The Third Son

by Julie Wu

  He handed me the form and walked to the counter by the sink. He replaced the lid on a canister of cotton balls, then threw a used muslin wrapper into a hamper under the sink. He opened the window shade and closed it again, and I was surprised that he would do something so purposeless. Then he turned to face me, his hands on his hips again. “Saburo,” he said, “you only have one life. Fight for it.”

  I blinked at him in surprise. “You’re the one who told me my life would be limited.”

  “It is,” he said. “But limits can be surpassed.”

  “You mean . . . the girl?”

  “I mean”—he waved his hand—“everything.”

  “Why would a girl want an electrician when she can have a doctor?”

  He sighed, looking at me. “Believe in yourself. Let her be the one to decide.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I bicycled downtown, my hands gripping the handlebars.

  Of course, Toru was right. Had I grown up so soft? As a child I had stood up after all my bamboo whippings and gone out to play again. I had, knowing that it might expel and harm me, told Teacher Lee and my father that they were wrong. Why would I let Kazuo’s threats keep me from Yoshiko? He had already burned my book. What else could he possibly do if Yoshiko chose me of her own free will? And if she chose Kazuo over me, then so be it.

  I pushed through the glass door of the pharmacy. I watched Yoshiko close a cabinet and then return to the counter, neatly entering figures into a large ledger book. I admired the soft angle of her cheek and the smoothness of her neck. As I drew near, I could even see a thin gold necklace glimmering at her throat as she breathed and frowned a little, murmuring arithmetic calculations in Japanese. What had happened to that happy little girl, so full of love and trust?

  “What do you need?” Her eyes were down as she snapped the book closed and put it under the counter.

  I plopped a little paper bag on the counter. There were darkened spots of moisture on the sides.

  Her eyes shot to the bag and then up to me. I felt a shock as her eyes met mine.

  She straightened up in surprise. I drank her in, intoxicated by her proximity, by the transparent mixture of pleasure and uncertainty on her face, until she peeked down at the warm peanut moachi nestled in the bag.

  “You said it was your favorite,” I managed to say. Just as I was going to tell her there was a movie ticket inside the bag, too, her brother stood up from a low stool behind her where he had been opening cartons and glowered at me. I had not even thought of a pretext for coming to the pharmacy. Hurriedly, I turned away.

  “Wait!” I heard Yoshiko say. As the door fell closed behind me, I saw her watching me, eyes wide and searching, one hand on the counter, the other clutching the moachi bag, her brother at her back.

  I SPENT THE next two days in torment. School had ended and I walked the grounds of the family company, Taikong, with my fourth uncle so he could show me the layout of the buildings they planned.

  He waved importantly through the air. He looked very much like my father, except that his face, instead of being rounded like an egg, was longer and concave in the middle, indicating, according to tradition, less good fortune. He was a powerful man, equal to my father in his position in Taikong. “Though we’ve expanded into other pharmaceuticals, injectable glucose still constitutes a large part of our sales . . .”

  As he talked and our feet crunched across the gravel grounds of the factory, I berated myself for not being more cunning, more bold. I didn’t even know whether Yoshiko had seen the ticket. Perhaps she’d eaten the moachi and thrown the bag away without looking. Perhaps her brother had taken the entire bag, and I would find him next to me at the movies instead. If I could just have told Yoshiko or indicated with a look or pointed, then I could be sure she had seen it. If she didn’t show up at the movies, I wouldn’t know whether she was rejecting me or simply hadn’t known I had invited her.

  ON SATURDAY I paced in front of the cinema and was the first person to enter.

  I sat in my seat, one away from the aisle, and waited. Every time I heard the door open, I turned to look.

  The theater began to fill, and the air grew thick with a thousand conversations. Many times I stood to let gangly young men in short-sleeved button-down shirts shuffle past me, their dates’ flouncy skirts brushing against my knees.

