Jia Bao nodded quickly. “Of course.”
“You may not know that I’m persona non grata among the KMT. I’m sure if they could wipe any record of having known me, they would.”
Jia Bao played it cool. “I hadn’t heard.”
“I retired. It was a forced retirement.” He laughed. “Purely political. My enemies made it impossible for me to get anything done. My hands were tied. Nowhere to go but out.”
“You can’t get more out than here,” I said. “Why this place?”
“Besides the horses?” He leaned back in his chair and his eyes traveled the tree line behind us. A twinkle of awe, or perhaps just the reflection of the sky, shone in his eyes. “Look at this place. Everyone knows everybody’s business. Do you know what I mean? There are no secrets. There’s no anonymity.”
Hiding in plain sight, I took him to mean. A typical small-town eagle-eyed watchfulness pervaded beneath the sleepy exterior. The same reason we’d thrown the party for Jia Bao.
“In any case, never mind about me. Back to you,” he said. “How can I help?”
Jia Bao described the laudatory books published by Westerners praising the Nationalists’ goals and achievements, and the general nodded and grunted—he’d read them all. Jia Bao said he wanted to write the view from the inside, what lay behind the layers of carefully translated propaganda and official escorts. No Western account failed to comment on American-educated Madame Chiang’s impeccable English. A beautifully tailored dress and fluent banter were enough to prove the government’s good intentions.
The general closed his eyes and smiled. “Well, she is quite charming. No photograph quite prepares you. Go on.”
“I want to write about 1947,” Jia Bao said. I tried to read the tiny thread in his voice—aggression, maybe defiance. He had let the pen rest on the page and a drop of ink seeped from its tip.
Quietly, Lorraine slipped her hand over her husband’s. Her nails were painted copper and a large diamond ring sat below a swollen knuckle.
The general opened his eyes. As a bit player, I had the luxury of watching faces. His look, settling directly on Jia Bao without a flicker, was almost hostile. Again, I asked myself if this was another skill from a career in politics: every weak emotion hidden beneath a mask of strength. He must have been veiling his surprise.
His delay was theatrical: a drink of tea, a lick of the lips and clearing of the throat. Finally, he spoke. I wrote as quickly as possible, blurring strokes into one continuous scribble, just enough for us to decipher it later. “I was a low-level officer then, you realize. We just cared about following orders. And to be honest, we also wanted to get the ‘good boy’ praise, maybe a promotion. To be acknowledged that we were patriots, willing to play the game. We had absolute faith that what our superiors told us was true: the insurrection had been planned by secret communist agents. We got the list of names. ‘Just bring them in,’ we were told. But what good would it do to put them on trial, or to jail them? Either way, they’d just become martyrs to the cause, which would keep the fight going. It was more efficient to shortcut the whole thing and wipe out the opposition. Exterminate them.
“So we did.”
I flinched. “Them”—he meant men like Baba.
“Yes,” Jia Bao said. His eyes narrowed, and he nodded, urging the confession out of the general’s mouth.
“We shot them. Put them in rice sacks and threw them in the port. For efficiency, sometimes, we’d bind them together and use a single bullet. The whole line dragged down to their deaths. It was wartime. We were being economical.” His smile was dry, without a trace of amusement. No, not a smile—a grimace. “We were simply being frugal.” A life diminished to the price of a bullet; I felt ill. Needing some camaraderie or reassurance, I glanced at Lorraine, but her eyes stayed on her husband’s face.
“Whose decision was it?” Jia Bao asked, and I finally understood his tone. He was nervous, a man finally sighting what he had long been searching for. What I initially heard as belligerence was actually anticipation and hope.
“The governor-general gets all the blame, but it was the Generalissimo who sent word. This went all the way to the top.” Feeling like I was transcribing a line of noir dialogue, I carefully wrote down the general’s words. This went all the way to the top. Maybe we all spoke in clichés, trying to elicit the drama of fiction to beautify the cadence of real life.
“No one has officially blamed Chiang,” Jia Bao said. “Do you have proof?”
