Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  However, skill and education could not erase his second-class stigma. The Taiwanese doctors ate separately and endured snide comments on their fluency in Japanese.

  He tended to all sorts of ailments brought on by the hot, damp conditions. Illnesses of the mind, which were more prevalent, were outside his realm and ignored. He did not believe in the war, or in Japan’s project—the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—but the job put rice on the table, even if back home in Taipei patients suffered from the shortage of doctors.

  And then dysentery hit the camp and my father realized that death would not be by British bullet, or wild cat, or even starvation. It would come through the simple economics of a body’s need for water. This was the noble death the war recruiters had promised when they had lured Taiwanese boys into fighting for the glory of the Japanese empire? The majestic death of wrinkled skin, a parched throat, blinks that no longer moisten the eyes? He might have been angry had he the energy.

  In the Burma camp, he became ill too. He curled up on his bunk beside a growing puddle of his own stink. He would die there. He understood that fact, even as everything seeped from his brain. Anything beyond that simple meditation was enough to call up the nausea that he was trying desperately to keep at bay. He fought off images of his family: his oldest child, a daughter, flicking the abacus beads with her chubby fingers; his oldest son, who had just started school, marching off to class in his school cap and tidy navy shorts; his youngest son still toddling around in diapers. And his wife. He recalled the day he had noticed a paint stain on her finger, a deep jade she had been unable to wash away and that he had first taken for a bruise. He realized that she was still painting in secret. He didn’t say anything to her, but remembering how carefully she had hidden her passion, his throat clenched with pity.

  He pitied himself too, because he would not see any of them again. He was certain he would die here. His pants were damp with filth and he could not even bother to button them.

  A nurse stripped him down and bathed him. In the warm tent, beneath the caress of the wet rag, the shit stink of his body was unleashed. She wiped the terrible pungency of fear from his armpits. She made him new. His lids grew heavy. Finally, for the first time in days, he slept.

  He supposed she expected a miracle. He did too, but the next time he awoke, it was from the urgency that rushed out of him in a torrent of shit and blood and mucus. Still crouched, sweaty, he bowed his head, now sick with realization. He cried, but had no water left for tears. He closed his eyes and dry sobs racked his bare chest until he faded to sleep.

  Light slanted through tall windows. He turned his head—neck aching—and his gaze unfurled over an endless row of beds.

  “Where are we?”

  The man in the bed to his left turned toward him. His head was encased in bandages and one bright black eye blinked at him. My father saw the blood seeping through the gauze as the man answered: “Bangkok.”

  From the jungles of Burma to a hospital in Bangkok.

  He had survived. He thought, wryly, he could recover and fight yet for the empire—demonstrate the Yamato spirit of a true Nihon citizen. He scanned the long columns of men with hunks of torn flesh, decaying limbs, missing eyes, and scorched skin surrounding him. The odors that wafted up when the nurses changed the sheets of the man to his right—a bullet had torn through his back and exposed his spine—or the bandages of the man to his left—an eye, part of his cheek, and his ear were gone—intensified his sickness. Amid these wounded, a quiet illness like his was forgotten.

  His body had expelled every ounce of strength. He had absolutely nothing left. This was the most inglorious sort of death, and he wished for some proclamation that might redeem it. An utterance like Tenno Heika Banzai! to indicate that his last thoughts were, loyally, on the empire. Instead, he closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep.

  —

  Startled by a gunshot, Baba woke up in Taiwan, the intervening years gone. He was still in the village house surrounded by his fellow prisoners. Another shot rang out. He pressed against the side of the wardrobe and could not move. On the bed, Professor Wu lay on his side, frozen, one glazed black eye staring at him.

  “It could be anything,” Baba whispered to him, but then the hard crunch of boots stomped past the window, and before they could sit up, a voice from the front room demanded them.

  Baba felt for the lucky talisman of my mother’s hair, but his finger was bare. He looked among the dust on the floor and found nothing but grit and what appeared to be their own detritus. Suddenly, life and death seemed to depend on finding that elusive and fortunate strand of hair. After all, in the novel, the doctor with the same lucky charm had eventually been freed.

  “Dr. Tsai, let’s go,” Kai Hsiang urged.

  He couldn’t. He was now a man with a single possession and he needed it.

  He crouched over his blanket.

  “Dr. Tsai.” An unfamiliar worry trickled into Kai Hsiang’s voice. From the other room, the unseen man commended the professors for their punctuality and again ordered the rest of them out. The blanket was filthy—nubby and speckled with many long strands of anonymous hair. He didn’t want to think about what had happened to the woman who had once slept beneath it.

  “Dr. Tsai,” Kai Hsiang pleaded.

  It was a lost and insane cause. Baba scrambled to his feet and joined the others.

  —

  They walked by the freshly executed men who lay facedown in the dirt road, their hands bound behind their backs. Heat still rose off the blood seeping from them. Out of the corner of his eye, Baba saw women moving quietly between houses. Only women.

  The group turned off the road and traipsed past a tidy garden and then along a narrow dirt path. Soon, a temple came into full view—somehow, in this remote, godforsaken little place—painted red and green with touches of gold leaf. The thick round columns, lacquered red, gleamed. However, boot prints dulled the carefully varnished wood floor.

