Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “Why?” She still had not left the comforting rigidity of the doorway, where post pressed to spine. She could flee easily into the kitchen and shut the door, and exist again in a world where life, throbbing and churning inside her, was primary.

  Her husband hushed them. His fingers curled delicately over the man’s wrist. His nostrils flared once, quickly, the only indication of what he’d learned. What good did it do to be so impassive? she wondered, then immediately reminded herself that a cool head—aloof even—was a doctor’s talent.

  “The bullet has broken into pieces,” he said.

  The man in the corner groaned, like a cat, then fell silent.

  She couldn’t help feeling that giving birth seemed almost an indiscretion at this moment. Quietly, without alarm, she told her husband that she was going to have Ah Zhay fetch the midwife.

  Her pregnancy registered on the face of the man in the corner and fear lit up his eyes. “Your daughter? No, I’ll go. They are shooting in the streets.”

  Her bones were widening, the baby insisting. She couldn’t fit his words together.

  “Who is shooting in the streets?”

  He told her of the widow in the park, the morning’s protests, the banners hung with the call for the “mainland pigs” to return to China—then the shootings at the railway station and in front of the governor-general’s, where he’d been with his friend, this man who lay propped like a straw dummy in the mise-en-scène.

  “It was inevitable,” her husband said softly. Yes, she silently agreed. She thought of the slimmer and slimmer offerings in the market since the Japanese had left two years before, and how self-conscious she felt strolling past the wary gaze of the Chinese Nationalist soldiers. She had felt the tension of the city in her own body: her purse pulled close, her shoulders raised, her eyes averted.

  Her husband wedged rolled towels beneath the man’s shoulder to brace him. She could barely see the rise and fall of the man’s chest.

  “I’ll go for the midwife,” the injured man’s friend said again, as if the errand was the only payment he could offer. Li Min saw how anxious he was to leave, and she wondered if he would return. Her husband gave him the address and the man slipped out.

  —

  Grimacing and impatient, she waited upstairs on her own bed. The man still had not returned and it was already afternoon. Finally, her husband appeared, his hands scrubbed and pink, but she swore she saw the injured man’s blood dried, rusty, under his fingernails.

  “Wash your hands,” she said. She hoped her panic came off as annoyance. He nodded dismissively and pulled a chair to the foot of the bed.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “I think,” he said, “that we are on our own, so let’s move ahead.” He was sure she saw the effort in his words; his confidence was halfhearted. He did not tell her that he had not planned for this, that he had been downstairs, in the clinic, thumbing through his old medical school text, taking a quick review course in obstetrics. He urged her knees up and lifted her skirt.

  “Perhaps you should fetch your sister?”

  He laughed. “We’re better off on our own.”

  “You’ll need my help,” she said.

  He pushed the hem to her hips and separated her legs.

  “How big?” she asked.

  He made a circle with his finger and thumb. “Like a—a date.”

  “A date?” She felt hysterical. “When it’s a durian, we’ll worry.” He didn’t smile at her joke. She carefully exhaled as another cramp clutched her and squeezed away her humor. Rage flooded in with the pain. The urge to urinate was strong, but she didn’t trust it. When the tightening had relaxed again, she giggled.

  “What?” His distracted question drifted toward her.

  She didn’t know why she was laughing. Just as quickly, the image of the injured man downstairs came to mind. Soon, she’d be drenching the bed with her blood as well. She willed the thought away, but it was stubborn and came back to her in black-and-white images.

  Her first child—my sister, Ah Zhay—had been born the year Japan went to Nanjing. A victorious battle, the Japanese newspapers had said. Hardworking soldiers with nothing to eat but sweet potatoes, so many that they shit orange. Orange shit—this was the symbol of military sacrifice offered to the people. The Chinese Nationalists had arrived in Taiwan with a different version of events. They had thrust the photos, accusingly, in the faces of the Taiwanese: women speared through their genitals; breasts lopped off and tossed like baseballs; bodies stacked up along the riverside; severed heads impaled on fence posts as warnings. The Nationalists saw the ignorance of the Taiwanese as more evidence of their brainwashing under the Japanese and treated them not as rescued compatriots but like conquered adversaries. My mother tried to extract the memory of her daughter lying bloody on her chest from the other images. Some blood is good blood, she reminded herself. Then she suddenly remembered all the pain that had been sucked away by her last nursing child. She struggled: Don’t think of it.

