It went on like this for days. The island was in chaos. School was canceled and students took up arms. The governor-general seemed anxious to know what people wanted. Community meetings were convened; people drafted up settlement demands.
“And Baba went?”
“Mama begged him not to go that day. She was sick. They had four kids at home, including a newborn.”
“Me.”
“Yes, you. I remember they fought about it all morning before he left. Mama cried, and Baba left anyway. All the men who went with him that day later disappeared.”
A list of names floated through my mind—women I had heard about growing up, mothers without husbands.
“I don’t understand. Wei said there was blood in the streets.”
“Soon, the troops came to stop the protesters. Retribution. Even though things were already peaceful when they arrived. I heard the shooting. We didn’t go outside for a week. We couldn’t even go upstairs, but one day I snuck up there and looked into the street. There was a man, a body. How can you count them? There were no death certificates. Most of the time, there was no body. After Baba was taken away, we were certain he was dead. How would we know? People talk to each other; the story gets stitched together, piece by piece. We weren’t the only ones. Su Ming Guo wasn’t the only one. You have to assume we weren’t unique. There were thousands like us.”
“Then Wei was right?”
“I don’t know.”
A bird dropped a seed that skittered across the roof tiles.
“So, it was like that.”
“Don’t tell anyone.” A well-worn phrase. Down the alley, a scooter rumbled and a woman yelled at her child. The streetlight slowly brightened and cast the alley in an eerie white glow. A mosquito buzzed against my ear and I batted it with my fan. “Don’t talk about it,” Ah Zhay said again.
“What did the body look like?”
“What?”
“The body you saw in the road.” I was tired of not talking. Not talking had brought me—us—here. Silence, not speech, had been the problem.
“It was a man.”
Maybe she had imagined it. A story drifts around, and everyone claims to be a witness. “I want to know what you saw. Old or young?”
Ah Zhay looked at her feet and hesitated. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What did he look like? I want to know what you saw.”
She sighed. “He—he was on his back. His arm was over his face. His coat was torn and his blood was in the street around him.”
She dreamed of the man for years. Not nighttime dreams, pregnant with symbolism, but drifting daydreams, as she wondered what had happened to Baba. She never told our parents, afraid they would be angry that she had gone upstairs. After Baba was taken, she wondered if another girl had pretended not to see our father’s body, and had let the soldiers drag him away to an unmarked grave, or to the sea. For years, she uttered apologies under her breath to the fatherless girl.
She looked up at the bugs clicking futilely around the streetlamp; the light, like the chilled glare of a camera flash, made her face ghostly.
“That’s just our life,” she said.
“Don’t say that.”
The sound of the returning kids floated down the alley: their sandals slapping against the footbridge that spanned the benjo ditch, their voices layering over one another.
Ah Zhay smacked her knees. “I should make dinner.”
After she left, I stared at the chipped stucco on the side of the house next door, whose back bedroom overlooked our end of the alley. Tiny little stars textured the window glass, creating a hazy vision inside. A shadowy figure crossed in front of a blur of light. A temple priest had recently been to the house after the construction of a new room had revealed human bones. He’d exorcised the home, and when the neighbor suggested that he come to our house too, Ah Zhay had scoffed. The city retrieved the remains, and the room was sealed in concrete, followed by a layer of brown-and-white linoleum.
Mei Mei and the boys ran down the alley in a whirlwind of noise and sweat, bug-bitten feet, ashy elbows and skinned knees, floppy hair and sugar-sour breath.
“Ayi, Ayi,” they cried in voices that killed reverie.
—
On Thursday night, Ting Ting—a woman I worked with—and I went to the OK Bar to dance. It was one of a handful clustered within a few blocks that catered to the Americans and boasted grand and insinuating names: the Suzie Wong Club, King’s Club, the Paradise Club, the Playboy. The OK Bar was the most innocuous among them—no “hostesses” or women wearing subtle lapel pins that indicated their occupation. A band of local kids played Rolling Stone covers on a stage lit by red and blue lights. The area in front of the stage was mostly empty: just a few men clutching beer bottles and nodding to the music. Most people stayed outside the halo of the stage lights, lingering in the shadows along the walls and crowding at the bar. Ting Ting and I ordered beers and nursed them. We giggled and feigned misunderstanding whenever men we didn’t like tried to talk to us.
