Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  Through campus connections, Wei found Jia Bao a job processing incoming materials in the Department of Oriental Languages library. Each morning, they left together like two boys marching off to school with homemade lunches packed into their satchels. Some days, I met up with Jia Bao at the stone lions in front of Durant Hall and we walked across campus together to find Wei. The three of us ate in the shade next to Strawberry Creek, wedged onto a bench, our heels resting on the damp dirt. Wei sat in the middle. Wei always sat in the middle.

  How does one reconstruct a life? This question, never asked aloud in so many words, hung over our conversations. The cataloging job could not go on forever. At the same time, Jia Bao could not drift into obscurity, or be expected to pass a quiet life. He did not know when or if he’d see his wife and children again. For the next few years, he could expect nothing but waiting.

  He mentioned the book idea once more. Jia Bao had already passed into a realm in which only heightened notoriety would help. A semifamous man—with a name not immediately placeable but tickling the edge of your mind—found dead of apparent suicide elicits only pity (poor man couldn’t stand the pressure). An infamous man found dead in his car, a victim of suicide (oh, him, yes, I know that name), inspires conspiracy theories, rattles trust.

  During those lunches, as our Indian summer sank into a more proper and chilly autumn, Jia Bao and Wei planned the book. The story of the March Massacre, which had been discussed in a text by George Kerr and in a few eyewitness accounts by Westerners, was still forbidden to be spoken of openly in Taiwan. Jia Bao’s book would start with the moment our difference was etched into history. That was how Jia Bao would later phrase it—etching difference, the birth of the modern Taiwanese identity. He would include his own father’s murder of course, through martial law and the White Terror, then his arrest, imprisonment, and escape, making an ultimate argument for democracy.

  “But the audience is limited if it’s not in English,” Wei said.

  I was half listening as I watched a squirrel, at the base of a coastal redwood, gnawing on a scrap of something or other. I picked up a leaf and tossed it toward the creature. It scampered off.

  “Will you do it?” Jia Bao broke me from my thoughts.

  “Do what?” I leaned forward to see him past Wei.

  “Help me translate my book,” he said.

  “Me? I can’t do that.” In my lit classes, I sometimes daydreamed about being one of the writers we were reading, spinning stories for others to get lost in, but these thoughts were only idle distractions. I never would have admitted my yearnings to Wei or Jia Bao.

  Wei elbowed me. “You’re being modest. Yes, she can do it.”

  Where had his faith in me come from?

  “If not you, then who?” Jia Bao said.

  I gestured at an imagined gallery of candidates. “Anyone else. We know a dozen people.”

  “But someone we can trust,” Wei said.

  Keep it within the clique. Mr. Lu’s cocky smile came to mind, and I shook my head.

  “Think about it,” Jia Bao urged. His posture betrayed his easy tone. He was hunched forward, his elbows dug into his thighs, and his left hand fisted in his right.

  Looking for an excuse, I glanced at my watch. “It’s time to pick up Stephanie.” I slipped on my purse and stood up.

  “Think about it,” Jia Bao said again. Too polite to say no, I nodded. I grabbed their discarded lunch bags, pecked my husband on the cheek, then strode across the glade toward Bancroft Way, where I had parked my car.

  Despite the cool weather, the station wagon was hot. I rolled down the window, leaned across and did the same for the passenger’s side. The arrests and killings, Baba’s lost years—why dredge it up again? I thought of Jia Bao’s despairing pose and something like pity flickered in my chest. No, no, no. I shook my head as if responding to their question once more. I shifted the car into reverse and edged out of the spot. Remembering didn’t change anything. I didn’t want any part of it.

  —

  When I arrived at school—a big yellow room with the rubbery, pungent smell of tempera paints and child sweat—Stephanie was in one of the tiny wooden chairs at a small table solemnly molding a lump of green Play-Doh. One cheek was an angry and alarming red. She offered a desultory wave and returned to her project.

  Before I could look more closely, the teacher intercepted me beside the reading loft next to the door. “I tried to call you.” Her name was Mary. She was a throwback: two vestigial blond braids fell over her sagging bosom, and bright calico appliqué flowers patched her high-waisted bell-bottom jeans. Her voice was breathy, like someone who had surrendered her attachment to base emotions and gazed upon humanity with the benevolence of a bodhisattva. Yet now, here, spikes of impatience poked through. She folded her arms and said, “Stephanie bit one of the girls in class and the girl slapped her.”