  Their guard ordered the four to sit in a line at the center of the room. Baba stared up at Matsu’s incense-blackened face. She, like them, had been silent; her muteness had been the first sign of her immortality. The final sign—legend claimed—was the day that she, at the age of twenty-eight, walked up a mountain where she’d seen the light lancing the earth and disappeared into the clouds. Her wordless arrival and departure sealed her legend. Fishermen adopted her as their patron saint. Men carved her face into wood and stone and carted her on palanquins down village roads, arraying her in firework and incense smoke. Her best likeness was set into a special temple and worshipped for so many centuries that her face blackened from the smoke. And now Baba prayed that the goddess of compassion would open her eyes to them.

  A soldier stood before them and beckoned their attention with a spool of wire. “We need to make sure that you all stay together. Hands clasped behind your backs.”

  Why not handcuffs? Baba thought. The soldier began with Professor Wu, and when he screamed, Baba understood why not handcuffs. They were being strung together like fish for market. Professor Wu sobbed as the soldier moved on to Professor Hsiao, who had already begun to pant with worry.

  “I can’t. I can’t,” he cried.

  “Shock will set in and you won’t feel it.” My father tried to comfort him, but the professor squealed through his gritted teeth, and the tendons in his neck swelled. Matsu continued to gaze placidly upon them, not a flinch in her expression. The demon guards on either side of her, stern faced, betrayed nothing.

  “Endure it for a minute,” Baba told Kai Hsiang, who was next. “And then you will feel nothing.”

  Kai Hsiang took deep, heavy breaths as the soldier pierced his palms. The wire now had the blood of three men. Despite his own assurances, my father’s heart was pounding. Even though Kai Hsiang resisted crying out, tears streamed down his clenched face.

  Just endure, Baba reminded himself, advice difficult to follow now that he sat beside three weeping men. When the wire br
oke through his skin and slid through his flesh, worming past the metacarpal of his index finger, his heart began beating so quickly that he could not swallow his spit. His brain flooded and his ears throbbed and went deaf with pain.

  He gasped and cried despite himself.

  The soldier stabbed his right hand. He gnashed his teeth. Sweat rolled down his face. He waited for the nothing that he had promised. No, he had been wrong. The pain pulsed in a searing heat that made him twist his back. The others protested every time he twitched—each shiver echoed down the line.

  Three higher-ranking men—Baba did not know what ranks the various colored bars and plum flowers signified, only that these men had a well-fed luster, like the infamous concubine Yang Kuei-fei, creamy as sculpted lard—took seats at a table set up between the prisoners and the Matsu idol. They sat like triplets of varying plumpness. Other soldiers began to fill the room: surrounding the men, sitting cross-legged on the floor, slouching against the lacquered columns, fiddling with bits of wood or string or detritus from their pockets.

  The man on the left, whose shirt held the fewest flowers, said languorously, “You are on trial for sedition and challenging the status quo.” He rolled his eyes as a soldier translated into Taiwanese.

  “Sir.” The plea broke between Kai Hsiang’s pained breaths.

  “What?” The word echoed from the soldier’s mouth in Taiwanese.

  “I’m just a fisherman. Please use plain language.”

  The words traveled back to the men behind the table, and their mouths curled into sneers. The man on the left smacked the table. “You’re spies!”

  The accusation fell without any reaction from the audience, whose purpose Baba did not understand. This was clearly not a court but a farce, perhaps played out every day at this time. Guilty shot in the morning, newly accused sentenced after that, and then repeat, day after day between breakfast and lunch. All of it done in the secrecy of little villages. So no one can count the bodies, Baba thought.

  The man in the middle, swollen, with jowls like heaps of white dough, clearly suffered from decadence. Too much rich food. Baba knew that if the man stripped off his shoes, his feet would be fat with gout. Indeed, beneath the table, the doctor could see the man’s laces were very loosely tied. He also was the highest-ranking man at the table.

  He grunted in impatience. “Read the charges.”

  The pain in my father’s hands subsided for a moment, then howled back. Without it, he might have thought more about how his knees ached on the hard floor. As the soldier-secretary began to recite their crimes, Baba felt the trembling of the others through the wire.

  Professor Hsiao was accused of reading Marx and sympathizing with Mao. Professor Wu was named a collaborator with Professor Hsiao. They were both enemy agents because they had spent time at a Chinese university during the war.

  “I was there because I didn’t support the Japanese!” Professor Wu cried.

  “Your colleague on the mainland is a known communist. He has rebuked his position and forsaken academia. He now works for the communists. He is a hero.”

  Professor Wu’s eyes widened. “I had no idea,” he said.

  “Is ignorance an excuse?” the man on the right, a deflated version of the other two, asked the one in the middle.

  “The professor knows too much to be ignorant.”

  “I am an admirer of Chiang Kai-shek,” Professor Wu protested.

