Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  Now it has been said. Words that will echo down the years.

  A deep breath.

  After the press conference, during the handshakes between both sides, Nixon says to an official, “Tonight I will not force you to Moutai.”

  And the Chinese official replies, “Quite on the contrary—we can drink more Moutai tonight.”

  Laughter.

  —

  We said good-bye in the airport.

  The world was just as unsafe then, thick with potential death, but in those days we were still allowed to walk right up to the airport windows and watch planes depart. I crossed the tarmac, the straps of my overstuffed purse cutting into my shoulder, and glanced back at my family behind the terminal glass. My niece and nephews waved; the adults did not move. My family was not the type to hug, but Ah Zhay had squeezed me and whispered, “I hope it’s wonderful. Come home if it’s not.”

  When I reached the top of the stairs, ready to enter the plane, I paused before the smiling stewardess and looked back one last time. In the days after our wedding, Wei and I had visited the hot springs at Peitou, avoiding the ones that were loud with GIs and their weekend companions. One night, in our hotel, lying in bed, Wei had talked to me about this day. “Don’t turn around,” he said. “Go up the stairs and leave. If you turn around, you’ll never come. I’ll be waiting in San Francisco for a girl who never shows.”

  For a moment, I doubted I’d actually step into the plane until the man behind me cleared his throat and nudged me with his bag.

  —

  By the night of the Shanghai banquet, after the release of the communiqué, Nixon is exhausted. The meal begins with the Chinese talking about how this banquet will stand up to the one in Hangchow, some friendly city-versus-city competition. Chou En-lai inspects the menu to see how it measures up.

  The premier makes a joke about women in China no longer caring for their families, then laughs brightly and loudly with his hand over his mouth.

  A final banquet speech. Nixon says, “What we have said in that communiqué is not nearly as important as what we will do in the years ahead to build a bridge across sixteen thousand miles and twenty-two years of hostility which have divided us in the past…Our two peoples tonight hold the future of the world in our hands. As we think of that future, we are dedicated to the principle that we can build a new world, a world of peace, a world of justice, a world of independence for all nations.”

  —

  At a certain point, the land becomes patchwork. This is after the city has shrunk to the chaos of tiny crammed buildings and narrow alleys and minuscule scooters swarming the streets like ants. The land between the dark green hills and the gray tumbled-block city is laid out in haphazard squares of shimmering black paddies and chartreuse taro fields and marked by the red roofs of farmhouses. Motorbikes speed on singular roads as thin as thread, swerve past specks—oxen—that seem to not be moving at all. Cars grow slower; clouds intervene; mist envelops the windows. Sunlight replaces the overcast day. The world reverses, and through the breaks in the clouds and for hours and hours, the blue ocean.

  —

  In 1972, February had twenty-nine days.

  1979

  29

  MOST PEOPLE THINK they remember Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater when he made the announcement, but what serious president would not wear a tie when finishing the work Nixon had begun? He sat in front of gold drapes, flanked on both sides by flags. He wore a burgundy tie, and he tried to smile when he gave the news.

  It’s December 15, 1978, when he makes the announcement. His smile is cautious—this is good news, but he knows that his statement, in eight minutes, will delegitimize a government and turn a half century of history into a joke. That is why his people waited until the last possible moment to tell the Republic of China that today is the day. Messengers rouse Chiang Ching-kuo’s men from their beds to hand them the notice, and they have barely enough time to craft a response that is anything more than disappointed.

  Carter says, “The United States of America recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China.”

  He says, “In recognizing the People’s Republic of China, that it is the single Government of China, we are recognizing simple reality.”

  His smiles are random—notated onto the text of the speech?—before “historic,” before “commercial,” before “hegemony.”

  On January 1, 1979, the United States would assume relations with the People’s Republic of China. Students in Taiwan—some say they are government plants—vandalize the American consulate. They hang signs that urge the boycott of Coca-Cola and depict a weeping Statue of Liberty and devilish Carter.

  On February 28, 1979, the American consulate in Taiwan closes.

