“Okay,” I finally said.
We drove to the motel and he sat on the bed as I tossed our clothes into the suitcase. I didn’t bother folding anything. With Wei there, I suddenly noticed how ragged our lives in this hovel had been. The stale odor, which I’d ceased to notice, erupted again, along with the stains that had somehow faded during our stay. I saw how sun-bleached the old bedspread was, how dingy the carpet. I saw the dust in the pleats of the lampshade and the fingerprints smudging the TV screen.
“You were here the whole time?”
I nodded.
“How’d you pay for it?”
I shrugged, my stomach cramping with guilt.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “We can take our time.”
I kneeled and put my head on his lap. Tentatively, his hand settled on my hair.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Sorry to him and to Jia Bao. I said it again and again and again until they became just empty, impotent words.
—
The Chinese-language papers in the United States put Jia Bao’s murder on the front page; in the local English-language news, his death warranted nothing more than a brief note in the crime column. The newspapers in Taipei, of course, were silent.
We told the girls that Jia Bao had returned to Taiwan. Emily said that she would write a card to him.
“Why didn’t he say good-bye?” Stephanie asked.
“He was in a rush,” I said, my heart aching at every word. “He wanted me to say good-bye for him. He said you two were very good hostesses.” Pleased by the compliment, even though she did not really understand the word “hostess,” Stephanie grinned.
The funeral was well attended, but more than a few people, afraid of being targets themselves, stayed away. We all suspected who the culprits were—Jia Bao had not been robbed or beaten. This was not your run-of-the-mill South Berkeley crime.
I thought of his first day in Berkeley: how he’d reclined on the porch, eyes closed, warming himself in the sun. His glasses lay in a bag on our dresser, waiting to be carried back to Taipei.
Gently, I touched the urn. Silently, I told him I was sorry. How dare you come? I imagined him saying. No, Jia Bao was too rational. I understand, he’d say. It was your only choice. This has always been about sacrifices.
47
BECAUSE OF THE GIRLS, time could not stop.
Wei and I wanted nothing more than to close the shades and hide away, but these two small creatures demanded that the days cycle as they had before.
Routine numbed us. After sleepless nights, I forced myself to ready the girls for school, to attend my own classes, to make lunches and dinners and do laundry. Wei seemed to always be at some committee meeting or student conference. Long days on campus and short nights at home. He took up running too, some sort of homage to Jia Bao, I think. He wouldn’t tell me he was going until he was out the door, and then, an hour or two later, he would be back, salty and damp, and go straight to the shower. We barely looked at each other.
I didn’t mind Wei’s absences. I hid the evidence of my broken conscience, the copy of Jia Bao’s manuscript that I’d kept from Mr. Lu, out of sight in the attic, deep in a box amid my college essays. I needed the space to review my guilt, like a woman who must persistently count the cracks in the walls lest she go insane.
I’d had a conversation with Mr. Lu.
Baba had been taken in for interrogation.
I had collected the manuscript.
I would save both men.
Ah, that was the hitch, the point at which my imagination could not match the depravity of the state. I checked the details of the time line again, searching for other options, but everything circled back to now. I wept.
I suspected running for Wei was the same activity as my mindless work in the garden: a place where I could nurture my obsessive thoughts undisturbed.
My conversation with Mr. Lu.
Baba taken in for questioning.
Collecting the manuscript.
Would I have let Wei—if he had made the overture—pull me to his chest and, in that cradle, would I have felt permitted to cry out my pain? Hell yes.
In the end, what was intimacy? What could have been more intimate than our dear friend’s death?
—
The first break in the investigation came when the car—noted by an old woman who had glanced out the window at just that moment, thinking she heard the mailman—was traced to a dealership in Oakland. The receipts were signed, two Chinese names, one illegible but the other stupidly distinct. He had come through the airport in San Francisco two weeks before, but there was no record of his departure from the same airport.
