Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  This would never go any further, I told myself, as I crawled onto the bed beside Jia Bao. Fully clothed, I slipped my arm across his chest, my leg around his. He sank against me. I inhaled the musk on his nape. The Swallowtail Way Motel was nowhere in time. I held him until we both fell asleep.

  38

  GROGGY FROM THE SHERRY and sleeping with the lights on, I woke up before dawn. My arm was still folded around Jia Bao’s chest and clasped in place by his hand. I was afraid that if I disturbed our configuration, we would never get it back. We smelled of sleep, and the ringing odor of blood still lingered over him. He must have heard me stir. He released my arm, reached back and stroked my thigh. I imagined he was lost in some dream where the warm body curved against him was his wife, but then he said my name and turned.

  His puffy face, blackened with hemorrhaged blood, startled me. The laceration on his lip, now seamed together with a fine hard scab, had bled more in the night, leaving a brown smudge on his chin. I licked my finger and rubbed it clean. His eyes closed, and his grimace looked almost like the ecstasy of prayer. I slipped my hand under his shirt to his hot skin.

  “Is this okay?” The words cracked out of me.

  “I don’t think my head is clear,” he said.

  “Me too,” I murmured. I wondered if my woozy state—the previous night’s adrenaline still seeping away and my energy drawn down by drink—would absolve me.

  “What I mean is…” His nose pressed into the roots of my hair and his breath warmed my scalp. “What I mean is that I know how this goes.” He lifted my hand from his skin and placed it on my stomach. “And I love my wife.”

  My face burning, I fell back and stared at the ceiling plaster. “I love Wei too,” I said indignantly.

  “Wei is a lucky man. But I can’t be a hypocrite.”

  “Your political values include love too?” I said sourly.

  As if racked with pain, he clenched the bedspread. “It’s all love. Don’t you see that? For me, it’s all one and the same. I can’t have one set of values on the street and another in the bedroom.” We were lying arm to arm. I pulled away and he said, “I’m sorry if I misled you.”

  The hurt rose from the uneasiness in my stomach to a pressure in my eyes, but I held back my embarrassed tears. “But this feels real,” I whispered.

  When Jia Bao did not answer, I wanted to believe that honor held him back. In a surge of embarrassment, I realized that he understood me better than I did myself. He’d felt this before—the flush of adrenaline that turns the mouth to metal and burdens every choice as either eternity or oblivion.

  “It’s for another life,” I said. “Like so many things. For another life.”

  There was no other life.

  We didn’t speak during the drive home. Exhaustion showed itself fully on Jia Bao’s face; in the unfiltered sunlight, with broken black capillaries stippling his purpled skin, his injuries were monstrous, as if his skin was just a sack to hold the mess of his body.

  —

  “What the hell?” Wei asked as, laden with our bags, Jia Bao and I limped into the house. I shook my head, knowing that my tears would start at the first syllable. I reached for my husband. He embraced me, allowed me to hide my sobs in his chest. “What the hell?” he said again. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

  Jia Bao pushed past us and washed his hands in the kitchen.

  I cried harder.

  “No,” I gasped. “I’m okay.”

  Jia Bao returned, shaking the water off his hands.

  “You need a doctor,” Wei said to Jia Bao.

  “Nothing is broken.”

  I shrugged out of Wei’s hold. He said to me, “Why didn’t you call? You should have called.” His concern sounded like a rebuke.

  “What would have been the use of calling? What could you have done?” Jia Bao’s voice had an edge I hadn’t heard before. “We’re fine. She didn’t do anything wrong.” Shuddering with a deep hurt, I glared at him.

  Wei saw something pass between us. Something he couldn’t articulate, something intangible that triggered an uneasy pang. “You have no idea how serious this is. This isn’t a game.”

  I heard the same man who’d lectured me in my grandparents’ front room, the one who had looked at me and seen an uneducated waitress who needed the veil of her naïveté ripped from her eyes. He, of course, would be the one to do it.

  “How dare you,” I said.

  “Wait. I’ll tell you what happened,” Jia Bao began.

  “Yes, you tell him.” My face was tender, my lungs fatigued. “I’m going upstairs. I’m exhausted.”

