Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  And then what? I thought. Mr. Yang said I’d see Wei. Was it a lie to urge me forward? Was I to be delivered, sopping wet, to the couch to continue answering questions, or would I see my husband? I tipped my head back to squeeze out my dripping hair and saw the moon haloed by a cloud. Emily and Stephanie would be asleep by now. I felt linked through the years to Baba by this moon, which had witnessed it all. Had he stood here too, under its gaze, thinking of his sleeping children? I longed to say to him: Baba, I understand.

  —

  The examiners had stripped Wei. They had spread his legs wide apart and chained his feet to bolts in the floor. Trickles of blood ran down his legs. His ribs were mottled black. At the sight of me, he strained against his manacles.

  “Wei!” I cried. I moved as if to run toward him, but Mr. Ping was fast, and he grabbed me. “Let him go!” I could not catch my breath.

  The walls had softened and chipped, and mold speckled the paint. The air smelled damp and singed. Mr. Ping pulled me to a chair and apologized as he handcuffed my wrists in my lap.

  “You can’t do this. He’s an American citizen,” I said, even as I knew “citizen” had no traction here in this place where no one who mattered knew where we were. I wondered what they could do with me as witness. My presence would not stop them. I shuddered as I remembered what had already happened. Car “accidents.” Murder-suicides. Or we could just disappear without a trace. There had been plenty of those too. What did those five words—“I am an American citizen”—matter to these men caught up in sadism, enrobed in the moment of inflicting pain on my husband, who had lost his humanity in their eyes? He was just a piece of meat—if that. In fact, his suffering did not exist for them at all. And even if Washington were to find out, official relations between the two countries were nearly dead—would the US government jeopardize what was left for two lowly citizens like us?

  With Wei were three men: one to ask the questions, one to hold the prod, and the last to control the voltage. I thought of a nursery rhyme—and this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way home. When the second man touched the prod to Wei’s testicles and the third man turned on the voltage, Wei unleashed the beastly scream I’d heard from next door. He twitched and pissed himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he blubbered to me. I closed my eyes.

  The man tasked with asking questions turned and snarled at me, “Keep watching, you bitch.”

  I knew his insults were meant only to rile Wei, and I prayed Wei would not be provoked. Of course, Wei was hotheaded even at his best, and he found some reserve of spirit and snapped, “Leave her alone.”

  “Now, now,” Mr. Ping said. Greenish circles had emerged under his eyes; he sounded weary and strangely sheepish.

  The interrogator ignored both of them. “Answer me and I won’t have to rape your wife.” He was tall and extremely thin, and as he strode toward me, he resembled a giant insect coming to suck the sap from my veins. Empty threats, I reminded myself, but all the same, I felt a hot, sour liquid rising in my throat. I was determined not to retch again and I choked it back down. Uttering a barely audible apology, Mr. Ping stepped aside to allow the man to stand behind me. He cupped the back of my neck with a cool, dry hand.

  “There’s no plan,” I said. “Wei, there was no plan. Don’t lie for my sake.”

  The man’s hand slid down over my collarbone and onto my breast. He squeezed, pressing my nipple into the center of his palm. I cringed but shook my head at Wei. “There was no plan,” I reiterated. Whatever Wei had done—whether he had met with this man Huang Ying Cheng or whether the accusation was just for intimidation—Wei had always been discreet. Wei would never name names. I was invested in my image of Wei as an idealist, stubbornly—naively—devoted to his beliefs and his vision of himself as a hero. I didn’t want this destroyed by some lout’s hand on my breast. It was just flesh.

  “Huang Ying Cheng,” Wei began.

  The man’s hand relaxed and slid out of my dress back to my shoulder.

  “Stop, Wei.”

  “Chen Hsin Je.”

  I screamed and I jerked the man’s hand off with such force that I fell out of the chair. My elbow slammed into the cement and my whole arm reverberated with pain. My hair stuck to my face, and I couldn’t keep the spit in my mouth. I tasted blood. I felt every fleck of grit scrape my flesh as I tried to crawl toward my husband. The thin man leaped toward me and seized my ankles. The cement abraded and seared my skin as he dragged me toward the door feetfirst. Mr. Ping tried to be kind. He grabbed my bound arms and lifted me from the ground.

