Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “Baba has never thought about consequences. He can see only one step ahead.”

  “He just wanted to say sorry. He did. Then we went home,” I insisted.

  “Does anybody else know?”

  “No.”

  “Not Mama? Uncle Su’s wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you go? You can’t feed his fantasies like that.”

  A moan floated over the crowd as a batter struck out.

  “He’s our father,” I said.

  Who was Dua Hyan? Where did his loyalties lie? With the Generalissimo, whom he had sworn himself to? Did that elusive, stubborn man with the too-wide smile, the tidy mustache, and the gleaming pate deserve a devotion greater than family? Of course, my niece and nephews and all the children of their generation, if they knew about their grandfathers’ past, would side with Chiang Kai-shek. The lessons of their civics class were simple: Don’t argue with your friends. Listen to your parents. Listen to your teacher. Chiang Kai-shek is great.

  “Baba is deluded.”

  “Don’t say that.” I realized that I wanted to resurrect Baba in Dua Hyan’s eyes. Couldn’t he see how sorry Baba was?

  “It’s the truth. Someone needs to tell him.”

  “Dua Hyan. Please. Please don’t say anything.”

  He stared at our nephew, who hunched at third base, his yellow-and-white uniform streaked with dirt and grass. “If they win, what happens?”

  The conversation was over. A drop of sweat rolled down the side of his face and disappeared under his jaw. “They play again,” I answered.

  “And if they win that?”

  “Another game.” The bat cracked against the ball and Jia Lun ran toward home. The spectators screamed. A flock of colorful parasols bobbed as mothers clapped.

  Dua Hyan whistled when Jia Lun slid into home. “How many until they make it to the Series?” he shouted against the noise.

  “Dozens,” I yelled back.

  “Is it likely?”

  “No. It’s not likely.”

  —

  Dua Hyan stayed at Ah Zhay’s for one more night before going to my parents’ for a couple more days. Despite Mama’s attempts to coddle him, he insisted on washing his own clothes, on helping in the kitchen, on rebuilding the pigpen and slaughtering a chicken. Shirtless, blood splattered on his feet and chest, he plucked it in the courtyard. Small soft feathers stuck to his damp hands. His face showed no emotion.

  Clenching feathers in his fists, what passed through his mind? Did he think about the moments that had made him, such as the time, years earlier, when he was a no-name young cadet, and he had watched with the same expression as his “buddies” strung up a stray dog they’d lured over with a chicken bone? They’d tied up the dog by its back legs and took turns beating it with a stick, its body clenching and swinging as it screamed. He hated himself for not speaking up. He had gone back to his bunk and cried. Later, he had reported on them to his commanders. The reports became a monthly occurrence, and if nothing happened, he made something up. The reports, above everything else, were the priority. These reports snaked throughout society: elementary school students reporting on their classmates, teachers reporting on their colleagues, neighbors reporting on neighbors. If one wanted a job, a promotion, a visa, this is what one did.

  The chicken’s body was still warm from the scalding water he’d dunked it in to loosen the feathers. Not twenty minutes before, this animal had been scurrying across the yard, jerking its head at him, murmuring. He suddenly felt the weight of its destruction, of the sack slowly filling with wet feathers.

  Our father rolled his bicycle through the gateway. His shirt was completely unbuttoned over his undershirt. A cigarette hung at his lips. His chess game sat in a sack in the basket. He spent the afternoons playing with old men at the park. We weren’t sure if he even knew their names, but he challenged them day after day. He never told us whether he won or lost.

  Dua Hyan greeted him. Baba sat beside him and offered him a cigarette. Dua Hyan jerked his chin at his dirty hands, so Baba put a cigarette in Dua Hyan’s mouth and lit it. Dua Hyan continued plucking the chicken.

  “You kill it?” Baba asked.

  Dua Hyan, his hands and mouth busy, grunted.

  “Ah, the red one. She was sweet. Should have taken out that mean brown hen instead.” Baba exhaled. He scratched his sideburn. His hair was flecked with gray and his hands mottled with brown spots. “Jia Lun win the game?”

