He clicked the lighter and I was dismissed.
—
Wei called me a few days later. He borrowed his father’s car and drove down from Taipei. This time, I waited at my sister’s house in the veterans village, and I wondered what he thought as he made his way through the laundry-strung alleys, kicking away dried cat turds and bits of loose paper that had not yet been swept up by a conscientious grandmother. He called through the screen door. I saw him—glowing in the sunlight, all slick-combed hair and sweat-glistening skin—before he saw me. His clothes were fashionable, but decidedly American—the colors and cuts slightly off. I felt a twinge of pity. I wondered if he felt like a stranger here in Taiwan, the place that should have been home.
Knowing he was too light-blinded to clearly see inside, I let him stare into the darkness for a moment before I returned his greeting.
When I nudged open the sticky door, he smiled and asked, “Is your sister here? I haven’t seen her since I was a kid.”
“She’s out,” I said. I locked the door.
“Let’s make a fresh start.” He smiled—a self-conscious and almost silly grin—and I noticed how uniform his teeth were. “Hi, my name is Lin Wei. I’m pleased to meet you.” He offered his hand. I caught myself smiling and reminded myself: One date. This is punishment, not fun.
I took his hand. “Sure. Nice to meet you.”
“No politics today, I promise.”
“Swear.” I pretended a searching look from the corner of my eye, and realized I had learned more from Ting Ting than I’d thought.
He held up his hand. “I swear.”
—
We went to Sun Moon Lake, an obligatory tourist destination and a terrible choice on a sweltering summer day. The road to the lake was winding and rough past banana and orange groves and fields of pineapples. We rattled along with the windows down, no comfort coming from the hot wind blasting into the car. I’d spent all my summers in this heat, but I couldn’t stop complaining about it.
“Berkeley has mild summers,” he said.
For an hour, I’d managed to forget the reason for the trip, the weight bearing down on both sides, the hope from both our families that Wei would leave here in a month with a fiancée, but his comment reminded me.
“I’m just saying,” he said to my silence. “As a comparison.”
The lake came into view. “I’ve actually never been here,” I said. I stuck my hand out the window and batted at the wind.
“You should see Lake Tahoe.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s on the border between California and Nevada. You’ve never seen water that blue.”
“Oh.” I offered the only piece of information I knew about Nevada. “My English teacher is from Nevada.” I grabbed the leather strap above the door and gritted my teeth as we jerked over a series of potholes.
“Prostitution is legal there.” He kept his eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel, a model driver.
I looked back at the lake growing closer and closer. “Oh.” I didn’t understand why he had mentioned such an awkward topic. I hoped he wondered the same.
Ahead, parallel to the lakeshore, a line of colorful stands bordered the road.
“I heard there is a good meat dumpling here,” Wei said as he pulled over suddenly and lurched to a stop.
He was cheap also. I tried to be more generous and reframed my assessment: he was frugal. A graduate student in America, he most likely had become accustomed to living on a slim budget. That was the only explanation for our march across the road shimmering with so much heat that I felt my shoes stick, the explanation for the pink umbrella-shaded cart where an aunty said coarsely, “How many bowls?” and our subsequent squatting on the red plastic stools by the rickety folding table as we waited.
I offered Wei a tissue and we both blotted the sweat from our faces.
“I get cravings for this in California. There’s no place like Nantou for this.” Nostalgia numbed his gaze. I noticed tissue lint stuck to his forehead.
“Excuse me.” I reached over and brushed it off, which sent an immediate blush up his cheeks. He reflexively reached up and swiped at his forehead again.
I looked over at the lake, reflecting the deep, rich green forest around it. Haze swathed the hills: Chinese watercolor paintings, I realized, were a genre of realism. A dock, ending in a pavilion, jutted into the water where people got on and off boats. A hotel and bus station ensured that the lakeshore was crowded. Could I marry this man, bumbling despite his spirited political pronouncements and apparent ego? I allowed myself a quick look at him out of the corner of my eye. I noticed his strong eyebrows, his clear eyes the color of tea, his wide, full lips. Today, he was almost charming. What did a young professor’s wife do? Would Americans be kind to a waitress from Taiwan with halting English?
