Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “You’ll be a virgin a day longer than you think.” She winked.

  “Morning?” I had asked, incredulous and naive. She choked on her laughter.

  Wei went to the tea table and poured a glass of hot water. He stood at the window, framed by black glass and the parted burgundy curtains. He blew the heat off the water. I ordered the bills by denomination and asked again about the woman in blue. He didn’t answer. I looked up. His back was beautiful and strong. He didn’t have the body of a graduate student, but of an athlete. Morning crossed my mind again and I blushed. Finally, he brought the glass back to the bed and offered me a sip. I declined.

  “Actually, she’s my ex-girlfriend.” He folded one arm behind his head and leaned against the pillows.

  “Oh,” I said. I fanned the money. I was confused. “Did your parents invite her?”

  “No, oh god, no. She tagged along as someone’s date. She must have arranged it.”

  “She’s still in love with you.”

  “No, I think she was just curious.” He peeked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  “She could have waited for the pictures.” I didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t jealous exactly. But how dare she come, even for a peek? A sour cast fell over the whole reception. I set the money on the nightstand, hugged a pillow and tucked my chin into it.

  Wei rearranged himself, resting on the pillow clasped in my arms. The weight of his head pressed into my stomach. “We didn’t date very long.”

  I hesitated and then put my fingers into his hair, struggling through the shellac. I raked his hair soft again and thought carefully about my tone. “How long?”

  He exhaled. “Two years.”

  Two years. I’d known him less than a month.

  “Obviously, if I was going to marry her, it would have happened.” He closed his eyes and his face softened.

  His carefully slicked hair was in disarray. I massaged his scalp. My husband. Even if I repeated the phrase a hundred times a day, it would feel strange for a while. “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “I went away to school.”

  “Oh. That’s all?”

  “Her parents didn’t like me. They were old-school Chinese. I was too Taiwanese.”

  “And how did they feel about your Japanese mother?”

  “That too.” His eyes still closed, he grabbed my hand and kissed it, then pressed it to his cheek.

  I pulled it away. “You should have eloped.” I felt violated.

  He laughed. “Then we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Right, with all this cash.” I scooped up the money from the nightstand. I tried to forget the woman in blue ghosting our conversation and clouding the glow between us. My stomach was sour. Afraid Wei would think me petty and jealous, I pushed back my discomfort.

  He sat up and squeezed the stack of bills. “Not bad. At the current exchange rate, that’s like three hundred US dollars. That’s three months’ rent.”

  “We still need to pay the banquet hall.”

  The conversation had eased into banalities; we truly were married. I put the pillow back in its place, tucked my nightgown under my knees, and yawned.

  “I’m tired too,” he said. “We should go to bed.”

  Afraid to see what he might be implying, I averted my eyes. I thought of the woman in blue and felt inexperienced and stupidly virginal. I put the money away in my suitcase, then crawled into bed and turned off the light. Wei kissed me chastely on the mouth and wished me good night.

  “Did you love her?” I asked in the dark.

  He rolled over and embraced me, pressing all his angles and softness to me. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  I considered this. “I guess it doesn’t.”

  I lay awake for a while, listening to the traffic on Nanking Road and the revelers leaving the hotel nightclub and returning to their rooms. My husband held me and I knew he didn’t sleep yet either. Eventually, though, we did.

  In the morning, when I woke, I found Wei watching me. He smiled and caressed my cheek. “I’m scared,” I whispered.

  He kissed me, and then it was as Ting Ting had promised.

  —

  The week after Wei left Taiwan, as I waited for my visa to join him, the Tainan Little League team won the World Series. “A Win ‘Made in Taiwan,’ ” cried the papers. Foreign newspapers called us the “Little Island That Could” and proclaimed the win “good for morale.” The boys were heroes. If only that burst of pride could have carried us through the end of February, when Nixon went to China.

  28

  THE ISLAND BEGAN TO DISAPPEAR on October 25, when half a world away, the Republic of China lost its seat in the United Nations. An uncontestable reality, said the American ambassador, George H. W. Bush. The United Nations must reflect an uncontestable reality determined by land and population. Against all rules of the organization, the ROC was being displaced. Not kicked out, we were assured, though the draft resolution said they wish to restore to the People’s Republic of China all its rights and expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. The People’s Republic of China would replace the Republic of China to strengthen the authority and prestige of the United Nations. Like a street hustler playing a shell game, the UN moved Red China to the Security Council and slipped Free China into the General Assembly. It had dismantled the symbol. And we, swindled pedestrians, overturned the shell and discovered beneath the Republic of China there was no China. We were an empty signifier. In disgust, Representative Liu Chieh left the floor, and Taiwan was never allowed back into the UN again.

