Green Island
Page 1
ALSO BY SHAWNA YANG RYAN
Water Ghosts
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2016 by Shawna Yang Ryan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt from “It Was Like This: You Were Happy” from After: Poems by Jane Hirshfield, copyright © 2006 by Jane Hirshfield. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ryan, Shawna Yang, [date]
Green Island / Shawna Yang Ryan. — First edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-101-87425-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-101-87426-4 (eBook)
1. Taiwan—History—20th century—Fiction. 2. Taiwan—Social conditions—20th century—Fiction. 3. Taiwan—Politics and government—20th century—Fiction. 4. Taiwan—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.Y344G74 2016
813'.6—dc23 2015002202
eBook ISBN 9781101874264
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover image by Aaron Joel Santos/Offset and Henry Westheim Photography/Alamy
Cover design by Stephanie Ross
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Also by Shawna Yang Ryan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Book I: Taipei
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Book II: Taichung
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Book III: Berkeley
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Book IV: Taipei
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Epilogue: Memento Vitae
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
IN MEMORY OF TERENCE CHEUNG
這綠島的夜已經
這樣沉靜
姑娘喲妳為什麼
還是默默無語
This green island night
appears so peaceful.
Darling, why are you
still silent?
—“GREEN ISLAND SERENADE” (TAIWANESE LOVE SONG/SONG OF RESISTANCE)
It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
—JANE HIRSHFIELD, “IT WAS LIKE THIS: YOU WERE HAPPY”
IT WAS LIKE THIS.
1947
1
MY MOTHER LI MIN’S labor pains began the night that the widow was beaten in front of the Tian-ma Teahouse.
The first cramp was unmistakable. She leaned against the wall and pressed her fingers to the underside of her belly. All her previous children had taken their time, leisurely writhing for days before they finally decided to emerge. She expected the same with her fourth.
The children, freshly bathed and rosy from the hot water, their hair still damp, were upstairs in bed. She went outside and around the house to add more kindling to the furnace that would keep the water warm for my father’s bath. A wave went through her, like a girdle expanding, pulled from the front of her pelvis to her back. She exhaled. Some women toiled up until the moment that they gave birth in a field, then went back to work while nursing the still-bloody newborn. This was women’s lore. My mother, however, had given birth each time in her husband’s clinic, with hot water and a midwife, and then appreciatively followed the prescription for a reclusive month indoors, hair unwashed, eating chicken soup, attended by a Cantonese woman her husband hired. No fields for her.
—
Across town, the widow, who sold black market cigarettes in front of the teahouse run by the popular silent film narrator Zhan Tian-ma, was about to become infamous.
She was just a young woman with a dead husband, sitting on her haunches behind a cheap makeshift stand on a busy road. She was a few years older than my mother, with two children playing in the waning light on the sidewalk next to her spindly-legged table. The lights on the street were coming up, and people—artists, writers, actors—the types who would drink, smoke, and laugh their way through the end of the world—drifted out of the teahouse. Often, they stopped at the widow’s stand. She even sold American cigarettes. They tore open the pack right there, lighting up with a match she gave them.
The night was chilly, and smoke mixed with breath in the cold air. The widow’s eyes settled on a pair of lovers who meandered down an alley, whispering, arm to warm arm. She was gazing in their direction, thinking of her dead husband, when the Monopoly Bureau agents approached. She knew only a smattering of Mandarin but did not need it to translate their haughty faces, or their greedy hands confiscating her cigarettes.
A shout of protest flew from her lips.
People turned.
One agent’s face blazed, and he cursed the widow, reaching once more for her cigarettes. She grabbed his arm and he shouted, “Let go!” Ignited by his tone, the crowd drew closer, clamoring for the agent to stop. In a way, weren’t they all widows selling black market cigarettes? And can shame—or pride—explain why the agent threw the widow to the ground, fumbled for his pistol, gripping it as if he would shoot, and then slammed the butt into her head? Was he merely saving face?
—
The bath was drawn and the room muted by steam. Dr. Tsai was naked, on a low stool, ladling water from the tub over his shoulders. Li Min hitched up her dress, settled slowly on another stool behind her husband, and began lathering the washcloth.