“Nothing but hearsay that he sent a telegram instructing that the situation be expeditiously taken care of. Now, however, one can’t speak ill of the dead.”
“Dictators are exempt.”
“Ah, there’s another funny thing. He was our president, fighting for democracy and freedom. A dictator? Who would call him a dictator? We don’t use that language. That’s for Westerners. If we say he was a dictator, then we will have to admit that we were duped.”
—
To meet with countrymen in this remote Northern California town was a rare opportunity, and the general and his wife were eager to stretch our visit into the evening. Because of the forest, the light faded earlier than usual and an even deeper chill set in. The birds retired and the dogs sought warmth in the house. Beneath the yellow porch light webbed in dead bugs, our breath was as opaque as smoke. “Stay for dinner,” Lorraine urged. I looked at Jia Bao for a signal of either yea or nay and found him searching my face for the same. I flashed a brief smile—it’s up to you—and he answered, “We’ve bothered you so much already.”
“My husband went fishing yesterday. It’s fresh and there’s more than we can eat. Unless you have plans.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “We don’t want to be a bother.” The back-and-forth etiquette dance—we all knew our roles. Next, the general’s turn.
“Stay.”
The general had spoken, and so it was done.
—
In the other room, a fire snapped and spit in a giant flagstone fireplace. The distant, low murmur of the general’s and Jia Bao’s voices reminded me of the conversations of people hidden in library stacks. I wanted to eavesdrop, but Lorraine and I made our own noise in the kitchen as we prepared dinner. I sliced ginger and scallions. She accidentally broke a glass against the sink and cried out. A dog curled near the kitchen door sighed and farted in its sleep.
In the window over the sink, I saw the kitchen open up behind me—streaks of light and glints of movement—and then that world disappeared when, outside, a deer pranced into the clearing, revealing itself with a flicker of white.
“Look,” I gasped.
Lorraine dropped the glass into the trash and came to my side. Her shoulder pressed mine. Glimpsing us inside watching him, the deer froze. We too were still. Then he jerked his head and bounded back into the forest.
“He’s a regular,” Lorraine said. “It’s all I can do to keep him out of my flower garden.” She wiped her hands with a dish towel and set it crumpled on the counter. “Exciting, huh?”
“I saw a deer running down a street in Berkeley once, but this is…nice. It feels peaceful.”
Lorraine spoke over the running water as she rinsed the fish. “It’s wonderful.” She nudged the faucet off with her wrist. She carried the fish on her two open palms like a tiny newborn and set it atop a paper towel. As she patted it dry, she said in a lower voice, “Actually, it’s awful.”
I was not sure I’d heard her correctly. “Awful?”
Her eyes darted toward the living room, gauging the men’s voices, and then she smiled at me.
“Oh, I’m being dramatic.” She arranged the fish onto a platter and stuffed it. “My daughter is in Taiwan and my son is in New York. I’m a little lonely.” Her slick hands—speckled with tiny green scallion rings, knuckles inflamed and skin reddening in the creases—moved mindlessly. I thought of my mother’s hands, too familiar to be beautiful. She ran them under the faucet; the water cascaded over her diamond, the careful
manicure, the details that were useless, irrelevant here in the woods.
She hunched over to watch the burner as she clicked on the stove.
“A stranger in a strange land,” she said in English when she stood up, then spoke again in Mandarin. “I moved to Taiwan from Fuzhou when I was thirty-two. It always felt like exile. But now that I’m here, Taiwan feels like home. Isn’t it funny? The two of us here, so far away, brought together by the island?”
I understood what she meant. The names of people and places had meaning and memories; she could mention a street, a site, and it would bloom before my eyes: the direction of the afternoon shadows, the odor of charcoal and exhaust and benjo sludge, the commotion of horns and voices. The sound of Taiwanese jumbled with Mandarin. There, however, our paths would never have crossed. America—or was it exile?—had erased our differences.