The aunty plunked the bowls down in front of us.
Hot dumplings on a hot day. I curbed my annoyance.
He ate with elegance—none of the slurping and sighing I would have heard from my brothers. I bit through the gelatinous skin and the steam rising from the meat and mushrooms scalded my tongue; I huffed the pain away. Wei wiped his forehead with the crumpled tissue, then touched it again with a self-consciousness that was almost sweet.
—
My grandfather had told me about the aborigine uprisings that had begun soon after the Japanese took over the island. The Japanese had adopted the American strategies for dealing with native peoples: reservations and decimation. For the first thirty or so years of the colony, the Japanese and the aborigine tribes traded horrors that stained the front pages of the newspapers: surprise attacks followed by beheadings at school events, poison gas bombings, hangings, burnings. Even as my grandfather narrowed his eyes and mimicked what he claimed were authentic battle cries, his expression betrayed a sense of irony that I read as sympathy. Today, the violence had ebbed away to nothing more than innocuous places similar to what we found along the lake: little shops built to look like authentic tribal homes where native people in native dress sold native weavings and beadwork, as well as cheap trinkets such as key chains cut from leather in the shape of the island or clay whistles molded like pipa fruit. I ran my fingers along a skirt of woven red and yellow thread. People who bought such things did not wear them. They tacked them to the walls as “folk art,” or tucked them into drawers to be pulled out years hence when one wanted to reminisce about a particularly charming excursion.
“Interested?” Wei asked.
Glancing at the clerk, who wore a similar skirt as well as a woven headband around her thick black hair, I told him in a low voice, “It’s beautiful, but not something I would wear.”
The clerk called across the shop, “A performance is starting in five minutes. Right outside.”
Wei picked up a bottle of honey wine, marketed as a native specialty: “For the show.” I winced with nausea at the sight.
We sat outside, shielding our eyes with our hands, as music howled out of a portable record player, and shirtless men performed a desultory dance before a small crowd of wilting tourists, many of them GIs, cooling themselves with leaf fans recently purchased from another shop. The dance ended to a smattering of halfhearted, heat-exhausted clapping. Wei tossed some coins into the tip basket, and then we caught a boat back to the other side of the lake, where we had parked. There, we wandered along the shore to a shaded rock. Wei offered me wine, but I told him I didn’t drink. He unscrewed the cap and took a swig.
The drive to the lake had taken so much time that we felt compelled to sit there together even when many painful silent minutes had passed and I became too aware of the quiet to even sniff.
Purgatory on a rock—surely this erased my misbehavior. I had said yes to Wei’s invitation. I had ridden hours in a car through the heat, made conversation, smiled. Because of our families’ friendship, I knew I’d be compelled to see Wei for years. I had to be nice. I wondered what Ting Ting would say about him. “Bookworm,
” she’d surely sniff. “Good-looking but a bore.” I defended him against her imagined accusations: He’s smart; he has opinions. Those are good qualities.
Thick clouds gathered for the usual afternoon thunderstorm. Across the lake, a little boat appeared to redouble its efforts to return to the dock. However, people still roamed among the shops, holding concern at bay until actual rain touched their skin. I hoped the weather would free me.
“We should get back,” I said.
Before we reached the car, the storm began—in typical island fashion—without prelude: a sudden lukewarm downpour. I shrieked as our walk turned to a jog. My cloth sandals began bleeding dye. Completely soaked, we collapsed onto the vinyl seats.
I smiled.
He reached over and swiped water off my cheek. His dripping hair was plastered to his forehead. I noticed the fine texture of his skin.
