Green Island

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  “Why don’t you come to California and stay with us? We have an extra room.”

  She pulled Stephanie onto her lap and let her paint one of the faces. Stephanie’s dexterity was good for a six-year-old, but still the eyes were lopsided, strokes sloshing out of the preform eyeballs.

  “Too far. Even Taipei is too far. What kind of life could we have there?”

  “You have us. You could walk the girls to school. Try it out?”

  “America. America. That’s a whole other country. I don’t even speak English.” She returned her attention to Stephanie. “Good, now let me rinse the brush and you can try painting the mouth.”

  “I want my turn,” Emily said.

  “Be patient, Emily. One at a time. Ma, you can get by with very little English. Chinatown is just a train ride away. Try it out. For a year?”

  “Chinatown? What do I want with Chinatown? Wow, she has a very big mouth! Let’s wipe it off and try again.” Mama twisted the end of a rag and dabbed the sloppy, oversized mouth that Stephanie had painted, and I understood the discussion was over. I was sure they would be happy if they only gave it a chance. They probably imagined isolation, swathes of suburbs, and had no idea how diverse and lively the Bay Area was. They would learn to love thick chewy bread and red wine, the open sidewalks and cool weather. I had.

  And I needed them. What if I left Wei? Or what if we continued on “for the sake of the children,” two mildly invested people sharing, by force, a life? Perhaps I could move back to Taiwan with the girls. They would hate it at first, but they were young enough that those unpleasant memories would eventually recede and they would barely recall the time before they belonged.

  —

  After dinner on the second night, I walked with Mama around the neighborhood that had sprung up in the years since I’d left. The Owyangs had sold their place; the paddies had been filled in and large tiled houses built. The city had inched up to us, bringing the glare of streetlamps and constant drone of scooters. Tonight, though, the main road where I’d first met my father was empty. I linked my arm through my mother’s.

  “How have you been? I want the truth.”

  Was it the tension in my breath, or did my arm tremble against hers?

  “What’s wrong with you? Speak up.”

  “Ma.” I uttered one syllable before I began crying too hard to speak. We continued to walk, and she squeezed my arm as I let myself free the tears I’d been holding back.

  I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and caught my breath. “Wei had a mistress.” I had chosen the wrong word—it made him sound like some fat-bellied patriarchal landowner. I thought of concubines, wives two and three. “Affair” seemed so breezy, more American. I said in English, “Wei had an affair.” I found the distance created by language comforting. I waited for her to curse him, to tell me to leave, to offer me her home. Instead of Mama moving to Berkeley, I could move back to Taichung. “Well? What do you think? Look at me: six months along with a cheating husband.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “He told me.”

  “And you never suspected?”

  “Never.” I caressed the curve of my stomach, while sweat slid down my other arm onto the crook of my mother’s elbow.

  “Ah, so he’s more clever than I thought.”

  I suppressed an instinct to defend Wei, and instead accepted the insult as a gesture of solidarity.

  “And so what are you going to do about it?”

  “Leave him?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he lied to me!”

  “And you have never lied to him?”

  My pause gave me away. I recalled handing the manuscript to Mr. Lu and the undisguised triumph in his smile. I wished I had thrown it down and burned it, right in front of him. A scene. In the parking lot of the Longs Drugs, spectators gathering around us (A dysfunctional marriage? An ending affair? Who? Why?), and us staring at the tidy bonfire both surprised by my stunt. If only.

  “What is your marriage for? Just love?” Mama asked.

  A stray dog ambled toward us; we stepped aside, but it paused a moment to sniff us before moving on.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Love is love, but do you think your daughters want a mother without a father? Does the child you are carrying? Do you want them to envy their friends?” Where our skin touched, I felt her pulse moving fast. “This is a small matter. It all fades away. Forgive him.”

  “How can I, Mama?”

