by Julie Wu
“Does she still complain?”
“Of course. But she has a better life than she would have if she’d married someone poor like her father and stayed in the mountains.”
She glanced at me sideways and my heart sank.
WE GOT OFF at Taipei Main Station. On the crowded platform, I saw other men glance her way, and I was both proud to be with her and ashamed not to be worthy of her.
She walked on with a confident click of her black patent leather pumps, knowing the exact location of the Sintori Noodle Shop, as her sister, Tsun-moi, worked in a bookstore down the street. I recognized her sister’s surname as one of the Hakka minority that were commonly adopted as maids.
“The sister she was supposed to replace works near here, too. My sister Leh-hwa—given away at birth, you know, to save dowry.”
“Yes.” I knew of poorer families in which a daughter was given away at birth. The family then adopted another girl to take her place and serve as a maid and future daughter-in-law.
“But she didn’t like her family, so she ran back home when she was sixteen.”
We walked a few paces before she spoke again.
“I was supposed to be given away, too, but I was sleeping. Bad omen. They took my cousin instead.”
We turned down Zhongshan Road, busy with signs, banners, bicycles, and motorcycles. We crossed the street to get to Sintori Noodle Shop and passed by a radio shop along the way. I stopped for a moment, looking in the storefront window.
“I thought Hsimenting, but this is a good location, too,” I said. “For a radio shop. Lots of foot traffic here.”
“True,” she said. “But shops are fancier in Hsimenting.”
“True.”
I saw the reflection of her in the window as she scratched her arm briefly. “Why not keep working at Taikong?” she said. “It’s so successful.”
A rickshaw whirred past behind us. I wondered which would be more important to her—my success or my happiness.
“I want to be on my own,” I said.
I WALKED HER home from Taoyuan Station. In only a couple of hours she would be meeting Kazuo, and then I would leave for my military service. I’d made her laugh many times, but was that enough to counteract my lack of promise as a provider?
Chungcheng Road still bustled, even on a Saturday, and we weaved our way up the sidewalk, dodging the bartering crowd, the crates of mangoes, and the dank puddles draining into the sewer. I pulled her out of the way of a series of drips coming off a red-and-white awning, and she smiled up at me, covering her mouth delicately with her hand to hide her front teeth, which were fake and crudely outlined in gold. Her eyes followed my glance. “I’m embarrassed about my teeth,” she said, with charming candor.
“Oh no,” I said. “You don’t need to be.”
“It’s because of all the treats my father brought me as a child.”
“All the Japanese moachi,” I said. “I remember.”
We made our way through the throngs surrounding the Jin-fu Temple gates and onto a quiet patch of sidewalk.
“My house is just up there.”
“It’s near the lumberyard,” I said.
She cocked her head, looking up at me. “Would you like to see the lumberyard?”
I nodded. I didn’t really care about the lumberyard, but I didn’t want her to go home.
We crossed the street and walked a block west. The crowds thinned, and our heels scuffed the sidewalk as we walked. We turned up a dirt lane, passing a row of small concrete shacks with corrugated iron roofs. She laughed and shook her head. “That’s the first thing my mother saw when she was brought in her palanquin from Hsinchu for her wedding. She nearly told everyone to turn her around.”
“What are they for?”
“Some are for storage, some are housing for the workers. Actually, my parents did live in one at first, but they soon moved into that house.” She pointed down the lane at a large two-story house. “We lived on the top floor with the number one and number two families. The first floor was all filled with wood shavings.” She smiled, forgetting this time to cover her mouth. “I played there with my cousin. And here, too.” She pointed to boards propped up into pyramids to dry. “We used to play hide-and-seek in them, though it was dangerous.”
She got a pebble in her shoe and sat down on a rock by a pile of logs, emptying out the pebble and rubbing a spot of dirt off the shoe’s heel with a lacy handkerchief, as she had when she was a child.
I sat next to her, looking around at the stark landscape. “You’re lucky to have so many happy memories,” I said. “No rich man can buy you that.”
She put the shoe back on her foot and stood, saying nothing.
She was silent all the way back to the pharmacy.
I hesitated in front of the door, despairing at having offended her. There was only an hour until she would meet Kazuo, and then I would be gone. Once again, my frankness would be my downfall.
She looked to the side, fiddling with her purse strap.
“Listen,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”
She turned to face me, eyes flashing. “You think I’m a gold digger, do you? You think I just want to marry a man for jewelry and fancy clothes?”
“I don’t know,” I said, taken aback.
She bit her lip and then motioned for me to follow her. “Let’s go to the temple.”
“The temple?”
I followed her back south, through the crowds. She reached Jin-fu Temple and pushed her way through the outer courtyard, where children threw wooden balls and old men sat talking between rows of flickering candles.
I leaned forward to whisper into her ear. “Watch your purse.”
She nodded, clamping her purse under her arm. She led me between the warrior guards, painted in all their twisting fury on either side of the massive gate. In the inner courtyard she stopped, pointing toward the corner of the temple. “There’s my mother praying to Matsu. She spends almost every day here since my brother died.”
Through the clouds of incense I spotted a slight gray figure bent in prayer. In my mind, a memory stirred.
