by Julie Wu
Now Kai-ming is crying, so I’ll have to go. I think I can understand how your mother felt, as I have only one child and I am completely exhausted.
Love,
Yoshiko
23
I SAT AT THE end of the assembly line at Zenith, puzzling things out. I chased the images of Mrs. Larsson out of my mind, ashamed to be ogling a foreign woman while I had a wife and baby at home. I thought instead of lying with Yoshiko at Sun Moon Lake, limbs entangled, laughing while we watched the shoji screens. I thought of the indescribable pleasures of our rosewood bed, the surprising softness of Yoshiko’s skin. These pleasures were real, and they would be my reward when I returned to Taiwan.
But was this job to be the pinnacle of my engineering career? A silent radio dropped into my box and I unscrewed the metal back to poke the wire innards, testing circuits, going through protocols I had developed in junior college. I untangled, connected, reconnected, and replaced missing parts, and when I plugged it in again, Marian Anderson’s rich voice rang out in snippets over the clanking of tools and the whine of the conveyor belts.
God bless America . . .
How much could I accomplish at Baylor in a year? Could I jam my schedule with courses? Was there a special short course of study for foreigners who had already been to college?
Imagine. My family at my feet.
I screwed, unscrewed, added missing components, removed extra ones. Marian Anderson was silent and then crackled back to life, the waves of her voice intersecting with the waves from the other radios behind me that were being tested, plugged in one after the other.
While the storm clouds gather far across the sea . . .
“More for the dead bucket.” An avalanche of mute radios fell into my box.
The electricity galvanized the tips of my tinkering fingers, and I worked as efficiently as a machine. The longer I worked, the more my thoughts rose above my mechanized routine and hovered in the realm above, where radio waves bounced off steel office towers and skittered across the vastness of oceans; where a computer could calculate the velocity of a rocket exiting the earth’s orbit. Practical, theoretical—I could do both.
What a shame, then. What a shame.
I RENTED A single room for the summer at the Chicago Formosan Club, which was run by pro-independence Taiwanese. The club was in an old bus depot with a glass door entry and a front desk where our mail was held. My room was just large enough for a twin bed, a small table, and a chair.
Dear Yoshiko,
I have not received a letter from you for some weeks now. Perhaps there is a delay in the mail?
The lack of news from Yoshiko turned my fantasies to dark ones. Was she concealing something? The silence became unbearable. To rouse myself from my anxious solitude I made arrangements to visit Toru’s old math teacher, a man by the name of Chen Kong-hsu. Toru had described him as brilliant, eccentric, a man who defied convention and had given up a significant career as a mathematician to work as a landscaper. I missed Toru and looked forward to meeting his mentor.
I walked up the path to Chen’s row house. I had guessed which one was his. Where all the other yards were sparse, his burst full: a profusion of deep pink roses scrambled up the trellises flanking his door, peony bushes lined the front path, and the red-tipped leaves of a bright green Japanese maple ruffled in the wind. The path itself was uneven, some of the bricks missing or cracked, and white paint crumbled off the doorway and the door itself, which was inset with stained glass. But the plants were meticulously maintained, glossy-leaved and rounded in form with hardly a weed between.
Chen Kong-hsu greeted me perfunctorily and brought me into his dining room overlooking the garden. The dining table was covered with books, and he pulled out a chair for me, settling into another one facing mine by the bay window. A flip-flop dangled from his toes as he crossed his legs.
He was indeed very eccentric in appearance, at least for a Taiwanese. He had a thin, gray beard and thick, round glasses. He wore dungarees cut just below the knees, the edges white and frayed, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, from which long hair peeked out in the back. He cocked his head, studying me without reservation. He should have offered me something to eat or drink, but he did not seem to abide by any societal norms.
“Toru speaks highly of you,” he said. “I just got a letter from him last week.”
