Emily said again, “This is so boring,” even though she had thrown her arms around my neck in fear and excitement.
34
WHEN THE RUMOR of Jia Bao’s escape to Sweden first broke, the authorities in Taiwan brushed it away as an impossibility. Rumor became news and, in a state of disbelief, they closed the harbors and airports and scoured the island. He was really gone, as a picture accompanying an article in a Stockholm newspaper attested. I spoke with my sister, who asked, “Can you believe it? Where has he gone?”
I answered, “I have no idea.” I was afraid to tell her. It would only put them in danger to know. Wei had taught me the term “plausible deniability.”
“If only Baba had been so lucky,” she said.
And now Jia Bao was in America. The only thing that might silence him was dangling threat over his family: his wife’s clinic was closed according to an obscure building ordinance; his daughter was denied entrance into one of the top middle schools, despite her scores; and a cousin had the imports for his store held up by customs and left moldering on the docks. Jia Bao’s only weapon was fame. While the island government struggled to piece together a plan to smother this public relations mess—what stories this former political prisoner could tell!—we raised Jia Bao’s profile by throwing a party.
Wei and I had gone back and forth about it for a week, whispering our argument in bed so Jia Bao would not know. We smiled all day, but at night, alone, we went over the same debate, day after day, getting nowhere. I was exhausted.
“You promised me you’d keep us safe.” Frustrated, I pounded the bed. The blankets flattened the sound, making me feel even more impotent.
“This is the safest thing we can do,” Wei insisted.
“How? Everyone will know he’s here!”
“Exactly. No quiet disappearance will be possible. The American media would be all over it. They will keep him alive. If everyone knows, anything that happens to him will look suspicious. Do you think the KMT will risk losing face like that?”
“Do you think they care about face? You are so infuriating!” I grabbed a pillow and screamed into it.
Wei hushed me. “Stop. The kids will think we’re doing something strange up here.” He shot me a mischievous grin, then leaned over and kissed my neck. “This is the best way. Trust me.”
—
“What are you looking for, Mom?” Emily asked as we stepped onto the porch. I held Stephanie, who, still drowsy, gripped my neck and rested her head on my shoulder.
“Please hurry. We’re going to be late.” I nudged her down the steps toward the front gate and she kicked her Happy Days lunch box with one knee and then the other as she walked. No wonder the Fonz was looking a little worse for wear when I’d packed her lunch the night before.
She sighed and said to the rhythm of her lunch-box drum: “Look both ways before you cross the street. Every morning, you look both ways like we’re crossing the street. But we’re not”—she banged her lunch box again—“even on”—another bang—“the street.”
I opened the car door and urged her in, then lowered Stephanie onto the seat. “Come on, baby girl, you have to let go of Mommy now.” She crawled in and slumped over, closing her eyes. “If you are this sleepy every morning, you’re going to have to go to bed earlier,” I warned. She let out a moan of protest and yawned.
I slid into the driver’s seat, started the car, and watched in the rearview mirror as exhaust filled the air behind us. I thought about Emily’s question as we drove to school. What did I expect to see each morning when I scanned the street as we stepped out at seven thirty, when the fog still hazed the neighborhood? An unmarked black car parked at a discreet distance, two men in mirrored sunglasses in the front seat? A man in a trench coat skulking around beneath our windows with a steno pad and a sharp number two pencil? I blamed Wei for my paranoia.
“Mom!” Emily wailed.
“What?” I snapped. I reflexively tapped the brake, ready to screech to a stop for whatever animal scurrying before us that I’d missed in my reverie.
“You passed my school!”
I glanced around. I’d overshot the school by two blocks. “Okay, okay. I’m turning around.”
The drive to school was muscle memory, and my inattention alarmed me. Wei. Wei had set all this in motion. Outside of the house, every moment now seemed perilous. And now he wanted to open our house to the world with a party for Jia Bao.
