The Third Son

by Julie Wu

  “What will you be now? A janitor?”

  I was silent, chewing my rice, flavored with soy sauce and invective.

  As I lay back onto my futon, I heard snippets of news from the radio. The Settlement Committee, of which the Taoyuan magistrate was a member, had presented the Thirty-Two Demands to Governor Chen Yi and his government, calling for steps toward greater Taiwanese representation—the enactment of a provincial autonomy law, new elections of the People’s Political Councils, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Governor Chen Yi announced that he would meet with the Settlement Committee to negotiate.

  My father snorted. “They hope the Americans will hear,” he said. “They could just have knocked off all the Mainlanders, but they think this way they’ll be let into the United Nations.” He spoke derisively, but as he brought a teacup to his lips he had a wistful expression on his face.

  But then, on March 8, my father’s cynicism was once again proved correct. Chiang Kai-shek’s Twenty-First Division arrived at Keelung and Kaohsiung. These were not like the bedraggled troops we had initially welcomed with a parade; they were the Nationalists’ most notorious soldiers. They had been told Taiwan was host to a Communist uprising, and having lost so many lives to the Communists, the new troops were vengeful and unmerciful. They swept through the cities, killing every man, woman, and child they encountered in the streets. Chen Yi’s concessions had been a farce, designed to buy time as the division boarded boats on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.

  The next morning, the magistrate was dragged out of his house and shot in front of his wife and children. In the days to come, a similar fate befell all other members of the Settlement Committee who had not yet gone into hiding, as well as the members of the Loyal Service Corps, university student activists, prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians, and any person who performed or had ever performed the criminal act of showing leadership or offending a Mainland official.

  We stayed inside. My parents would not even answer the door, as they had heard that the Nationalists would shoot whoever opened it. It was a fail-safe way of eliminating heads of households.

  During our isolation I dribbled a ball in the courtyard with Jiro or folded airplanes for my youngest brother and sister out of musty old newspapers. But my stomach pains worsened and I began having diarrhea with blood in it. I grew so light headed and weak that I retreated to my futon, seeing, on the way, Kazuo’s room with The Earth tantalizingly on his shelf as he studied, his broad back hunched over his desk. Just walking the few yards from the courtyard to my room winded me. My body was dwindling with my dreams; I was becoming a shadow.

  One day my parents summoned Toru to the house to attend to a painful rash on my mother’s shin. As he was already out seeing patients, they didn’t mind asking him to make the trip to our house. Doctors weren’t safe from persecution—a prominent physician downtown had recently disappeared and was presumed dead—but Toru was a young doctor who was not yet prominent or politically active, so he seemed less likely to be targeted.

  I heard Toru’s calm voice in the great room. “It’s a spider bite,” he was saying. “There’s nothing to do.”

  “I’ve been putting this cream on it to make it feel better,” my mother said.

  “Ane hou.”

  “I wanted to be a nurse, you know. It was my parents who wanted me to stop school and help on the farm. Otherwise I was very smart and I could have gotten into a good nursing school.”

  “Of course you could have,” Toru said.

  I stood in the shadows of the hallway. I wanted so much to see Toru, yet I felt too ashamed. He must have learned of my expulsion by now.

  My father asked him for news. Toru, lowering his voice, replied that he had treated a university professor who had been held for questioning. For two days the professor had been tightly bound with sharp wire, so that every movement had caused the wire to cut into his flesh.

  “. . . and I saw a ten-year-old boy with stumps for hands because a soldier wanted his bicycle. The child told me he refused to give up the bicycle because it was his father’s, and the soldier simply sliced off the boy’s hands with a bayonet, took the bike, and left the child screaming and bleeding on the street. Luckily there were passersby who stopped his bleeding and brought him to me. They picked his hands up, too, but I am not a surgeon, nor could I find anyone else skilled enough to reattach them.”

  “Ho!” my father exclaimed. “What a horror!”

  “I dream about that poor boy at night,” Toru said. “You are right to keep your children at home.”

