Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “Why him?”

  “Do you think he’s the only one? He just insists on being the squeakiest. What’s that the Americans say about squeaky wheels?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Here comes your husband now.”

  I composed myself. I was placid. I was cool. “I was just about to bring Jia Bao some tea,” I said to Wei as he approached.

  Mr. Lu reached out to shake Wei’s hand.

  “Your wife tells me that you and Mr. Tang are close friends.”

  Wei answered with an ambiguous noise. “I’m sorry. I missed your name.”

  “Lu Ai Guo.” He handed Wei his card. Wei’s eyes drifted over it. His face hardened.

  “Is that for Jia Bao?” Wei reached for the cup in my hand.

  “Don’t be upset. I’d like to talk to you. I’ve given your wife my card as well.” How could he? My protest caught on my lips and I glared at Mr. Lu.

  “Come.” Wei tugged at my arm.

  We left Mr. Lu at the refreshment table. On our way to the front, Wei asked me what I’d told him.

  “Nothing!”

  He clutched my arm. From afar—from Mr. Lu’s vantage—it must have looked like a sweet gesture: a husband gently guiding his wife through a throng of people. Mr. Lu could not hear Wei spit into my ear, “Nothing? What’s nothing? Everything is something. You should have known the moment you saw his card.”

  I had an impulse to confess everything. But I’d already taken it too far. I couldn’t tell Wei. Never.

  —

  Once, driving on a freeway, we passed an accident in the opposite lane. The traffic coming toward us was backed up for miles. None of them knew what lay ahead—that a boat that had somehow jumped its towline had flipped over a car. We knew the disaster that lay, in a way, in their future. I mention this because on the same day that we sat in that little church, listening to Jia Bao narrate his escape, police in Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung—light scissoring across their black face shields—brought out the truncheons and celebrated Human Rights Day with beatings and tear gas.

  I was there in the church on Cedar Street, listening to Jia Bao, while across the Pacific, Taiwanese echoed from a megaphone truck: “People in your homes, people on the streets, Taiwan is your home. Come stand together for your home. Police, you are brothers and fathers of Taiwanese. Come stand together for freedom. In three weeks, the United States abandonment will be complete. Taiwan will cease to exist. Come stand with us.”

  The loudspeaker mumbled and the voice of the crowd rose up in response:

  “Human rights now!”

  “Oppose arbitrary arrests!”

  “Oppose torture and violence!”

  “Oppose one-party dictatorship! Oppose one-party dictatorship!” The officers were three deep, and they completed their blockade with billy clubs. The loudspeaker called out for the protesters to join up with those waiting at the Tatung Department Store and the people cried back, “They’ve blocked us! We cannot move! The trucks are coming from the east!” The loudspeaker continued mumbling and then screams rang out: “Tear gas!” White smoke, reflecting the light of camera flashes, billowed out on the far side of the crowd. The panicked protesters waved their torches, trying to break through the police line, and the police resisted with their batons. A few hundred pushed through before the officers quickly closed up again, trapping inside the rest of the group who continued to cry, “We cannot get out. Stop the riot trucks!” But the trucks continued to roll on; they split the crowd and then were swallowed by it as the loudspeaker urged calm, urged the trucks to leave, urged the police to step aside.

  Men in helmets, armored vests, kneepads, and black boots, wielding riot shields, ringed the giant crowd. Far off, the rumbling of a herd of trucks, an entire battalion, approached. The speakers resumed—histories of colonialism, of slavery; calls for the release of political prisoners—as the crowd started to disintegrate into chaos, as the police ringed in tighter and tighter, as fights broke out between the Anti-Communist Heroes (egg-wielding hoodlums wearing armbands printed with the Nationalist flag) and the protesters, as some tried to light the riot trucks on fire and begged for gasoline to be siphoned from the sound truck, as others urged for peace.

  Canisters steaming out poisonous gas were lobbed into the group. A roar rose up, a collective aah. The officers swung their billy clubs, grabbing people by their napes or by their shirts and thumping them into submission. Gas, blood, sweat rained down.