The investigators asked Wei who Jia Bao’s enemies were, but still didn’t believe him when Wei bitterly fingered the entire ROC government. They asked if drugs or gambling were involved. To them, assassination was for movies, not for humdrum Berkeley mornings.
Wei’s friends demanded a federal investigation and began calling our congressmen.
I prayed they would find the killers. I prayed that these two men would turn out to be run-of-the-mill hoodlums, that this was a robbery gone wrong, a bad plan hatched in southwest Berkeley and not Taipei. Only then would I know that his death was merely coincidental with my surrender of the manuscript, and that I could forgive myself.
I called Mr. Lu from a pay phone a few times, but each time the receptionist said he was busy. I expected Mr. Lu to accost me with one task more as I came out of stores, or on the way to my car after dropping off the girls, but he was never there. “You lied!” I would have said with a feeling beyond rage. There was no word in any of the languages I spoke for how I felt when I found new pages in Jia Bao’s apartment. He had not given up his work on the book. He had not been bribed. Rather, I was the dumb bird who had been lured to the chopping block, even with the glint of the ax blinding my eye.
Mr. Lu was gone from my life. I was on my own.
—
The pain of revisiting Prince Street was sharp and sweet, like teasing a loose tooth. I went back most mornings and parked in front of Jia Bao’s place. My windshield framed bare asphalt and quiet houses. I willed myself to see Jia Bao, dressed in his running clothes, slip through the side gate.
He doesn’t notice the two men in the car idling farther down the block, but I see them, and I want to warn him. They drive up to him and shout. I see in his face that he immediately understands everything.
I replayed it again and again. I watched the bullets burst through his body. I cringed when he fell to the ground, hard, cracking his elbows on the street. I realized the manuscript had been the only leverage he had in the bargain for his life. I almost believed the force of my regret would raise him. “I’m sorry.” I tucked my face into my folded arms and sobbed. “I’m so, so sorry.”
—
In bed at night, I begged my husband, “Talk to me. What are you thinking?” My mother had yielded to Baba’s silences, but I was not my mother’s daughter. I burrowed against his body to feel his heat on my back. I pulled his arm around me and kissed his fingers. “Please, Wei. Talk to me.”
He would not speak.
—
The United Bamboo Gang. Begun in the 1950s as a group of street toughs, the children of high-ranking KMT, it had grown into a seething, powerful underworld organization, drawing money from gambling, nightclubs, and dance parlors.
The first link to Taiwan that the police found was United Bamboo, when they pulled over an olive ’65 Ranchero for running a stop sign and the driver broke down in tears. He had an arrest warrant for a bounced check, but when they brought him in, he confessed to being the driver for the gunman.
“I didn’t know he was going to shoot him,” he cried. “I thought he just wanted to talk.”
Within an hour, he had given up the name of the killer, who was hiding out in San Jose. The Frog. The more notorious the gangster, the more ridiculous his name: the United Bamboo was a veritable menagerie of Ducks, Dogs, Crocodiles, a
nd Monkeys. We all knew The Frog, however. He’d been incarcerated on Green Island at the same time as Jia Bao, a common criminal rubbing shoulders with prisoners of conscience. Here was the motive, investigators concluded—it was a prison grudge taken to the extreme.
The police told us they’d made an arrest.
“It’s not enough,” Wei said. “He’s not the only one. It’s impossible.”
—
We lay in bed, the only time of the day that we were really together anymore. I nudged my legs against Wei. He didn’t respond. His stare remained on the ceiling, the hazy orange glow of the streetlamp outside our window reflected on the curve of his unblinking obsidian eyes. My husband ate meals with us, paid the bills, slept in my bed, but he was nothing but a body.
“Talk to me, Wei,” I murmured.
“I want to take his ashes to Taipei.” His voice was as unyielding as his body.
“You know you can’t.” Like many of our friends, Wei had been blacklisted. He couldn’t return to Taiwan.
“Maybe there’s a way.” He threw a sideward glance at me. For the first time since Jia Bao’s death, I heard something lighter—almost hope—in his tone.
