Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  Because of this, and their long history, Uncle Lin was the only one who had been exempt from Baba’s strident ideas about friendship. Uncle Lin had been promoted to surgeon at the hospital in Taipei as the positions formerly held only by Japanese were vacated because of the war. However, like so many things masked under careful labels, he was officially a “research assistant,” receiving no pay but prestige. Others envied him, but his wife worked as a Japanese tutor in the homes of rich Taiwanese in order to feed the family. When my father returned, just before the end of the war, he was disappointed to discover what he considered was Uncle Lin’s betrayal—in a hushed, almost embarrassed tone, he referred to Uncle Lin as a “collaborator”—but he had not repudiated him as he did other friends.

  Uncle Lin’s acceptance of the hospital job was emblematic of his more moderate personality—the pragmatism that kept him out of danger when the riots broke out, that kept him from being arrested, that allowed him to prosper when my father was languishing away in a prison. And now his youngest son was earning a Ph.D. in America while Baba’s son was cleaning rooms for Americans.

  “Really?” I stared at the calendar. May fluttered in the breeze from the fan; somehow, we had made it to July without tearing off the months. “A Ph.D. in what, Mama?”

  “In what? How do I know? He goes to Berkeley. I told his parents that they should come visit us. He wants to meet you. Be there at ten on Saturday.”

  I sighed. She did not ask; she demanded. “How old is he?” I squeezed the receiver between my chin and shoulder and reached toward the calendar; the cord stretched to its full length and I grabbed the two sheets and ripped them off.

  “Thirty? Let me see, Ah Zhay was almost ready for school when Aunty Lin had him. Wei must be close to thirty.”

  “Ma, you aren’t setting us up, right?”

  Mama clicked her tongue. “Don’t be a nitwit. It’s just tea.”

  Despite my mother’s denials, I knew this subterfuge too well. One by one, my friends had married similar men, graduate students in America who came back during vacations to look for wives. “Just tea” could turn into an engagement.

  “Saturday at ten,” she said again.

  I sighed. “Right, Mama. Saturday at ten. Just tea.”

  —

  I would not go. I told myself I would not go, even as I combed out my damp hair, as I swiped astringent on my face, and as I pulled on my jeans. I argued with myself: But the Lins are driving down from Taipei for this. The reluctant part of me countered that he was already thirty, too old for my tastes. The whole meeting was a waste of time. Again, I told myself I wouldn’t go as I backed my motorcycle out of the courtyard.

  The city now abutted my grandfather’s land; the old dirt road along which so many visitors had trekked into our lives was sealed with tar and radiated like a stove in the July heat. I arrived with my face shiny and sweat rolling down my arms and between my breasts.

  “Here she is!” my mother exclaimed when I entered. Indoors was only marginally cooler than outside. The electric fan mounted on the wall buzzed loudly. Looking unruffled by the long drive, Uncle Lin, his wife, and their son sat on one side of the low coffee table. My parents and grandmother sat in polished cherrywood chairs on the other side. My grandfather was in the corner, bent close to the murmuring television and ignoring us. Baba caught my eye for a moment. His mouth flattened into what a stranger would have read as a grimace but what I knew was a smile. Suddenly, I was eleven again, filial, compliant.

  I said my hellos. My mother ushered me over to the remaining chair. I had seen the Lins a few times before, but their son had already been away at college by the time my parents had revived the friendship, and I had never met him. He wore his hair parted on the left side. His mouth was full and solemn. He wore socks and loafers despite the heat and humidity. He had no qualms about looking me over. His eyes traveled from the top of my head to my toes. His bold gaze embarrassed me. I blushed and focused on the gleam of his shoes.

  Very quickly, his mother resumed what I suppose had been the earlier conversation topic: singing his praises. He was a Ph.D. student in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He had received his undergraduate degree from National Taiwan University in Taipei. He spoke four languages fluently. He had a beautiful singing voice. He also had a hidden talent for cooking. I glanced at him. He raised his eyebrows and flared his nostrils, biting back a grin, as his mother broadcast his résumé.