  She didn’t answer. We reached the intersection of the road that led directly into the heart of the city, so we turned around and headed back home. I pulled my arm out from her grip and rubbed it dry against my shirt. Our ideas of love were clearly different; where I saw devotion, she saw duty. I cared how one felt, while to her what one did was what mattered. I wondered if I should pity her. Or perhaps my abstract concept was the more hopeless one.

  —

  The next night, my entire family sat around a huge round table in a restaurant in central Taichung. The restaurant was on the seventh floor and looked out at the multiplying high-rises, the infinite gray rows of narrow windows that promised industry and growth, a view I found both dystopian and hopeful.

  Ah Zhay, in her midforties, had—for some reason—returned to the same schoolgirl haircut we’d been forced to wear more than thirty years before. Jie-fu looked strong, but marked with thick pouches of exhaustion under his eyes. I marveled that there had never been a sign of discord between the two. My niece, Mei Mei, had come with her husband and her daughter, Yaru, who squirmed on her lap, grabbing for the chopsticks at every chance until Mei Mei had cleared an arc of empty table in front of her while her husband ate contentedly, oblivious to the struggle at his elbow. When Yaru occasionally patted her father on the arm, he would look up with a mouthful of food, smile, and return to eating. I didn’t know him well; in fact, I couldn’t remember his name and just called him “nephew.” I caught Mei Mei’s eye and raised an eyebrow.

  “You have your hands full with her,” I said across the table.

  “Yeah, she’s a naughty one,” Mei Mei’s husband said proudly, and stroked his daughter’s hair. He reached for more shrimp. Mei Mei shrugged.

  Mei Mei’s two brothers were in their twenties now. Both politely called me “Aunt” and chatted with Emily and Stephanie.

  “Your Taiwanese is good,” they said to the girls, who exclaimed in response: “We’re Taiwanese, that’s why!”

  Dua Hyan had come to dinner too, and I was pleased. He cast his critical eye around the table: who drank their beer without waiting for a toast, who held their chopsticks lazily and dropped food on the table, who took too much of one dish. I waited for him to rebuke Mei Mei’s husband for his selfishness, but he said nothing either.

  Stephanie had taken to Dua Hyan. She sat between the two of us, and something in the tone of his questions made her feel respected and adult, so she carefully answered as if she actually were the young woman he seemed to think she was. She sat up and pondered her answers so seriously I wanted to scoop her up and cover her with kisses.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked.

  “A car,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A car.”

  “What is she saying?” he asked me, certain that she had misspoken, or he had misheard.

  “It’s true. Stephanie wants to be a car when she grows up. Wei told her she could be anything when she grows up and she has decided to be a car.”

  Dua Hyan pressed back his laugh when he saw that she was not joking. He matched her earnestness.

  “What kind of car?”

  “A truck. A red truck.” She emphasized “red.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can carry things. I can go anywhere and carry things, and you can’t crowd me with too many people, so they won’t make a mess.” She switched to English. “It’s practical.” I translated for her.

  “She’s special,” Dua Hyan
said to me.

  I covered her ears and agreed with him.

  They continued on about the specifications of Stephanie’s future; with the obsessive focus of a first grader, she could discuss horsepower and mileage and tires.

  I glanced over at Zhee Hyan’s girlfriend, who was even further along in her pregnancy than I was. At twenty-six, she had two children already. She was incredibly beautiful, on the edge of unusual: she had a long face and a long, slim nose, but something in her mouth, the way her top lip perked up, made her look insolent and alluring. Why had she chosen Zhee Hyan? He overcompensated for his average looks with overdone hair and loud clothes, yet she somehow found him attractive—perhaps because he expected she would. She was the third or fourth girlfriend he’d brought around whom we thought he might marry. With the baby on the way, however, this time he surely would. At that moment, I realized my brother was the kind of man so in love with his own masculinity that he would end up with a lot of children. There was something proprietary about it, which wasn’t about legacy, or some dream of family, but pure strutting cockerel.