“Oh.” My stomach fell. So the mail was not delayed. Why had Yoshiko stopped writing? My head swirled for a moment, imagining letters falling from the mail trucks, the plane, pages falling into the water—or worse, Yoshiko’s hand crumpling the pages, the pages gathering dust on the desk by our bed. And then I drew myself back to the moment. “Toru has been very kind to me,” I said.
“How?”
“He saved my life twice,” I said.
“How so? Do you have a chronic illness? Diabetes? Cancer?”
“I was bitten by a snake,” I said. “And I was malnourished.”
“Malnourished? Why? Are you poor? How did you get here, then—on a boat?”
“No,” I said, somewhat impatiently. “Not on a boat. I flew.”
“Don’t scoff. I came here on a boat,” he said.
“Oh.” I looked around at the piles of books, a jumble of horticulture, mathematics, philosophy, art history. In the corner of the room was an easel with a half-finished oil painting of a nude American woman. I was irritated at his intrusiveness, his rudeness, and I wondered at his sanity.
“I hid in a box,” he said, wiggling his toes. “Sailed into California.”
“Why?”
“I was tired of the Japanese.”
Since he eschewed all semblance of politeness, I decided to, also. “You don’t miss math?” I said. “You’re happy as a gardener?”
“I still have mathematics,” he said, pointing to his head. His glasses blinked in the light from the bay window. “But mathematics is an inhuman field. Too much, and you become separated from reality. Whereas landscaping connects me to the world. When you choose a plant, you need to keep in mind the culture of the organism—the type of soil, the amount of sunlight filtering through the neighboring plants, the amount of shelter from the wind, the macroclimate, the latitude. There are just as many variables as in any mathematical equation, but the answer in the end is a living thing, a thing of beauty, rooted in the earth.”
He uncrossed his legs and led me out through his garden, pointing at each plant and proclaiming its names in English and Latin while I feigned interest.
“Now this,” he said, pulling out a large, gangly potted plant with two long buds on it. “You know what this is?”
I peered at it. “Midnight orchid?”
“Yes. So you do know something.”
“I know a lot of things,” I said, annoyed at his condescension. “It’s about to bloom.”
“So it is,” Chen said. “Perhaps today.”
My parents had always had a party on the day their midnight orchids bloomed. It had been a political networking opportunity like everything else.
He brought me into the kitchen and poured me a cup of tea. “There you go, Saburo. It’s whole jasmine flowers. A friend of mine dries them and ties the petals together like this, reconstructing the flower.” He sipped, sitting back and looking at me across his small kitchen table, the side of which he had stacked with books and papers to clear a small rectangle for our teacups. “It’s interesting—you and Toru, holding on to your Japanese names like some badge of pride.”
“It’s not a matter of pride,” I said, flushing. “It’s just my childhood name.”
He cocked his head and adjusted his baseball cap. “It’s truly fascinating to me how the Taiwanese hold on to the vestiges of Japanese colonialism, after all the Japanese did to us.”
“You haven’t seen what the Chinese have done.”
“I’ve heard. People go on and on about February twenty-eighth. Well, the Japanese killed just as many people in their early years. Tens of thousands at least.”
“But
the Japanese were more straightforward. It was like a war, not like 1947, where the Nationalists just eliminated people on a list, dragged them out of bed into the street.”
“What about 1902? Taichung?”
I recalled learning about this. “They killed a bunch of rebels.”
“That’s right. The Japanese government offered amnesty to any rebel who surrendered. Invited them to a celebration dinner. Wined and dined them. Killed them all. Three hundred and sixty of them. Very straightforward. One of them was my father.”
He took a drink of tea and set the cup back on the table.
For the first time, I felt ashamed of my Japanese clothes.
He continued. “The Taiwanese have been subjugated so long they don’t even know how to express their own identity. All they can do is express loyalty to different regimes.”
I stared at him, remembering our welcoming parade for the Nationalist soldiers. How we had cheered for them, waving our little Nationalist flags, because they were not Japanese.