  I wondered what my parents would offer about me in return. I had ten toes and could blink my eyes at will. I could speak fluent Mandarin and could read a book. I could walk without stumbling most of the time, and I had very pretty hair.

  Instead, my mother told them that I was a talented writer (was she referring to the single junior high essay that had been praised by my teacher?) and an expert homemaker and patient with children (many years of babysitting my niece and nephews). I glanced up once and caught Wei smiling at me. Mutual embarrassment bonded us. I let a smile flicker across my lips. Apparently—my mother claimed—I was also good with numbers (referring, no doubt, to my experience calculating bills for customers at the Golden Rooster).

  My grandmother suggested that they leave us and visit a teahouse on the main road that had an air conditioner, a large, growling electrical unit wedged onto a windowsill and dripping condensation. All the parents pretended that this was a natural turn of events, and in a matter of minutes, after my grandmother forcefully clicked off the television and dragged my grandfather away, Wei and I were alone.

  “More tea?” I asked.

  “Thanks, but it’s too hot.”

  I nodded. “Ah, I know.” I went to the refrigerator that was set here, in the front room, near the door, not only because the kitchen lacked space, but also to show off this large, humming, status-laden machine. I found two popsicles in the freezer and gave him one.

  He struggled off the paper wrapper and bit awkwardly. His nails were cut too short and the skin at the edges was bright pink.

  We nibbled silently. I licked a drop off my wrist. Our parents’ caravan had likely reached the teahouse, and they were just pushing back the sliding glass door and stepping into the chilled, damp room, battling the air conditioner’s rumble with loud gossip about the two children left at home. I wondered how terrible it would be if I drove Wei to the teahouse and went to meet my friend at the department store. No, I had no choice. I’d have to endure it.

  “Do you like California?” My voice startled him. He hurriedly chewed, then licked his lips and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Yes, quite a bit.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever move back here?”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing for me here. The economy is growing—no doubt about it—but despite what the economists say, this is still the Third World.”

  “Third world?”

  “Technically, Third World means nonaligned, and we are, of course, with America, but we’re also poor. Half the kids don’t wear shoes to school.” His voice swelled with something professorial and patronizing. He set the half-eaten popsicle on the table.

  Annoyed, I told him he was wrong. “But there are so many factories here. There’s a Barbie factory in Taishan. My friend Yi Chin went to work there. She says there’re thousands of women working there.” He had not lived in Taiwan for five years; he touched down in a Pan Am 747, stepped onto the sweltering tarmac, and lamented the sidewalks splattered with red betel nut spit, the street vendors with their sun-creased necks, the men pedaling tri-wheeled trucks laden with flattened cardboard, the cone-hatted women clearing rubbish from the streets, and the girls clad in long sleeves picking tea leaves. He didn’t see the streets clogged with red taxis, the tiled high-rise apartments, and the factories running multiple shifts to keep up twenty-four-hour production.

  “Factories are not doctors, scientists, inventors. Nothing original comes from Taiwan. We merely stamp out what others create.” He emphasized his point by pou
nding his fist into his palm.

  The popsicle melted onto the torn wrapper; the juice threatened to spill over the edge of the table. I watched its slow creep, fuming at his messiness.

  He went on. “Made in Taiwan? It’s a joke. Cheap toys, ashtrays, flimsy electronics.” He threw his hands up. “Concerts for Bangladesh? You could just as easily put a picture of a dirty-faced Taiwanese orphan in the plea.”

  I continued eating my popsicle. I refused to let his tone incite me. He tore a piece of tissue from the roll on the table and wiped his forehead.

  “In school, you learn the history of China as if it’s our own. But we were a Japanese colony for fifty years. Their model colony, in fact. We were as advanced as any city in Europe. Then the Chinese came and treated this place like a temporary campground. Retake the mainland? Treating us like nothing more than a base camp for their final victory. Where is that victory now? The island looks like a shantytown.”

  “But at the root, we’re all Chinese.” Twelve years of school had taught me that, day after day.

