Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  The staff had waited three hours before letting me hold Stephanie for the first time. Their reasons were rational. The baby needed her vitals checked. I needed to be sewn up. We both needed sleep. Later, chatting with me about her own recent delivery, a friend told me how the doctor had informed her that she was considered a “good candidate” for post-delivery bonding. They had let the still-bloody baby warm himself on her bare chest. I was too ashamed to admit that no one had said such a thing to me.

  —

  I pushed off and the swing sagged and lifted, over and over, on its wheezing frame. I dragged my toe to stop and held out my mug. “More wine, please.” Wei poured wine from his cup into mine.

  “Well, Emily is doing great. So maybe we’re not terrible parents?” Wei said.

  “Yes, Em is fine.” Sweet Emily, so good-natured—her emotions drifting across her face like clouds over a landscape—that one almost felt sorry for her.

  With the mug held to my mouth, I whispered, “Sometimes I feel like I can’t do it.” For a moment, I was afraid he wouldn’t answer at all and my admission would dissolve into the wide black sky above us.

  Wei cocked his head and gave me a confused smile. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

  “Never mind.”

  Wei shrugged. “Okay.” He took another swig.

  My hands were cold. I could see the faint cloud of my breath. I wanted him to ask again, to hear me, to comfort with logic. Instead, he said, “Ready to go in?”

  I nodded and gulped down the rest of my wine. As we headed back toward the house, he put his arm around me and touched my cheek with his icy fingers. I pressed myself to him, seeking his warmth.

  36

  IN ORDER FOR STEPHANIE to remain enrolled in her preschool, we agreed to see a family counselor. “Americans!” I complained. Only Americans, I grumbled to Wei, would believe that talking about problems to a completely disinterested third party—a stranger—was a solution. “It’s tacky. I’m almost ready to find a new school.” As worried as I was about Stephanie, I wanted to stay suspended in this place of everything-is-fine.

  Wei squeezed my shoulder. For once, I wanted Wei to make one of his dumb jokes. Instead, he was serious. “Hey. She’s our baby. We need to help her.” He pressed his forehead to mine. “We’ll talk it out and everything will be fine.”

  —

  The therapist, Dr. Matson, insisted that we call him Dave. Across a worn Persian rug, he sat in a papasan chair, his loafers, adult-sized Buster Browns, resting heavily on the floor. With the point of his pencil, he gently scratched the hair above his right ear as he waited for us to get settled.

  Side by side on a tweed couch, Wei and I faced him. Stephanie had not come to this first session, which was, Dave explained, a chance for him to acquaint himself with Stephanie’s “situation.” All of our actions revealed something and I was conscious of every gesture; I feared that Dave would need to spend only this hour with us to know what brokenness our daughter had inherited. Therefore, I signaled how warm our family was. I sat so close to Wei that our arms touched and showed no disappointment when he subtly pulled away. Would this be the first note in our file?

  Dave raised his voice at the end of every sentence, the sound curving up like a check mark, a nonthreatening question. No leading statements; we would damn ourselves. And what about the sandbox in the corner? Did he expect us to pay for our daughter to come play for an hour like a rat in a lab? Dave hummed as he wrote. “These are not judgments,” he assured us. “I’m just tracking the conversation so I remember what I want to ask you?” He asked us how old Emily and Stephanie were, how they got along, how much time we spent with them per day and doing what. Innocent questions, pure data. What could he possibly decipher from the fact that the girls had separate rooms, that Emily had decorated her room with unicorns and slept in a twin bed while farm animals pranced across Stephanie’s and she laid her head in a transitional crib? As in a play, was everything in the mise-en-scène loaded with symbolism?

  “And let’s talk about your relationship?”

  “With Stephanie?”

  “No, your marriage? Let’s talk about your marriage?”

  I quickly said, “It’s great,” as Wei answered, “I don’t see how it’s relevant.” I turned sharply toward him, surprised. Just as suddenly, Dave was there, squelching the spit of tension.