“There were some months before the Nationalists came,” I said, “after the Japanese surrendered. We studied Taiwanese textbooks at school. I saw a John Wayne movie. My family had big parties where we sang Taiwanese folk songs.”
“Your only taste of freedom in Taiwan.”
“My father knew the whole time that the Nationalists were going to crush us.”
“He’s a smart man. You know, I know why Toru likes you,” he said, resting his hand on his pile of books. “You’re just like him. Aware of convention but burdened by it.”
“Burdened by it?”
He nodded. “Yes. I do hope you end up happier, though.”
I WALKED BACK to the Formosan Club.
Happier than Toru? I had never even considered whether Toru was happy. He was always simply there, healing, fixing. Burdened by convention? What had Chen meant? The man was surely not right in the head. I had gone into his house hoping for some kind of camaraderie and walked out feeling ruffled and irritated.
I pushed my way through the glass front doors of the Formosan Club.
Brilliant, yes, Chen surely was, and his point about the Japanese was well taken, but . . .
“Well, how do you like that? It’s Tong Chia-lin!”
I stopped short, my shoes squeaking on the linoleum tile. For there, on a torn gold velvet sofa, drinking tea and eating honey-dipped donuts, sat Li-wen and the security general’s son whom I had seen in San Francisco.
It had been Li-wen who spoke, and he beamed, arms folded across his chest, so that the leather collar of his vest puffed out. The security general’s son squinted at me through his thick glasses frames. “Tong Chia-lin? Oh, I remember him now. His father was Taoyuan’s representative on the People’s Political Council for an extremely brief time. Funny, I saw him in San Francisco with Professor Hong.” He coughed meaningfully.
My hair stood on end, and adrenaline surged through my body, urging me to run. The very inclusion of the word Formosan in the title of this club implied opposition to the Nationalist doctrine and support of Taiwanese self-determination. These two men were not here on a friendly visit.
Li-wen set his teacup down on a chipped glass coffee table. “You look surprised as a rabbit at gunpoint. But really, we are the ones surprised. What are you doing in Chicago?”
“I have a job repairing radios at Zenith.”
“The factory?” The security general’s son raised his eyebrow.
“America has a lot of factories,” I said. I wasn’t going to let him imply that I was Communist. “What about you, Li-wen,” I said aggressively. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you working in John Gleason’s laboratory?”
Li-wen laughed again and waved dismissively in the air. “That Gleason, all hot air. I’m working in a better lab with a superior computer, just down the hall. But it’s too hot there in the summer for the computer to work. I have a job at a country club.”
“Bryn Mawr?” I said.
He looked at me, surprised. “How did you know?”
“Sun-kwei told me they paid well for dishwashers. And I suppose that means Gleason didn’t take you on.”
Li-wen winced. “Brash as always. But I guess that’s part of your charm. We’re meeting my old classmate here.” He had a sly look on his face. “He’s here on vacation and loves Japanese food. There’s a place with pretty decent sushi, if you’d like to come along and shoot the breeze.”
I could think of nothing I would have enjoyed less. “I have already eaten,” I lied. All Chen had offered me was that jasmine tea. “I’ll go to bed. I’m tired from my day’s work.”
They nodded, and I turned away, feeling glad about getting the upper hand.
“By the way,” Li-wen called, “I just got back from visiting home. Your home, I mean. Your wife looks terrible—well, for her. Coughing up a storm. Your brother says she’s being treated with antibiotics, but I would guess antibiotics don’t kill tuberculosis, from the looks of her.”
“Tuberculosis!” I turned on my heel. “Who says she has that?”
This time, Li-wen looked genuinely surprised. “You didn’t know?”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, though his surprise confused me. “She hasn’t said anything to me.”
He shrugged. “Women lie.” He pointed his chin toward the front desk, which was dark. “By the way, you have mail.”
24
MY HEART POUNDED SO that I could barely work the key in my door. The door caught as I pushed it open, and I reached in to switch on the light, half expecting Nationalist agents to be standing under the dangling bulb, but the light revealed only the same quotidian barrenness of the days before—my single bed with its coarse brown blanket, a small wooden table, and a chair of orange melamine with uneven steel legs.
