The Third Son

by Julie Wu

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I hesitated. “Maybe because of Aki. And I’m not the firstborn.”

  “Aki?”

  “I kept him out too late. That’s what she says. It’s why he died.”

  “But you were what—six?”

  “Five.”

  He was silent for a moment, looking down at the needle in my arm. The lamplight flickered and he absentmindedly checked the ties on the splint. “Your poor mother,” he said.

  I looked up at him in surprise.

  “I don’t think she ever wanted the life she has,” he said. He looked back down and his eyes slid toward my midriff. Without speaking, he dug a small jar of ointment from a box and smoothed it onto my skin. “Sometimes people are unhappy, Saburo, and they make others suffer to feel better. Do you understand?”

  “No,” I said. I closed my eyes, feeling the sting of the ointment on my wounds. I thought of Yoshiko chattering so happily about her father and his plans to see Japan and China. I wished I could have been like her.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Saburo,” Toru said.

  He finished applying the ointment and washed his hands. It began to rain, the raindrops pattering against the windows.

  “Finally,” I said.

  “What?” Toru looked over at me as he dried his hands on a towel.

  “It’s finally raining. I knew it would.”

  “Why? Because the air strike’s ending?”

  “No. The clouds. When they look like fish scales, it always rains. Only this time it took a whole day.” I imagined Yoshiko hearing the rain, too, and remembering me.

  Toru laughed in surprise, the absent look leaving his face. “There’s a lot going on in that head of yours, isn’t there? What else do you think about?”

  “Toru,” I said, “have you seen the world?”

  He smiled. “The world? I have seen Tokyo. I studied there for a year. I wanted to go to America, but I didn’t have enough money and my English isn’t good enough for me to take classes there.”

  “America? Why? They’re destroying Taoyuan. They tried to shoot me yesterday.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, sighing. “That’s war. These young men with guns think it’s all a game. But America itself—it’s a country founded on principles, on personal freedom.”

  “I’d like to see America, too,” I said. “And Japan.”

  He patted my arm. “Then we will get you better. And when you get better, stay inside and study and be a good boy. You’re very smart, very capable, and if you study hard you’ll go anywhere you want to go.”

  “But I’m not smart,” I said. “The teachers punish me every day.”

  “They do?” He folded his arms and watched me for a moment, then leaned back to stuff the vial of antivenom into his box. He turned to face me again. “There’s a certain kind of mind that most teachers do not appreciate,” he said. “Teachers like rules. And they like the children who follow the rules, not the ones who question them. Mothers, too, I should say. Some mothers, anyway, are like this, too.”

  He got off the box he had been sitting on and foraged around inside it.

  He pulled out a book and handed it to me.

  “Keep your questions inside. Direct them toward your studies and you’ll be a great inventor or scientist, a famous artist. My old math teacher gave me this. The best teacher I ever had. Something to read until you’re feeling better.”

  I drew my finger over the book’s rough blue fabric cover. Gold kanji spelled out the title, The Earth.

  4

  AFTER TWO WEEKS IN the hospital, I was placed in an oxcart and sent north. My father had finally agreed on a price for the country house and evacuated our family.

  Toru had saved my life, and the antivenom had saved me from any neurological damage. But I did not feel as lucky as I was. As I sweated in bed, first in the hospital, then on a musty futon with a view of Guanyin Mountain, the scene in the rice paddy played over and over in my dreams. The snake writhing, black and white against the blue sky, its fangs dripping with venom. I willed it sideways, away from me, behind me. I tried to run away, scramble out of the paddy. But my legs were stuck in the mud, and every time, the snake fell straight down, ruining everything. I would never find Yoshiko and her brother and their happy home.

  Periodically I awoke to find on the floor beside me a cup of tea and a bowl of rice with a speck of egg on top. I guessed it was about a quarter of one scrambled egg, my mother’s concession to my illness. I ate, the rice sticking to the sides of my mouth, and then fell back into my terrified dreams.