  MY MOTHER INSISTED that Toru stay for dinner.

  I sat listlessly at the table, picking at my rice and avoiding Toru’s eyes while he talked in low tones with my parents about the government crackdown.

  “Boats are having trouble passing through Keelung Harbor,” Toru said, “because it’s so plugged up.”

  “Plugged up with what?” Jiro said beside me.

  “With fish,” Toru said, turning to smile at Jiro.

  But I knew that Toru had meant with corpses.

  I pictured the harbor filled with blood and floating bodies, the boats knocking against what was someone’s father, someone’s daughter.

  All of a sudden, I realized Toru was staring at me. I stared back at him. What had he said? Had he said something about my expulsion in front of the whole family?

  “I—I haven’t done . . . ,” I stammered.

  “He’s pale as rice paste!” Toru said.

  “Ah,” my mother said, waving her hand dismissively. “I keep telling him to get up and move around. All he does is lie on his futon—”

  But Toru had risen and come to my side. He kneeled, putting his hands on either side of my head, and finally I realized he was not talking about my expulsion at all. He pulled down my lower eyelids with his thumbs and tilted my head back to look into my mouth. Though I had been avoiding him all day, I felt, at his sure touch, an immense relief, and it was with gratitude that I watched him swiftly turn my hands over to inspect my fingernails.

  “My God! It’s a wonder you’re sitting upright at all,” he said. “You’re terribly anemic!”

  ONCE AGAIN I lay on the examining table of Toru’s clinic. His window was now covered with iron bars, and his front door had been reinforced with a chain and a large dead bolt. My arm lay in a modified version of the immobilizing splint he had used to infuse the antivenom into me four years ago.

  He moved about the room, setting a bottle of rubbing alcohol on the counter and unwrapping a needle and a syringe. He opened a steel cabinet and pulled out a large bottle of yellow fluid.

  “But where did all my blood go?”

  He shut the cabinet and twisted the needle onto the syringe, pulling yellow fluid into it from the bottle. “You’re malnourished,” he said. “You’ll need daily treatments.”

  As Toru pierced my skin with the needle, I winced. “I thought it was from being sad,” I said.

  Toru pulled back on the syringe, and my blood swirled up into the fluid. He pushed it back into me. He moved quickly, preoccupied; a baby wailed in the full waiting room next door. He glanced at me, pushing the fluid into my vein. “You have reason to be sad,” he said. “Many roads are closed to you now.”

  I turned my head away from him. I had hoped that he might offer words of comfort or encouragement.

  “One thing you need to keep in mind,” Toru said, pressing on my arm as he pulled out the needle. “The people who govern us now value only power. If you want to survive, you need to keep your mouth shut. You will have a more limited life, now that you have been expelled, but at least you are alive. Be grateful, lie low, and keep yourself out of trouble.”

  BE GRATEFUL, LIE LOW. In the time to follow, I would be grateful for many things. The Mainlander whose mob-induced injuries Toru had treated on February 27 turned out to be the son of Chien Kuo’s middle school principal. The son’s gratitude to Toru was so great that when he returned to the clinic for continui
ng treatment, he brought gifts, and Toru seized the opportunity to plead my case.

  His father agreed that expulsion should really have been his decision as principal, and it was conceivable that Teacher Lee had been unduly influenced by the events of February 28. My punishment was reduced to two black marks, and I was allowed to resume studies at my middle school. This was a great relief to my family, but Teacher Lee was deeply angered and struck me down at every turn. The remainder of my time at Chien Kuo middle school was nothing but misery, and though I won admittance into Chien Kuo’s prestigious high school, out of spite I refused to go.