Another cramp knotted up. She gasped softly and exhaled. Her ar
m fell to her side as she waited for it to pass.
Dr. Tsai looked over his shoulder. “What is it?”
“It’s begun.”
“When?”
“Just a few minutes ago.”
She watched her husband’s shoulders relax. “I’ll go for Aunty Cheung after we’re done,” he said.
But she thought the midwife could wait until morning, and she told him so. After her first child, she’d sworn not to have any more. One already required her whole self—absolute, daily devotion—but then there had been two, then three, and now four, like spirits forcing their way into the world, demanding life despite her precautions. She was ready to pray to the fertility goddess to take her blessings elsewhere, and deeply grateful that her husband agreed.
She moved the washcloth in slow circles and watched the skin on his back bloom pink.
Perhaps she’d end up like her neighbor’s mother, having children into her late forties. The woman’s breasts dangled like a street dog’s teats beneath her thin shirt.
Four was already just shy of a litter, she thought.
“We’re done,” Dr. Tsai said. He rinsed himself, shook the water from his hair, and put a hand gingerly into the tub. He pulled back; it was bright red. “Ah,” he said, pleased. He stepped into the water and sank down.
With effort, Li Min rose. Her face glowed with sweat and steam.
“It’s too hot for me. I can’t stand it,” she told her husband.
—
The cigarette vendor clutched her head. Her fingers were greasy with blood. Pain rippled through her skull in slow waves. She imagined she heard her children screaming somewhere in the chaos.
The Monopoly Bureau agents, pressed to the widow’s fallen body by the crowd rolling angrily toward them in a fog of cursing, kicked her. Eyes wild, the agents waved their guns and threatened to shoot, but the crowd’s cries swallowed their words.
The people would not retreat; some fought to get to the bleeding cigarette vendor, while others surged forward in rage. The agents began firing and the crowd collapsed, fleeing, breaking into a hundred splinters.
—
Li Min paced the hall.
The midwife had told her it was natural to feel regret, but this did not stop her guilt. The worst was the months after each baby had arrived, when she wondered what curse she had visited upon this new thing by bringing it into the world.
Behind the bathroom door, water splashed occasionally, but her husband, resting neck-deep in the tub, was otherwise quiet.
Was it possible this one would be a son too? She hoped so, but not because she favored men. Her husband modeled the seriousness, the stoicism, that she hoped her sons would inherit, but she had nothing to teach a daughter. She could teach her to dream—say, to be a painter, as she herself had been trained—and then teach her to let it go. Teach her to cloister herself in dark hallways, admiring how the light fell through the rice-paper doors while knowing that there was no point in putting it on canvas. Already, her oldest child, a daughter, at ten years old could make simple meals, washed laundry, and cared for her younger brothers. Li Min did not know how to give her more.
Last time, the midwife had said castor oil would bring out the baby faster. But the shops were closed.
She concentrated on pressing each foot deliberately onto the floor, feeling the wood, cool at first and then warming to her skin. She concentrated her whole mind in her feet and tried to forget the pain.
—
The agents stumbled their way through the street and hid in a police box, where they waited while the military police were called.
A knot of people eased open. Among them, a man lay bleeding. Bystanders turned him over, saw the bullet hole clogged with blood. Shouting helplessly, pushing someone’s shirt against the wound and feeling it grow heavy and wet, they watched his eyes glaze over, his mouth gape. Somebody beckoned to a rickshaw. When the driver saw the dead man, he shook his head and waved his hands in protest. “Oh no. No dead passengers.” He cycled away.
Two Samaritans made a stretcher out of shirts and carried the body away.
The military police arrived and the crowd rushed them to demand a summary execution, on the spot, for the murderers, who cowered inside the police box. The MPs promised justice at headquarters.
Justice. That abstract word. Reluctantly, the crowd allowed the Monopoly Bureau agents to be escorted away. But the bystanders’ fettered rage demanded release. They pulled open the doors of the agents’ abandoned truck, ransacking the backseat, building a bonfire of everything they found inside. The crackle of the fire was hungry.
