He came closer. His brown cheeks were wet with tears. He wiped his face, rubbed his nose against his sleeve, and smiled at me. Then he called me by my sister’s name—not Ah Zhay, big sister, as I called her, but her formal name. “Tsai Li Ka?”
An itch overtook my leg, and I rubbed at it with my other foot, leaving smears of mud.
“I’m not Tsai Li Ka,” I said.
Water spots dulled his glasses. His hair was too long and going white above his ears.
“Do you know Tsai Li Ka?” he asked. He spoke Taiwanese without an accent. My posture softened in response. I squeezed Mei Mei’s foot for reassurance. She batted my head. “Yi!” she shrieked.
“She’s my sister,” I said softly. “Tsai Li Ka is my sister.”
“Your sister.” The question dissolved into a statement. “Who is this?” He jerked his chin at Mei Mei.
“My niece.”
“Your niece.” He echoed me again, adding awe to the words, and I began to wonder if he was an imbecile.
His eyes met mine. The whites of his eyes were threaded with veins. His gaze traveled my face: my eyes, then my hair, then my nose and mouth.
“Stop,” I pleaded.
“Please take me to your mother.”
—
We walked single file along the levee. Mei Mei wriggled in the sling. I didn’t dare turn back to look at the man who followed me, but I listened carefully for the suck of the mud on his shoes. I worried my mother would scold me for bringing this stranger to the house. I considered leading him to the Owyangs’ place, calling Aunty Owyang “Mama,” then running off to let them disentangle the lie. Or I could desert him and warn my family.
But I did none of this. We came to the courtyard. Jie-fu and Zhee Hyan halted at the sight of us. I saw the wary curiosity in their eyes, so explained, “He’s looking for Mama.”
Jie-fu greeted the stranger, took Mei Mei from the sling, and told me to get my mother. I found her mopping the floor.
“Ma.”
“You’re getting the floor dirty.” She shooed me back toward the doorway.
“Somebody came to see you.” My stomach tingled with fear and pride: a stranger had come to see Mama, and I had brought him.
She jerked her head up and looked at me. “Who?”
“I don’t know. A man.” I did not mention his damaged glasses, or his new shoes. Or how he had repeated my sister’s name with wonder.
She dropped the rag into the bucket and went to the kitchen. I followed her.
“What does he want?” she asked. She washed her hands, and the pink bar of soap spinning around and around in her grip mesmerized me.
“Didn’t say.”
Thin, milky bubbles ran down the drain. She shut off the water and looked into my eyes. “What’s he like?”
“He has black shoes.”
Mama paused. “Did he mention Dua Hyan?”
“No.”
A small mirror hung over the sink. She glanced into it and swiped water along her hair, then, checking the result, snorted and shook her head. “A mess. It’ll do.”
“I don’t think it’s about Dua Hyan,” I said, trying to reassure her though I was not sure. We had heard nothing about the impending battle in the strait since before the storm.
When we came out, Jie-fu was still talking to the man, who sensed our presence and turned.
“Ah Bin,” the man said. In his mouth, my mother’s name sounded like a broken plate, the shards of it lacerating his throat.
My mother raised her eyebrows in hope, but it quickly darkened to a frown. She clenched her hands. She spoke as she approached him. “Who are you?”
The man repeated my mother’s name like a plea: “Ah Bin.”
“Leave,” she said. “Leave.”
“It’s me.”
She stood right in front of him now, and her closeness was intimate even though her face was hard.
“Prove it. What’s his name?” She pointed at my brother. “Or hers?” She gestured toward me. “Your uncle’s name? The one who ran the printing shop? The cousin who married the Japanese doctor?” Her hope—and disbelief—mutated into an anger that brought her close to tears.
Ah Zhay stepped through the dark doorway into the bright and cool morning. Something glimmered through her body, turning her into a young girl again.
