Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  My grandmother clicked her tongue. “What’s this? Come, give me.” She took me from Ah Zhay’s arms. “Look at this one.” She nuzzled my cheek. “This baby is too young to travel. Boy or girl?”

  “Girl, Ah Ma,” Ah Zhay said proudly.

  “Marvelous! Lucky baby—she has such a good older sister.” My grandmother squeezed Ah Zhay’s arm. “My sweetheart. So tall already.”

  My mother and grandfather dragged the luggage through the gate and the taxi rumbled off.

  “Where’s your husband?” My grandmother’s eyes darted between my mother, my grandfather, and our meager belongings. She had heard about the trouble in Taipei; Taichung had been racked by its own violence and arrests.

  Ah Zhay declared, “He went to Tokyo to visit his friend.”

  My mother choked out the words, “Yes, Tokyo.” She managed a weak smile and my grandparents saw that this was a lie. My mother was their only daughter. When she fell in love with the young doctor, my grandparents had been pleased. They still remembered the world before the Japanese had come, and they liked this young doctor’s politics, his ambition, his sober manner.

  Understanding amassed in the silence.

  My grandmother said, her voice too bright, “Have you eaten? What an adventure. And now you are tired and probably hungry. I’ll fix something for you.” She urged the children inside.

  Once the children were out of earshot, our grandfather put his hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Where is he?”

  My mother bit down her lip and shook her head: I don’t know.

  10

  MY FATHER SPENT TWO MONTHS with Big Brother at the execution station in the mountains. His original impression had been correct: trials at midmorning, drunken banquets in the evening, and dawn executions on nearly a daily basis. He saw close to a hundred men killed, and every day he wondered if he would be next.

  By the end of the second month, he started to think that he might be freed despite what he had witnessed. He had become Big Brother’s confidant and adviser and had begun to understand the man. Under his supervision, Big Brother slimmed down, and his gout subsided. Baba told himself that the word “betrayal” had no significance when it came to medicine. His only loyalty was to his patient.

  Loyalty had a different meaning to Big Brother, however, because in the middle of May, Baba was once again ordered into a truck and driven back down the mountain.

  —

  The village seemed almost quaint once he met the damp prison walls. Perhaps prison was a kind of leniency, the only loyalty Big Brother could have offered in this new world. Daily fear was replaced by a long-term tenacity.

  In the interrogation room, shackled by a rusting leg iron that chafed his skin, he was shown twenty-eight methods of torture and asked to choose the one he preferred. Hung by the arms bound in front or bound in back? Four limbs strung up? This could be avoided for the time being, however, with a bit of writing.

  “For your sake, let me be brief: half a dozen witnesses heard you demand independence and accuse the KMT of not adhering to democratic values. Your unfounded accusations are extremely damaging to the government. We want the whole story. We want anything else you might be hiding.”

  Baba’s skin felt scorched. It took all of his will to stay stubbornly quiet. He knew he’d never be able to stand the smell of green menthol oil again. The guards reeked of it while the prisoners were tormented by dozens of mosquito bites, scratched to blood, irritated by the humidity and dirt, that took weeks to heal. It was among the smallest of the indignities, but that they managed these insults big and small demonstrated how much thought went into cruelty.

  “Oh, Dr. Tsai. Silence is a luxury you can’t afford. You aren’t anybody. You’re a ghost. A ghost. You think you’re dead now? Just wait. I am going to leave you this pen, this paper, and my chair. Take your time. Tell me the entire truth.”

  The interrogator, as ageless as a recurring nightmare, left. Outside, sunshine caressed the window and teased Baba.

  —

  Truth. “Sincerity,” “honesty,” and “accuracy” were all synonyms, but with different connotations. Which kind of truth did they want? What kind of truth—if any—would set him free?

  Truth is in the details. Yes, Baba thought. Details, minute and exact, weave a fabric of truth.