—
After that, nothing else about the dinner stands in my memory except the word copita. We drank sherry after dinner. In detail, the general expounded on the benefits of the tapered shape of the copita and we sniffed appreciatively. It was after ten when we finally stretched and declared that it was time to leave.
As we backed out of the driveway, our headlights washed over our hosts, who stood waving from the bottom porch step. This was the image I would hold of my first and last encounter with them: lit up in an arc of white that swept over the house, streaked toward the paddock, then left them in darkness as the car turned away.
I grabbed Jia Bao’s arm. “Navigate.”
He picked up my hand and gently placed it on the stick shift: “Drive.”
We found our way to the county road and knew it only when our tires hit the smooth blacktop.
“Left,” Jia Bao said.
“Are you sure? I remember a right.” The lingering taste of sherry soured on my tongue.
“I’m sure,” he said as he hit the overhead light and unfolded the map. “What street is this?”
“I missed the sign.” I realized that I’d had too much to drink. My face was hot. I reminded myself we’d likely be the only car all the way into town. Deer were the most dangerous thing I had to watch for. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mouth of another road and hit the brakes. Jia Bao found it on the map and told me to turn.
“It says ‘private road,’ ” I protested.
“Look.” Jia Bao poked the spot on the map and I followed his finger as it traveled the line to the one that would bring us back to the Swallowtail. “Turn right.”
The road went on. Pavement turned to dirt. The road became a flue as it carved into the land that rose on both sides of us. Tree roots and shrubs slapped the car as we wound through. Then we rose again onto pavement. I didn’t remember any of it from our earlier drive.
“Check the map again,” I urged. Frustration sobered me. In the rearview mirror, I caught the glow of headlights far behind us. Relieved, I realized that this road wasn’t totally untraveled.
“Thank god. Let’s flag them down and ask for directions,” I said.
Jia Bao grunted his assent without looking up from the map.
I began to veer off the road, but it narrowed to a dead end—a service road blocked by a locked gate and a sign punctured with bullet holes. “Perfect,” I said. “They’ll have to stop too and we’ll ask them.”
The car pulled over behind us, lights shining at our rear bumper and through the back window. When I looked back, I was blinded. I couldn’t see the driver.
“I’ll ask,” I said.
Jia Bao glanced back at the screaming white light. “I’ll come with you.”
As we approached the car, two Oriental men—even in this moment, I heard Wei’s exasperated reprimand: “Asian, not Oriental, dear”—got out. Average-looking guys in slacks and collared shirts. Here, in remote Mendocino. “Shit,” I gasped.
Before I could tell Jia Bao to get back into the car and lock the doors, the men quickened their pace and had us backed against the station wagon.
“What’s this?” Jia Bao asked, more to me. He knew. He had to know. I cursed his stupid question, this stupid trip. I cursed Wei for making me drive, for inviting Jia Bao to stay. My heart thrashed like a bird trapped in a box.
“We want the tapes,” one answered in Taiwanese, and we knew.
“Tapes?” Jia Bao asked. I knew we had the same thought—I simply could not fathom that we had been followed all the way to this obscure road in far Northern California.
The man facing Jia Bao punched him in the jaw and his glasses clattered somewhere in the darkness. I squawked. Jia Bao staggered into me and I stumbled, but the other man caught me, embraced me for a moment before easing me back against the car. Jia Bao rose slowly, clutching his jaw. Blood dribbled from his mouth.
“The tapes.”
Pain—broken teeth? broken bone?—muffled his voice. “Who are you?”
The one who had punched him now gripped him by his tender jaw and squeezed. Jia Bao grunted. His elbows banged against the car as the man nudged him back and said, “It doesn’t matter.” Jia Bao’s blood shone on the man’s fingers.
“I’ll give you the tape,” I cried. That was clearly the only solution. I pushed my way past my guard and—moving with deliberate slowness in a piteous attempt to appear sober—walked to the other side of the car. From the backseat, I pulled the recorder out of Jia Bao’s satchel. I delivered it and let the man pop out the cassette himself.
“This is from today?” he asked.