Yoshiko sat on the edge of the low stone step behind a table where an orange-robed nun sold incense and oil. Yoshiko put her feet together and inclined her knees to the side, her legs tapering gracefully to her black patent leather pumps, so white that they shone in the smoky light. I sat next to her, leaning away from the passersby holding candles, paper money, and bundles of incense, and my shoulder touched hers.
She turned to face me. “You want to know how my brother died?”
“Yes.”
“Hou.” She folded her arms. “My father always had all these grand plans to go off somewhere and get rich.”
“I remember,” I said. “You said he was going to take you to Japan and China.”
“Did I?” Her eyes turned to me absently. “I trusted him then. That was before the restaurant failed, and the café, and the grocery store . . .”
“So you never went?”
“I didn’t. But he did. He always wanted to go, and then he met a Mainlander who kept whispering in his ear and convinced him that if he could only get a boat, they could sell sugarcane to Japan and get rich quick.”
“When was this?”
“Just after the war.”
“But we weren’t on good terms with Japan—”
“Of course. So my father and his friend spent all our money to lease a boat from the government. They sailed into Japan with the Nationalist flag flying and got arrested before they even reached Okinawa.”
“They went to jail?”
“House arrest. And by the time they were released, the boat’s lease had expired and they didn’t dare come back to Taiwan because they were afraid of what the government would do about the expired lease. That’s what he says, anyway.”
“So they stayed in Japan?”
“No. They went to China. For a year.”
“A year! And what about you?”
“We starved. We still had the grocery store at the time, but my mother knows nothing about business—she’s illiterate. My brothers quit school to help in the store and I did the books. I was twelve, but even I knew the money was going in the wrong direction. We closed down more and more aisles of the store until we were just selling rice.
“Every week my mother would cry, ‘Li-hsiang, what will we do? Your father has left us, and now we will eat only sweet potatoes all winter.’ And I would get her one of the red envelopes of New Year’s money that relatives had given me over the years. Then my mother would nod and say, ‘Now we can eat for this week.’ But then I ran out of red envelopes, except for one, which I hid in case of emergency. That’s when my sisters ran away to Taipei. They couldn’t take it. And that’s when Kun-tai got pneumonia.”
“My little brother died of pneumonia,” I said.
“Oh!”
“He was just three. Go on.”
She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine. “Kun-tai was so weak. He couldn’t lift the sacks of rice anymore. The delivery men would dump them on the sidewalk, and all the soldiers would gather around like vultures. My other brother got tired of doing all the work, and sometimes he took off with his friends. My mother was helpless. One time there was a boy who helped her, a brave boy—”
“But your uncles with the lumberyard—” I said, “didn’t they help?”
She laughed bitterly. “My number one uncle would drop by in his rickshaw and give me a little sweet treat and shake his head. My mother treated him so well, warmed up sake for him whenever he came . . . Even at twelve, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t help us.
“The police kept breaking into our house at night because of the ship. Swept through our beds with flashlights, looking for my father. One afternoon there was a knock at the door, and this strange man ran into the house, all in white, with sunglasses and a mustache. My mother and I screamed, thinking it was a policeman, but it was my father in disguise.”
She laughed briefly. “He was so excited. ‘I have been to Mainland China! I have brought back textile manufacturing equipment that will make us a fortune!’ ”
Yoshiko looked down at her purse, playing with its strap.
“But by that time, Kun-tai was already dying. I used my last red envelope to send him to a Western doctor, but there was nothing to be done.”
Her voice broke. From the adjacent hall came the sound of a nun’s chanting, accompanied by the piercing hollow beats of the muyu.
“The equipment my father brought back—it was junk. Worthless.” She shifted, part of the fabric of her skirt falling onto my knee. “So after that,” she said, “I decided my fate is my own, and my life is going to be different.” She turned to look me full in the face, her eyes glistening and fierce. “My family’s going to survive. Memories are good,” she said, “but living people are better.”
I stood up, incensed. “My brother died, too, though we had plenty of money,” I said. “Money is not enough for life.” She looked up at me in surprise. My heart raced and I felt the heat rise to my face. “Have Kazuo if you think he will make you happier!” I said, my voice shaking. “But I’ll have you know I am not your father. I would not leave you to starve. And that boy who brought in the rice for your mother—that was me.”
I turned my back to her and made my way out of the temple. At the door I looked back and saw her watching me. She was standing motionless among the flickering candles, the curling ascent of incense smoke, and the people stepping up and down to the different levels of the courtyard. The gray figure of her mother rose from where she had knelt. As she turned, the shadows pooled beneath her cheekbones.
I turned away and went into the street.
12
KAOHSIUNG WAS NOT FAR enough away for me to go. The thought that I had lost Yoshiko, that Kazuo would bring her home as his bride, their bed just steps from mine, so enraged me that I barely registered the endless military exercises in which I was forced to participate. Rousing from my tortured thoughts, I found myself at various times singing the national anthem, polishing my shoes, and running in formation in a field, shouting, “We shall take back the motherland!”