  But the news did not put a damper on Ting Ting’s marriage celebration. She held a small banquet at a restaurant on the outskirts of the city that was attended mostly by Minnesota Eddie’s American friends, who brought coveted bottles of liquor from the PX. By the end of the night, the party had trickled away to a few very drunk tables. I found myself sick on whisky, surrounded by American men, and absurdly confident about my English. I thought of my own banquet, tame in comparison, and then of Wei, so far away in California, and wondered what he might be doing at that moment. Sleeping, I chided myself. I thought of our good-bye at the airport in Taipei, and how surprising it was to feel that this stranger was now mine, forever.

  I looked for Sam, the man who had taken me home that night in August, but Ting Ting later told me he had returned to Oregon, where he was originally from and where his wife lived.

  Ting Ting wore bridal red that night—an empire-waist dress like the one Olivia Hussey wore playing Juliet in the film of the Shakespeare play that had been so popular a few years before. The dress hid her growing belly. I looked at her, my eyes bleary from drink, and I wanted to cry for her. When I finally left, nausea spinning in my chest, I hugged her tight and wished her a safe journey. She laughed in her carefree way and told me, “Don’t let the boss bully you when I’m gone.” A week later, she was on a plane to Minneapolis.

  After Ting Ting left, I renewed my vow not to drink and began to prepare myself for my own departure. My visa finally came in February.

  —

  At the end of February, the Spirit of ’76 brought Nixon to China. He was a man with a face like a marionette’s and a wife who looked like a brittle beauty queen. Wherever they went, he and his wife, with her bright red coat and blond hair, were the center of a crowd of people in drab blues and grays.

  In Hangchow, his wife wears fur. They walk through a park with Chou En-lai, surrounded by curious onlookers in padded coats. Their translator is a young woman with bobbed hair pulled off her face with a clip and horn-rimmed glasses. She helps translate when Nixon bends over to shake a young boy’s hand. The boy’s sister is called over too, and when the American man talks to her, she presses her tongue into the space left by her missing front tooth and will not look at him.

  “Where is your mother? Is she here?” the translator asks.

  “In the city,” the girl says, then tries to step away from the American and the cameras, but fin
ds herself trapped by the ring of people.

  After the girl comes the fishpond. Nixon stands against a metal rail and tosses food into the water with concentration and joy. He drops into a grinning reverie as if he has forgotten the entire world is watching.

  “Dr. Kissinger,” the translator says, “you can have a package if you want to feed the fish.”

  “Denmark, Denmark,” says the Secret Service. “President feeding fish.”

  They stand here at this moment, three of them the most important people to the fate of Taiwan—Richard Nixon, Chou En-lai, and Henry Kissinger—on an overcast day in Hangchow, feeding fish.

  —

  I went to see my parents and grandparents for one last dinner before my departure. I had quit my job just a few days before (“So you’re going too?” my boss said, and I swore I saw some regret in his eyes). My grandparents were taking their afternoon siesta and Mama was at church. I found Baba in the garden, a dead cigarette hanging from his lip, plucking snails from the plants.

  I sank into a plastic chair that had a teddy bear decal peeling off the back.

  “Have you eaten?” Baba asked.

  “I’m waiting for dinner.”

  “Come help me.”

  I hunched down beside him and began searching for the tiny snails.

  We worked together in silence for a long time. I wondered when I would see him again. What if my plane went down in the Pacific? More than that, I held a constant fear that he could just disappear. Thirteen years had passed since his return, and yet I still wondered each morning if that would be the day that Baba was gone again. If I had cut my knee, or even lost my leg, the wound would have healed already, but the mind and heart are trained in different ways.

  “Ba,” I said. “I love you.”

  I had never spoken these words to him—such words were for lovers. But maybe I had spent too much time watching American movies, where people loved their parents, their siblings, their pets, their clothing, and their cars. In our world, love was supposed to be unspoken and understood.

  He traced his thumb over a leaf, slowly, as if he hadn’t heard me. As he moved to the next plant, I watched his profile. His glasses were a decade out of style and his shirt, washed too many times, was coarse with tiny knots of fabric.

  “I know. You don’t need to tell me.” He still didn’t look at me. “You’re a good daughter. Very filial.”

  It was the highest praise I could expect, and I felt grateful though I longed for him to say he loved me too. I stroked the leaves of the next plant, found another snail, and dropped it in the bucket. Baba thanked me.

  —

  At every stop, they hold a banquet. Nixon signals each joke and compliment to his uncomprehending audience with a smile and a nod. In Hangchow, he brings applause when he proclaims, “Now that we have been here, now that we have seen the splendor of this city, we realize why it has been said that heaven is above and beneath are Hangchow and Soochow.” Smoke drifts around the room. Premier Chou En-lai stares grimly at the table as he listens, then claps politely.

  The First Lady wears baby blue and smiles with her mouth closed.

  To someone at the banquet table, as he eats, Nixon says, “I never have enough time to read the things I want to read.”