  I opened my eyes one day feeling suddenly clearheaded. I threw off the damp covers, stood up, and nearly fainted. I held the wall for a minute to keep from falling. But then I kept walking, feeling very odd as I left the rancid bedroom and found my way outside. My mother was sitting on a bench by the back door, trimming beans. My littlest brother and sister were poking at an army of ants with a stick a few feet away.

  My mother looked up. “Ah, you’re up,” she said, and she bent back to her work.

  I had seen Yoshiko’s brother enfold Yoshiko in his arms. I had heard the worry in his voice. And now I knew how a child should be greeted after escaping death.

  I was starting to wish I had never met Yoshiko. Before meeting her I had not known how very much I was missing at home. I felt again that rising ache inside and turned my face from my mother. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, soothing myself with the scent of sun-warmed grass. The wind blew gently on my face, and bamboo leaves rustled beyond the house, calling me to explore their shady, hidden-away places.

  I felt light headed again and sat down on the stairs. “Where are Kazuo and Jiro?” I asked after a moment. “Are they at school?”

  “There’s no school here,” she said. “I told you many times that I had no access to school when I grew up here. They’re with their tutor.”

  I remembered Toru’s admonishment to study. “Do I have a tutor?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll sit in with Kazuo and Jiro, then,” I said.

  She looked up at me, eyebrow raised. “With Kazuo and Jiro? You’re still sick.”

  “I’ll be better in a couple of days,” I said.

  She snapped the ends off a few more beans, eyes flickering as she calculated the extra costs, which were probably close to zero. “Hou,” she said. “But you’re not to slow them down. I will not allow her to change her lessons to suit you.”

  TWO DAYS LATER I sat in the kitchen with Kazuo, Jiro, and a curly-haired Japanese tutor named Keiko Sato, who was reciting arithmetic drills. Kazuo was in his element, eyes focused on Sato Sensei, his plump hands calmly folded over the neat rows of writing on the papers in front of him. He answered with great speed and just enough scorn to let everyone know he knew the sums cold, but not enough so as to be punished for being disrespectful. Jiro sat beside him, stumbling over his responses, his eyes wide with panic and doubt. Before him was a pile of his own work, each of his strokes neat enough, but just a bit too short and uneven to be considered beautiful.

  Sato Sensei glanced at me, her round, freckled face smiling kindly. “Sorry, I know you’ve only just finished second grade.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. Though I took a bit longer, I did the problems as well as Jiro, who was two years older than me.

  Sato Sensei cocked her head. “How did you figure out that sum?”

  “Well,” I said, “you count up by twenty to one hundred sixty, and eight threes is the same as two twelves, so I subtracted two tens and a four.”

  Jiro looked at me, mouth open.

  Kazuo snorted. “That’s not how you multiply!” His voice was scornful, but I could see him looking off, trying to figure out what I had just said.

  After our session ended, I overheard Sato Sensei talking with my mother in the entryway.

  “He’s exceedingly bright. He figures these things out intuitively, and his fund of knowledge is extraordinary—”

/>   “I don’t know what you’re talking about. His school reports are mediocre at best.”

  “Perhaps he’s bored at school—”

  “Bored! He’s just lazy. Not like my Kazuo! He’s already said he wants to be a doctor. Have you seen his calligraphy?”

  The following day, Sato Sensei quizzed us about the water cycle and laughed in amazement at my answers. I had never had a teacher who paid so much attention to me. I grew bolder with her praise, enjoying Kazuo’s crestfallen looks, and I thought that perhaps Toru was right, that if I studied I might go places.

  But on the third day, I overheard my mother and Sato Sensei again.

  “ . . . the boy is distracting him and Jiro from their work—”

  “On the contrary, he enlivens the discussion—”

  “That’s not what Kazuo tells me. I will not allow him to be slowed down any longer—”

  “And how will Saburo’s education be achieved? With all due respect, Mrs. Togo, not all firstborn sons get such preferential treatment.”

  “Some sons are more deserving than others.”

