Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  I worried about Mr. Lu. We now housed a brightly colored bird, highly sought and visible, and I wanted to cloak our home in drab cloth until he disappeared again.

  The phone rang all night, people eager to know that Jia Bao was safe. Wei and I were restless too. I tried to read a novel. I scanned entire pages and could not remember a single word. I eavesdropped on Jia Bao’s calls while Wei pretended to put his papers in order. At three a.m., Emily came downstairs, her hair damp on her forehead.

  “I had a bad dream, Mom.”

  I pulled her onto my lap. “What was your dream? If you talk about it, it will go away.” I pushed aside her sweaty hair and blew on her skin.

  “So many bells were ringing. Like a house full of bells and I couldn’t make them stop.”

  “Darling, that was just the phone. Remember I told you Uncle Jia Bao was coming to visit from Taiwan? His friends are calling to welcome him.” Sure enough, the phone rang again, and Wei picked up the extension in the office. “See? Daddy just got it.”

  “I want to meet Uncle Jia Bao.”

  “It’s late now. In the morning.” I hugged her and she nestled against me. Soon, we both fell asleep on the sofa with the light on.

  —

  In the morning, when I came back from taking the girls to school, Jia Bao was barefoot and gazing at our small yard through the back door.

  “Did you eat?” I asked. On the table, I’d left a pastry and coffee for him.

  “It’s beautiful.” His enunciation was crisp. I could imagine his clean voice echoing in a lecture hall. Young redwoods lined the back fence and a patch of bamboo obscured our view of the house on the right. We were in the midst of an Indian summer, and the heat had wilted the lawn. In the far left corner, Stephanie and Emily’s swing set gleamed in the sun. The yard was modest, but I tried to see it through his eyes. So much green.

  “In the spring, I’ll plant flowers.”

  I wondered what I would have to say to him in the hours until Wei came home. Should I treat him like an out-of-town guest, take him on a tour of the town? Or enclose him in a garret, sneak him pieces of bread folded into napkins? Was he safe now? Would he be like my father, glimpsing danger in every gesture?

  He was wan from travel, his shirt crumpled from the suitcase. He was at least four inches shorter than Wei, small boned. A night in prison would crush him—and yet he’d survived much more, his figure belying the density of being, the will to revolution. Despite this, I pitied him. I knew what it was to land here, dizzy, the past wiped away by an ocean, the future unfurling like an unexploited continent.

  “I’m going grocery shopping,” I finally said. “Do you want to come?”

  —

  At the supermarket, he insisted on pushing the cart. He seemed pleased by the utter banality of the gesture.

  He read everything aloud: the signs for the trading stamps that customers exchanged for sets of dishes, the price per pound of plums, the cuts of meat. His accent was light, his English fluent, and yet he read on. His narration of our trip was in a low voice, and I kept my head down, but I wondered if people around us gave second looks when he said, “Milk, a dollar sixty-three a gallon. Bread, fifty cents.”

  After shopping, we went for gas. The oil crisis had changed refueling from a casual errand into a major event. The station near our house was open that day, and we joined the line of cars waiting to fuel up. I shut off the engine. It was going to be a while. We cranked down the windows. I leaned against the door, an elbow poking out the open window. Just considering the line tired me.

  “How old are your children?” I asked.

  He told me they were in middle school. He had uncharacteristically kissed them good night before he left and they had eyed him suspiciously. But in that kind of situation, I knew, kids learn to say nothing. We didn’t acknowledge their uncertainty: whether or when he’d see them again, or who they would be when they did finally reunite.

  “And what does your wife do?”

  “She’s a doctor.” He watched the attendant pumping gas, then smiled grimly. “She was fired after my arrest, but she opened her own clinic.”

  “She must be so relieved that you’re here.” I noticed how bright I tried to make my voice, how I had widened my eyes in nodding encouragement: Reassure yourself—and me—that this was not a mistake.

  He said nothing.

  A gnat flew in and circled the dash. I waved it away.

  “Were you scared?” The question burst out of me. I was embarrassed by my lack of tact.

  Jia Bao took his time answering.

