by Julie Wu
We squeezed past my mother’s piles of old shoes and newspapers in the hallway on the way to the dining room for our welcome meal. Yoshiko clutched at her shawl to keep it from being marred by the dust and ink.
My family name promised riches and aristocracy, yet how much poorer in some ways was our home life, compared to the one she knew.
At our reception I watched her, glamorous as a movie star in the shimmering reception gowns her friend had sewn for her over the past few weeks. She smiled graciously, circulating through the banquet hall with a tray of tea, serving all my father’s relatives, his business associates, his political connections, key local members of the Nationalist Party. In return, they placed red envelopes of money onto her tray. Each time she came out with a new tray, she wore a new dress and was rewarded with new red envelopes.
I heard my father, Taoyuan’s newest and most popular representative to the People’s Political Council, lecturing at the next table, where Kazuo sat with a sour expression on his face.
“There are hierarchies, overlapping hierarchies,” my father said, clearing his throat. “Within the family, within the community, within the government infrastructure, it is like a series of grids. You must learn these grids and work them well in order to use them as so many ladders. If you try to escape these grids, you will fall.”
Yoshiko walked up behind my chair, and I stood up to meet her. She was wearing her brocade cheongsam, embroidered with silver, and she smiled up at me, her skin pale against the burgundy. I took her tea tray for a moment to give her a rest, my fingers brushing the soft skin of her arm. Her dress hugged her body, accentuating her curves, and I wanted the reception to be over, to feel that soft body under the stiff brocade.
She looked into my eyes and laughed.
The table behind her—my friends from junior college—began chanting together.
Yoshiko glanced over curiously. “What are they saying?”
The chant rose. “Give me back my one dollar! Give me back my one dollar!”
I laughed and waved to the table.
“Is that a drinking song?” Yoshiko asked.
I shook my head. “They used to visit you in the pharmacy.”
She laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes.
WE LEFT THE next morning for our honeymoon, staying in a Japanese-style hotel overlooking the startling aqua blue of Sun Moon Lake.
We made love on our futon, our ardor interrupted only occasionally by the unheralded whoosh of the shoji screens as the hotel maid, clad in a kimono and bearing a tray of tea, entered the room and provoked a flurry of flying bedclothes.
“Hai! Why don’t they knock?” Yoshiko giggled from under her sheet as the maid left.
At night we lay on the bare tatami, our bodies damp with exertion, our laughter ringing out into the darkness and melting into the screeching of the frogs in the marsh grass.
We traveled, huddling together on the summit of Alishan to watch the sun rise over the countryside where Yoshiko’s mother had spent her childhood.
And then, too quickly, we returned, and the first piece of mail that Yoshiko received at our house was a note from her boss at the bank notifying her that she had been fired.
“What! Just because I got married?” She sat down with the letter on our new rosewood bed and almost fell off the edge.
“Didn’t he warn you?”
“Well, he did say something about how none of the women there are married, but I never thought . . .”
“He wants that long line of young men.”
“That’s absurd. They never deposited more than a few dollars. I passed the exam to keep the books, anyway. I wasn’t supposed to be just a teller.”
I sighed. “You should have married a doctor after all.”
She looked up at me fiercely. “I didn’t want a doctor, I wanted you. Thank goodness you have that job at Taikong or we’ll never get out of this house.”
I said nothing but stood up and opened the new rosewood armoire that her father’s carpenters had built to match the bed. They had built it unusually tall, for my height, and it was beautifully, solidly made, the hinges turning smoothly, the finish polished and mirrorlike, easily the finest piece of furniture in my parents’ house.
“How much do you earn, by the way?” she said.
I opened and closed the drawers, feeling the wheels gliding on their runners, smelling the rosewood. It smelled like Yoshiko’s parents’ house.
“Saburo, how much—”
I sat down on the bed next to her. “Seven hundred NT,” I said.
“A month?”
I gave a short laugh. “A year.”
“A year?” Yoshiko looked up at me for a moment, her mouth open, her face flushed with heat down to the collar of her yellow silk shirtdress. “I made ten times that much at the bank!”
She got up and paced around the room. Then she rummaged in my bag and took out Fundamentals of the English Language for Foreigners.
“Here.” She dropped it into my lap, then took out the chemistry and physics books and a couple of issues of Life magazine that I had borrowed from the United States Information Service office to read on the train to Sun Moon Lake.
“What do you expect me to do after I go to America?”
She shrugged. “Teach at Taiwan University. Be a scientist.”
“It won’t make me rich.”
“We’ll be able to live on our own.”
“You just got here. Maybe you’ll like it.”
She gave me a look.
“What?” I said.
“I’ve seen how they treat you.”
“You have?” I thought back on the brief times we had spent with my family. The engagement, the wedding, the reception, our first twenty-four hours as husband and wife. It hadn’t seemed remarkable to me. “What did you see?”