  —

  He did not want to betray anyone, yet if he hid a name, he was sure the men reading his account would know. He understood their strategy: it was a test. He was to write the truth as his captors knew it, and if he happened to reveal a previously unknown name along the way, they would think it all the better.

  Each day, he thought of new people to add to his story. He listed his fellow overseas classmates in Tokyo who had worked with him on Tomorrow’s Hope, a simple newsletter where they railed against home politics. The empire, benevolent and secure, could bear talk of autonomy from its visiting Taiwanese students. In Japan itself, encouraged by more liberal leaders, dreams of Taiwan’s self-rule burst open in blossoms of possibility. On Taiwan, however, these conversations could happen only in whispers, lest they trigger the government’s alarm. Punishment was swift.

  He recounted conversations that damned his acquaintances—he noted who had nodded in agreement with his complaint about the KMT’s corruption, or even blinked in a way that said yes.

  He wrote about the strangeness of hearing the emperor’s voice as he announced Japan’s capitulation (the emperor would not—did not—use the word “surrender”). The emperor had a voice. Divine beings spoke in some platonic ideal—whatever one heard in his head as the growl of ultimate authority—but these were the words of a real man, middle-aged and trim.

  Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its divine land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibilities and the long road before it.

  Baba described witnessing the arrival of the KMT troops in the fall of 1945 on American ships after Japan was forced to give up its colonies as part of its surrender. Eager onlookers crowded the roads from Taipei to the port of Keelung. Banners rose over the boulevards: welcome signs with earnest, heartbreaking Nationalist flags accidentally drawn backward. The schoolchildren were pushed to the front of the crowds that crammed the port. His daughter stood among them in a white dress with a starched collar. Her white socks folded over into lace cuffs. As her mother had instructed, she smiled and waved a tiny Nationalist flag. The gangplank had already thudded to the ground hours before, and it taunted, empty before the murmuring masses.

  When the men finally disembarked, they looked nothing like the laudatory terms that the newspapers had used, nothing like liberators. Their uniforms were dirty; some wore shoes so ill fitting that they had to be bound with rope. They carried their own cooking pots, their own sad sacks of rice. They were kids and old men with creases seared into their ruddy faces. They smiled for the cameras that archived the event.

  Beneath the cheers, disbelief churned its way through the crowd. These coarse men—the ones who smiled like bumpkins hitchhiking through the countryside, the ones who now stood beside the ship and relieved themselves—these junkyard soldiers had defeated the emperor?

  Yes, he had wanted Taiwan to rule itself. Yes, he had uttered thoughts disloyal to the KMT. But these were only ideas, only words. Baba did not believe himself guilty, but he wrote himself so.

  My father confessed it all.

  —

  A year after he had last seen his family, Baba received a ten-year sentence. The judge assured him that it was a generous punishment. He would come out still a relatively young man. He would see some of his children become adults.

  Even at the jail, the dawn gunshots continued. The cells were emptied and filled weekly. My father wondered if there would be anyone left on the island. History was—as the interrogator would have said—scuttlebutt, dribbling into his world via each new prisoner: the war with Mao’s men was—no, not lost—it was…on hiat
us…Chiang Kai-shek had brought all his men and their families to Taiwan—more than two million people had fled China and now crowded the streets…Chiang Kai-shek claimed they would stay just long enough to regroup and retake the mainland…Chiang Kai-shek had a multiyear plan…Baba tried to imagine what the world outside the prison now looked like: the sidewalks teeming with soldiers and buildings crammed with haphazard shops, beggars in the streets, ladies strolling by in high-necked, frog-button gowns. And he tried to imagine us, his family.

  11

  HERDED OUT OF THE PRISON, the prisoners—accused communists, thieves, and rabble-rousers—crowded the train cars, sharing seats and cramming the aisles. The windows were pulled down and those nearby pushed their faces toward the hot air rushing past. They were going east, my father noted.

  Somebody said they were heading to sea, somewhere far from land where they’d be left to fight out their last few hours in the warm salty water with nothing to cling to but each other.

  —

  Indeed, there was a ship.