  “I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t leave. But I knew what it meant to people if I did.” He tugged a pack of cigarettes from his front pocket. “Do you mind?” I shook my head and he lit one. I pulled out the ashtray.

  “I didn’t want to go back to prison. They would have sent me back. That government does not care about international censure. And the world does not care about someone like me. They would justify it as treason or some other scandal. I’d go away and my name would fade. There are already thousands like me who didn’t leave. They’ve been shipped off to Green Island, and it’s like they don’t exist.”

  Green Island. The tiny place just off the eastern coast of Taiwan where Baba had gone. A beautiful name for the home of the Oasis Villa, the political prison. The writer Bo Yang had recently finished a nine-year sentence there. His crime: translating Popeye cartoons. One in particular had been read as critical of the Generalissimo. Popeye, with Swee’Pea at his side, surveys an island and says, “I’ll be king of that island and you will be my darling prince.” The dictator who cannot be named. Jia Bao was right: I’d forgotten about Bo Yang. I’d forgotten about so much in my time away. Looking at Jia Bao, exhaling smoke out the window and tapping ash into the tray, I thought of my father. This is what Baba had wanted to do. Leave. But he had been caught.

  “What’s the point?” I asked even though I didn’t expect an answer.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Power.” He took a drag on the cigarette.

  “To what end?”

  When he exhaled, the smoke melted from his mouth like a wave of fog. “Even power is overpowered by the desire for it. Assassinations, purging, massacres: all these inhabited the nucleus of every cell. Every decision tainted by fear. What else can account for the Generalissimo’s statement: Better to kill a hundred innocent men than let one guilty go free. Not pure cruelty, but paranoia.”

  Only after moving to the United States had I begun to think of Chiang Kai-shek as a dictator, but the word “dictator” turns him to stone, a statue in a traffic roundabout, or a portrait on a wall. He was a man. A man who ate daily, who pissed and shat and made love. Jia Bao was right: the desire for such extreme power can be only selfish, only human.

  “And why do you fight it? Can you fight it?”

  The cars ahead had moved, and Jia Bao waited until I too moved forward and turned off the engine again.

  “Your father did.” When I heard his words, I felt as if the car was lurching.

  My mouth felt sticky as I answered, “You know my father?”

  “The island is small.”

  I wondered what he had heard: about Baba’s imprisonment, or what had happened with Su Ming Guo, or all of it. To the new generation opposing the one party, was Baba a simple traitor or a complicated hero?

  “He tried,” I said. “He failed.”

  “I don’t think so.” He looked me in the eye. “Your father, all those men—I’m here, what we’re doing, the opposition—they’re here because of those men.” Though he was not traditionally handsome, his compact assuredness was attractive.

  I turned away. The woman in front of us dangled her legs out the open door and fanned herself with a magazine.

  “That’s kind of you to say.” I felt ill. “God, it’s so hot.” I threw open my door, but it did nothing.

  “Once you realize all our assumptions about power are created by the powerful,
you understand it must be changed. You rethink power. Not the power that is desire, or dominance. The power that is strength.”

  He smashed out the cigarette. He smoked the same brand of Taiwanese cigarettes as my father, and the faint yellowish tinge of his fingers was pure nostalgia. An urge to smell his fingers struck me. I felt like crying.

  “It matters,” he said. “I’m sure it felt like it was for nothing. Maybe my children will feel that way too. But it matters.” He looked out the window. A pair of college girls in peasant tops and long skirts walked by. They cut through the line of cars and their laughter floated over us. “It matters.”

  —

  We ate BLTs on the back deck. We warmed our toes in the sun. The silence felt easy between us.

  He reclined on the deck steps and stretched his legs out before him. Crows landed on the boughs of the redwoods and the trees shuddered.

  I wondered how he had come to be sitting here with me, in Berkeley, eating sandwiches. He was too well known in Taiwan; his arrest had been splashed across the newspapers. Everyone knew his face. He was labeled a traitor, a man working to dismantle the foundation of the country. Most people knew better than to believe the stories planted in the paper, but truth or not, his face was known.

