by Julie Wu
It was hard for me not to read this as angry, both because of the stark format of the telegram and because I had always experienced him as angry. I wished I could see him face-to-face, for the one moment that he might be defending me against Kazuo. Did my father finally see my worth? Or was it simply the responsibility of a man for his underlings, like the time he had rescued me and The Earth from the Nationalist soldier? Was it just that he wanted so badly to visit my brother in Japan?
I heard nothing else for months except from Yoshiko.
Dear Saburo,
There has been a lot of strife here since you sent that letter to your father. I don’t know exactly what you said, but your father has been irritable as an old bear, growling and snapping at Kazuo. Kazuo finally agreed to marry So-lan, that scowling girl with three downtown Taipei apartment buildings as her dowry. He and your father have been in a terrible mood.
But the house is full of activity, as Jiro has also found a bride, a bank teller named Li-sing, who wears bright blue powder on her eyelids and has been plying your parents with beer. Plans are for a double wedding. The phone rings again and again and packages are piling up all over the great room. I couldn’t help noticing that two of the packages were very ornate and expensive wedding dresses for the brides . . . Well, expensive or not, my dress was much more beautiful.
I told Kai-ming he would have two new aunts by his next birthday, and he was quiet for a moment, then ran down the hall, shouting, “Oh no! I’m dead! New aunt! New aunt!”
Poor boy! His aunts were so cruel to him while I was in the hospital. For him these years have been very hard.
These years. My poor boy! And I didn’t even know him.
I knew only of him. And all that I knew was in the gossamer blue airmail envelopes I received from Yoshiko. I told myself that this was enough, that I knew just as well as any father how high my son could count, how well he could throw a ball. I knew, from pictures, his delicate face. A photograph of him on one foot was enough for me to divine his sense of balance, his confidence.
But I knew what I told myself wasn’t true. Yoshiko’s words on onionskin, a two-inch photograph—these were nothing real. As the year stretched on and I received more letters detailing Kai-ming’s larger shoes, his height, now thirty-six inches exactly, his hilariously bold comments (to a teasing uncle: “I’m the boss and you’d better listen to me!”), I felt more and more that I had made a mistake in leaving him. Probably Yoshiko alone was giving him more love than I had received from my whole family as a boy. But he wasn’t getting anything from me except for messages and the few small gifts I could afford to send. Between my studies in South Dakota, in Michigan, and in South Dakota again, I arranged my pictures of Kai-ming—once so tiny, now one, now two, now wearing a new birthday shirt with an orchid pinned to it, left over from my brothers’ wedding. Yoshiko’s father had abandoned his children for a year. Now I had abandoned Kai-ming for three.
“IT’S A BIT of a delicate situation,” Senator Dickey said.
It had taken some doing to get myself into his office. Some months earlier I had bumped into Bashir, the Lebanese student I had met at Mount Rushmore. He was indeed now pursuing a career in civil service and had been working summers as an intern with the South Dakota State Legislature. It was through his efforts that I had obtained fifteen valuable minutes with a United States senator.
The desk surface gleamed, reflecting light onto the double chin of this man who had been chosen free and clear by the people of South Dakota to represent them. He looked perfectly ordinary to me—a white man with trim gray hair and rectangular glasses. Did he have special skills of oratory, a special way of appearing as every man’s friend or father? Was his house filled with sycophants and operants, whispering and persuading, while his children cowered in the shadows?
Through the window behind him, snow fell, coating the pine branches and making them sag. Pheasant-hunting season had come and gone again.
“The government of your country, the Republic of China, has been allied with us against the Communists since the Sino-Japanese War.” He cleared his throat. “So on the one hand we don’t want to upset our allies. On the other hand, we want to discourage foreign governments from throwing their weight around in inappropriate ways within our borders—”
“That’s right,” I said. “Especially when some of their agents are not even here legally.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Suddenly he seemed old and very weary. “Not here legally?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose I should ask you who.”
