Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  The room tossed back and forth like a ship. Baba slipped off his own glasses and wiped them. With his eyes closed, the room went bright with the panting of the fighting men and the shouting from the spectators.

  Baba fumbled his glasses back on in time to see Kai Hsiang pull Professor Wu from the soldier’s grasp. “Stop it! Try me instead,” Kai Hsiang declared. The professor crawled to the edge of the circle and lay down.

  The new foes circled each other, two suspicious predators with bared teeth. Kai Hsiang, who was stocky but not tall, barreled toward the young man, knocking him over. His fist broke across the young man’s cheek once before the soldiers pulled him off. They held his arms behind his back—restrained him for the young man, swaggering and offended, to beat like a dummy. My father’s mouth filled with spit every time Kai Hsiang gasped for air. Both men were bathed in sweat. Kai Hsiang’s nose cracked and blood flowed from one nostril. Finally, his legs gave out and they dropped him.

  “Doctor!” they called. Baba realized they meant him. He squeezed his eyes, trying to will himself toward sobriety.

  Kai Hsiang’s ear was mangled, his lip split against a broken tooth, his nose smashed. Both eyes were so swollen and purple that his lashes disappeared into the flesh. Blood ran down his neck and soaked his collar.

  A bubble rose in the blood streaming from his lip and Baba knew that he still breathed, but the doctor had no tools besides his pierced and swollen hands. He removed his own shirt and used it to wipe the blood from Kai Hsiang’s eyes, his nose, and his ear. He couldn’t bring himself to promise comfort.

  “He’ll be fine, Doctor.” The—sergeant? colonel? general?—from the trial, the portliest one with the loosened laces, beckoned my father to stand. “Come with me.”

  8

  You are a Taiwanese. The Taiwanese sky hangs over you and your feet tread on Taiwanese ground. What you see are conditions unique to Taiwan and what you hear is news about Taiwan. The time you experience is Taiwanese time and the language you speak is Taiwanese. Therefore, your powerful pen and your colorful paintbrush should also be depicting Taiwan.

  IF MY FATHER HAD CHOSEN literature or art as a path, he might have heeded these words from the writer Huang Shih-hui. Instead, he had chosen medicine.

  The body, unlike a poem, is tangible. Flesh is a real thing; often, illness and health are visible—the pale fingertips or slack skin, or even a shine in the eye. We prod at a poem by testing its metaphors, finding the heartbeat in the scan of a line, and looking for meaning in the white space. My father needed touch. Needed the sweetness of a diabetic’s breath, or the murmur of a faulty valve. Needed to see the jaundice in the skin. His world was concrete.

  In the seized house that served as the officers’ quarters, he found his hunch had been right: the man’s tender feet revealed gout.

  “Without my medicine bag, there isn’t much I can do.” He was glad to have an excuse not to treat the man, who insisted that my father call him Big Brother, a nickname—my father noted—more appropriate for a gangster.

  “The pain keeps me up. Can’t you make some herbal solution?”

  “My training is in Western medicine,” Baba said evenly. He tried to soften the Japanese accent that sometimes seeped into his Mandarin.

  “We have aspirin.”

  “A high dosage might help you clear out some of the uric acid, but it might make it worse too. What about ice?”

  Big Brother laughed. “Ice? I haven’t seen ice in months.”

  Baba slipped the sock back over the man’s swollen foot and sat back on his haunches. “I can try to offer you some relief from the pain, but you will really need to watch what you eat if you want to avoid this in the future. These are the symptoms of an indulgent lifestyle.”

  Baba’s stomach seized with worry when Big Brother said nothing. Would his advice be considered a critique of the entire administration? He would be shot in the morning anyhow. He vowed to speak his mind. This was his last freedom.

  “I understand.” Big Brother’s voice was cold.

  “Strawberries may help. They aren’t common, but your men may be able to find some in the city. May I stand?”

  Big Brother indicated his permission with a jerk of his chin.

  They were supposed to meet the executioner’s gun too drunk to fear it, but even though my father was still a little drunk, he felt a sobering nausea coming on. He burped. An idea—an old home cure—came to him, but he asked himself why he should help this awful man. He should let him limp along in pain. He wished kidney stones upon him.