  Her husband placed his hand on her knee. “Pay attention.” She focused her eyes on the charcoal portrait that hung on the wall directly across from the bed. Her husband. She had done it herself one day, sitting as quietly as possible in the clinic, observing him, still perplexed by the man she’d recently wed. She’d come to know his habits—how he bit his cuticles while reading, how carefully he left his shoes facing out and perfectly aligned when he slipped them off at the door—and she could replay his routine between rising and bed like a film, down even to the schedule of his bowel movements, but he was still veiled to her. She liked it, she realized. That he remained, in some way, unknown made the thought of a lifetime together bearable.

  Another contraction racked her; instinctively, she held her breath, and he reminded her to breathe, then glanced at his watch.

  “Ask Ah Zhay to come up. You should check on”—she paused, as if unsure what to call the dying man—“your patient.”

  When he hesitated, she reassured him. “I’ve done this three times before. Don’t worry over me, my husband. Go see your man.”

  —

  The man was dead.

  From the moment the stranger and the rickshaw driver had dragged in the injured man, Dr. Tsai had known that the man was doomed. He had already lost too much blood. His face was pale with shock. Dr. Tsai wished they had gone to the hospital and hadn’t cursed him with this certain failure.

  He would do nothing about the body until the dead man’s friend returned. He pulled up his stool and inspected the man. Leave the bullet in. He knew that removing the bullet could damage the body more, the cure worse than the disease, but now that the man was already gone, he probed the wound and extracted a shard of the bullet. Was it as the friend had said—had the shooters really used hollow-point bullets? He knew little of guns except for the military books he’d read as a child. Hollow-points, he remembered, were forbidden by the Hague Convention. The way they opened up inside the body was inhumane. Dum-dum bullets, they were also called.

  He reached into the man’s pocket and found a silver card case. Inside, a dozen copies of the same name card. The man was a high school principal. At least he had an address if the friend decided never to return. Behind the cards was a hand-colored photo of a bright-cheeked woman. Her name was scrawled in watery ink on the back. He returned the case to the jacket and sighed. Though he didn’t believe in the superstition that viewing a corpse was bad luck, he shook out a sheet and watched as it settled, like a bird alighting, over the body.

  He heard, from the street, the echo of a loudspeaker. He left the clinic, crossed the gravel yard, and went through the wooden gate. The street was strikingly empty of traffic. A train of three military trucks, the insignia of the US Army barely disguised by a thin layer of paint, crawled down the road. The announcement came from them. He could not piece the words together until they came closer, squawking in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Japanese that the military curfew would begin at six in the eve
ning. Violators would be shot on sight.

  Dr. Tsai slipped back into the yard and, feverish with dread, shoved the gate shut. The midwife, he realized, would not be coming.

  3

  “CLEAN MY GLASSES,” Dr. Tsai ordered his daughter. When she pulled off his fogged spectacles, he was relieved to have the world blurred for a moment. His daughter’s gestures were vague, her contours like a smudged sketch, but he heard her two quick exhalations and then the squeak of cloth against glass. She slipped the glasses back on him, and her flushed round face, expectant and obedient, greeted him. For a moment, he was startled. When did she start to look like a young woman? he wondered. Her limbs had shed most of her baby fat, and two modest bumps declared themselves beneath her blouse.

  Li Min, sweating, half-coherently spoke. “Is the baby going back?”

  “Going back?”

  “Is it coming out? Is it going back?” A drawn-out groan floated through her clenched teeth.

  Dr. Tsai squatted. The baby seemed wedged, its damp, warm head straining against his wife’s body. He thought he might be able to slip his fingers in and urge it out, but her skin was stretched thin and had no give.

  “Why aren’t you doing anything, you worthless bastard?”