  —

  The students marched silently down Telegraph Avenue wearing paper bags over their heads with ragged holes punched out for their eyes. They bore signs reading END MARTIAL LAW IN TAIWAN! and FREE POLITICAL PRISONERS IN TAIWAN! Dressed like a student, I stood on the corner of Bancroft Way with my Leica and documented the protest at Wei’s request. Across the street, a man I didn’t recognize also took pictures. I tried to obscure my face with my camera. When Wei passed—I knew him by his clothes—he shoved the man so hard that the camera fell from his hands and broke on the sidewalk.

  “What the fuck?” the man shouted. My own camera trembled in my hands and I resisted the urge to call Wei’s name. Anonymity was crucial. Another protester ran up and threw himself in front of Wei: “No, not like this.” He ushered Wei back into the group that was now crossing onto campus. The man, gathering up the pieces of his broken camera, continued shouting.

  The group, nearly a hundred graduate students and young professors like Wei, drifted like scarecrows across Sproul Plaza and through Sather Gate. I followed. Since President Carter’s severance of US relations with Taiwan, the newly rogue Nationalist government had become even more brutish. A young Pomona College professor, back in Taipei on summer break, had been denied an exit visa and interrogated. The morning after his interrogation, even though the police claimed they had escorted him home, his broken body had been found on the campus of National Taiwan University, a crisp hundred-dollar NT note tucked into his shoe as a traditional assassin’s tip for the person tasked with clearing his body. Gangsters, claimed the government. Government, claimed everyone else.

  Just the week before, someone had bombed the KMT offices in New York City and Washington, DC.

  It had taken moving to America for me to realize what Wei had told me during our first meeting was true. American campuses were full of student spies who had been bribed with plane tickets and show tickets and other cheap trinkets by the Nationalists. Speak a wrong word in New Haven and your cousin in Kaohsiung would lose his job. The chain of events could not be coincidence. In America, I had stopped calling myself “Chinese” and started calling myself “Taiwanese.” In America, I had met my first Chinese national and discovered the gulf that separated us, despite the language we held in common.

  But none of the terror could have happened without the tacit agreement of the American government, Taiwan’s former and closest ally. Against it too, we protested.

  —

  A brown shingled house—four bedrooms, two and a half baths—across from a park, a short bike ride to campus. A swing set in the backyard crushing the grass. Two daughters, aged six and four.

  The American Dream, and for a while, it was. Even to myself, my letters home sounded absurd, as if I had taken over another woman’s life. I didn’t feel like the girl who had grown up in my grandparents’ farmhouse. I drove a station wagon, went to dinners with Wei’s colleagues, gave birth in a sterile hospital coaxed along by women I’d never met before. And perhaps most strange was how normal it all felt, how easily I slipped into it, as if I had never watched movies under the stars, or played with chickens, or went to school barefoot. Yet, my story was an immigrant’s tale told a million times ov
er; in the everyday movement, it became pedestrian. I grew tomatoes and three kinds of lettuce. For dinner, I made taco salads topped with corn chips, or casseroles with Tater Tots, or Jell-O sculptures shot through with a vein of sour cream.

  I had been born on the first night of the crackdown, in my parents’ bedroom, guided by my father’s hand. Old men who struck up conversations with me in the grocery store wondered if I was Vietnamese, or else called my homeland Formosa. It was a tiny island far away, almost mythical. I spoke to my parents three times a year. The first time I called home, after my arrival in San Francisco, I broke down in tears and wasted five whole minutes—a fortune—just crying. Now when I called, their voices were hollow and distant. I wondered how much of what I said they could imagine. They passed the phone back and forth, demanding to talk to the girls, who squirmed and said nothing, perplexed by these grandparents whom they had never met.

  Taiwan was very far away.

  30

  I PICKED UP THE PICTURES the next Wednesday at the camera store on Ashby Avenue. The clerk, a college kid with a misshapen patch of scruff on his chin, had absolutely no reaction as he handed me the envelope. He was a modern-day priest, required to keep quiet counsel on all the hundreds of strange and banal photos he’d seen. My photos of masked men likely meant nothing to him.