I was silent. Even after all the trouble they’d caused for me, I felt sorry for Li-wen and Sun-kwei. They were lightweights, really.
Dickey gave a little wave of his hand and sighed heavily. “Actually, I don’t want to know.” He sat back and fiddled with a golden letter file. “Any other reason why they should listen to me?”
“You’re an American senator,” I said. “They want to stay in the UN.”
He looked at his watch, scratched his head, and sighed. “You know, Chia-lin, I’ll tell you something. I really am not sure the US has any business meddling in Asia.”
I swallowed.
“I mean, look what happened in Korea. Fifty thousand American boys dead, in some country most Americans can’t even find on the map.”
“But—”
“And all this squabbling between the Nationalist Chinese and the Chinese Communists. Who is the real ruler of China? Well, who cares? How is that our problem?”
I said nothing.
“But you’re not asking me to fix that problem, are you, Chia-lin?”
“No,” I said.
“Give me your information.”
I handed him a stack of letters representing my odyssey through the United States. Pat O’Reilly, Ni Wen-chong, Professor Gleason, Professor Beck.
“You know,” Senator Dickey said, taking my papers, “the thing that gets me about this case is that your own brother did this to you. Now, that’s what makes me mad.”
“ANY NEWS?” BECK said.
We sat on folding chairs on a vast frozen lake in Custer State Park, watching our lines freeze in the fishing hole. Other fishing parties on the lake had huts—heated ones, even. We, of course, had none.
Beck wore a red parka and a mink hat he’d bought in Czechoslovakia. I wore the new parka I’d splurged on at Sears. It was so cold the air hurt my lungs when I breathed in. It reminded me of Fort Churchill.
“My son has measles,” I said.
“I thought he already had measles.”
“I thought so, too.”
“What about your wife?”
“They say the quota will be abolished soon. We just have to get me cleared of the political charges.”
“You said your father’s taking care of it?”
“I think so.”
“And Senator Dickey?”
“I think he will help,” I said.
I got a bite on my line. I pulled it up, and a silvery trout wriggled three beats on the ice before it froze. I pulled my fingers back up into my sleeves. No need to end up like the fish.
I drove us back over Iron Mountain Road, which hugged the side of the mountain with precipitous drops to the side.
“When are you taking your qualifying exam at Michigan?” Beck said.
“Oh, a couple years. First I’ll teach signal processing this year so I can review that, then the next year I’ll do—”
“Just take it. You’re ready.”
“But it’s extremely difficult. It’s oral, and they can ask you anything. None of the Taiwanese there has ever—”
He glanced at me sideways.
“One more year,” I said.
“What happened to the plagiarism charge?”
“It’s dropped,” I said. “I’m very lucky. Otherwise, Immigration would say I do not have moral character and I could not stay or get my wife here.”
“You’re not lucky. I’d say y
ou’re not lucky at all—”
Suddenly a car zoomed out of a narrow tunnel into our lane.
“Ai!” I swerved and felt the tires skid on the icy road. The steering wheel spun out of my grasp. I slammed into the horn and then against the door.
When the car came to a stop, Beck was leaning against me. He looked sideways at me and then moved back over to his side of the car. One of his mink ear flaps was over his eye, and he swiveled the hat back into place. “As I was saying . . . ,” he said.
“We’re on the wrong side of the road.” I reached for my door handle.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Beck said.
“Why? We need to get out.” I opened the door and shifted to step outside. But my foot didn’t touch anything. I turned to look and saw the ground—a thousand feet below my dangling boot. We hung over the edge of a cliff, prevented only by the base of a half-dead tree from plunging down and crashing onto the glinting ice below. I recoiled into the car and began shaking. “My God,” I said.
“You don’t take no for an answer, do you?” Beck said. “Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes that’s not going to work out well for you.”
37
Dear Saburo:
I got a letter from Senator Dickey saying that I have been “reclassified into the preferential portion.” What does this mean? Will he let us in soon?