  Dua Hyan made a noise that meant no.

  “Next time.”

  Dua Hyan gestured for Baba to take the cigarette out of his mouth so he could talk.

  “You should have gone,” Dua Hyan said.

  “I was busy.”

  “Playing chess?” Dua Hyan ripped clumps of feathers from the bird. Baba cringed.

  “Right.”

  “Or visiting Taipei?”

  Baba smoked quietly for a moment, then laughed. “Your sister told you.”

  Dua Hyan did not lie. Baba took another drag, exhaled, paused as if he were going to speak, then, thinking another moment, drew again on the cigarette.

  “Stupid girl,” he finally said, his voice calm.

  “It was a stupid thing for you to do.”

  Baba laughed again. “What a world. A son, eating his father’s food, tells his father what is stupid.”

  “You’ll ruin everything again. I could lose my whole career. Do you think they’ll ever make the son of a criminal into a general?”

  “They’ll never make you a general anyway. You’re Taiwanese.” Baba dropped his cigarette on the ground and stamped it out. “Stupid boy.”

  Dua Hyan held his tongue. I knew what he was thinking because I had thought it too: he knew more about how to negotiate this world than Baba would ever know. He squeezed the cooling lump of flesh harder, digging his nails into the plucked skin, feeling the sharpness of broken shafts. This is what the military had taught him: to separate out rage from violence; physical acts come out of cool heads and hot heads should be followed by still hands. He was convinced that when the soldiers had sought out his father, it had been not a panicked reaction to the days of protest, but a methodical act, born of level heads.

  —

  At the end of his visit, we find this scene.

  The train station is a relic of the Japanese era: red bricks and gray stones and a clock with a sooty face. In front of it stand a man and his grown son. They are relics too, mirror images separated by a generation, motionless amid the swirling chaos of the station. As their family looks on, the father puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and, for the first time since their argument, looks him in the eye.

  The son is surprised by what yearning arises: he wants his father to apologize, to wish him well, to tell him he loves him. He wants this to be the moment when all the scaffolding around the years falls away. Eight years old when his father left, the son was already away from home when his father returned. They met again as adults, two men warily eyeing each other.

  The father says, “Safe travels.”

  The son exhales. He blinks. He glances at his shoes, which gleam. His father wears plastic sandals, house shoes, starting to tear. He looks at his father’s eyes. The whites have yellowed from too much smoking, too much drinking. He thanks his father.

  —

  He has bought a ticket on one of the faster trains, a soft seat for the long ride south. He tosses his duffel bag on the overhead rack, then goes to the hot water dispenser at the back of the car. The city rushes away; buildings spread out to haphazard gardens—fences made of stripped mattresses and planters of rusty lard cans and old tires—to farms of glistening rice paddies and wide taro fronds, to fields and hills. Once he is settled again—his coat hung on the hook, a glass of hot water in the holder beneath the window, the curtain pulled partway against the glare—he begins his report.

  25

  THE NEWS THAT TAINAN’S Little League team was going to the Series marked the
beginning of the end of summer. It was not my nephew’s team, but we were all proud nonetheless. Paper jerseys and signs went up on shop walls and windows all over the island, proclaiming Nationalist Chinese pride for these little scrappy boys from down south. The end of summer also meant Wei would be leaving for California soon and he told me he wanted to see me before he left.

  He took me to a fish market outside of the city. We walked past the baskets mounded with dried shrimp and flattened squid, among the trays of frozen-eyed fish laid upon ice and the tubs crammed with crabs scrambling over and under one another. The cement floors were wet and the place smelled like algae and glass. We bought a pink fish with wide, glassy eyes and a bag of writhing blue shrimp and carried them to a nearby restaurant, which prepared them.

  I told Wei about Ting Ting. He frowned as I set up the story: her charm in the restaurant, the nights in the clubs, her journal. I thought he would think it was funny, mildly scandalous, but instead he said, “Girls like that make all Taiwanese women look bad. You shouldn’t go out with her.”

  His response disappointed me. I glimpsed again the haughtiness of our first meeting. “She’s not a girl. She’s a woman,” I said.