“Jerk,” I cursed as I swung back around the block to take my place in the school drop-off queue.
“Me, Mom?” Emily asked.
“What?”
“Am I a jerk?”
“No, honey, not you. No one. I’m just talking to myself.”
—
Three weeks later, it was a rare warm Berkeley evening, and even with the windows open, the thick heat of fifty people crammed into our house—their breath and laughter and odor—was stifling. I threw open the front door. The party spilled out the back door, onto the deck and into the yard. Figures, scarcely lit by the tea lights flickering on the railings, shifted on the grass, far back in the shadows near the swing set.
The ambient sound track was tinkling glass and the surge of voices, flattened every so often by the collective, eerie silence that seems to fall innately on a group. We had a mix of university people, Amnesty International staff, and our Taiwanese American friends. They marked themselves off into cliques, and sometimes a quip at the wine table would lock strangers into conversation for an uncomfortable five minutes.
Jia Bao stayed on the sofa. The center of the celebration, he drew people to him. Everyone was eager to say hello, to ask of his escape, to commend him on his fight. I passed around a platter of Vienna sausages, cubes of cheddar, and manzanilla olives, each speared with a toothpick decorated in a frill of colored cellophane.
People lingered on the front walk and smoked, tapping ash onto the grass.
We depended on safety in numbers. The vigilance of the group. I didn’t notice Mr. Lu slip in. Behind me, I heard his voice: “I agree. Mr. Tang is certainly a symbol of the power of democracy and freedom.”
I jerked around.
He spoke calmly to one of Wei’s colleagues. He acknowledged me with a nod and continued talking.
“Pardon me,” I said, and put out my hand. “I’m Wei Lin’s wife. You are…?”
He smiled at my game and shook my hand. “Mr. Lu. I was just saying to Mr. Boyd here that this is a lovely party.”
Wei’s colleague agreed, said something generically kind about the food, then excused himself to refill his wineglass.
As soon as he was out of earshot, I muttered, “Why are you here?”
“I was invited. We have mutual friends, you know. It’s a small community. I’m surprised—and a little hurt—that you didn’t invite me yourself. This is a big deal, right? Tang Jia Bao escaping house arrest and making it all the way to California. In certain circles, this is cause for a huge celebration.”
The room was hot. Someone had turned off a lamp. The dark was hotter. My hair clung to my neck. I searched the room for Wei—I’m sure Mr. Lu saw my frantic look.
“Please, enjoy yourself.” I pushed the words out between my clenched teeth. Still carrying the half-empty tray of food, I squeezed between people, trying not to show my panic. At least the girls were at a friend’s house. Wei was not among the smokers in the front or with the intimate shadows in the back. The kitchen too was as crowded as the living room, but he was not here either. I set the tray on the cold stove and waded back into the other room.
The door to the den was ajar. Wei stood at the bookcase next to a diminutive woman. At the sudden rush of noise through the opening door, they both turned.
“Helen,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
I didn’t know her well. She and her husband, James, lived in the Berkeley Hills in a house much larger than ours. Our girls were close in age, and we had been to their house for dinner a few times. James and Wei shared po
litical views and knew each other from their undergraduate years at National Taiwan University. Helen, also from their university cohort, was perfectly, blandly pleasant, with feathered hair and slim wrists that twisted like bird bones wrapped in muslin.
Her lips were wine stained, and her smile revealed purple-tinted teeth. “Great party. You worked so hard.”
I deflected her compliment. “Hardly any work at all. It’s an honor.” I shot her a blithe smile and hoped she read it as sincere. I turned to Wei and, in a careful mock-chiding tone, I said, “Mr. Lin, I need you.”
“Aha, someone hasn’t been pulling his weight,” Helen said. “Well, then, I’m going to excuse myself and get more wine.” She waggled her empty glass. As she walked past me, I caught the scent of L’Air du Temps, such a chaste aroma, and I thought of the frosted doves that kissed atop the swirled glass bottle. She shut the door.
