Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “I was the only one he would have trusted. I was his closest friend,” Baba said. “I was the only one who could have done what I did.”

  Su Ming Guo was nothing more than a name to me. Three syllables I heard only on the worst days of my life. To Baba, the name had a history, memory, intimacy. In a way that I could not imagine, the name was a person.

  “I’ll stay.” And then I’d tell my mother what we had done. But that would not stop his next trip. He was a blinded man: he could not see others’ frowns, their flailing arms reaching out to stop him. Dragged by his heart, he bumbled along.

  We waited. I found a stick and began carefully chipping away the dirt around a half-buried stone near my feet. I thought about Wei. Maybe I could call him and his neatly combed hair and reasonable voice would convince Baba to leave. The whole Lin family could gather around, urging and coaxing like police waiting beneath a man crying on a sixth-floor ledge. But that would surely draw Su Ming Guo out of the house. Thinking of Wei made me think of Sam, whose face I could barely remember. I wondered if I’d ever see him again. Or had he moved on to the next young, drunk woman? I felt a little slighted that he had never stopped by the next day to check on me.

  Suddenly, the gate squealed. A man in a hat stepped through. My father straightened his spine. My stick froze, wedged between rock and brick. The man nodded at us, then paused to blow his nose with a crumpled handkerchief. He stuffed it into his pocket and turned back to the gate. His key ring clanked noisily against the metal.

  “Baba,” I whispered, “let’s go. Don’t bother him.”

  My father touched my knee to silence me and stood up. He strode toward Mr. Su with intention that could be mistaken, from afar, for menace. I couldn’t help but call, “Ba!”

  My voice startled Mr. Su, who immediately turned around. I couldn’t see his eyes under the shadow of the hat, but I could see his mouth go slack in surprise and fear.

  “Who are you?” His voice wavered. He sniffed.

  Baba reached out his hands. “Please, my friend.”

  Mr. Su pressed himself against the gate and his heels caught on the hem of his pants. His eyes flashed toward me, sunlight catching the whites for a moment.

  “Who are you?”

  Baba stood right before him, entering a space that should have been saved for lovers, or strangers in a packed crowd. But the alley unfolded empty behind them.

  “Baba, come here.”

  Baba gestured at me without looking, the kind of hand flick one might give to a dog to urge it to stay.

  “Ah. It’s you,” Mr. Su said. Relief and annoyance replaced fear. He moved slightly away from the gate, which forced Baba to take a step back. “My wife mentioned you had come.”

  “She did?” I cringed at the boyish hopefulness in Baba’s voice. “She sent me away. I told her you’d want to see me.”

  “Who is that?”

  “My daughter. Did you greet Uncle Su?” My father spoke to me like I was a schoolgirl, and I responded automatically.

  “Hello, Uncle Su.”

  “The youngest? The one Li Min was carrying when—” The last time he saw my mother must have been before all the trouble, when I was just an idea inside of a swollen belly.

  I nodded.

  “My wife will be home soon,” Uncle Su said. “I was going to see the doctor, but I can wait. Let’s go before my wife comes home.” He pushed past my father.

  Baba reacted the same way I did: for a moment, neither of us could move. We could not believe Su Ming Guo had decided to speak to us.

  —

  In the brightly lit coffee shop, I was able to finally see Su Ming Guo’s face and I was surprised that such a plain man had been the focus of so much of our worry. His eyes were very narrow and half-moons of flesh sagged beneath each one. His lips were an odd purple shade. The hat had obscured a circle of baldness amid a U of thick gray hair. The heroes of revolution did not wear berets or belts of ammunition: they were stooped, middle-aged men with yellowed collars and nicotine-stained teeth.

  I came back from the counter with pastries filled with cream and slid in beside Baba.

  “Please, eat,” I invited. They acknowledged me with a nod and continued talking.

  Their conversation was just as pedestrian as Uncle Su’s appearance: wives, kids, grandkids, what to do with one’s free time. Every once in a while, he would pull his dingy handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his nose.

  He seemed to be free of the obsessions that cycled through my father. However, I noticed Uncle Su did not show his teeth when he smiled.