  “One at a time? Describe ‘great’?”

  I felt my mother’s instincts rear up. Proudly, we smeared clay into the breaches. A united front. “We never fight.”

  “Never?”

  “Again, I don’t see how this is relevant to Stephanie’s problem,” Wei said. “I’m here to find out how to help my daughter.”

  “I’m just trying to get a fuller picture?”

  “No, we don’t fight.” Of course, I was visualizing my parents: the broken-glass comments sharpened by yearly iterations and the literal broken glass when words weren’t enough. Wei and I had a two-story shingled house, dinner on the table every night at six. A Ph.D., citizenship, two lovely daughters. Again, the American Dream. What was there to fight about?

  “Maybe ‘fight’ is a strong word. Argue? Bicker? Every couple has those few topics that get hashed out over and over. What would you say those topics are?”

  I glanced at Wei, who was brooding. I knew he would not answer, so I made some harmless admissions. “I believe every couple argues about money,” I began. Dave nodded. “Wei occasionally spends more than I would like to. And sometimes, I do not appreciate Wei’s sense of humor. I think serious moments should remain serious.”

  “Wei, what do you think?”

  “I don’t think this has anything to do with Stephanie,” Wei said again. His words darted out as if each quickening heartbeat paced his thoughts, and I realized how angry he was.

  Dave shifted his tone. “Recent research shows that the parental relationship has a strong effect on children. In fact, some therapists believe that if parents focus on their own relationship, their children substantially benefit. I’ll be happy to show you the journal studies next time?”

  “Do that,” Wei said.

  “Would you two be willing to do some exercises at home together? Relationship work?”

  “I’m here to talk about my daughter. That’s what I’m paying for. That’s all I’m paying for,” Wei said.

  Dave thumped the pencil against his notepad. “I need you to understand that this is a process? We don’t just dive in; we get our feet wet first? I’d like one more session with just you two and then you can start bringing Stephanie?”

  “I still don’t think that it matters,” Wei answered.

  37

  IN MOVIES, frustrated writers tore paper bearing only a few lame lines out of their typewriters, crumpled the sheets into tight, mad balls, and tossed them at the trash. This was the dynamism and excitement of the writing process. How else to externalize the racing, exploding mind?

  It certainly wasn’t visible in our den that fall as I helped Jia Bao translate his book. Just soft breath, a once-in-a-while sniffle, the shifting of paper, the sigh of a chair spring. The preceding shots of a revolution.

  Jia Bao wanted to release the English and Chinese versions simultaneously, so I translated the early chapters as he polished the later ones. Even though the words were his, the deliberate choosing of equivalents and the careful parsing of meaning invigorated me. I longed to write stories of my own too, though I didn’t dare admit it. So I sated my hunger transforming Jia Bao’s words.

  Jia Bao sat in the orange armchair and softly mouthed the words on the sheet I had given him. I sat on the footstool beside him, my arm folded onto the armrest of his chair, pretending to read along with him, but instead I watched his lips.

  “Rather than ‘oppressive,’ how about ‘brutal’?” he asked.

  I straightened up. “ ‘Brutal’ is so dramatic. ‘Oppressive’ is much more measure
d.”

  “People need to be shaken up.”

  “But the wrong language may turn off some people,” I argued.

  Jia Bao read the line aloud again.

  “It is brutal,” he said plainly. “This is the most accurate word. Brutal.” He jotted down the change.

  “This situation must be so hard for your wife.”

  His head shot up and he looked at me as if trying to read my meaning. I was embarrassed; I wanted to withdraw my comment, but he said, “I don’t think she realized what marrying me entailed.” He bit gently at the metal ring girding the pencil eraser. His nails were trimmed at awkward, inconsistent angles, and tiny fringes of skin curled up at each base. He turned back to the page. “What is the next word?”

  “How did you meet?”