  Baba thought of the last time he had seen the sea: 1934. The year he had returned from Japan. The sun had been so bright that whiteness blinded him. They had approached Kiirun—Keelung. Lush green hills sloped gently toward the town that embraced the water—he imagined that Gauguin, if he’d only known, might have chosen Taiwan over Tahiti. Ilha Formosa. Instead, it had been claimed by Chinese fishermen and pirates, by the Dutch and Spanish, and then finally by the Japanese. He could almost smell the camphor distilleries and sugar mills. Long warehouses with large green corrugated sliding doors, not sandy beaches, lined the cement quay that greeted the water. A variety of boats crowded the harbor: ocean liners, ferries, cargo ships, and slim fishing canoes. Coolies in their pajama uniforms hurried about, moving freight. Where Baba’s ship was set to berth, waiting pedicabs crowded into a jumble of wheels and canopies. Under the carefully spaced trees along the water’s edge, food vendors had settled next to their carts.

  He had edged himself between the people clustered at the railing to watch the ship slide, like a tamed beast, into its slip. After four years, he was finally home. Among the crowds gathered to greet the ship, no one was waiting for him—he had planned on taking the train to Taipei on his own—but the group’s enthusiasm caught him. Tears brimmed in his eyes and he had scoffed at himself for crying at nothing, for nobody, not understanding that his joy was for exactly this: the chaos of cranes, ropes, and cargo in the harbor; the black coal smoke gusting from the trains heading south, deeper into the island; the cities with their overflowing bushels of goods spilling into the walkways; and the marble gorges and bamboo forests and craggy mountains and grassy plains enfolding all of it.

  —

  Now, in the rags of a prisoner, and in an unknown year, he made the opposite voyage from Keelung to a new destination.

  A pale, bony parade of men limped down the gangplank before the scrutiny of the Ami tribe. Baba stumbled on the porous volcanic ground and knew where he was. The Japanese had called it Kasho-to, Fire-Burned Island.

  “Welcome,” shouted the guard, beckoning them toward land, “to Green Island.” As if the new cool, verdant name could hide the rocky black ground and the sun blazing without relief. It was unbearably hot. Baba rubbed his face against his shoulder, trying to blot the sweat. The guard called it New Life Camp, the sweet sound casting irony over the cluster of sheds and bare ground begging to be broken and cultivated.

  The prisoners made a new life out of the barren earth. Breaking stones shaped the doctor’s arms; reeducation classes shaped his mind. Mornings in the garden browned his skin. He raised chickens and pigs. He hiked into the hills and chopped wood. In narrow rooms, the prisoners slept in shifts, propped along one side: arm, rib, and thigh. Sitting in perfect columns and rows, they took exams on the beach and pretended to not notice the photographers lauding these perfect pupils who readily recited their anticommunist lessons. In hot examination rooms, they sat for tattoos bearing slogans of revolution, the ink transforming blood: Retake the Mainland!

  —

  Solitary confinement is an old concept, a practice meant to elicit introspection and remorse. Absent of outer light (save for that small dribble, that melting glow oozing through the tiny window, that minuscule hint of God), my father is meant to find inner light.

  On Green Island, the solitary cell is padded, the size of a wardrobe, a psychological effect that implies insanity while simultaneously encouraging it. At first, he panics within the soft walls that threaten to swallow him and the dark humidity that sits like layers of dirt piled on a coffin. He runs his fingers along the ledge of the small window to reassure himself.

  The light dribbling through the shoe-box window fades to darkness then brightens to day and then fades to darkness and brightens to day then fades to darkness and then the slot in the door screams open and a plate shoots into the room followed by a cup of warm water. My father has traveled past hunger, but the smell of the rice and salt and wilted, blackening vegetables awakens his stomach again and he scoops it up with his hands, shoveling it in until his belly aches and groans. He picks up the cup and drinks carefully so as not to lose one drop, and then he continues the dance of the last few days: standing, pacing, sitting, curling up, sleeping, touching the window ledge, singing, sleeping, jumping. He won’t talk to himself—that’s the first step toward separating self from self, the first step toward the fracture that makes one unfit for any post-cell life. He reassures himself so often that it becomes a circular thought, and he forces these thoughts away lest this too is a path toward insanity’s seductive call. The slop gurgles inside him and he feels it churn through his intestines. He rushes to the soil bucket. He has no paper and he pulls up his pants still dirty. Now he lies on the floor, stretches out his arms and touches either side of the cell and begins to whistle.