Love,
Yoshiko
I bought a little yellow house on Elm Street and filled its empty rooms with furniture from Sears and Montgomery Ward. For our bedroom, a double bed with a bookcase headboard for my bedtime reading. For Kai-ming’s room, a small twin bed, as Yoshiko had told me he no longer needed a crib. There was a guest room, and in there I put a full-size bed with a very firm mattress—easily the most expensive bed in the house, because Yoshiko had told me my father was planning to visit as well.
I leaned out the window of the living room. Against the backdrop of the low, snow-covered hills that separated Robbinsdale from the School of Mines, the apple tree out back was beginning to bud, its branches swollen with the promise of sweet beauty after the frigid blasts of winter. Perhaps this fall my wife would be here to twist the ripe fruit off our own tree. Perhaps we could bite into the juicy flesh together—I, Yoshiko, and Kai-ming.
I opened the window. The grasses rustled, and the cool wind, spiced with new life, rushed into my body like an embrace.
AND AT LAST:
Among the gray and brown figures making their way down the stairs from the plane in Rapid City, in bold relief—black hair, fire-red coat—she appeared. She stopped for a moment on the stairs, scanning the crowd. She was dwarfed by the pale midwestern throng around her, her face thinner, her nose and chin more pointed than I recalled, though less skeletal than in the photograph of her at the height of her illness. I felt as I had when I was a boy at the Nationalist parade, spying her across Chungcheng Road between her father and her beloved brother; as I had peering through the pharmacy window the day before the meet, wondering whether she really was that same girl I had clung to in the air raid. But then her eyes found mine. And this was the difference between then and now: she was mine, and she came to me, stepping carefully down the stairs, her high-heeled legs appearing and disappearing between the flaps of her coat as she descended. Though she had flown for two days, her hair was styled in a glossy bouffant and her complexion was white and immaculate. She held the hand of a child—my impossibly big son, navigating his own way down the stairs, his face echoing Yoshiko’s delicate features. As they climbed down, a camera bulb flashed in Yoshiko’s face, and she and Kai-ming looked up in surprise at a stranger taking their picture.
They reached the tarmac, and we embraced, feeling the people rush by. She was slight in my arms, soft and vital, her breaths quicker than I remembered. I clutched her hard. I couldn’t believe I had almost lost her. My nose in her hair, I smelled peach blossoms, the scent of life.
But I could not hold her forever. There were the people squeezing by, Kai-ming at our feet. I released her, and she smiled up at me, eyes sparkling, mouth bright and lovely. I had told her Americans did not have gold teeth, and she had gotten new porcelain ones.
I picked up Kai-ming and he held me at arm’s length. The weight of him sent searing pain down my leg.
“Don’t you recognize your papa?” Yoshiko laughed, that rich, womanly laugh that put me at ease. I smiled at my son, but he did not smile back. He blinked, his eyes scrutinizing mine, scanning my face, my hair. And the idea of him that I had built up from all Yoshiko’s letters, of his illnesses, of his first steps, of the time he escaped from his crib and the time he rode the train, blew away like the merest wisp of vapor. Here in my arms was a four-year-old boy full of life, his fingertips brushing my shoulder, his body twisting unexpectedly as he glanced at his mother, and we had not one shared memory, not one shared smile. I did not know his movements, his expressions, his smell. I did not know my son at all.
He turned back to me. “Amah took my gun,” he said seriously.
“What?”
A dark expression passed over Yoshiko’s face and she touched the child’s hair. “No need for that. Be happy. We’re in America!”
I GLANCED AT Yoshiko as we drove, the bright coat throwing into relief the whiteness of her throat and the pink delicacy of her lips, smiling and half-open at the new world around her. The light reflected from the plains and played upon the luminosity of her skin. On all sides, the grass stretched to the horizon, forming a landscape vast and empty beyond the imagination of any boy or girl growing up on an island so dense with life as Taiwan.
“Aiyo!” she exclaimed. “There’s nothing here!”
“That’s right,” I said. “But it’s a good place to live. I’ll show you.”