  He frowned. “If we are all Chinese, then why does the KMT send spies to America to watch us? Even in America, even in Berkeley, California, I must watch with whom I speak. Do you have any idea that people are coming together to talk about how we can take our island back? No, you don’t, because there are only three television stations, and they are all owned by the government. This is a dictatorship. A dictatorship.”

  “You’re wrong. We just had elections. Some islanders won.” A viscous stream of juice trailed over the edge of the table. Smart but oblivious. I’d tell my parents how this careless gesture had revealed everything.

  “Local elections. Agree to the rules and they let you play small stakes, just to make you think you have a say. Make your own rules and you go to prison.”

  Prison. We never said this word. In its place, my mother always held her breath, or found softer euphemisms: He went away. Baba had been away. Su Ming Guo had been away and had just recently returned. He’d sent a letter to my father—no doubt monitored—that said he’d forgiven Baba. It was the worst thing he could have said, doubling Baba’s guilt.

  Wei leaned forward. “Even your father—in prison for what? Ten, eleven years? And why?”

  I said softly, “I don’t know.” I tossed the popsicle stick into the trash.

  His eyes narrowed. “You don’t know? Don’t be coy.”

  “I really don’t know.” I kneeled next to the table and carefully lifted up his sticky discarded wrapper. It dripped across the table and floor as I carried it to the garbage. “I don’t think we should talk about it.”

  He settled back and tapped his fingers together in a tent across his belly, signaling the start of the real sermon. “You need to know what your father did. After they broke him, he betrayed Su Ming Guo, but before that…” He sat up. “He wasn’t arrested just because he spoke out. He was dangerous. He had ideas and, to the KMT, that was a crime. My father said he knew how to talk, beautifully, in a way that made people want to listen.” His tone softened. “You should see that your father wasn’t a bad man. For our fathers, that’s why I—” He shook his head. “Oh, never mind.”

  “Good. Don’t say any more.” I slid back onto my chair. I inspected my fingernails. The buzzing of the electric fan grew louder. My mother had said Baba was a good man, but the claim slid in among all her other repeated phrases, uttered so often they lost any force. This was the first time I’d heard someone other than my mother call Baba good. But Wei did not know Baba; he knew only stories.

  Wei cleared his throat. “In 1947, before the refugees got here, the islanders rose up for their rights. The KMT crushed them. Blood ran in the streets.”

  “I’ve never heard that,” I rejoined, annoyed by his lie. “Where did you hear that?”

  “I could go to prison for even mentioning it.” He raised his eyebrow. Was that pride?

  I wanted to crush his arrogance. “I don’t believe you. I would have heard of it.”

  “Ask your father.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Something like that, and I never heard of it?”

  “Twenty thousand men died. Ask your mother.”

  I turned my head. I did not want to look at him. Spoiled by his American education. He was pompous. “No. It would be impossible to hide a thing like that. Be quiet.”

  “I was six years old. I remember that we hid.” His voice softened. “They were raping girls. My mother smeared ash on her face. Ask your sister.”

  “No.”

  “Ask your brothers.”

  The first meeting should be light. We should be making small talk about recent events, hobbies, and pet peeves. The conversation had devolved. I would tell my parents how crass he was. I would say only that sentence: He was crass. I would not elaborate and let them draw their own conclusions.

  “I’m tired.” I rose.

  “Ask your brothers,” he said again.

  “I need some air.” I stepped around the table and past his chair.

  He stood up. He touched my arm, a halfhearted gesture to soothe me. “I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  I waved him off and went out back, into the garden, and sat in a rusty folding chair. I looked at the furrows that Baba and I had tended years ago, which were gouged along the same paths year after year. My impatience turned into a rage that surprised me, and I found that I couldn’t have spoken even if I’d tried. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew my family, but he could not imagine what our lives had been like. I left him to swelter alone in the house until our parents returned.