  “They told me I wouldn’t see my children again,” Baba said. “I tried to write in such a way that you would know it was not my voice. Didn’t you sense it?”

  Without lifting his head, Uncle Su looked up at Baba from under his lids. Nothing moved but his eyes, the light sliding over his damp, dark irises.

  “I also had children,” he said.

  I wanted to leave. The café lights were obscenely bright, and the orange plastic tray beneath the untouched pastries was garish. Uncle Su’s hands wrapped around his coffee cup so tight and still that they seemed like one object.

  “I had been there already for eleven years,” Baba said without energy. In the coffee shop glare, amid the students who had just come out of the nearby high school, and the other patrons who mysteriously had no work this Tuesday, intensity was masked beneath ellipses and vagueness. Spies, as everything from posters to gum wrappers to movie stubs warned us, were everywhere. It was our national duty to watch for suspicious behavior, to report unsavory words. Everyone in the café—the girl in the red-and-white-striped miniskirt pointing to the cakes behind the glass, the lanky boy with the American flag patch sewn onto his school bag, the young women with shopping bags piled on the seats beside them—they all could be spies. Even the old friend sitting before you.

  Uncle Su rolled up a sleeve, exposing his wrist and forearm, and reached across the table. The skin was puckered and brown in places, scars like sunbursts and welts.

  “This is only my arm.”

  “These mistakes—they were of the times. The past,” Baba stuttered, his tone pleading with Uncle Su to believe him. The past. The past was dead, gone, irrelevant. His desperation made my chest tighten with pity.

  Uncle Su wiped his nose. “I have given you a chance to speak, despite my wife’s objections. Your burden is your own.”

  I lightly touched Baba’s arm, felt his elbow twist beneath his sleeve.

  “Please do not come see me again,” Uncle Su said. “I have nothing else to say to you.”

  24

  TWO WEEKS LATER, the streets were filled with smoke as the Festival of the Hungry Ghost began. Folding card tables covered in food and incense to honor our ancestors suddenly appeared on the sidewalks. Women stood over metal barrels and burned hell notes for the dead. Even my boss at the Golden Rooster put out a table: a fat and stinky durian, pyramids of steamed buns, bowls of chow mein and steamed shrimp, and a deep-fried fish on a platter. For a month, the world was thrust into danger as the door to the underworld opened and ghosts were free to roam among us. The living had to appease them with food, lest they cause harm. Swimming and traveling took on special dangers, and we were all careful of theft, of accidents, of arguments. Ah Zhay and Mama condemned the holiday as pagan and refused to take any part. Even though I knew it was superstition—just a way to urge the living to remember the dead—I still took care around water and while driving.

  The Golden Rooster Garden was busier than usual, bright with the sound of clinking beer glasses and tapping chopsticks and male laughter. The weather report predicted a typhoon by the next day, and perhaps the Americans wanted to eat their fill before they were restricted to dining at the base. Already, the wind had blown out the heat and the bamboo blinds clattered against their moorings. I checked in with my boss and headed to the floor to take orders.

  Ting Ting was scheduled to come in when I did, but I didn’t see her. I ask
ed another waitress, Yi Hua, what she knew.

  “Sick. You know Ting Ting.”

  Another hangover, though she usually was able to drag herself to work. We hadn’t been out together since the night I met Sam, but she had come in a few mornings since then winking about her previous night’s exploits.

  In the rush of the next hour, I forgot about her as I moved between table and kitchen in a flow that seemed more muscle memory than work. Tables of men ate, paid, left, replaced by more tables of men. The wind occasionally rose up, slamming the blinds and silencing the restaurant for a moment. My boss brought in the food he’d set out for the ghosts and called me over to help carry in the table.

  As we were folding the legs, Ting Ting rolled up on her scooter, her hair tucked into her collar to keep it from whipping her face.

  “Hey, Boss,” she said. She nodded at me. She looked great: cheeks flushed, hair shiny.

  “Feeling better?” he asked. He shook his head and barked at me to lift the other side of the table.