“There isn’t.” I whispered it. “You know there isn’t.” I stroked his shoulder.
“Maybe the police are right. Maybe it was just an old grudge,” I continued. Please agree. Be complicit in my innocence.
Wei shrugged off my hand, turned away from me, and tugged the blanket to his neck. “Wei? What do you think? Maybe it was just that.” I had almost convinced myself too.
—
Shunned by my husband, I began a journal. I was surprised by how much clarity ordering the words on the page gave me. I was forced to narrow down my chaotic thoughts to one adjective, one noun, one verb at a time. I liked the deliberation over language and began to think maybe this was a path I could follow. I brought it up with one of my professors. “Keep reading,” he said. “Build up your language skills. Writing is not an easy business, you know.”
I was embarrassed that he suspected me of naïveté, that I did not have a sense of my own limitations. “Of course,” I said quickly. “But how could one get started in such work if and when she felt she was ready?”
He told me to try the Daily Cal, the school paper. We could talk more after we saw how that went, he said. I left our conversation resolute. I decided I would not tell him how much his discouragement had inspired me.
In writing, I discerned too the power that Jia Bao must have felt while working on his book, sorting out the mayhem of his experiences into a sane narrative. Understanding this, my betrayal felt doubled. Taking the manuscript had not been just theft, but emasculation. The nausea that surfaced when Jia Bao came to mind became a constant pall that I couldn’t shake.
—
The trail stopped cold in Taipei. Despite The Frog’s insistence that he had been paid by a colonel to knock off Jia Bao, and that the order had come from even higher—from Chiang Ching-kuo’s gangster-consorting son—he had no proof. He’d been paid in cash. The government in Taipei disavowed any connection with him and offered his long record of arrests and imprisonment. Officials reiterated that it was a personal vendetta, most likely stemming from his and Jia Bao’s time on Green Island. We heard rumors that on the US side, the government urged the police to solve the incident quietly and quickly in the wake of Taiwan’s new status. It would be too embarrassing if it was known that the United States had allowed the KMT to run amok on American soil.
It was a mistake. The next year, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, Chen Wen-cheng, would die on a trip to Taiwan after a long night of interrogation, leaving behind a young widow and a baby son. In 1984, the KMT would come to California again to wreak vengeance. That time, it would be a US citizen, Henry Liu, shot in his garage in Daly City for an unflattering biography of Chiang Ching-kuo. That murder would make the New York Times. That murder would earn a congressional hearing. That murder would finally break open the truth.
Until then, Jia Bao was just another dead man.
48
WE GOT THE NEWS as we were eating the birthday cake that Wei had picked up for me at the grocery store. Shortcake, but he hadn’t bought any strawberries, just strawberry ice cream in a box. Thirty-three years old. He stabbed two fat pink 3 candles in the cake. They leaned in opposite directions.
“Mom, look!” Emily tapped her spoon on the cold, spongy stew she’d made by furiously mixing the cake and ice cream.
“Don’t play with your food,” Wei said, jabbing his spoon toward her.
“Oh, let her. Who cares?” I said.
Wei started, “She’s being—” The phone rang. He and I looked at each other.
“It’s my birthday,” I said, taking another bite of dry cake. Wei’s spoon clattered onto his plate as he went to answer.
“It’s good, Mom. Try it,” Emily said. She slurped up more, and urged Stephanie, “Try it.”
“Just eat up, darling,” I said. The only wish I had made when I blew out the candles was that I wouldn’t spray wax all over the cake. But when Stephanie asked what I had wished for, I smiled and told her it was a special secret wish.
I heard Wei hang up, but instead of returning to the table, he closed the den door. Emily and Stephanie, enraptured by their new concoction, hardly noticed. I hesitated to follow him. We’d had enough bad news.
Despite myself, I went to the den. He sat in the orange chair, elbow bent, his forehead resting on his fist.
I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to retreat back to the table, but I forced the words out. “What happened?”