  However, after a long moment of debate, Baba spoke again. “My grandmother used to soak her swollen feet in warm charcoal water. I thought her feet were just tired, but now that I think about it, she likely had gout.”

  “Charcoal water. We can do that.”

  —

  Big Brother ordered my father to supervise the man who made the charcoal bath, then asked the doctor to sit with him as he soaked his feet. Through the wooden shutters, Baba heard the bacchanalia in the temple continue.

  He was fully sober now. The wounds in his hands throbbed; the infection had started. If the bullet didn’t kill him, tetanus would.

  The water in the bucket burbled as Big Brother shifted his feet. “It’s charity.”

  Baba reluctantly lifted his eyes from the jumble of scrolls piled on a shadowed shelf. “What is?”

  “The liquor. The men meet their fates half giddy. They barely know what is happening. Didn’t the Japanese do the same?”

  “They didn’t have firing squads.” My father couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice.

  “The pilots. The kamikazes. They spent the whole night drinking before their final flight. True?”

  “There was absolutely no honor in survival,” Baba murmured. During the war, he’d spent a few weeks with young men preparing for their flights and that was what they had been taught. American soldiers were trained to kill; Japanese soldiers were instructed to die.

  Big Brother laughed like a bird choking a fish down its gullet.

  —

  A flurry of gunshots woke my father. He had fallen asleep in the chair. The bucket of charcoal water remained, but Big Brother was gone.

  The window revealed nothing but the muddy alley and the neighbor’s wall.

  A soldier posted at the door stopped him, but another waved him through. He ran down the hill, past the temple, and through the garden. In the quiet morning, his breath smacked in his ears. He burst onto the main road. Three bodies lay there.

  Professor Hsiao was facedown in vomit and blood. Professor Wu’s finger twitched. His guts leaked out of his torn stomach. Kai Hsiang’s eyes were glassy, but a heartbeat, like the faint flicker of a hiding moth, still pulsed in his neck.

  Baba touched Kai Hsiang’s damp head and felt the heat seeping from it. He held his palm there until Kai Hsiang’s skin went cool.

  The young pilots had been naive but right. Survival carried no honor.

  9

  ONE MORNING, screaming drew my mother to the window. Soldiers dragged our neighbor’s bedding into the rainy street. The neighbor, a drenched and disheveled woman, shouted for help, but the loose rifles and bored gaze of the soldiers had stigmatized her as untouchable. My mother saw hazy faces in the windows of the neighboring homes. One by one, they turned away and closed the curtains.

  A few weeks later, my mother found a letter nailed to the gate. The grim black ink declared our misfortune to every passerby: we were to be the neighborhood’s third eviction. The soldiers now claimed that our beautiful house—with its blond tatami and white paper screens and dark halls—was to be requisitioned. My family had two days.

  Fighting an urge to claw the letter to shreds, my mother tore it from the nail and brought it inside. She gritted her teeth, determined to not amplify her children’s misery with this latest insult, but Ah Zhay saw the rage in my mother’s face.

  “What is it, Mama?”

  My mother found that she could n
ot speak. She shoved the letter into her pocket and looked squarely at her oldest daughter. Tell her everything is fine, she thought, but she knew that if she opened her mouth, only tears would emerge.

  She shook her head at Ah Zhay, then went upstairs to the room in which she had become a wife and then a mother.

  From the doorway, she surveyed her wedding trousseau. The beautiful carved wardrobe and the matching vanity table. All of it to be left to the Nationalists. She cursed them. I, lying swaddled on the bed, began to cry. “Squall” is a word often used to describe the sound. The noise rises up violently, stormy and sudden. Babies know nothing of modulation; everything is the cry.

  My mother lifted me up and hushed me. She agreed with my complaints in a low voice, repetitive and soothing, like a groove revolving and rasping beneath a stylus. “We will leave,” she whispered to me.