  I raised an eyebrow at her as she followed us inside. She smiled.

  “I’m going to fire you,” our boss said, as he had said a dozen times before.

  “I’m sorry,” Ting Ting said. “I was really ill.”

  Our boss grunted his disbelief, but we knew he’d never fire her. Ting Ting was too pretty. When she wasn’t there, customers asked for her.

  “I’ll be on time the rest of this week, I promise.”

  “And next week?”

  “Next week too.”

  “Who raised you? You act like a girl, not a woman.”

  Ting Ting pouted and rubbed her stomach. Her cleavage quivered with the gesture—a move only Ting Ting could manage. “My stomach hurt. Don’t bully me.”

  Our boss shooed her away. “Fine. Go. Work.”

  She was so easy with men. I could never be that way. I had brothers. Men had no mystique. Flirtation was awkward on me—my words and gestures came out stilted—and annoyance showed too easily on my face. I watched the sideward glances she gave to the customers and the way she jutted her hip and pursed her lips when they said something on the edge of inappropriate.

  “She’s nothing to be jealous of,” Yi Hua said as she passed with a stack of dirty dishes. We both looked at Ting Ting across the room, laughing loudly as she poured beer for a table of pleased GIs. Yi Hua wrinkled her nose. “She’s nothing.”

  —

  We didn’t get a chance to speak until the lunch rush died down. Already, up and down the street, shop owners were pulling in their sidewalk displays and taping and boarding up their windows. Our boss insisted that we work until the usual midnight closing.

  Ting Ting beckoned me out back. The cooks had propped open the back door with a crate. She sat and lit a cigarette.

  “You feeling okay?” I asked. I grabbed another crate and set it near her.

  “How do I look?” She glanced over her chest. “Do I look different?”

  “You look fine.”

  “That’s good.” She took a deep drag and exhaled. “I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” I could not imagine Ting Ting at home changing diapers. I saw her leaving the baby at home with her mother or husband as she went out with her girlfriends, with me. How could she have let it happen?

  She nodded. “I’m pregnant.” Holding the cigarette in her teeth, she squeezed her breasts. “Don’t I look, well, bigger?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was at the doctor’s this morning. It’s true.”

  I scooted the crate closer to her. “Whose?” I whispered.

  “The American. Eddie.” I looked at her blankly, and she clarified: “Minnesota. We’re going to get married.”

  “Oh, Ting Ting.” We’d known enough girls jilted by Americans promising marriage and plane tickets. Two girls in my neighborhood had babies by men who had returned to the United States and left false addresses. The faces of their mixed-race kids declared their humiliation to everyone.

  “We really are.” Her voice was defiant.

  I didn’t know what else to say.

  The back of the restaurant faced a field where a lone, abandoned house stood. Behind the lot was the ROC air base. From my perch, I had a clear view of planes screaming as they descended onto the runways on their return from sorties to Vietnam. Two months before, the Pentagon Papers had been published; now I wondered how much longer the war would go on, how much longer the Americans would stay.

  Ting Ting crushed out her cigarette and stood up. She glared down at me and insisted, “They’re not all the same.” She left me.

  —

  War hovered at the periphery of everything. Not only in Vietnam, but in the continuing cold war across the strait, and the odd/even-day propaganda schedule agreed upon between the two sides. On alternating days, we sent—packed in buoyant Styrofoam—canned rations with labels reading OPPOSE COMMUNISM, bright color postcards with pictures of life in Taiwan guaranteeing fish, freedom, and singer Teresa Teng—the true emblem of liberation clad in sequins and hairspray—while the Chinese sent over leaflets with round-faced, smiling families that promised the beauty of the “ancestral land.” On our side, newspapers had brought us stories of famine and terror from that same ancestral land. Mao was a tyrant. People starved to death in the streets. The sparrow population was destroyed under the Four Pests campaign: peasants swarmed the fields clanging pots and pans, driving the birds into the air, and kept up the racket until the sparrows dropped to the earth in exhaustion. But sparrows ate insects as well as grain, and without sparrows, the locust population bloomed, then burst into crop-decimating clouds that drove the country into famine. Antiques were crushed and scrolls burned, schools shut down and teachers tortured. Culture was dead. Or so said the papers.