“Of course,” I snapped.
Anger crackled across his face, but he decided to not punish my impudence. He slipped the tape into his pocket and his partner released Jia Bao, who turned and spat.
“Stop fucking around,” the man who had punched Jia Bao said. “This is nothing.”
Still stunned, we watched as the two men returned to their vehicle, gunned the engine, and spun the car around in a cyclone of dirt. Even after we could no longer see their taillights, we could hear the engine’s growl echoing through the woods.
Then, I think, I finally breathed. I searched for Jia Bao’s glasses and found them unmarked. Exhausted, we collapsed back into our seats. I immediately locked my door. I rummaged through my purse for a tissue and, with one hand on Jia Bao’s shoulder to steady him, leaned forward and blotted the blood from his chin. He closed his eyes and winced.
“We’ll put ice on it when we get back.”
His hair, I now noticed, was damp. How scared he’d been, though he hadn’t shown it. I looked at the blood, bright on the tissue.
How smart too the general had been. The tape, of course, had been blank.
—
Back at the Swallowtail, I bundled ice into a washcloth for Jia Bao. He lay atop the comforter of one of the beds in my room and held the compress to his swelling jaw. Even after we had washed away the blood, he looked brutalized: on his lip, a cut sliced through a black contusion and the bluish flesh on his chin had swelled into a freakishly misshapen lump. The bruise spread up his cheek, stopping just short of his eye.
I settled on the other bed and watched him. Between us sat a nightstand with two lamps and an illuminated flip clock, and I felt demurely American, like we were Rob and Laura Petrie. I’d forgotten to turn off the bathroom fan, and behind the closed door it whirred, white noise.
He had one arm tucked beneath the pillow. The other hand rested on the ice pack to steady it.
“Should I call Wei?” Guiltily, I realized I didn’t want my husband to know yet: even from hundreds of miles away, he would wrest control—he’d tell me how many cubes to put in the compress, ask for details about the men and the car that I could not think about yet. He’d ask how old they were, what distinguishing marks they had. Could I really tell him that they seemed ageless, anywhere from twenty-five to fifty? Washed out by the headlights, their faces were bland—not a single freckle to identify them. I could not even recall the color of the car and certainly not the make.
“There’s nothing he can do. We’l
l tell him when we get back.” His injuries deadened his words. Speaking caused a spot of blood to erupt from the cut on his lip.
“You carried yourself well,” I said.
He grimaced. “It’s not the first time I’ve been hit.” I had almost forgotten about prison. He had surely suffered worse. Wei had once regaled me with the alleged torture techniques of the secret police: gasoline poured up the prisoner’s nose, electric shock, removal of fingernails, genital mutilation. It couldn’t be true, I had said to him. If what he said was true, then my father had surely endured some of it—a thought too awful to accept. Finally, I had covered my ears and said, “Shut up, just shut up already.” I could not think of Jia Bao there too, broken that way.
I kneeled in the narrow space between our beds. “Let me look again.” Gently, I brushed the bruise with my thumb. It pulsated, hot. He opened his mouth and his jaw popped.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Not broken,” he said. “Just dislocated.”
I took the towel to the bathroom and squeezed out the water. The row of bulbs above the vanity warmed away my exhaustion. It was one of those deceptive mirror-and-light combos that make you look thinner and clear complexioned. A much healthier, less haggard phantom existed on the other side of the glass. I wrapped more ice into the washcloth. The woman on the other side lived a very different life. She would have come for a lovers’ getaway, not this.
Back in the room, I settled again on the floor next to Jia Bao’s bed. His eyes were closed, but his breath was too shallow for sleep. I whispered his name and offered him the ice. He opened his eyes. Between us passed a realization of what we had both seen. The full weight of the day hit me. “This is real, isn’t it?” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He gave me a funny half-smile and reached out to stroke my hair.
No, we could tell Wei in the morning. Even though I wanted to talk to the girls, I was afraid that my voice would break if I spoke to them. We could wait until morning to call.
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