The Third Son

by Julie Wu

  She was standing on the other side of Chungcheng Road at the front of a crowd, all of whom were peering down the street for their first glimpse of the Nationalist Chinese soldiers. Her face was obscured by the wide brim of a hat trimmed with blue ribbons, but I could tell it was her by the way she stood—feet together, inclining her head with a polite, expectant air—and the way she held, on one side, her brother’s hand, and on the other side what I took to be her father’s. The three of them were easily among the handsomest and most finely dressed of the crowd. Her father was slim and dapper in an elegant, well-tailored suit with a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. His teeth flashed with a smile as he bent to talk to Yoshiko. Her brother was a young man now, as tall and handsome as his father, laughing and patting Yoshiko on the head as she pointed down the road. Yoshiko’s white dress, trimmed with blue ribbons to match her hat, billowed out into her brother’s fine dress pants in the light breeze.

  “Oh, look!” I heard a man near me say to his friend. “There’s Frog Face with his daughter.”

  “The guy who owns the Tiger Café? With that girl in the white?”

  “I don’t see his wife—”

  They chuckled together.

  I wanted so much to talk to Yoshiko. Had she seen the world? Was she no longer poor? I jumped down from the platform onto the sidewalk.

  Gasps and quiet cries of surprise arose around me, and I caught my breath. Had I done something wrong? I looked around in alarm, but no one was paying attention to me. They were straining to look at something in the street, and in the general commotion I squeezed through the dress suits, the lace-trimmed sleeves, the embroidered silk cheongsams from Shanghai, and the traditional Chinese dress robes released from decades of storage and emerged at the front of the crowd.

  There was no question of crossing the street to get to Yoshiko; groups of bedraggled men now strolled down the road, pots and pans dangling from yokes around their necks. Cooks or servants for the soldiers, I thought. The men were gaunt, their clothes faded, with sloppy white stitches meandering across holes they had clearly tried to mend themselves. Seeing loose chickens in the street, they lunged after them, pots and pans clanging together.

  A chicken scampered between my legs, and I leaped back, falling onto the dusty road. A man stepped on my toes with his boot and nearly hit me in the face with a frying pan.

  I scrambled to get up, but when I did, I held an upside-down, empty rucksack, and the man who had given chase to the chicken was holding The Earth.

  “My book!” I yelled at the ragged man.

  “Be quiet, young man!” someone whispered behind me. “He’s a soldier.”

  “A soldier?” I stared at the man’s rotten teeth, his hollow cheeks. This could not possibly be a soldier. Soldiers were terrifying men who wore crisp uniforms and marched in formation. They might demand a chicken, but they would never stoop so low as to chase one in the street.

  The man did not hear me, and if he had, he most certainly would not have understood me, as he was shouting and pointing at my book in a language I had never heard. His words swooped and chopped, his face grew red, and he waved my precious book in the air, marking the cover with his dirty thumb.

  “It’s mine,” I said, reaching for the book.

  He struck my hand back and grabbed me by the arm. He smelled like the goats on the farm near my parents’ country house. I heard him say something that sounded like “Fujian ren,” and he dragged me into the street where the rest of the men still ambled by.

  “Ow!” I struggled to loosen his grip on my arm.

  The man waved down another man who wore no yoke around his neck and appeared of higher rank. I felt a shock as I realized that this actually was an army and that this second man was an officer.

  This officer bent down to me, his hollow-cheeked mouth forming words that were comprehensibly Taiwanese, though with a very odd accent. I would understand later that he must have been from the province of our ancestors, Fujian.

  “What is your name? Why do you have a Japanese book?”

  I began to shake. I had never been face-to-face with a soldier. I had always run from the Japanese soldiers, like everyone else. Any kind of contact with a soldier was sure to bring dire consequences.

  “My name,” I said, my mouth sticking together, “is Sa—”

  “His name is Tong Chia-lin.” My father pulled up at my side, his jacket unbuttoned to reveal his ever-present bow tie and the expanse of shirt over his belly. His eyes were cold and fearless. I had never heard the name he had just called me, ever. I looked up at him in amazement.