  “She is just another plaything for the Americans. Doesn’t matter if it’s Thailand, Okinawa, or Taiwan.” He bit a shrimp out of its shell and tossed the translucent carcass into a bowl. To him, this was such an obvious truth that it could be casually uttered as he spat shrimp legs.

  “She likes it. You talk about her like she doesn’t have a choice.” I thought of my own encounter with the Americans. Sam. My cheek on his back, the wind tearing at my hair. His smell. Desire flickered in my chest. He was so different from Wei. Uncomplicated. Exotic. Would Wei turn his critique on me if he knew?

  “I know what she likes,” Wei scoffed.

  “You don’t even know her.” I stifled an urge to kick him under the table. Even more than his words, I despised his certainty.

  “She doesn’t realize that she’s just a cog in a larger system. What she thinks is choice is actually just— Never mind. I promised not to talk about politics.” One by one, he sucked on his fingers. “Delicious. Very tender.”

  “Right. You promised. Anyway, she’s getting married,” I said triumphantly. Her search had been more successful than his. “The banquet is planned for October, and then they’ll leave in November.”

  Wei said nothing. With his chopsticks, he lifted out the spine of the fish so that we could eat the other side. He picked at it slowly, methodically, clearly still brooding. He had a tall Roman nose, the kind I associated with Hong Kong men who had a touch of British somewhere deep in their bloodlines, and thick eyebrows—inherited from his Japanese mother—and the combination of his good looks and ego irritated me even more.

  We left thin clean bones and broken shrimp shells.

  —

  By the time we reentered Taichung, the sky was dark and the city was a swath of lights.

  “Shall we stroll the night market?” Wei asked. It was the first sentence of significance we’d spoken since dinner.

  “Don’t you have to get back to Taipei?” I asked.

  “I’m not in a rush.”

  I remembered Baba’s words. One more evening, and then my obligations would be fulfilled. I told him about the night market near the university.

  It was early and the market was still setting up. Pedestrians were starting to trickle in. Carts selling fresh cane and watermelon juice and shaved ice and sweet sausage stuffed with raw garlic sat alongside booths—strung with dazzling white bulbs—of clothing, purses, and trinkets. Other vendors laid their wares across blankets on the ground or on simple folding tables, prepared to gather up everything if the police came to check permits. One whole aisle was devoted to games: pachinko, ring tosses, pans of small turtles with paper clips taped to their backs, and tubs of tiny goldfish. Children squatted before them with paper paddles, trying to catch a fish before the wet paper tore.

  “Shall we?” Wei said.

  I raised my eyebrows. “We’re a bit old.”

  “Not at all.” He bought a couple of paddles. We crouched in front of a pink plastic tub and watched the little orange fish dart beneath our shadows.

  “The key,” Wei said, “is to not plunge in, but skim the water.” He smiled as he placed the paddle gently in the water and slipped it under a fish. Quickly, he flicked his hand and the fish slid atop the damp paper. He dumped it into a bowl of water the vendor had given us.

  I tried, but I was too hesitant and the paddle tore. Wei bought another. He held my wrist, both our hands hovering over the water. His thumb pressed into my pulse. He spoke in my ear: “Wait.” I could smell the beer from dinner on his breath, and it reminded me of the drunk men who showed up at the Golden Rooster late at night, flirtatious and loud. I liked the smell: thick, masculine, an entitlement that was frightening and sexy.

  —

  Wei parked on the main street: the alleys of the neighborhood were too narrow for a car. The flicker of televisions from inside living rooms illuminated the path. In the heat, people left their doors open and noise drifted through screen doors and open windows. I carried my two new pet goldfish in a plastic bag of water.

  “I had no idea you were so skilled.” I grinned.

  “Hydrodynamics,” he said.

  “You must have a tank full of fish at home.”

  He laughed.

  We stopped before the footbridge. Someone had set up a laundry line between the eaves of the two houses adjacent to the bridge and scrubbed white shirts dangled, smelling faintly of detergent and the sweet summer mildew that permeated nearly everything.