Ting Ting was twenty-nine but she could still pass for twenty-five, or even twenty-one. She watched me carefully when we primped for our club nights and commented on the shininess of my hair or the texture of my skin. “Look how old I am,” she’d wail, tugging at her eyes or the invisible lines by her mouth. She was determined to be married by thirty. She kept a diary of her exploits, which she showed me one afternoon. She called it her “American Tour”: a man from each of the fifty states. By the end, she hoped she would have found a husband. Her colored pencil illustration of a map of the United States, with a third of the states shaded, embarrassed me. I was a virgin, but Ting Ting’s candidness made me feel virginal. I smiled and handed the book back to her, and she said, “I hope you don’t end up like me.” I didn’t know what to say—I hoped so too. So I just shook my head and said, weakly, “Oh, come on.”
The androgynous lead singer, with floppy black hair and hip-hugging white pants, did a fair imitation of Mick Jagger. “I’d be his Marianne Faithfull,” Ting Ting murmured. The singer shimmied across the stage with his lips pursed and his chin thrust out. A group of GIs near us snickered. Ting Ting shot them a dirty look. The singer leaped off the stage onto the empty dance floor and writhed into splits. A few women hollered, but his last notes faded into silence.
The stage lights dimmed and music came on over the speakers, coaxing people out to the floor. The singer, ignoring the lukewarm response, picked himself up, still swaggering. The band began dismantling. The beer was already warming my stomach and face, and I suggested we dance.
Ting Ting said she needed a shot of whisky first. “Sweetie,” she called at the bartender, who had come to know us, “two shots of whisky.”
“I have to work tomorrow,” I reminded her.
“Don’t be a killjoy. A shot. And then we dance.”
It was the same routine. The one shot would lead to a second, and by the third I would be pulling her away from whatever man from whichever of the fifty states who was amused by her sloppy dancing. She would turn on me, accuse me of trying to ruin her fun, and she’d go off, not seen again until she trudged into work the next day, wan and abandoned. We’d done this for months now. I think she judged herself less knowing that a prig like me still found her worthy of friendship.
The bartender raised an eyebrow at me as he handed us our glasses.
“Come on,” Ting Ting said to him. “I’m not forcing her.”
“Completely by choice,” I said. “I want to dance, she wants to drink. So we drink.”
“Stop complaining,” Ting Ting said. She held up her glass. “Cheers.”
—
One shot led to a second, and soon the music was louder and the colored lights flashing brighter and the room was pulsing in my head. Dancers crowded the floor. Ting Ting had her arms around a short blond man in a purple shirt. I heard him say he was from Minnesota.
Ting Ting winked at me and shouted, “I don’t have Minn
esota yet!” as they danced away.
A man with dark curly hair leaned over and shouted in my ear, “Your friend left you.”
I nodded.
“Me too.”
I closed my eyes. Heat throbbed in my cheeks and radiated off the people around us. I opened my eyes and found him watching me. He had large brown eyes and long thick lashes. I closed my eyes again and let the room spin. He introduced himself, shouting, “I’m Sam!” in my ear. It was such a tidy name, and so completely without associations to me. I didn’t know if Sam was a nice name or an old-fashioned name. I swayed to the music and softly repeated his name.
“It’s hot. Do you want to go outside?”
I nodded. Alcohol always made me reckless. He took my hand and pulled me through the crowd and onto the sidewalk, where, beyond the noise, the world was muffled and the bass still throbbed.
“Ah. Fresh air,” he said.
Various couples leaned against motorbikes and pillars, flirting, nuzzling, whispering. The street was still crowded with traffic. On every building, neon signs flashed and buzzed, announcing motels and furniture and jewelry. A man in a coned hat pushed his cart in front of the club and cried, “Stinky tofu!”