  I ENROLLED WITH some elementary school classmates at Provincial Taipei Institute of Technology. This was a junior college, which my classmates convinced me would save me from three miserable years of high school and an additional round of entrance exams. And in fact my life did improve. The teachers at my new school were kind and fair, if not rigorous, and the courses required little study. As I was still weak I did not complain. I was no longer on track to take the American entrance exam, but at least I was in school and I was alive. White banners hung over the train platform every day with the freshly painted names of those who had been executed that day: My classmate’s father, a chemistry professor. My cousin’s friend, a university student. Hundreds of students at Taiwan Normal University and Taiwan University had been arrested, obliterating entire departments. Mothers with drawn faces made the walk to the station every morning to look up at the banners, scanning them for the names of their sons. Had they been killed? Sent to the prison on Hue Sho To, Fire-Burnt Island?

  About twenty thousand people died during that time, the White Terror. Taiwanese, aborigine, and Mainlanders, too. “Communist sympathizers,” they were called. I was lucky I had a father savvy enough to keep me alive.

  Toru continued my daily infusions. My family’s company, Taikong, was branching into pharmaceuticals, so my parents got the yellow fluid free of charge. Sixty milliliters of vitamins—B6, B12, C, glucose, and who knows what else—every day for months without end. My veins shrank from the assault, burrowing deep into my flesh and making each needle stick more excruciating. The very sight of Toru’s office made me sick.

  8

  WHAT DOES ‘REFORM’ MEAN, Otosan?” Jiro asked. “They keep talking about it on the radio.”

  We were in our jeep, on our way back from a meeting at my uncle’s house in Taipei. My father and his brothers met every few months to discuss their finances, which were all joined together. My father sat in the front seat, between our driver and Kazuo.

  “ ‘Reform,’ ” my father said, folding his arms, “means that Chiang Kai-shek wants the United States to send him more money. It means he is trying to make the world forget about the many thousands of people he has killed since February twenty-eighth and all the American dollars he wasted when he failed to beat the Communists.”

  “But things are better now, right?” Jiro said. “Since Chiang Kai-shek came here? He killed Governor Chen Yi, right?”

  “Tyo,” my father said. “He killed his friend after he realized it didn’t look good to the West that he was being rewarded. And once he had a replacement who went to Princeton University, in America.”

  The jeep slowed to a stop as we passed through downtown Taoyuan. American jazz drifted through the jeep’s open windows from a record store.

  “Governor Wu Kuo-chen,” Kazuo pronounced, adopting our father’s scornful air. The folds of fat on the back of his neck bunched up as he turned his head to address us over his shoulder. “His new cabinet is mostly Taiwanese. But it’s just for show—”

  “Shh, stupid! There are soldiers there!” my father growled under his breath.

  Kazuo looked wounded and glanced out the window. Just a few feet away, outside a barbershop, two Nationalist soldiers stood in their familiar uniforms, smoking cigarettes and chatting. The jeep rumbled under our seats, and we all looked forward, silent, pretending we knew nothing of February 28, the White Terror, or any need of reform.

  THE MOLECULES FROM the yellow bag swirled through my blood, reinforcing the scaffolding of my bones and the marrow within them. My cells feasted, divided, and grew. I grew tall—taller than my brothers, taller than my father, my legs so long they earned me the new moniker Horse when I joined the school’s track team.

  Toru gradually decreased the frequency of my injections to once a month, to three times a year, and then discontinued them entirely. I was able to eat more now because my mother gave me money for my train fare to junior college. Most days I did ride the train, stumbling about in a blue cattle car with my classmates, commuters, and farmers carrying goats, chickens, and baskets of eggplant to the market. But when I could, I sat on the back of a friend’s motorcycle and used my train fare to buy spare-rib soup or oyster omelettes, slurping the food quickly in front of a stall on Gongyuan Road. It was not much food, not nearly as much as I would have liked, but it was enough to sustain the production of my blood.

  IN MY FINAL year at junior college, before my mandatory military service year, I hitched a ride home with my classmate, Yi-yang. I’d rapidly become the school’s track star, and suddenly I was surrounded by friends. Yi-yang, with his easy smile and impish attempts to introduce fun into my life, was one of my best ones.