  “Right, go clean up,” Wei said with an annoyance that he couldn’t put his finger on raveling in his words.

  I trudged up the stairs. I went to the girls’ rooms first. They were at school, but their strong, sweet smells comforted me. Their pajamas puddled atop their unmade beds, and toys were strewn from bed to door in Emily’s room. I gathered them up and dropped them in her toy box. For this, right? For all this, I thought.

  I remembered a moment from our first apartment. We had ridden the newly opened BART train into the city, to Sixteenth Street. The train smelled like a new car, with clean carpet and fabric seats. As we dropped into the Transbay Tunnel, I felt as if we were in a bullet shooting toward the future. In the Mission, the musk of all the fruit left in boxes in the sun reminded me of home. We brought back mangoes and papayas.

  I had come out of the shower and Wei was at the table slicing one of the mangoes. He had stripped down to his undershirt. The curves of his golden arms were so beautiful, especially against his white shirt. The mango juice ran down; he raised his arm and licked it. I sat and he handed me half, cut the way my mother did it—scored in a grid and the skin folded so that the flesh rose in cubes. He ate slowly, his mouth grazing along the fruit, his lips glistening with juice. More juice trickled down his hands, down his arms. He caught it with his tongue. Juice ran down his chin. I wiped it with the edge of my palm and kissed the juice off his face.

  This was around the time that Emily was conceived.

  It seemed like so many years ago. As I left Emily’s room, I heard the men arguing downstairs. I paused.

  “It’s the last straw,” Wei said. “It’s a declaration of war.”

  “We need to be methodical.”

  “I say strike. They have no method. It’s just savagery after savagery. Why should we be civilized?”

  “That’s exactly why,” Jia Bao said. “It’s what they don’t expect. What they can’t imagine. They assume we will be like them.”

  “This is what I think we should do—” And then Wei shut the door to the den.

  I wanted to run downstairs and stop their mad plans. Look at Jia Bao, I wanted to say. Look at us. We can’t win. Just stop. It’s not worth it.

  Wei wouldn’t listen. I knew it. Our tear- and blood-stained faces had made him only more strident and I was exhausted. Instead, I went to my room, where I took a long, hot shower and tried to pretend, at least for half an hour, that none of it existed.

  39

  REVOLUTION WAS IN THE AIR that autumn. The shah, sick with cancer, had come to America for treatment, riling up distrust that the United States would try to put him back in power, so on the morning of November 4, Iranian students broke into the US embassy in Tehran for a peaceful “set-in” that ended with the taking of more than sixty hostages. However, after the incident in Mendocino, Iran diminished for me to some murmured news report.

  Wei, Jia Bao, and a group of their friends began gathering at a different house each week—was this pretense an actual strategy or some cliché pulled from a movie?—all men; the women had no role but to arrange the crackers or hush the children.

  “What do you do every Thursday?” I asked.

  “Bridge,” Wei said. He had watched Jia Bao’s bruises slowly turn from black to lavender to yellow before vanishing, and yet he still dared to continue.

  “Don’t you care at all about your famil
y?” I fumed.

  When Wei said, “It’s just cards. It has nothing to do with you,” I knew I truly had been exiled from their plan.

  They never met at our house, and I could only suspect the numbers and names of the men who participated; if Mr. Lu ever questioned me, I could plead an honest ignorance. After it was all over, Wei would tell me that the group had planned to provide weapons to the activists in Taiwan in order to help nurture the native protests that had already begun to flare up: tiny explosions that the government quickly doused. Against the KMT’s tear gas and truncheons and rubber bullets, the protesters had nothing but words. Martin Luther King Jr. was ten years dead and the oppressed were weary of nonviolent resistance.

  I don’t know the details. A few of them ran import-export businesses, and I suppose at that time, anything could be done for a bribe. Instructions were coded into invoices. With MADE IN TAIWAN still a ubiquitous sticker on many goods, this group of bridge-playing businessmen purported to be manufacturing golf clubs and patriotic sparklers.

