“Coward!”
What defense could he make? Everything she said was true. Yet, as a reflex, he denied it. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” Everyone heard the pathetic weakness in his voice. A whole chorus of accusing eyes: some bright, some bloodshot, others weeping pus, but all certain of his guilt. “You don’t understand,” he said.
“Mr. Tsai.” Dr. Sun stood in his office doorway.
Baba said, “I don’t know her.”
“Go home,” Dr. Sun said.
Su Ming Guo’s wife’s hand trembled as she wiped saliva from the corners of her mouth.
“Fire him,” she said.
“This is a clinic, not a courtroom.” Dr. Sun’s voice was sharp. “Mr. Tsai, please go. Take the day off.”
Baba grunted out some vague affirmation. He took his lunch tin, his hat, and his coat and slipped out under the glare of all those sick people.
—
As he pedaled home, the sun melting away the February chill, he thought of killing himself. He could strangle himself. He thought of the aborigine uprisings of his youth, of the hero Mona Rudao who had resisted even under the poison gas canisters of the Japanese. At the end of the siege, many of his men had been found in the forest hanging from trees. Better to die than surrender. Though the word “Savages!” had been splashed across the papers, Baba had found virtue—some deep, honorable machismo—in their deaths. In suicide, he saw the possibility of redemption.
He left his bicycle on the grass and made his way across the rocks to the river. In the distance, a turtle lifted its pointed snout, then dipped back under the surface. The water was slow, deep, brown.
He’d feared drowning once: one night, when soldiers had marched him by water that was already thick with bodies. The gesture was a threat, he realized later. But at that moment, cringing, waiting for the boom of a single gunshot that would drive the line of men—who were wired together at the wrist—into the water, he thought he would also be swallowed up by the dark. At the same time, he couldn’t believe the stupidity of the killers: water reveals its evidence. Death floats. The soldiers would shoot only one of the men—the others, lashed to the first, would be dragged in after. He wanted to be the one who was shot. He prayed for it.
But they had kept walking.
He still feared drowning. He crouched, feeling warmth radiating into his soles from the rocks. He was a doctor; surely he could craft a better death, something more elegant. Bloodless.
On the other side of the river, a heron picked something out of the grass and jerked forward on its stalky legs.
He was six months out of prison. He had dreamed of the sky, and then discovered its endlessness a burden. He had imagined his children grown, and found, instead, these flawed creatures running through lives he would have forbidden. He picked up a flat stone and chucked it into the water. It skipped once and disappeared. He hadn’t set all this in motion. He threw another stone into the water. The heron lifted its head and cocked an eye at him.
—
My father walked his bike toward the house. He had sweat through his shirt. He gripped the handlebars to steady his hands. He could not walk fast enough. At the pump in the courtyard, Jie-fu ladled water over his head. He must have seen Baba’s shoes stop next to him. He shook the water off his head and warily greeted Baba.
“Stand up,” Baba said. His hands, heavy with blood, felt like sledgehammers.
Jie-fu stepped back. Water ran into his eyes and down his neck, soaking his collar. His eyes skimmed around the courtyard—it would be just the two of them now.
“You’ve been watching me,” Baba said. Every finger felt swollen. His fingertips throbbed and he barely noticed the fearful tick of blood in his throat.
“What?” Jie-fu blinked. He didn’t wipe his face.
“I want you to leave.” Joy followed the demand; he wanted to weep. Finally, he could say what he really felt. Wasn’t it everyone’s task to root out the enemy? Wasn’t he following the government directive?
“I don’t understand.”
“Leave. Leave today.” A good citizen. He had served everyone who had demanded it. Now he would scour away this final rat.
“I don’t understand,” Jie-fu repeated. He said it like a dare. Baba wondered if the man was pretending his stupidity.
Ah Zhay ran out of the house, her eyes wide and her hair loose. “Baba!” She rushed between her father and husband. “What’s going on?”
“Your father told me to leave.” Jie-fu’s surprise spoiled into anger.
“What did you do? Baba, what did he do?”