The light caught the gold in her eyes as she turned to me. “I’m very happy,” she said. She touched my arm and laughed so that her dimples showed. Then she looked down for a moment. “Your father’s coming in May,” she said. “For four months.”
“Four months! Why?”
“He said he wants to see the country. But he seemed very serious about it. I think he wants to talk to you about something.”
“But we’re moving to Michigan in the summer. I wanted to take the qualifying exam in August and then work on my thesis.”
“So he’ll see Ann Arbor, too. He can help us move.”
I had never seen my father lift a piece of furniture in my life.
“What about my studying?” I said.
“Study. If he wanted you to cater to him, he should have asked what was a good time for a visit.”
I looked at her. She sat upright, looking straight ahead, and there was a bitterness in her lovely eyes that I had never seen before.
I HAD PIGS’ feet and noodles waiting on the table at home because it was Kai-ming’s birthday.
Yoshiko laughed. “I don’t even know how to cook that myself!”
Kai-ming seemed satisfied, and he ran around the little yellow house as though he owned it. At nighttime, tucked into the bed I had purchased at Sears, he said to me, “My mama says you’ll get me a new gun.”
I found Yoshiko in our new bedroom, unhooking the clasp of her faux pearls in front of the bureau mirror. She unpacked her toiletries from a train case.
I sat on the bed, watching her. After so many years of yearning to have her in my bed again, I was impatient for her to be done with her preparations. But then she rubbed her eyes, and I could see now her fatigue, the weight of traveling so long with a child, of being in the opposite time zone. She had had an overnight connection in Seattle, and I had arranged for an acquaintance’s wife to meet her and take her to a hotel for the night. If not for this stranger’s coming to pick her up again in the morning, Yoshiko had told me, she would have missed her flight. She had slept so deeply she did not hear her alarm.
She pointed to a cloth-covered bundle on the bureau. “That’s my money. It’s a lot. We should put it in a safe place.”
“I’ll put it in the bank tomorrow.”
She nodded, opening a jar of cold cream. “Your mother wanted it. She saw me packing and said, ‘There’s no need to take all your money to America. Just leave it with us.’ ”
I felt sick to my stomach.
“And then a day later, Kazuo came in and sat down to watch me pack. At first I thought he was being nice, helping me pack. He really hadn’t been so bad recently. He plays well with Kai-ming and gives him rides on his back.
“He said, ‘You’re working so hard. You should take a break.’
“I thought that was very nice. But then he folded his arms over his belly—he’s got a big one now. He said, ‘There’s no need to pack so much. There’s gold in the streets of America. All you need is one dollar, and you can leave the rest with us.’ ”
Yoshiko turned to me, eyes flashing in the dim light. “Can you believe it? Do they think I’m stupid?
“After he left the room, I realized it was your mother. Kachan had asked him to talk to me. I was so angry I grabbed a fistful of cash and stormed into the kitchen. Kachan was there pickling cabbage, and she looked up at me with her mouth open. I threw the money on the table. ‘Take it!’ I said. I was so angry. And that made them stop bothering me. I gave them a few hundred. They have no idea how much I had stored with my parents.”
I was speechless, both at my family’s greed and at my wife’s boldness.
“Kazuo makes plenty of money as a doctor,” Yoshiko said. “And with So-lan’s money, he has all the money he could possibly want. Your parents, too.” She shook her head.
Ah, but no amount of money will be enough, when what you really want is Yoshiko. In a way, I felt sorry for Kazuo, and even for my mother.
Yoshiko continued dabbing the cold cream onto her face. With the anger in her eyes, she looked more like a warrior applying war paint than a lady performing her beauty routine.
“Kai-ming keeps talking about a gun,” I said.
“Ai!” She clicked her tongue, wiping the cold cream off her cheeks with a tissue. “It was his favorite toy. My uncle gave it to him. You pulled the trigger and it went tyak, tyak, tyak. We were all ready to bring it onto the plane and he was out on the tarmac shooting with it.