  The next day, the door to the room was locked, and I had no more tutoring sessions with Keiko Sato.

  WE STAYED IN the country house for three years. While Kazuo and Jiro were tutored, I roamed the fields and forests until well past the time my mother considered to be late; on rainy days and evenings I sat by the courtyard, carefully turning the damp pages of The Earth.

  Sometimes Keiko Sato came to the house early on rainy days, shaking the water off her umbrella and resting it against the courtyard steps, and I wondered whether she came to the courtyard on purpose to find me.

  “I’ve learned the names of the clouds,” I said, whispering so my mother would not hear me. I was ten and it was March. It always rained in March. “I’ve learned how they’re formed.”

  She leaned in close, also whispering, her curly hair streaked with gray. “Tell me.”

  But more often than not, when I returned from my outside adventures, Sato Sensei was gone and I was left by myself in the evenings to read and reread The Earth.

  The years passed, and I grew taller, thinner, fed as much from my growing knowledge of the stratosphere, the ionosphere, and the aurora borealis as from the berries and mushrooms and silvery fish that I gathered from the countryside. And as I did, those two days in Taoyuan—the day I had met Yoshiko, and the day the snake had bitten me—crystallized in my mind like two glittering windows into worlds I had never considered it possible for me to see. They created such longing in me that my dreary existence became almost too painful to endure. I had only this blue book, which proved that other worlds—other planets, even, and other galaxies—did exist, that our lives were infinitesimal in the face of the universe. That there might be no limit to what I could learn or where I might go some day.

  The Japanese surrendered. The war was over, and we could now return to Taoyuan. Sato Sensei came by to give Kazuo and Jiro her last lesson, and I waited in the courtyard for her to finish. My mother packed boxes in the entryway, pausing every few minutes to sigh or complain.

  Sato Sensei stepped into the courtyard. She put her finger to her lips and bowed hastily. Glancing toward my mother, she tapped my book, pointed mysteriously toward the sky, and, picking up her umbrella, disappeared forever.

  As we returned to our house in Taoyuan, I looked up from my seat in the rickshaw into the night sky. The rickshaw bumped and swayed beneath me while the stars shone down, their light piercing through the outer reaches of their own galaxies and through all the orbits of our solar system, through all the layers of oxygen and nitrogen, dust and heat, ire and disappointment, to reach me. I knew what Keiko Sato had been trying to tell me, and it was something I’d always felt—that the stars, the sky, the earth, would save me from this life. I just didn’t know how.

  5

  AS FOR YOSHIKO, I did see her again, on the day the Mainland Chinese soldiers—Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army—arrived.

  I had been reading The Earth and was as usual the last member of my family to get ready. I hadn’t heard them calling me or noticed them getting ready.

  “Saburo!” my mother called. “You’ll make us all late for the parade!”

  A parade, to welcome the Chinese Nationalist takeover.

  The jubilation over the departure of the Japanese and the imminent arrival of Chinese Nationalists confused me. We had been taught in school to identify with the Japanese and revere their culture. Hadn’t we bowed low before our classroom portrait of Emperor Hirohito and whooped when our principal announced the attacks at Pearl Harbor? Hadn’t we just finished cheering on the Japanese fighter pilots, the ones who didn’t shoot us down?

  My teachers had taught us all the good things the Japanese had done for Taiwan. They had built our schools, our airfields, the rail lines stretching north to Keelung and south all the way to Kaohsiung. They had even let the Taiwanese people elect local representatives. Representatives like my father.

  My father grunted and shifted in his armchair when we asked him these questions after a particularly breathless radio commentary about Chiang Kai-shek. “Only at the end did the Japanese let us do these things. At the beginning they squashed us down like bugs. Tens of thousands of Taiwanese. Like this.” He drew his finger across his throat and pointed to our family altar, where incense smoldered in a small pot before a scroll of our family tree. “Our ancestors are from China. Never forget it. Japan and China have been warring for many years. In 1895, Japan defeated China and got Taiwan. Now, with this American bomb, Japan has lost the war and lost Taiwan. We are going back to the Chinese, and people will always be glad to be ruled by their own kind. This is why everyone celebrates.” He paused, frowning into the distance.