  Her name was Ching Ching. She called me “big sister” (I was nearly ten years older than her) and stood up to reach across the table and put food on my plate. Her kindness felt almost aggressive.

  “Please, I’ll get it myself,” I protested.

  “I’ve never met a professor before!” she said brightly to Wei. “I feel so honored. You must be so smart.”

  She was inane, and while Wei might banter back and forth with Mei Mei, who was nearly the same age, he was cold to Ching Ching. He answered all her exclamations with a single-syllable grunt. It seemed he couldn’t even bear to look at her. Pregnancy had made us both voluptuous, but I noticed that while I hid my curves under a loose, flowing top, she wore a shirt that slipped down to reveal her full cleavage; once in a while, she tugged her collar back up, drawing attention to what she purported to hide.

  Maybe Wei wasn’t annoyed. Once the thought crossed my mind, I couldn’t lose it. When he answered her, his eyes didn’t meet hers. What was he looking at? Had I ever looked so beautiful, like an adman’s perfect vision of pregnancy? My hair was frizzy, my face swollen, and my skin waxy. I had no “pregnancy glow.” And there was Ching Ching, with her legs still slim, her ankles narrow. What did I really think? That Wei would take her into the bathroom and make love to her, her pregnancy hiding the evidence of the deed? I knew the idea was completely irrational, but I watched Wei’s eyes again follow Ching Ching’s hand as she lifted the neckline of her blouse and concealed the shadow of her cleavage.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  Wei grabbed my arm as I rose. “Are you okay?”

  I barely spat out the word “fine.” I hurried past the bathroom and out the front door into the vestibule in front of the elevator.

  I went to the window and squeezed the sill. The overcast day looked deceptively cool, but no amount of rain would wash away the tropical heat. Would my blood thicken with jealousy every time we encountered a new woman? How could I trust that he wouldn’t find another excuse, and then another, to justify his infidelity? Mama had told me to forgive him—but how could I listen to a woman who had chosen misery, it seemed, at every opportunity? I did not want to martyr myself to some ideal of marriage.

  I thought of all the ways I could hurt him: his pride, his heart, his life. Leaving him—divorce—was what he feared the most.

  Feeling mean, I decided I would tell him just as he had confessed to me: offhand, through a half-open door, as if it meant nothing to say.

  —

  But I wasn’t so casual. I looked forward to revealing my decision. That night, we lay beneath the mosquito net. The girls had been sleeping in my old bedroom, so it was only the two of us. The moon, and a yellow light Baba had installed in the courtyard, shone through the open window. The clacking of the standing fan that Mama had set up near the door provided a shield of white noise. Curled on my side, I reached out and touched Wei’s arm. He pulled my hand to his lips, kissed my knuckles, and turned to face me. He brushed the hair from my temple and tucked it behind my ear.

  “I decided what I want us to do,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About us.”

  He knew. He knew from my preface. His eyes traveled my face. I thought back to our date at Sun Moon Lake, both of us drenched, finding refuge in his car, me holding my breath for a kiss that never materialized. Had this moment always been inevitable, from the very beginning etched into the DNA of our relationship?

  “And what do you think?” he asked.

  As much as I wanted to be cruel, I found I couldn’t. And I found I couldn’t say the word “divorce.”

  “I want a separation.”

  “A separation.” He sounded relieved, as if giving me everything would make me change my mind. “Just temporarily, right? I get a place nearby, give you your space, we work it out?”

  “No. Permanently.”

  “Permanently? You mean a divorce?”

  I pressed my lips together and nodded.

  He sat up. “That’s a mistake. You haven’t had time to think about it. What about the baby? What about the girls?”

  “I don’t think you were thinking about the girls when you and Helen—”

  “This is different,” he snapped.

  I felt a little sorry for him, but more than that, I was relieved. Another, brighter life appeared before me, without the melancholy cast of my stay at the motel two years before.

  In his breath, I heard him sorting it out. He left the bed and paced the room. I wanted to comfort him, but instead I waited.