“They ignore you. They’re always talking about Kazuo. Calling you stupid all the time—”
“Not all the time—”
“I remember what you said, you know,” she said, folding her arms, “the day of the air raid.”
“What? What did I say?”
“You said no one cared whether you came home.”
I went to open the window as I had so many times as a child, looking outside for my refuge, my escape. The wind was blowing, rustling the grass and the leaves of the bamboo trees outside. My mother had not beaten me for many years, but even now, a bamboo tree was not all beautiful to me. I remembered how a bamboo branch felt across my chest, across my flank, how it could scratch you raw, give you bruises.
She stood up behind me. “No one will care if you leave, either.”
“No one from Taoyuan County has ever passed that exam,” I said, one more time. “Even the ones who went to Taiwan University.”
“So study,” she said.
I STUDIED. THROUGH the cracks in the walls, the wind swept onto my desk, ruffling the dimly lit pages of my book. The exam that had loomed in my imagination since I was a child had been developed to winnow out 99.98 percent of test takers so as not to exceed the quota imposed on Taiwan by the United States. As a result, the test’s scope was paralyzingly huge. I charted my subjects out by the day. I reviewed differential calculus one day, Western history through the Renaissance the next. I wrote out chemical equations and reread my chapter on quantum mechanics. I quizzed myself on past participles and, when I became bored with my textbooks, read Modern Radio articles on new capacitor models and transistors, which I had never seen. I borrowed Time and Life magazine issues from the United States Information Service office so I could read about real-life cowboys on cattle ranches, about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, about many other famous actors I had seen in the movies, and about something called the International Geophysical Year,
which will become the greatest and most ambitious example of cooperation in the scientific community the world will ever see. Starting July 31, 1957, leading scientists around the world, free and Communist alike, will coordinate their effo
rts to track signals transmitted from satellites orbiting the earth!
There’s just one small problem: getting the satellites into space. But that’s just a matter of time, according to . . .
As I worked, Yoshiko slept on the futon, turned away from my tiny lamp, the light gently glancing off her hair and the soft contour of her cheek. I sat back, watching her rhythmic breathing. Even in her sleep, she held her hand over her belly, for we had learned, much to our surprise, that she had become pregnant on our honeymoon.
“No wonder you’ve been so hungry,” I had said.
She’d frowned. “Yes, and because there’s not enough food . . .”
I didn’t tell her that we had actually been getting more than the usual rations of food from my mother. My mother seemed quite enamored of Yoshiko and had been taking her aside so that they could do chores together or so my mother could complain about her ailments and her lot in life.
Through the days, I worried—about failing, and about passing. There was the issue of leaving my new wife and baby. There was also a practical, monetary hurdle. Before I would even be allowed to leave the country, I would have to demonstrate to the government that I had enough cash to survive a year in America. Namely, twenty-five-hundred American dollars, or a hundred thousand NT.
“Where am I going to come up with that!” I said, looking up at the ceiling in the dark.
Yoshiko laid her hand on my chest. Moonlight shone on her cheek, the closed lids of her eyes, as her head turned drowsily toward me on her pillow. “Go to sleep,” she said. “You have the richest family in Taoyuan.”
But my stomach growled, long done digesting my meager dinner, and I knew never to assume I would get what I needed from my family.
14
THROUGH THE TRAIN’S WINDOW I watched: the sky lightening behind a double-peaked mountain on Taiwan’s northeastern coast; light shooting down the mountain’s terraced shoulder and onto the sugarcane fields below. The sun rose, its rays stretching across the plains, and the rice paddies glinted as we curved into the explosive manmade growth of Taipei City.
I jumped off the train and rushed through the streets. They were framed densely with store signs on either side, characters stacked one on top of the other, three stories high. Above my head, Nationalist flags flapped from wires extending from one side of the street to the other. On the sidewalk, street carts steamed with sweet soybean soup and you tiao.
It was an hour before the exam, and already a crowd of jittery young men had gathered on the steps of the civic auditorium. I glanced up at the massive building. The Settlement Committee, including my father’s friend the Taoyuan magistrate, had met here after the February 28 Incident to draw up and present their demands for democratic reform to Governor Chen Yi.
My stomach churned with nervous energy as I snaked my way up through the crowd, climbing two stairs at a time.
“Hey! Our whole study group! All going to MIT, right?”
Toward the top of the stairs, a plump young man in a leather jacket smiled at his circle of buddies and raised his hand. It was Kazuo’s friend Li-wen, from the Anti-Communist Youth Corps. “I’ll go to California Tech,” he was saying. “I like the warm weather.”
His friends laughed.
I turned away. No one in my family, including Kazuo, knew I was taking this exam. The last thing I wanted was for Kazuo to find out and ridicule me if I failed. I tried to move away through the thick crowd. It was growing by the minute and I could smell the different brands of soap and pomade. I crouched down and angled myself behind a chubby young man with a pompadour.