The honey wine on his breath was sweet. His gaze drifted around my face, as if he was carefully inspecting each feature in turn, mystified by a newly discovered creature. He gently tucked my hair behind my ear. My scared heart stretched and pushed against my ribs; I felt its beat throughout my body.
I waited for an utterance—You’re beautiful—or for him to kiss me. Instead, he nodded slightly—an answer to an imagined question—and said we should go.
“Yes, it’s that time.” I fiddled with my seat belt so that he would not see the blush flooding my face.
We were far away from the lake when the pounding in my chest finally subsided.
23
MY FATHER ASKED ME to go to Taipei with him and told me not to tell my mother. Curious, on my next day off, I met him at the Taichung Railway Station. He stood in front of the gates, aloof to the taxi drivers who asked him again and again where he was going. He wore a white button-down shirt—ubiquitous pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket—and black slacks. He carried food in a little tote bag. He had already purchased our tickets.
We waited on the platform among men hawking saliva, and old women sitting among their stained, worn cloth bags, and mothers with babies strapped to their backs and bundles of fruit tied haphazardly with string into a contraption that could be carried in one hand. Baba lit a cigarette and paced, flicking his ash onto the tracks.
“Did you notice I didn’t ask where we are going?” I had done him a favor by going on a date with Wei, and I was doing him a second favor with my complicity in his mysterious day trip. His debt made me feel free to be pushy, even a little mean.
He glared at me and continued pacing. His smoking was a meditative act.
I sat on a bench, determined to ignore him. I would be the good daughter and not speak until spoken to.
—
The train attendant, who pushed her tea cart down the aisle, offering her wares in a sweet voice that called to mind the ideal woman—elegant and professional, yet soft and delicate—must have been perplexed at the two of us, who stared straight ahead and ignored her pitch even when she paused beside our seats and asked, “Tea? Snacks?”
Baba’s silence was a trigger. I saw him slipping down into the layers of his mind. He had the stoned stare he used to get years earlier when he lost track of the year, the place, us. After that, only the most nonsensical things made sense to him. I had the absurd thought that he was kidnapping me. I’d heard rumors that in rural places, desperate parents sometimes trapped unsuspecting men to be grooms to their dead daughters in ghost weddings. Perhaps I’d be met at the Taipei station by a cavalcade of robed men and women who’d carry me off in a palanquin to a place where I’d eat sweets with the dead and exchange vows with a stuffed-paper version of a man who was already rotting in his grave.
—
As the train left the station at Panchiao, closing in on Taipei, I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
My father blinked. He seemed to be mesmerized by the permed hair of the woman in front of us.
“I won’t get off this train unless you tell me.”
I was not even sure he heard me. I rolled my eyes and stared at the window, black in the lightless tunnel. I should have pleaded sick when he called the night before. He would drag me into some scheme. Three hours on a train, I was already a coconspirator.
The train pulled into Taipei. Baba stood up and joined the slow shuffle of passengers to the door. I stayed seated. He called my bluff and didn’t turn around to check if I would follow. Embarking passengers started to push their way on before the car was fully emptied, bringing new baskets, bags, bundles smelling of the hot summer day: fruit going soft and oversweet, train smoke, exhaustion and hunger.
“This is my seat,” a somber little man with bloodhound eyes said. He held out his ticket as evidence.
I sighed and glanced out. My father waited patiently on the platform. I banged on the window. He did not look at me. I grabbed my purse, pushed past the people lifting their packages onto the overhead racks, and joined him as the station intercom played “Auld Lang Syne” to announce the train’s departure.