“We have a problem,” I said.
Wei grasped both my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “What?”
“There’s a man here who—who shouldn’t be here.”
Wei stepped back. “Who?”
“From the consulate. I don’t think he’s supposed to be here.”
“How do you know?”
“I overheard him.”
Wei sank into our old orange armchair, a remnant from our days on Shattuck Avenue. I’d stitched squares of brown cloth over its thinned arms. “Well, of course they know Jia Bao’s here.” He bit his knuckle. “Maybe this is good. He can’t hide. We’re not afraid.”
“I’m afraid.”
He dismissed me with a low hiss. “He’ll look and leave. There’s nothing he can do here.” He asked me what Mr. Lu looked like. “We’ll act like we don’t even care. I won’t even say hello. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I wanted to believe him.
—
The candles were extinguished and gathered, hard wax and singed wicks piled on the kitchen table. I’d decided to wait on the dishes until morning, and they sat in dirty but orderly stacks on the counter. Garbage bags of stained paper cups were heaped in the corner of the kitchen. We’d pushed some of the chairs back into place just for a semblance of order. The girls were sleeping and Jia Bao had gone to bed as well.
I stood in the doorway between the bathroom and our bedroom, rubbing lotion into my hands. In a commercial, standing before a woman dancing the hula, Don Ho had promised silky soft skin and I was Madison Avenue’s perfect victim. I was nearly through with the bottle, had to twist off the pump, turn the bottle upside down, and shake and squeeze the moisturizer through the lotion congealed and clumped at the opening.
“I hate that stuff,” Wei said. “It smells like I don’t know what.” He flung his arm over his eyes. “Why do you think he came? To scare us?”
I riffled through the vanity drawer, feigning disinterest. “I’m sure he had orders to check things out.”
“He just wanted to see for himself,” Wei affirmed. His eyes followed me as I walked across the room and slipped into bed. “How did you know who he was again?”
I leaned over and switched off the bedside lamp. “I heard him telling someone.” I reminded myself I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t even memorized the number on the card first, like some harried heroine.
“And he just introduced himself like that? ‘Hi, I’m from the consulate’?”
I nodded. In the dark, he felt the gesture on the pillow.
“There has to be more. I’ll talk to Jia Bao about it,” he said finally.
“How long is he going to stay?”
“It’s bigger than that.” He answered curtly as if abstractions could muffle the danger.
“Wei.”
My impatient, pleading utterance of his name hung in the room. I waited for his defense, though I could already anticipate everything he’d say. I ground my teeth. I wanted a vote in this time line.
“Wei?” I said again.
I caught the slow, deep drift of his breath.
He was asleep.
The shadow-leaves danced on the wall. A chair leg stuttered across the floor downstairs and then silence. I wondered how I could be so wound with tension while he slept easily. In the distance, a train whistle screamed and a dog barked. Finally, I took a book from the stack beneath the bedside table, found my robe, and crept down the stairs.
—
The den light was on; Jia Bao worked at the desk. He looked up as I approached. “Did I wake you up?”
I waved the book. “I need to finish this for class.”
He stood. “I’ll work in my room.”
The perfect hostess, I backed toward the door. “No, no, I can read on the sofa.”
“Please.”
“No, stay there.”
But reading did not calm me either. Just hours before, Mr. Lu had been in this room. He had touched my furniture, pissed in my toilet, wiped his hands on my towels. I scanned the pages of my book, but his violations obscured the text, and I remembered nothing, so I set the book down and went to the kitchen.
And had he stood here too, surveying my taste in dishware and choice of wine, cataloging and interpreting as a good spy should? As I filled the kettle, I looked at my reflection in the black window. Was it only sleeplessness dragging down my face? A blurred figure slipped in behind me. I turned off the faucet. Jia Bao stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles.
“You’re a night owl like me,” he said.