  “How did you do it?” I spoke in a low voice, as if the retired nurse next door, rustling in her garden beyond the bamboo stand, would understand our Taiwanese, or even care. Had he followed the route of Peng Ming-min, who had been arrested for writing the Formosa Declaration of Independence? It was rumored that Peng had escaped house arrest—and the country—by changing his face. He grew a beard to an eccentric length that was meant to be a physical manifestation of his misery. He took long, meandering walks, pretending to be oblivious to the men tracking him. He erased all meaning from his actions. Then he shaved his beard and his head. Now he was smooth-faced and pert. He ironed and starched every piece of clothing before he left the house. After a few weeks, he let the beard grow again. Sometimes, he would go out to shop; other times, he would not leave his home for days.

  He kept up his erratic behavior for months, until the surveillance team grew so weary that it paid no attention to whether he had a beard, no attention to whether his coat was bulky or he wore pajamas. The team pinned no meaning to whether he left at noon or midnight.

  One cold night, Peng made his escape. He stayed in a safehouse for two days, then, under the watchful eyes of comrades posted along the route, he left the island. He arrived in Sweden a couple of days later with no papers and asking for asylum. After a few months there, he applied for a visa to the United States. I knew Jia Bao had followed a similar route, but how?

  Jia Bao laughed. “I can only say it was like the song. ‘I get by with a little help from my friends.’ I’m sorry, that’s all I can say about it.”

  “I understand.”

  He had the courage Wei had been seeking. But Wei could only circle around it, talking about it, yearning for it. I pushed away the thought. I reminded myself that my husband was sincere. Half of courage was opportunity, wasn’t it?

  The clock in the living room tolled. It was one—I had to pick up Stephanie. I asked Jia Bao if he wanted to come, but he declined. The weariness of jet lag drifted over his face, but he said he wanted to go for a run. How different it must have been for him to move through these wide streets unencumbered, to not appear as if he was running away. I found an extra key strung on an unmarked, flimsy metal-and-paper key fob in our kitchen catchall drawer and brought it to him. He squeezed it in his palm and leaned back onto the deck steps, where I left him in the sun.

  33

  IT TOOK FOUR SECONDS for a body to reach the water from the bridge. Seventy-six miles an hour. Dead on impact.

  I had arrived in America on my twenty-fifth birthday. I passed through customs, nervously using my English for the first time in a real context to answer the agent’s questions, then pushed my luggage cart through the gates to find Wei waiting for me, bouquet of daisies in hand. His voice sounded choked when he called my name and I smiled shyly. “Welcome home,” he said. He handed me the flowers and took the cart, and we didn’t hug until we had reached the car. We celebrated my birthday that weekend. Wei brought me to the Golden Gate Bridge. I had a plaid flannel coat. We didn’t touch as we walked, and when we reached the midpoint, Wei told me to stop.

  Some people survived the jump and died of hypothermia.

  In the middle of the bridge, Wei took my picture. My eyes watered in the wind. Then we switched places and I took Wei’s picture. This is what you did in the city. You took a picture on the bridge. The fog clouded around you, and you squinted as the wind whipped your hair. Then you walked back to your car and found a greasy spoon in Chinatown and ate dim sum off chipped melamine plates.

  The picture on the bridge, two days after my birthday, was the first picture of me taken in America. I sent it to my parents. I counted off the days on the calendar: what day it would arrive, and how long until I’d receive their letter back. I asked for a picture of my niece and nephews.

  The day after they received my photo, Ah Zhay called.

  Baba had tried to kill himself. Some kill themselves out of despair; others commit suicide to save face. Baba had an old-fashioned idea of honor, but the gesture was a pathetic yearning for martyrdom too. He’d thrown himself into the river with a cinder block tied to his leg. But a man riding by on his bicycle had seen him and stopped. He dove into the water and, with a pocketknife, cut Baba free.

  Jumpers who want to be saved leap from the side facing the city. Those who want to die face the open sea.

  Baba was limp and distraught. Water spewed from his mouth, and the man cried, “Uncle! What’s the matter with your life?” After Baba’s color returned to normal, he told the man to go, but the man refused and they sat, in a stalemate, on the riverbank for nearly an hour as Baba’s clothes dried. Finally, the man escorted Baba home and told my mother what had happened. Baba hung his head, an angry and scolded child.