  The soldier straightened up, chastised by my father’s aura of authority. “You’re his father?”

  “I am,” my father said, and he glanced at me in a way that made it clear he was not entirely happy about that fact.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Tong, but a soldier in my troop found your boy hiding this book.” He held up The Earth.

  “Sir,” my father said. There was just the faintest trace of derisiveness in his tone that only those who knew him well would recognize. “That is a textbook. We have been occupied by Japan for fifty years and all our textbooks are in Japanese.”

  The officer looked down at the book. He opened it and looked down with disgust at the mixture of kanji and hiragana. “What if I don’t believe you?” he said. He turned the page, and there was an illustration of the solar system.

  “You see?” My father pointed at the picture and, at the same time, deftly dropped a small red envelope—the kind people used for New Year’s money—on top of it. “The solar system.”

  The officer quickly pocketed the envelope and closed the book with a snap. “I see that it is a textbook. You may keep it. Forgive my mistake.”

  As my father’s hand closed around the book, relief and gratitude flooded through me. I reached for the book. “Otosan!”

  In the same instant that I cried out, the soldier was called away, hurrying after the last of the soldiers. The crowd, silent and shocked by the parade of bedraggled soldiers, began dispersing, their welcome banners slack.

  My father whirled to face me, bending so his face was close to mine, his eyes menacing. “Fool!” he whispered. “Don’t you ever talk to me in Japanese in public again. In front of a Nationalist soldier!” He tucked the book under his arm and grabbed my elbow. “I will burn this stupid book when we get home!”

  “No!”

  He dragged me back to the truck, his fingertips digging so hard into my arm that my eyes watered and I knew there would be marks for days.

  Why my one book? Our house was filled with Japanese books. They were on every shelf, in every book bag. That book was the one thing I owned that mattered at all. My throat swelled, but I took a deep breath. I was twelve years old and I didn’t want to give my father and my brothers the satisfaction of seeing me beg and bawl like a baby.

  I climbed onto the truck bed and squeezed again between Jiro and Mariko, who complained that I was wrinkling her skirt. Jiro turned to me, eyebrows lightly furrowed. “What happened?”

  I wanted to answer, but my throat was still swollen.

  Kazuo was standing by the truck with my father. “Nice job, rice-for-brains,” he said to me. And then, to my father: “How did you know what to do?”

  My father grunted. “These people are obviously desperate and corrupt. There’s only one way to deal with people like that.”

  Kazuo chuckled, shaking his head. He put out his hand. “I’d like to have that book,” he said.

  My father handed it to him. “It interests you?”

  Kazuo leafed through it. “It does.”

  “Keep it, then.”

  “Hey!” I jumped to my feet and nearly fell over the side of the truck. “That’s my—”

  “Shut up!” my father barked up at me. “You’ve caused enough trouble today.”

  I sat down.

  Kazuo climbed up onto the truck bed and smirked, brandishing the book and then sitting on top of it, right in
front of me. “That’s better. And now you’ll have no more advantage, little boy.”

  “That’s not fair,” Jiro whispered to me, his eyes wide. “That was yours.”

  I was breathing so hard I had a stitch in my side. I would sooner have burned the book than give it to Kazuo. “I’ll get even with him someday,” I said under my breath. “Someday I’ll—”

  I stopped, remembering to look back at the street.

  Yoshiko and her family were gone.

  6

  I WAS FOR A time consumed by feelings of helplessness and rage. Walking by Kazuo’s room, I could see The Earth, shelved between his geometry and physical science textbooks. Kazuo never read the book, to my knowledge. For him it was a trophy, an assurance that he retained his superiority.

  I could simply have taken it back. But since my mishandling of it had caused so much trouble, and since my father had in fact taken a great risk in retrieving the book from that Nationalist officer, I did not feel justified in taking it back. I was lucky enough that my father had punished me only in this way. At least The Earth was safe in our house. I tried to be satisfied with stealing into Kazuo’s room when he was not there and flipping the book open, its pages fluttering in the breeze that passed through the large screened windows of his room.