  Imperfect time travel for an imperfect world. Their December 10 happened before ours, and we learned of it when we came home that afternoon. One of our local Taiwanese friends called with the news. He had heard it from his brother, who was a taxi driver in Kaohsiung and who had seen it himself.

  Wei, racked with guilt, sat down on the sofa while Jia Bao paced the room. I thought of the sweet church with its swept hardwood floors and the innocent plates of cookies and the welcoming crowd that had embraced Jia Bao and his words. Words, words, words—nothing but words and ideas—as heads had split open. While our friends were rioting, handcuffed and starving, in the yard, we were the ones banging on open cell doors, bellies full, crying for our freedom.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been up to, but you have to stop now,” I said. “The situation is too dangerous.” Martyrdom was paid for in flesh. Words from the man who lived happily ever after had the weight and consequence of air and Wei knew it.

  “No, we have to move faster,” Wei said.

  “Faster doing what?” Anger and fear made my voice sharp.

  Jia Bao was about to answer when Wei gestured for his silence.

  “How well do you know this Lu Ai Guo?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “You’ve seen him before.” Accusatory. Wei stood up. He turned in small circles, like a dog looking for a place to lie. So lost in his thoughts, he seemed to have no idea what his body did, then he sank into a blue armchair.

  I protested, “He came to the party. I told you that.”

  “Who?” Jia Bao said.

  My gaze darted to him—was he playing the same game?

  “There was some snoop at the church today. She’s talked to him.” The weight fell on the pronoun—she—as if he ripped away my identity; I was nothing but a single-syllable generic pronoun. Wei turned to me again. “Did you talk to him before? Not at the party. Somewhere else?”

  “I’ve never said anything.” Blood shot from my heart to my brain; heat flared in my head. “I never said anything.” The words collapsed, weak.

  “She would never say anything.” Jia Bao frowned. A grateful affection rushed through me. He continued: “She’s your wife. You’re being manipulated. This is how they destroy us. This seed of mistrust. She didn’t say a thing.” Jia Bao’s voice was weary: this was a thing he’d seen a hundred times, the oldest trick in the book. I wanted to tell Wei everything, and what Mr. Lu had claimed about Jia Bao taking the money, just so I could say: Look at him. He’s no better than me.

  Wei gripped the armrests. His knuckles flushed red and white. He pushed “I’m sorry” through his gritted teeth. The urge to appear the reasonable intellectual kept his temper at bay.

  Surveillance was the heart of it, Jia Bao reminded us. “Isn’t freedom the ability to conduct our lives in privacy, without every action logged, reported, and punished? To ride the bus without wondering if the old woman clutching her purse is noting how you sit, whom you sit next to, what you mutter when the bus clatters over a pothole? Every banality jotted down in a huge file where every pedestrian action, beneath the glare of the investigator’s lamp, takes on significance? The loss of freedom isn’t a restriction of movement; it’s the unending feeling of being watched.”

  I had to do something with my hands. I rearranged the trinkets we kept on the mantel: the brass monk’s bowl, the ceramic kewpie doll that Stephanie loved, the misshapen cup Emily had made in school, the various cards left over from the year’s holidays. “It’s over, Wei. No more. I don�
�t want to be a part of this anymore.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  “Go upstairs and look at your daughters and then come back down and tell me that. No more.” Emily’s cup fell from my hands and shattered. “Fuck!” I cried. I crouched down to gather the pieces.

  Wordlessly, Jia Bao moved to the sofa.

  Wei stood up. Restraint shuddered through him and he took his seat again. “You don’t understand. We don’t have to live small lives because of what happened to your father.”

  I turned and gestured with my hands full of shards. I’d cut myself and the blood trickled down my palm. “A small life? This is a small life? Everything you wanted, and you want to throw it away so you can play cowboy?”

  The line of blood traveled to my wrist and a single drop splattered onto the floor. A snarl flashed on Wei’s face, one brief reveal, and then his expression cooled. “Clean yourself up. You’re hysterical.”