  “What?” I lurched toward my daughter, but Mary held up her hand and lowered her voice. “She didn’t break the skin, but she bruised her.” She glanced back at Stephanie. “We need to have a meeting—with your husband here too. We love Stephanie, of course, of course, but she’s been acting up a bit lately, and…” She didn’t finish, but I understood. We’d have to find a new school if we didn’t get a fix on the situation. Our daughter was getting expelled from preschool.

  I looked at my innocent and small daughter. Her fine black hair fell loose from the ponytail I’d made that morning. Flecks of Play-Doh glowed beneath her fingernails. Four years old. Children, still little beasts, react to the waves and impulses inside. Feeling, not thought, is the thing that is true and right.

  I said as much to Mary. “She’s just a kid,” I concluded, but I knew it was a misguided excuse. Fighting was not in Stephanie’s character.

  Mary threw up her hands. “I know. I know. But we have to think of all the kids, you know what I mean?”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t understand. I can’t believe it.” I looked again at my daughter, now more shocked by the blazing red blotch on her cheek. “And what about the other girl? Look at that mark. That looks pretty bad!”

  “Rebecca. Rebecca was simply defending herself.”

  Defending? I had nothing rational to say: I wanted to justify my daughter’s conduct just because she was my flesh and blood. And to assuage my own concern.

  “I’ll talk to my husband. We’ll talk to her. Call us about the meeting.” I grabbed Stephanie’s sweater and art from her cubby. Grimly, reluctantly, Mary nodded at every word.

  —

  In the car, Stephanie crawled onto the back console like it was a hobbyhorse and slung her arms over the front seat. Why was she acting out? She’d suffered no trauma that I could think of—our life went on as it always had. I thought seeing me worry would make her more anxious, so I slapped the steering wheel and said, “How about ice cream?”

  “Really?” Her little hand caressed my collar absentmindedly.

  “Yeah. Don’t tell Em, okay? It’s our special treat.”

  “Okay.” She stood up and pecked my cheek. She was so sweet and even-tempered—how could she have bit Rebecca?

  We went to Fentons, which beckoned with HAVE FUN AT OUR FOUNTAIN painted across the top of the building. Inside, amid the milk-and-metal ice-cream parlor odor, Stephanie pressed her palms against the cold glass and eyed the tubs of ice cream. She bounced on her toes and pointed at each one, declaring it the flavor that she wanted until she finally settled on rocky road. The girl behind the counter loaded it into a silver dish and we slipped into a booth. I had just a glass of ice water with lemon.

  I watched her labor with the long-handled spoon. Finally, she used her fingers to push the ice cream onto it. I sipped my water and longed for a cigarette when smoke from a nearby table drifted over.

  “What happened at school today?”

  She shrugged and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

  “Stephanie, your napkin,”
I said.

  She picked it up and wiped her mouth again and scrunched the napkin as she set it down.

  “Nothing happened at school today?”

  Thoughtfully, she licked her spoon. “Rebecky hit me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She hit you first? Did you make her mad?” Under the bright parlor lights, I felt like an interrogator needling a recalcitrant suspect.

  “I don’t know.”

  I softened my tone and hunched over, trying to appear smaller. “Stephanie, Mary said that you bit Rebecca.”

  She nodded.

  “You did? Why would you do that?”

  “She’s a bad girl. A very bad girl.” With each word, she tapped the spoon against the ice cream and it splattered in a halo on the table.

  “Stop that.” I grabbed a napkin from the dispenser. “A bad girl? Why is she a bad girl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I sighed. I reached over and wiped up the melted ice cream puddling around her dish. “It’s very bad to hurt other people. You have to use your words. I’m going to tell your dad and we are going to punish you.”

  Her eyebrows shot up and she looked directly at me. “What’s my punishment?”

  “I don’t know.” I crumpled the napkin and reached for another. “I need to talk to your father.”

  She shoved her dish over. “No!”

  I snatched her wrist. “Stephanie!”

