Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “But this is more urgent,” she said.

  “You should have thought of that before you brought a young infant on a sightseeing trip.”

  In the waiting room of the big-city surgeon’s office, she rocked the listless, dehydrated baby and waited for hours as one woman entered and did not come out, and another entered and did not come out. Only after nightfall did the group trundle out altogether, with glassy eyes and bandages over the bottom halves of their faces, even their mouths. They looked like bandits, or ghouls.

  “You can write?” a nurse asked Laqi in Japanese.

  “Of course.” The truth was, her reading and writing ability was far behind her speaking ability. She knew only hundreds of kanji, not the thousands she would need to be literate.

  “Write the patient’s name for me, please.”

  And now Laqi had to decide: what did her son’s name mean? Not dragon, today. Not lightness, either. She might have chosen “distant,” for her child seemed as far from her as he could ever be—unresponsive, nearly immobile, unwilling to nurse. Instead, she chose the last possibility. Forgiveness. That was what she hoped he would grant her, for having made this trip, and for having brought him into this world in the first place, without a family, without a father, without anywhere to belong.

  In the village later that week, there were three deaths. A woman her grandmother’s age, who had succumbed to infection because of the tattoo removal. A woman even older, who had also succumbed. And Ryo.

  Hiro said, after a long pause, “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes,” Sayoko said. Her tone was steely but her eyes were brimming.

  “You don’t need to continue. Perhaps you should rest.”

  “No. I have not yet answered your question.”

  The first letter from Daisuke had arrived while she was away, which only made things worse. If only she hadn’t been impatient, perhaps she would not have gone in search of Daisuke. Perhaps Ryo would still be alive. But she had always been restless and impulsive. Every good and terrible thing had come to her on account of those traits.

  Laqi could read only one kanji of five in Daisuke’s letter. Tears dropped onto the card, smudging some of the words she was sure of: some Taiwanese place names, the word for police and maybe the word for confinement. Her dirty hands—for she had stopped caring for herself, stopped washing her body or combing her hair in the days since Ryo’s death—smudged additional spots on the card. She was destroying the only link she had, but its value was less now. Their son was dead, before Daisuke could even know he had a son. And her dream of Japan was dead as well. There, she was a barbarian: illiterate, unsophisticated, incapable.

  The second letter arrived not much later, while her breasts were still painfully engorged with milk that her departed baby could not drink. The ache in her heart became yet more intense. She woke many nights to a blanket spotted with tears and leaking milk until both streams stopped, and she was left only hollow and dry, light enough to blow away. A third, fourth, and fifth letter from Daisuke arrived after that.

  But then a number of weeks passed without any letter at all. Laqi bathed herself at last. She had eaten little more than rice since her breasts had dried up, but now she allowed herself some dried fish. With her new strength, she gathered up the letters and went to Lee Kuan Chien.

  “You could marry me,” Lee Kuan Chien said, after he had read the first letter from Daisuke but before he had translated it.

  “What do the letters say?” she pleaded.

  “I would give you a place to live. If you have another child, I will treat it as my own. I am not asking that we have a child together. You could do as you wish.”

  “Please, start with the first. The gist of it. Anything.”

  “Things will be no better for you in a few years. In fact, they may be worse. There will be more interference. Policies are changing.”

  “Just read it, if you can,” she begged.

  “There was a time when the government encouraged intermarriage between Japanese and aborigines, for the purposes of assimilation. But since Wushe, things have changed.”

  She had heard about the incident at Wushe, a failed uprising by the neighboring Seediq people against the Japanese, and knew it had resulted in many deaths. But she did not know it had changed the empire’s policy on aboriginal subjects.

  “A wise Japanese man would not enter into a relationship prior to consulting with authorities,” Lee Kuan Chien said. “He could start a conflict that way. He could anger a tribe leader and at the same time anger the colonial authorities. There are punishments for Japanese citizens who create such conflicts. This is a sensitive time.”

  She told herself she would not beg again. But she could not resist. “Please.”

  “All right,” said Lee Kuan Chien, a man who had lived many years, and who played a long game, still. “He says . . . that he was moved from one logging camp to another and that he will write again.”

  “The next one?”

  “He says . . . he hopes you are still waiting, and have not married.”

  “The next?”

  “He says . . . he has been sent back to Japan, but will be returning to the colony, perhaps in the spring, and perhaps sooner after he speaks with the authorities. He will send a gift.”

  “I have received no gift,” she said.

  “He says . . .” and this time Lee Kuan Chien paused, his face marked not with slyness or stoicism, but with a tender expression she had never seen. “He writes to you from a jail in a town one day south of here, where he is awaiting sentencing.”

  She needed to know the fifth letter’s contents, and did not want to know. But she calmed her voice and shifted back on her stool, hands folded in her lap. “Go ahead.”

  “Stay with me,” Lee Kuan Chien said. “Put all this behind you.”

  She did not answer.

  “What if I told you that you were my child,” Lee Kuan Chien said, and his voice cracked at the last word.

  Her body flashed with rage. “I would not believe it.”

  “Your mother made the same mistake you did. She had a baby. What if I said that I was the father of that child, but she made me promise never to tell anyone in the village?”