  “Three kids by yourself? Have you lost your mind?” he finally said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You haven’t thought about this. In just two weeks, you can make a decision like this and just toss away ten years of marriage?”

  “Eleven years,” I corrected.

  “I won’t let you. I won’t agree to it.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Please don’t.”

  With pity, I reached out and tugged the corner of his shirt, wrapped it around a finger. “I won’t tell anyone. Not now. We can finish our trip and talk about it more when we get home. Let’s just make the best of it for now.”

  “You’ll change your mind.”

  The spell of sympathy was broken. I let go of his shirt. Now, the other details of our early meetings came to mind: how he had patronized me, lectured me, judged me.

  “Yes, exactly. I will change my mind. I’m just saying this for laughs.” I curbed my anger and said firmly, “I’m not going to change my mind, Wei.”

  Still he did not face me, but his shoulders sank, and I did not know if I was sorrier for me or for him.

  52

  WE SMILED THROUGH our last two days in Taichung. I believe that my parents never suspected a thing. In fact, Wei and I were even closer than ever, affectionate, touchy, as if we were determined to draw the most out of our remaining time. Mama assumed I had listened to her advice and that we had reconciled. She caught my eye once and offered a grim, approving smile. She could read the news in a letter, later, once everything was settled and we had made the living and custody arrangements.

  We even made love, our last night in Taichung, his body scooped around mine, and for a few moments, I forgot our trouble. Maybe Wei started to believe too that I had changed my mind. Afterward, he nuzzled under my hair and kissed the back of my neck and said he loved me. I did not answer.

  We had three more days in Taipei before our flight back to California. We returned to Wei’s parents’ house. His mother took me for some last-minute baby clothes shopping—she was determined, it seemed, to send me home with one extra suitcase full of gifts for the baby, despite my protests.

  In Wei’s old bedroom, Wei and I worked to organize the baby clothes piled on the bed. I kneeled on the floor next to the open suitcase, while Wei folded and handed me the small bundles. Already, I had decided that we shou
ld wait to separate until at least the baby was born. Wei deserved to see the birth. But as we moved through progressively larger sizes, from the zippered, hooded sacks for newborns to the two-piece sleep outfits for an eight-month-old, I imagined how the next year would look in our house without Wei. How strange it would be to see his shadowy figure behind the stained-glass front door panel as he rang the doorbell to be let in. So many real and imagined boundaries would spring up from a decision encapsulated in one word.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “A jumper.”

  He shook it. “It has no butt. There’s a big hole here.”

  “Your mom says that’s the best way to potty train. Just let the baby go. She says I’ll get attuned to the baby’s signals and the baby will be potty trained before he or she turns two.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “That’s how my mom potty trained me.”

  Shaking his head, he doubled the jumper, handed it over, and said he had a surprise for me.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? I hope it’s better than the last one.”

  He frowned, but ignored my remark. “I want you to take a trip with me. Just one night. I asked my parents to watch the girls.” Like the naughty child who charms his way to forgiveness, Wei seemed to expect me to share a strange amnesia for his misdeeds. His knitted eyebrows and earnest stare seemed to ask how I could possibly carry my anger from one day to the next. It offended me.

  I put my hand on his knee. “What are you thinking? One night is not going to change my mind.”

  “I’ve made the reservation already,” he said. “My parents will think something’s wrong if we change our plans.”

  I returned to the suitcase, mindlessly tidying the already tidy stacks of clothes. “I don’t want to go. I just want to spend time with the girls—maybe we could take them to the zoo. Is Lin Wang still alive?”

  “That old guy? He must be dead. How long can elephants live? He’s been around since before I was born.”

  It occurred to me that the iconic elephant would be a great addition to my article—an elephant born in the early twentieth century, who had worked for the Chinese troops in Burma, then had come over to Taiwan with the Nationalists in the 1940s. “I want to take the girls to the zoo and see if he’s still there.”