  He fears he is losing his mind.

  And then—through the magic of sheer hope—she’s right here. He stands in the center of the cell, the moonlight through the window just touching the top of his head, and looks at her. It is really her, not some idealized hallucination: sweat beads on her forehead and her thick makeup is turning to milk. He drops to his knees and crawls toward her, collapses his face to her feet and sniffs. He smells her shins, her knees, dragging his nose up her warm body to her neck, her hair. Her first touch, fingertips pressed to his neck, hurts. Thank heavens for the dark—to add color to smell and touch and sound would devastate him.

  Her hands drift down his back and he moans.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  Wordlessly, he turns around and strips off his shirt, and her hiss tells him all he needs to know about the weeping cuts on his back.

  “Animals,” she says.

  He sinks down to rest his head on her inner thigh. She smells like the world: like soap and streets and restaurants and traffic lights and parks and people, and he muffles his cries in the thick of her flesh.

  1952

  12

  FIVE YEARS PASSED. Rumors—airy, vague, unsubstantiated—blew through those years. One whisper put Baba in a prison in Taipei, where a friend of a friend of a friend had seen him, his face obscured by a philosopher’s beard, sitting broken against a cell wall. Another placed him in a shallow grave, his body atop others, turning to dirt. Yet another claimed he was in Naha, passing as Okinawan and treating American servicemen.

  March 1947, according to official history, had not happened. My father had not disappeared. Nobody in my family spoke of him. My father did not exist. But the arrests that had been set in motion in 1947 continued. Martial law had never really ended.

  The disappearances were an island-wide secret. My father was not the only man who had evaporated. It seemed everyone knew someone, and it was simply unspoken: this way we could not count the missing; we would not know for decades that the dead measured in the tens of thousands.

  Five years packed with the struggles of life pass quickly; five years of longing drag on. Mama was tet
hered between the two extremes. On bad days, she would spend an hour listening to the clock, as if each tick was a mark on a scroll of time measuring the space between his leaving and his return. On good days, hours would pass in which her husband did not cross her mind; then suddenly she would remember, and she would punish herself for forgetting.

  My grandfather was reticent about my missing father, but my unsentimental grandmother urged my mother to move on.

  “It has already happened. Thinking won’t bring him home.” My grandmother understood my mother’s obsessive mind. Mama almost believed that she could will time backward and worry her way to another path. Over and over, she reinvented the story of that last day.

  She was lonely too.

  When I close my eyes, the market rises up and I see her winding her way among the crowd, tilting her parasol as she moves among the other shoppers. She has discreetly mended the dress she wears. Her posture, her skin, and the way she speaks declare the height from which she has fallen. Can observers detect in her patrician gait the folded newspaper that shields the hole in the bottom of her shoe?

  She still loves books, and she lingers at the bookseller’s booth. She drags her finger down sooty spines and across yellowing pages. The books are piled atop tables and amid shelves in a little maze that leads into the alley, where the bookseller sits in the shadow of a torn awning.

  “What are you looking for?” he asks.

  She names some French authors she read at university, when it was sexy and exhilarating to read in the park or a café and utter French names aloud. Or perhaps, really, it had been tedious, just a class requirement inspired by a vague promise from her professor that these books would help her become a better painter. Is it only nostalgia that recalls the flecks of paint on her fingers as she turned the pages, and the little craving in her mouth for a cigarette, which seemed outrageous and bohemian? She has trouble distinguishing her real memory from her fantasy of it.