  I didn’t tell Wei. I said good-bye and returned to the bed, which was our only large piece of furniture. Ah Zhay’s phone call felt like a dream. I knew that later the news about Baba would clarify into something real, and I would cry—alone in the shower when Wei was at school—but, for now, I sat beside my husband as he watched The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and I laughed along even though I didn’t understand a word.

  —

  Bundled up against the mist and wind, we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. Wei carried Stephanie, and I gripped Emily’s hand. Our cheeks were bright with the cold, our skin damp. Jia Bao walked alongside Wei, and I followed behind. The wind blew away their words. Children screamed, and the indeterminate snap of adult voices followed. Cars roared past, masking everything except our own breath in our ears and the ambient rush of the ocean below. Now here with the girls and Jia Bao, we stopped midway across. I tipped my head back and gazed up at the orange tower, the cables, the rivets. I crouched beside Emily and whispered in her ear: “Look.” We grew dizzy gazing up.

  Wei said, “I’ll take your picture.”

  Jia Bao stood with the city behind him. The fog weighed down the headlands and the cypresses dripped into the wind. He smiled. Then he beckoned for the camera and said he would take our picture as a family. I picked up Emily. The four of us pressed together. The space between photographer and photographed was an invisible barrier that could not be trespassed. Other tourists swerved around the bubble between us, squeezing behind Jia Bao. I told the girls to smile.

  —

  We walked through the Dragon Gate of Chinatown and past the shops selling paper lanterns and tinkling metal balls that were good for your wrists but were rumored to have been passed on by concubines to improve other muscles, past the cheap T-shirts and fake ivory carvings, past tourists speaking in German and French and Italian and hunchbacked grandmothers in cloth slippers tugging along their reluctant grandchildren to the heart of Grant Avenue, toward a cacophony of honking car
s. Traffic had stopped and the intersection was filled with old men clutching a long cloth banner that read KUOMINTANG: THE RIGHTFUL HEIRS OF CHINA. They faced off against a bank of young Chinese Americans who were waving communist flags and shouting, “Down with feudalism!”

  “What’s this?” Jia Bao asked.

  Wei laughed. “The old KMT are still having a hard time with the new status quo.”

  “They’ve been doing this for years,” I said.

  Since the 1911 revolution, Chinatown had been filled with KMT supporters who thought themselves the torch carriers of Sun Yat-sen’s republic. They ran the tongs and filled the rosters of the benevolent associations. Then consciousness-raising hit, and young, radicalized Chinese Americans began loving Mao and all things China. Once in a while, the old guard, the bachelors filling the residential motels who had lost families to the communists, feeling threatened, would shine their shoes, take out their signs, and step into the streets. To the younger generation, the KMT represented old-school elitism, something to be dismantled. Rumors too claimed that the KMT paid protesters. Last year, the police had been held up at another protest across town, leaving enough time for fifteen people to be brutally beaten by these paid hoodlums. It had killed tourism in Chinatown for a while.

  Among the other tourist families, we watched the protesters, young men and women in their ringer tees and collared velour versus grizzled men—old, lonely bachelors owning nothing more than their principles—in their pressed white shirts, armpits scrubbed thin. If they hadn’t fought for the KMT, then for what?

  Emily covered her ears. “Mom, I’m bored. This is so boring.”

  A man came out of his taxi and screamed until his face turned purple. The honking and shouting masked his words, but we saw their force in the sunlight illuminating his spittle. He jumped back in his car and reversed suddenly, slamming into the car behind him, then charged forward and banged the car in front. Its bumper jerked into the crowd and a handful of people screamed. The students pressed closer to their opposition. The taxi thrust up onto the sidewalk, scaring people from its path. We were on the other side of the street, but Wei picked up Stephanie and pushed us to the window of the corner shop. Stephanie shrieked. My heart thumping, I lifted Emily and turned so that I stood between her and the street. People cried angrily at the taxi driver, and he turned onto California Street and sped away.