  —

  They put me in a cell with a cracked wood floor, a toilet, and a blanket. My dress had dried stiff. I imagined I heard Wei crying, but it could have been anyone in the cells around me. The heat was even more stifling in this windowless cell, and I uselessly batted away mosquitoes. Their bites turned into welts. In frustration, I scratched until blood washed away the itch.

  We were innocent, I told myself. And then I recalled how innocence had done nothing for others. What was innocent when it was up to the Garrison Command to decide the definition of terms? Too upset to sleep, I pressed myself to the wall to wait for morning. They wouldn’t kill him, I told myself over and over. And they couldn’t keep us here indefinitely. A lawyer must come at some point.

  I felt my concept of time evolve. How long time felt waiting for rescue. Was it absurd to think there might be someone who could or would rescue us? To think that our fates were out of our hands and that there was some conquering hero who might swoop in and find us? Jia Bao had told me how interrogators were careful to use techniques that wouldn’t leave marks—beating the bottom of one’s feet, for example, or just internal injuries. Their carelessness with Wei—I’d seen the black burns and the bruises—worried me. They were not concerned about evidence.

  —

  The heat of the rising day filled the cell. I rinsed my arms and splashed warm water on my face from a spigot next to the toilet. What a decadence to have a cell to myself when I knew the ones around me were crammed, no room to stretch out or do push-ups for sanity. I was blessed!

  I suddenly saw my gratefulness as a kind of insanity. What would eleven years do?

  I heard footsteps in the hall so I returned to my station with the wall safely at my back. The loud, strident tone outside the cell sounded like English. The window in the door opened and a foreigner’s face appeared. Then a key clanked in the lock and the bar squealed as it was yanked back.

  In a short-sleeved baby-blue button-down and clean black slacks, framed by the grimy doorframe, the American was almost incandescent.

  “Mrs. Lin? I’m Mark Jenson from the AIT. I’m so sorry about this. I’m here to take you home.” His nostrils flared in disgust as he looked around the cell before entering. He stepped toward me and reached out two hands to raise me to my feet. I struggled up. I had not eaten and had been given just one cup of bitter water that tasted faintly of tea.

  I gripped his arm as we walked down the hall. “What about my husband?”

  “He’ll come with us too.”

  I glanced at all the shut doors I passed and thought of the people behind them who would not be going home.

  —

  Wei sat on the sofa in the room where I’d originally been taken. Though he looked haggard, true to Jia Bao’s statement, his face showed no obvious sign of abuse. I hurried to him and pressed my face into his neck. He stank of sweat and urine. My relief was so sudden and overwhelming that I began to sob. I felt tremors in his chest as he tried to hold back his own cries.

  When we finally pulled apart, Mr. Jenson introduced us to his colleague Benjamin Sutton, freckle-faced and slouching next to the door, looking as if he was on his first foray outside of the AIT compound.

  “We’ll be leaving in just a moment,” Mr. Jenson said before he excused himself from the room. Mr. Sutton’s eyes ricocheted between us and the door.

  “How are you?” I asked Wei.

  He squeezed
my hand and didn’t answer. He had not said a word to me. I began to fear that if he opened his mouth I would see broken teeth, a lacerated tongue.

  Through the wall, we heard Mr. Jenson yell, “I understand, but what the hell were you thinking? You should have called us right away. This was way, way out of line. You better believe we’re calling this one in. Your goons have created a real fucking serious situation. Fucking amateurs.”

  I wondered if the man receiving these words even understood the word “goon.” No, I thought, fuck him. Fuck them all.

  A cramp shot from hip to hip. I moaned and doubled over.

  Wei gripped my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked, and I was relieved to see his teeth were intact.

  I did not want to tell him how much it hurt. I nodded: I’m okay.