“Baba,” she said. And then she stopped, as if she feared coming closer would dissolve the ghost. She blinked, puzzled, her mouth indecisive, quivering toward a smile and tears. Baba? I thought. Baba?
Zhee Hyan, who had been only four years old when my father left, repeated the word, two unfamiliar syllables, and then I turned toward the stranger and said it too.
“Baba.”
My mother exhaled. Her chest seemed to cave. A decade of tension dissipated on the breath, and, finally, my mother touched his—my father’s—sleeve.
14
I IMAGINE THE TIME before Baba left, before my siblings and I existed, when my parents were just a family of two.
It’s an August evening in 1935. The sun has set and the street glows with neon signs and lit apartment windows. Occasionally, car headlights slice the dark.
They are newlyweds. My mother’s wedding dress—white lace and a delicate birdcage veil—is folded into a box in the wardrobe and still smells faintly of her perfume. They had honeymooned at Alishan, welcoming the cool morning mist of the mountains, the giant cypresses and cedars that contrasted the palms dotting the rest of the island. This was how my mother had imagined Europe to be. Alishan had been significant in another way too: here my parents had shared their first intimate night together. But my mother had not been a blushing bride. Art school had already accustomed her to nude bodies. My father was taken aback by her insistence to leave the lamp on and wondered briefly about the woman he had married. Of course, this is what he loved about her: her modernity, her dismissal of the giggling, coquettish ways of other women her age.
They come to the restaurant. A huge ceramic fish sculpture bursts from the center of the room, tail curled to the floor, head pointed to the ceiling, a red electric light glowing in its gaping mouth. Their friends wait at a round table behind the fish. When they spot my parents, they erupt with greetings, waving them over, exclaiming hello, asking about the honeymoon.
These are the best and the brightest of the colony: two doctors, a school principal, a book editor. The wives are university educated; one is a doctor too. They talk loudly, laugh without self-consciousness, make raunchy puns, tease each other, and gesticulate with the confidence of youth who are destined to inherit the world.
My mother watches my father speak about the recent agreement to demilitarize Chahar and she wonders how she ever had the good fortune to marry this man. He is not the most handsome man at the table, but he is eloquent and intelligent. She has always had the sense that some central, purely moral thing lies inside him. She doesn’t know if it is his certainty when he speaks, or the steady way he holds one’s gaze when he listens, or just some intangible she can’t quite articulate—something below language: the tiny gestures, blinks, tones barely registered—that coalesce into this impression. She laughs along with them, her chopsticks darting into the communal dishes, at a glance appearing to be as fully invested in the conversation as the rest of them. Do they admire him as much as she does? Do they notice his smooth skin and neatly combed hair, his clear enunciation? She feels moral for having been chosen by him.
She puts food into his bowl; he flashes a look at her, stop on the edge of his tongue, then says nothing.
Of course. Of course. A spike of heat burns her neck and jaw. None of the other wives do this. She must seem so provincial, so Confucian. She returns to her own bowl. No one can see her embarrassment: my mother quiets her emotions beneath a placid mask. Anxiety looks like grace; she doesn’t know that it’s precisely this quality that attracts my father. Even now, feeling reprimanded, she betrays nothing, doesn’t hang her head or blink meekly.
They
walk home arm in arm, my mother’s heels clicking on the macadam. The night is hot and the air pungent with the odor of ripe fruit. The rickshaw drivers pedal by. Their white uniforms and white hats glow in the night. Out of other restaurants comes the mechanical whine of music spinning out of record players. They turn down their alley, which is empty except for a cat lapping at a puddle beneath the communal spigot.
Upstairs, among the new bedroom furniture that still smells like fresh varnish, they undress. My father sits on the bed and pulls his socks off his damp, pale feet. My mother wipes the powder off her face with a cotton ball dipped in cold cream.
“The way the administration is dealing with the savages is completely misguided.”
“What?” my mother says. She drops the cotton ball into the trash and picks up her hairbrush.