  Reading the book was a balm for me through all the changes in the world outside. The Taiwanese textbooks we had studied between the Japanese departure and the Chinese takeover had been swept aside, and I was now called by that strange name, Tong Chia-lin. Outside, we were once again forbidden to speak our own language and forced instead to speak a foreign language. This time it was Mandarin Chinese, the four tones of which—as opposed to the eight of Taiwanese, the atonality of Japanese—we were still training our ears to recognize. We chanted, “Bo po mo fo,” and recited Chinese nursery tales in our cracking preadolescent voices. Between classes, I stole off to clamber up piles of hacked-up desks and peer through the windows at soldiers who lived in a blocked-off section of our school. Some sat on beds of rags, smoking. Others stripped our classrooms of shelving, lighting, the very outlets from the walls. They sold these things, I heard. They sold everything they could remove except for our Japanese textbooks. These they set fire to in the courtyard, along with our desks, cooking over them in huge blackened woks and squatting to eat on the ground, like the poorest of beggars.

  In the streets, sirens wailed, signaling bank robberies and the looting of stores and factories. Toru’s own clinic was looted for stomach powders and antibiotics.

  Once, I passed a grocery store where sacks of rice, barley, and sweet potatoes were piled outside the door. A small crowd had gathered and a small, wild-looking woman fended them off.

  “I paid good money for these! They cost one hundred of those new dollars. My son’s upstairs, but he’ll be right down to carry these inside, so don’t get any ideas.”

  “He’s too sick, Ma!” A girl’s voice called from inside the house.

  “What are you talking about!” The woman wrung her hands, standing in front of the sacks. Her cheekbones were sharp and there were hollows beneath. “Well, my other son will be back any minute now.”

  Why didn’t anyone help her?

  “I’ll carry them in,” I said. Then, as I went to pick up a sack of rice, I saw that three men in the front of the crowd wore Nationalist uniforms. My heart flip-flopped, but I couldn’t fathom how helping this woman with her own rice could be wrong, so I kept my head down and carried the heavy sacks in, one by one.

  “Chit pieng. Here.” The woman pointed me toward the dusty, empty shelves. Inside, she whispered, “You see those pigs think they can just take what they want.”

  The crowd broke apart and I left the store as quickly as I could. I heard a voice call out from the second-floor window, but I was too scared to look back.

  THROUGH THE MONTHS that Taiwan sank into chaos, I continued to steal into Kazuo’s room. He had a tutor to help him prepare for his high school entrance examinations, and as their voices sounded in the kitchen, I stood by his bookshelf flipping through The Earth. I didn’t dare sit, for fear of leaving traces of my presence on his chair or futon. It was in Kazuo’s room one day, as I carefully pushed The Earth back onto its shelf so the spine lined up with the others, that I saw a sheet of paper on his desk. It was set in the middle, as though it were especially important.

  Examinations to Determine Eligibility to Pursue Graduate Study in the United States take place yearly in October. The top twelve scorers in the country will be allowed to apply for a United States student visa. Subjects to include English, mathematics, physics, history, biology, chemistry . . .

  Scrawled across the top of the announcement was a handwritten note:

  No one’s passed from Taoyuan County. Let’s be the first!—Li-wen

  And at that moment, looking down at Kazuo’s fine, neat desk, surrounded by the handsome screened windows facing the courtyard and the stacks of new, folded clothes I would someday get thirdhand, I knew what I had to do. I would take that examination. I would beat Kazuo to America.

  TORU HAD BEEN right: academic success could be my ticket to see the world. And I needed to make up for lost time. The Taiwanese education system was rigidly tiered. All the students who had passed the American entrance exam had graduated from one school—Taiwan University, unequivocally the best school on the island. If I wanted to get into Taiwan University, I had to go to the top high school, and if I wanted to go to the top high school, I had to go to the top middle school. There was no dodging this tracking system. One misstep now would send me down a lesser path, and I would never get the education I needed to pass the most difficult exam in Taiwan.

