Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  It was too complicated to explain, so I said, “For mailing purposes, sure, it’s China. Well, the Republic of China. But you know, and I know, it’s Taiwan.”

  For some reason, she was convinced I was lying to her and she burst into tears. She could not believe she was wrong. She had seen the word “China” with her own eyes.

  Nothing was as it seemed; everything was subterfuge: me, Wei and Helen, Wei and his friends, the name of the country, the label Free China—ironies cascading over one another like a toppled heap of discarded pages.

  I did not include any of this in my article. Instead, I created images of ruddy-faced children, paddies full of water buffalo, cities teeming with stylish men and women. I fell asleep on the sofa clutching the legal pad. Wei came home late smelling of smoke and beer. His kiss woke me.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Stinky.”

  “See, I really went to the shrimp pools.” At his careless use of the word “really,” I cringed, reminded of his confession, just days old.

  We went to the bedroom. While Wei showered, I lay on the bed, now wide-awake, my limbs splayed in the heat, upset anew at the cunning of his timing. We both knew that I would not leave him with this baby just months away.

  Wei crawled into bed. The girls slept on the floor on a pallet of blankets and made little grunts at the disturbance of the light but did not stir. Drowsy from drink, Wei fell asleep right away.

  My head throbbed with the thoughts of the last two days. How wonderful and unsettling it was to be bathed again in the sound of my most familiar language, the barrier of ignorance gone and every conversation intruding on my thoughts. When I’d first arrived in the United States, trying to make sense of the babble around me, my mind started to transform the conversations into sensible nonsense.

  Love shield that fish two who yes.

  Tired brother, endure ah big hello?

  I’d felt like I had discovered an eccentric hidden language. It took months for me to parse the syllables, then the words, then the meaning.

  Tomorrow, I would finally meet Jia Bao’s wife. If, to hide my remorse, I was too friendly, it would strike a false note with everyone, but if I was too reticent, that would also seem strange. I decided not to think of it. I told myself that everything that came before today no longer existed.

  Oh god, I realized. Just like my father. This must have been the mantra that allowed Baba to endure the days.

  I felt light-headed. The baby squirmed, jostling my organs. I made my way out of the dark bedroom and into the living room. I eased myself onto a wicker ottoman in front of the fan and closed my eyes.

  Nothing could calm me. In the throes of full-fledged insomnia, I grabbed Gorky Park from the stack returned by the customs agent. As I tried to find my place, I noticed that pages twenty-nine to thirty-four were missing, sliced away close to the binding, nearly undetectable save for the gap in numbers. I flipped through. Page seventy-three/four was gone too. I leafed through the other books. Jane Austen was completely intact, but John Fraser’s The Chinese: Portrait of a People was shredded.

  I thought to keep them as a memento of the trip (Look, I’d tell my friends in Berkeley. This says everything you need to know about the situation in Taiwan.), but the two ruined books were unreadable. I tossed them in the trash, where I knew they would end up in some riverside rubbish heap, burned to black smoke.

  It was nearly two a.m. I shuffled back to bed, where I lay until morning in some stunned, jet-lagged space between wakefulness and slumber.

  —

  The next day, we went to Jia Bao’s house. His family lived on a small alley across from a little park made of cinder-block paving and a few trees that smelled like orange jasmine and carambola. Their apartment was on the fifth floor.

  The four of us trudged up the stairs. Wei carried the urn, which we had swaddled in white silk.

  Jia Bao’s wife, Qiong Hua, stood only as tall as my ear. Her hair, cut like the gamine heroine of a French New Wave film, emphasized her petite bone structure. I tried to imagine her ballroom dancing with Jia Bao in the school club where they had first met. She must have been a tiny music-box ballerina. Nevertheless, she radiated strength, and I could tell that no amount of threat could terrorize her.

  “Please, come in,” she said. Over her shoulder, her children watched us expectantly.

  The house smelled like Jia Bao. Yet years had passed—how could it be? For a moment, the night in Willits exploded before me: my fingers were fragrant with the smell of Jia Bao’s sweat, my nose buried in his musky hair. I squeezed Stephanie’s hand.