  “No!” she screamed. “Don’t touch me! I’ll tell the police!” Her eyes—wild, wet, and black—sparked like the eyes of a small feral animal seized in a trap. I grabbed her around the waist and her jeans squealed across the seat as I pulled her toward me.

  “Let’s go home.” I struggled out of the booth with her in my arms. She writhed and screamed half coherently that I was a “bad mommy.” The eyes of the entire parlor were on us. Despite the chill, I began to sweat. Stephanie’s feet knocked against my legs and she wrapped my hair in her fist and tugged as she yowled. “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” I said.

  I heard someone hiss: Those people.

  I shouldered the glass door open, and as we passed through, I felt Stephanie sink her teeth into my upper arm.

  —

  I let Stephanie cry herself out in the backseat and tried to ignore the horrible drag of her fingernails on the upholstery as she flailed and protested. I dropped my head into my arms, cradled over the steering wheel, and waited. I had almost slapped her. When she had clamped down in that hard and angry little bite, slapping seemed the only way to make her let go. And I wanted to punish her. I felt shame and relief in admitting it. I had wanted to punish her not just for hurting me, but for the judgmental glares from the other people in the parlor. Reflexively, I had tugged her hair—just enough to jerk her back into the moment—and she had let go.

  Finally, she fell asleep, thumb in mouth, hair in disarray, and breath still shuddering from her tears. I looked at the bite on my arm. Blood speckled each tiny crescent. The entire bite was ringed in purple. She was only four, I assured myself. Just four. Every four-year-old throws tantrums. There was nothing remarkable about it at all.

  —

  Jia Bao had gone out for the evening with another local expatriate Taiwanese couple from our circle of acquaintances, and Wei and I found ourselves alone for the first time in weeks. After the girls fell asleep, we carried mugs of Carlo Rossi cabernet out to the girls’ playset. The structure heaved as we settled onto the swings.

  I laughed. “Are you sure this will hold us?”

  “I’m sure. I built it.”

  I twisted one arm around the chain and nudged myself back and forth with my toes. Woodsmoke from someone’s chimney, a bouquet of warmth amid the cold, drifted into the yard. Impending winter excited me; already, with glee, I had bundled myself into a thick gray wool sweater, hand knit, that I’d bought at a campus crafts fair a few years before. The wool had never lost its almost gamey barnyard odor. Yellow and orange lights from our neighbors’ houses twinkled through the bamboo stand.

  The bite on my arm ached. I’d cleaned it with alcohol and covered it with two Band-Aids and hadn’t said anything to Wei. Like any proper procrastinator, I was waiting for the right moment. I took a sip of wine and rested the mug on my thigh.

  “Do you think I’m a bad mom?” Admittedly, it was a leading question extending directly from my bruised ego.

  “Where’s this coming from?” Wei shifted and the whole swing set swayed. I gripped the mug to keep it from sloshing. I told him about Stephanie, and when I was done, he threw his chin up and laughed. He wasn’t being mean-spirited, I knew—he was truly amused.

  “It’s not funny. I’m really worried, Wei.”

  “I know, but I can just imagine her face.” He laughed again. He cleared his throat with a large gulp of wine and his voice shifted to solemn. “You’re right. What’s going on in that serious little head of hers? It’s totally unlike her.”

  He remembered their birthdays, played Chutes and Ladders with them, read Dr. Seuss to them, answered their questions about the existence of giant squid or where thunder came from. He seemed to save all his patience for them. I longed to know where he found this reserve of composure. I thought of the bubble-bath commercial, the harried mother who begged to be taken away. The advertisers had touched on some universal longing. But there was no going away. When I woke up tomorrow, I’d yet again face Stephanie’s preschool teacher and I would still have two bandages clinging to my arm, the edges rolled and the gum turning black.

  —

  From her mother’s womb, untimely ripped. Pain urged me to expel this tiny beast. But the nurse, shaving me, told me to wait. She stood patiently—foamy razor held aloft—as another contraction traveled through me; when it had passed, she continued cleaning me for delivery. I couldn’t see beyond the thin floral cotton kimono draped across my knees, but I felt her wiping away the shaving cream with a cold washcloth and then she inserted the enema. Wei had been pacing at the end of the bed; he cringed and moved up toward the head and clasped the rail. He hadn’t been there for Emily’s birth. Two years before, he had not even been allowed in the room. I wondered if he regretted the change in policy. He had no excuse now. The nurse flushed me out and then asked the question I had been anticipating.