  —

  The building where Wei’s parents lived in Taipei was later demolished in the early 1990s and replaced with a cram school: six stories of classrooms stuffed with tense students weighed down with the pressure of exams. They come in their school uniforms—cheap cotton T-shirts with the contrast-color collars and polyester sweatpants, dirty after a long day—and sit in rows at long tables, by all appearances studious but secretly passing notes. During the breaks, they insult and smack each other. Their tables are crowded with textbooks and notebooks and cute novelty pens and empty snack wrappers and small cartons of milk tea.

  I wonder if the ghostly imprint of my last night before I left for America still lingers today somewhere in a classroom on the third floor, where Uncle Lin’s apartment had been. Do the students of this room, where the junior-high-level English class is taught—usually by an expatriate Canadian—find an inexplicable sadness among the exercises on subject-verb agreement? Do they sometimes see in passing, out of the corner of an eye, a family wearing old-fashioned clothes bickering and gossiping? And do they daydream of me, a young woman nearly the same age as their teacher, sorting through her suitcases as she prepares for a very long trip?

  The apartment was the perfect size for a family of four, but my family added eleven more people, and for the duration of the evening, we stepped around and over and past one another. My two suitcases stood next to the door—a piece of waiting quiet in the chaos.

  After dinner, I retreated to the Lins’ bedroom to sort my luggage again; Aunty Lin had given me shirts and snacks to take back for Wei. I layered the packages among my clothes, wondering if Wei was really a secret fan of beef jerky and sour plums, or if his mother simply still clung to his childhood favorites even though he’d outgrown them. I would eventually find out. I had learned a lot about him through our correspondence since our wedding, but nothing as rote and banal as “favorite foods.” I had not thought to ask.

  Baba came to the doorway. “Almost packed?” He sat on the bed next to my suitcase. The Lins’ bedspread was ornate: a blue peacock of silk thread burst onto a bright pink satin field. Baba ran a hand along one sapphire-embroidered peacock feather. I knew from the creases that they had brought this out just for guests and I wanted to tell Baba to be careful of his calluses.

  “I’ll be done soon,” I told him. In the living room, my nephews were shouting and the women’s voices rose in a separate conversation. “I think I’ve just crammed an entire dried cow in here.”

  “I have something else for you.”

  “Ba, I can’t fit anything else.”

  He held a jar filled with what looked like coffee grounds. I leaned forward. The jar still bore strips of glue where the label had been washed away. I swore I would say no. I doubted it would pass customs.

  “This is a godforsaken place. I sometimes wish that you—all of us—could leave and forget it. We’re a cursed people,” he said.

  “Ba. Please.” I slid yet another package of jerky between some shirts. Impatient, I was afraid to encourage another one of his flights of persecution.

  “I want you to take this.”

  I pulled away from my suitcase and looked again at the jar. “What is it?”

  “Soil from our garden.”

  The garden that my grandparents had begun half a century before; the garden that my mother had tended through my father’s absence and that, now, my father still worked when he wanted to be alone. The garden where Baba had sought my complicity after the secret police had visited and where I had found refuge after my first meeting with Wei.

  “I want you to remember.” He set the jar atop my heaped clothing. “Don’t forget.”

  Don’t forget. His words were both an order and a plea.

  Maybe, despite what haunted-house stories claim, ghosts aren’t anchored to place. This must be true, for I carried that ghost across the ocean with me to California, where I heard it for years. Where I still hear it.

  —

  In his thick, black-framed glasses, Henry Kissinger looks younger than forty-eight. He steps up to the mic and waits for his introduction before beginning to speak haltingly, the “uhs” drawn out and deep. The communiqué between China and the United States has been released. He looks up as he speaks, thinking as he talks, clearing his throat, repeating, pausing. A bank of white men with cigarettes and pipes and gaiwans sit before him, watching and taking notes. The camera flashes sound like the slicing of scissors.

  But there is no need to be cautious. The communiqué is filled with language about justice and freedom and liberation.

  China says “it firmly supports the struggles of all the oppressed people and nations for freedom and liberation and that the people of all countries
have the right to choose their social systems according to their own wishes and the right to safeguard the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of their own countries and oppose foreign aggression, interference, control, and subversion.”

  The Americans say, “The United States supports individual freedom and social progress for all the peoples of the world, free of outside pressure or intervention.”

  And then Taiwan. A thorn between the two nations, or, as phrased in the communiqué: “The Taiwan question is the crucial question obstructing the normalization of relations between China and the United States…”

  And here is the declaration:

  The Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China; Taiwan is a province of China which has long been returned to the motherland; the liberation of Taiwan is China’s internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere; and all U.S. forces and military installations must be withdrawn from Taiwan. The Chinese Government firmly opposes any activities which aim at the creation of “one China, one Taiwan,” “one China, two governments,” “two Chinas,” an “independent Taiwan” or advocate that “the status of Taiwan remains to be determined.”

  While the United States “acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.”