  Mr. Sutton tapped his watch. “As soon as Mr. Jenson is back, we’ll go see a doctor and have you both checked out.”

  The cramp receded slowly; a shadow of pain lingered on the spot.

  When Mr. Jenson returned, he exhaled loudly and wiped his palms on his pants. I swore I saw him sneer. We stink, I thought.

  “Shall we?” he asked.

  I wanted to tell him that I had noticed his contempt and remind him: Our kids could go to school with yours. I make a mean macaroni casserole. We are Americans like you.

  —

  They didn’t take us to a hospital, and instead called a doctor to the AIT office. Wei suspected that they were trying to be discreet. The doctor said Wei’s burns would heal without long-term damage. There could even be a baby number four. He gave Wei an ointment for his bruises, noted a possible cracked rib, but no broken bones. He asked no questions about where the injuries had come from.

  My and the baby’s heart rates were slightly elevated—adrenaline and dehydration, he said. Drink water, rest, check again when you get home, he advised.

  The two men took us back to the hotel to gather our things. There, Mr. Jenson told us we had twenty-four hours to leave. We were being deported. He could free us, but he had no control over deportation.

  “Can we ever come back?” Wei asked.

  “It depends on how the wind blows. I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  “And what recourse do we have for what happened last night?”

  “Of course we’ll make a report to the State Department.” Mr. Jenson squinted. “But to be honest, there’s so much on our plate that I can’t see much happening after that. The men who interrogated—”

  Wei cut him off. “It was torture.”

  Mr. Jenson sighed. “The men who interrogated you will probably be reprimanded to save face, maybe be moved around, but I can’t see much more than that happening. I’m just being honest.”

  “I understand,” Wei said, his face dark with anger.

  53

  WE FOUND OUT Wei’s father had called the hotel when we were two hours late coming home, and the man at the front desk had whispered the story to him. He had immediately called the AIT.

  We told the girls the police had just wanted to ask questions, no big deal. Emily, seeing us rumpled and dirty, glared as if we had betrayed her.

  “Then why did the police take you for so long?”

  I reminded myself that she had grown up thinking the police were the good guys, there to help if you were lost, or you couldn’t find your puppy. Only real criminals earned the ire of the police.

  “They made a mistake,” I said.

  Stephanie balled up a section of my dress and tugged on it. I dug my fingers into her hair, comforted by the heat of her small head.

  “Why did it take them so long to figure it out?” Emily insisted.

  How could I explain it? “It was a mistake,” I snapped. “They made a mistake. Even police make mistakes.”

  Her eyes drifted over my greasy hair and reeking dress, then she jutted out her chin and stomped away, dragging Stephanie with her.

  —

  On the plane, my body felt completely still, completely numb. Shaken to tranquillity. Would a doctor have called it shock? The baby did not protest my exhaustion and lay motionless, a boat floating on a placid lake.

  I recalled how, before we left, Emily had walked into the room as I was rubbing ointment on Wei’s battered chest. He hurriedly threw on his shirt.

  “You lied to me,” she wailed.

  “I’m fine. Look at me.” Wei stretched his arms and popped his back. He clenched his teeth and forced a smile. “Come here, Em.” He tried to hug her, but she struggled out of his grip and threw herself into a corner, crying against the wall, suddenly an inconsolable toddler again, provoked by a force far larger than she could comprehend.

  Even this memory exhausted me. I didn’t dare think about the rest of it. We had left the country and were in the air, we would be home soon, and I finally felt safe enough to sleep.

  An hour before landing, when we were still miles out over the Pacific, I awoke. I stretched and rose. Stephanie joined me and we paced the aisle, then gazed out one of the back windows at the clouds tipped gold and pink by the setting sun. She pressed her palms to the window and marked it with her breath. She dragged her finger through it, drawing an X of clean glass.

  “It’ll still be light when we get back,” I said. “We’ll have dinner, and unpack and take a nice hot bath and go to bed. How does that sound?” The normalcy of it was surreal. Which was the dream—the interrogation, or the sheltered life we were returning to?