  She shook her head. Pathetic man. Ridiculous old man.

  “What if I told you I have been trying to let you know since the first time you came to me?”

  “You’re lying. You wanted me as your wife the first time I came.”

  “Are you sure? I am skilled with languages. You are skilled with languages. I was restless in my youth. You are restless. My harsh tongue finds trouble, as does yours. What is so hard to believe?”

  “You’re only saying that now to make me live with you. My mother had relations . . .” she paused, before deciding to finish. “With a Japanese.”

  “Did she say that?”

  Laqi struggled to remember. No.

  “You have imagined it, hoping for an advantage. The days of the Chinese in Formosa are over. The Japanese are ascendant. But that may not always be so.”

  She had never disliked him more than in this moment.

  “I have tried to warn you: about men and what they do to women, about the future, about going hungry, about your child going hungry. These are the messages of a father, not a lover.”

  The evidence confused her, but her intuition still said he was lying.

  “Read the last letter,” she said.

  He sighed and lifted the piece of paper, with its tiny kanji characters, its smudges of black ink. He read with a passionless voice, taking no pleasure in the news.

  “Daisuke Oshima has been charged for consorting with an aborigine without authorization. Evidently, he chose to be honest with the authorities about his activities last year in hopes of seeking permission, not understanding the difference between permission a
nd forgiveness. They will hold him only temporarily. They will confine him but they will not send him back to Japan. He will be free to travel in perhaps six months.”

  She exhaled and drooped forward, elbows on her knees. It was not as terrible as she’d imagined.

  “As your father, I forbid you to see him again,” Lee Kuan Chien said, and then seemed to hold his breath. The hut had never been so quiet.

  She laughed violently. “You’re not my father! You’re only a trickster!”

  She could feel it inside of her: she was half Japanese. She was certain of it. But what did that even mean? How did she know she wasn’t half Chinese? Either way she was not full Tayal and had no place in her own village, and no future there. But why should it matter?

  But the truth, that mattered. For the first time, she was angry at her mother, for having denied her that truth. Her mother had claimed that this secret was to be a treasure kept hidden, perhaps valuable someday. But Laqi realized that treasures are only deemed precious when the right people appreciate them. Nations come and go. Values and appetites change. What is esteemed one day may become worthless, even intolerable, another.

  The gift from Daisuke, mailed before he’d been confined, finally arrived. This was more than five months after Ryo’s passing. Daisuke had addressed the gift to the headmaster with a note explaining it should be hand-delivered to Laqi, as thanks for her help translating during his visit. A schoolboy was tasked with delivering the object and once he left, and before Grandmother could return to the hut from her afternoon meanderings among the neighbors, Laqi opened the crate. Inside was shredded wood packing material, and nestled deeply within that was a lidded box. From the box she extracted the strange thing inside: heavy, shiny, like nothing she had ever seen.

  She thought it was a pretty giant spider of some kind. But no. It was a clockwork crab—a mechanical toy or automaton from Tokyo or Kyoto, very expensive, very rare, meant to look like an animal that lived far away, where the river ran to the sea. Just the sort of thing that would have grabbed a naturalist’s eye. Also the sort of thing you send to a young woman who is barely past childhood, or an easily astounded aborigine.

  She was less astounded than resigned, wishing only to see Daisuke again: his face, his hands and long tapered fingers, his strong arms, his strong narrow back, his legs in mud-spattered white trousers walking ahead of her on a trail framed by thick stands of bamboo and laced with ever-changing stripes of sunlight. She would keep waiting.

  Still, the clockwork crab provided some amusement. A boy cousin, half her age, came to the door of the hut to bring some duck eggs from his parents to Grandmother, and he spotted Laqi with the automaton and could not pull himself away. The glassy glaze on the hard body shone in parts brown, in parts orange, and at the sharpest points of the crab’s claws, bright purple. Laqi turned the key underneath the crab’s glistening carapace and all the legs moved, frightening her cousin.

  “Is it alive?” he asked. “Does it see us?” The boy took the still-moving crab warily as she handed it to him.

  A printed card had come with the crab, and Laqi could puzzle out most words, aided by the plentiful illustrations. It seemed that mechanical dolls were an ancient tradition and had been popular in Japan since the 1600s.

  “They are so clever!” the boy said, meaning the Japanese.

  “I believe there is something here about Western dolls,” Laqi said, warming to her cousin’s enthusiasm. “They have little strings above them, to make the dolls move.”

  He said, “Japanese dolls are better.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Because they can move without strings. No one can see what is making them move.”

  She nodded and showed him the illustrated card. “Exactly so. In Japan, as it says here, there is an emphasis on the art of concealment.”

  She took the crab back from his hands, understanding now what Daisuke had meant by sending this gift: not only that there was a spirit alive in everything, but that they must become experts at disguising their identities, their earlier encounters, their future plans—whatever it took to someday be together.

  She had not adored the crab at first, but came to love it more as she associated it with Daisuke’s secret message to her, and as she began not only to think it might be alive, but to be sure that it was. Perhaps it only needed her love and care to become more intelligent: a friend, an oracle, a protector.