  The central man dragged his finger down a sheet of paper. “Did you not write a newspaper editorial claiming that the decadence of Governor-General Chen Yi’s regime is draining the island of much-needed resources? You say, ‘This is not the time for more war. This is the time for recovery. We must first heal the island before healing the mainland.’ ”

  Professor Wu hung his head.

  “I believe this is a criticism of Chiang’s plan. What did you expect people to feel when they read this?”

  “This clearly incites discontent.” The man on the left nodded. “Obviously.”

  “Also, while buying soy milk from the street vendor, two neighbors report they heard you express doubts about the ability of our republic to control the mainland. You have been extremely careless. What do you say to the charges?” asked the man on the right.

  “I’m not guilty.” Desperation made his voice shrill.

  “Unfortunately that’s not an option. I will note that you admit you are the author of these statements.” The only sound in the temple was the scratching of his pen. “And you, Professor Hsiao?”

  “I tossed out the Marx. I never opened it.” He was firm, assured.

  “Hand him the book,” snapped the man on the left.

  A soldier placed the book on the floor before Professor Hsiao.

  “I’m sorry.” The man on the left laughed. “Hold it for him.” The soldier lifted the book before Professor Hsiao’s face. “Is this your copy?”

  “I never looked closely at it. I can’t say. These are mass-produced. How can I say if it’s my copy?” Baba was shocked at the insouciance in Professor Hsiao’s voice. Did he not yet comprehend their situation?

  “And has the binding been broken?”

  The soldier opened the book and everyone heard the binding snap, fresh pages cracking like eggshells. “The binding is broken,” the soldier said.

  “So it has been read,” the man on the left proclaimed.

  “It hasn’t!” shouted Professor Hsiao. He strained and the wire tugged at Baba’s hands. All four men cried out.

  “I will take this as evidence of guilt.” Again, the loathsome scratch of the pen.

  “Next, Fisherman Liou Kai Hsiang. Despite your innocent face, you are the most insidious of them all. We have a copy of a handbill that you printed at your cousin’s shop. You quote Marx: ‘Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour.’ What do you say?”

  “It’s true,” Kai Hsiang replied simply. A murmur of surprise disrupted the temple.

  “The words are true or the accusation?”

  “Both. I believe democracy is part of the journey to communism. I am not a spy, but I believe in revolution. We have nothing to lose but our chains. You!” He nodded toward the soldier who had been jogging back and forth, delivering evidence. “You!” He looked at the one who had strung together the men, who’d had to bite back his humanity in order to not flinch. “Why do you clean their boots and pick stones from your rice while these men eat fresh meat? Don’t you work harder? Suffer more? And when it’s all done, what will be left for you? A pathetic pension and a tin medal?”

  “Stop him!” roared the man in the middle. His hands shook and his pale face turned red. “Shut up!” But his lackeys were frozen. How to stop a man already bound and bleeding?

  “I admit all charges! I am proudly guilty!” Kai Hsiang settled onto his heels and his linked compatriots had no choice but to follow suit.

  Kai Hsiang was both stupid and brilliant. “Please, stop,” my father pleaded. Could it be true? Did Kai Hsiang really believe what he said? The communists were abominable; Baba felt it. Yet Kai Hsiang was not.

  The man in the middle sneered. “You’re a poison to the Republic of China, an admitted traitor. I’ll shoot you myself. Did you think that honesty would buy leniency?” His pen slashed across a piece of paper. “Now, the doctor.”

  Baba closed his eyes. As the charges against him rang out through the temple, he relived the moment of his alleged crime. He recalled winding his way through the anxious crowd to the spot in front of the auditorium stage that was set aside for public comment. Another time, he might have been nervous about talking in front of a large group, but the memory of the man who had died in his clinic superseded any fear. This abysmal government’s policies were personal now.

  “Traitor,” the man in the middle proclaimed. Other words followed, but this one dangled in the air like a noose. Baba clenched his teeth. It
had required genuine loyalty—real faith, not treachery—to have said what he did in front of the community meeting that day: considering the political maturity of the island, they deserved a locally led civilian government. He had spoken for—not against—the interest of the people.

  Why bother defending himself? What he said did not matter. They were already dead. He could admit or refute and it would not matter. He could say he was a spy. He could say that he had already telegraphed his mainland compatriots and ships were due to land at any minute. None of the four accused men would make it to the next week. They would all bleed red before April.

  —

  Evening brought a death banquet, and when the condemned refused the liquor they were offered, they were forced down on their knees, their mouths pried open and wine poured down their throats. Despite themselves, they got drunk. My father believed that alcohol brought out a man’s true character. Indeed, Professor Wu became belligerent. The soldiers egged him on, teased him, and brought him to tears once again. His face swelled up and turned red from the wine. When he began to sweat, the soldiers forced him to strip down to his bare chest. A lightning bolt of red flushed down his pale, slim torso. His two limp hands bore the stigmata of the afternoon. The soldiers formed an arena of men around him, and then one marched to the center, threw off his own shirt, and lunged at the professor. Professor Wu’s glasses fell to the floor and in the tussle were kicked to the side, where someone picked them up and wore them atop his head.

  Clasped in the soldier’s arms, Professor Wu groaned and cried. His blood smeared across the young man’s bare shoulder.