At night my bunkmates laughed and teased one another and dragged me to cafés and dances. One of the other servicemen was a ballroom-dance instructor and taught us to waltz, tango, and fox-trot. In the dance halls, I held the hand of one girl or another and impressed her with my steps, which seemed decisive merely because I made the steps without taking the least notice of what my partner was doing. The breaks between dances were the most awkward. The girls I danced with wanted to talk, and even if they were very pretty, it was all I could do to keep my mind from wandering off, from wondering where Yoshiko was and whether she was with Kazuo. I had never had a chance to dance with her. Had Kazuo, holding her waist, like this? Had he touched her?
“You’re not listening to me,” one girl said, her perky, round face suddenly falling into a frown.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “You teach . . . eh . . .”
“Kindergarten.” She turned and walked away.
The next evening I pretended to have a stomachache and stayed in the barracks when my bunkmates went dancing. I reached into my bag and pulled out Fundamentals of the English Language for Foreigners. I had taken it from Kazuo’s room when I left.
I had been through the book before, but that night and in the weeks that followed I read it with renewed intensity. I forced myself to think about conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs—all the strange little connecting words that Mandarin Chinese did not have, or that Japanese used, but quite differently.
As I studied, I thought, Why not try the American entrance exam? The common belief was that only Taiwan University gave adequate preparation for it, but I had access to books. I could read. What did I have to lose except a little pride?
My stomach growled, unsatisfied by our wretched meals—rice with pickled cucumber, soggy yellow daikon, and fried gluten. But my hunger only spurred me on to study more, because I knew what hunger was. Hunger was home, and only by leaving for good could I truly be free of that gnawing in my belly.
I had brought other books, too. Chemistry, physics, engineering. Mostly they were American, bearing the imprint of universities I imagined to be massive, humming with brilliance and intellectual activity.
I studied, and the time, which had seemed so interminably slow, seemed now to fly. The next American entrance exam was in less than a year. In ten months, in eight, in six.
I WENT HOME for spring leave. The rain was just lightening to mist in Kaohsiung when the train pulled away. It had been raining for days, and as we passed the verdant central mountains, the rivers spilled forth, splitting into gurgling branches that infused the land below—the broad valleys and plains encompassing Taipei and Taoyuan—with the possibility of life. I imagined Yoshiko’s mother as a child, bumping down the mountain in an oxcart and up along a coast she had probably never seen until that day, hoping that whatever lay ahead would be better than what she had known.
To her right, to my right, farmers toiled on the paddies that checkered the broad Chainan Plain; farmer after straw-hatted farmer, knee-deep in the water, pushing down the plow behind his water buffalo, as he and his fathers had under the Dutch, the Spanish, the Japanese, and now the Mainland Chinese.
IN AN OPPRESSED society, there are three main means of survival. There is the farmer’s way, plowing on as he has for centuries, his hat shadowing his face. There is my father’s method, of opportunism. And then there are those who cannot or will not accept things as they are. Like Yoshiko’s mother, who came down from the mountains, and the Taoyuan magistrate, who was killed, they must either speak up or leave and seek freedom elsewhere. This last option, I was increasingly beginning to feel, would be my way.
I had never felt so sure that I would escape as I did on that bus. Though I was going home to discuss a potential job at Taikong, I had gotten all the way through my English-langu
age textbook. I had mastered that idiosyncratic language. How many people knew the intricacies of tense or the different uses of articles as I did? I wouldn’t need a job at Taikong for long. I was going to America.
At my parents’ house, I pushed open the heavy oak door, and the smell of an egg fried in lard hit me full across the face. Kazuo was home from medical school.
I went into the kitchen, where Kazuo read the newspaper over his empty, egg-smeared bowl. He looked up at me, his thick lips open in surprise.
I looked around for my mother. “Where’s Kachan?” I said.
“Getting ready to go to the market.”
“I suppose she’s out of eggs,” I said.
“Yes.” Kazuo smiled slightly.
I felt a surge of anger. “I haven’t heard anything about you getting engaged, by the way.”
“What? Oh, you mean that girl.” He waved his hand dismissively and shook out his newspaper. “Superstitious bitch. She said our zodiac signs were incompatible.” He glanced at me over the paper. “She’s engaged to a friend of mine. Studies poetry at Taiwan University. Got a job lined up in his daddy’s bank.”
My stomach lurched.
You think I’m a gold digger, do you?
“Don’t fret, my boy.” Kazuo smoothed down the page of his paper. “She’s not worth it. There are plenty of girls prettier than her.”
I SPENT THE rest of the day lying on my futon, brooding. But by the next morning I realized that nothing had changed. I had not had Yoshiko before, I did not have her now, and I never would. It was time to get out.
I went downtown and registered for the American entrance exam.
I zoomed home on my father’s motorcycle, eyes tearing in the wind, ears filled with the roaring of the engine as the buildings and marketplaces streamed behind me in a blur. As I passed Jin-fu Temple, a small boy leaped from a cart into the chaotic street after his dog. Honks and curses rose up around them and I swerved to a stop behind a rickshaw. I put my foot down and couldn’t resist looking to my left at the familiar little two-story building flanked by towers.