  At night she turned the copper key and felt its sharp legs move in the dark. She whispered to it, “Are you there?”

  And, “Do you miss the sea?”

  And, “When will Daisuke come?”

  And, “Will we both return to Japan with you?”

  She resolved to forget how she had felt in Tokyo, like a worthless object of public scorn, and she hoped that, in Daisuke’s presence, she would bloom with confidence again. Nothing would take away the pain of having lost Ryo. But with Ryo’s father, who had never had a chance to learn about their son, she could at last grieve him properly—they could grieve him. She could finally feel at ease again, like the young woman Daisuke had once known.

  She remembered their days on the trail and along the river. She remembered their legs and arms darkened by the sun, feeling stronger every day they were together. She remembered the joy of her active mind, working hard to master Daisuke’s language and to see the world as he saw it: full of spirits, endlessly alive. She remembered their nights, sleeping back to front, his hand on her hip, his breath against her neck.

  She whispered to the crab, “I’m ready. When Daisuke arrives, we will all leave together.”

  A few weeks later, Lee Kuan Chien came to her yard, where she and Grandmother were cutting and boiling large piles of bamboo shoots. She had never seen him in the village or anywhere outside his shop. She was suspicious at first, until she noted his sober bearing.

  “I’ve brought you a newspaper,” he said, with head down, face half-hidden by the steam rising from the pot. “It came in with goods from Taipei.”

  He glanced in Grandmother’s direction but Laqi didn’t care what Grandmother heard.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He bent over and showed her the front page photo of the village on fire, and with it, the colonial administrative building, the police station, and the jail.

  “The Tayal started the fire,” he said. “To get back at the chief of police.”

  Laqi stopped stirring the boiling pot.

  “All of the official buildings burnt down. And the people in them.”

  Laqi was speechless.

  “The prisoners did not escape.”

  She did not believe him. He had been crafty before.

  But he pointed at the newspaper, and she could read enough of the words herself: names of the prisoners, six of them Tayal, and one of them Japanese.

  This time, Lee Kuan Chien did not ask her to come live with him. He did not seem interested in manipulating her anymore.

  He said, “Some of what I told you before was not true. Forgive me. But this news, this is true.”

  16 Angelica

  Angelica woke with a wet face, her eyelashes crusty, the pillow damp.

  She pulled herself out of bed and headed toward the bathroom, avoiding the mirror. Looking down at the sink, she felt suddenly dizzy. She made the toilet bowl just in time, retching. Everything she’d eaten in that covert late-night leftover binge came up again.

  She steadied herself and wiped her mouth with a clean, cold washcloth. She dressed carelessly: an older nursing top, faded lavender, and her least favorite pair of black pants with a stretchy waistband, convenient on this morning when her belly felt bloated.

  “I was worried,” Sayoko said when Angelica finally went to her room. Sayoko was already up, dressed, hair brushed and pulled back in a neat bun, sitting in her wheelchair. Itou-san, an early riser during the rare weeks
he wasn’t abroad, was already at work.

  “It was the food Hiro made,” Angelica said.

  Sayoko frowned. “We all ate it. Not just you. Even my son had a plate after work. I think something else has sickened you.”

  Angelica approached the wheelchair, turned and sat quickly at the edge of Sayoko’s futon, head in her hands.

  Sayoko’s tone softened. “You’re sure that you’re all right?”

  It may have been the first time that Sayoko had asked after Angelica’s health instead of the reverse, but Angelica was not in the mood to appreciate it.

  “Take it easy today,” Sayoko said, wheeling herself out, with Hiro following silently behind. “Take a nap if you need it. I’ve got company coming, but we can handle things.”

  “Company?”

  “Rene. Ten o’clock. Remember?”

  Another first: Sayoko keeping better track of her schedule than Angelica, and for once, not complaining about the routine ahead, including a visit from the physical therapist.

  After breakfast, Sayoko was eager for Rene to arrive, eager to work on walking. Her self-pity had vanished. Even as they waited in the living room, Sayoko warmed up with the lime-green two-pound dumbbells that she hadn’t touched in ages, doing bicep curls from her wheelchair.

  Angelica met Rene at the door when he arrived, punctual as always, dressed in scrubs decorated with tropical macaws. Angelica admired how he seemed not to worry about standing out, and how could he avoid it even if he’d wanted to? Ebony skin, broad shoulders, a big smile that lit up any room. On top of that, he always smelled wonderful, like sandalwood. Sayoko had warmed to him slowly, but Angelica had found him pleasant from the very start and hoped he wouldn’t have to change jobs too soon, as so many people were forced to. Even when the latest immigration restrictions made the news, she resisted asking him: What are your plans? How is your visa status?

  From the kitchen, now, she could hear Rene’s laughter and cheerleading. Sayoko was responding girlishly to his charm. When Angelica peeked through the doorway, she saw Hiro bracing himself next to the wheelchair, ready to help Sayoko as she lowered herself back into it, while Rene stood off to one side, nodding encouragement. Her walker was across the room. Instead, she had been practicing with a cane on one side, Hiro on another.