I closed the door behind me and looked at the letter from the front desk. It was from Yoshiko, forwarded by Mrs. Larsson. The original postmark was from almost a month ago. I examined it closely for signs that it had been opened before but could find none. I ripped it open so hastily that a picture fell out onto the floor. When I picked it up, a shock went through me. In the picture, Yoshiko wore a dress I recognized from our honeymoon—silk (I knew it to be red, though the picture was black and white) with velvet trim around the collar—but whereas on our honeymoon the dress had accentuated her curves, here in the picture, just a few months after the birth of our son, the dress hung slack. Shadows pooled beneath her cheekbones, so that she resembled her mother.
Kai-ming, glumly propped up on his mother’s lap, also looked terribly thin and had bags under his eyes.
Li-wen had been telling the truth.
I paced back and forth, holding the picture, remembering my words in Jin-fu Temple.
I’ll have you know I am not your father. I would not leave you to starve.
History would repeat itself. Yoshiko had chosen the one man who would do just as her father had done.
I took some slow breaths to calm myself and then stopped my pacing to read the letter.
Your mother has been forbidding me to tell you, but now I feel I must disobey . . .
Your mother is so stuck in her old frugal ways, never getting enough food. I admit I am proud, and I will not stoop to fighting over the dishes at dinner or beg your mother for more. As a result I have grown very thin and weak. For some weeks I have been coughing and coughing. When I cough I feel that my eyes will explode. Sometimes I cough so that I vomit what little food is in my belly. And at night I lie in bed shivering, though it is ninety degrees outside.
In the mornings, though, I feel better. And so over the past few weeks I kept convincing myself that I was better. I don’t want to be sick now. Not when you are going to bring me to America.
Your mother has also noticed I am not able to keep up with her when we go to the market. She bought a black chicken to make soup, but of course I had to share it with the whole family and hardly got anything but broth.
But then I started coughing up blood
, and my friend May-ying urged me to get an X-ray.
My mother dragged me down to the roentgenogram clinic. She held my arm so tight she left marks on my wrist. She kept saying, “You foolish girl! Don’t you remember your brother?”
The X-ray showed tuberculosis. What bad luck!
I sat in Toru’s office coughing and shivering, wrapped up in a towel. My mother was hysterical, saying I was going to die just like my brother, that it was your fault for leaving—though it’s not, of course! But I have faith in Toru. I have been in that office so many times with Kai-ming and he has saved Kai-ming’s life that many times.
Toru moved around the office, opening all kinds of packages with all kinds of needles and bottles. He gave me an injection called streptomycin. It’s some kind of miracle drug, something new from the West. It cures everything, but very slowly. I’ll need to take it for four months!
My mother asked if I should go to the hospital, and for a while Toru didn’t answer. I thought it was because he was busy writing something down in his book and he didn’t hear her, so I repeated her question.
But then it turned out he did hear the question and he was too embarrassed to answer. Because he does think I should go to the hospital, but he already talked to your mother about it when he heard from the roentgenogram clinic, and she refused to let me go. She said, if Toru can give me the medicine, why should I go to the hospital?
My mother was so mad she was shaking her fists in the air. She looked like an old witch, with her drab old clothes and her face all twisted up. She kept saying, “Too cheap to pay for the hospital! Two cars and a chauffeur!” Maybe it was my fault that I had told her about your sisters’ Japanese pearls and gold bracelets, their alligator-skin purses and shoes. My mother kept saying your mother was hoping I would die so they could get a girl with a dowry. Of course I know your mother is not that bad, and she really does like me, possibly better than she likes her daughters, but she is very stuck in her old ways.
I got my mother calmed down and she called your mother to offer to take care of me herself, at my parents’ house. Closer to Toru’s office, she said, but she also meant cheaper than the hospital.