Wei pushed his eyes against his sleeve and looked up at me. His face was flushed, his eyes rimmed red. He told me that the twin daughters of the recently arrested activist Lin Yi-hsiung had been murdered the day before. Just a run-of-the-mill big-city crime, except for the date, the circumstances, the victims, and the perpetrators.
February 28. Broad daylight. Taipei City. Victims: seven-year-old twin girls and their grandmother. Girls barely older than Emily. Girls who no doubt owned the same kinds of toys: googly-eyed stickers, baby dolls with painted plastic mouths and nylon hair, wasp-waisted Barbies. Girls who sketched the same kinds of rainbow-framed drawings and made the same kinds of wishes.
Their father had been arrested after the December Kaohsiung protest and their apartment had been under surveillance ever since. After hearing that Lin had been tortured in prison, his wife had called a human rights organization. Later that day, Lin’s mother and two of his three daughters were murdered in their apartment. Only the oldest one, stabbed in both lungs and found bleeding on her parents’ bed by her father’s former secretary, survived. She was eight years old.
“When will they decide they’ve taken enough?” Wei asked. He dropped his head again and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
My chest clenched, a burl of grief in my heart and lungs. I slipped out of the den and returned to the table. Emily and Stephanie, sensing that something terrible had happened, something so terrible that questions could not be asked, said nothing.
I stroked Stephanie’s hair. “Are you done? Let’s go upstairs. It’s time to get ready for bed.”
I trudged up the stairs behind them. I was tired of mourning.
I drew a bubble bath for the girls and let them play. I kneeled beside the tub, soaking my hand in the warm water, watching how quickly they forgot the crying adults in the joy of windup backstroking panda bears and plastic fish that squirted water.
I flexed my fingers and imagined a clean slice, blood clouding into the warm water. Billows of red engulfing the bath toys and encircling my daughters’ limbs. A failure. Would they see my repentance for what it was?
I shook the water off my hand and tied up their damp hair. They were children, but I still thought of them as babies. My babies. They had flat androgynous chests. Their cheeks bloomed from the warm bathwater. Their small teeth were so white and their wet hair so
black. The first time I’d held them, it seemed that they had always existed. I found it hard to remember the world before them, as if their being had been inevitable. Of course it’s you, I had thought each time—first as I had cradled Emily and then, two years later, Stephanie. You couldn’t have been anyone else.
I wiped my nose against my shoulder and chided my sentimentality.
They pushed each other, splashed water onto the floor, glanced at me to see if I’d say anything. I didn’t.
How joyous it was to be free.
1982
49
THOUGH THE TRANSFORMATION had been gradual, I couldn’t stop rubbing my growing belly. It had been six years since I’d last been pregnant and I had forgotten everything about it: the random little contractions, the swollen feet, the disturbances that felt like a small porpoise doing somersaults in the ocean of my body.
I was sitting on the floor of the den, newsprint spread around me, clipping articles to take home to show my parents. The summer before, despite my professor’s doubts, I’d published a piece in a local free weekly about the attempt to turn a neighborhood park into a parking lot, with the requisite reference to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” I had published two more pieces since then, and was starting to toy with the idea of finding work as a paid reporter rather than a freelancer.
Two and a half years after Wei had applied for the first time to take Jia Bao’s ashes home, his visa had finally been approved. Wei thought the repeated denials had been a way of teasing us. We were not sure what had elicited this approval, at long last. After a decade away, I prepared to see my family again, and the girls would meet their grandparents for the first time.
I tucked a flimsy rectangle of newspaper into an envelope, which I would keep beside my and the girls’ passports in my purse.
Wei would carry the urn. I looked across the room at the inconspicuous glossy black jar on a cleared bookshelf. That wasn’t Jia Bao. I had a strange sense that he lived somewhere out in the world, because how could a man like that no longer exist? I squeezed shut my eyes and told myself not to think of it again. The edge of the tightrope cut into my foot: I reminded myself to keep focused on the moment before I tumbled again into reiterating my guilt. This was the precarious way I had rebuilt my sanity.
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