“What did I do?” Jie-fu snapped. “He’s crazy.”
“Baba, he’s my husband. If he leaves, I leave too. What did he do?”
“He’s been spying on us.” Finally, Baba admitted it. The burden slipped away; he felt free. His daughter should know whom she had married.
“Baba, no, he hasn’t.” Ah Zhay caressed Baba’s arm. “Baba, if he leaves, I leave.”
Baba didn’t have to punch or pound. The steel in his bones entered his words. “Then you leave.”
“Baba, I said if he leaves, I have to leave.” Ah Zhay scanned Baba’s face, waiting for Baba to realize his mistake and all the levels of loss he was enacting. Even when I had rebelled, or Mama had withdrawn, Ah Zhay had been there for our father, coaxing, yearning. She had been his only true ally. One quiet night, not long after Baba’s return, I had seen her steal into the courtyard and present to him the pair of glasses she had chosen from the wagon that Mama had dragged to the secondhand market. Her face was expectant; it was a declaration of love. Baba had picked up the glasses, unfolded them and turned them around, then set them back down. “I no longer wear glasses like these,” Baba had said, and I noticed how tightly Ah Zhay held them in her fist when she walked back inside.
Now, Baba again refused her love. “Then go. You all go.” He could be free of all of them.
Mama’s arrival interrupted them. She stumbled off her bicycle, her face swollen with tears, and staggered toward them.
“How could you?” she cried. “You lied.” She turned to Ah Zhay. “He told Su Ming Guo it was safe to come home and now they’ve arrested him.”
Baba saw understanding light in my sister’s eyes, the gauzy veil whisked away.
“Traitor,” she said.
Baba slapped her. The back of his hand on her cheek—so hard that he felt her teeth, so hard that her skin flamed into a scorned symbol that she bore for days.
Jie-fu shoved Baba, who staggered and fell. Baba glared at his foolish family—they didn’t appreciate that his decision had been one of loyalty. The soft, soft scrape of the pen on the page as he signed his name—he had saved them all.
Standing over him, Mama whispered, “I don’t know you.”
—
I waited at the school gate until the crowd had thinned to just a few students who had stayed to sweep the classrooms and wash the blackboards. I became more worried. I searched for him among the crowds passing by, at the same time anxious that someone would say pityingly, “Are you lost?”
When afternoon darkened to dusk, I realized that my father wasn’t coming, so I rode home alone.
The house was eerily quiet. No clanging in the kitchen, or my niece cooing away somewhere. I did not even smell my grandfather’s pipe.
“Ma?” I called. I leaned my bike against the wall. A dark figure flickered at the corner of the house. “Hello?”
The figure hissed, “Come here.”
I walked over to where Zhee Hyan was crouched out of sight of the door.
“What are you doing?” I expected the trouble was his. If Zhee Hyan was sullen and Baba was in a mood, the clash could send the house into darkness.
His damp hand grabbed my wrist and pulled me down. “Don’t go in there. Stay here.”
I curled my book bag into my lap and steadied myself against the wall. “What happened?”
He was still in his school uniform, his knees du
sty and his shirt cuffs yellowed with sweat. He smelled like the boys at school: iron and dirt and a slight, bitter mildew in his clothes. His breath was sour, as if he hadn’t eaten for a long time. “Ah Zhay left.” As he recounted the fight, hot streaks of guilt burned my skin. I had brought the paper and pen to Baba. Just like Baba, I also had not refused. I was just a little girl, I told myself. Yet a man sat in jail because of me.
Afraid that Zhee Hyan might suspect me too, I spoke quickly. “Where did they go?”
“Don’t know.”
“And Grandma and Grandpa?”
“Inside.”
I peered around the corner at the house cloaked in quiet blackness. We could have been two wanderers in a remote land happening upon a long-abandoned home.
“But it’s dark.” My protest came out like a bark.
“I know.”
Something in my heart exploded. The men on mopeds had come because of Baba. I had brought the paper and pen only because Baba had asked. Baba had caused all this trouble. My face flushed and my ears throbbed. “I wish he had never come home.”