  Dr. Tsai’s textbook had mentioned nothing about his wife’s horrific moans or the sheer anger she seemed to have at him and the baby who resisted inside her. Earlier, to calm her, he had given her a cup of whisky, claiming that his textbook had suggested it, then had guiltily watched her gag and spit it over the front of her dress.

  “Snip it out. There’s no room. Cut it; Aunty Cheung did it,” she gasped.

  The instructions came back to him as a block of text:

  When the infant’s head no longer retreats this is known as “crowning.” Now, it is in the mother’s best interest to refrain from laboring any more. The physician should inquire about a “fiery” sensation, which signals that the mother should relax and allow the contractions to complete the rest of the birthing process. At this point, the doctor too may choose to cut the membrane to allow the infant to more easily pass through.

  “My scissors. The small ones.” While his daughter rummaged through his bag, his wife muttered, “Cut it, cut it,” like a madwoman writhing in delirium. Ah Zhay finally found the scissors. “Wipe them down with that alcohol.” The doused wad of cotton dripped as she cleaned the scissors. The damp blades in her small hand glittered in the lamplight. He saw no fear in her face. Dr. Tsai was nervously quiet, watching his wife grip the blankets as he palpated her stomach, cringing when she cried.

  “Damn you,” his wife hissed. Dr. Tsai took the scissors from his daughter.

  I was born just after midnight on March 1, 1947. There was nothing spectacular about my birth. I was not born with my eyes preternaturally open, or oddly mute like the girl-goddess Matsu. Rather, I joined the street dogs in howling my way into that silent city.

  My father laid me, still bloody, on my mother’s chest as he sewed up the wound he had created. My sister held the lamp over his work. Careful, tiny stitches. His hands were steady.

  —

  One of my mother’s breasts became infected and the vessels flared up, a red coral bouquet. The crackle of illness was more madness to the chaos. Fever sweat drenched her clothes. With the radio station under government guard, everything was rumor. The rumor of the shootings at the railway station and in front of the American consulate that had taken place on the day of my birth. The rumor that the railroad tracks had been dismantled by citizens to keep Governor-General Chen Yi’s troops from moving north. The rumor that the soldiers had used forbidden hollow-tipped bullets. Rumors of indiscriminate shootings, of razor-wire barricades in front of the governor’s office, and of Mainlanders tossed off moving trains by angry Taiwanese. Rumors whispered through the fence, by the rice seller on the back stoop of his shop, by the lone tofu vendor who dared pull his cart through the alleys. The only certainty was the loss of electricity, which caused the radio to intermittently sputter to life like a ghost awakened, then die down to silence with the lights.

  Dr. Tsai, my father—Baba—had managed to keep the dead man a secret until the baby was born, but now my mother had the thought of the corpse stiffening downstairs to keep her company during her fever. She knew Baba had walked past the body when he went to fetch the pills for her infection, and she swore he was shrouded in death when he returned upstairs. She closed her eyes and turned away.

  With my two brothers clinging to her skirt, Ah Zhay brought broth to our mother. The three children peered at the new baby. One look was enough for my brothers, who spent the rest of Mama’s bedridden period reveling in my parents’ inattention. For two afternoons, they rummaged through my mother’s art supplies, wore her pencils down, drenched the paints in water, and tore the sketch pads until Ah Zhay, catching them, spanked them on behalf of our sick mother.

  And then there was the matter of the baby—me—a stubborn girl who let the nipple tickle the roof of her mouth but did not latch on. Baba brought a bowl and helped drain Mama’s breast by hand while I wailed with hunger.

  —

  On the second of March, the man with the hangdog face returned for his friend. In the doorway of the clinic, he muttered his apologies over and over, and Baba had only to gesture toward the covered body to silence him. The man shuddered and began pacing, frantic, crying out, “No, no, no.” He stumbled toward the body, then staggered back, almost comically, as he caught the odor.

  Baba didn’t try to comfort him. He stepped outside and permitted the man his private grief, letting him cry until he was spent. Finally, the man, vigorously rubbing his eyes with his sleeve, came outside.

  “When?” the man asked. Now, he could barely lift his eyes to the shrouded body, a lump of white in the dark office.