Still electrified, they turned their attention to the truck itself. They rocked it until it fell over and the windows on one side shattered.
—
Her husband slept but Li Min could not. Next to him, she sat up in the dark, feeling the weight of the baby pressing against her bones. If she had risen, gone downstairs, and soothed herself beside the radio, she might have heard the news.
—
The fire burned itself out, leaving a heap of ash on the pavement.
2
BY MORNING, Li Min felt her pelvic bones separating, opening up to greet the new baby. The creature shifted inside her, settled lower. It is a creature, isn’t it? she thought. Some little monster feasting on her. Two months ago, she’d lost a tooth. In the palm of her hand, the tooth was translucent, almost gray. “Don’t worry”—she could not help but notice the affectionate chiding in her husband’s voice as he assured her—“the baby is not sucking the marrow from your bones.”
Downstairs, the boys shrieked, and her daughter, good girl, hushed them. Far off, someone thumped at the clinic door. Chaos, muffled by the floor and walls, rumbled. Maybe the midwife had arrived. The woman was efficient, no-nonsense. A different kind of mind lay inside a person who was accustomed to seeing blood without injury and to thrusting her hands into that most private and miraculous moment.
My mother lumbered over to the vanity, pulled a sweater from the pile of clothes on the stool, and struggled into it. When the knitting cut into her, she realized how much her arms had swelled.
At every third stair, she winced with pain. At some point, the body became a boulder barreling toward the precipice: the cramps grew closer in time, harder; her heart quickened; and she would not be able to resist the impulse to force the baby out. An irreversible course. The clinic had quieted. She passed by the dining room, where the boys were splayed on their stomachs on the tatami, brows furrowed over a board game.
“Ah Zhay?” she asked.
“Kitchen,” the oldest boy said. His eyes stayed on the game.
She found her daughter at the stove trying to stoke a fire. Hiccups broke her attempts. She was crying. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.
Mama stroked her daughter’s hair. “What’s wrong? Where’s Baba?”
Ah Zhay cast her wet eyes toward the door that connected the clinic to the house.
“Did he scold you?”
Ah Zhay shook her head, but refused to say more. Li Min made it only two steps when her legs were suddenly drenched.
She hoped the other voice behind the door was the midwife’s.
Inside the clinic, her husband was kneeling beside a man whose blood dripped through the bamboo mat of the clinic bed and spread over the floor, soaking her husband’s knees. At the queer, metallic smell—worse than the bloodless pig heads in the market, with flies lighting on their eyelashes; worse than the far-off recollection of her thick menses blood—she fought the heaving in her throat. Her husband jerked his head, and his eyes, wild, met hers.
“What is—?” She could barely get the words out.
He snapped, “Not now.”
She noticed a man standing in the dark corner, wedged between the microscope table and the bookshelf. He looked miserable, shocked and impotent. He glanced at her, then sank down onto his haunches and held his head.
Her husband’s world encompassed the radius of an arm’s
length. He and his patient. Her husband’s angry intensity alarmed her almost more than the blood. She stumbled back to the kitchen and found Ah Zhay struggling with the hot kettle.
“Is he dead?” Ah Zhay sobbed.
“Go look after your brothers.” She grabbed the kettle, set it back on the cooling burner, and limped back to the clinic. Her husband had propped the injured man on his side. Keep the wound above the heart, she recalled her husband once saying. With the man now facing the wall, she could see that what had been just a black knot in his chest was an angry, ragged tear in his back. Her husband had snipped open the jacket around the wound, and the petals of ripped and stained cloth hung limply.
The wad of rags that had been stuffed against the bleeding was already soaked, and her husband took a thick fold of fresh gauze and pressed it against the old bandage. The blood seeped through quickly, flowering against the white. The man’s eyes were closed, his lips blue. She was sure he was already dead. She noted the spent syringe, one last drop of liquid swelling at the tip, discarded on the tray beside the bed.
“He was shot in front of the governor-general’s,” the other man offered. Even without the worried twist in his eyebrows, he had a maudlin face, heavy jowled and droopy eyed. She realized that the splotches on his hands, which she first took to be freckles, were dried blood.