  Wei had rehearsed with me what he would say when he handed over the urn, but in this actual instant, with lunch steaming on the table and Jia Bao’s children’s eyes wide upon us, he could not say a word. He presented the urn to Qiong Hua and she received it without a lip quiver or tear. This kind of stoicism, which I’d seen with my own mother, was heartbreaking. For sure, in seclusion, she’d likely gnashed her teeth and wailed and pulled her hair. Who knew what private sorrow her children had witnessed to carry around in their hearts and memories.

  “Thank you.” She placed the urn beside an offering of oranges, incense, and a cup of wine that had been set in front of a picture of Jia Bao mounted on the wall. I had never understood why people chose the worst, most bureaucratic pictures for these memorials, the same photos on ID cards and in official files. Did anyone consider when they posed that these rote and standard photos could one day be their funeral portrait? Here was Jia Bao, looking stupefied by the camera’s flash. Who would want to remember him this way?

  Ceremony completed, Qiong Hua clasped her hands together. “Come, let’s eat while the food is warm.”

  At the table, while Wei and Qiong Hua caught up on the people they knew in common, I searched her children’s faces, willing Jia Bao’s features to reveal themselves. Their daughter, unlike both of her parents, was unusually tall. She was in her second year of high school, and was enthusiastic and authoritative in a way that mesmerized Emily and Stephanie. She announced that her English name was “Melody” because she wanted to be a singer. She was the cool older girl; for an afternoon, at least, the girl they wanted to be when they grew up. I saw a hint of him in her eyes and in the way she moved her mouth. But her face was light, happy, while Jia Bao’s had carried a perpetual uneasy cast.

  His son, Jia Lung, on the other hand, was awkward—as adolescent boys are—a little angry, a little sullenly obedient, nothing exactly you could pin on a specific action but a general sense of bitterness and maladaptation about him. He did not engage with anyone. When Wei tried to speak with him, he barely opened his mouth, as if his lips were afraid to form around words, lest anyone see that he moved and lived. In short, he was utterly paralyzed. Even though he seemed so unlike Jia Bao, I saw his face superimposed on the bones of his father. Yes, Jia Bao was in there too.

  I dropped back into the conversation. “After Jia Bao passed, I stopped all interaction with the movement,” Qiong Hua said in a way that let us know she actually hadn’t. Was this admirable or stupid? Did Wei feel the same? So committed that no fear could drive him away? And for what? An abstract principle that had no bearing on whether the kids had rice to eat each day? I politely kept my mouth shut.

  Qiong Hua reached over and poured more tea for us. “After I lost my husband, my patients stayed away. They were afraid to see me. Now, my friends have become my patients. Even when they’re healthy, they still come see me.” I was moved by her friends’ simple, sympathetic lies. Without the imagined ache or phantom sore, she and her kids would have nothing to live on.

  She and Wei continued on, and the girls chatted with Melody, but I, like Jia Lung, could not bring myself to speak. After lunch was over and we had moved on to a platter of chilled sliced pear, all I could do was poke at the fruit with my toothpick and smile whenever Qiong Hua caught my eye.

  Then Jia Bao walked in. The colors of the room, the sounds, everything grew brighter and louder and blood pounded i
n my cheeks. When I opened my mouth, only a dumb little exhalation emerged. He slipped into the chair between his wife and his daughter, grabbed a toothpick, and snatched a wedge of fruit. I saw the saliva glistening on his lips, and the dots of light reflected on his glasses.

  Wei slipped his arm around my shoulders. “Hey, are you okay?”

  I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to answer.

  Emily asked, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Jia Bao was gone and all that was left was a table of staring faces. In my wrists, in the crooks of my elbows, and in my throat, my pulse throbbed, my skin was feverish.

  “Come, lie down for a bit,” Qiong Hua said. “In the bedroom.”

  Wei helped me stand and the two of them escorted me to the bedroom, where Qiong Hua pulled the curtain shut and turned on the air conditioner. She left the lights off. After I settled onto the bed, Qiong Hua asked Wei to leave the room. She brought a folded damp washcloth and laid it on my forehead.