  In the parking lot, I sat in my car with the window cracked and riffled through the stack. Except for Wei, the protesters were unrecognizable. I spotted the man who had been taking pictures across the road from me. He didn’t look particularly menacing. Boring, in fact, in a blue cable-knit sweater and brown slacks. A lock of hair hung over one eye. His shiftless appearance gave the impression of a man not anchored to any belief system, the kind of person who followed the scent of advantage. In the next pictures, Wei shoved him, they both looked at the broken camera, then the man glared at me as he picked up the pieces of his camera. The hatred on his face made me cringe.

  A knock on my window brought me out of my thoughts.

  A man smiled into my car. Black hair, translucent teeth, a sweater vest and tweed slacks. A birthmark in the middle of his cheek shaped like Illinois. He had a very square nose that matched his square jaw, and his skin glowed with the red-honey tone of a weekend at the beach. Panhandlers were common in Berkeley, remnants of the summer of love more than a decade before, or broken veterans, but he appeared to be neither. That worried me more.

  “Can we chat?” he said in lightly accented English.

  I glanced across the parking lot into the shop, where I could see the clerk behind the counter turning the dial on the radio and oblivious to us, and rolled up the window.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ll be just a moment. Come, let’s get a cup of coffee,” he shouted through the glass.

  “I have to go.” I shoved the pictures back into the envelope and put the key in the ignition.

  “Milvia Street Preschool, right?” he said, still smiling.

  I froze. He continued. “Stephanie gets out at one. You have plenty of time for coffee.”

  Stephanie. My mind stuck on my youngest daughter’s name. Stephanie. My hand still poised at the ignition, I crushed the dangling key chain in my palm. Drive away, I thought. It can’t be a crime to run over his foot. Bully your way to safety.

  “Mrs. Lin? What do you say? Coffee?”

  —

  We crossed the street to a café full of old-men philosophers reading the paper and playing chess. I sat down and he brought us two cups of bitter coffee.

  “My name is Lu Ai Guo.” He handed me a business card, on which he was listed as a liaison for the ROC consulate, an institution that would soon disappear when Carter’s Taiwan Relations Act took effect. His friendliness appeared genuine. He switched to Mandarin: “I’m sorry if I scared you. I had to get your attention.”

  His laughter was tinged with sheepishness. I tried to keep in mind that he was a professional, trained in psychology and manipulation and a dozen other skills I didn’t even want to imagine. “Well, I won’t be coy,” he continued. “Let me speak frankly with you. I know who your husband is.”

  “Yes. He’s a professor. Half of Berkeley knows who he is.” Fear made my words sharper than I intended.

  “I’m referring to his extracurricular activities.” He scrunched his brow as if distressed by the thought.

  I reflexively squeezed the purse on my lap. How naive we’d been to think we might have slipped by unnoticed. I blamed Wei; he had not been vigilant enough. Wei’s political heart lay with underground activists trying to nudge the ruling KMT party, and the de facto one-party system, out of place. He wanted the dictatorship, martial law—all of it—to end. Like my father—I cringed—like my father—he wanted democracy and the island’s self-determination, nay, its independence. The protesters’ masks, Wei’s “discretion”—all just false security.

  “And I’m worried for you. I think that Professor Lin may be in over his head. I worry for his safety—and for yours and your daughters’. I don’t think Professor Lin quite understands that this is not a game. Only Americans can play around like this with no repercussions.”

  “My husband is American.”

  “Then he has no business in Taiwan.” His tone had teeth, but he quickly noticed his lapse. He smiled. “Please, don’t be upset. I’m saying this to you because it’s always the wife who is practical. I’m sure you know what I mean. While your husband is off dreaming of revolution, it is you who must remember to dress and feed the children. For practicality’s sake, hear me out.”

  I was angry. Though I would never admit it, he was right. “You know nothing about my marriage. And what business is it of yours anyhow?”