  She turned from the window. “Can I watch TV?”

  I ran my fingers through the tangles in her hair. “Of course.”

  I tapped my stomach. I tried to remember when I’d last felt the baby move. During the questioning? When I’d returned to Wei’s parents’? Before I boarded? During our layover in Honolulu? I rubbed small circles. Baby, wake up.

  During the next hour, I waited for the baby to turn itself around, to knock a joint against my flesh, to assert itself. When we felt the subtle shift of descent, the baby still had not responded to my moves to wake it.

  Waiting at the baggage claim, Wei nudged up against me and put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s nice to be home.”

  I stared at the luggage dropping onto the carousel and circling past. “The baby hasn’t moved all day.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean usually she—he—she—is usually restless, but I haven’t felt anything the entire flight.”

  “You were sleeping most of the time. You were too tired to notice,” Wei said.

  “Maybe.” I wanted to believe him, but the way his eyes darted around the terminal made me doubt that he believed it himself.

  The city greeted us with fog, cool and white, a stark contrast to the bright sun and unrelenting heat of Taipei. The fog lifted somewhere on the Bay Bridge and the East Bay was warm. On the radio in the cab, we heard that while we were in the air over the Pacific, the last of the three communiqués between the United States and China had been announced. There was a sense of finality to it. America reiterated its position on Taiwan. We were too tired to care.

  Closed up for weeks, our house had a stale odor, but I could smell us too, our family. I could detect both Emily and Stephanie in it, Wei, and then the deeper bones of the place, the seventy years it had existed before we moved in, years and families before us deep in the paint and wood. I went around and opened the windows.

  In our bedroom, as the girls watched TV downstairs, I sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the phone, and held it in my hand so long that the dial tone became an alarmed flashing cry. Wei came to retrieve our laundry and found me.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to go to the hospital. It just doesn’t feel right.”

  He took the phone from my hand and returned it to the receiver. “Of course.”

  “Now. I need to go right now.” I saw his shock as he registered the exhausted green smudges beneath my eyes, my face drained by nausea and fear.

  “Let me tell Pam that the girls are home alone. She c
an come check on them.” A few minutes later, I heard him outside knocking on the next-door neighbor’s door and her exclamatory hello, followed by the murmur of polite exchange about the trip, and then the tone lowered and grew more serious. I remained on the edge of the bed, afraid to lie down. I felt like nothing inside.

  —

  The ride to Alta Bates was short, but we couldn’t get there fast enough. Wake up. Move. I found myself pleading with the baby so often that it became a mantra before I realized it. I bargained. I waited for a tiny knee to reach out and kick me, to make me cry out with relief.

  In the examination room, wearing paper pajamas, I waited anxiously for the doctor to begin. I stared at the posters taped next to the lights on the ceiling and thought of the other women who had lain here, dozens a day, gazing at these same inane images, slogans in comic-book fonts encouraging us to eat cheese and broccoli, or to HANG IN THERE, BABY! My rage at the men who had interrogated me was so consuming that I felt dizzy and my limbs driven to a numbness indistinguishable from apathy. I did not know this doctor—Dr. Sloan—the only one available; luckily, she emanated competence. Her black hair was streaked with gray and twisted into a bun, and she spoke with a trace of New York in her voice.

  She gasped when she saw the bruising and scrapes on the side of my body and glared at Wei.

  “I know what it looks like,” I said. “But I fell. I really did. He’s never laid a hand on me.”

  She looked directly into my eyes and I met her stare. I saw that she believed me. She slid the wand over my belly. I reached for Wei’s hand. Where there should have been the rapid whomp whomp ocean rush of a liquid heartbeat, there was nothing but white noise, something too close to silence. I waited for the doctor’s explanation—the machine was broken or the baby was elusive. Something other than the reality that was forcing itself upon us.

  Dr. Sloan looked at the nurse as she said, “I’m sorry.” Her eyes darted over to Wei before she finally made eye contact with me.

  Wei squeezed my hand. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Do you need another machine?”