  My eldest brother, our link to authority, cast a strange sort of legitimacy over our family. Dua Hyan, stationed south in Gangshan, was soon to be a colonel in the air force. Over the last decade, we’d achieved a precarious balance between him and Baba and their two divergent lives. Even though Baba was an outcast, a criminal, Dua Hyan’s position gave us some small security that we would never be truly adrift. It was unusual, my sister’s husband reminded us, for a Taiwanese to rise in the military as Dua Hyan had, especially with our family history. What remained unspoken was the trade that must have taken place, whether of secrets or soul.

  He had gone away from home, and though his life had followed convention most closely, he felt the most elusive. The routines of his life were mysterious: we knew he lived in military quarters, that he was somehow involved with the Americans who were using the island as a staging ground for forays into Vietnam, and that this arrangement was in exchange for some semblance of international support as the ROC’s claim as the single government of a yet-to-be-unified China crumbled. We didn’t know if he had a local girlfriend, if he lived as celibate as a monk or as libidinous as the Americans who flooded the island on R&R.

  On leave, he had come to stay at Ah Zhay’s. He accompanied me to our youngest nephew’s baseball game—Ah Zhay and Jie-fu both were at work, and Dua Hyan and I were the sole representatives of our family. Little League fever had swept the island as it became more and more evident that Tainan’s Little League team would be going to the World Series in Pennsylvania at the end of the summer, and, across the island, parents and siblings crowded the edges of countless baseball fields, squinting in the sun’s glare, mothers shielded by parasols. Who knew which team might be next up for greatness?

  Even in civilian clothing, Dua Hyan stood like his erect shoulders were still draped in uniform. Perhaps it was my imagination, but the people around us moved warily. He kept his eyes on the game, never shouting, even when our nephew Jia Lun cracked the bat against the ball and made it to second base.

  “Let’s eat after this,” I said.

  He nodded. He looked like Baba. If one had compared pictures of them at the same age, they might look like brothers, or even twins. But Dua Hyan radiated vigor
and stability while Baba had shrunk in his late middle age. It suddenly struck me that Baba had once looked as austere and righteous as Dua Hyan. This is who Baba had been before I’d known him. And before Dua Hyan had become this man, he’d been the older brother who had protected me from the taunts of Zhee Hyan. He had stood between our mother and the rest of us in her moments of insanity, and had laughed when I was a little impudent girl and spat at him in frustration. I suddenly missed him.

  Without thinking too carefully about it, I said, “You know Su Ming Guo is home.”

  He winced. “Mama mentioned that.”

  I wanted him to look at me. “Baba and I went to see him.”

  He snapped toward me. “In Taipei? What for?”

  I regretted my confession. “Forget I said anything.”

  He glanced around. “We’ll talk more later.”

  “It was nothing. Baba just wanted to say hello.”

  “Two”—he lowered his voice—“two criminals cannot meet up just to ‘say hello.’ What the hell was he thinking?” He crossed his arms. His fists clenched and the tendons in his arms pulsed.

  I stepped away from him and hissed, “Baba is not a criminal.”

  “You are too naive.”

  A cheer rose as the batter on Jia Lun’s team hit the first pitch. On cue, like an automaton, Dua Hyan clapped and whistled, a high-pitched, lip-biting whistle that he must have learned in the air force.

  I could not move. Dua Hyan was angry at Baba, and Baba would soon be angry with me. Everyone, in fact, would be angry with me. Worry churned in my stomach.

  “Dua Hyan.” I touched his arm. “Please. Forget I said anything.”

  He pulled his arm away slightly, rejecting my plea. “If you thought that you shouldn’t have said anything, then you should not have said anything. You’re not a child anymore.” He spoke without turning, seeming to address the baseball field.

  The one person who would not be angry was Zhee Hyan, but only because he didn’t care about anything except gambling, beer, his motorcycle, and women.

  “Baba felt bad. He wanted to apologize.”