“Not usually.” I set the kettle on the stove. The gas clicked and the flame hissed to life. “I’m making tea. Want some?”
He murmured some sort of affirmation and slid into a seat at the breakfast nook table. He drummed the surface, the energy of his racing mind expended through his fingers. “I want to write a book. My father died in the March Massacre.”
“I didn’t know that.” I stayed by the stove and faced him across the kitchen. I thought of my own father, alive. I didn’t want to talk about it, but he continued.
“I was just a child. I don’t remember him. I vaguely remember the MPs coming to arrest him. They didn’t bother wiping their boots before they came in. My mother was hysterical. She spent the whole night scrubbing the dirt from the floor, as if it would bring him back. I can’t remember his face. I have to look at pictures to remind myself.”
“I’m sorry.” The words came out as a lame whisper. “Did you find out what happened to him?”
“We found his body in the street the next day. Shot in the chest and bled to death. Right outside our gate and we had no idea. My mother found him. She dragged him in and washed his body. A man from the American consulate came and took a picture.” A scar along his chin like a fine white thread danced as he spoke. Something lodged in his throat—spittle or emotion—and he cleared it.
“What did they do about it?”
“What could they do? It was none of their business. An internal matter. The Generalissimo was an ally. You don’t criticize your friends.” The kettle started to cry and I quickly shut off the flame so the whistle wouldn’t wake the girls. His voice was weary. “I don’t blame Carter. He’s right to turn the KMT into an international pariah. Their time has come.”
I brought the tea to the table and he thanked me.
We sat for a while in silence, warming our hands on the cups.
The Generalissimo had died in 1975, but—befitting a monarchy—his son Chiang Ching-kuo had continued the legacy. I still try to make sense of Chiang Kai-shek. He was handsome really: a charming smile, kind eyes, that jaunty mustache. None of the sharpness of Hitler or the weightiness of Franco.
My family had been lucky. Baba had returned. But could our misfortune be measured on a spectrum? Were we thrown into a collective suffering for being Taiwanese—fate—or something more pedestrian like the ambitions of men working against us?
I thought of Jia Bao’s wife. What was it like to be the wife of a national hero, a half-widow, every hardship lightened by the idea of a greater good, her experience so unlike my mo
ther’s? I imagined that if I were her, I’d hide in a kerchief and sunglasses like Jackie O, slipping between home and the clinic, notoriety both my burden and my security.
I felt Jia Bao’s eyes on me—his gaze seemed to have a physical weight—pulling me from my thoughts.
He smiled. “What are you mulling over?” Unlike the grimace-smile he usually mustered, this was open, candid. I jiggled my cup and watched the bits of leaves swirl.
“You must miss your wife.”
“I do,” he said, and I admired him for not feigning stoicism.
“Do you have a picture of her?”
He retrieved a photo from his room. Their wedding banquet. She wore a red dress embroidered in gold thread and red lace gloves. Her eyeliner flicked up at the corners, thick, black, and exaggerated on her thin, pale face. He wore a plaid suit. His hair was carefully parted, varnished smooth, but a jagged tuft had come loose and hung over his brow, making him appear sweaty and unkempt. They stood side by side, mouths ajar, caught mid-toast.
She was tangible, and somewhere on the other side of the globe, she breathed. “She’s pretty.” I handed the picture back to him.
Modesty, I think, kept him from responding. He turned the picture over to its plain white back and covered it with his hand.
“I should sleep,” he said.
I nodded. He carried his cup to the sink. Behind me, I heard the faucet, and then the scrape of the gritty, unglazed bottom against the porcelain basin as he set the cup down.
35
AS THE DAYS PASSED without incident, we eased into something that felt like security. It was easy having Jia Bao around. He made no demands, was kind to the girls, and thoughtful about his presence. He and Wei grew as chummy as brothers. I stopped looking around whenever I left the house. I began to believe Wei was right: we were safe; everything was going to be okay.
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