IN ALL WAYS, he was a stranger.
With a wary eye, my mother continued to watch my father. When she hung clothes in the courtyard, she would glance over her shoulder as he helped her. He squeezed water from a shirt with the intense and clumsy concentration of a child learning to thread a needle. Or her gaze would drift down the long hall, from kitchen to front room, where my father sat in awe of the newspaper. Reacquainting his eyes with the look of words, he read article after article, then began again when he had finished. As he read, he rubbed at the paper until his fingers were black and the surface pilled.
At dinner, we watched his shaking hands as he brought his bowl to his mouth, the chopsticks clattering in his fingers. I stared at his damaged teeth until my mother snapped at me to keep eating. For days, Baba refused to leave the house. He would not bathe and he carried his stench through the rooms behind him, like the shadow of a shadow.
I hated baths too. One evening, when my mother ordered me into the water, I pointed out her hypocrisy.
“But he doesn’t have to,” I protested.
“He who?” Her eyes brightened, an ebony rage sliding over her irises. “He who?”
Through gritted teeth, I muttered, “Baba.”
I didn’t even see her lift her arm; the smack of her hand on my cheek was loud and painful and left a memory of burning splinters on my skin. When I cried out, she hit me again.
“Stop!” I caressed my cheek with both hands.
“Don’t ever talk about your father that way. He?” Tiny glitters of sweat arose along the bridge of her nose. “You don’t want a bath? Fine.” She crouched beside the tub and grabbed the handles.
“No, Mama! I’ll wash.”
“Ungrateful child.” With a rasp of effort, she overturned the tub. The water burst out, an errant wave consuming the floor. It lapped the wall and swirled around the bristles of a broom. It crept under the feet of the stove. Dried bug carcasses floated back out and spun in sluggish circles.
“He is your father,” she reiterated as she surveyed the flooded kitchen. “Your Baba.”
—
One afternoon, a month after his return, I toiled away on my homework at the courtyard table beneath the shadow of the banyan. My father brought out a stool and settled across from me.
“What are you doing?”
I was practicing my multiplication tables. I offered the same cool politeness I would have given a very distant cousin. I did not meet his eyes.
He continued to watch me work. I had not yet memorized the times tables and I resorted to drawing little clusters of hash marks. But under his gaze, my pencil dragged on the page; I felt I had even forgotten how to draw a line.
“This is not the way to learn.”
I lost my place counting and began again.
“Where is your abacus?”
“I don’t know.” It was under my bed. If I did not look at him, he might leave.
“Forget it. You should memorize this. Look at me.”
Finally, I raised my eyes. His chin was dotted with dried blood from his morning shave.
“You should be able to recite it without thinking.”
I nodded.
“Give it to me.” Without waiting, he took my homework and folded it in half. I uttered a tiny note of protest, but quickly swallowed the sound. I looked into his eyes. Dua Hyan had Baba’s eyes: heavy lidded and sparsely lashed, and I found comfort in thinking of my brother.
“Three times five.”
I counted by fives silently. “Fifteen.”
“Good. Three times six.”
I added three to my last answer.
“Good. Three times eight.”
Feeling confident, I answered quickly. “Twenty-eight.”
“Wrong. Three times eight.”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Wrong.” The word cracked in the air. I flinched.
The correct answer receded. I held out my fingers and counted upward from eight.
“Stop. Stop. Does anybody else in your class count on their fingers? Does your teacher let you count? How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven! And you are counting on your fingers like a five-year-old?” His eyes widened, ringing his irises in white. It was a look of madness.
I dropped my limp hands into my lap.
“Follow me.” He began to recite the times tables, pausing after each one to let me repeat. My voice dropped to a drone. I watched a bird hop from branch to branch in a tree. I watched the pigs snuffle against one another in their pen. I thought about Cheng Ping, a boy in my class, and how I might impress him with my math smarts.
“Pay attention!” Baba’s voice startled me. “You aren’t listening.”