  Her parents lived south in Taichung, a few hours by train. We would go there—“home,” my mother called it—and leave this godforsaken house, “this cursed city,” she cooed. She went home at least once a year; now she would stay, protected by her parents as she had been when she was a girl. Still, I wailed. Finally, in the shade-drawn dark of a house that she would never see again, she lay down on the bed and nursed me.

  —

  On the floor of the bedroom were books Baba had read and stones he’d collected on the eastern coast. The frustration boiled up—so many things he had touched and made, scents still lingering. My mother felt like an archaeologist, excavating proof of his existence.

  After the war ended and the Japanese gave up the island, the homes abandoned by the Japanese were reproduced in the secondhand markets of Taiwan: table and chairs, cupboards full of dishes, chopsticks and sake cups, beds draped in neatly smoothed bedspreads. A dirty joy swept through the people as they brought their children to bounce on these beds, as they snapped up fine European umbrellas, as the paper collector came for the kana schoolbooks to sell to the pulping plant.

  Two years after the end of the war, my mother too was humbled as she dragged a cart filled with Baba’s belongings to the secondhand market. My mother gathered up Baba’s books, his equipment, and his clothes and dumped them into Dua Hyan’s play wagon. Before my mother left the house, Ah Zhay hung on her arms, trying to slow her with deadweight. “No, Mama! What will Baba wear when he comes home?”

  My mother tried to shake her free. “Let go.” Her cold voice hid the heat in her chest.

  “You don’t love him! Don’t you love him? Baba won’t have anything when he comes home!” Ah Zhay’s voice rose to a hysterical squeal. My mother wanted to slap her and then complain of her own misery and guilt, but her daughter was still too young to understand.

  “How about this.” She tried to soothe Ah Zhay’s panic with her calm tone. “Why don’t you and your brothers choose one thing to keep safe for when Baba comes home? He will see how much you love him.”

  Ah Zhay kept Baba’s extra pair of glasses, Dua Hyan took a box of glass slides, and Zhee Hyan grabbed a little booklet on obsolete politics that had a fanciful cover.

  Mama went from stall to stall, offering, bargaining, assuming novel voices. “The doctor retired,” she lied. “This was imported from France before the war—look how well kept it is,” she said to another stall keeper. When that pitch failed, receiving only a skeptical glare, she tried a different tack: “My four children will eat on this money. Don’t let them starve. I could sell this for so much more, but we need rice.”

  The equipment went first: the microscope, slightly bent from a police raid, but easily fixed; the stethoscope, still gritty with Baba’s earwax; his battered leather medical bag; even his wheeled stool. His textbooks, in Japanese, were more difficult, but finally a shrewd stall owner calculated the price of selling them to the paper collector and purchased them. Lastly, then, went Baba’s clothing.

  As far as mementos go, clothing is curious. The shape of the body, but no body. The touch of the skin to this cloth. And then the smell. My mother had lined the bottom of the wagon with Baba’s neatly folded pants and shirts. Owner after owner shook his head; they all suspected where these clothes had come from: one of the unlucky missing. The last stall was run by a woman who might have been a little dull in the head from the way she slowly ran her eyes over the modest clothing and then listened to my mother speak while looking only at her right ear. She nodded and, in a voice as slow as her gaze, uttered a price.

  My mother began to protest. “I bought this just a few months ago for five times—” She made a quick calculation of the value of hope against money. “Yes, that’ll be fine.”

  She emptied the clothes from the wagon. The last item was a shirt. The lightly stained strip that had caressed his neck, the seams that had brushed against his armpits when he picked up a book or measured out a prescription, the tinged cuffs that had dragged against paper as he updated his records. The front panels, along the buttons, seemed to contain the heat of his chest. Briefly, without the other woman noticing, my mother pressed it to her nose. She inhaled him. For a moment, he was there.

  Then she put the shirt atop the others on the rickety bureau that made up one side of the woman’s stall and Baba was gone.

  —

  My mother gave her paintings and vases to the neighbors. She packed our birth certificates, her marriage certificate, photos, and clothes for summer and winter. With an ax, she destroyed the bedroom set and dragged it downstairs piece by piece.