  “I’m leaving in two weeks,” he said.

  “I know.” A spasm tickled my stomach.

  “Our families have a long history together.”

  “Your aunt must have introduced you to a lot of women,” I tentatively probed. He simultaneously frowned and smiled, apparently amused by my obvious statement. His aunt had assumed the role of matchmaker, and my mother had warned me early on that he would be meeting other women this summer. That was how these engagements with overseas students went: a school recess, a whirlwind trip, a hasty decision based on three or four good dates, compatible family histories, and perhaps a horoscope reading.

  “Don’t say that.” He laughed. “I like that you can’t help but say what you think.”

  “Ah Zhay hates it.”

  He nuzzled my forehead. “Don’t listen to her. Even when she was a little girl she was bossy.”

  A half-laugh jumped from me, sounding like a cough. I felt heat from the little triangle of exposed skin above the open top button of his shirt. I put a hand on his waist, holding him and pushing him away. He covered my hand with his. In this long, awkward moment, something shifted. In this new vision of the world, I glimpsed—just a brief, blurred peek—Wei not as a pesky sermonizer, but as a lover.

  His lips grazing my ear, he said, “I like you. Would you consider coming to California?”

  California. All I knew about it was artificial, stereotypes, ideals: sunshine, oranges, movie stars, Disneyland, and Steve McQueen.

  I freed my hand from his and stepped back. “I don’t know you.”

  “You know enough.”

  “You also don’t know me.”

  “I’ve known you since you were born.” His elegant nose. The divot at the base of his throat, between the ridges of his clavicles, glistening in the humid night. The weight of his fleshy palm. I fought to unsee my new life, to remember how grating he could be, how sure of himself.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  I was twenty-four, already quite old to not have a steady boyfriend or looming marriage. I figured I’d escaped serious intervention thus far because I was the youngest in the family, but my sister and mother had both warned me that after twenty-five, I’d be a spinster. I’d be Ting Ting, forced to marry an American.

  “I don’t kno
w.” I was not waiting to be swept away. My fantasies were humbler, even more romantic: the subtle, irrevocable plaiting of two lives.

  “Think about it.” He kissed my forehead. “Let’s go.”

  We crossed the bridge into the darker end of the alley where it curved and ended at Ah Zhay’s house. The red courtyard gate was locked, but I could hear the television in the front room and my nephews arguing. The cement courtyard wall was embedded with shards of glass. I’d have to knock.

  “Go,” I urged.

  “Think about it.”

  I nodded. “Yes. Go.”

  I watched him walk down the alley, the light falling across his shoulders.

  26

  “DID YOU KNOW he had gone to see Su Ming Guo?” Standing in the doorway, Ah Zhay woke me the next morning.

  Over a month had passed since the visit to Su Ming Guo. I had convinced myself that the whole incident had been forgotten—by Baba, by me, by Dua Hyan. I covered my eyes with my arm and steeled myself. “Dua Hyan told you?”

  Ah Zhay’s annoyance soared into rage. “Dua Hyan knew and I didn’t?”

  Once again I cursed my big mouth. I’d tripped into my own trouble here. Afraid to look at her, I stayed hidden beneath my arm.

  “Baba’s been called to Taipei for a meeting.” The chopping of the fan blades sliced through Ah Zhay’s words. A “meeting.” We all knew this meant interrogation. Or worse. “Take the day off and go with him,” she said.

  “To Taipei?”

  “This is your mess. You shouldn’t have let him go see Uncle Su. Why didn’t you say anything? He can’t go to Taipei alone. You have to go.” Someone needed to account for him, to bear witness if he entered the building and never came out again.

  “I’ll get fired,” I whined. I clung to the idea of my meager job. This was just an everyday trip to Taipei. Nothing to lose a job over. Everything was normal. Friday morning, ticking fan, the faint shout of orders over the military base wall, the dying scent of the breakfast I had slept through.

  “Find another job!” She turned off the fan and the room immediately swelled with heat. “Get up. He’s leaving soon. And this time, don’t tell anyone.”