“I am.” My voice was meek. Mama often got frustrated and let me be. However, Baba seemed to be having the opposite reaction. I felt squeezed tighter and tighter. Go, just go, I silently pleaded.
He unfolded my homework and erased my afternoon’s worth of work. “You won’t eat until you can recite it perfectly.”
“What?” Fear of my mother kept me from kicking this stranger and shouting my refusal.
“No dinner until you can do this without mistakes.”
I looked at him. I no longer saw a trace of anyone familiar in his eyes. No echo of Dua Hyan or hint of Ah Zhay. His eyes had clouded over, as if he conversed with another person in another time. I didn’t want to listen to him. I scrunched my nose up in disgust at this injustice.
Luckily, he did not catch my impertinence. He stood up. My homework lay before me, smudged, creased, and littered with eraser ash.
—
While my family ate, I murmured numbers over sheets of homework fanning across the floor. The fragrance of fried pork, the glistening creamy fat, the salty cabbage, and the steamed rice made my stomach burn. My head felt empty. I felt abandoned and pitiful, like a poor foundling suffering at the windows of the rich. Every once in a while, I cast my disgusted eye at the source of my misery.
“Let her eat,” my grandmother said.
My father did not look up from his bowl. “No.”
“She’s worked for hours.”
My mother tried to hush my grandmother. She dropped food into my grandmother’s bowl, attempting to appease her with filial piety.
My grandmother was not swayed. “This is the way you treat your daughter?” Her chopsticks, stabbing the air, emphasized each word.
“Ma,” my mother murmured.
My father glared at my grandmother. “This isn’t your business.” A blade slid through his words.
No one said anything. My brother-in-law found something fascinating in the surface of the table while my sister fed my niece. My grandfather concentrated on flicking grains of rice off his vegetables. Zhee Hyan searched the communal bowl for a particular slice of meat. My grandmother threw down her chopsticks and left the table with such force that the chair legs skidded across the floor.
My mother pushed more and more rice into her mouth, more quickly than she could chew it. Her cheeks swelled and the food crowded her tongue. Tears fell off her chin. No one acknowledged my grandmother’s departure or my mother’s crying.
“Baba, I’m ready.” My mastery would save dinner.
“Come here.”
I stood before them. He told me to start. I enunciated carefully, trying to think past my hunger. Numbers. Numbers twisting around each other into bigger numbers, numbers marching in troops. I tried to visualize the sheet I’d been staring at since the afternoon.
I got to the nines. And even though I knew the nines table merely repeats multiples that have come before, but in reverse order—nine times six rather than six times nine—I stumbled.
“No,” my father said. His wooden face declared his duty: enforce the rules, don’t pity the suffering.
My mother whispered, “Please, just let her eat.”
“She’s wrong. Keep working.”
“Darling, come eat. Mama will fix you some food
.”
“No!” Rice flew from my father’s mouth and his bowl cracked against the table.
“I don’t want to eat,” I said.
I wanted my father to watch the suffering he’d created. I wanted to grow light-headed, waste to white, topple over so that guilt would seize him, so he would cry out, curse himself, and want to die.
“Try again when I’m done,” he said, returning to his dinner.
“Yes, Baba.”
—
I fell asleep on the floor, crumpling my homework. My mother woke me. She held a bowl of cold food, hushed me, fed me like a baby.
—
Baba kept his vow that I would work harder. Every afternoon, after I’d fed the chickens and had a snack, Baba sat with me at the courtyard table and watched me do my homework. After I was done with that, he brought out the lessons he’d created while I was at school: pages of math problems, sheets of characters to copy, classical poems to memorize.
On some days, he kept me at the table until dark. He would bring out an old lamp and set it before me and I had to write through the dancing shadows it cast. I glimpsed Zhee Hyan inside reading a comic. Ah Zhay marched through the halls clasping my giggling niece. Darkness swam into my eyes from so many hours by the yellow light.
This was how I learned that I was his favorite child.