“Assimilation is the solution. Otherwise, we’ll always have a population ready to chop off our heads at any provocation.”
“Indeed.” My mother realizes he is responding to a conversation from dinner. She wants to talk about what motivated Mrs. Lin, a Japanese woman, to marry Mr. Lin, one of them. Why she gave up her country and citizenship to come here. But my father’s mind, as always, is on much loftier topics.
“And then they numb them on drink. Generations from now, this will be a problem. Wu Ming is wrong. Completely wrong.”
She can’t remember what Wu Ming said, but she hums her assent. She watches him in the vanity mirror. He strips down to his undershirt and underwear and pauses to wipe down his glasses with his shirt hem.
“The issue is we shouldn’t even use the word ‘savage.’ Aren’t we as Formosans in the same boat? How are we any different from them? All of us are second-class citizens. Looking down on them doesn’t turn us into first-class citizens.” He holds the glasses close to his face and squints, then scratches at something on the frame.
“You believe everyone is equal. That’s your flaw,” she says, half joking.
“It’s true.” He puts his glasses back on and notices for the first time she is wearing only her negligee. “Wear that,” he says, desire tightening his jaw.
“To bed?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s my slip.” She self-consciously touches her shoulder. “I’ve been wearing it all evening.”
He walks over and kneels behind her. Gaze meets gaze in the mirror, then he kisses her shoulder and bites the strap. She reaches back to touch his cheek.
It was like this. In the beginning, it was like this.
—
Another city, another era. Taichung, 1958. No longer wide, spacious streets or cool, lush parks. Everywhere now were cars and bicycles, trains crying out of stations, and people chatting under the teeming arcades, driving up the temperature by a few degrees. My mother regretted wearing stockings.
She was fixated on the sweat tickling her calves and the phantom feeling that her nylons were slipping. In the heat, her lipstick began to feel thick and gaudy. Elbows, purses, and sacks jostled her, driving her into my father, who stared straight ahead, charging through his own nattering thoughts.
My father had been home for two weeks and my mother had planned this dinner in order to vanquish rumors—for some, his return was an intimation of disgrace: What price had Dr. Tsai paid? What deviled deal had he made? She tried to forgive those who begged out, citing other plans; she knew they feared that Baba’s trouble was contagious.
As they strolled to the restaurant, Baba imagined he was a time traveler. He’d been set inside a time machine—this one more simple than the kind in books—made of concrete and iron and moving no faster than time or light, and had emerged into this strange world where even the palette had changed. His children grown, his wife another woman with a tentative smile. The streets had been so open and empty that they used to walk in the middle of the boulevards. Now, seas of people surrounded them. Military police in white helmets strode past. Mountains of trash swept up from the morning market waited for the garbage collectors. Drivers pounded their horns at this weaving bicyclist or that careless truck. What kind of world was this? Again, the force of the crowd pushed her into him. He could tell her about the time machine. Speaking things made them less real. But already, planning out the words, he heard how absurd they were. He would stay quiet.
—
If only he had spoken. His silence poisoned the dinner. The mood began to sour, my mother thought, when the women—my aunt and a few of my mother’s middle school friends—rushed forward, exclaiming over my father as if he were a sweet-smelling newborn.
“Dr. Tsai! You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Ah, good old Dr. Tsai. Glad to have you back.”
My mother suspected that they had decided to save face for my father and pretend that the eleven missing years had been nothing more than a business trip gone awry. My mother returned their enthusiasm, but my father uttered his greetings in an unsmiling monotone: grunts that passed for hello and nothing more. A tendril of worry unfurled itself in my mother’s chest. She had insisted he bathe and had dressed him in a new shirt, and, for the first time in days, he had complied. But what was he doing now? Was he reneging on the promise, unspoken but so clear to her?
“Still the same serious doctor,” Aunty Chu teased. “Sit down so we can order.” Her hand at his back, she guided him to his seat.