  He looked up again and, still drawing himself from another world, squinted at me. “What’s that?”

  I wondered if he found my persistent curiosity annoying. “Your wife. How did you meet?”

  He smiled faintly. “In a ballroom dancing club.”

  I laughed. “You dance?”

  “Passably.” He tapped the pencil on the page. “It was a college club. My pal told me it was a good way to meet girls. And I did.” He looked up at me. “And you? How did you and Wei meet?”

  “Family friend. It was kind of arranged.”

  Since coming to California, I’d discovered what came to mind with the term “arranged marriage”: exchanged trunks of gold and a veiled child bride who does not know her groom’s face until the wedding night. Americans certainly didn’t think of the casual dates Wei and I had shared, how we’d come to know how much we liked each other first. Our matchmaker could have easily been a mutual college friend—bubbly and meddling—who’d glimpsed some potential compatibility in us.

  “You’re a good match,” Jia Bao said.

  “Yes,” I said, but wondered what he meant. Standing side by side, I barely reached Wei’s shoulder. We would both be called slim, though Wei had some heft to his figure that brought to mind an athlete’s body—a hockey player, perhaps. In Taiwan, it was considered a compliment to note that a couple resembled each other. What similarities did Wei and I share? A broad forehead? Attached earlobes? Or was our compatibility in the facade of unwavering support that I put up in front of our guest?

  I tapped the page and said brightly, “Next sentence. I used the word ‘demand,’ but ‘request’ might be more moderate. It’s polite.”

  “Less demanding.”

  “Yes, exactly.” The corners of his mouth moved slightly and I realized he was teasing me.

  “I’ll trade you ‘brutality’ for ‘demand.’ That’s fine. We want a consistent tone. Assertive but not strident.” He had the pencil back between his teeth again. I looked at the page. His notations marked up my typing. Beneath this lay his handwritten original in characters, with my scribbles over them.

  “You could do this on your own. You don’t need me.”

  His eyes did not leave the page as he answered. “Sometimes the benefits of collaboration are more than…” He didn’t finish.

  “More than what?”

  He laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s nice to have a friend. This kind of work has always been about the group. There’s no way to go it alone.”

  “Collaboration,” “community”—all the key words I’d heard spouted at any gathering of earnest activists, whether in the middle of Sproul Plaza or on TV. What had I expected exactly? I blushed.

  “I’m glad I can help,” I said. My eyes drifted over the crammed bookcases where my and Wei’s books mingled in rough alphabetical order. Work. It was always about the cause. I was not so earnest, but I had put up a good front for Jia Bao. “Wei is so passionate about this. I guess it’s time for me to get involved,” I said.

  —

  My duties as translator, it turned out, soon included driving. Jia Bao tracked down a retired KMT general living up north in Mendocino County who was willing to talk to him. Because Wei had classes to teach, the role of chauffeur fell to me.

  “I don’t want to,” I had told Wei privately. Mr. Lu lurked in the background of my memories of the party, the last time I had seen him. Had he been satisfied by what he found that night? Or would this trip draw him out again? Already, I had the weight of the manuscript, which I could not deny knowledge of if he asked. Every escalation, I feared, would bring him closer to us; he’d catch the scent of it and seek me out. “I can’t do it. The girls. Stephanie has an appointment with Dr. Matson on Tuesday.”

  “I’d go if I could, but I can’t miss class,” Wei countered.

  “What about James?” Helen’s husband had helped Wei organize the last campus protest against the KMT. Thinking of the protest reminded me that Mr. Lu possessed a set of those pictures. I crossed my arms against my turning stomach.

  “He could, but he doesn’t know about the book. You know it better than anyone—better than me. Even if I drove, I’d want you along.”

  “The girls, Wei.”

  “No problem. I have enough time before class to take them to school. I’ll cancel office hours for Stephanie’s appointment.”

  “I’ve never driven that far.”

  “It’s not any harder than driving across town. Just takes a little longer. Any other objections?”