16
WHEN BABA WAS NOT SUPERVISING my education, he spent most days in his room. Ah Zhay would lean against the doorframe with the baby on her hip and tell Baba little frivolous things: that Mei Mei had just put together a sentence—just three words, but nonetheless…—or a piece of gossip that her husband had heard at his construction job. At the table, she put meat in his bowl, and she brought back cigarettes for him when she went to town.
He nodded at her stories, ate the meat, smoked the cigarettes, but his eyes looked at the wall or the floor, anywhere but at her coaxing, anxious smile.
“He’s not well,” she’d whisper to me as we prepared dinner. Feeling guilty, I nodded. I plunged bean sprouts into a basin of cold water and she drove a cleaver through a slab of pork. The knife stuck for a moment in the damp wood, and we both ignored the dirt in the creases of my neck from the long afternoon I’d spent with Baba looking for frogs to supplement my science lesson.
Ah Zhay was the oldest. Of the four of us, she had known him best.
She knew his hand on the back bar of her bicycle when she learned to ride, the look of his brushstroke spreading across a scroll, and the sound of his voice reading the paper aloud at dinner. Her memory, unlike mine, contained whole narratives: incidents with beginnings, middles, and ends.
—
We awaited Dua Hyan’s visit home for the Mid-Autumn Festival. If Ah Zhay could not bring Baba back to normal, perhaps the sight of his oldest son would. We scrubbed the floors and cleaned the windows. Mama aired out the bedding in Dua Hyan’s old room.
I expected Dua Hyan to be different after so long away, that he would have become as cheerful and easy as the soldiers I saw in town, but beneath his sunburn and the train odor lingering in his wrinkled uniform, the usual wariness still knotted his shoulders. When he stepped off the train, he ignored Mama’s smiles and my exclamations, set down his duffel, and bowed deeply as he met Baba again, his body reaching back to the gestures of a defeated culture. I thought of the man with amputated limbs who dragged himself through the market: he’d set his bowl before us and violently knock his head against the ground, as if only the most debased self was worthy of a spare coin. Dua Hyan too looked only at the ground and, like the beggar, he could not see the wincing face above him.
—
To celebrate Dua Hyan’s return, we went to Café Paradiso, a European-style restaurant with red vinyl chairs where they served coffee in white porcelain cups rimmed with gold. Mama said it was like a café they used to go to in Taipei where artists and writers gathered before the war.
“It was just like being in Paris: people fighting over art, arguing about surrealism, defending Picasso, hating Magritte. I studied French at university. Did you know that?” She flashed a full smile at Baba. She was so giddy that she spoke while chewing. I half listened, bored by the list of foreign names. I was more interested in blowing the steam off my coffee and watching the vapor fade away. My father’s knife broke through a tendon of meat and squealed against the plate.
Mama stopped for a moment, glanced at my father, then continued to tell us about a theater director they’d known who had chosen to move to Japan when the war ended. The director had once been a silent film narrator, a benshi, one of the most famous in Taipei.
“They put his name at the top of the marquee,” she said, “above the title of the movie.”
“Watch your voice,” my father warned. He glanced around and returned to his steak.
We fell silent. His hands trembled as he lifted his fork. That afternoon, my mother had finally coaxed him into a haircut, and a ring of pale skin traced his trimmed hairline. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy.
“I haven’t been to a movie in a long time,” Dua Hyan said.
“Let’s go,” my mother said. “The place near the airfield.”
With his mouth on his coffee cup, my father muttered, “We’ll talk outside.”
“Ah Lu’s mom sells peanuts there,” Zhee Hyan said. Ah Lu was a classmate whose name came up often enough to reveal Zhee Hyan’s feelings for her.
I taunted him with the tines of my fork. “Ah Lu, Ah Lu, Ah Lu.”
“Shut up.”
Dua Hyan dug into his food and talked over us. “I’m starving. I feel like I haven’t eaten in months.” He laughed. If we were loud enough, if we said enough, maybe we could erase Baba’s fear.
“You do look thinner,” Mama noted for the tenth time that day.
“You have more muscles,” I declared.