—
I had not been to Taipei since my mother carried me out of the city as a baby. Even though it was summer, the sky was gray. Everything seemed doused in drab olive. The streets were a chaos of military trucks, taxis, cars, buses, pedicabs, and bicycles moving at cross-purposes. Baba pulled me through the people milling around the front of the station and flagged down a pedicab. The canopy was pushed back, and torn pieces hung down from the folds. Red paint flaked off the bike. The driver wore plastic sandals. As we moved through the traffic, the rhythm of the driver’s callused feet mesmerized me. Baba elbowed me. The buildings rose around us: four, six, eight, ten stories high, each window boasting a treacherously balanced air-conditioning unit. On the sidewalks, pedestrians quickly avoided intermittent obstacles: a shoe shiner, a man chiseling stamps at a rickety little table, a woman with a face white with talcum squatting on a tiny stool as another deftly threaded off her facial hair with a piece of floss held taut between teeth and fingers. We moved away from downtown, past a shanty village of one-story buildings where women tended charcoal stoves out on the street and others waited for water from the communal faucet.
“We lived there,” Baba said as we rolled by a Japanese-style house flashing like a zoetrope through a fence. I saw topiary, the pale figure of a person stepping off the porch in the stuttering motion of an old film. I craned my neck to keep watching. Baba didn’t.
We kept going, up the wide boulevard shaded by trees planted in the median, past the looming Grand Hotel, built where the main Shinto shrine of the Japanese era had once stood and now owned by Madame Chiang and in the midst of expansion. Rumors claimed that secret air-raid tunnels that could hold ten thousand people ran beneath the hill.
Soon downtown was behind us, and the hills of Yangmingshan, formerly Grass Mountain—damp, luminous, and green—rolled through the skyline ahead.
We passed the Generalissimo’s Shilin estate, but all we could see was the tall row of palms, their trunks hard as concrete, that lined the drive. Finally, we turned off the main road and rattled down an alley where homes sat behind metal courtyard gates.
Breathing hard, the driver stopped and wiped his forehead with a rag he pulled from his back pocket. We hopped off and my father paid him. The driver took a moment to catch his breath before he left.
It was early afternoon, Tuesday. The alley was quiet. Here, up the hill, things were damp and the air smelled of the sulfur springs on the mountain, and vines tangled around the walls and gates. Banyan trees dripped roots over us.
“Well?” I asked.
Baba walked across the street and sat on a small stone border surrounding a tree.
“Come eat,” he said. “You must be hungry.”
He pulled out a rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves and string and gestured with it at me.
The non sequitur was insanity. He acted as if we were picnicking.
I crossed my arms. “I’m not hungry.”
At the cross street at the end of the alley, a woman gripping a parasol and dragging a rolling wire cart of groceries glanced at us as she passed.
“Baba, what are we doing?”
“We’re waiting. Come sit next to me.”
I relented. “What are we waiting for?” I could sense he was thawing. Reaching our destination seemed to have buoyed him.
He jerked his chin toward the house across the alley. “Su Ming Guo.”
My stomach clenched. Peering down a stereoscope of memory, I saw the two secret police who had come to our house the day my father wrote the letter. One ugly, one handsome, two sidekicks in a terrifying dark comedy.
I had not realized that Baba had held it in his mind for so long.
“He came home last year.” I remembered the letter Su Ming Guo had sent, and the line my mother had repeated to my sister, who then repeated it to me: My friend, I forgive you. My father had wept, but my mother thought it was a lie.
“Have you been here before?” Sometimes, when my mother was at church all day, my father was nowhere to be found. Had he been slipping off to Taipei for a year now?
“Just a few times.”
Did they have an appointment or did he just sit here, eating his lunch and staring at the man’s front door? Did they speak?
“He’s really forgiven you?”
Baba cringed. I had watched him sign the letter that brought Su Ming Guo home to be arrested. Had he forgotten how I’d been his accomplice, serving tea to the secret police?
“His wife won’t let me see him.”
As I feared, he sat outside their door and waited, hour upon hour, uninvited guest, spy.
“Baba, let’s go home.”
“No!” Hands shaking, appetite chased away by anger, he hurriedly squeezed the damp leaves over his uneaten rice and dropped it into his bag. “I asked you to come as a favor. This is my errand. You leave. I’ll stay.”
I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself.
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