Once everyone was settled again, and after Aunty Chu had given the waitress the order, an uneasy silence fell over the table. Someone remarked on the flavor of the bean curd and a chorus hastily agreed. My mother decided that since she and Baba were the reason for the awkwardness, she had a responsibility to warm up the conversation. Directing the question to no one in particular, my mother asked how the children were.
With care for my mother, Aunty Wong leaped on the opening. “Wei Shin passed the university entrance exam.”
“Wonderful!” my mother said. “She was always such a smart girl.” She waited for my father to echo the sentiment, but he was staring into his tea.
“Will your son be home for the Mid-Autumn Festival?” another aunty asked my mother.
“We hope so. Everything is so uncertain now.”
“I bet he can’t wait to see his father,” Aunty Wong said. Her husband immediately touched her arm. She had called the elephant into visibility. It lumbered out of the corner and sat on the table.
“And we can’t wait to see him, right?” My mother’s hand landed gently atop my father’s. He jerked and said, “Yes.”
Uncle Wong spoke up immediately, some comment on the recent cross-strait fighting, which carried the conversation into the realm of current events, a topic on which everyone could express some outrage and concern. My mother was grateful.
Blinking like a man stumbling out of a cave, my father emerged into the moment. His eyes darted among the dinner guests, gaze tracking the conversation. My mother poured more tea for him. She muttered, “Drink.”
“I want to go home,” Baba said just loud enough for my mother to hear.
“We just got here. Wait for the food.”
“I want to go home.”
“Wait.”
My father stood up. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”
“Need a light?” One of the uncles proffered a lighter. My father shook his head.
“You don’t have to go outside. Here’s the ashtray,” Aunty Wong said, but my mother noticed how her eyes moved around the table, searching for shared judgment.
My father lit the cigarette. “I’ll go outside.”
A bas-relief of a goddess swirling among clouds hung on the back wall of the restaurant. It was the gaudy type of art that my mother hated. “Art.” It didn’t even deserve the label. The sort of thing pressed out by a machine, swabbed with glue and paint, and then sold in a cheap sundries store. As my father left the restaurant, my mother kept her eyes on the gold-leafed goddess. She sipped her tea, which was weak and cold. The tendril in her chest had bloomed, full leaves and blossoms, snaking around her heart, chokin
g her throat.
—
When the food arrived and my father still had not returned, she went out to look for him. He was not in front of the restaurant. The garbage trucks had come through and cleared away the trash, leaving damp circles. She hurried to the corner, expecting to find him squatting on some overturned crate and surrounded by cigarette butts. He was not there. She went one block farther, hoping to catch him in front of a closed shop, idly staring through the window. Still no sign. She went another block. Maybe he had decided he was in the mood for noodles.
Returning alone to the restaurant was too shameful, so my mother caught a bus.
The open windows rattled and exhaust thickened in the humidity. My mother watched for my father on the street below. Dozens of men, dressed similarly, sauntered down the streets, smoking, toting parcels, holding their children’s hands. She felt like fainting. Afraid that she might vomit out the window, she gripped the seat in front of her and hung her head. Waiting had been easier. Guilt overcame her and she chastised herself. What a terrible, terrible thought. She remembered those days of uncertainty and potential. All those daydreams of his return, family completed. She had never considered this. The bus stopped, exhaled, then shook back to life. All those naive canvases she’d painted of reunited families against idyllic landscapes. She had considered only happy endings.
—
He was not home. She waited at the table in the dark courtyard. This was too familiar to all of us. I came out and sat beside her. She put her arm around me.
“I’ll stay with you,” I declared.
“You should go to bed. He’ll be home soon. He’ll come home.”
I am thinking of that moment. I am thinking about the texture of skin, the particular clamminess of my mother’s arm on my bare shoulder and her hand pressed to my hip as she leaned over to kiss me.
When I got older, I still thought I could write life. I didn’t understand, as my mother had just realized that evening, that it is the other way around. And yet, here I am, still trying.
15
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