Dua Hyan smiled. “Check it out.” He pushed up his sleeve and flexed his arm.
“Ooh,” I teased. I reached over and squeezed his biceps. “Like Popeye.”
“So what was it like? Did you kill any commies?” Zhee Hyan asked. I leaned in. Even my mother shifted, betraying her curiosity about the battle Dua Hyan had just witnessed.
Dua Hyan began to speak but my father interrupted him. “Be quiet. People are listening.” I glanced at my mother to see if this was true.
The usual restaurant din rang around us: clinking silverware, waitresses shouting at the kitchen, and a rumble of intersecting conversations. The lovers sitting in the booths across the aisle smiled and cooed and self-consciously wiped imagined crumbs from their mouths. Two men talked over coffee and pastries. Other families loudly coaxed their sullen children.
“You’re here now,” my mother said. This was how she soothed my father during his nightmares, or when he imagined men outside our windows. It was what she had quietly said when Dua Hyan had first bowed before Baba in his Nationalist uniform.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Baba said.
The cheer vanished from my mother’s eyes. She arched her neck, feigning dignity as she did when she felt humiliated. I wished my father would go away again, then quickly pinched myself for my evil thought.
Dua Hyan tried to distract us. “A movie is a great idea.”
Baba glanced around the restaurant. A boy, reprimanded by his mother, had begun to cry. At another table, a woman left a stunned man staring at her empty lipstick-marked cup. Baba’s gaze lingered on the two pastry-eating men, who now pored over a clipped newspaper article. I found everyone utterly boring; I wondered what Baba’s critical eye saw.
“Ba?” Dua Hyan said. “What do you think?”
Baba kept his eyes on the two men as he uttered his agreement.
“Hurray,” I chirped. “Let’s go. Hurry, Mama.” I gulped down the rest of my coffee and coughed on the silt.
—
The theater near the airfield was actually just a sheet tacked up in a fenced lot that lay beneath the airfield’s flight path. The night was warm,
and the film, Old Yeller, dubbed into Mandarin, was occasionally interrupted by the roar of descending planes. The screen family mirrored ours: a missing father, two brothers and a sister. But Dua Hyan had never had a dog—some loyal, scrappy thing, but regal—and become some hobbled-together combo that dummied the missing father.
If only we’d had a dog, I thought. Not some mean street dog that nipped at your heels when you rode by on your bike, though maybe he’d start off that way. I’d feed him clumped old rice and gristle I hid in my sleeve during dinner, and coax him closer and closer until he was tamed.
Behind me, my father whispered to my mother. She said, “You’re losing your mind.”
The family lived in a house made of logs, but like us, they raised their own chickens and pigs. They had a cow with horns like a water buffalo. Though I’d seen American faces on cosmetic boxes in the drugstore and on advertisements, this was my first sight of moving, talking Americans. The mother was lovely and bleached out, like a shirt left too long in the sun. Her eyes were the color of marbles.
“We’re not going,” my mother whispered so loudly that the woman in front of me turned around.
I pretended I didn’t hear them. If we just didn’t listen to him, maybe he would stop.
My father gripped my neck. His hand was clammy, the heat throbbing against my skin: “Let’s go.”
“Let go of her.” My mother’s voice was firm.
“Ba,” Dua Hyan said.
If we left, I swore I would never forgive him. I crossed my arms and hunched over. “Don’t touch me,” I hissed.
“Come.”
People on either side of us glanced over.
“I don’t want to go!” I shouted.
His grip tightened. “Stand up.”
With his hand on my neck, I had no choice.
“Sit down!” a man yelled. A chorus of agreement joined him. My mother grabbed at Baba’s sleeve, but he yanked it out of her grip and urged me out of the row, accidentally overturning our stools. My mother and brothers scrambled after us.
I was yoked in my father’s pinch. My face prickled with hot anger; I felt no pain. He led me through the gate. The rest of the family trailed us in a tumult of protests. “Baba, slow down,” Dua Hyan called, while Mama cried, “What’s happening?”
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