  At two minutes to the hour, I realized she wouldn’t show. She hadn’t checked the bag. Her brother had taken the moachi. Or she had seen the ticket and thrown it away in disgust. Worse, she had thrown it away with regret.

  I looked at my watch and again at the door. A single girl walked through in red high heels and a ponytail. Not her.

  The lights dimmed, and the national anthem began. We stood at attention, watching the Nationalist army marching across the screen under the benevolent eye of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. How many lives had he snuffed out with that paternal smile? Like the repeated sticks of a needle, the sight of that patriotic sequence made me sick to my stomach every time.

  I felt a rustle at my elbow and looked to see a girl put her purse down in the seat beside me—the aisle seat. Her face was shadowed from the screen by the man in front of her. Was it her? I had heard of girls playing tricks, of taking tickets from adoring young men and giving them to their friends.

  The anthem ended, and we sat. The countdown began and I turned toward the girl beside me. The light from the screen flickered across her face; her eyes, flashing golden brown, looked straight into mine. I flushed in the dark. She turned to the screen, and so did I, for the moment, only to turn back again and watch the images slide over the soft contours of her face.

  The first reel was a travelogue—Midwest Holiday. It had a story, in which a jaded journalist followed a beautiful painter and her father through endless plains, across the Missouri River, and through the Rocky Mountains. I had seen images like this before, and mostly I watched Yoshiko. Occasionally she met my gaze, then turned back to watch the screen. Only toward the end of the reel, as the camera panned across the carved granite foreheads and noses of George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, did I sit up in wonder. Later in my life I would realize that these scenes were fleeting and distant, far less grand than the true place. But perhaps it was because of my elation at having Yoshiko here beside me at last, so close that I could hear her gasp and feel the movement of her elbow as she brought her hand to her mouth in surprise, or perhaps it was because we were finally watching an American movie in the cinema that she had spoken of as a child and that I had so often frequented hoping to see her, that I thought there could be no grander place on earth than Rapid City, South Dakota.

  I turned to Yoshiko. “I should like to go there,” I whispered.

  She turned to me and smiled so her dimples showed.

  I barely registered the film that followed. I had chosen it merely because of the time and location and waited impatiently for it to end.

  Finally the lights came up, and the theater filled with the rustling of people rising and gathering their things.

  I stood, leaning aside to let people by, and as I did, I noticed across the aisle the broad back of a leather jacket. The jacket twisted, and my eyes met those of Li-wen—Kazuo’s friend who belonged to the Anti-Communist Youth Corps.

  I quickly looked away. Yoshiko had stood, too, the top of her neatly coiffed hair reaching only as high as my shoulder, her elbows brushing into me as she buttoned an embroidered cardigan over her yellow silk dress.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  She looked up at the urgency in my voice and saw me glance at Li-wen. He was talking to someone next to him.

  Yoshiko looked back to me, her expression anxious. “Where shall we go?”

  “The elementary school?”

  We hurried out of the cinema, Yoshiko delicately clutching the strap of her imitation-leather purse with the first three fingers of her hand as we passed the cafés and the brightly lit night markets hawking smelly tofu and cheaply made clothing, shaved
ice with red bean, and ginger ice cream.

  We turned off Mingchu Road toward the school, our footsteps crunching on the gravel as we stepped between a pair of blossoming peach trees. A breeze blew, laden with the delicate fragrance of the trees, whose petals fluttered above us in the cool air. Past the trees, the sky was clear and high, and the stars showered down light from past millennia upon our heads, upon the modest little building and its schoolyard of dirt and grass.

  Yoshiko stopped walking and stood in the starlight, a peach petal in her hair, looking at the school.

  “This was your school, wasn’t it?” I pulled up beside her, my throat constricted with emotion as I indicated the dark silhouettes of trees behind the school. “We met in those woods.”

  “We did,” she said quietly.

  I turned to her, and she looked up at me with glittering eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s a bittersweet memory for me, as my cousin and my brother are both dead.”