  I hadn’t been paying attention while we rode, and realized he had stopped his motorcycle on Chungcheng Road. “I thought you were taking me home,” I said. It was Friday. Kazuo would be coming home from medical school for the weekend, as he usually did. I had taken to borrowing Fundamentals of the English Language for Foreigners from his bookshelf during the week. I had finally discovered certain tricks to help me study. I wrote things down and quizzed myself forward and backward—even upside down, like a game. I listened to Glenn Miller on a radio I’d put together in class. The music, paradoxically, helped me focus on my work and made it so much less dreary that I began thinking I might make a living building and refurbishing radios. And since I finally had a handle on studying, I couldn’t resist the temptation to learn English. But Kazuo’s book was still in my bag and not where it belonged, on his shelf. I needed to get it back fast.

  Yi-yang looked back at me slyly. “There’s Wen-shen. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

  He waved to our classmate Wen-shen, and we crossed the street, Yi-yang pushing his motorcycle along in neutral. We had just learned about fuel cells at school, and as we walked I listened to the motorcycle’s purring, its controlled, compartmentalized fire. We dodged people walking, riding bicycles, hauling rickshaws. Despite the political oppression, Taoyuan, and Taiwan as a whole, was booming. The buildings along the street shot skyward, fueled by our economy, which had recovered—depending on whom you spoke to—either because of the Nationalist’s Land to the Tiller Act, which had given my grandfather’s hard-earned hectares to the farmers he had hired to farm them, or because of the restoration of our already robust Japanese infrastructure. There was so much scaffolding on the buildings along the street that people could hardly walk down the sidewalk. Each story was different from the one below, with larger windows and squarer construction, like an upside-down mountain terraced with rice paddies. Workers in conical straw hats climbed through the scaffolding, hammering above our heads.

  We reached Wen-shen, a stocky young man with a disproportionately big head, and he smiled.

  “Need some medicine?” Yi-yang said.

  Wen-shen giggled, smoothing his shirtfront.

  Yi-yang laughed, turning red, and glanced at me. “Come on, Tong, we’ll show you the prettiest girl in Taoyuan.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Another of your schemes.” Kazuo’s book banged against my side through my bag. “I have to get home. I’ve got to”—I thought quickly—“I’ve got to practice for the meet tomorrow.”

  “I know, Saburo,” Yi-yang said. “You’re in love with that florist girl.”

  “Oh no.” I looked away, embarrassed. Being an athlete had also attracted attention from girls, and there was one, a
very pretty girl with a delicate chin, that I had been on a few dates with.

  “What?” said Wen-shen. “Are you engaged?”

  “Bou-la,” I said. “I’m not seeing that girl anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was always giggling,” I said. Actually, the headiness that I had felt, watching the pretty girl laugh and flash her eyes at me, had not survived the excruciatingly painful silences that occurred when her laughing stopped. I had tried talking, asking her questions, but every story I told seemed to fall into a bottomless hole, and everything she said was prefaced by “My friend, Bu-chi, says . . . ” I simply couldn’t endure it any longer.

  “Well, then, come. This one’s not giggly at all. And don’t give me that excuse about your meet. You shouldn’t tire yourself out the night before a big race.” Yi-yang indicated for me to follow and blithely pushed his motorcycle up the wrong side of Chungcheng Road. “You’ll like her, you’ll see. She goes to a business school in Taipei. We followed her home on Tuesday.”

  “You’re stalking the girl?”

  “Tong Chia-lin,” Wen-shen said, “how else can you know where a girl lives? Will you just walk up to her and ask her address?” He turned to Yi-yang with mock concern. “You need to teach Saburo here, or he’ll end up arranged to marry some ugly woman with a big bank account.” They erupted in laughter.

  We crossed Fushing Road. It was a brilliant day, and the winter winds had subsided into a mild breeze. The crowd bustled, women carrying baskets of nappa and ku tsai, bags of rice noodles, bolts of striped or brightly flowered cotton. We passed a grocery store, the sweet smell of cloves and allspice wafting into the street.

  I envied my friends’ lightheartedness. Mine had gone long ago, flying out the window of my middle school and splashing into the lotus ponds in the botanical gardens beyond.