Zhee Hyan flinched. I saw the pain of his missing birds flash quickly over his face, but he answered, “Don’t say that.”
“I hate him.”
“Don’t say that.” Zhee Hyan, hunched and too tall, looked like a man forced to return to childhood in karmic punishment. “He’s still our father.” With Dua Hyan gone, Zhee Hyan should have been the one to save us. But he was just a silly boy.
“I’m not going to stay here,” I said.
“Don’t talk crazy.” Zhee Hyan hugged his knees against a blast of wind. The moonlight glistened against the whites of his eyes. He would not look at me.
“This isn’t even a family!” I shouted.
“Stop. You’re just a dumb girl.”
That was enough. I had no one but myself. Zhee Hyan snatched the hem of my skirt when I rose, but I tore it from him and ran to my bike. My heart was beating so fast that blindness laced the edges of my vision. Somehow I scrambled my way onto the seat and pushed off.
I had lost my father when I was two weeks old. I pitied myself, a fatherless girl riding along the black fields, past faraway homes lit like dollhouses. I didn’t think about where I would sleep, only that I wanted to go away. I vowed to never go back.
Family.
I decided the word was meaningless, some dream sold to us by storytellers and government men.
1971
21
BY 1971, THE VOCABULARY of the world had changed. Some argue that 1968—the year of the student protests in France and the United States, Poland and Yugoslavia; the year Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot—was the moment that the dictionaries were burned and rewritten, but this claim disregards the change that happens day by day, so incremental that it is invisible to us, like a snail sliming its way across a road. Somehow, we ended up on the other side of that road, in a world of two Germanys, two Vietnams, and two Chinas, one Free and one Red. The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. I’d heard the battle cry for so long that I didn’t even question it. The Nationalist government was stuffing tiny leaflets into tiny caplets for fish to swallow so that mainland fishermen would receive the KMT message along with their dinner. Toys bearing the flag of Free China were tossed into the ocean to be washed up on mainland shores. Armageddon was coming—always approaching, never arriving—in the guise of a showdown between communism and democracy.
I was twenty-four years old, working as a waitress in a restaurant near the university, serving mostly the American GIs who flew in from Jungle Survival School at Clark Air Force Base, northwest of Manila, to their new station at Ching Chuan Kang Air Force Base, in Taichung, Republic of China. Men of every shade with their Levi’s and pressed shirts and aviator glasses and shorn hair. Word by word, I transformed my lexicon—“Here’s the skinny,” “Foxy!” “How’s it hanging?” “She’s a piece of work”—learning English from the customers and from the class I took a few mornings a week that was taught by a young, red-haired Mormon man.
The restaurant, the Golden Rooster Garden, was a huge, open-air, shedlike building with a concrete floor that we sprayed down every night. During the summer afternoon thunderstorms, we unrolled the bamboo shades and lashed them to the pillars that held up the roof. People tried to talk over the rain clattering against the bamboo, but thunder was always followed by a moment of silence. The rain streamed in under the shades and streaked across the floor, such a relief from the thick tropical heat that no one minded.
The work was monotonous but fast; the hours passed quickly. I practiced my English as I served tall brown bottles of Taiwan Beer, bowls of soy-sauce-drenched fried noodles seasoned to the American palate, platters of salted shrimp and steamed crabs. At night, I rode home on my scooter with bags of leftovers dangling from the handlebars.
—
Other words had changed too. “Courtyard” no longer meant what it had when I was a child and chased hens across the banyan-shaded expanse of my grandparents’ courtyard. Now it meant a cramped space twenty minutes away, crowded with motor scooters, drying raincoats, a birdcage still littered with seed that had belonged to my niece’s long-dead bird. I lived with my sister and her husband and their three children in a house in the South River Veterans Village, where my brother-in-law had received housing for his service in the Nationalist air force. I stayed in the dark back bedroom that had a barred window overlooking the small weedy lot where we burned the neighborhood trash. The front room was paneled in a veneer of laminated wood. A large cross hung in an alcove alongside a mini plastic Christmas tree with tiny colored lights that stayed up year-round. My sister, lying in bed during her tough third pregnancy, had seen an angel hovering above her: a huge blue-faced angel with thick white wings that brushed against the sides of the room. The angel’s words matched the blood beating in her ears: He can save you. The angel pressed against the mosquito net, mesh tight against its skin like a thousand cracks: Repent and He will save you. The voice was so loud that the world collapsed around her. Her fever broke, she went to church, and she had all her children baptized.