  —

  That evening, I sat in the alley outside my sister’s courtyard, cooling myself with a paper fan. My nephews were tangling and untangling a yellow yo-yo, while my niece leaned against her mother and tried to sidle into our conversation. Mei Mei was fourteen, with the same ear-length haircut her mother and I had been forced to wear as schoolgirls, the same heavy-lidded yearning in her eyes as her mother at that age, and the same deep gold complexion as her father. Her bare legs were marked with fading mosquito bites, and she scratched these as she listened.

  “Don’t lean on me. It’s too hot,” my sister snapped.

  Mei Mei nuzzled her cheek on her mother’s arm. “But, Ma, I love you.” She flashed a conspiratorial smile at me. I grinned at her.

  “Sweet talker!” Faux exasperation lightened my sister’s tone. She asked me about Wei. “I remember him as a cute little boy. His brother and I dressed him up once in Mama’s clothes. He was adorable.”

  “He’s obnoxious.” I slapped a mosquito, leaving a smudge of blood on my arm.

  “Why, Ayi?” Mei Mei still clung to her mother’s arm and looked up at me with bright curiosity.

  “All he talked about was politics.”

  “Is he handsome? If he’s handsome, it doesn’t matter, right?” She smiled.

  “Politics? He’s really an American now,” my sister said.

  “He’d have to be a lot better looking to make up for his personality,” I said, and Mei Mei giggled. Using Taiwanese, which Mei Mei did not know well, I said to Ah Zhay, “He told me about something else too. About Baba.” I remembered how my parents had used Japanese for their private conversations around me; only Ah Zhay and Dua Hyan had been old enough to have learned it in school.

  Mei Mei protested. “No fair! No Taiwanese. I want to hear the gossip.” She pulled at her mother’s arm.

  Ah Zhay shrugged her off. “Quiet!” Her mouth tightened. “What did he say?”

  I repeated what Wei had said about the massacre, about Baba’s part. How he had stood up and been wanted for it.

  “Why would he say this?”

  “Is it true?” I countered.

  Ah Zhay switched back to Mandarin. “Sweetheart, go play at the school.”

  “Why?”

  “Just go. No, wait. Here’s some money. Take your brothers for shaved ice.” Ah Zhay dropped a stack of coins into Mei Mei’s hand. The boys forgot the yo-yo�
�now a tangle of knotted string—and clamored for the money.

  “But I want to stay.” Her brow furrowed; she knew she was being excluded from the best parts of the conversation.

  I smiled at her and drew on the privilege I had as an aunt—power without the stigma of an authority. “Go, sweetheart,” I said.

  After the kids ran off, Ah Zhay began again in a low voice, “I don’t want to talk about it. But…” She sighed. “It started the night you were born. March first. I always remember your birthday because of that. The island was under martial law. I didn’t really understand, except it meant we couldn’t go outside, and the midwife wasn’t coming, so I had to help Baba when you were born.”

  This I knew. It was family lore: I was born in the upstairs bedroom, at home, with Baba as midwife, Ah Zhay as assistant.

  Ah Zhay went on. The Mainlanders were the protesters’ first targets because after the Nationalists had taken over from the Japanese, they had been using the island to help support the civil war on the mainland: driving up inflation, causing a rice shortage, exhausting materials that might have been used to rebuild the cities destroyed by the Allied bombing. The Taiwanese were angry. Finally, Ah Zhay said, set off by a gendarme’s beating of a street vendor, a young widow selling cigarettes, people took to the streets, protesting, picking fights, challenging passersby on the sidewalks with questions in Taiwanese, beating up those who couldn’t answer.

  “You have to understand how upset people were. Mama reminded us every night how lucky we were to have rice, because most people didn’t. If you have nothing, at the very least you have rice, but people didn’t even have that. Meanwhile, people said the KMT were hoarding. They were eating well, throwing parties. Worms eating an apple. Of course people were upset. I’m not saying it was right, but it was what it was.”

  At that time, some men still wore the Sun Yat-sen suit—it later became infamous as the “Mao suit”—but this identified them as Chinese, so they switched to Western shirts. Wooden Japanese sandals, a relic of colonial life, made a comeback.

  “Why?”

  “Because only Taiwanese women owned them.”