  While Dua Hyan and Zhee Hyan watched, frightened, from the base of the stairs, Ah Zhay scurried up and down the steps behind her. “Stop it! Mama, stop!”

  “Hush. Help me carry this.” Half a headboard thumped its way down. My mother was pleased to see a deep scratch in the floor tracing its path.

  Ah Zhay screamed—a frustrated and crazed ten-year-old girl’s howl—and tossed a dismembered vanity table leg down the stairs. It clattered to a stop next to Mama’s foot. She kicked it away. “Bring down the others too.”

  My mother gathered nearly all the paper in the house—the journals she’d kept since girlhood, her sketchbooks, the medical records the police had missed in their raid, Ah Zhay’s and Dua Hyan’s school compositions—and piled it atop the destroyed furniture in the courtyard. She surveyed the heap and readied herself to turn her life to ash.

  A woman pushed through the gate clutching a small boy’s hand, and my mother froze. “What are you doing, Li Min?” the woman demanded. “Dr. Tsai is gone? Li Min, give me.” She beckoned for the matches.

  My mother reached out and dropped them into the woman’s outstretched hand. “Naomi,” she began. “I…They…” She covered her face. She breathed deeply. She would not cry again. Despite herself, the tears came. She kept her hands pressed to her eyes, trying to hide her sobbing. The woman spoke to her son: “Wei, go inside and find Ah Zhay.” After he had scampered inside, the woman embraced my mother.

  When my mother’s tears were spent, she wiped her face with her bare hands and asked, “And where is your husband?”

  Baba had met Naomi’s husband, Uncle Lin, when they were children in the Twa Tiu Tiann area of Taipei that was then called Daitotei by the Japanese. When my father went to Tokyo for university, he had roomed with Uncle Lin, who studied medicine as well. Being Taiwanese in Japan was like being a guitar-playing monkey: their fluent Japanese elicited awe from the people they met, yet they were considered not-quite-whole people. Uncle Lin fell in love with another student at the university, Naomi, a Japanese woman, whose parents disapproved, and my eloquent and reasonable father spoke to them. They reluctantly agreed to the match. For the first year of the Lins’ marriage, the three of them had lived together.

  “He is home. He did not think it was safe to come, so he sent this.” Naomi lifted her blouse and pulled a pouch from her waistband.

  “I can’t,” my mother protested.

  Naomi was soft-spoken, yet forceful. “You must. This is not for you but for your children. You know that you must take it.” She pu
shed it into Mama’s hand and folded Mama’s fingers closed atop it. “You’ve had the baby. Is it a girl or boy?”

  “A girl.”

  Naomi smiled. “Wonderful. You must take the money. Four babies.”

  “We’ve been evicted,” Mama whispered. She looked over her shoulder at the mound of papers and hacked furniture.

  “So you will burn it all.”

  “My life is over.”

  “Four babies. Your life is not over. But you can do it if you feel you must.”

  They looked up at the children gazing at them from the second-story window.

  Naomi handed Mama the matches. My mother lit one and touched it to the corner of one of the books on the pile. For a few seconds, it threatened to die out, but the flame caught and soon it roared, surges of fire anxiously gulping air.

  She burned everything.

  —

  South of Taipei, headed toward Taichung, three children slept on a hard wooden seat, their heads nodding with the sway of the train. Across from them, their exhausted mother cradled a baby. The car was nearly empty. The land outside was dark. Only the cigarette of the man sitting across the aisle glowed, its reflection doubled in the window.

  —

  From the train station, a taxi brought us to our grandparents’ house. They lived outside of Taichung, in an old-style three-sided brick country home with a courtyard, accessible by one lone road, or—for those on foot—by the narrow levees that separated the paddies and fields. Through the silent countryside, the taxi growled like a demon. Lights flickered on in each of the houses that we passed.

  The driver stopped right in front of the courtyard gateway. The boys tumbled out and trudged through. Ah Zhay held me while my mother unloaded the car.

  Hastily dressed and toting a lantern, my grandparents burst out of the house. My brothers erupted in happy cries: “Ah Ma! Ah Gong!” My grandfather crouched and patted each boy on the head before helping my mother with the bags.