  “Forgive my big mouth. I guess I’m just a little old-fashioned. Now, I am only telling you this because I am concerned about you. I’m concerned about your daughters. I’ve seen too many husbands get reckless and hurt their families. I know it’s a strange job, but now with the new status quo, we have a greater need to stick together, don’t you agree? What’s the phrase? We are strangers in a strange land here. Americans no longer care about Taiwan. Not like we do.”

  I stared at my coffee cup. The steam had gone away and oil sheened on the surface. I wanted to get up and run.

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “I don’t want anything from you except your vigilance.”

  I suddenly felt my waistband cutting into my flesh, my collar choking my throat. As I picked up my coffee cup, I saw the tremor in my hand. The cup clattered onto the saucer as I set it down.

  I had stood beside my father as he wrote a letter full of promises to his best friend and had watched the aftermath rip through him. Even I had despised him for it.

  But this was different. On the clock behind the cash register, the long hand jerked toward the three; it was twelve fifteen. In under an hour, I would be at my daughter’s preschool, set on a shady and windy street across from a nondescript apartment building where, I was often told, two famous poets had once lived in their pre-fame youth. The kind of place where people found it significant to remember the lives of young poets had to be safe. Behind the school’s cedar fence, children galloped and screamed, and there was absolutely nothing to worry about.

  The police would never arrest Wei. Spilling secrets would make him safer. The only price I’d have to pay was with my conscience. The torment would solely be my own.

  “What kind of vigilance?” I ventured.

  “Since you ask, the photos would be a nice start. You can make another set for yourself. My number is on my card. Call me if you need to. If you hear anything significant. And I’ll do the same.”

  “You’ll call me?” I asked as I tentatively pulled the bundle of photos from my purse.

  “No,” Mr. Lu said, “but I’ll find you. Don’t worry.”

  —

  I sat in the car for nearly twenty minutes after Mr. Lu left. I watched people park, drop off rolls of film, emerge with envelopes of photos. No
ne of them were accosted and forced to give up their mementos. I imagined them returning home, tossing the pictures on the table, getting around to slipping them into albums maybe this weekend, maybe during some rainy day devoted to long-neglected chores. Such easy lives. Maybe my fate had been set generations ago, Baba, then me, then my children, and so on merely discharging the ordained steps of our destiny. I pounded the passenger’s seat and cursed Mr. Lu, Baba, and my jinxed forefathers.

  It was nearly time to pick up Stephanie. I took a deep breath, smoothed my hair, and—my mind still wild with the unfairness of it all—returned to the camera shop and gave the negatives to the clerk.

  “I need another set.” I waited for him to meet my eye, to recognize me.

  He scratched at his lame little beard and sniffed. He scribbled on the envelope. “Come back on Saturday.” He handed me a torn stub. He was completely apathetic.

  —

  Stephanie was drawing when I arrived. Unlike the other children who looked eagerly through the door for whose parent would show up next, she didn’t blink when I crouched beside her chair.

  “Sweetie. What are you drawing?”

  “A rocket ship.” On the page was an almost-triangle with scribbles bursting from the bottom. Her lines were shaky and approximate. A person stood next to the rocket, the same size, with wildly different-shaped eyes and spindly stick limbs.

  “It’s lovely.” I spoke to her in English. “Are you about ready to go?”

  She ignored me.

  I gathered her jacket and lunch box and returned to the table.

  “I’m done,” she declared, as if it had been her decision to leave. She passed me the drawing, then slipped her hand in mine. Stephanie looked like Wei; she had his high nose bridge and angular cupid’s bow. “Stephanie”: a name chosen from a book. Wei had argued for “Betsy.” “It’s patriotic,” he claimed. I had told Wei that I liked “Stephanie” because it was multisyllabic, like a stream falling over three rocks, and because it was contemporary. And, besides, he had chosen “Emily,” which he said was classical. The girls also had their Mandarin names, which I usually used when I was upset and my tongue stumbled over English.