Li-wen’s jacket squeaked as he tapped his forehead. “I’ve calculated it. They pass about one in five thousand, and there are two thousand at this site, so that means half a person here will make it to America. The question is, will it be the top half or the bottom half?” He punched the bony arm of the student next to him. “Or Professor here. He’s about half a person!”
The group erupted in laughter, jostling their friend, the Professor, who smiled quietly and pushed his heavy glasses up his nose. The pompadour shifted slightly, opening a direct line of sight between me and Li-wen.
Our eyes met for a split second before I hastily turned away. “Eh!” Li-wen said, and he pointed to me. “Eh! Aren’t you Kazuo’s little brother?” Li-wen chuckled. “The one who went to Taipei Provincial Tech? I can’t wait to tell Kazuo you were here! He hasn’t even dared take the exam, and here you are.”
I felt my cheeks grow hot.
Li-wen laughed. “Do yourself a favor, little brother. Go home to your sexy wife.” He turned to his group. “This boy improves our statistics. We forget who our competition is.
“Eh,” he called again to me. “I’m curious. How are the English courses at Taipei Provincial Tech?”
I heard someone snicker. I watched Li-wen’s face, pudgy with rice cakes and pork dumplings. This was not the face of a man who would succeed in the New World. Above the sneering mouth, the eyes were small, dim, and afraid.
I stood up straight and pushed forward to face him. Toru’s shots had made me a head taller than the other men. The laughter trailed off, and I spoke in English. “If I were to go to America, I would not have to worry about people like you standing in my way,” I said.
The group looked among themselves for a moment. One of them nudged the Professor, but he shook his head.
Li-wen tilted his head to the side and raised his eyebrows. “Nice use of the subjunctive, little brother,” he said. “My friends, this boy has been rehearsing that line for a week.”
The group laughed again, and I turned away, heart charging.
A hand touched my arm and spoke quietly. “Good luck, little brother.”
But I did not look back to see who wished me well. The doors to the building were opening, and I pressed up the stairs to go through them.
You wasted your life!
I found my chair and sat tall—tall as a cowboy poised atop his horse on the prairie, strong as George Washington’s gaze carved in South Dakotan granite.
Stupid boy!
I shook my head and breathed deeply, blocking out the persistent needling of my self-doubt, the rustling pages around me, the click-clacking of hundreds of shoes sticking to and releasing from the tacky floorboards. I would work slowly and carefully, pacing myself as I would for a long-distance race. Steady as the wind over the Taiwan Strait. Rhythmic as Fred Astaire in a fox-trot.
I forced the cacophonous images from my mind. My pencil made strong strokes on the paper. I calculated the area under a curve, the speed of a falling rocket as it entered the atmosphere. My heart flip-flopped as I saw that the reading passages were not textbook English but culled from Life magazine and the New York Times. Thank goodness I had gone through the trouble of parsing all those sentences about Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips and Spencer Tracy’s Catholic upbringing. Two rows down from me, the Professor scratched his ear and pushed his glasses up his nose with a quick, repetitive movement.
In the same hall where a plea for democratic representation had ended in massacre, my pencil moved, deliberate and unstoppable as a locomotive, across the paper.
I can go.
I will go.
I’ll go to the United States of America.
A FEW WEEKS later, I tried to stop Yoshiko from jumping up and down on the train platform.
“The baby! Remember the baby!” I said. And I hugged her tight. Her body shook against mine, and I didn’t know whether she was crying or laughing.
A little crowd had gathered. There was a banner overhead, white with black lettering.
“Has someone been executed?” I heard someone ask.
“No, it’s the examination results, rice-for-brains.”
I reread the banner. It said TAO-YUAN COUNTY: TONG CHIA-LIN.
Yoshiko laughed against my neck. “See! I knew you could do it!”
I clutched her tightly, feeling her breaths, quick and shallow, and her belly, swollen with new life’s pr
omise. For the first time ever, the world felt open to me, boundless. I could open my arms and jump into the sky. I could fly across the Pacific Ocean with one beat of my wings, the sun warming my back.
“I’m going to America,” I said, amazed.
Yoshiko laughed, and I touched the fragrant softness of her hair. And then, in spite of winning the two things that I had longed for all my life—Yoshiko and my ticket to America—I despaired. In proving myself to Yoshiko, I was also abandoning her. I closed my eyes, clutching her hair, her body, still slight despite her pregnancy. How could I leave? How could I?
To my surprise, she pulled out of my grasp. She looked up at me, her eyes sparkling and ferocious.
“What is it?” I said.
“Do well in America,” she said. “And bring me over, too.”
I stared at her. “What about your family?”
“They’ll survive. You are my family now,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
“We’ll talk about it. I have plans. I could teach at the university—”
“Bring me over,” she said. “Please. I’ve thought about it. I’ve seen how your family treats you. We’ll have a better life. We’ll be free—” She glanced around at the train platform, at the white banner flapping in the wind.