  —

  Once I’d washed the blood away, all that remained was benign, not much bigger than a paper cut, and I covered it with a bandage. We arrayed ourselves again in the living room. Wei took up his place in the blue chair; I sat beside Jia Bao on the sofa.

  “We’re not going to run away like cowards,” Wei said.

  “This is the end game, Wei,” I said. “It’s over. What’s the point? More violence? You think if you fight hard enough, the government will just give you what you want? You’re not a naive student anymore. You know how it works.”

  Jia Bao sighed. “The fact is. The most important point is.” He spoke carefully, a child leaping across a stone path through a stream. “What we need to remember now is that…something has happened. This is a moment. The pivotal moment, and all we can do is help as much as we can. Everything has been set into motion. The machinery has awakened. We have to keep it running. This is the moment when everything can change. I understand that—” He sighed again. “I understand that you two may not agree on this, but something bigger is happening now.” Jia Bao’s argument slowly turned on me. “We can’t be selfish.”

  I stared at the ceiling. They were closing ranks. Cobwebs laced the light fixture. I watched a spider creep across the plaster. A small, drifting speck.

  “I understand that you can’t help but feel a part of it, against your will. And now the KMT have approached you and you have to decide what you think is right. But this is the moment.” Jia Bao’s voice was so soft, so reasonable. He spoke like a negotiator whispering to a person whose toes were already curling over the ledge. I resented it.

  “I don’t want to end up a widow.”

  Wei threw up his chin and laughed loudly.

  “Go ahead, laugh. If this wasn’t a life-or-death situation, you wouldn’t want anything to do with it.” My eyes returned to the moving speck, that industrious little spider trekking its way home.

  Jia Bao cleared his throat. I hoped that he had felt the insult as well.

  “You don’t understand. In this place, even the smallest dissent can result in death. This is a looking-glass world without logic. Nothing is what it seems. Remember Professor Ong. Every gesture is a risk,” Jia Bao said.

  Professor Ong: dropped from a campus building by the secret police on a visit home to Taipei. For what? The opposition claimed his crime had been merely questioning party politics at a conference in California. A single question.

  “Then say nothing.” See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil. Turn a blind eye. I ran through the idioms I’d learned in my ESL classes, how I thought these trite turns of phrase, tossed into conversations, would make me more American. Silence is golden. Instead, these clichés, which came like blocks awkwardly tumbling from my mouth, had called out my foreignness. “Do nothing.”

  “It’s not possible,” Wei said.

  I recalled the day we’d met, when Wei had first told me about the March Massacre and my father’s role. Later that day, I’d gone home to Ah Zhay’s, and we’d sat on the stone ledge in the alley and she had finished the story. The event had not even existed until I’d heard the story. It happened this way for each of us, one by one, across the island, a structure suddenly exploding onto the placid empty plain of our history.

  “I just want peace and quiet,” I said. I was losing. My words were listless even to my own ears. I wished none of it had happened. I wished Jia Bao back home and Mr. Lu back into the shadows. How far back would my wishes have to go to erase all of it? All the way back to February 1947?

  “If only,” Jia Bao said.

  44

  THE CHRISTMAS SEASON ARRIVED. Emily wrote a holiday card to the hostages in Iran and let Stephanie scribble a stick figure on it too. Across the country, schoolchildren put crayon to paper to remind these poor people that another world still existed, even as they were blindfolded and forced to sit in handcuffs for days at a time. In windows around town, American flags had appeared. Emily brought the patriotism home and muttered the Pledge of Allegiance as she colored.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Emily complained. “My teacher said, ‘Write something cheerful.’ ” Her crayons, all dumped from the box, splayed out in front of her. She gripped a chubby pencil, the stout kind made for children’s clumsy hands.

  “Well, you know you should start with ‘Dear.’ ”

  “Okay.” She wedged her tongue into the corner of her mouth as she concentrated. Her letters were big and round. “Dear Mr. La-i-n-g-e-n.”

  “Why don’t you think about the kind of letter you’d like to get if you were—” I paused. If you were what? A hostage? “If you were away from home.”