  A fourth force. Three fingers already jammed into the pie: the KMT, America, and China. Inspired by Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which I had read for a class and discussed with Wei one evening, they decided they would form a “fourth force.” Four was an unlucky number, a homophone for death, but, as in tarot cards, death could be not an ending but instead a rebirth and change. Jia Bao was to be the liaison to the American media, his recent imprisonment and escape bolstering his credibility as a voice for human rights. But I did not know any of this until it had already all fallen apart.

  40

  FOR JIA BAO’S FIRST THANKSGIVING, I modeled our meal on the famous Rockwell picture, which I’d seen taped in the window of Andronico’s market. I heaved a defrosted twenty-pound turkey out of the fridge, pulled a bag of giblets out of its body and set it aside for gravy, and crammed the cold, damp body cavity with stuffing. I rubbed the bird with seasoning and butter and wrapped it in foil and started baking. No rice noodles this year, no preserved duck eggs. Instead, I made a tomato aspic, corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes. In the grocery store Thanksgiving display, I’d discovered canned pumpkin, and made a pie according to the recipe on the label. Emily and Stephanie ran in and out of the kitchen, so pleased to not be in school on a Thursday. They stuck their fingers into the dishes, licked mashed potato off the beaters, and scraped the cans clean of pie filling. As a child, forced by Ah Zhay’s and Mama’s precise instructions, I thought preparing food was drudgery. I was happy that the girls still found it novel.

  That evening, I pulled the turkey from the oven. It was beautiful: perfectly brown, crackling skin that split and revealed moist, thick meat. I called Wei and Jia Bao for dinner.

  I made the girls and Jia Bao sit before I presented the turkey. The girls cooed and clapped; the whole event, done this way, was a novelty to them. I handed Wei the knife and told him to carve the bird.

  “You see,” Wei said. The knife sank into the meat. “Here we go, the American way. My wife has cooked all day, but I’ll take the honors.”

  “No sarcasm, please. The girls are hungry.” I realized I was still wearing my apron. I untied it and hung it on my chair. The smell of the kitchen was heavy in my clothes.

  “What’s the reason for this holiday again?” Jia Bao asked.

  “Emily, tell Uncle Jia Bao.”

  “The Pilgrims were starving and the Indians helped them grow food, and when they harvested it, the Pilgrims and Indians came together to thank each other for not starving to death.”

  “Indians?” Jia Bao said.

  Emily had used a literal translation of the word. “Indigenous peoples,” I corrected.

  Wei laughed. “Pilgrims and Indians. The explorers thought they had reached the Indies when they arrived.” He lifted a chunk of meat. “Pass your plates.”

  We passed the dishes around the table the way that I recalled from faculty dinners, each person taking a share, unlike our usual practice of reaching into the common plates for whatever we wanted. Jia Bao hesitated over the quavering mound of tomato aspic.

  “It’s a savory gelatin,” I said self-consciously. He shrugged and took a scoop.

  Wei waved a drumstick. “I feel like a real American. Head of household.” He took an exaggerated bite, like a lusty medieval king. His antics exhausted me.

  “I want one too,” Stephanie cried.

  I hushed her. “Eat what I gave you.”

  “Oh no!” Emily cried. Her mouth formed a comic O of horror. “We forgot to say what we are thankful for. We didn’t say grace.”

  “Grace?” Jia Bao said.

  “She wants to pray,” Wei said. “Ever since she went to that girl Amy’s house, she wants to say grace all the time.”

  “Ah Ma would like that.” My mother said grace before even a cup of tea. Suddenly, homesickness washed over me. I would call my parents later. “Should we talk about what we are thankful for?”

  Emily closed her eyes and bowed her head. Wei raised an eyebrow at me. “I’m thankful for my family. Thank you, God. In Jesus’s name, amen.”

  I repeated her “amen,” and Jia Bao’s and Stephanie’s voices lagged a moment behind me.

  “Me too,” Stephanie said. “I’m thankful for my family. Thank you, God. In Jesus’s name, amen.”

  “She copied me.” Emily narrowed her eyes at her sister.