  And so when the time neared for my middle school entrance exams, for the first time in my life I was nervous about them. Even so, I was unable to study systematically. I was distracted by too many things—the fields, the sky, a neighborhood dog who loved to roam and splash in the paddies when I threw sticks. Only after the dog bit me on the calf did I sit down for one or two days with my Chinese schoolbooks. This was more than I had ever done for an exam, and strangely, the pain focused my mind. I sat in the examining room, blood seeping into the iodine-soaked rags my mother had wrapped around my leg, and sorted through logic problems that I would normally have found too tedious to undertake: There are thirty legs in a roomful of turtles and storks, and twice as many turtles as storks. How many of each animal?

  In the end I passed my first hurdle: getting into the premier middle school in Taipei—Chien Kuo. Chien Kuo’s high school was likewise considered the top high school on the island, and going through the middle school was considered the inside route to Taiwan University.

  The fact that I passed Chien Kuo’s entrance examination had caused much surprise and celebration—even announcements in the newspaper and on the radio. I was the first from my elementary school ever to have passed, and I had not been one of its top students. My family considered my success a fluke; one of my uncles asked frankly whether my father had interceded on my behalf. But my mother, in a fit of appreciation, made a pair of navy-blue shorts just for me—the first brand-new clothes I had ever had. I stroked the seams, marveling at how many times my mother had poked her needle through the cotton. Of course I knew that she had made pants for Kazuo out of the same fabric. But even so—so much labor! For me! I strolled around in those shorts like a king.

  IF I WANTED to be one of the top twelve students on the island, however—the best student Taoyuan County had ever seen—I would need to actually study. I was not at all one of the top students in my class at Chien Kuo, though according to my teacher, who said so in a rather peeved way, I could be if I paid as much attention to his lectures as I did to the workmen outside who built the concrete walls of our school’s new wing.

  I resolved to turn a corner, to take my studies seriously. And so it was that, one February morning in 1947, I hopped off the train at Taipei Station having actually read the books that were in my bag. My brothers Ka
zuo and Jiro ran off toward their school, and I toward the part of the city by the botanical gardens. I smiled to myself, confident that from now on I would be that stellar student Teacher Lee thought I could be. I imagined myself without my brothers, in a world of movie stars, Cadillacs, and freedom.

  But in the streets, there was a sense of disquiet that I had not noticed before today. Since the Nationalist takeover there had been much grumbling in houses and behind closed doors, but now clusters of people stood together at newsstands, talking loudly.

  “She was just trying to make a living!”

  “They just want the money for their own pockets!”

  “Tell them to go try a day of work for a change!”

  “I would’ve given them something to remember—”

  A freshly painted banner hanging over the street read, THE DOGS GO AND THE PIGS COME!

  I had never seen anything so bold. We all knew that “dogs” referred to the Japanese, and “pigs” to the Nationalist Chinese, but to hang it out there in broad daylight . . . Though I never thought I would have missed the Japanese soldiers, I missed the feeling of safety and order we had had before. As my book bag slapped against my side, I hastened past a bashed-in bank and a grocery store sporting the sign RICE! BUY TODAY BEFORE PRICES RISE TOMORROW! Glass crunched under my feet and I smelled something burning.

  When I reached the school gates, I breathed out with relief and only then realized I had been holding my breath for quite some time. Inside, though, we were shuttled from our regular classroom into the newly constructed wing of the school.

  It was the first Friday I was actually prepared for our test, and Teacher Lee was late. The principal—a Mainlander, of course, like all our teachers—poked his head in and said in his usual severe way that Teacher Lee was at a special teachers’ meeting and that we must wait patiently and cause no trouble or we would be in trouble ourselves. As we waited for him, my classmates talked, louder and louder, our voices deadening in the still-drying walls of cement that surrounded us.

  “What can the teachers be talking about all this time?”