  “Everything’s been normal with this pregnancy?”

  I nodded. “It must be the heat.”

  She picked up my wrist and took my pulse. “Nothing to worry about here. Just rest.”

  Rest. Just rest. After she left, I gazed around the room. This was Jia Bao’s life right here: the laminated white dresser, the vanity stool upholstered in rose print fabric, the framed pastoral print on the wall, and, next to it, another picture of him, this one a casual photo blown up to portrait size, the pixels glowing black, magenta, cyan, and yellow. Where I now lay, he too had once lain scheming about revolution. He had spent his house arrest in this very apartment, pacing from corner to corner, gazing out the window at the police posted below.

  He had been as real as the rest of us sitting around the table.

  There must be a word for a person there but not there. Something more concrete than a ghost and realer than a memory.

  —

  Qiong Hua gently jostled me awake. “I’m so sorry, but Wei wants to go home.”

  It took a moment to place myself. I caught sight of Jia Bao’s portrait and recalled where I was. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Two hours. How do you feel?”

  “Much better.” I struggled up, still trying to catch my bearings.

  In a surprisingly intimate gesture, she sat on the edge of the bed. She frowned and pursed her lips a few times, readying to speak. I was afraid of what she would say.

  “You were such a good friend of Jia Bao’s.”

  “We did what anyone would have,” I insisted.

  She smiled. “Please, don’t be modest.”

  I blurted out, “I’m so sorry that we couldn’t protect him.”

  “You saved him. You gave him freedom.”

  I bit my lip. Freedom?

  She read my expression as survivor’s guilt. “Nothing would have been different if he had stayed,” she assured me. “They wanted him and they got him. They would have gotten him either way. At least he got to taste freedom. And he got to write his book. I’m grateful for what you did for him. Grateful. I was hoping that you could have brought the manuscript back, but I know you couldn’t. Maybe someday I’ll come to America and see it. Tell me, is it good?”

  A pang of guilt struck me as I answered. “It is. He said everything he wanted to, without apology. It is powerful.”

  She pressed her knuckle into her eye and smiled. “I miss him.”

  “I do too,” I said, surprising myself with how natural the words sounded. The admission lacked the desperation of the lovestruck or guilty. It was simple empathy.

  I do too.

  51

  WHEN THE TAXI STOPPED at the gate to my grandparents’ courtyard, Mama ran out to greet us. She looked over my full belly with nostalgia for the two pregnancies she’d missed, then turned to Emily and Stephanie.

  “Who are these pretty girls? Your mother wrote so many letters to me that I feel like I know you.”

  “Did you greet your grandmother?” I nudged.

  “Ah Ma,” they said in unison, and I was pleased that they sounded just like dutiful Taiwanese children, obligated to state the title of every relative who crossed their path. Grandmother, second paternal aunt, maternal uncle’s wife, paternal uncle’s daughter—through greeting, they contextualized their position in relation to everyone else in the family.

  Baba followed, instantly triggering my anxiety about coming home for the first time as a mother. Would he criticize my parenting the same way he’d criticized my homework? Would he take my authority for granted, or would I revert back to my childhood self, as Wei had before his father?

  “Hello, Baba,” I said. “Girls, did you greet your grandfather?”

  Even the normally outgoing Emily was suddenly shy in the face of this man in the big black-framed glasses, his white hair combed in the style he’d had since his middle age.

  “Hello, Ah Gong.”

  “Have you eaten?” Baba asked.

  “We ate on the train,” Wei said.

  “Let me take your bag,” Baba said. For him, there was no time for cooing over the missing years; it was important that we immediately plunge into normalcy as if only yesterday I’d boarded the plane for San Francisco. Couldn’t he spare five minutes for sentimentality?

  When he reached for my bag, I snapped, “Ba, Wei will get it.”

  “Well then, why don’t you and you”—he jerked his head at the girls—“come meet the chickens.”