Jesus was also how she had reconciled with my mother. They went to church together on Sundays and Bible study on Wednesday evenings.
“Come with us,” they urged in bright voices. Sometimes my mother said, more concerned, “Jesus will be good for you. I worry that you haven’t found a path. Jesus can show you a path.”
“I agree,” I said. “Someday, Mama.” But I never went. The remaining “sinners” of the family—Baba, me, Jie-fu, and my brothers—agreed on this matter: my mother’s conversion had been strange. I found it less about faith than control. However puzzled, Baba treated it with respect and quickly hushed my sarcastic comments. Perhaps Baba guiltily saw himself as the trigger?
In Ah Zhay and Mama’s church, everyone was a “sister” or “brother”: Sister Chen, Sister Tsai, Brother Zhang, Brother Yu. When it was Ah Zhay’s turn to host, they prayed and sang hymns in the living room while the kids played in the alley and I read magazines in my room and listened to the group’s long murmurings punctuated by loud “amens.” After they were done, I drifted into the room to share little plastic cups of Apple Sidra and munch on flaky Danish butter cookies from a tin. The sisters and brothers cooed over my niece and nephews and told me how wonderful it would be if I came to church too. I nodded, said yes, promised I would make it if I didn’t have to work. They were always gone by the time Jie-fu came home, his clothes and hair steeped with spices and grease from his job as a dishwasher at a Szechuan restaurant. He brought food for us in plastic bags tied with pink string and we ate at the round table in the kitchen while Ah Zhay told us about everyone they had prayed for that evening. Every week, they prayed for Baba.
—
Ah Zhay had also started praying for our brother Zhee Hyan. He lived in a tiny studio in town and worked as a “houseboy” cleaning barracks at the air base. He said the GIs called him
“Joey,” which was, he said, better than the nicknames they’d given to the two other men who worked with him, “Donald” and “Mickey.” Despite their jokes, they were kind to him. They bought whisky for him at the PX and, in return, he took them to “barbershops” and hostess bars.
“You’re disgusting,” I told him one night as I watched him polishing the handlebars of his motorcycle in the alley outside Ah Zhay’s house.
“Why?” He chuckled. He twisted the rag around a finger and buffed a spot.
“Come on. Do they pay you?”
“Who?”
“The GIs. The bars. I don’t know. Anyone.”
“Well, it’s not charity. Being a houseboy”—he crouched and began attending to the front forks—“is not a lucrative job.”
“So drive a taxi! Become a mechanic! Do something else!”
He laughed again. “You’re so naive. Do you want to meet some Americans?”
“No!” I exclaimed, and hoped it sounded sincerely offended.
“Come on. They’re fun. We’re going to the beach next weekend. I’ll bring you.”
“I’m not that kind of girl.” I almost wished I was, but my whole being resisted it. I could not trust anything that easy or fun.
“Of course not. You’re my sister. They want to meet nice girls. You’re a nice girl. The nicest girl.” He looked up at me with a placating smile.
I nudged him with my toe. “Stop. Ah Zhay is going to kill you. Corrupting your baby sister.”
“What corruption? There’s no corruption.” He turned back to the bike. “I’m totally innocent.”
—
My parents were concerned about my unmarried status and their nagging soon turned into action.
“Wei, the second son of Uncle Lin, is visiting.” As soon as my mother started, I wished I had ignored the telephone. “He’s getting a Ph.D. from Berkeley.”
My parents had not forgotten how Uncle Lin had sent over Aunty Naomi with money for my mother when Baba was arrested. Aunty Naomi had held the matches when my mother burned the mementos of our life in Taipei.
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