  Reluctantly, I had agreed to the task and Wei, cupping my face, had kissed me wetly on the mouth. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  For a long time, Jia Bao and I cruised along Highway 1. Despite the gas crisis, I decided on the longer, scenic route, following the coastline, the gray sea blurring at the curved horizon. After the logging town of Fort Bragg, set on a craggy oceanside ridge rough and beautiful with hunched cypress, we turned inland. The general lived outside Willits, hours and hours from Berkeley. The heart of Mendocino. Don’t feed the hippies. A small town where horses trotted on the roads alongside cars, and people smoked on the sidewalks in front of the liquor store. Embedded amid hundreds of miles of forest-dense hills all the way to the Oregon border, the area was warm and green and a perfect refuge for “recreational” gardeners. On our way into town, we glimpsed partially obscured gates leading down gravel-and-dirt drives, front yards with stacked wood and gutted cars and lounging dogs, and innocuous greenhouses. I’d heard a rumor that the elusive writer Thomas Pynchon lived here.

  A monochromatic town too. I wondered what had brought the general, a military man from a tiny tropical island, to this landlocked place of cowboys and pot farmers.

  Jia Bao and I checked into the Swallowtail Way Motel (“Where There’s a Willits, There’s a Way”), which boasted a funky and outdated neon sign that looked like it had been lifted off the Las Vegas Strip. Our keys came attached to large wooden squares branded with our room numbers; separate rooms in different wings of the motel.

  —

  The general lived in a raised yellow bungalow down a quarter-mile private drive off the county road. Two brown dogs—stocky and sinewy pitbull mixes—barked and splashed toward us through the mud thickening in the sun. The day was mild; a bearable winter bite hung in the air. At the end of the drive, inside a metal paddock, three horses, coats glistening with every movement, grazed. Beyond the pasture, trees were lost in the darkness of the forest.

  “Horses,” I said.

  “I forgot to tell you. He raises them as a hobby,” Jia Bao said.

  As soon as we parked, the dogs stopped a few feet away, barking warily, but their tails wagging. On the porch, a man had been hidden behind the railing. Now he rose and waved at us—a gesture surprisingly warm. I had expected him to be aloof, cold—someone like my brother Dua Hyan.

  Our shoulder bags weighed down by legal pads, pens, and recording equipment, we met the general and his wife on the stairs. He was a compact man, slim, bulked up only by his tan sweater. He still bore a military cleanliness: closely cropped hair and nails and a neatly shaven face. His wife too matched him in stature and tidiness, her hair short and silver, and her face brighte
ned with coral lipstick. She told us to call her Lorraine. When Jia Bao introduced me as his translator, the general clasped my hand in both of his and his smile was so genuine that I almost forgot how practiced he must have been in the art of appearing sincere.

  —

  The house lay in a clearing, but the tall trees kept away the sun. From the porch, I enviously glimpsed the light in the pasture that warmed the horses and now the dogs, who had settled near the paddock gate. The chill was bright but not unpleasant, cut by the hot jasmine tea that the general’s wife brought out.

  I set the cassette recorder on the table. It was portable, ran on batteries, and had previously been housed in Emily’s room, where it played stories for her at night. It had a mic embedded in the body, but I had brought a plug-in one too, and I began to unwind the cord.

  “Please,” the general said. “Notes only. I don’t want my voice on tape.” His eyes darted to his wife and she pulled her lips together in a way that told me they had discussed all of this before our arrival.

  “No problem,” Jia Bao said. I kept the recorder on the table, in the open, a gesture of honesty.

  The general had beautiful slender fingers. I flinched when he picked up his tea. The water was freshly boiled—my own fingers had recoiled when moments earlier I had touched the cup. I could barely draw my eyes away from his hands as he began to speak. “First,” he said, “I read about your escape. Very brave. That is why I agreed to see you. But anything I say must be off record. I cannot have my name associated with this. You understand.”