  A motorcycle roared by in the distance, its tail-end growl fading into the screeching of the cicadas, the calling of frogs at the foot of the fence, the rushing rhythm of the blood pulsing through my heart.

  The shadow of her eyelashes played along her cheek as she blinked and looked away. “My cousin, Ah-hiang,” she said. “You remember she fell and cut her knee?”

  “I remember,” I said. “She was holding the writing board over her head.”

  She nodded. “It was a stupid thing to do, as you said. So she fell, and she got tetanus, and I never saw her again.”

  “Tetanus!” I looked away at the silhouettes of the trees swaying in the darkness. I lost my bearings for a moment and had to step back.

  “Your brother, too? But I saw him later, at the welcoming parade for the Nationalists . . .”

  “Did you? Well, he died soon after that.” She frowned. “It’s a long story.” She looked up at me. “What about you?”

  “Me?” I had so longed to hear what happened to her that I had never even thought of talking of myself. “Well,” I said, “I was bitten by a water krait and expelled from my middle school.” I said the words without thinking, then quickly regretted it. It was not what a young man was supposed to say to win a girl.

  “Expelled? Why?”

  “Well . . .” I hesitated, but she looked curious. “I drew a picture of my teacher with a pig’s nose, and unfortunately it happened to be February twenty-eighth.”

  To my surprise, she laughed, and her laugh rang out in a womanly way that reassured me.

  “So that’s why I went to junior college. I was lucky, actually. They reversed the expulsion.”

  “Junior college? That’s pretty good. College is college.”

  “Well, it’s not Taipei University, or”—I looked at her slyly—“medical school.”

  She shrugged, looking away. “It doesn’t matter what school you went to. Your father didn’t go to college at all and he’s mayor.”

  “Well, that’s true.” Why hadn’t I thought of that when he said I’d ruined my life?

  She waved toward the fence. “Let’s sit. My shoes are killing me.”

  We sat. She smoothed a lacy handkerchief onto the fence railing first to protect her skirt. She patted the railing. “This wood is from our lumberyard. I remember when they built this.”

  “Your family owns the lumberyard past the temple?”

  “Well, now it’s just my uncle’s. He kicked us all out after the war. My father had no say. He’s number three, like you.” She glanced at me.

  “How did you know I’m number three?”

  “I asked around.”

  She looked down, and I thought she looked a little embarrassed.

  “Are you seeing my brother again?”

  “I agreed to have dinner with him tomorrow night.”

  My stomach lurched, but I saw the faintest trace of a frown on her face, which reminded me of her wary look when Kazuo invited her to the meet. “I saw you at the pharmacy,” I said. “Before we met at the stadium.”

  She looked up at me, and I told her about Yi-yang and Wen-shen and their scheme to ask her for aspirin.

  She burst out laughing. “I charge all those guys a dollar,” she said. “Here I have this whole long line of customers, and these boys are asking for things they don’t even need.”

  I laughed, too, glad I hadn’t gone in to gawk with Yi-yang and Wen-shen or made up a story when I had gone myself.

  She smiled up at me, eyes shining in the silvery light. “So that was you watching in the window when your brother was there?”

  “It was.” I smiled, too. “I should have gone in.”

  “Why didn’t you? Were you afraid of your brother?”

  I changed the subject, telling stories about my classmates. She laughed easily and often, and so I told her more. I found myself telling her stories I’d never told anyone—about fishing with my bare hands in the countryside, and how I’d worked on my running technique at Taikong. I told her how I was teaching myself to repair radios. Everything I said seemed fascinating to her, and it was almost impossible for me to stop talking, as though I’d saved up all these things to tell her for my whole life.

  “I think I could make a radio shop work,” I said. “It’s just a matter of building up the capital first.”

  She turned her head to the side for a moment, her face in shadow. “You will. I still remember that car you made in the hardware store,” she said.

  “It’s late,” I said.