The sound of popping oil and odor of fermented tofu turned my stomach. My legs suddenly itched; I felt as if I were suffocating. I unzipped my boots and tugged them off and flexed my bare toes.
“Too hot,” I said in English. I began fanning myself, trying to wave away heat and nausea. “Go away,” I called to the tofu seller. He muttered and moved on.
“I can take you home. You look sick.”
“No,” I said, and kneeled next to my abandoned boots.
“Do you want me to find your friend?”
I waved my dissent just as the sickness washed up my throat. Sam squatted down next to me and held back my hair. I threw up again, simultaneously apathetic in my sickness and embarrassed by the stench.
“Let me take you home.”
“I am okay,” I said. My mouth was sour and tears ran down my face. Slightly more sober, my sense of shame had returned. I thought of how disappointed Mama would be. What if one of her church sisters or brothers saw me? I had become one of those girls who drank too much and acted like a clown in front of Americans. Like Ting Ting.
“Come on.” He picked up my boots and helped me to my feet.
I told him, as best I could in my drunken, broken English, that I’d take myself home.
“I can’t in good faith let you do that. You’ll kill someone. Or yourself. My bike’s over there.”
The street trembled beside me, but a sort of tunnel vision had set in that muffled the noise of motorbikes and buses to a faraway place, and all I heard was the pressure in my ears and my own voice, pleading with my stomach for calm.
While islanders were content with their bicycles, upon which we managed to pile shopping bags, pets, children, entire three-generation families, the Americans went for old war bikes: Harley 45s, BSAs, and Triumphs. Ting Ting and I had spent hours parsing the significance of each type of bike—what it meant about a man’s personality, status, ego. I would tell Ting Ting that Sam had a Harley, and she would tell me how to read the night’s events.
Under normal circumstances, I would have tried to be modest and sat sideways, gripping the small bar behind the seat, keeping a polite space between Sam and me. But I was too ill. I collapsed forward, wrapping my arms around his waist, and dropped my head against his warm back. I closed my eyes and let myself relent to the speed of the bike, dipping into the curves and lashed by my windblown hair. So this is what an American smells like, I thought, even as I swallowed against my nausea. Inexplicably, I thought of Wei. Look at me, I said to him. Is this Third World? Aren’t you impressed?
“Where are we going?” Sam shouted.
I called out directions with my eyes closed. I didn’t have to look in order to tell him to turn at the dumpling stand, then at the shoe repair shop, then finally at the kindergarten with the plaster giraffe grazing against the mural. As his bike growled into the tiny alley-maze of my neighborhood, I suddenly realized what trouble morning would bring. Everyone from the main street to our dead end would hear the bike, arriving so late, so clearly American, and so obviously me.
He cut the motor and I hopped off. I mumbled thanks, too ashamed to look him in the eye, and hoped he’d make a quiet, subtle exit. The cooling engine ticked, almost keeping time with the crickets sawing away unseen in the dark. He wished me well, and I acknowledged him with a nod and a silent desire that he’d disappear. I waited behind the courtyard door until the sound of his bike faded, then I trudged to my room, where I curled up in my clothes, my arms slipped between the cool pillowcase and the cooler bamboo mat.
—
The sun never came into that back bedroom. The air base wall, the positioning of the house, and the bars over the glass all conspired against sunshine, so I woke according to clock alarms, noise in the front room, and, today, my sister screaming over me.
The stench of alcohol and smoke sheened across my skin and hung in my clothes. I turned away from her barrage of “hell,” “Jesus,” and “shame” and buried my face in my pillow. The room was still spinning and her voice slammed against my tender ears. Like a dream, she left the room, and I slipped back into a half-drunk reverie.