  “But the situation is more complicated than many people realize. It is not just any Chinese who come to rule us, but the Nationalists, and they are not coming here because they want to,” he said. “They are coming in defeat.”

  “I thought you said they beat Japan,” I said. Kazuo snickered behind me.

  “China is split,” my father said impatiently. “The Nationalists have ruled for a short time and the Communists are rising and decimating the Nationalist power base. The Communists and the Nationalists fought off the Japanese together but were also fighting each other, and the Communists are winning. Chiang Kai-shek is almost done for. But the Americans support him. They dislike Communism, and that is why, though the Nationalists are losing control of China, they get us as a booby prize.”

  He took a couple of puffs on his cigarette. “And so the losers get the sweet potato,” he said, referring, as we all did, to Taiwan’s tuber-like shape, “and we welcome them with open arms.”

  I STUFFED MY book into my rucksack and hurried outside, where the whole family except for my father was piled into the bed of a delivery truck.

  I climbed in and squeezed between Jiro and my younger sister Mariko on the metal bed. I felt a pull on my rucksack. “What are you doing with that?” Kazuo said from behind me. “It’s dirtying my trousers.”

  I yanked it back and curled my arm around it. Jiro moved over to make room. He looked at me. He had grown bigger, like me, nearly as tall as our mother, but his eyes were still fearful as a little boy’s. “Why are we going to see the soldiers? They’re so loud.”

  Their march, he meant. The only army we knew was the Japanese imperial army, whose synchronized march was so loud and terrifying that the streets would empty long before any soldier was visible. We naturally assumed the Chinese army would be the same.

  “A parade!” my father scoffed. “We fought the Japanese when they came. People weren’t stupid then.” I looked to the side of the truck, where my father approached the cab with the Taoyuan magistrate, a thin man who wore black glasses and a friendly smile. He had been a leader of the Home Rule Association under the Japanese.

  “Come, old man,” the magistrate said. “For so many years we have dreamed of this moment. Celebrate.”
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br />   “We have dreamed of the Japanese leaving, not of the Chinese Nationalists coming. Don’t you wonder why they were so unpopular in China?”

  The magistrate laughed, his thin face creased deeply around his mouth as he opened the cab door and clapped my father on the back. “Such a man! Don’t worry. The Chinese are our brethren. Even the Japanese were beginning to concede to our demands.”

  “Yes.” My father’s face was dark and mirthless as he shrugged off the magistrate’s hand. “But Chiang Kai-shek is a general, not a monk. He won the whole of China before he lost it to the Communists. And he did not win it by asking politely.”

  My father slammed the door shut, and the magistrate, smiling and shaking his head, walked around to climb into the driver’s seat. The windows were open and my father’s voice carried through the air.

  “Think,” he said. “Chiang’s Nationalists have been brutalized not only by the Communists but also by the Japanese, and here we drink sake and sleep on tatami. The West has given Taiwan to the Nationalists to punish Japan, not because Chiang Kai-shek loves us.”

  The truck started up, and my father’s words rose over the roaring of the engine.

  “Only a child believes his rulers have his best interest at heart,” he said. “We would be wise to disabuse ourselves of such illusions.”

  WE WERE UNLOADED onto a set of tiered platforms in the downtown section of Chungcheng Road, with my father joining the magistrate and members of the town assembly at the top. There were three chairs sitting on the lower platform where my brothers and sisters had been deposited, and they quickly busied themselves squabbling over whether the oldest or the youngest should get to sit. Only Jiro stood looking down the street, a fearful expression on his face.

  I looked down over the crowd standing on the sidewalk around us. The populace of Taoyuan lined either side of the street, waving red-and-blue Nationalist flags and scarlet banners saying WELCOME, GENERALISSIMO CHIANG! Though in fact only Governor Chen Yi and his troops were coming today.

  And then I saw Yoshiko.