  “I should go.”

  I touched her elbow to help her off the fence, and her hand rested for a moment on my shoulder as she stepped down. A memory roused in me that I could not trace, and as she began to pull away I held her arm. She looked up at me, eyes reflecting the starlight. I could smell the perfume of her hair.

  “You’re meeting Kazuo for dinner?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I thought of Kazuo burning my book.

  “Then meet me in the morning at the train station,” I said. “We’ll go to Taipei. Do you know the Sintori Noodle Shop?”

  She laughed. “All right.”

  I left her by the big front windows of the pharmacy and walked home, mind racing, heart bursting, my body flushed with warmth. The cicadas screeched in the dark alleys between the buildings I passed, and the spicy moistness of the night air filled my lungs. Yoshiko, the girl I had looked for all my life. I had been a fool not to look harder. I would be an even bigger fool to stand by and let her go.

  I turned south toward my parents’ house, and as I walked, with the feel of her hand still on my arm, the memory came, flashing through all the curtained years of solitude and pain. She had touched me that way after the air raid. It had been my first such touch, and my last, until today.

  11

  WE HURTLED EAST TO Taipei, the train’s whistle amplified in the metal interior of our passenger car. I breathed in the smell of burning coal sweetened by the light scent of Yoshiko’s perfume.

  Her head swayed gently as she looked out the window, her eyes reflecting Guanyin Mountain and the northern countryside where I had wasted three years of my childhood. With the train’s rocking movements, the red wool of her jacket shoulder brushed against my upper arm. She was so slight and gentle. I wanted to claim her, make her mine, promise her a world of happiness. But what did I have to offer her? After last night’s euphoria I had awoken feeling the burden of my past mistakes, of my limited life.

  She looked out the window with sadness in her face.

  “I leave for my military-service year tomorrow,” I said.

  She turned to me, her eyes illuminated with the sunlight slanting in from the window. “Tomorrow! Where will you go?”

  “Kaohsiung. I’ll be taking that train instead.” I pointed ahead to the train approaching on the adjacent tracks.

  The train whooshed past, filling our car with its roaring clickety-clack, clouding our window with steam and flecks of black coal.

  Yoshiko blinked in the filtered
light, shadows of the passing windows sliding across her face as she watched the train, so I could not read her expression. When the train had passed, she was silent for a moment, then absently indicated the direction the train had gone. “My mother is from Hsinchu. Actually, she’s from the mountains, but she lived in Hsinchu before she got married.”

  “The mountains? She’s an aborigine?” I said.

  “No—well, she says no, but she grew up among them, and she looks so different from other people. She calls herself a hill person. She has white skin like mine, and those high cheekbones. It’s possible she’s part aboriginal or part Dutch or something.”

  “Why did she leave the mountains?”

  “Her father sold her when she was twelve. They were desperately poor. He made cedar mothballs for a living and they had to haul them down the mountain to the market and all the way back up again every week. She kept complaining about it—she’s a terrible complainer—and finally when she was twelve and complained one more time, her father said, ‘Fine. We’ll sell you.’ And he sold her to a rich banker and his wife in Hsinchu.”

  “Then how did she end up in Taoyuan?” I asked.

  The dimple on her cheek reappeared as she smiled. “Well, the vendors at the market all talked about this pretty girl and asked who her parents were, and somehow word got to my father’s family.”

  “I see.”

  “A pretty good match for an adopted daughter, even with my father’s name problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Perhaps you don’t know what my surname is?”

  “It’s Lo, right? I asked my friend and he said—”

  “That’s right. And the odd thing is that my father is the only one in his family with that name. His father, brothers, cousins—everyone else is named Cheng.”

  “Why? Is your father adopted?”

  She shook her head. “Only my grandfather knew, and he became senile before he died, so there’s no way to know now. We know he’s not adopted. But he’s been treated the same as his brothers, so for my mother it was a very good match.”