  “Epidural?”

  I held my breath as I clenched up again. I would have taken a punch in the face.

  I puckered my lips and exhaled. “Yes.”

  In a matter of minutes, half my body disappeared. My legs were not there; at the same time, they were an immense weight, heavy dense logs of clay. A useless bystander, Wei sank into the chair beside the bed.

  “Don’t push,” the nurse said. I decided that I didn’t like her. She was too thin. Translucent but not ethereal. Gray cast to her skin, too many freckles, elbows like dresser knobs.

  “I can’t tell if I’m pushing or not,” I protested.

  Her head disappeared behind my bent knees and the spread of my kimono as she checked my dilation. Her head popped up again. Over the hills of my knees, her green eyes met mine. “You’re ready.”

  She wheeled me through the hall. I was anesthetized not only to the pain, but to the haze of light and faces I passed as we moved to the delivery room. Wei followed behind and then was masked head to toe in scrubs, shoe cozies, and a mushroom-shaped bonnet that looked like a shower cap.

  My doctor, Dr. Brancusi, arrived too, shawled in the odor of coffee and tuna sandwiches (pregnancy had made my sense of smell sickeningly keen). Beyond the fresh blue drape that separated the still sentient part of me from the dull workhorse that labored and seized, he probed around and returned to me with blood on the tips of his gloved fingers. The baby was breech, he told me, curled up like a little Buddha, legs folded and butt nestled against my pelvic bone.

  “I can try to turn it, but I strongly suggest a Cesarean.”

  “Stop pushing!” the nurse snapped.

  Without pain, I felt my
body rippling and struggling with the baby. It wanted out. I wanted it out. Yet we were in a battle. I felt trapped. “Whatever you think is best,” I panted.

  After I was swabbed and probed, Wei’s face described to me everything that I couldn’t see. The doctor took the scalpel and Wei’s eyes widened and glistened and he gulped down his disgust. My blood spread down the sheets and he stepped back to me and touched my shoulder. “Like slicing open a fish,” he told me later, describing how my flesh peeled back, revealing a white fatty layer and then our child in a secretive and dark pool of blood. Dr. Brancusi held her up, as if to verify there had, in fact, been an infant inside me, and I saw only the blue scrunched face before the nurses whisked her away so she could not be “contaminated” by me. I had a better view of my placenta, which the doctor displayed for me, expanding it into a veiny sac anchored by a lump of meat. I didn’t know if he was putting me on. I nodded and closed my eyes—relieved, exhausted. The baby was healthy. I could sleep.

  —

  When I woke up again, Wei had gone home and the wound was stitched. A wide black mouth smiled beneath my now-deflated belly. A new nurse came in—at the start of her shift and fresh, with clean blond hair wrapped in a tight bun. She checked the stitches and declared, “No more bikinis for you. That’ll be a mean scar.”

  I nodded drowsily. I could feel the pain throbbing its way up past the analgesic.

  The nurse brought the baby, swaddled and wearing a little cap, in a rolling plastic-walled bassinet, and I had my first real look at BABY GIRL LIN, as the bassinet sticker read. Six pounds, three ounces; eighteen inches. I had forgotten how fragile newborns felt, like hollow rubber dolls, yet wielding so much power: I thought of the great stretch of time and energy devoted to creating her, how many people had been called into the room to bring her forth, how destroyed my body was in her wake.

  The nurse told me that my colostrum was too weak; I’d have to bottle-feed formula. I wished Mama were there to tell her how ridiculous that was. When Emily had been born, the nurses had fed her sugar-water for the same reason, and after hearing this, Mama wrote me a long, angry letter. “You cannot let strangers tell you how to care for your own child. The American way may be the best way for an American child, but your child is Taiwanese!” She thought I should adhere to the one-month sitting period she’d followed (for every child except me) and could not believe that I had showered before leaving the hospital. “To not feed from your healthy breasts is an insult to your child and to God.” With Stephanie, I would disappoint her again. I accepted the baby into my arms and took the warm bottle. I tickled the nipple against the roof of her mouth and she began to feed while my breasts wept into my robe.