My memory was a line of punctuation and no continuous prose. Punctuation: Sam (was that his name? I could barely remember) looming over me; punctuation: the dark heat of the sidewalk, sheltered by the overhanging second floor of the bar, light glinting off rear lights and handlebars and baskets; punctuation: the rush of speeding through the streets cutting the summer heat. I barely recalled coming into the house.
Among those too was some vaguely articulated sense that he had been attractive. I had ridden home with my breasts pressed to his warm back. At the thought, lightness turned in my chest.
But now that I was awake, the illness returned. Hunched over, I ran to the bathroom. As I knelt in front of the toilet, my sister came to the doorway.
“I called Mama. What were you thinking? Don’t you care about face at all? And was he American? An American? The only kind of woman who talks to Americans is a whore!”
I was too weak to argue. I soothed my hot skin against the cool bathtub.
“You couldn’t have taken a taxi? Or walked? You have no self-respect.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Well, look, congratulations. Your sister is a whore.”
She glared at me and disappeared.
I fell asleep against the bathtub and woke again to the bleary vision of my mother standing now with my sister in the doorway and muttering about the devil inside me. I closed my eyes again. Behind my dreamless sleep, I heard their prayers in the front room. Perhaps that angel my sister had seen had merely been a drunken hallucination, its warnings the utterances of overzealous family members in another room. When the shifting light woke me again, I found Mei Mei there, worry on her face. She whispered, “I need to use the bathroom,” as if it were a betrayal.
I hauled myself up. I shook my head. I wanted to tell her I was okay, but I was too ill to open my mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as I dragged myself past her. I crept out without glancing down the hall. I heard my mother say, “She’s up,” and the prayers began anew.
22
THEIR PRAYERS DID NO GOOD. Despite the vow to never drink again, I was just as unrepentant the next few days as I’d been that first sick morning. I did not speak to my sister except to tell her when I’d be home from work, or to ask where she had put the detergent. I did not want to see my mother, but on Saturday I went for dinner because even my mother’s assertion that evil spirits had taken hold of me could not kill my filial guilt.
In the courtyard, the late-afternoon sun fell through the banyan as it had all of my life, and for a moment, nostalgia flashed through me as I remembered those painful afternoons of finishing homework in the dwindling light. Baba sat at the table that was now
marked with thousands of pencil imprints in its soft wood. A pack of cigarettes and a red plastic lighter lay before him. He tapped his fingers against a jar thick with tea leaves and diluted tea.
I rolled my bike in and said hello, trying to hide my sheepishness.
“Come,” he said.
I told him I wanted to say hello to my grandparents first.
“Come.”
I nudged down the kickstand. Over the years, I’d developed immunity to my mother’s hysterics, and even my father’s explosions followed a familiar, if unpleasant, arc. Therefore, his measured tone scared me.
I sat across from him and waited for him to speak. If he had known how his calm frightened me, he wouldn’t have bothered with yelling throughout my adolescence.
He looked directly into my eyes. His cheek pulsed; he was clenching his jaw. “How are you feeling?”
I could not tell if this was his idea of humor. “Fine, Baba.”
“Your mother has said everything we need to say, so I won’t repeat it.”
The surface of the table, upon which I now concentrated my gaze, was a palimpsest of my childhood: word upon word, figure upon figure. I dug my nail into a fleck of bare wood and scratched at the peeling paint.
He stared toward the gate, his jaw hard, the creases by his mouth deep and placid. “Wei is in Taiwan for another month. You should spend more time with him.”
“Okay, Baba.”
“If he wants to go out, you go. No more bars, no more Americans.”
I glanced at him. He was bathed in a familiar sweet, ugly smell of nicotine that reminded me of the men, dressed in white tank tops and shorts, who casually draped themselves on scooters at the side of the road while they blustered and chewed betel nut. The lost look in his eyes, as if he carried at every moment a wide and menacing world in his sight, had died over the years to a sculptured stillness. I was eleven years old again, being ordered to memorize my multiplication tables, and I could not say no. Baba picked up the pack of cigarettes and pulled one out.
Lightly clenching it in his mouth, he said, “That’s it.”
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