  I released the breath I’d been holding. The girls fell in line behind him and marched into the courtyard toward the chicken coop. The dirt beneath the banyan tree looked raked clean, and this small touch made me regret my impatience. Baba clicked his tongue to call the chickens, and the girls squealed as the birds darted over in their jerky, prehistoric way. Mama and I exchanged a look.

  “Your father is very happy that you’re home.”

  “I know, Mama.”

  “You can stay in Ah Zhay’s old room.”

  She led Wei and me inside. My grandparents were both dead, and I felt their absence. Other than that, the house had not changed except to grow more decrepit. It held all the same old furniture that I had grown up with, now scuffed at the arms and the base of the legs, the basketry of seats and backs torn. “We send you money; why don’t you buy new furniture?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Ma?” I understood her silence. “Ma, are you giving the money to Zhee Hyan?”

  Wei cleared his throat. We had suspected as much, but even so, I could not stop sending them money, even if they threw it away on scam antiques aged like buried treasure in the dirt of someone’s yard or—as it were—gave it away to my deadbeat brother.

  “His wife is having a baby,” she protested.

  “A baby?” Wei said diplomatically. “That’s good news.”

  We arrived at Ah Zhay’s old room and I tossed my purse on the bed. “He’s married? When did he get married? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “His girlfriend. His girlfriend is pregnant. But she might as well be his wife.”

  I shook my head. “Ma, that money is for you and Baba. Zhee Hyan has to take care of himself. He’s older than me.”

  “He’s your brother.”

  I began to complain, but Wei touched my arm. “I’m going to get some fresh air.”

  I nodded. “See if the girls are thirsty.”

  After Wei left, Mama raised an eyebrow at my belly. “Tell me, has everything been fine?”

  I sank onto the bed. Her question seemed to imply more, and I wondered if I should let her know about Wei’s affair. “Perfectly normal.” I wouldn’t mention the spell at Qiong Hua’s the day before, or the specter of Jia Bao that I’d seen. Nevertheless, she searched my face skeptically.

  “Take a rest. Baba will watch the girls.”

  After she left the room, the girls’ excited voices drew me to the window. Baba embraced one of the hens and the girls reached out, squealed, and snapped their hands back.

  �
�Gently,” Baba said. “And not so loud.”

  “Look. Like me.” With more courage, Stephanie reached out again and stroked the bird.

  “Right. Good girl,” Baba said, and I was a girl again, barely older than Emily, under the same banyan. Where was the ruler to strike their hands? The eraser to efface their work? The stare that would silence them?

  We are different people now, I reminded myself. Wei crossed the courtyard to them, barking at the chickens that scurried toward him. “I have nothing for you, birdies.” The chickens squawked and lifted their wings and doddered away.

  “Dad! Look!” Stephanie rested her hand on the hen’s head. “I’m petting a chicken!”

  “Amazing!” His voice was full of kindness. I thought of Helen again. A whole year? Four seasons? Did he call her on Christmas? Did he give her a gift?

  The last time we had seen them, I had offered to help her with the dishes, but Wei had cut in and said he would do it. I had read it as love for me; now I understood I had been wrong.

  Outside, Baba smiled at Wei. My daughters, showing off to their father and grandfather, beamed. In the trees around the house, cicadas buzzed. This scene. Exactly and only this.

  —

  I found out that Mama was making money through piecework for a small local doll manufacturer. “Every living room a factory,” some politician had proclaimed when I was a child, turning Taiwan into an economic dragon, and now my mother, trained in fine arts in Tokyo, painted faces on generic dolls. She opened a sackful of doll heads, to the delight and horror of the girls. When she offered to repaint their dolls’ faces, they ran to pull them from the suitcase. Stephanie wanted her doll’s blue eyes painted over in brown.

  We watched as my mother, her glasses propped on the tip of her nose, pinched a blank doll head steady. With a very skinny brush and extremely noxious paint, she colored the irises brown, enlarged the black pupils, and added a dot of white light to each eye.

  “Ma, you should ask Zhee Hyan to come help you do this. He can earn his pay,” I pleaded.

  “Oh, shush.”