  “Hush. She’s not copying. We can all be thankful for family. I’m thankful that we can be together.” Again, I thought of my parents, an ocean away, and I sniffed. “I’m thankful that we have so much to eat when children are starving around the world.” I threw in a bit about kids picking up rice grain by grain from the sand, a visual for the girls to underline their privilege.

  “I’m thankful to be safe among good friends who have shown me every kindness,” Jia Bao said solemnly. He had closed his eyes too. I watched him suspended in his reverie. Then he lifted his head, opened his eyes, and smiled.

  “Daddy?” Emily said.

  “I’m thankful for television,” Wei said. The girls giggled.

  Nothing was sacred unless he declared it so. “How American of you,” I said.

  Wei threw up his hands. “That’s what my passport says.”

  The girls and their little murmurings provided the sound track for our dinner. I took the silence as a compliment. Then after dessert, Jia Bao halfheartedly cleared his throat.

  “I’m moving,” he said.

  Wei’s expression revealed that he had already known. This declaration was for me. Emily let out a low, drawn-out Aw—the kind of disappointed six-year-old whine that threatened to be followed by a No fair. Stephanie’s look darted between us; she understood that this was important but was not clear why.

  “Oh,” I said. A hundred thoughts ran under that deflated single syllable. I wanted to know whose plan it was and why.

  “We found a place in South Berkeley,” Wei said.

  “You found a place.” I made my face as unexpressive as my voice.

  “South Berkeley. Prince Street. A little basement apartment.”

  “Already paid the deposit. Lease signed,” I said, not question but confirmation.

  “Lease signed,” Wei affirmed.

  “I couldn’t trouble you anymore,” Jia Bao said. He looked at Wei, not me.

  “Of course you want your independence. Prince Street. Off Shattuck?” I almost said it once more as I tried to force the idea into my brain. “And the lease starts when?” I spoke so quickly that my throat felt choked.

  “December first.”

  A week from now.

  “Prince Street off Shattuck.” I tried to picture the street. Residential, treelined, a little run-down, middle class. I stood up. “More pie?” Without waiting for an answer, I began clearing the table.

  In the corner of my eye, I caught Wei and Jia Bao exchanging a glance. Jia Bao offered to help.

  “I got it,” I snapped. I let the plates clatter atop one another. An obedient, fearful
silence settled over the girls.

  “Help your mother,” Wei ordered.

  “Don’t worry. I can do it.” I forced a smile. I gathered the utensils into a noisy silver bundle that rang out against the plates. The girls scooted out of their chairs and skulked away.

  In the kitchen, I turned the faucet on as high as it would go and watched steam float and the foam rising in the sink. Denied thoughts took a physical form: a constriction in the throat, a tension around a nothing that felt like an object, a ball, a knot, something lodged. I breathed hard, trying to loosen my ribs. My relief felt so strange. I suddenly thought of the previous winter, a spur-of-the-moment trip we’d taken up to the snow, the four of us, a family, in our inadequate winter coats and sneakers. We’d stopped randomly somewhere on Interstate 80; it wasn’t even a snow park or anything, just a tiny turnoff with an open patch of snow. Wei had brought the garbage lid and we used it as a sled, skittering down the little hill and dragging it back up, over and over, all afternoon. We stopped at a diner in Truckee on the way home and feasted on burgers. The girls’ cheeks were bright pink, snowburned.

  No, I recognized with wonder, this is not relief. This is disappointment. I plunged my hands into the hot, soapy water. They tingled with pain. The trip was less than a year ago. Days you could count. I pulled the stopper and turned the water back on.

  I turned my face into my sleeve. Behind the blast of the water, I could hear Wei and Jia Bao murmuring in the other room. No one came to ask what was wrong. And if someone had, I wouldn’t have been able to answer.

  —

  Without a word to Wei or Jia Bao, I went upstairs after the dishes were done and put the girls to bed. After I tucked Stephanie in, she grabbed my hand and kissed my palm. She had become more physically affectionate since starting her visits with Dr. Matson.

  “Mommy,” she said. “Don’t be sad.” Her plea was a jab in my stomach.

  “I’m happy,” I protested, but I sensed that she knew it was a lie. “I’m happy that I have such a lovely daughter.”