  Emily tucked her fist under her chin and frowned, her eyes drifting in thought. Poor Mr. Laingen. We knew his face well from the news—Stephanie had mistaken him for Mr. Rogers. I understood how his family felt. Would it have been worse if we had known Baba was alive? If we had known that a blade of death—dangling by a thin, tenuous thread—hung over him each day? If we had known his life depended on the negotiations of dozens of strangers and the whim of angry students? If I could have written a letter, I would have told Baba he was not forgotten. That we thought of him every day. That his absence was a ghost in our home.

  “I know!” Emily declared. She began writing.

  I read over her shoulder: I’m sorry you can’t come home. What do you want from Santa this year?

  We miss you.

  Come home soon.

  An earthquake in Colombia, Soviets in Afghanistan, Mother Teresa winning the Nobel Prize. The world spun ’round and ’round with its usual mix of tragedy and triumph. Threading through it all, every day on TV, were the hostages. They lurked at the edge of everything, in every activity, a corner-of-the-eye twinge that something was out of place. I even dreamed of them.

  On American soil, the Iranians, like us, had been vulnerable to the cooperative machinations of the CIA and their own secret police. As with the KMT, information was exchanged tit for tat with the shah’s men, so that an American, bolstered by the promise of the First Amendment, was guaranteed to have his brother’s legs broken in the homeland for the wrong words uttered so many thousands of miles away.

  In my dreams, I sat with President Carter in a panopticon, while all around us, out of reach, blindfolded men were tied to racks, had their wrists bound to their ankles, and were lined up for firing squads armed with blanks that shot to scare, not kill. We pressed ourselves to the glass and called out for it to stop, but no one could hear us. I spotted Wei there, his face masked but his clothes recognizable. They tied his hands and removed his belt and let his pants drop in humiliation. He hung his head. Do something, I told the president. He smiled, ashamed.

  I woke and gripped Wei’s arm. All I wanted was to feel the realness of his muscle and bone under my fingers. I thought of my mother and how many times she must have woken up wanting the same and found nothing.

  “Don’t do it,” I murmured to Wei.

  The meetings continued. He stopped saying good-bye to me when he left. In frustration, I
could not help but think that they were becoming a parody of themselves, as theatrical and self-important as the Weathermen or the SLA, their values disintegrating beneath ego. Though I had no idea what their plan actually was, I was sure of the impotence of their work against a machine as large as the KMT. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, the government had tightened its grip, bulldozing through magazine and newspaper offices and shutting them down, arresting writers, editors, teachers, thinkers.

  Christmas was somber. We gathered at the tree on Christmas Day. The girls grabbed at gifts littered with dried fir needles. Wei and I smiled and cooed as the girls held up their presents—a mini Tupperware set, Legos, two dolls with matching black hair and blue eyes—but we could not look at each other. We stood the girls in front of the tree and took a picture of them cradling their new babies.

  “Dad! The flash hurt her eyes.” Emily nuzzled her doll. “She’s crying. She wants her grandma.”

  Wei raised an eyebrow at me. “She means you.”

  Emily brought the doll to me and I brushed aside its nylon hair and kissed its plastic face. Its eyes rocked open and closed. “Don’t cry, little baby,” I soothed.

  Emily smiled. “Much better.” She planted a loud, damp kiss on my cheek and grabbed Stephanie’s hand, dragging her back to their pile of gifts.

  I watched them play. The recent progress reports from Stephanie’s teacher had been positive: no more acting out, a generally more cooperative attitude. After our fight in Dr. Matson’s office, Wei had refused to return and scorned the whole concept of therapy as hokum. He insisted that Stephanie would be better off if she wasn’t made to feel “different” with these sessions and he pulled her from them too, preschool be damned. If Jia Bao had been the problem, he said, the problem was solved. There was nothing wrong with our daughter. I was the one forced to make a sheepish call to Dr. Matson to tell him to cancel our ongoing appointments. He asked why, and even though he must have known the reason, I lied and said with the coming holidays, our schedule was too busy to accommodate these extra hours a week.