLF.

From that day forward, the system did not lack knowledge of where he was.

His name was on a roster. His photographs appeared in messages. He had a social worker and childcare visits. A process appeared to be moving.

At the first visit on September 25, the record noted bruising on his forehead. The caregiver said he had struck it while playing.

At the second visit on October 23, the record described him as quieter and lacking energy. The caregiver said he had just awakened.

In November, the caregiver reported that three of his teeth had fallen out. A later park visit and messages concerning medical care introduced accounts involving teeth grinding, possible stress, and other physical conditions.

A fourth visit scheduled for December 5 did not take place. The caregiver said other children in the home were ill and asked the social worker to return another day. Information about Kaikai was subsequently provided by phone and message. In the early hours of December 24, he was taken to a hospital.

The door closed once more.

This time, a physician said there were no signs of life.

The bruise on his forehead.

The eyes without energy.

The missing teeth.

The visit that did not take place.

The photographs sent from one phone to another.

One accepted explanation settles over another, like too many quilts in winter. The adults believe the child is asleep. In truth, he is disappearing, little by little, from everyone’s field of vision.

In 2024, the case entered public view and shocked Taiwan. Only then did the wider public learn that a child not yet two years old had spent the final 115 days of his life at the boundary between adoption placement and round-the-clock care.

After Kaikai’s death, the system began to close gaps. Local governments became involved earlier in assessing whether adoption placement was necessary. When a child awaiting adoption required out-of-home placement, local authorities were to provide assistance under the law. For round-the-clock and overnight care, and for children under three, guidance emphasized unannounced visits, visits at different times of day, and seeing the child in person. It also called for clearer recognition of unexplained injuries, caregivers who avoided visits, and other indicators of risk.

Reform is necessary. Yet reform always appears most complete after a tragedy.

A system does not resemble the villain in a tale. It has no single face to identify and does not smile coldly for a camera. It becomes visible only as one handover remains unclear, one visit does not pass through the door, one abnormal sign is explained away, and one responsibility is passed to the next office.

Peipei and Kaikai had different causes of death and different legal findings. One cannot stand in for the other, and they must not be casually described as the same kind of case.

They do, however, leave behind one question that cannot be filed away under a category:

Once a child has left home, is there anyone among the state, the organization, and the entrusted caregiver who must confirm the child’s safety continuously, from the first day to the last?

The child in the old legend was held to a chair by cords.

Children in the real world can be held by things that are harder to see: procedure, divided authority, trust, and adults’ willingness to accept another adult’s explanation.

The chair recedes into the dark.

The old legend stops here.

The legend ends. The record begins.

What follows is no ghost story.

08 | A Grandmother’s Tears: The Night Before Chapter Two

Source notice: Named courtroom reporting / editorial compilation | Not an official verbatim court transcript

Classical inscription and present-day reflection | A grandmother’s tears

How grievous the toil of parents, who bore and raised us.

Family love is not always complete, secure, or given enough time. A maternal grandmother’s tears cannot replace evidence, but they remind a court that every disputed point in a file once fell upon a real family.

“White hair is not snow; it is worry laid down one day at a time.” — Taiwanese saying
White hair is not an ornament of old age. It is the trace left by passing days. After a loss, time continues, but the weight of care does not grow lighter.

Complete shadow-play dialogue

Literary shadow-play narration | Not dialogue spoken by people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S08-L01 Woman: She made her longing small, afraid that a visit might disturb the care being given, and afraid that every glimpse would make it harder to let go. So she trusted that someone else would go close to the child on her behalf.

• S08-L02 Man: Trust was a lamp placed in the hands of the system. It should have illuminated danger behind the door, not returned after loss as a weight upon the family’s shoulders.

• S08-L03 Woman: She is not asking why time is cruel. She is asking why, while there was still time, seeing, questioning, and protection did not arrive.

• S08-L04 Man: A judgment can answer responsibility, and a file can preserve what happened. Neither can return a child barely more than a year old to her arms.

• S08-L05 Woman: Then do not pursue her tears. Let the camera remain with the microphone, the tissue, and the witness stand gone cold after she leaves, so that the audience understands: after a person leaves, the room returns to its former state. The person who has lost a child never does.