  “Not long after you left.” Baba offered him a cigarette, which he refused. Each breath ended in the exhausted sigh that follows violent tears. Baba took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled. “Who shot him?”

  The man shook his head, but began to speak anyway. He said that they had heard about the widow cigarette vendor on the radio, and a call had gone out for people to march to the executive office and demand punishment for the officers involved. He and his friend had been talking for months about the corruption on the island. At last, people were taking action; naturally, they decided to join the protest.

  “Naturally,” Baba echoed.

  They thought they would crowd the plaza, shout, and maybe the governor-general would address them. They didn’t expect the barrier of soldiers, all wielding guns. The crowd hadn’t called for blood, and yet the soldiers had shot.

  Baba continued smoking calmly, never revealing the anger rising in his chest. And he thought how stupid the authorities had been—didn’t they realize an act like this would only inspire more people to oppose them? A massacre may incur silence, but a random shooting inspires ardor. This was the truth of human behavior, he decided. And it was true for him. The zeitgeist, he thought. Discontent was in the air; the explosion had only been a matter of when.

  Later in the afternoon, the man returned with friends to carry the body away. They’d borrowed someone’s truck, and they loaded the corpse in the bed and gently arranged the sheet around him.

  —

  The governor-general called a community meeting in order to find a solution to the unrest. The people, expecting nothing but honesty, were not suspicious of the suddenly conciliatory approach. My mother shook with chills and dampened the bedding with her fever sweat. My sister and brothers, who had not gone outside since the first day of rioting—five days—were restless in the destructive way of children; they’d already punched through one of the paper screens downstairs in their murderous chase of a poor gecko that had caught their eye. Despite the chaos under his own roof, Baba put on his coat and hat, told my sister to keep an eye on my mother, and left.

  My father barely recognized the Taipei he stepped into that Tuesday morni
ng. Once he exited the narrow, crowded lanes of our neighborhood—the windows pleading mute innocence with curtains or tacked-up towels and old shirts—he found that nearly half the buildings on the wide main boulevard were boarded up. Hastily painted signs—ragged banners fluttering from windows and over doorways—called out for justice or cursed the building’s inhabitants as “mainland pigs.” GO HOME! the posters demanded. The click of geta—Japanese wood-soled sandals that he’d not heard since Japan’s surrender made its fashions suddenly suspect—sounded from the feet of women hurrying by, telegraphing the message to angry Taiwanese: I am one of you, do not beat me. Military trucks rolled by like pensive beasts.

  At this moment, I want to call out across the decades, “Baba, turn around. Go home.”

  He kept walking.

  Thousands of people, their stomachs ill with anticipation, filled the hot auditorium—the same room in which the Japanese, just a year and a half before, had signed over the island. Baba wedged himself among them. Flanking their leader, the governor-general’s men sat on the stage like a row of grim judges, not even flinching as gunfire rattled in the plaza beyond the doors. Baba noticed that even when Governor-General Chen Yi was not smiling, his pudgy face looked amused. The men on the auditorium floor, stripping off their jackets and rolling up their sleeves, made their demands.

  “Release the wrongly arrested!”

  “End armed patrols!”

  “Restore communication!”

  “Negotiate in good faith: no more troops!”

  Baba pushed his way toward the stage and demanded to speak too.

  A man, sitting to the right of the governor-general, pointed at Baba. The auditorium quieted.

  “Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Tsai.” This was Baba at his best: his words loud and clear, his arms relaxed by his sides, standing centered as if integrity aligned everything inside of him.

  With steady eyes and voice, Baba spoke about the friendship between Generalissimo Chiang and the United States. He said that since the money of democracy was helping to fund the war against the communists, it seemed only right that the Republic of China should apply those same principles on the island. Taiwanese, he argued, deserved representation in the new government. The rhetoric of American democracy was everywhere that week; there had even been a roaming truck that blared “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The United States had run an impressive pro-democracy propaganda campaign after the war, and the island, fresh out of Japan’s colonial clutch, had believed it all. A secret idealist, Baba had too.