Full text

Taipei District Court, May 2025.

The wood in the courtroom is dark.

Air-conditioning descends from above and passes over rows of people sitting upright. The clock on the wall moves neither quickly nor slowly. Like every clock untouched by grief, it keeps perfect time.

Kaikai’s maternal grandmother is called to testify.

Before she is fully seated, tears begin to fall.

At first, she can answer only through sobs. The judge asks a question; she replies, her voice breaking between words. She says that after Kaikai was born, she cared for him for nearly two months. Because the family could not continue to support him, she sought assistance from the local social welfare authority. Later, after he was placed with a caregiver, she did not dare to visit often: every visit made it harder to part from him again.

She trusted that the social worker would see him on her behalf.

The sentence falls lightly in the courtroom, yet weighs more than any accusation.

What Kaikai’s grandmother said in court | Sources kept distinct

Family member’s courtroom statement | Indirect account supported by named courtroom reporting
A named report dated May 5, 2025, stated that Kaikai’s maternal grandmother became visibly distressed while testifying and said that the two caregivers had no right to treat a very young child in that way. The passage below remains an indirect account; it is not performed in an actor’s imitation of her voice.

What she wanted to ask was this: he was barely more than a year old—how could anyone treat him that way? She also made clear that no one had the right to treat a child that way.

Compiled from this project’s courtroom notes | Not an official verbatim transcript
The following sentence comes from this project’s compilation of courtroom material. At present, no publicly available court transcript with a precise citation has been identified to support it as a verified direct quotation:

“To avoid disturbing the caregiver as much as possible, I learned how the child was doing only through the social worker, Ms. Chen.”

The sentence may be preserved as a record of how a family member remembered that period. Standing alone, it cannot establish the complete number or content of all contacts, or determine legal responsibility. Unless and until an original record can be publicly checked, it must not be presented as verified verbatim testimony.

A grandmother’s tearful reproach | Closing text

Named reporting states that Kaikai’s grandmother became deeply distressed in court and was accompanied as she left. We do not magnify her tears or reenact loss with the sound of weeping.

She once believed that placing the child in the care of the system meant choosing a safer road for him. When she spoke of him again in court, that trust had become a question time could not answer: while there was still time to take him away from danger, why did the duties meant to protect him not arrive first?

The courtroom eventually returns to quiet. Air continues to move the paper at the edge of the table. For a family that has lost a child, however, time does not fill the place left empty.

This section does not treat tears as evidence or grief as a judgment. It places a family’s loss beside the case file to remind us that every date in that file was once a present day in which a child might still have grown.

Image caption | Artistic reconstruction, not courtroom photography
The courtroom sketch is an artistic impression, not a photograph of the hearing or an official court record. It does not replay the grandmother covering her face or becoming overwhelmed.

The next chapter begins with a sentence repeated in the course of legal proceedings—a sentence that must be read together with its source and context. Repetition does not make a statement true. This page does not decide in advance between disputed accounts.

Closing Shadow Play | Let the Next Door Open Sooner

Original literary shadow-play narration | The two figures are gatekeepers, not people in the case | Not a real recording | Not a court finding

• S09-L01 Woman: The play is almost over, and the lamps will soon go dark. We have passed through legend, hospital wards, and a courtroom. Must all that remains be the name of a child who can never return?

• S09-L02 Man: If the files can tell us only after tragedy who did wrong, then a page is still missing. That page should say who had a legal duty to activate protection and open the door in time—before danger became the ending.

• S09-L03 Woman: Flowers bloom again, and spring returns. But the years a child has lost cannot be restored by the flowers of another season.

• S09-L04 Man: To remember him is not to hold him forever in his final night. It is to ensure that when the next injury appears, someone believes, someone asks again, and no one places today in the keeping of tomorrow.

• S09-L05 Woman: Nor should protection be entrusted to legend, luck, or one good person standing alone. Let every handover be confirmed, and let every duty pass through the door.

• S09-L06 Man: Then please, open this door. Not to look upon sorrow, but so that while the next child still has time to grow, someone is already waiting outside.

Closing words

To remember him is not only to remember a tragedy.

May the next child be met by an outstretched hand before harm occurs.